The Hanged Man (Bone Field 2)

by Simon Kernick

  I reached over, grabbed him by his lank, greasy hair and hauled him to his feet. He yelped in pain and struggled, but years of hard living had weakened him and, like all bullies, he was no good at standing up to aggression.

  Shoving his arm up behind his back, I marched him through the living room and into the bathroom. The toilet seat was up, revealing a foul stained hole with rusty water at the bottom that probably hadn’t been cleaned since I’d been in uniform, and which made it perfect for my purposes. Ignoring Moffatt’s indignant shouting about police assault and how he’d have me out of my job, I kicked his legs from under him, forced him to his knees, and stuffed his head as far into the bowl as it would go, then flushed.

  Moffatt bucked and thrashed, his threats turning into a desperate series of chokes as I held him in place with my knee in his back, realizing almost with surprise that I was enjoying myself. I suppose I should have been worried that he could carry out his threats and report me for assault, but the thing was, I wasn’t.

  I pulled his head back up by the hair, let him choke and gasp for a few seconds longer, then slammed it back again with an audible crack as it met the dirt-encrusted enamel.

  ‘Now I’m going to ask you a set of questions, Mr Moffatt, and you’re going to answer them truthfully. Otherwise things are going to get very unpleasant for you very quickly. Do you understand?’

  He gripped the toilet bowl and tried to force his head back but I had all the momentum, and I just forced it back in harder.

  ‘I said, do you understand?’

  He answered with a muffled yes, so I let go of his hair and stood up, waiting as he rolled away and leaned against the wall, mouth open as he gasped for air.

  ‘Your girlfriend, Tracey Burn, went missing over a decade ago now. What happened to her?’

  He didn’t answer. Instead he shot me a resentful look. So I grabbed him by the hair again and started to drag him to his feet. ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear.’

  ‘You did, you did,’ he said desperately, so I let him go and he fell back to the floor.

  I repeated the question. I felt no guilt about what I was doing. Paul Moffatt was an animal. He had no redeeming features. I was finding it hard not to lay into him some more.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to her,’ he said at last, giving me the kind of imploring look that says ‘I’m telling the truth’. ‘Honestly. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘What, she just walked out one day and you never heard from her again? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Because from what I heard, you wouldn’t let her go anywhere without you. You’re going to have to do better than that.’

  ‘I’m telling the truth,’ he said, using his shirt to dry his face. ‘Honest. She went to work one day and she never came back. It wasn’t like her at all. I kept trying her phone and texting, but I never got any answer. I was even going to report her missing, you know, but then she phoned from one of those withheld numbers, and said she was starting a new life out of London and she never wanted to see me again. I swore at her, told her I’d find her wherever she was … and she just fucking hung up on me.’ He shook his head. ‘And then this weird thing happened.’

  I looked at him. ‘Go on.’

  He frowned. ‘I got a visit a few days later from these two geezers. They told me not to go looking for Tracey. Said if I did, they’d break my legs. I believed them. So I stopped looking. And that was it. I never heard from her again.’

  ‘You said walking out wasn’t like her. So what made her leave in the first place?’

  He thought about this for a minute. ‘She used to clean for a few people, and one of them must have been putting ideas in her head telling her to dump me, because she changed. She wasn’t like the normal Trace. She stopped talking to me about stuff.’ He shook his head again. ‘I remember thinking I couldn’t understand it.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘You’re such a catch. Do you remember the names of any of the people Tracey used to clean for?’

  He laughed. ‘Course I can’t. It was … it was years ago. Another life, right? Why are you asking all these questions about her now anyway?’

  There was no point holding anything back. It would be public knowledge soon enough. ‘She’s dead.’

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he looked up at me with beaten, bloodshot eyes, and I saw there were tears in them. I almost felt sorry for him.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘She was murdered. And we’re pretty sure it happened not that long after she left you. Is there anything you can remember about the men who came to see you? Something they might have said?’

