Only he got this call from Jimmy. “Okay. Sure. Right on it.” He hung up and punched in a number for Martin.
“Henry,” said Martin. “I’m right in the middle of something …”
“Drop it.”
“I just did.”
“I mean you’re to watch out for somebody.” Henry described the shooter. Martin stored the fake gold bracelet in his rear pocket, smiled at the sucker he’d been about to fleece, then knifed through the crowd to a place that served as a great vantage point for the station.
Almost immediately, before he could punch in Suki’s number, he saw him: big guy, hard square face, gray topcoat and still with the red scarf round his neck. Why not? Maybe he was meeting someone and the poppy-colored scarf was the sign. Fuck’s sake, did he have to choose a color that would tell the world?
He had Suki now. “Where are you?”
“Same place as always, at the caff.”
Suki would stand near the door of this café, her big brown eyes and her puppy looking starved. Martin had never known anyone who could look more in need of a meal than Suki. How she managed to suck herself in, he didn’t know, because she wasn’t thin. It never took Suki more than five or ten minutes before the mark—usually a woman—had her at a table, ordering food. Sometimes, the woman would ask Suki to watch her belongings whilst she went to the loo. The pockets of Suki’s little cargo pants would soon be stuffed with whatever was lying around—money, jewelry, lipstick.
Hearing Martin’s voice, Suki immediately lost her lost look, secured Reno’s thin rope leash and looked puzzled. “Why’s he still got the red scarf?”
“He’s meeting someone’s my guess.”
“But he must be catching a train. Why else Waterloo?”
“To get lost in. Move around in.”
“Wait. I think I see him … Near WH Smith … over there. Hold on, he’s talking to someone—Jesus, it’s the Filth.”
Martin said, “They got him?”
“He doesn’t look got.”
“This guy shot two people outside the Artemis Club.”
“Artemis Club? Oh, cool.” The Artemis Club was Suki’s notion of heaven. She’d never been inside, of course, being nine years old, but dreamed of it. “So this idiot’s wandering around Waterloo with a scarf like a flag … Unless …” she said to Martin, “the second guy isn’t really a cop.”
He wasn’t really a cop.
Suki, with Reno on his lead, followed the big man (now divested of his red scarf) through an exit to Station Approach Road. “Shit, they’re heading for a car. God, it’s a Porsche.”
“Get the reg and call Robbie.”
“Now they’re just standing there and talking.”
Suki let Reno off his lead and motioned for him to go. Reno trotted off toward the two men.
“That your dog, kid?” asked the one dressed as station security.
“Yeah. Did he bother you?”
“No. But he should be on a lead.”
The black man said nothing, only looked at her indifferently, as if he found the incident monumentally boring.
That annoyed Suki. She should garner more interest than that. “He’s always getting off his lead. I’m sorry.”
“Come on,” said the big man. “Let’s get going.” He had the passenger door open and a foot in the car.
But the other man was now focused on the dog. Then he put his foot in on the driver’s side. Suki heard him make a shuttered comment about Heathrow and the terminal and Emirates as he slammed his door.
“Heathrow, Terminal Three. Em—what’s that airline?” Suki said into her mobile when she called Martin back. “Who do we have?”
Martin groaned. “Emirates, maybe. Terminal Three’s a zoo. It’s its own fucking city. We’ve got Aero and Patty.”
“This guy is getting out of the country, so he comes to Waterloo to make the cops think he’s just getting out of the city, or what?”
“He has to get by passport control,” Martin said.
“Control to where? What country? How do they ID him? The guy shot somebody only—what?—a couple of hours ago? There wouldn’t be any pictures yet.”
Martin didn’t like it when Suki started reasoning. “Call Aero and tell him there’ll be two guys pulling into Terminal Three and that our guy is really big. And black.”
“There are a lot of big black guys.”
“This one’ll be getting out of a Porsche. He’ll know.”
Heathrow Airport, London
Nov. 1, Friday, 10:00 P.M.
4
Aero could canvass the entire arrivals section outside Terminal 3 in ten seconds flat. When Suki told him the big guy would be getting out of a Porsche, Aero said spotting him would be a piece of cake.
Twenty minutes after the call, Aero saw him—hell, the guy must have been six feet three or four. Hard to lose yourself in a crowd when you’re that big. And black.
Aero was spectacular on a skateboard. (Indeed he was good at anything that required balance.) But skateboards were not allowed at Heathrow, so he had outfitted himself with a pair of specially made skates that were so low to the ground all anyone could see was a kid moving very quickly along the pavement.
The skates themselves drew up into the shoes’ thick soles like the wheels-up of a plane. Aero could both fly and walk. The shoes were invented by his friend Jules, a man who made his living as a cobbler. He made custom shoes and had his shop on the ground floor of his little house in Notting Hill. Aero’s aunt and uncle lived in Notting Hill, an area of London that Aero couldn’t stand since that old film with Julia Roberts in it. Seeing Julia Roberts’s tits, apparently, was supposed to be the event of a filmgoer’s lifetime. Endless stretches of sand in Lawrence of Arabia were far more exciting than anything Julia Roberts had to offer.
