The Missing Husband

by Alex Coombs

  She was very worried, but couldn’t think of anything to do.

  There was nothing she could do.

  Family. Her mother was a foul-mouthed drunk living in Woodstock; Chantal wasn’t going there unless she had to. She was worse than useless. Chantal had been taken into care when she was young and even she felt that had probably been the right decision.

  cold revenge

  * * *

  Friends. She didn’t really have any, just Curtis and the phone numbers of a couple of ex-boyfriends, both violent, both untrustworthy. All she could do was text him and add increasingly desperate emojis. Now she was down to just sending emojis. The bright primary colours cheered her up a little.

  Maybe he was with another woman. He’d have phoned with some pathetic excuse, a cold voice inside her head said.

  Maybe he’d just got off his face with some friends, a stag do he hadn’t told her about. He doesn’t have any, he’s Billy No Mates, the voice said.

  Now here was Dimitri. He stroked her hair proprietorially and she flinched. He took his tracksuit top off and she could see even more of the sinister tattoos that covered his body. I’ll tell Curtis, she imagined telling him. The inner voice laughed, coldly unimpressed. What’s he going to do against Dimitri? Him and whose army?

  Perhaps, she wondered, if the policeman came round he would be able to deal with Dimitri; he’d certainly looked sizeable. But then her gaze took in the huge, muscled bulk of Dimitri, his horribly animal presence. The big policeman had looked kind and, although he had been bear-like in build, it was a cuddly kind of impression. She had found herself considering Enver Demirel in her professional capacity. Men like him were her favourite clients; he’d have been polite, gentle, no trouble at all. She had even quite fancied him. That comforting, muscular weight on top of her. Not like Dimitri.

  His hand was still in her hair; now his fingers tightened and clenched and he pulled at it viciously. She gasped in pain.

  ‘Call him now, bliyad, get him over here.’

  She nodded and took the business card with his number out of the cutlery drawer where she’d put it for safe keeping.

  * * *

  She typed the number into her mobile, heard Enver’s voice on the other end, a questioning tone when he answered as he didn’t recognize her number.

  He sounded pleased to hear from her. Yes, he’d be round in about an hour and a half’s time. She hung up and looked at Dimitri.

  ‘He’ll be round in about an hour,’ she said.

  He started taking off his shoes. ‘I heard hour and half. We have plenty of time.’

  The other shoe followed. He was wearing white ankle socks. The right one had a hole in and she could see the nail of his big toe. It was quite long and grubby. Like the rest of him it looked strong, like a broad claw. It made her feel sick.

  ‘Curtis might be back soon,’ she said desperately.

  Dimitri tugged off his sock and looked at her. ‘He won’t.’

  The amused look in his eyes said it all. There was no hint of, I don’t care if he comes; no hint of, So what, or, Call him and tell him you’re busy. It was just callous good humour. She doubted if he would even care that she had noticed. It was then that she knew Curtis was dead.

  Enver had lied about the time it would take to get to Chantal’s flat. He was in Oxford when his phone rang, sitting in a café eating doughnuts. They weren’t American-style donuts. They were jam, the real deal as far as Enver was concerned. Thick, sugar-encrusted, plumply seductive. He had meant to have just one but he told himself that, technically, he was on holiday and, as such, deserved a treat. He would walk them off later. He had no idea how many calories were in a doughnut or indeed how long it would take on foot to negate their effects. The truth was, he didn’t care. He was in a nice café, drinking good espresso and eating these hard-to-find excellent doughnuts.

  * * *

  Besides, he thought righteously, the café was independent, not part of a chain, so he was also benefitting the local economy. In fact, the more he spent, the better.

  The proprietress eyed him in a friendly way from behind the counter. She liked a man who enjoyed his food. Enver was on his fourth doughnut, his eyes gleaming, his strong white teeth occasionally visible beneath his heavy black moustache, now dusted with caster sugar as he chewed. She noticed that his powerful fingers were free of a wedding band. The look in his eyes, unalloyed greed and good nature, reminded her of her Labrador when she fed it. Enver looked like the kind of man who would be as nice as her dog, and, she felt, he could do with a woman to advise him on clothes; that T-shirt did not go with that jacket.