  ‘Just what I told you,’ he said, and I knew he was telling the truth.

  I crouched down so we were face to face, close enough that I could smell his rancid breath, and when I spoke my words were calm, almost reassuring in their tone. ‘If you report me for assault, or make any complaint at all, I’ll come back here one night when you’re asleep and I’ll inject you with a lethal dose of unusually pure heroin, and hold you down while you die. Look me in the eye, Paul.’

  He did, and I could see the fear.

  ‘You know I mean it, don’t you?’

  He nodded. He understood. So I got to my feet and left him sitting there.

  Dan was in the kitchen. He’d taken off his suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his expensive, perfectly ironed shirt, and cleared some space on the only worktop where he was changing the nappy of the two-year-old boy, now with a smiling face. The girlfriend was sitting quietly in a chair watching him.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing her the child. ‘That’s all you need to do. Now put some clothes on him and get out of here. Go back to your flat, and if you ever have any dealings with Paul Moffatt again we’ll be straight on to social services, and you’ll lose him. And you don’t want that.’

  She took the child, holding him against her. ‘But Paul … he’ll come after me.’

  ‘No he won’t,’ I said. ‘We’ll make sure he doesn’t bother you. I promise.’

  Fifteen minutes later, mother and toddler were gone, as were we, leaving a shaken Paul Moffatt to the cracked, withered bones of his life.

  Fourteen

  As far as Stegs Jenner was concerned undercover work was both the best and the worst job in the world. The buzz you got from playing a part, especially when walking headfirst into danger, was like nothing else on earth. It gave you a real sense of power to pull the wool over the bad guys’ eyes, knowing that you were the one who was going to bring their criminal careers to a crushing, and in some cases permanent, end.

  But Jesus it could scare the shit out of you too, and although you could never show it on ops, the stress could sometimes be all-encompassing. Stegs had come close to death on more than one occasion in a long and massively chequered police career. He’d watched men being tortured in front of him, knowing that he was going to be next, had been threatened with knives, guns and baseball bats – even, once, a giant leg of Parma ham by a bodybuilding money launderer with links to the Mob – and yet somehow he’d talked his way out of every corner.

  Twelve years earlier that career had almost come to its own permanent end when he’d been hounded out of the Met after an undercover op went spectacularly wrong, leaving behind a dead colleague and multiple allegations of corruption. Stegs had spent nine years out in the wilderness – quite literally, as he’d been living in Friern Barnet. His missus had divorced him and married someone else, his young son had become a near stranger, and his attempt at writing a book about his exploits with the less than original title of Undercover Cop had foundered, not on the vagaries of the Official Secrets Act but on the fact that his writing talent was a lot closer to nil than he’d previously thought.

  But the thing was, like it or not (and most of the Met’s top brass didn’t like it), as undercover cops go, Stegs Jenner was one of the best, and three years back he’d been recruited into the newly formed NCA after a recommendation from one of
the few former colleagues who’d actually liked him.

  As a general rule, the undercover ops weren’t anything like as exciting as they had been in the old days when the Met wasn’t so heavily scrutinized and the bosses were far more prepared to take risks, but ultimately Stegs – now forty-four, and with his best years behind him – needed the money.

  And for once, the op he was on now looked like it could actually provide a decent adrenalin boost as it came towards its conclusion.

  ‘You think he’s going to be here?’ said Big Tone as they walked towards the rendezvous, a rundown social club in the basement of an otherwise empty sixties building in East Acton that was simply crying out for the wrecking ball.

  The ‘he’ in question was a Jamaican thug with the frankly amazing name of Ralvin ‘Busta’ Lambden, who apparently had at least ten kilos of very high-quality coke to sell, and who was currently a fugitive from the law both in the UK as well as in his native Jamaica.

  Stegs turned to Big Tone. ‘Let’s hope so. I want to get this deal over and done with.’

