by Alex Coombs
‘What makes you say that?’ she asked.
Oksana looked at her steadily. ‘The people Charlie knew, particularly from Moscow, that is how they deal with problems. They eliminate people.’
‘I see,’ said Hanlon. Maybe in Russia, she thought, but not in Windsor, not tubby ex-civil servants like Charlie. Litvinenko, yes; Taverner, no. ‘But you shouldn’t really be talking to me about this. Your husband was a civil servant, ex-Foreign Office, an important man. You have a reasonably convincing story suggesting a crime has been committed. Go to Corrigan. He’s surprisingly accessible.’
‘No,’ said Oksana.
Hanlon wasn’t over-burdened with work but the Baranski disappearance was generating more than its fair share of paperwork and she had a meeting with Child Protection looming that she had to prepare for. Oksana’s problem wasn’t her problem. Even if what she said was true, her husband’s disappearance wouldn’t fall under a Missing Persons remit. It would be Thames
Valley’s Serious and Organized Crimes’ baby.
She also suspected that Mawson would not be happy at Hanlon taking it upon herself to bypass procedure. He’d made it clear that such things would not be tolerated.
‘Look,’ said Hanlon, leaning across her desk and pushing some hair from her forehead. The light through the window picked out several long, pale scars on her forearm. There was a slight kink to her nose that suggested it had been broken some time ago. Oksana noted the fine lines that time and pain had etched on Hanlon’s forehead, the tiredness around her eyes. She had obviously known hardship and trouble in her life.
She also noted the ligaments moving elegantly under Hanlon’s skin. Oksana, a former gymnast when younger, until she had become the wrong shape – too curved, too tall – could appreciate how strong Hanlon was. Her eyes now ran over the elegant musculature of Hanlon’s frame. She could easily imagine her on a parallel bar or a beam.
‘You need the National Crimes Agency. Maybe even MI5 or 6.’
If it’s a threat to the country, which I doubt, she thought. I wish you’d go away.
‘Not me. I’m Missing Persons, OK, Mrs Taverner,’ said Hanlon wearily. ‘I find errant husbands and sometimes I order reservoirs dragged for missing Polish junkies.’
As I am at the moment, she thought, thinking of Datchet Reservoir, Peter Baranski’s probable resting place. She should be seeing the Specialist Search people really, rather than wasting time with this woman. She thought, You really don’t need me, not unless Charlie is shacked up with his secretary in South Berkshire.
Oksana shook her head angrily. ‘Nyet, nyet, nyet, Hanlon. Sorry, I mean no. These other people. They are nomenklatura.’ She virtually spat the word out. Nomenklatura, the high priests of the ruling caste. Every Russian’s nightmare. There was no Party in the UK, but there was its equivalent, the civil service. ‘They are officials, government officials. Charlie’s killers have access to obshchak.’ She hunted in her mind for the English word; the policewoman was looking baffled. She found it. ‘To trough, like pigs. But a trough full of money. They will have someone to help them in government. They will have someone in police. We say in Russia, ‘roof’, a krysha. They have millions to spend. You cannot trust government.’
‘I’m the government,’ said Hanlon acidly. She had a certain amount of sympathy with Oksana’s views but she didn’t appreciate someone from the back of beyond, the Urals, telling her the score.
‘Yes,’ said Oksana. ‘But you are different. I have seen your file.’
You have done what? thought Hanlon. Her thoughts – alarm, rage and wonder – were painfully transparent to the Russian opposite.
Oksana said simply, ‘You cannot trust government. Like I said.’
‘So you’ve read my file.’ Hanlon’s voice was low, menacing. Hanlon was a very private person and the idea that someone like Oksana could access it was as alarming as it was enraging. How the hell had that happened?
‘Yes. Charlie’s firm has many connections. It is think tank, it has many government connections.’
‘Oh, does it now,’ said Hanlon menacingly.
She had a mad desire to leap over the desk and smack the woman opposite hard across the face. What right have you to review my life? she thought. Not even my account of my life either, but that of some official. Presumably it went into detail as to why I’m stuck here, in Missing Persons, cleared of any serious charges but deemed unsuitable for front-line police work. Better deployed in back-office jobs, like this.