  He was surprised that Chantal had called him. She had looked so scared when he’d been in her tiny flat.

  He stared at his phone and drummed his fingers gently on the table in front of him. He had a vague sense of disquiet but he shrugged it off. What could she possibly do to him? Equally Sam Curtis posed little or no threat. Enver’s increased body mass, allied to his powerfully muscled physique, while of no use in a boxing ring, was ideally suited to successful brawling. He would have flattened Curtis like a steamroller.

  He toyed with the idea of phoning Huss but decided against it. He thought of his approaching evening with Melinda Huss with excitement. He was going to invite her to stay the night, provided all went well, and he could see no reason why it shouldn’t.

  He’d checked that the film, A Room with a View, was on and that it was what it purported to be, not some porno version or a remake. He’d had another look at the menu, even eaten a solitary, exploratory lunch and made friends with two waitresses

  * * *

  and the manager. His family name, or rather the restaurants associated with the Demirels, was reasonably well known in this part of London, plus of course he knew quite a few names that he dropped to good effect – catering is a tight-knit community. Enver was a formidably good planner. Entertainment was sorted; dinner was sorted; his flat was nearly there. He was halfway through Operation Springclean in his flat. It was always clean and tidy; now it gleamed. All he had left were the insides of the windows to clean and the skirting boards, in case Huss got down on hands and knees to run an exploratory finger

  along them.

  He pushed the chair back and smiled politely at the woman behind the counter as he left. What a nice man, she thought as she cleared away after him and pocketed her tip.

  Enver walked to a nearby taxi rank and gave Chantal’s address in Cowley to the driver. He’d had enough of negotiating the one-way streets of the town and the endless, problematic bicycle chaos the last time he had driven here with Huss.

  As if he had conjured her up by thinking of her he felt his phone vibrate and there was a text message from her, asking about the coming evening. The mannered Oxford streets passed by outside the windows of the cab as he laboriously typed in the time of the train he’d expect her on at Paddington and where exactly at the station they should meet.

  Enver was leaving nothing to chance. He thought of Huss’s attractive curved body; he thought of her blonde hair. He thought of her clever, competent hands and the look of studious concentration on her face as she adjusted some tricky component on the exposed gears of a car. He thought of the scent of her body, wholesome and attractive, like rising bread. He thought of her lovely breasts and underwear as revealed by the half-undone boilersuit. He thought of her even white

  * * *

  teeth. Melinda Huss, he thought wonderingly, I think I’m in love with you.

  * * *

  The taxi pulled up outside Chantal’s flat. He got out and paid off the driver. The car pulled away and Enver’s thoughts of Huss vanished as he looked at the doorway sandwiched between a betting shop and a fast-food outlet that sold fried chicken.

  His good humour evaporated. Chantal’s surroundings were as depressing as her life. Win, win, win screamed the betting shop, its frontage bright with vibrant primary colours, green and red and yellow, its lettering bold, emphatic, confident. />
  Its optimistic slogan was negated by its neighbour. The fast-food shop’s photos of the takeaways it sold had been bleached and yellowed by the sun and time. The chicken in the pictures was gnarly with dun-brown corrugated batter, like growths waiting to be removed. The shop smelled sharply of rancid fat. Enver could imagine only too well what the kitchen would look like, the cracked rubber seals of the fridge grimed with dirt like a tramp’s fingernails, the off-putting reek of out-of-date chicken in stained plastic tubs and boxes of congealing coleslaw. He knew the horrors that lurked in crappy kitchens only too well – not in the Demirels’ kitchens, but in rival places

  he’d worked when he’d been a student.