  He was posing as a cash-rich nightclub owner from Brighton in the market for as much coke as he could lay his hands on to sell at his club, while Big Tone, an immense black man with a head the size of a watermelon, was acting as his bodyguard.

  A long-standing police informant had put Stegs in touch with Ugo Amelu, a career criminal with delusions of grandeur who’d told Stegs that he was the son of a Nigerian prince, and who was the one putting the deal together. Stegs didn’t trust Ugo an inch. The bloke was as slippery as they came, but he talked a good game and came across as a lot more intelligent than your average crim – which, Stegs thought ruefully, wasn’t always a good thing.

  This was their first time at the club in East Acton. On the two occasions they’d met Ugo in the past it had been out in the open, where the chances of anything going wrong were small. Their first meeting had been an intro set up by the informant between Stegs and Ugo so they could check each other out, while at the second, Stegs had made a test purchase of fifty grams to sample the produce. It had come back an extremely impressive 70 per cent pure, so now it was time for the next level: a meeting with Ralvin Lambden to arrange to buy the whole ten kilos.

  The club’s only entrance was via an alleyway dotted with lumps of dog shit and lined with overflowing wheelie bins swarming with flies that smelled exactly as you’d imagine they would in the heat of a midday sun. They stopped outside a heavily fortified steel door with blacked-out windows on either side, and Stegs rang the buzzer on the wall and looked up at the security camera filming him and Big Tone.

  A minute later, with nothing happening, he rang it again, except this time he kept his finger on the buzzer for a good ten seconds. The first rule of undercover work was never let people take advantage of you. Most criminals, Stegs knew, were predators. They could spot weakness a mile away. Stegs might only have been five feet eight and of proportionate build, but he was a master of controlled aggression.

  He withdrew his finger to the sound of bolts being pulled on the other side, and the door shot open about a foot, revealing the face of an unfamiliar and very unhappy black man.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he snarled.

  Stegs gave him the disdainful stare he’d perfected over years of undercover work. ‘We’re here to see Ugo,’ he said. ‘We’re expected.’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘Just tell him Mark’s here,’ said Stegs, using his standard undercover name.

  The guy told them to wait, and shut the door.

  Stegs and Big Tone waited. They didn’t speak or exchange glances, knowing they were almost certainly being recorded. This type of hassle was par for the course in the crime trade. Because of the complete lack of trust between parties, no transaction, particularly a major financial one – and a ten-kilo coke buy definitely counted as that – was ever smooth. It was like a long and complicated dance between two drunken strangers, where you’re just hoping you can somehow stay on your feet to the end.

  They waited for a good couple of minutes before Ugo, who’d probably been behind the door the whole time, opened up and ushered them inside, giving them both a big shit-eating grin as soon as the door was closed.

  ‘Hey Mark, my man, good to see you.’

  He fist-bumped Stegs, which seemed to be his preferred method of greeting, and nodded to Big Tone, who tended to play the strong, silent type, before leading them down a long, dimly lit corridor past a door that led to a bar with a dance floor and another one filled with gym kit and weights. There were a handful of men at the bar and two more pumping iron in the mini gym, but otherwise the place felt empty. At the end of the corridor they came to a windowless room with a table in the middle and a bank of lockers on one wall. A man the size of Big Tone was sat at the table, a baseball bat down by his side. He looked at them both with the same dead-eyed stare that Stegs liked to use himself.

  ‘Listen, bruv,’ said Ugo, ‘you know the rules. Everything out of your pockets and I’m going to need to do a patdown.’

  It was standard procedure, but Stegs and Big Tone still made noises of irritation as they took out their phones and wallets and chucked them on the table, just to show they didn’t like being inconvenienced.

  Ugo flicked open Stegs’s wallet and pulled out his driving licence, grinning as he looked at the photo and then at Stegs. ‘Not a good picture, bruv,’ he said, but Stegs knew the real reason he’d taken it out was to check that the licence was in the right name, which of course it was. Stegs was a professional. He didn’t make amateur mistakes like that.

