“What?” snapped an irritated Lucie, trying to keep her mind focussed on her lamentations.
“I know him!”
The words, combined with the rapid approach of wailing sirens dragged her back into the present, Lucie finishing her confession and pulling herself back to her feet. The sirens had reached the destroyed gateway, two response cars pulling up to the pair, uniformed officers spilling out and screaming for immediate surrender.
“This is a bit of a pickle,” Ismail opined. “I’m normally on the other side of the fence.”
Lucie though simply offered the first constable the beamiest of beaming smiles and stepped towards him.
“Evening, Officer! Nice night for a drive, eh?”
“Get your hands in the air,” ordered the young officer with an uncertainty in his voice that was mirrored in his expression.
“Nah,” Lucie said, shaking her head. “Is now a good time for my phone call?”
FOURTEEN
It was late afternoon the following day when Ismail met Lucie as she came out of Westminster Abbey, dressed in the more comfortable attire of jeans and a polo shirt, the increasingly frayed looking overcoat hanging on her shoulders and her hair untidily down.
Their spell in custody the previous evening had been as brief as Lucie had expected it to be, her call to Lake surprisingly well received and resulting in immediate release for the pair of them. Though one or two eyebrows had been raised at the appearance of Ismail in the custody suite, they were soon satiated by cryptic references to the ‘special secondment’ he was involved in.
“It’s hardly a secondment, it’s a bloody suspension,” he had spat as the pair had walked free from the station in the early hours. But Lucie, tired of games and repentant of her latest killing, was in no mood to respond, the pair retiring to their respective flats an agreeing to liaise in the morning. While Lucie had spent the morning in a tense de-brief with Lake, before heading to the Abbey to sit in morose contrition, Ismail had made good on his offer the night before to track down ‘Ludmita’ and press her further on what she had let slip the previous evening. He relayed the tale as the pair strolled around the historical beauty of the Abbey gardens.
The ‘entertainment centre’ had released Ludmita’s address on site of Ismail’s faked ID. He had found her that morning, tired and angry, at the studio apartment she rented in Elephant & Castle, disposed to give Ismail successive mouthfuls of the foulest language she could muster until she too had lain eyes on the shining badge of the Met. As it had turned out, whatever the secret of ‘Ludmita’s’ true identity, she was so desperate to keep it that she didn’t allow the resentment she felt to inhibit her answers. Over an early morning bottle of vodka, she had spilled what she knew about the visit of Ines to the centre in return for Ismail’s assurance he would not take her in and set about uncovering who she really was.
His bluff had evidently worked, and by the time he had caught the tube to meet with Lucie, he was satisfied that the young prostitute had told him everything she knew. Ines, Ludmita revealed, had been well-known at the centre, along with several other women who had actively campaigned against the opening of the brothels since they were first mooted by one of the Cabinet’s more libertarian Members. At first the protests had been confined to comments and messages to the centre’s social media pages; never aggressive, quite the contrary in fact, but relentless. One night, not long after the messages had been blocked, a small group of four women had arrived at the centre asking to be entertained by a selection of girls, Ludmita among them. Almost before the door to the suite had closed, the group had begun what amounted to a sermon, urging the women to abandon this career and not let themselves be used and abused by the people who frequented it.
Security had swiftly arrived, and the women escorted from the premises. One woman however, who spoke in a French accent and introduced herself as ‘Ines’, appeared again later that same night. It had been in the early hours when Ludmita had finished her shift and was leaving for the night that this woman approached her on the steps outside the centre, begging her to listen and asking her to at least take her number and meet sometime to talk, away from the centre. Though she was sick to death of people screaming their morality at her, there had been something in the woman’s eyes that almost compelled her to accept the number and agree to meet, and had the bouncer, Jim, not come outside and intervened at that point, she might well have done so. As it was, she was marched from the grounds in much the same way, Ismail noted, as Lucie herself had been the previous night. That had been the extent of Ludmita’s involvement with the mysterious Ines, and for what it was worth, Ismail had finished, he had believed her.
“Doesn’t tell us much,” Lucie mused, “but at least we know for sure she’d been there. Thanks for taking care of that, mate.”
“No problem,” he said with a sly smile. “Mate.”
Lucie’s cheeks flushed for a moment and Ismail switched the conversation back to the matter in hand.
“You still think the brothel guys weren’t involved, even after the fun and games last night?”
“If I wasn’t sure of it before, I am now.”
“What’s convinced you?”
“You did,” she smiled at him, enjoying the bashful look that briefly appeared on Ismail’s own face. “The name you gave me last night after we finished up with your chums in blue.”
“Ah,” Ismail acknowledged. “The infamous Mr. Healey?”
“The very same. How did you come by him again?”
“It would have been the beginning of last year,” Ismail sighed. “Uniform brought him in on a D&D arrest after a demonstration, and then the next week he was nicked again for harassment when he started following certain MPs around and turning up on their doorsteps at night. CID got involved when we had an anonymous tip he was funding his political activities with a bit of, shall we say, freelance gardening.”
“Weed in the attic?”
