Killing the Emperors

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Peace reigned even through lunch, during which the baroness assured them once again that Big Brother was a guy with a great sense of humour who was probably having a laugh with the evictees. Anastasia was equally bullish. Everyone drank a lot except for the baroness, who was awaiting the moment to foment yet another argument.

  ***

  Amiss was watching a scrum of photographers snapping Anastasia Holliday’s parents, who had just come off the plane from Sydney. Having been pursued to the airport by a press posse, they had been greeted at Heathrow by another shrieking the news that two more of the missing had been found dead. Having been given the details, they were asked to describe their feelings.

  ‘How do you think we’re feeling, you dipsticks?’ shouted Ben Holliday. ‘Our only daughter’s missing and your police are as useless as tits on a bull.’ As he grabbed his wife’s hand and began to plough through the crowd, Mary Lou rang Amiss.

  ‘Ellis just called and I managed to keep him long enough on the phone demanding news of progress to find out that a Special Branch informant in an Albanian-owned brothel reported that some guy called Akim, one of the owners—who is also one of her regulars—was very keyed up on Tuesday night.’

  ‘The night Jake Thorogood was killed?’

  ‘Yep. She was surprised that he was sober, because he almost never is, but he explained that he couldn’t drink because he had a very important mission. And she knows he works for a Russian, because when he’s drunk he curses Russians. Apparently he didn’t stick around long, looked at his watch about ten and rushed off and into his BMW.’

  ‘He didn’t say where the brothel was?’

  ‘Just that it was north. And then he had to hang up.’

  ‘Well done. I’ll call Mike now.’

  ***

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ shouted Gavin Truss, ‘you’ll be telling us next that nothing in Tate Modern is art.’

  ‘Most of what goes on in that repugnant edifice of brutalist architecture too damn right isn’t art,’ said the baroness. ‘Tat Modern is full of tat and is crammed to the gills with the effluence of so-called artists who couldn’t draw or paint to save their stupid lives. And any good stuff they’ve got is doled out grudgingly and rarely.’

  ‘It’s the most successful art gallery in Europe. I suppose that counts for nothing?’

  ‘Compare like with like. It’s a bloody fairground, not an art gallery. I bet it doesn’t have more visitors that the Paris Disney.’

  ‘How can you justify that, you awful person?’ shouted Truss. ‘What do you mean fairground?’

  ‘Take the Tat’s turbine hall. All five stories and forty thousand square feet of it. Now Serota’s empire includes vast storehouses full of great art that the public doesn’t get to see. You might think he’d be glad to fill this huge space with enormous pictures and grand sculpture. At least occasionally. Henry Moore could cut a dash here. But our friend Sclerota, as I like to call him, commissions installations specifically geared to the Hall and otherwise leaves it barren.’

  Marilyn was looking worried. ‘What do you think, hon?’ she asked Herblock. ‘Maybe Jack has a point. It’s a big space. Maybe it should be filled with something.’

  ‘You might be right, hon. The longer I’m in here looking at flies and dead cows, the more I begin to think we haven’t been giving Michelangelo enough respect.’

  ‘You may,’ said Truss grudgingly, ‘have a point about empty spaces, Jack. I have my differences with Nick. I find him rather unimaginative. But surely even you can rejoice in the magnificence of Weiwei’s majestic installation.’

  ‘I’m lost,’ said Anastasia.

  ‘Weiwei’s main claim to fame is that the Chinese government persecutes him,’ said the baroness. ‘Gives him no end of cachet.’

  ‘I think she’s actually evil,’ whispered Truss to Herblock, who shrugged.

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard of him,’ said Anastasia. ‘He did something with sunflower seeds, didn’t he?’

  The baroness began to laugh. ‘That was funny.’

  ‘Him being persecuted by his government was funny?’ asked Charlie Briggs, whose brow was furrowed.

  ‘No, no. Him being persecuted by Health and Safety.’

  Anastasia was puzzled. ‘What? I thought he got banged up in China.’