  They went through the whole process of being patted down by Ugo while the big guy ran a high-end commercial bug-finder wand up and down them, just to make sure they didn’t have anything hidden away. As always, they came up clean. The mikes they carried were far too sophisticated to be picked up by any of the devices currently on the market. Still, Stegs couldn’t help but have a tense feeling in his gut, just in case for once he was wrong.

  Ugo then took the battery out of each phone to prevent them being turned on remotely, threw everything in a ziplock bag, placed it in one of the top left-hand lockers, and locked it before handing Stegs the key.

  Stegs had to admit that, if nothing else, Ugo was thorough.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he asked sarcastically.

  ‘You know what it’s like, bruv, you can’t take chances in this game. Come this way.’

  They followed him down a flight of concrete steps towards the basement, from where harsh grime music was playing.

  The tense feeling in Stegs’s gut returned. Although their handler was listening in to the mikes and would call for back-up if there was any trouble, there were no reinforcements waiting nearby to help them, since this was only meant to be an introductory meeting between them and Ralvin Lambden. And Stegs had a thing about basements ever since he’d been dragged down to one by a group of gangsters and made to watch while a suspected informant had been scalded repeatedly with a steam iron. The thing about hardened criminals, in Stegs’s experience, was that they could go from being perfectly reasonable to full-throttle psychotic in an instant, as if a switch had been flicked.

  Ugo, however, had always been perfectly reasonable. A muscular, good-looking guy of around forty, he had a wide smile and a cheery air about him. Even so, his list of convictions meant he must have exactly the same kind of switch as the rest of them.

  The basement was long and narrow, and painted completely black. A dozen lamps dotted around the place gave it a dim light and there were sofas and bean bags littered around the bare floor with no real sense of order. Various posters lined the walls along with a huge Jamaican flag, and there was a strong smell of skunk, and something else that Stegs couldn’t quite identify, in the air.

  At the far end of the room, sitting on a high-backed chair like a throne, was a long, thin man Stegs immediately recognized as Ralvin Lambden. He was wearing a beanie hat, even though it had to be at least twenty-five degrees down
there, and smoking a joint – something which Stegs knew from experience was never a promising sign.

  It wasn’t that which made his heart sink, though. It was the fact that there was a man dressed only in his underpants kneeling next to the chair, and chained by the neck to the wall. The man’s head was bowed so Stegs couldn’t see his face, but he looked worryingly like the informant who’d first introduced him and Big Tone to Ugo.

  Ralvin pressed a button on the remote control and the music stopped abruptly. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said in a thick Jamaican accent, glaring at Stegs and Big Tone as he stubbed out the joint.

  They did as they were told, stopping a few yards from the chair while Ugo leaned against the wall.

  Ralvin then leaned over and grabbed the kneeling man’s bald head with a huge spidery hand, lifting it up and confirming Stegs’s worst fears. It was indeed the informant, whose name was Donny Jeeks. His face was bloodied and bruised, and frankly he looked terrified, which was no great surprise.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Stegs saw Big Tone tense. They exchanged looks. Stegs’s said ‘Don’t do anything stupid – we can sort this’.

  The second rule of any undercover officer is never to admit you’re a cop under any circumstances. Always deny everything. The third rule was less obvious but equally important. Never lose control of the situation, and if in doubt, attack.

  Stegs attacked. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he demanded. ‘Why have you got my friend Mr Jeeks here chained to the wall?’ This last bit was for the benefit of the mike. If the handler was listening – and Stegs hoped she hadn’t taken a quick tea break – she’d know that back-up might be needed at some point.

  ‘I’m sorry to say we’ve got a problem, bruv,’ said Ugo, whose earlier good humour seemed to have done a runner. ‘Word is that this boy’s a snitch. And as he was the one who put you in touch with me, we’re a little bit worried that you might be Feds.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him then?’ said Stegs. ‘Because I know I’m not. Are you a Fed, Tone?’