The Missing Husband

by Alex Coombs

  She picked up Hanlon’s book. She didn’t want to be reading this, or anything, for that matter. She wanted to be watching Helena Bonham Carter in a dark cinema, holding Enver’s large hand and feeling the sap rising. She shook her head in disbelief. God, I hope he’s all right. She started reading about pre-Achaeminid Iran circa three thousand BC. She read that the Elamites destroyed Ur round about two thousand BC. And they’re still at it, Huss thought. She turned another page.

  It was going to be a long night.

  23

  After meeting Albert Slater at Iris Campion’s, in an idle moment at work, Hanlon had looked up his criminal record, which had begun when he was sixteen and had gone on, in various forms, until he was sixty. It took in everything from sex, when being gay had been a crime, to real crime. There had been importuning in a public toilet and gross indecency, Slater’s gay martyrdom, that would only end in 1967 when homosexuality was legalized. However, this sexual persecution was leavened with his first conviction for burglary at eighteen and a string of other offences, mainly other counts of burglary of commercial premises. Sex crimes (i.e., convictions for homosexual behaviour) ended in 1967, and real crime, burglary and robbery, took over until the late eighties. His record was sprinkled with occasional affray and a couple of GBH convictions. Slater was quite a violent man. Something about the aged villain had stimulated Hanlon’s curiosity and she had gone for a quiet drink with a copper, now retired from the force, who she had worked with years previously. McClennan had worked with Tremayne, her guv’nor from way back, when she had been a probationer. He knew Albert – Vicious little bastard, he used to get pissed and cause fights. He’d really camp it up to provoke a reaction and then go for it. McClennan had taken another sip from his pint. They’d been in a pub in Wardour Street, very close to the Krafft Club,

  * * *

  an establishment he would have known well by name, not as a punter.

  Francis McClennan had leaned over the small, heavy, circular wooden table and put his face close to hers. The pub had been packed, the noise deafening.

  ‘I tell you something, Hanlon, he was very good at breaking and entering – neat, tidy, knowledgeable. I think he got used on some big jobs, couple down in Hatton Garden, very high security, but Albert was good with electronics. He moved with the times.’

  She looked affectionately at McClennan, paunchier, jowlier, redder of face and nose than he had been fifteen years earlier, but still good-looking in a kind of dad-off-the-leash way. He’d got carried away once, drunkenly frisky, and had tried to grab her at a police do when he was very pissed. She’d kneed him hard in the groin. Neither bore the other any resentment. Now McClennan had a business running background checks on people for companies seeking in-depth profiles of potential employees – high-risk, high-responsibility jobs where the employer wanted to know every scrap of carefully buried dirt that may have stuck to the candidate in question. McClennan had the expertise and the contacts and the mindset that made his services highly sought after. He’d been delighted to hear from Hanlon and assist her.

  ‘Albert, hey. I think he sells Chinese stuff now; goes to Hong

  Kong a lot.’

  ‘Drugs?’ asked Hanlon hopefully. McClennan shook his head.

  ‘No, all legit. Furniture, rugs, that kind of stuff. Chinoiserie, that’s what it’s called, isn’t it?’ He shook his head ruefully at the way of the world. Hanlon could smell his industrially powerful aftershave; his hair was swept back and lacquered into place.

  * * *

  He had a consoling mouthful of beer. She looked at him with genuine regard. ‘Chinoiserie. I don’t know, Hanlon. A grown man selling knick-knacks.’

  ‘Do you know his address, Frank?’ she asked innocently.

  McClennan smiled at her. ‘Same old Hanlon, eh?’ he said. She had a reputation for leaning on people, for extorting favours. He wondered what she would want from Slater. He considered her request. Hanlon was tainted goods, but she had been his mate’s protégée and she had an odd effect of charming people when she wanted to. McClennan looked at her and pushed a hand through his hair, still thick and abundant at sixty-four. He looked at her hard, attractive face, the gleam of her eyes. I wish I was thirty years younger, he thought.

  ‘I’ll find out and email it to you.’