  ‘Our Health and Safety, Anastasia. They’re world-class. You see Weiwei produced for the Tat hall an enormous field made of a hundred million sunflower seeds. Except they weren’t sunflower seeds but porcelain replicas, individually made and handpainted over a couple of years by sixteen hundred workers in Jingdezhen, which of course you’ll undoubtedly know has been the ceramic capital of China for almost two millennia. I think it was supposed to remind us that many poor bastards had nothing else to eat during the Cultural Revolution. No wonder his government isn’t pleased with him.

  ‘Having cottoned on to the fact that what visitors to Tat Modern are mostly looking for is a funfair, WeiWei essentially turned a huge part of the hall into a kind of playpen. The visitors played with the seeds as they might with sand, ran them through their fingers, danced on them and rolled in them.’

  ‘Sounds like fun.’

  ‘It was, rather. Whether it was art was another matter, but fun it undoubtedly was. I would quite have liked a bit of a roll among the seeds myself for nostalgic reasons, but I never got the chance. It took only a couple of days for the puritans to strike. Within forty-eight hours, the installation had been roped off and the public ordered to keep outside a barrier lest dust-inhalation damage their lungs.’

  Anastasia ruminated. ‘What happened to the seeds after the exhibition closed?’

  ‘Last I heard they were sold off at Sotheby’s about a quarter-ton at a time. The first lot, I seem to remember, went for something like £3.50 a seed. Weiwei won’t starve. Mind you, Sclerota’s made off with the bulk of it for Tat at God-knows-who’s expense. You can look at it, but you still won’t be allowed touch.’

  ‘You are an absolutely appalling woman,’ said Truss, his every word dripping loathing. ‘What about Louise Bourgeois, if you’ve heard of her. Would you describe her work as fit for a funfair?’

  ‘Some of it certainly is. Funfairs love freaks.’ She turned to Anastasia. ‘Bourgeois deserves a bit of respect. She showed an enormous steel-and-marble spider in that hall a few years ago. It was a tribute to her mother, if I remember rightly. I don’t know if they got on. Sadly, the public weren’t allowed to climb up and down it.

  ‘I admit she has some skill. Amazing that Sclerota let her into the building if you think about it.’ She grunted. ‘The Belgian who installed huge steel circular tubes for the punters to slide down was more his sort of thing. And someone called Doris from Columbia who beats up furniture and chucks chairs around for a living. Her contribution to the gaiety of nations was to create a five hundred foot crack across the hall. Apparently it was about racism and colonialism. It cost about £300K and almost fell victim to the health and safety police because kids tried to jump into it.’

  ‘Why not just turn the hall into a permanent fairground?’ asked Anastasia. ‘Take away the health and safety people and have dare-devil attractions like a speeded-up merry-go-round or dodgems without brakes. Performance art and all that. People like me could do turns.’

  She caught sight of Truss’ expression. ‘Just a thought,’ she said, and poured out some more wine.

  ‘Laidee Troutbeck to Diary Room.’

  As the baroness reluctantly got to her feet, she tried to summon up a little gratitude that this time, at least, it wouldn’t be difficult to choose.

  Chapter Thirteen

  To Milton’s intense frustration, no one had got anywhere in the questioning of any Zekas and no one admitted to knowing anything about the whereabouts of Akim although there were suggestions he might have gone back to Kosovo for a holiday. Worse s
till, Akim hadn’t visited Edona on Tuesday or Wednesday night. She reported on Friday that he’d called to order her to be ready and energetic about four o’clock on Saturday morning, which boded very ill.

  The commissioner chaired the meeting with Special Branch and the firearms unit as they all tried to work out what to do. AC Pilsworth’s suggestion that Akim Zeka be arrested and held for questioning when he arrived at the brothel was greeted with incredulity. ‘You’ve heard what they’re like,’ said the head of Special Branch. ‘He won’t talk. It’s a matter of pride. We could hold him for days and get nothing out of him. Our only chance is to follow him back to his HQ, hope the prisoners are there, and try to get them out alive.’

