by Carl Goodman
Most of the tables were occupied by groups of drunken people more interested in downing another beer than watching two near-naked women cavort with each other. One of the women slipped her hand down the front of the other’s thong. Eva wondered which would be more humiliating. To exposure yourself on stage in that way while performing simulated acts of self-abuse, or to be ignored as you did so. As she watched, a massively overweight woman barged through a door at the back of the pub and weaved her way to a table, where she deposited large bags of freshly cooked chips in front of three pissed guys and one watchful woman. A ragged cheer went up. Chips were grounds for celebration, Eva assumed.
Eva walked towards the bar. Bait, Hadley had said, and now she understood why. She had decided on tight jeans and a cropped T-shirt under a long coat that hung open. Not exactly femme fatale, she thought as she too weaved between tables, but she got a few interested looks as she crossed the pub. At least Hadley had warned her in advance. She wondered if any of the handful of people who stared actually recognised her. She glanced around the room. Maybe he was here, the man who had driven the lorry and tried to kill her. The odds were better than even, she decided.
At the bar she used cash to buy a vodka and tonic from a young, scrawny man with pockmarked skin while another man, overweight, scraggy beard and hair scraped back into a grey ponytail, watched the pub and sipped on a beer. The landlord Eva knew, a man named Warren Muir. If Hadley was correct then Muir orchestrated Razin’s local low-life, the grunts and thugs he occasionally needed for crude and dirty jobs like running police officers off the road. You’re in for one hell of a night, Eva thought as she wandered away from the bar.
She felt a buzz in her pocket; her phone had a message on it. ‘Anyone recognised you?’ It was Hadley.
‘Not yet,’ Eva messaged back. ‘I’ll show myself around a bit.’
She stood in front of the stage for a while watching the band bang their heads in four-four time. A few other drunks hung around too, oblivious to clumsy segues between songs. She sipped on her drink and scanned the room. Nobody seemed to be watching her; nobody was paying her any particular attention. Need to try harder, Eva told herself.
A sense of anticipation grew inside her as she looked around the pub. It felt, she admitted to herself as she strolled between tables, delicious. Just for once she would not be on the receiving end. Even if it was really Alastair Hadley’s gig, just for tonight she would be on the side dishing it out. Razin’s people would not forget tonight. Of that she was certain.
The band stopped playing and the pole dancers stopped cavorting. She could hardly believe her eyes when the two near-naked women stepped down from the stage and started going table-to-table to gather tips in pint glasses. Attention, what little there had been of it amongst the crowd, drifted away from the stage, so Eva set her barely touched glass down on a table and wandered back towards the bar.
‘Want a drink?’ When she turned she saw one of the members of the band standing behind her, stupid grin painted across his face. ‘I saw you up at the stage,’ he said. ‘I’m Terry. I play lead guitar, but I guess you noticed that.’ Alarmingly, she had. ‘You’re into a bit of rock and roll, right?’
Eva managed to force an interested smile in return. She needed to strike up a conversation and at least he had approached her. ‘I like metal,’ she told him. ‘And yeah, I’d love a drink. Eva, by the way,’ she said as she let a grey-haired rocker nearly twice her age lead her to the bar.
Terry made some show of buying her a drink. Eva took another vodka and tonic while Terry waited for the head to settle on a pint of Guinness. ‘Thirsty work,’ he informed her as he downed half the pint in one go.
‘Do you play here often?’ She watched the bar and the rest of the pub. A couple of people had glanced at her. Maybe someone would recognise her as a local police officer at some point.
‘Every couple of months. We tour a lot, travel the country.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It gets lonely on the road.’
You have got to be joking, Eva thought. You’re old enough to be my grandfather. You’re not seriously hitting on me, are you? She forced a sympathetic frown, though.
‘So what about you?’ Terry leered. ‘Love what you’ve done with your hair.’
She ran the palm of her hand over her scalp and leaned against the bar. ‘I like it this way. It’s really refreshing.’ Warren Muir had moved a little closer. Now the music had stopped he could hear their conversation.