  He walked up to Chantal’s front door. Someone had pissed in the recessed doorway during the night and there was still a residual puddle of thickened, semi-evaporated urine in front of the scuffed white door, the smell mingling with that of the chicken joint next door.

  He pressed the buzzer and heard Chantal’s voice, sounding slightly out of breath, metallic and tinny on the scuffed, steel honeycomb of the intercom.

  ‘Hello?’

  * * *

  ‘DI Demirel,’ he said. The door buzzed and he pushed it open, stepping carefully over the puddle as he went.

  He glanced at his watch as he stood at the bottom of the narrow, steep carpeted stairs, the beige fabric unpleasantly stained here and there. A smell of stale skunk clung to the walls.

  He thought of Huss longingly. Only a few more hours, he thought.

  He started up the stairs and knocked gently on the door. Chantal opened it and he went into the cramped flat. Enver looked at her with concern. She had obviously been crying. Her eye make-up had run, and her fingers plucked nervously at the hem of her dressing gown. It was a cheap, oriental-effect garment made of red synthetic fabric with a gold dragon, the kind of thing you bought on a stall in a not-very-good market for a tenner. It looked highly flammable. He had the feeling that she was naked underneath the tawdry gown, which added to his discomfort.

  He hoped that her unhappy state had nothing to do with him. He had a sudden surge of resentment at Corrigan. All well and good for Corrigan from his bastion of gentlemen’s clubs and the upper floors of New Scotland Yard to issue instructions on ‘shaking the tree’, but it was Enver who had to do the dirty work and it looked as if it was Chantal who had borne the brunt of things. There was a swelling by the side of her eye that she had attempted to conceal with foundation. It hadn’t concealed it. It was now a foundation-coloured swelling. Enver knew a thing or two about bruising and contusions – what boxer didn’t? – but there was a time and a place, and in his mind the place was never on a woman’s face. Curtis, he thought. He had a sudden desire to give Curtis a good going over. See how he likes it, thought Enver.

  ‘Are you OK, Chantal?’

  * * *

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. Then she raised her gaze to his and opened up the dressing gown, flasher style.

  It was the last thing Enver expected and it certainly caught his attention. He stared at Chantal’s slim body, the strip of dark pubic hair, her surprisingly full breasts. What the hell is going on? he thought, unaware of the bathroom door opening quietly behind him.

  His body suddenly exploded with pain and his legs gave way as if they’d been severed. He fell face forward, his head thudding heavily to the floor, dazing him even further as the pain increased and his body twitched while his mouth made inarticulate sounds.

  Chantal watched in horrified fascination as Dimitri stood over the body of Enver, the yellow taser in his hands like a child’s toy pistol, its primary yellow colour lending it an almost clown-like quality as it clicked away insect-like in a busy, threatening staccato manner.

  ‘Give it thirty seconds,’ Joad had said. It was a standard police-issue taser, property of Thames Valley Constabulary. Joad had stolen it a few months ago during a raid on a crackhouse in High Wycombe. Whichever of the three views held by his colleagues on Joad – likeable rough diamond; sleazy, yes, bent, maybe, but a good copper; corrupt, lazy, a disgrace, should be locked up – everyone, even Huss, agreed he was very useful in a ruck. He was in great demand whenever physical trouble loomed. When things had kicked off during the raid and everyone’s attention had been fully occupied, Joad had coolly expropriated the taser and sold it later to Belanov for three times its list price.

  Joad had said the best place to use it was on the back, which

  was why Dimitri had got Chantal to engage Enver’s attention.

  * * *

  Dimitri was also very wary of the bull-like policeman. Enver had hit him in the face once and that had nearly knocked him unconscious; Dimitri was taking no chances.

  He dropped the taser and kicked Enver hard between the legs, so hard it moved Enver’s body up off the floor. It was a precaution, but more than that it was payback. The first instalment. It was revenge, a cold revenge, one he had longingly rehearsed in his mind like a sexual fantasy.