“Yeah, a shit load of it if I recall. It can be hard to tell where the farms are sometimes, but in this fella’s case he opted to grow his stash in the middle of the cold snap. When every house on the street has a snow-covered roof except for one, and the upstairs windows all have tinfoil curtains, you get a pretty good idea of what’s going on up there. I think he got twelve months in the end, though he’d have been out in six. I never had him cut out for serious shit like this though.”
“Well thanks to your memory for faces, Lake was able to dig into things. Turns out that upon his release, the late Jonathan Healey had returned to his political activities, although in a more organised manner than before.”
The pair had passed through the gardens and headed for the beer garden of one of the trendier bars in the area, Ismail ordering them a beer apiece as Lucie continued.
“Healey got himself involved in one of these bloody yellow vest groups, wandering around shouting at people and disrupting traffic, but that isn’t the most interesting thing.”
“Then what is?” Ismail quizzed, handing a crumpled note to the waiter who placed tall, green beer bottles and half-pint glasses on the table between them.
“Who he worked for,” Lucie answered as she tipped her ice-cold beverage into her glass. “Your friend and one of his chums were nicked again not long ago. Turns out they both worked for WaterWhyte Defence.”
Ismail frowned and swallowed the ale in his mouth.
“WaterWhyte? The place building this Red Mako thing you told me about?”
“The very same,” Lucie confirmed. “Healey was employed as on-site security for the last few months, coincidentally at the same company and the same project that Kasper was looking into when he was attacked. I wouldn’t mind betting that Healey was the one behind it.”
“That’s supposition, Lucie,” Ismail warned, his rational, police mind resisting such leaps. “Healey had no form for firearm offences or attempted murder. He’s just been in a bit of a thug with a weed habit and a big mouth.”
“Is that all h
e was though?” Lucie pressed. “He tailed us through London last night, shooting bullets at us, remember?”
“He was the driver,” Ismail corrected, “not the shooter.”
“Potato, potahto,” shrugged Lucie. “He was in the car, he knew what was going down.”
Lucie could feel the anger building once more within her and she was grateful that Ismail did not press further. When Kasper was injured she had yearned for revenge, before regaining control of her emotions and accepting that revenge was, according to her long-held beliefs, The Lord’s to take. And after learning that she had taken the life, albeit by necessity, of one of those who had likely been involved in her friend’s suffering, the momentary pleasure the death had given her was now troubling her greatly. Had she really fallen so far?
Shaking her head free of such musings, she picked up her train of thought and continued.
“So, much as you might hate suppositions, all we have right now is the hope that the people who came after us once we’d visited the brothel, were the same who went after Ines when she’d done the same.”
“But you still don’t think the brothel itself is involved?”
“No,” Lucie confirmed, “sorry, I just don’t. I think the answer is at WaterWhyte. That’s who Healey worked for and that’s where I’m heading next, and I told Lake the same this morning; he wasn’t best pleased…
She allowed herself a small smile of victory at the look on Lake’s face when he had told her of Healey’s connection to WaterWhyte, and the need to expand her investigation in that direction. Triumphs over the spy master she had soon discovered were small, rare and to be cherished when they occurred, and she would have been lying if she’d said this one hadn’t brought particular pleasure. Regulations be damned, it was for her to get to the bottom of the attack on Kasper, not one of the other ‘operatives’ Lake frequently boasted of. Fuck them, and fuck him for taking her off the assignment in the first place…
She quickly drained the beer and ordered two more. It was a bright if cold late winter’s day and she had no wish to waste it. It wasn’t until she tipped the second bottle to her froth-stained glass and sat back to take in the opulent splendour of the nearby Abbey against the blue sky, that the emotions she had been pushing back down into her gut began to grow within her again.
Ismail was looking at her with the concern of not just a friend, but someone who quite clearly would welcome more, and she looked away as she felt the tears threatening to come.
“First time you’ve killed someone?” Ismail quizzed suddenly, his voice soft and with what sounded like a hint of compassion.
“If only,” came Lucie’s response. “No, I’m not a stranger to taking lives; it’s just that killing them is the easy part, but at the end of it one of you has to stay alive. The only thing worse than being killed is living with having done the killing. You must know what I mean…”
“Do I?” Ismail replied, with just a suggestion of indignance. “I’m a Police Officer, or was until your mate Lake had anything to do with it. My job was to arrest the bad guys, not put a bullet through them.”
He immediately regretted his choice of words and offered a perfunctory apology to Lucie, who shrugged away any presumed offence and simply drank deeper from her glass.
“It’s a hellish thing to do; to kill someone,” the spy mused, staring into the rising bubbles in her glass as though hoping her guilt would rise up and pop away with them. “When the blade goes in, or the gun is fired, they always fight it, like they know death is bearing down on them but their pride or their will or whatever, refuses to accept it, right up until the last second. You can see it in their eyes, that anger, that resentment that this really is it and their refusal to give in until the last possible moment…”
“But Healey wasn’t like that?”
Lucie shut her eyes, trying to force away the image of the felled killer that obstinately refused to budge.