Terry grinned. He looked happy. Of course he is, Eva thought. I must be coming across as easy enough.
‘So what, you decided to just cut it all off one day?’
A small number of other men had started wandering over to the bar. She noticed Muir exchange glances with one or two them. Muir was suspicious, she could see that. It was probably his business to be suspicious. Razin’s people would have pointed her out or at least mentioned her, she guessed, if only as the new kid on the block. Now somebody he might have half-recognised had shown up in his pub and if she had read the situation correctly he was asking a couple of his own people to check her out. She memorised their faces. Time to move things up a notch, Eva decided.
‘No,’ she told Terry, ‘it was just that I was in hospital a couple of years ago. They needed to shave my head to do some tests and I found I liked the way it felt.’
Terry blinked. ‘Tests?’
‘Yeah,’ Eva said while sipping on her drink, ‘they thought I might have brain damage. Somebody tried to kill me, you see?’
Eva could see the doubts that were starting to cross his mind reflected in his face. ‘Why would anyone want to kill you? Are you that annoying?’
She laughed, loud and raucous, and then put her hand on his arm for a moment as though his joke was actually funny. ‘No, of course not. Well, maybe. He was a drug dealer and I was on a stake-out, and he tried to bury me in a ditch with a lorry.’
Terry’s smile began to falter. Four men had started to move closer now as Warren Muir looked on. ‘Stake-out?’
Eva laughed again. ‘Sorry, I should have said.’ She took out her warrant card and made damned sure everybody could see it. ‘Detective Inspector Eva Harris, Surrey Police. But don’t worry, I’m just here for a quiet drink and a bit of relaxation. Oh, unless…’ she took a sip from her drink and put it on the bar, ‘unless I find the bastard who tried to kill me with a scaffolding lorry the other day. In which case I’m going to indulge in a bit of serious police brutality.’
One of the men who had sidled up to the bar spoke. ‘I think we’d like you to leave,’ he told her.
Eva turned to smile at him but spoke at Muir. ‘Warren, is this one of your trained monkeys or is he the one who yanks your chain? Tell me how it works with Semion Razin. I’m really eager to know.’ At some point the sarcastic bitch act would get her a punch in the face or worse, she knew that. Muir and the four men who had moved towards her understood something was wrong, even though they couldn’t figure out what.
‘Who’s Razin?’ Muir asked.
Eva turned her head and changed her tone. ‘That’s not very convincing, Warren. You must have worked out we’ve had electronic surveillance on this place. We know you work for Razin and that somebody here killed a driver on the A3. The question is what else have you been up to? We’re a bit worried about you, Warren. If it was just drugs and a bit of protection we’d probably overlook it, it’s just not worth our while. More than that though, and it becomes a problem.’
‘I don’t know what you’re going on about,’ Muir said. ‘And I want you out of my pub, now.’
One of the men went to grab her arm but Eva pulled it away. She had Muir and four others standing around her. That seemed like more than enough. ‘Before you do anything stupid, think about this.’ She took a small, clear plastic box from her coat pocket, set in on the table and opened it. ‘Semion Razin has gone beyond being just a drug dealer,’ she said as she opened the box. Inside were what looked like two yellow pills. Eva picked
them out, put one in-between each thumb and forefinger and started rolling them. ‘He’s reached a scale of operation that makes him a larger problem.’ When the pills were pliable enough she pushed one into each ear. ‘Razin’s operations are now on a level that gets them classified as an economic threat. Do you understand what that means?’ One of Sergeant Walker’s people had given her the earplugs. When she had walked into the sports hall and seen them loading their weapons she had understood just how dangerous Hadley really was. Walker’s people were not regular police. Dressed in black body armour and carrying assault rifles, Walker’s people were counter-terror officers. Hadley had manipulated evidence to frame the operation as an anti-terror raid.
She made sure the earplugs were in deep enough and then took something else from her coat pocket. A small metal cylinder with a button on top of it. The men standing around stared at her as if she were stupid or simply deranged, but the sense of growing anticipation was something that just for a moment Eva wanted to savour. I know what’s coming next you bastards, she thought. You have no idea what the fuck is about to hit you.