  We all have certain memories that we worry at like a loose tooth or picking a scab – unforgotten resentments that continue to fester and haunt us. Dimitri could still vividly picture being in the street in Bow in East London behind the wheel of the stolen white van. It had been dark, late at night, and he had only been half alert. He’d been waiting for Hanlon, waiting to settle his score with her, when he had become aware of a presence at the open window of the driver’s door. He’d turned his head irritably and seen a face, Enver’s face, before Enver’s fist had slammed into his head, breaking his already damaged cheekbone.

  The force of Enver’s punch had nearly knocked him out. The next thing he’d known, he was being dragged on to the London pavement where he’d lost consciousness momentarily before coming round, his body a sea of pain.

  Now God, or the Devil, had brought Enver back within reach.

  He handcuffed Enver’s hands behind his back and rolled him over. Enver was still moaning slightly from the excruciating pain in his testes and the residual effects of the electrocution. Dimitri had a roll of black gaffer tape and wrapped a length three times round Enver’s mouth then flipped him back over, face down, and, sitting on his back so Enver couldn’t move, taped his legs together at the ankles.

  * * *

  Enver was secure; now Dimitri could relax. Chantal watched silently. There was no fight in her, no resistance.

  She sat helplessly on the bed, waiting to be told what to do. She had never really in her whole short life made a decision herself. Her mother had put her in and out of care, depending on how sober or remorseful she’d been feeling. Handed back and forth like a parcel, she’d never had any feeling of being anything but a burden to everyone. School, a disaster. Work, a disaster. No one had ever wanted Chantal. If she’d been a puppy she’d probably have ended up being put down. The runt that nobody wanted, that would never be rehomed.

  Only sex had made her feel in demand and appreciated, even if it was pretty grim most of the time. But if you were out of it mentally enough it was bearable. Valium, temazepam, vodka and coke and weed, they all helped. And now her mind was practically blank with misery. She didn’t want to allow herself the ability to think. Any rational thought would just bring further pain. Curtis was dead; no help there. The policeman helpless, as good as dead; no help there. She couldn’t run away. As always, others would decide her fate.

  ‘You’re nothing,’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll never amount to anything, Jenkins,’ her form teacher had said in Year Ten.

  And now her destiny lay entirely in the hands of Dimitri.

  Well, that wasn’t encouraging, was it? she thought. She felt a ridiculous desire to burst out laughing, hysterically.

  Dimitri took a hypodermic from his jacket pocket and a small glass bottle full of a clear liquid. He put the needle through the cap of the bottle and filled the body of the syringe, then pulled Enver’s trousers down slightly to reveal the swell of his buttocks.

  Chantal watche
d silently.

  She had once found a small bird – she didn’t know what sort, it had been brown, terrified – on the doorstep of the home

  * * *

  she’d been living in at the time. It had obviously been young, it wouldn’t or couldn’t fly; maybe its wing had been broken. They had looked at one another, its eyes terrified, and she had closed the door on it, hoping something good would happen to it. Later she’d found its small, dead body by the scruffy hedge in the front garden. She had dug a shallow grave for it in the weed-choked flowerbed.

  She stood, as motionless as the bird had been, as Dimitri inserted the needle into the policeman’s backside and pushed the plunger. Enver sighed and she watched as his body relaxed.

  Yesterday had been her twenty-third birthday. There’d been no cards. Not even a text.

  17

  It was eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, the day of Malcolm Anderson’s funeral in Edmonton. Earlier that morning Hanlon had driven up through the City towards North London.

  The differentials in character between the districts she passed through were as sharply defined as rings on a severed tree trunk. The City with its ancient names – Leadenhall, Ludgate, St Mary Woolnoth – but now all high-tech, steel and concrete, even the food angular and spiky, sushi bars and terse, monosyllabic takeaways, Eat, Graze, Pret. The names themselves sounded like commands. Then Hoxton, hipper and more boho, followed by Stoke Newington, the trailblazer in the gentrification stakes as the native middle class was forced out of the centre of London by the colonizers from abroad.