  ‘If any of them are still alive,’ said Milton. ‘Sarkovsky knows we’re after him and he must want to cut his losses and get out of the country. In fact I can’t think what’s kept him so long.’

  There was a long and worried discussion about the difficulty of trailing Zeka from the brothel without being spotted, while having a firearms unit ready to roll into wherever he led them. One decision everyone agreed on was that since Fortune and Pringle had been left beside the O2, there was now no point in keeping covert surveillance on the galleries.

  ***

  Martin Conroy didn’t pay much attention to the news, and he didn’t care about the art world, but he was sorry that Jack Troutbeck was in trouble. He’d enjoyed the rousing speech she’d given a few years previously at an SAS reunion and had heard vaguely that she was close to Myles Cavendish, under whom he’d served in Iraq. Still, he was a man who concentrated on the work in hand and avoided all distractions, so it wasn’t until he got home mid-evening that he looked at the news and saw that the police were looking for Oleg Sarkovsky in connection with the hommage murders.

  By instinct and by training, Conroy avoided impulsiveness, so rather than immediately ring the police, he gave himself a couple of minutes to think. Then he looked up his private book of phone numbers and called Cavendish. After their conversation, Cavendish immediately called Mike Rogers and gave him the address. ‘I told him not to tell the cops. This is no time to piss about. There’s no way the cops could get into that house without Sarkovsky knowing, and if Sarkovsky knows, he’ll kill her and the rest of them. We’ve got to get in there now and without him knowing. I’ve texted the others with the code.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be on my way there in ten.’

  Rogers dressed in his discreet combat gear, loaded his boot with a small arsenal and went ahead to suss out the house Conroy had identified. Within a few minutes of locating it, he had parked, put on a balaclava, selected a gun and a sharp knife and had slipped onto the site. He was in his element doing the job that for over thirty years—in the army and working privately—had given him his greatest thrills.

  As he circled cautiously around the bank of portacabins, he was almost caught by the lights of the truck that came out of a garage at the back and drew up a couple of feet from him, but he slunk into the shadows just in time behind a half-built wall. And so it was that he had an excellent view of six large men coming out of a doorway carrying between them what looked like a cross and a corpse. When the truck and the van had driven away he made a call to Cavendish.

  ***

  Followed by a nondescript white van, the brown flat-bed truck festooned with the livery of Westminster Council drove from Cockspur Street into Trafalgar Square, took an abrupt left, drove past the fountain and parked beside the empty plinth in front of the National Gallery. It was a cold night with a slight drizzle, so there were no loving couples sitting on the steps or by the fountains. There were taxis going past, the odd bus and a few pedestrians, but, apart from the inebriates who were trying to decide where to go next, people were mostly rushing home.

  Two men dressed in oil skins with ‘Westminster Council’ in large letters got out of the truck and were joined by four more from the van. They hauled grey barriers from the back of the truck and put them all around the plinth, blocking all access. They then took out a ladder and extended it until it reached over twenty feet to the top. Three of them climbed up.

  A passerby became curious enough to come down the stairs and lean over a barrier. ‘What are you doing?’ he called to the nearest workman.

  ‘We’re putting up a sculpture on the plinth for the opening tomorrow.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Ugly,’ said the foreman. ‘Black ugly thing.’

  The passer-by shook his head. ‘Bloody modern art,’ he said, and wandered off.

  It took them the best part of an hour to hoist the iron structure from the truck on to the plinth and secure it safely. Getting the corpse out of the van and up there was simple by comparison. Although Sarkovsky had protested, it had been decided that a crucifixion was one complication too many, so they just tied the limbs to the cross securely, lowered the winch, retrieved the ladders and barriers and got back in the vehicles. They had just driven out of the square when Vernon Morrison and Sarah Byrne entered it from the Strand.

  Morrison was even more fed-up than usual. ‘I tell you, Sarah, I don’t know why we put up with this. What good are we doing walkin’ around and round in the rain only gettin’ our death of cold? More and more I begin to think I’ll have to pack this job in. It’s all right for all those wankers sitting comfy in their offices orderin’ us about. And now they’re talkin’ of fitness tests. Fitness tests? What the fuck? At my age am I supposed to be brawn or brain?’