  And he had. Before he had left Hanlon, he had turned to her. ‘You’ve got my mobile number. You need info on anyone, any time, Hanlon, I’ll drop what I’m doing and help. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Thanks, Frank,’ she’d said, touched by the affection in the old copper’s voice.

  After leaving Huss, Hanlon went straight to Albert’s place. It was at the end of a street in Kentish Town on the way up to Tufnell Park, near the Forum. It had been a crappy street in a crappy part of town but now, with the tide of gentrification spreading inexorably from the epicentre of Camden, it had become desirable.

  His house was at the end of a terrace. She guessed that there had been another house at one time next to it but it had been demolished, making space for a kind of yard that abutted on to Albert Slater’s property. Yellowing bricks that made up the high wall were topped by sagging barbed wire to deter intruders.

  * * *

  Hanlon thought to herself that if anyone knew how to prevent a break-in it would be Albert Slater. She looked more closely at the rusty, sagging barbed wire, saw a double row of gleaming razor wire concealed by the old stuff. A suitable metaphor for Albert himself.

  Access to the yard was via a gate wide enough to allow a single vehicle through. The red, rusty metal gates looked old and rickety, but when you got close you noticed that the hinges holding them up were massive and recessed into the brickwork. You also noticed the state-of-the-art computerized keypad, again recessed neatly into the bricks, and a couple of small skeletal cameras monitoring the gates.

  She moved on to the house and rang the doorbell. All the windows that faced on to the street were protected by ornamental wrought-iron metal grilles. She noticed again that there was a small camera above the door that inquisitively moved around on its gimballed mounting as it surveyed her. The intercom by the door asked, ‘And who might you be?’

  It was Slater’s voice, tinny and robotic through the small speaker.

  She pushed back the hood of the top she was wearing and stared up at the camera. Their unblinking gazes, her grey eyes, the lens of the camera, met and held.

  ‘DCI Hanlon,’ she said. ‘Lily Law.’

  Hanlon and Albert Slater looked at one another. The elderly criminal was wearing an ornate Chinese mandarin-style dressing gown, the style of which Chantal’s Rayon copy had tried childishly to emulate. He was wearing a white silk shirt underneath it, black trousers and black kung fu-style slippers. The clothes suited him. He looked like a sinister tai pan from Hong Kong. He was dressed more for Kowloon or Canton

  than Kentish Town.

  * * *

  He had led her from the doorway, a state-of-the-art console just inside the door providing views of the doorway and the street. Her professional eyes had noted the three bolts that would slide into the wall of the house from the door when he closed it. They were activated by a palm-sensitive motion detector that she could hear engaging other locks with synchronized precision. It would have cost thousands. The frame was steel-reinforced. The hinges belonged on a safe. Good luck trying to break that door down, she thought, if the police tried to raid him.

  ‘This way, Hanlon,’ he said.

  She followed him down the narrow hall passage, piled high with cardboard boxes done up for delivery or receipt, then into Slater’s front room.

  It was very warm in there and smelled of smoke, stale air and incense. It was dimly lit and crammed with artefacts and handicrafts, some cheap and gimcrack, some obviously extremely expensive. A couple of battery-operated, plastic cats, the kind that you saw in cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurants, their white faces with fixed, painted smiles, endlessly waved their paws in a hypnotically metronom
ic way. There were expensive-looking oriental rugs, rolled up and stacked like logs of wood, a Chinese suit of armour on a frame – ‘Tang Dynasty,’ said Slater – ceremonial swords on racks, and other lethal-looking antique weaponry, familiar to her from Hong Kong kung fu films. There were vases and a phalanx of replica terracotta warriors. As well as the chinoiserie, there were reminders of another more techno-savvy Slater. Steel shelving held carefully labelled electronic equipment and circuitry, a bank of monitors flickered randomly, showing images of the front and back of Albert Slater’s property, the yard adjoining the house with an old classic Mercedes sports car from the late sixties – ‘1968 280SL,’ said Albert Slater – and next to it a nondescript white Ford

  * * *

  Transit van. Other TV screens stacked on top were broadcasting Sky News, a Chinese channel and several showing a variety of hard-core gay porn like a homoerotic TV showroom. Sucking and fucking, fisting and golden showers, waves of cum sprayed and dripped over faces, buttocks, groins and eager tongues and mouths. The good-luck battery-powered cats sat waving their paws tirelessly at them. The screens displayed the silent, heaving bodies, money shots and the black-and-white exterior of street and yard.