Oksana smiled. ‘Yes. You are not corrupt, Hanlon, you are just crazy. I read your file. It is all there.’
‘Is it?’ asked Hanlon. I very much doubt that, she thought bitterly. My side of things won’t be there. So much for data protection.
Taverner’s widow nodded. ‘But back to Charlie. In Russia we say navomnye ubiistvi. Contract killing. If I go to normal police, I think nothing will happen.’ She paused and her long fingers with their shapely ox-blood nails played with her expensive Hermès scarf. ‘They know Charlie is missing, they will go through motions, that is all.’ She frowned angrily. ‘I have spoken to some policeman already. He asked me if I knew Charlie liked to go to see whores.’ A contemptuous look flickered across her face. ‘Yes, I say, is where his contact is. This policeman, he as good as told me that he was with some whore for sex, not information.’ Oksana made an expansive gesture with her hands. The movement encompassed her incomparable body, her beautiful face. Look at me, it said, look at me.
Hanlon looked at her as Charlie had almost certainly done, five feet ten of unbelievable sex appeal. Oksana nodded at her. Look what Charlie got for free at home. No sex worker was going to compete with her, that was for sure.
‘You can make things happen, I know this,’ she said. ‘I read your file. Facts are facts.’
I could help you, thought Hanlon, looking at her, but I’m not going to. I can’t fight the world’s battles. She thought of Mark Whiteside lying silently in the room in the hospital in his drug-induced coma. The sands of time were running out for him. Maybe Taverner was dead; she had the living to attend to. She had her own priorities and Oksana’s husband was not one of them. Priorities. She shook her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Finality was in her voice. ‘Speak to Corrigan. He’ll help.’
Oksana leaned forward. ‘Please, I beg you. Charlie is dead. I cannot bring him back. In Russia I cannot touch his killers. Here, you can. Please will you help me?’
‘No,’ said Hanlon simply.
The Russian woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘None of us can bring back dead, that I do not expect. What I was hoping for was justice, an eye for an eye, as they say. A life for a life.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Hanlon’s voice was curt.
Oksana recognized the irrevocability in Hanlon’s tone. She stood up, tall and elegant. Hanlon had rarely seen such a beautiful woman. She even smelled fantastic; some expensive light floral perfume that Hanlon didn’t recognize. The Russian woman had a point. If you had Oksana to come home to, you wouldn’t want to play away. She also revised her earlier opinion of Taverner. Oksana was not the kind of woman to just want a sugar daddy. And there was no doubt that she cared very much for her missing husband.
Her almond-shaped brown eyes rested contemptuously on Hanlon. ‘So the vor and his suki, his bitch Belanov, have won then. Is nothing more to say.’
Hanlon stiffened behind her desk. Arkady Belanov. Now Oksana had her interest.
‘Please sit down, Mrs Taverner. I think I’ve just changed my mind.’
Oksana Ilyinichna Taverner, née Yegorov, put her hand in her pocket and took out a memory stick.
‘It is all here, if you want it.’
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Shona McIntyre, her colleague, had told her that.
Hanlon nodded and took the memory stick. Oksana gave her a curt, formal smile and sat down.
‘Why don’t we begin at the beginning, Mrs Taverner?’
‘Thank you, DCI Hanlon. Pleas
e call me Oksana.’ She nodded at the stick in Hanlon’s fingers. ‘Time for you to meet the Butcher of Moscow. Charlie’s killer.’
‘And Arkady Belanov,’ added Hanlon. ‘Him too,’ said Oksana.
Hello, Arkady, thought Hanlon, still hurting women then?
It’ll be nice to see you again.
2
Assistant Commissioner Corrigan of the Metropolitan Police, naked except for a small towel preserving his modesty, looked thoughtfully at the man, similarly attired, sitting opposite him in the steam room.
The hot, heavy damp air, like being inside a heated cloud, billowed around them, obscuring vision, deadening sound. The thick, grey marble walls, a century old, dripped and ran with condensed moisture.