  ‘I thought we did something useful with those drunks in Charing Cross Station, Vernon. Defused a potentially bad situation, don’t you think?’

  ‘You may think so. I still think we should have arrested them.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We could go back to the station now.’

  ‘Let’s just give it another five minutes, Vernon. We’re supposed to go round the square. Let’s just do that. With everyone in a state at the moment, we don’t want to give Sarge any excuse to bawl us out.’ Grumbling, he acquiesced. They walked past St. Martin’s in the Fields with only the briefest of comments from Morrison about how the bloody vicar let down the neighbourhood by running a doss house, then crossed the street to the pedestrianised area. As they walked past the National Gallery, Byrne looked to her left. ‘What’s that, Vernon. On that plinth?’

  ‘What do you think? Another statue of some military nob. Like on the other plinths.’

  ‘Yes, but there isn’t supposed to be anything there. It’s the fourth plinth that has different sculptures at different times. Didn’t you see they’ve decided to put something cheerful up for the Olympics. A kid on a rocking horse, I read. This one looks more like the black sculptures on those other plinths that are supposed to be old-fashioned.’

  They crossed over. ‘This is something horrible, Vernon. I can’t see what it is properly, but it looks to me like a man in uniform on a cross.’

  ‘Are you saying it could be another hommidge?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Oh, Gawd. What have we done to deserve this?’

  Morrison went on grumbling as Bryan pressed the red button on her radio. Inwardly, however, he was thinking that he’d had another bit of luck. Reinforcements would be here in a minute, and once he was sure it was another hommidge and enough cops were on the spot so no one could finger him, he could find a minute to phone that helpful journalist. Hadn’t she told him to call her anytime he had any information. He went down the steps to find a suitable place and saw the big white label saying: ‘Nazi Jesus—Hommage to the Chapmans’.

  ***

  The four Zekas in the van were in high spirits on the way back to north London. None of them had been enjoying this job much because they hated being stuck in the bunker. Akim had told them that the boss had had big plans for it. The room the prisoners spent the day in was to have been a great ballroom. He’d had the staircase down to it decorated the way he like
d so as to give the prisoners a good impression before landing them in the horror room. Everyone thought it funny when they saw how shocked they all were when they saw that.

  But for weeks now the Zekas had been fed up and uncomfortable in what was no better than a building site and they were overjoyed to think they’d soon be released. They didn’t get the point of all the work that had gone into constructing peculiar decorations from pictures, but they didn’t care. If the boss wanted them to furnish rooms with disgusting things, or prepare strange deaths for people, that was OK with them. Better than ditch-digging, as Akim constantly reminded them. They had a couple of craftsmen among them who got a kick out of it and fortunately Diran had an artistic streak so painting corpses wasn’t a problem.

  Having to spend hours listening to and watching the prisoners had bored them senseless except for the good moments when that blonde was skipping around with no clothes on. The optimists among them hoped they might have a chance to screw her before they topped her, and Akim had promised that if there was time they could all have a go. There had been debate as to whether anyone one fancied doing it to the old women, and a few had said they wouldn’t mind.

  They hadn’t been allowed out at all—except to strew corpses around London—and they resented it that Akim always got to go to the shop and the take-aways and that he’d even been allowed a visit to the brothel when their needs were just as great. But Akim was Akim, and they did what he told them.

  The Zekas didn’t like the boss. Apart from a couple of newcomers, the Zekas mostly had excellent English, but the boss was crap. Those who had done a bit of security work for him over a couple of years in London said he was OK most of the time, but that when he got angry he was a maniac and he got angry if you misunderstood an order and said you were stupid even though it was him that couldn’t learn the language.

  The boss hadn’t left the bunker since the kidnappings began. He stayed in his room a lot of the time, he talked to the fat woman sometimes, he spent hours in the room with the screens watching the prisoners—even when they were just talking—but it was the Zekas who had to watch all round the clock in case anyone tried to escape and they had to shoot them.