  The walls of heavy red-flock wallpaper were decorated with Tom of Finland prints, some signed, Robert Mapplethorpe male nudes and classic Chinese landscapes. There were Japanese shunga prints, serious-looking oriental women being penetrated by eye-wateringly large Japanese penises, their owners also serious-looking, inscrutable. The room was dominated by a huge, black-lacquered desk.

  Hanlon was inspecting a print showing a gay orgy, more fucking and sucking – there are only so many variations after all – enormous engorged penises, ferociously intent anal sex. Brows were furrowed. More of the same was going on silently on the TV screen.

  ‘Did your omi-palone sharpy friend like Tom of Finland?’ asked Slater from behind his desk. His voice was sarcastic, the usage of the archaic Polari gay slang a deliberate anachronism to disconcert Hanlon. He had an oriental opium pipe in his hand, a long, thin stem and small bowl.

  ‘He preferred action to looking at pictures,’ said Hanlon. ‘He was kind of old fashioned that way.’ She sat down opposite Slater. The room was lit by a Tiffany lamp. The shadows were deep. The desk had an Apple Mac connected to some kind of external drive before the cable snaked away into the gloomy recesses of the room.

  * * *

  Slater touched the device gently. ‘Firewall,’ he said. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

  Next to the Mac was an old-fashioned telephone with a circular dial. The front of it was given over to numbers 1–9, arranged like a clock. You didn’t key the numbers in; you inserted a finger and turned. A receiver was balanced on top: one end for speaking; one end for listening. A curly cable connected it to the box.

  ‘No, no, you can’t,’ said Hanlon. Slater lit his pipe and inhaled deeply. A plume of greasy black smoke rose upwards. Hanlon could smell the burning opium now, heavy, stifling, powerful. Slater closed his eyes luxuriantly; the room was extremely hot. There were stacks of currency on the desk, tens, twenties, fifties, euro notes and ones she didn’t recognize with Chinese characters, presumably yuan. The lazy, oily, fragrant smoke curled into the dark, heavy shadows that surrounded the circle of warm light from the lamp.

  ‘Very daring of you to come and visit an old fruit like me,’ said Slater drowsily. ‘Sticking your esong where it doesn’t belong.’

  ‘I need your help,’ said Hanlon simply.

  ‘Do you now.’ His voice was bored; he sounded extremely stoned.

  He didn’t see her expression. His eyes were closed. Hanlon stood up very quietly and walked over to behind Albert Slater. She eyed the cord that connected the telephone receiver to its box. She toyed with the idea of wrapping its coiled wires round the old man’s throat, and tugging.

  ‘I’d be careful where you put your luppers, darling,’ said Albert Slater. His right hand was tucked inside the silken folds of the dressing gown. Gun or knife? wondered Hanlon.

  She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and leaned her face close to the side of his head, as if she was going to kiss him.

  * * *

  He could smell her perfume. Her hair brushed his cheek. ‘A firewall’s only good if it can keep things out, and some things are harder to keep out than others. Some things are already here, and some things you can’t keep out, you know that, don’t you, Albert,’ she breathed into his ear. ‘Now, you do what I ask you or I’m going to make a call to Dave Anderson.’ She paused to let the idea and its implications sink in, before continuing.

  ‘You know the Andersons, don’t you, Albert, you know monsters exist.’ Her voice was soft, cajoling, almost erotic. ‘You know the kind of things they do, Albert, and you know how easily old bones, old bones like yours, can break, don’t you, darling, and he’ll come visiting with his friend Morris Jones.’ Albert Slater’s chair swivelled and Hanlon spun it gently through ninety degrees so Slater was facing her. She placed her hands on the armrests of the chair and leaned forward so their faces nearly touched. He looked into her burning eyes.

