by Mo Hayder
‘Did you believe it?’
She gave a cold laugh. ‘I’m a post-menopausal woman who’s lived in a man’s world for twenty years. A more cynical, cruel creature it’s hard to find. But it’s true, I thought SOCA might help. I believed that at least other agencies would check it – make sure a target they were looking at didn’t have a great big flag marked “SIB” waving over it. Why didn’t you check before you started leaving messages at Mr Mooney’s office?’
‘You’re telling me Mooney’s in trouble?’
‘Yes.’ Watling splayed her hand out to indicate the long line of folders. ‘These represent almost two years of work – they’re ready to go to the Service Prosecuting Authority, which is our version of the Crown Prosecution Service, and, believe me, just as anal about procedure and—’
‘Hold on, hold on. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but Mooney – he’s a big cheese, isn’t he?’
‘Extremely. Doesn’t mean he can’t be a naughty boy.’
Zoë stirred her coffee thoughtfully. She watched the sugar dissolve and waited for this new information to move itself into line. ‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘I get it now. I’ve stumbled into something and I apologize for that. I didn’t check SOCA because it never occurred to me – I just pulled Mooney’s name out of a hat, from Dodspeople, because he’d done some time in Kosovo. I thought he might give me some information, point me in the right direction. I’m working on a misper on my patch, a pornographer who had something a bit moody going on with someone connected to the UN in Priština. I followed my nose, came up with Mooney as a starting point.’
‘Look,’ Watling folded her arms, ‘you know, of course, because it’s unspoken conventional wisdom by now, that where the United Nations goes, human trafficking goes too. That it makes a kind of hole in the ground, and all the women in the region who aren’t weighted down just roll into it.’
‘Yup.’
‘Well, that’s what happened in Priština. The floodgates opened, the prostitutes poured in. Except this time the UN got smart and set up a unit to monitor it. The Trafficking and Prostitution Investigation Unit.’
‘Yeah – I saw that. Mooney headed it up.’
‘And, as it turned out, made a few inroads into the local population himself.’
‘Inroads?’
‘That’s a euphemism. To make what he did sound less horrible, the way he abused his position.’
‘Like?’
‘Oh – no limits. Selling girls to the highest bidder, offering protection from criminal prosecution for sex, arranging abortions – some of the babies were his. The list is mind-boggling.’
‘It’s funny.’ Zhang rubbed his head, perplexed. ‘To meet the guy you’d think he was the kindest person on the planet.’
‘OK,’ Zoë said slowly. ‘I’m getting the drift now. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say I bet he persuaded them to do porn movies too.’
‘Very good. Very good. You should charge for that.’
‘Thank you. And for my second trick, he wasn’t actually making the movies, was he? Doing the nuts-and-bolts lighting and camera work? He was just providing the flesh.’
‘We don’t know. We think so. It’s one of the areas we haven’t put a line under yet.’
‘Well, let me help you put a line there. Let me make a guess and say that’s how he links to my man Goldrab. Who probably, at a guess, did provide all the technical stuff. David Goldrab? Ring any bells? Gold-rab. British citizen, had a lucrative market in the nineties bringing porn in from Kosovo. It was cheaper to make it out there, of course.’
‘Goldrab?’ Zhang glanced up at Watling questioningly. ‘Ma’am? Didn’t that name come up somewhere?’ He pulled a file towards him and shuffled through the papers. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen it.’
Watling pulled one of the other files across. ‘Was it in the …? No. It was one of those payments, wasn’t it? One of the companies.’
‘Ding-dong.’ Zhang shot a finger at her. ‘That’s it.’ He put down the file and snatched up another, moving through the pages at lightning speed, muttering names under his breath. At last he came to a Companies House certificate. He pulled it out. ‘There you go. DGE Enterprises. The director and company secretary? Mr David Goldrab. Registered address in London – but that’s probably an accountant, or a solicitor maybe.’
‘What sort of company is it? Purveyors of the finest-quality filth? By Appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II?’
‘Nope. Containers. Food containers to the catering industry. And in 2008 Dominic Mooney bought twenty thousand units of Kilner jam jars from DGE.’
Zoë raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, that’s a lot of jam. He must run a fruit farm.’
‘From his city house in Finchley?’