Through the mist, Corrigan saw a heavily built man in his late twenties, early thirties. His body was muscular, not the overly defined, chiselled look of the gym but spectacularly solid. His waistline was beginning to carry a couple of folds of surplus fat, but he wasn’t too far removed from the boxer he had once been. Corrigan, whose family had almost all to a man worked in construction, knew strength when he saw it. Enver Demirel was a powerful individual. He had a mournful face that bore the traces of the boxing ring, a heavy drooping moustache and sad, brown eyes like a seal’s. Corrigan’s gaze dropped momentarily to the man’s right foot. There was a small, red puckered scar where DI Demirel had been shot a year or so ago in the line of duty.
DI Enver Demirel stared unhappily back at the assistant commissioner. Corrigan was a huge man, six feet five, and the towel wrapped around his waist looked like a face flannel against his massive bulk, a weightlifter run to seed. Generations of Corrigans had done nothing but heavy, manual labour, and in some kind of Darwinian way the results of centuries of coded musculature were there in the AC’s body.
Enver averted his eyes. He hated public nakedness and was very uncomfortable in these surroundings. He was also uncomfortable with deviation from routine and he suspected that Corrigan had brought him here for some off-the-record discussion that he most certainly did not want to be having. They were in the basement of Corrigan’s club. Most of the members were military or businessmen who’d done time in the Guards, so it was old-school masculine, scuffed Chesterfields and deer heads on the wall. The walls were wood-panelled, the heavy pictures portraits of long-dead, long-forgotten generals or military events – Rorke’s Drift, Saving the Colours, that kind of genre. A huge stuffed pike dominated the bar from above the fireplace. The club was open to women, but Enver had never seen one in there. He wondered what they would make of Hanlon.
Enver knew from office gossip that the AC had rented out his flat in Notting Hill for an astronomical sum and moved Mrs Corrigan to their cottage in Sussex. Corrigan had bought the flat when Notting Hill had been predominantly Irish and Afro-Caribbean. (No blacks, no Irish, no dogs, the signs in rented properties had often read in those days.) Now only the super-rich could afford to live there. If you’d forecast that at the time, people would have questioned your sanity. Thirty years ago, Corrigan’s neighbours had been a squat full of dope-smoking hippies on one side and a West Indian drinking den on the other. Now he had a TV producer to the left and an alternative treatment centre for the extremely well-off worried-well on the other. Corrigan preferred the old days. During the week Corrigan stayed in this club, which had cheap rooms for its members. When Corrigan had invited Enver there for a meeting he’d assumed it would be in the tranquil old-fashioned bar, not in the bowels of the building in this strangely accurate nineteenth-century reproduction of a Turkish steam room or hamam from the Ottoman Empire.
So now he sat uncomfortably on a marble slab – a marble banquette really. The whole room, with its high, vaulted ceiling, was a temple to marble and brass. Sweat trickled through the forest of black hair on his body, while Corrigan said, ‘What I really like about this steam room, Demirel, is it’s so hard to bug anyone. Look around you.’ He waved a thick arm at the steam room. Through the swirls of vapour, pink blobs of people, rich, white, elderly and male, Corrigan’s clubland colleagues could be glimpsed, and a circular dais in the centre where two masseurs pummelled and kneaded their clients. There was no furniture, no nooks or crannies to embed microphones, and the watery atmosphere with its ninety-eight per cent humidity would destroy most electrics. And, with everyone being naked, there was nowhere to hide a recording device or a camera. Corrigan nodded his satisfaction. Being recorded was anathema to him. These days he had to assume everything would be made public, captured on a phone, photographed from a satellite or a car, and now there was the advent of smart glasses.
What he had to say was for Enver’s ears only. He wanted no record – no email, no paperwork, no photographs, no witnesses –
just nice simple deniability if things went wrong.
‘Yes, sir,’ Enver Demirel said. He wondered if Corrigan had a particular reason to feel paranoid or if all one-to-one briefings would, in future, be conducted in spas, plunge pools, showers. Maybe swimming pools. Hanlon would like that,
* * *
he thought. He had seen her swim, elegantly, effortlessly, tirelessly. He floundered in water. He felt he looked ridiculous.