He saw the guy. Damn! But that was some car! He took out his mobile and tapped in Patty’s number.
“We want to know where he’s traveling to,” she said.
“He’s flying Emirates as far as Suki could make out.”
“He won’t be queuing. He’ll be heading for a gate.” Patty flipped her phone closed and stuck it into the back pocket of her jeans.
Sometimes she was stopped by security, who wanted to know if she was okay, and who she was meeting, and other none-of-your-business questions.
“My mum’s right over there,” she’d say, pointing to any woman who happened to be looking in her general direction. Patty would wave, and sometimes the stranger would smile bemusedly and wave back for no reason. The guard usually would then leave her alone. If he continued to hog her air, Patty would go up to the woman and say something like, “You look just like my Aunt Mildred that’s supposed to be here,” and, as long as the guard was watching, continue with this vapid conversation. When he stopped, she’d say to the woman she’d just accosted, “Oh, there she is!” and skip off toward another stranger.
All this was really annoying; it pretty much ruined surveilling, having to interrupt to stage this scene. So if she was following somebody, she kept her mobile to her ear to make security think she was on it. Sometimes she’d run off into a group of strangers.
Once when a guard was being a particular prick she made her way to a young man with a bedroll sitting against a wall. The guard had actually had the nerve to approach him and ask, “Is this your little sister?”
Without blinking, he’d said, “Yeah. Y’r business? Why?”
No answer from the guard, who just walked away.
But tonight there was none of that problem; security seemed to be looking the other way. Maybe they were looking for him, the tall black guy in a gray coat. Aero had filled her in.
She had her passport (her “Smith” one; she had several more), but she needed a boarding pass and she needed it for Emirates, if that was the airline he was taking. She went toward the Emirates ticket counter and watched the line of passengers waiting to collect their documents. She took out a little notebook and a ballpoint pen and walk
ed along checking the luggage identification, looking for a female “Smith.” No one paid any attention to her, until a heavyset woman, who probably had to know everything, asked her what she was doing.
Patty said, “I have to write an essay for school about the kind of luggage people carry.”
A couple heard that and thought it cute; a few others looked at her indulgently. That was when she saw the name on a bag belonging to a harassed-looking youngish woman: Alicia Smith. Alicia. That would do, although Patty would have preferred “Tricia.”
After this woman collected her boarding pass and checked her luggage through and turned and walked off, Patty followed her. Alicia Smith had stuck her boarding pass into an outside pocket of her big carry-on bag (how stupid!), which she flung over her shoulder, where it pounded against her back along with her camera and binoculars. She was also pulling a bag on wheels.
That was far too much to jam around her seat and certainly too much to keep track of. As soon as Patty had the boarding pass in hand, she ran around Alicia Smith and sprinted to security. She got there way ahead of Alicia. She could hardly stand behind her, or she’d have to listen to a hysterical Alicia Smith bewailing the loss of her boarding pass. Then Patty wouldn’t be able to use it.
Naturally, they would question her being by herself with a passport that read “Patricia,” not “Alicia.” To the baggage security guard who started in, she said breathlessly, as she jigged from one foot to the other, “My mum’s just over there; we got separated.” Pained look, jig, jig, jig. “Please tell me where there’s a toilet, quick!” Jigjigjigjig—
The guard pointed the way.
Patty jigged off.
The man had not gotten far ahead of her. When he came to the next set of restrooms, he hurried into the men’s, and Patty went into the ladies’ for thirty seconds and then came out again to stand by the water fountain and wait.
When she saw him exit the restroom, she quickly turned to the fountain, drank and continued following. They were coming to the last stack of shops along this corridor. After the shops it would be gates, where it would be harder to run into him by accident. She hoped he’d stop—
He did.
There was a line in this newsagent’s as it was the last place to buy reading matter, candy, refrigerated drinks before going to the lounge and waiting for the plane’s departure. He wasn’t in the line yet; he was looking over the newspapers. Patty went to the refrigerated unit and pulled out a bottle of water, then moved to the magazines, where she looked for something that might get his attention if he saw it. Nothing in magazines; she went to the books.
When he appeared to be moving toward the counter, she snatched up a book about cards and got there before him so that she was standing in front of him. When the woman ahead of her left with her chewing gum and lotion, Patty set her water and her book on the counter and got out her change purse.
“That’ll be six pounds ten, love.”
Six quid! Good grief, books were expensive. She handed over a five-pound note, a pound coin, and ten p in change. As she was picking up the water, she shoved the book onto the floor. Of course he picked it up and looked at the cover before handing it back to her and receiving her thanks.
“Poker: Small Stakes Strategies. This is what you do in your spare time?”
“Me? No, it’s a present for my dad. He likes to gamble.”
And, of course, he spoke to her as she stood in the open doorway looking left and right, puzzled.
“Looking for your family?”
“What? Oh, no, I’m just wondering which way is Gate Twelve.”
He smiled. “Same way I’m going. Come on.”