The three of them looked at each other.
‘So,’ Zhang smiled, ‘who’s going to be the first to say it?’
‘Bagsy me.’ Zoë put her hand up. ‘Blackmail. Years ago Goldrab was making porn in Kosovo and Mooney was supplying the girls – using the ones his unit was supposed to be protecting. The relationship breaks down and years later, long after they’ve been in Kosovo, it occurs to Goldrab that blackmailing an old friend is a legit way to turn a dime.’
‘That’s what Mooney’s payments are – to his dodgy “catering” company.’
Zoë nodded. If Goldrab had been blackmailing Mooney he’d be a very happy person indeed for Goldrab to be dead. He could only win from a situation like that. She looked from Watling to Zhang and back again. ‘What’s Mooney like? I mean apart from what he did in Kosovo. Is he meaty in other arenas? What’s he capable of? Is he capable of murder?’
Watling gave a dry laugh. ‘Very capable. It wouldn’t be the first time. Not from what our investigations are showing – we’re seeing links to at least two missing persons, here and in Kosovo.’
‘And the name Lorne Wood hasn’t cropped up, has it?’
Watling raised her eyebrows. ‘No – I mean, I know the name. It’s the murder you’re dealing with in Bath, isn’t it? Surprisingly, at SIB we do take an interest in what the provincial police are doing, even if that interest isn’t reciprocated. But Lorne hasn’t featured with Mooney. Not at all. Why do you ask?’
‘Where was he a week last Saturday? The seventh of May? The day Lorne died?’
‘London.’
‘You sure?’
‘One hundred per cent. I can assure you he’s got nothing to do with Lorne Wood’s death.’
‘But he is a killer.’
Watling sucked a breath in through her teeth. ‘Let’s get this straight – yes, he’s a killer, but not that sort. If Mooney wants to off someone it’ll be a cold, calculating business contract, not a sex killing. Lorne Wood? Never. Goldrab? Maybe. But he certainly wouldn’t be getting his own hands dirty. He’d contract it out.’
‘Contract it? Then there’d be a record of payment.’ Zoë stood and leaned over Zhang to look at the file. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got Mooney’s bank statements there?’
He closed the folder, turned away slightly in his chair, crossing his leg and raising his shoulder protectively so she couldn’t see it.
‘There’s nothing in there,’ said Watling. Trust me. We’d know. If there had been a payment recently it wouldn’t be paper-based – he’d use hard currency so there’s no trace. My guess? He’d use Krugerrands – he had links to that RAF currency scam years ago, remember? The humble Kruger was a very hot ticket in those days.’
‘What sort of person would he hire?’
‘Usually ex-military. At the moment the market’s flooded with ex-IRA boys – they’ll drop someone for ten K. But it’s not Mooney’s style. They’re loose cannons, too unreliable, too flappy with the old gums in the pub afterwards. He’d pay more and get someone he could trust.’
Zoë put her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, and stared at the files, thinking about this. A hired gun. If Goldrab really had been offed by Mooney, and she could find out whom he h
ad paid to do it, the whole thing might start to unravel. If there was a connection between Goldrab, Mooney and Lorne that SIB hadn’t uncovered it would pop out in no time. If not, at the very worst she’d be sure Goldrab was really gone.
‘And where is Mooney at the moment?’
‘He’s on holiday with his wife – soon to be his ex-wife when this thing breaks.’
‘Anywhere I could go and visit him?’
Zhang snorted. ‘Yeah – hang on a minute. I’ll just write the address down.’
‘What I mean,’ Zoë said slowly, ‘is how do we work it from here? Who backs off? Who scratches whose back? I mean, I’ve got primacy on Goldrab, which means I’ve got a right to investigate his connection to Mooney.’
‘And we’ve got primacy on what Mooney did in Kosovo. And the bulk of the evidence.’ Watling shook her head. ‘Please – we’ve spent years on this, Zoë. Years. You can’t calculate the man hours. Everything’s in place – just teetering like that.’ She held up a hand and seesawed it, like a car on a clifftop. ‘Mooney’s arrest’s scheduled for next week. But he’s a flight risk – if he gets even a whiff of this there’s any number of ways he can disappear out of the country. His secretary’s already getting windy from your phone calls because you said the CID word, didn’t you? Forgive me but you’ve already jeopardized the case. One more cock-up now and we’re going to lose the whole thing. No.’ She placed two hands on the desk. As if she’d made up her mind and it was all over. ‘We’ll take on Goldrab’s disappearance, share our SPA disclosure files when it’s all tied up. You get the results without the work. Goldrab can’t be that important to you, can he?’