‘So Warren,’ Eva said, although she could barely hear her own words, ‘I have two questions for you. First is how do you think the police should deal with threats to national security and,’ she added as she pushed the button, ‘second is, did you think I came here alone?’
Something rolled into the room. The door to the pub opened a couple of inches and something, several objects, skittered along the floor. G-60 flash-bangs, Walker had told her. Standard CTO-issue concussion grenades.
She closed her eyes. Even though she knew what was coming when she pressed the panic button, she flinched. Multiple detonations. Searing flashes of light that penetrated her eyelids. The sound of people falling and screaming. Nobody would be hurt, she knew that, but none of them would know what the hell had hit them. When she opened her eyes the men around her were cowering, shock and horror painted across their faces. ‘You fucked with the wrong copper, Warren,’ Eva told Muir gleefully, even though with the sounds of the flash-bangs echoing in his ears she knew he would not be able to hear her.
Three seconds later twenty of Walker’s CTOs ran into the pub screaming like banshees, automatic weapons aimed at anyone who moved. MARS red-dot laser sights skittered lines of coherent light in the dissipating smoke of the flash-bangs. People staggered around. Walker’s men barged them to the ground. She saw one drunk go to attack one of the CTOs but a boot in the stomach put him on the floor before he could do anything terminally stupid. Two of the CTOs came straight over to Eva. When the man who had tried to grab her started to object they tossed him to the floor too. The other three dropped of their own volition when they saw the red laser targets of assault rifles painting lines on their faces. Eva looked around to see Warren Muir’s reaction, but Muir was gone.
She snarled. Gouged the plugs from her ears and reached over the bar. Grabbed the young man who had served her by the collar and pulled. Yelled in his face. ‘Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’ In that twisted moment she wanted him to fear her. She could see in his eyes he did.
He didn’t answer. Instead he just looked towards a door at the back of the bar. Eva slapped one of the CTOs on the shoulder and shouted, ‘come with me’.
Upstairs. She ran up a narrow flight of stairs through a corridor that had not been painted in a generation. Nicotine still clung to it. Behind her she heard the thud of the CTOs’ boots. Muir had to be here somewhere, she thought as she emerged onto a first-floor landing.
She ran from room to room. They looked like function rooms that had not been used in years. Muir was not there. ‘DI Harris,’ one of the CTOs barked. When she looked she saw he was pointing at another narrow staircase.
Second floor. The CTOs ran ahead this time, weapons raised. It looked like an apartment, Eva thought. Maybe it was where Muir wasted his days.
In a shabby bedroom with a single wardrobe she found Warren Muir trying to start a fire. He crouched on the floor with the contents of a metal security box in front of him and a cigarette lighter in his hand. It wasn’t working, Eva saw. One of the CTOs stood over Muir and took the lighter away. With two guns trained on him Muir did not even bother to resist.
He slumped. Kneeling on the floor in front of the wardrobe, Muir had the look of a man who had accepted that his death sentence was real. And well he should. She almost shook with anticipation as she stared at the pile of scraps and papers in front of him. If that’s what I think it is, Eva thought as she ran her eyes over the material on the floor, Razin’s people will find you, wherever you are.
She stepped past him and scooped up the contents of the box, then picked up the box itself and put the contents back inside. ‘We can offer you a deal, you know,’ she told Muir. He laughed at that.
‘In your dreams,’ he spat. He was only telling her what she already knew. ‘You think I’m going to last for long after they find out I kept this?’
‘What is it?’ she asked, even though she knew the answer.
‘A pension fund,’ Muir hissed. He stared at the ground as one of the CTOs dragged him to his feet. Muir nodded at the box. ‘Keep it safe,’ he told her. ‘They’ll have it out of your station before you can blink.’ The look on his face spoke of fear and an absolute loathing for her. It didn’t matter. Eva nodded.
‘I know,’ she told Muir as the CTOs led him away. ‘So it’s just as well that’s not where it’s going.’