“You won’t believe this,” she almost whispered, “but killing someone is one of the most intimate things you can do with them, closer than friendship, closer than sex. There’s a moment, when you connect utterly with them, soul to soul. You know you’re taking everything away from them and they know they’re losing it to you and despite all the fight and all the anger, for that final second, they accept it… I killed Healey, but I didn’t see him die, the connection wasn’t there and… and it feels harder because of that, as though I’ve denied him his moment of peace.”
Ismail, though the rest of his face remained the picture of sympathy, couldn’t disguise the eyebrow raised in confusion at her words, and he remained quiet for the longest time, before refilling his glass and raising it to his lips.
“Well if you’ll forgive me for saying so, those must be some weird-ass friends and some pretty bizarre sex you’ve been having.”
Lucie’s expression shifted immediately to one of shock and surprise, before the laughter within her erupted in a crescendo of noise that drew annoyed tuts from other tables but more importantly dragged the relaxing smile she had grown so fond of onto Ismail’s face.
“I’m sorry I’ve not been myself today,” Lucie said, sincerely.
“It’s ok,” he reassured her, “I get it. You need to make your peace with….” He gestured upwards towards the sky.
“Yep,” she nodded, “and it gets harder every time.”
“It’s meant to be hard,” Ismail said, sagely. “To keep your faith in a world like this, I mean. If it was easy everyone would be doing it.”
“What about you? Do you follow any faith?”
“Sure,” Ismail nodded, “I’m a Muslim, even though you can probably tell by the beer that I’m not the world’s best.”
“All any of us can do is try.”
“Truth is I don’t get to the mosque very often these days, what with shift work, and also being a bit of a lazy bugger on my days off. I used to go every Friday with my folks and there are days when I really do miss it.”
Lucie thanked the patient waiter for the further beers he placed on the table and shared a brief joke with him about whose turn it was to pay before turning back to the man who had quickly become a friend.
“The last place I went to with my old man before he got ill was church,” she said. “He hadn’t been in years then out of nowhere he said he wanted to take Communion, so off we trotted. Six weeks later he was dead.”
Ismail stayed silent for a moment, not wanting to simply give the obligatory ‘I’m sorry’ but unable to think of anything else.
“It’s ok,” Lucie said after he had given in to the inevitable.
“May I ask, how…?”
“Cancer,” she answered, blinking back a persistent tear. “Testicular. Make sure you check your balls.”
Lucie pointed to him with the look of an army recruiting poster as she issued her command, her little attempt to stifle her sadness and lighten things bringing an affectionate smile to Ismail’s face.
“I just got thinking about it since last night,” Lucie continued. “You know, I spent every waking hour sat at Dad’s bedside, not wanting him to be alone when his time came; I was there for days. Then one morning I went to get a coffee from the kitchen and when I came back, he was gone. Right at the very end I let him down… because of me he died alone.”
Ismail heaved in an enormous breath and shook his head gently.
“He wasn’t alone, Lucie,” he said. “He had his heart full of you and his mind full of memories.”
“Yeah,” she mused, a smile finally returning to her face. “And they were great memories ... music, booze and football, that’s what he was about. I’ll never forget my first trip to Maine Road.”
“Bloody hell,” Ismail grinned, “a City fan!”
“In the flesh,” Lucie grinned back, “and before you ask, yes, I was there when we were shit.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“It’s true! I had posters of Uwe Rosler and Paul Walsh all over my bedroom in the mi
d ‘90’s; I still can’t believe we got rid of Walshy…”
Ismail’s grin grew wider. “I felt a bit like that when Arsenal sold Anders Limpar, but then we got Dennis Bergkamp a couple of seasons later, so that turned out ok.”
“Yeah? We got relegated twice in three seasons,” Lucie laughed. “We lived between Manchester and Prague in those days but whenever we were this side me and my dad would trot along to see us get beaten by whoever we were playing that week…”
She took a sip of her beer as she allowed the memory a moment to caress her, Ismail patiently listening, a sincere smile on his face.
“There was a social club, a couple of streets away from Maine Road,” Lucie picked up, “and we’d meet up there with my dad’s mates for a drink before the game. They were a good bunch of lads, they’d always apologise for swearing in front of me, as though I’d never heard the words before. And they always called me ‘Tom’s girl’. It didn’t matter how old I got, it was always ‘Tom’s girl’, and ‘sorry for swearing, Tom’s girl’. It used to piss me off at the time, but it always makes me smile now… And then after a few drinks we’d walk to the stadium, grab a pie and wait for our mighty blue heroes to emerge and get stuffed.”
“Here’s to memories,” Ismail toasted, raising his glass towards her.
“And to making new ones.”
They drained their glasses and stood up to leave, Lucie wishing they could just forget the case for a day and continue relaxing into each other’s company, but duty continued to tug at her senses, and she re-organised her thoughts once more, shuffling the matter of Ines, and WaterWhyte to the front.
“We need to find a way to get into the company,” Lucie pondered aloud as they continued walking, the cold afternoon air beginning to chill their skin. “I want to know more about this Red Mako of theirs, and why they’d employ a man who spends his off hours speeding after people with a gun.”
“We could question the HR Manager, or someone with access to the employment records. We should be able to find out who hired him and work from there.”
Sealed With A Death Page 10