‘Yes. He can.’
‘Why?’
‘For all the usual reasons,’ she said sweetly. ‘Like when I close the case and my superintendent hangs out the bunting for me. When every plain-clothed officer in Bath lines up and sings, “We love you, Zoë,” as I walk through the briefing room. When bluebirds come in and tidy my desk every morning.’
‘Any of the glory we can spare we’ll pass on to you. You have my word. You’ll get your bunting, Zoë. You will. Bluebirds and whatever.’
She nodded and smiled. If they were in the movies, the way Zhang said, this would be the point at which she’d argue, refuse to have the case wrested from her. Why did they always do it like that? she thought. What did people have against just nodding, making a promise, then getting the hell on with whatever they’d intended doing in the first place? In her experience it saved a lot of trouble.
She gave a long sigh and sat back in her chair, arms flopping open. ‘OK. OK. But if there’s going to be bunting, I get to choose the colour.’
19
It was late and Millie wanted to stay with the Sweetmans, have a sleepover with Sophie. Apparently they were friends again. Sally wouldn’t have agreed after what had happened tonight, but maybe, she thought a little hopefully, Millie would spend time not just with Sophie but with Nial too. Get Peter Cyrus out of her head. And anyway, Steve insisted, Jake wasn’t a problem now: Sally could relax, she could come to his place and they could get drunk, celebrate the end of the whole bloody awful affair. Secretly she was glad. It gave her a chance to escape the silences that seemed to be building in the fields surrounding Peppercorn Cottage.
They stayed up late drinking a sweet dessert wine Steve had found for ten euros a bottle in a supermarket in Bergerac. They had sex twice – once on the kitchen counter with their clothes still on, and once much later in bed, under the covers, when they were very drunk and Sally couldn’t stop hiccuping or giggling. Things seemed almost normal on the surface. Even so, the last thing she did before she went to sleep was open the windows so the unfamiliar city noises would come into the room and get into her dreams – maybe stop Zoë, or David Goldrab sitting up in the field and grabbing her arm.
She woke late, her head thick and heavy, to a morning as hot as midsummer. She and Steve ate breakfast on the terrace. They drank cranberry juice and ate fresh raspberries. Today he was going to America and she had thought she was ready for that, but when, after breakfast, she came into the hallway to find him dressed in a suit, luggage on the floor next to him, she felt suddenly cold.
‘What if something happens? What if I get questioned again? I won’t know what to say.’
‘You won’t get questioned again. It won’t happen.’
‘What happens if someone traces that money you changed?’
‘The Krugerrands? They won’t. Trust me.’ He picked up his suitcase. ‘It’s going to be OK.’
Sally was subdued on the drive to the airport. The Audi would need to be repaired so they took her car, Steve driving, the window open, the radio on full blast, as if he didn’t have a worry in the world. She sat hunched on the passenger seat, her handbag clenched on her lap, staring out of the window at the Bristol suburbs, at the sunshine in sharp, blocky shapes on the dingy houses. She wondered whether Zoë sometimes came to Bristol. Of course she must – all the time. She’d been all around the world. Zoë’s face as she had stood at the table came back to Sally then, saying, ‘I apologize.’ She tried to imagine the image being taken away from her, pulled like a grey thread out of her head, out of the car window, whipped away by the slipstream, like a twisting ghost.
She and Steve didn’t speak much as they parked, made their way out of the sunshine into the terminal, through Check-in and up the escalator. They were already calling his flight, so he went straight to Security. It was after she’d kissed him goodbye and was walking away, her head down, that he stopped her.
‘Sally?’
She came to a halt, ten feet away, and turned. He was standing in the security line, facing her, the other passengers streaming past him. He wore an odd expression. He was rubbing his fingers together, studying them curiously. ‘What? What is it?’
He was frowning. He opened his hand to show her. ‘Lipstick?’