Chapter Eighteen
Sutton’s face looked like the storm beyond the window. ‘A counter-terrorist operation,’ she bellowed at Eva, ‘an armed raid that used concussion grenades to stun the occupants of a local pub and nobody thought to inform me in advance? What the hell are we here for, just to clear up the horse shit after Counter-Terrorism Command’s parade?’
She found she was becoming good at lying to her colleagues. ‘I can’t tell you much, ma’am,’ Eva said. ‘I got a call from Superintendent Hadley just yesterday afternoon. He said there was an operation in progress, that I was required for it and that it would be carried out that evening. I was explicitly instructed to not communicate that fact to anyone.’
Sutton kept glaring. ‘Friend of yours is he, this Superintendent Hadley?’
Apparently, she was not that good a liar after all. ‘No, ma’am,’ Eva practically spat back. ‘I first ran into Superintendent Hadley a couple of years ago. I wouldn’t say we have the most cordial working relationship. I do know when he says jump the required response is: how high?’
They stood in silence for a moment. Then Sutton sat down. ‘So what were Hadley and CTC after in a dodgy pub?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Eva insisted. ‘They chucked in stun grenades for shock value I think, because nobody was about to put up a fight with twenty fully armed CTOs hitting the place. When they had all the punters on the ground they ripped the pub apart like they were looking for something specific.’
‘And Hadley was there?’
‘No.’
‘So the CTOs conducted the search themselves?’
‘Yes.’
Sutton leaned over her desk. ‘And you didn’t think to ask why?’
‘They gave me the same answer Hadley did. I didn’t need to know.’
‘Did they find anything?’
‘I couldn’t say.’
Sutton snapped then. ‘Well, you’re the font of all bloody wisdom today, aren’t you Harris? Anything else you don’t know? Like who the hell is scooping the eyes out of corpses around here?’
Eva gritted her teeth. The backlash was inevitable. She hoped the box of documents from the raid that was now actually hidden under her bed would make it all worthwhile. ‘It’s two cases.’ She kept her temper and spoke with quiet insistence. ‘Alicia Khan proves that. If we try and combine the two we won’t get anywhere.’
‘We’re not getting anywhere at the moment,’ Sutton barked. ‘What are you waiting for, another murder?’
‘We may already have one.’ Eva told S
utton about Robert Isherwood.
‘An anonymous text?’ The look on Sutton’s face was not exactly encouraging, Eva thought.
‘Sent directly to my phone just before the crash. Flynn had it traced to a car park near the Chatham Centre.’
‘CCTV?’ Sutton demanded.
‘Unfortunately not. I think someone inside the Chatham Centre is trying to tell us something, though. I’d like permission to run more detailed background checks on the staff.’
‘I assume you’ve already done CRB and DBS checks?’
‘Criminal Records Bureau came back completely clean, as you would expect in a place like that. They’re not about to take any obvious risks. No,’ Eva continued, ‘I want to have Raj do an in-depth financial search on the company and its principles. That’ll require a warrant.’
Another snarl. ‘Evidence?’
‘An anonymous tip-off and four seemingly connected deaths. We ought to run the financials even if only for elimination purposes.’
Sutton drummed her fingers. ‘So what about Alicia Khan?’
Eva took a breath. ‘There’s almost nothing to justify keeping on looking at Mathew Harred, but we do know the previous victims had a tentative connection with New Thought. All three had visited the church at some point, although that hardly makes them remarkable. It’s Harred’s painting; the damn thing is like a magnet. The student union at the university organised a couple of group visits. That somebody was attempting a pre-Raphaelite style piece on that scale made it a curiosity, the fact it was actually bloody good made it irresistible. I think Harred was inundated with people wanting to pose for him, to be in the fresco. He still is. He can have his pick of the best-looking men and women in the county. He’s sole arbiter, but that doesn’t make him a killer. New Thought wouldn’t have dissuaded the university from sending students because they were all both potential converts and subjects for Harred. The real problem is that New Thought is a honey pot. It has affluence, a kind of cultist glamour and this incredible painting. Putting Harred to one side, I think there is still enough of interest in New Thought and sufficient connection between them and the previous victims to warrant further investigation.’