As they walked, he said, “Your family is going to Dubai?”
“No, just me. My aunt’s meeting me there.”
“You’re alone? That’s a very long way for someone to go alone.”
He meant, of course, for a child to go alone.
“Well, I travel a lot. It’s my dad. His job takes him to a lot of different countries. My mum’s dead. I stay with aunts and uncles a lot.” That, she thought, sounded sloppy.
“You know, you’re the same age as my great-niece. I wouldn’t like her to be on her own in airports and on planes.”
“Neither does Pop. But what can he do?”
They were in the foyer of Emirates now. He put out his hand. “People call me B.B. Bushiri Banerjee. Father was Bengali, my mother Kenyan. How do you do?”
“I’m Patty Smith. They got my boarding pass wrong and put down Alicia instead of Patricia.” She showed him the pass she’d lifted from Ms. Smith. Winsomely, she added, “It’d be nice if we could sit together.”
B.B. seemed to be thinking this over. “I might be able to fix that.” He had his boarding pass out and took hers too.
Patty watched him as he went up to the flight attendant, spoke to her. She nodded and turned to her computer. She turned back and said something and he took out his credit card and handed it to her. After this transaction, he returned to Patty and handed her a new boarding pass.
Her eyes widened. “This is first class!”
“Well, that’s how I’m going. We won’t be sitting together because we’ll each have our own room, but we can visit. It’s very nice on this airline.”
She thanked and thanked him and wondered if this guy was such a careless killer, such a hapless hit man, that he could be conned by a kid.
Or was she just a really, really clever kid? She gazed up at B.B. with a thankful look, preferring to believe the latter.
Her mobile twittered. “Hi.”
It was Aero.
“It’s my aunt. Would you excuse me a minute?” Patty went out into the aisle, out of B.B.’s range. “His name … let me think … Anyway, flight’s to Dubai on Emirates. Where in hell are the cops? This plane is going to leave and the gate’ll close in another five minutes.”
B.B. was standing now and motioning to her.
“Trouble is, this guy you’re following hasn’t been identified by anybody but us.”
“What about Robbie? Why isn’t he here with the police?”
“Don’t know.”
“So the Filth hasn’t got it together.”
Aero chuckled. “Why d’ya think they’re called the Filth?”
“This is London’s finest?”
“No, Robbie and them’s London’s finest.”
“The plane’s about to take off. Have I got to go to Dubai just to keep an eye on him? Where’s Dubai?”
“My God, Patty, don’t do that! Are you crazy?”
“Somebody’s got to be. His name’s B.B. Or that’s what he’s called. The plane’s leaving! Bye.”
Patty ran to the line and to where B.B. stood near the gate. “That was Aunt Monique. She was calling from Dubai; that’s why I couldn’t hear too well.” How ridiculous.
The attendant behind the counter moved over to take the boarding passes when their flight was announced. She smiled at B.B. and looked benignly at Patty, and said, “Aren’t you the lucky girl?”
Patty agreed that she certainly was.
What she wanted to say was it wasn’t luck, lady.
Islington, London
Nov. 2, Saturday morning
5
Detective Superintendent Richard Jury was dealing with his own smoke and mirrors in the person of his upstairs neighbor, Carole-anne Palutski, not a policewoman, although at times she thought she was. She had come into his flat early on Saturday morning with a pint of milk and his Times.
She handed him the milk and sat down on the sofa to read the paper by opening it wide, ignoring the important news, looking for ads for whatever Christian Louboutins or Jimmy Choos might be walking her way. After a bit of this browsing, she looked up at him. “You were awfully late coming in on Thursday night. And you forgot our date to go down the Mucky Duck.”
Jury had turned to take the milk into the kitchen and now turned back again. Why was she waiting until now to upbraid him? Now was Saturday
morning. And this alleged “date” he had no memory of making. Which was often the case. But all he said as he continued into the kitchen to pour milk into tea was, “At the Yard.” In case she’d forgotten where he worked.
“Doing what?”
He debated bringing up the Starrdust, as he didn’t want to get into a discussion of her psychic powers and David Moffit’s dark future. And he certainly didn’t want to go into his dinner with the Moffits at the Goring. So he lied. “Working overtime.” He walked the two mugs of tea back into the living room. She thanked him with a sighing insincerity when he handed hers over.
She said, “You’re a superintendent. You shouldn’t have to put in overtime.” She was holding the paper the way no one holds a newspaper who’s really reading it. Front page—citing the usual outrages—and back page visible, paper fanned out in two parts.
David’s worried look came back to Jury and he said, “Someone came in who needed to talk to a detective.”
“He could have seen any detective.”
“I happened to be there.”
“Probably, he saw you go in and followed you.”
Jury frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“People know you after all the publicity.” She turned a page of the paper.
“Carole-anne, that was over a year ago.”
“You think people can’t remember back that far? And excuse me, but don’t you have reception at New Scotland Yard?”
“We do have a front desk that’s manned by a couple of uniforms. We don’t call it ‘Reception.’ We’re not the Connaught.”
The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) Page 3