  Her voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper.

  ‘And they’ll huff,’ she murmured, her eyes holding his hypnotically, ‘and they’ll puff, and they’ll blow your house down.’

  She stood up and folded her arms, looking down at Slater. He put the pipe down on the desk and looked at her in an unfriendly way.

  ‘You’re a meshigener bitch, aren’t you, Hanlon,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I know,’ she said. She clapped her hands together, twice. The noise was almost explosive. ‘Now chop-chop, get dressed, Cinderella, you shall go to the ball.’

  24

  Hanlon parked the Ford Transit near where she’d left her car just a few hours ago. It was now nearly midnight. The roads were hallucinatorily quiet. The industrial park was deserted, the only sign of life an urban fox that had paused to look at them rather insolently at a T-junction. There was something furry in its mouth that had looked suspiciously like a small cat. Next to her in the other front seat her reluctant passenger grumbled, ‘Well, this is all very nice. Fantabulosa I very much don’t think.’

  ‘Stop moaning, Albert,’ said Hanlon. ‘We’re here.’ Albert Slater stared intently at the door in front of him. He was dressed more or less like Hanlon – boots, hoody, jeans. Although he was pushing seventy, and obviously a heavy drug user, he was in surprisingly good shape, she thought.

  The warehouse rose up in front of them. In the heavy shadows of the loading bay by the front entrance, screened from the CCTV on the streetlights by a concrete pillared portico, in their dark clothes they were as good as invisible.

  There were three locks on the door that Albert had to deal with. He stared at them with an expert eye. Initially, he’d been furious with Hanlon both for threatening him (he knew of the Andersons and they frightened him) and for forcing him into action when all he wanted to do was stay at home.

  * * *

  But now here he was, like the old days, and he was enjoying himself.

  He looked hard at the locks. Two of them were straightforward, a Yale and a Banham mortice lock, old friends, and he had picks in the dark sports bag by his feet to deal with them. Hanlon had told him not to worry about an alarm. The kind of people who had rented this space would most certainly not want to be hooked up to a security company or the police in case the alarm went off, for whatever reason.

  The third lock was much more modern than the others technologically, a magnetic lock that he guessed was installed by the new tenants of the warehouse. It was this that had been causing the problem. It was easy to put up, and a bastard to open. He could see why they’d fitted it in addition to the others. Ridiculously simple to fit; practically impossible to break. Because it was just a metal plate and a powerful magnet, there was no need to drill into the doorframe. Albert could have installed it in minutes flat: simple and horribly effective.

  It had a key-swipe mechanis
m attached to the wall to allow access. Unlike the other locks it was brand new.

  The lock was pretty secure. Albert guessed it would need about twelve hundred pounds of pressure to force it. Well, that wasn’t going to be happening. Or, if it was fail-safe, all you had to do was disrupt the electricity supply. You could dig a hole in the ground where the jacketed mains cable came in, then sever it. Well, that wasn’t going to be happening either. Or disable the sub-station. You could always pray for a miraculous power cut.

  He scratched his head in frustration. There was something he could try, but he had a feeling it wouldn’t work. Not unless he was very lucky.

  ‘Sod it,’ he said. Hanlon looked at him questioningly. He shook his head in irritation, rummaged in his bag and held

  * * *

  something like a silver, ridged cylinder in his hand. ‘Magnet,’ he said by way of explanation. If he was lucky and it was an old model, the powerful neodymium magnet should scramble the sensitive internal electrics and release the mechanism. He tried. It wasn’t an old model and nothing happened.

  Hanlon looked at him angrily.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she hissed. Slater indicated the key-swipe mechanism. ‘It’s magnetic and I can’t open it.’ He had a sudden thought. ‘The fire alarm probably will, that should trip it. Should have that as a safety feature.’

  Hanlon rolled her eyes. Any sensors would be inside the building. It’d be a catch-22 situation: to open the door, you’d have to get in first. To get in, first you’d have to open the door. Well, she’d have to find another way in. She’d thought it might come to this. She said to Slater, ‘Have you got anything to break glass in there?’ She pointed at his bag.