She walked back to him and together they looked at the lipstick on his fingers. A sort of orangey-red. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘I don’t know. Just from when I kissed you …’ He put his hand on her shoulder and rotated her away from him, looking at her back. ‘It’s on your dress. Look.’
Sally craned around, pulling the seat of the dress out to inspect. He was right – the back of her dress was covered with lipstick. A very distinct orange-red colour.
‘Did you brush up against something?’
‘I don’t think so.’ She strained to see it. ‘There’s lots of it.’
‘You have – you’ve leaned up against something. Here.’ Steve pulled out a folded handkerchief, made to rub at the cloth.
‘It’s OK. Don’t.’ She took it from him, let go of her dress and put the handkerchief back in his top pocket. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. You’ll be late.’ She kissed his cheek and gave him a gentle push towards the security checkpoint. ‘Go on.’
He took one last look at her dress. ‘You sure?’
‘Of course. Safe journey. Call me when you get there.’
20
Dominic Mooney’s Who’s Who entry hadn’t been updated since his return from Kosovo. It read:
Born: Hong Kong, 20 Sept. 1955; s of Paul and Jean Mooney; m 1990, Paulette Frampton; one s
Education: Kings, Canterbury; Edinburgh Univ, BA Hons; RMA Sandhurst
Career: Military service 1976–1988, UK, Belize and Northern Ireland (1979–80). Civil service 1986–present: 1986–99 Defence Procurement Agency; 1999–2001 Civil Secretariat, Kosovo; 2001–2004 TPIU Priština
Address: 3 Rightstock Gardens, Finchley, London N3
Zoë knew that on the first line ‘one s’ meant that Mooney had one son – who was probably a teenager and too old to go on holiday with his parents. It took her no time to find him online. She started after the morning meeting, searched Mooney/Kosovo and found him within ten minutes: Jason Mooney. He had posted just about his entire life story online, including the time his dad had spent in Kosovo. (No mention o
f the women and the aborted half-brothers and sisters.) He was a nice-looking boy, suntanned in the way happy students always seemed to be in their Facebook pictures. He liked swimming, and Punk, a club in Soho Street, and thought Pixie Lott was about the hottest woman on the planet. He had tattoos in Hindi on his left ankle, still wore a friendship bracelet his best mate had given him when he was twelve and was a fresher at City University, studying aeronautical engineering. His shoot-for-the-stars ambition was to work on a privately financed team sending a probe into outer space. But his number one love, his truly, truly highest devotion, the thing that would take his soul with it if he ever lost it, was his hog: a 71 FX Harley Super Glide. He was pictured with it, standing on a sunlit country lane, looking so happy his heart could burst. The photo had a soft focus to it, as if it was a picture of newly weds. The moment Zoë saw it a bright clean path opened up in front of her. So clear it almost seemed to have beacons at either side of it.
Watling had said there was no one in the wide world as cynical as she was. But she’d been wrong. Zoë beat the shit out of her for cynicism. She knew that the polite goodbye handshake of Watling and Zhang would be the last she’d ever hear from ‘the Feds’. There wasn’t going to be any bunting coming from the commanding officer’s desk on Salisbury Plain. She didn’t want to rattle the case for them, but she was still going to get what she needed from it.
Bring me the head of David Goldrab, she thought, snatching up her helmet, balaclava, credit cards and keys. She trotted down the stairs. No Zhang standing like a giant irritable spider in the car park today. She climbed on to the Shovelhead, opened up the choke and pressed the starter. She’d be in London by midday.
It was a sunny day – great riding weather. The M4 was clear, only one hold-up outside Swindon that she shimmied her way through. She got plenty of glances from men in their cars, the sun glinting off her Oakley dirt goggles like she was in some seventies road movie, the opening guitar riff from a Steppenwolf track looping through her head as she drove. The Mooneys lived in Finchley, north London, near the North Circular, where the packed terraces of the inner city began to give way to lawns and driveways and garages, lots of yew hedges and leylandii. She found the road easily – the sort of place you had to take only one step into to know you’d walked into Moneyville. High walls, electronic gates and security systems dozed in the sun. It wasn’t that far from Bishop’s Avenue, after all, where the zillionaires lived.