He hated being here. He looked down angrily at the swell of his stomach. It used to be flat; now it billowed out, straining his skin. I’m obese, he thought with self-loathing. Fat. I look pregnant.
‘I take it you read my briefing notes on the people-trafficking debate we’re having in London?’ asked Corrigan.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Enver. He quoted, pleased to be able to take his mind off his body issues, paraphrasing freely, ‘Conservative estimates would place the number of cases of trafficked sex workers in the UK in the thousand to two thousand mark. CEOPS reckon that there are about five hundred children trafficked for sex purposes and in London we’re dealing with about a hundred cases, each on average involving about a dozen people.’ Enver had a retentive memory for facts and figures and he could see Corrigan beaming at him through the steam, a teacher whose prize pupil had done well as usual.
‘Yes,’ Corrigan said. ‘But what particularly concerns me at the moment is the growth in crime from the former Soviet Union, Russia in particular.’
Russia was back in the news as enemy number one again. Not quite the heady paranoia of the Cold War days, but there was pressure on Corrigan from his political masters to provide hard information and to be seen to crack down. The last thing the government wanted was to be made fools of domestically as well as internationally. Some form of crackdown on Russian criminals was called for, in their opinion. It would look as if they were doing something and it would be popular with the public. Above all, it would be relatively uncontroversial. It wouldn’t upset, for example, the black and Asian or the Islamic community.
It wouldn’t upset Brussels either.
Enver looked round the steam room, ghostly glimpses of naked men seen through the swirling hot mists. Sweat was pouring off him now. He’d used saunas in the past to make the weight when he’d been a boxer, shaving grams off before a weigh-in. He’d be a super heavyweight now. It was a depressing thought.
‘Sir?’
Corrigan leaned forward. He spoke softly but Enver could hear the anger in his voice.
‘I should be chairing a meeting right now involving the Borders Agency, HMRC, CEOP command and the NCA. Our star turn was to have been a man called Charles Taverner, a Foreign Office expert recently moved to the private sector and well informed on Russian crime syndicates, particularly prostitution, the one that concerns me.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Enver.
Corrigan looked irritatingly composed, relaxed in the intolerable heat, like a huge lizard.
‘Taverner was supposed to give us a presentation on something called a skhodka,’ he said, ‘a special meeting of criminals in which a vor v zakone, that’s a kind of Russian crime boss, a sort of Godfather figure, would be elected or chosen to further Russian interests in the prostitution sector in London.’
> ‘That’s fairly clear, sir,’ said Enver. It was obviously a case for Serious Crimes, not for him. ‘Why would they want to come over here? Aren’t they busy enough in Russia?’
Corrigan smiled mirthlessly. ‘For much the same reason as the oligarchs; it’s a relatively safe place to do business and to bank your money. Particularly with the rouble going tits up.’ There was a brass tap on the wall and a small, metal basin. The AC filled it up and tipped it over his head, the cold water soothing him. He pushed his greying, dark hair back, obscuring his bald patch. ‘If you’re Russian and legit you’re always worried that the government are going to confiscate your assets, the way that happened to Berezovsky or Khodorkovsky, and if you’re a criminal they might crack down on you because a rival has paid the police off to eliminate you. It’s a murky world, Demirel.’
‘I daresay it is, sir.’ And it’s not my problem either, Enver thought smugly. I’m busy liaising with the London Turkish community. I’m building bridges, as they like to say.
As if reading his mind, Corrigan shifted his weight and leaned forward confidentially. ‘It’s always good to learn new things, isn’t it, Detective Inspector?’
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Enver reluctantly. The mention of his rank alarmed him. It was a none-too-subtle reminder that he owed it to Corrigan’s influence. He felt this was an overture to something he did not want to hear. There was a jocular, wheedling tone now in Corrigan’s voice. He’d heard it before; it was a softening-up tactic that the AC was fond of.
‘Here’s a new word for you, smotriashchya.’ Corrigan said the word again, as if savouring its exotic syllables. ‘Smo-tri-ash-ch-ya. It means a watcher, a watcher who looks after the interest of the vor. Taverner was going to tell us the name of the watcher and the vor, but he wasn’t at the meeting.’