The Missing Husband

by Alex Coombs

  ‘He is indeed. I think Morris Jones would make your life unbearable if you didn’t, and he has a colleague downstairs to help carry you out of the building after he’s finished.’

  Serg smiled and shook his head ruefully. ‘I had heard a lot about you, DCI Hanlon, and I am delighted to tell you, you are even more intriguing than I had dared hope.’

  Hanlon drummed her fingers on the fake wooden table in the bedroom. It was an ominous sound.

  ‘I have two addresses for Belanov,’ she said. ‘A central Oxford brothel and a warehouse in Slough. I need a third address. I’m looking for a farm not far from Oxford.’

  Serg looked at her face. Composed, perfectly prepared to do whatever it took to get him to talk to save her colleague. He knew that she would have no compunction in killing him, if that was what it would take. He also knew she would

  * * *

  take no pleasure in it either, unlike several of his colleagues. ‘I’m waiting,’ she said ominously. Whoever Belanov had taken must be quite a guy if a woman like Hanlon was prepared to go to these lengths for him. He felt a momentary stab of jealousy towards the unknown policeman. He reached a

  decision.

  ‘Well,’ said Serg, ‘I can help you there. Tragoe Farm, East Nethercote, near Chipping Norton.’

  Hanlon blinked in surprise. It had been that simple. She looked narrowly at Serg. It seemed too easy. He returned her stare, his feline eyes quietly amused. She shrugged on her jacket and banged on the door of the bathroom. Morris Jones emerged. Serg looked closely at him. The hitman’s eyes were narrow, his movements slightly somnolent. His head gave an involuntary nod. Heroin, Serg thought. Hanlon paid him no attention. She looked at her watch.

  ‘I’ll be back before 6 a.m. tomorrow to untie you.’ ‘That’ll be nice,’ said Serg. ‘We can breakfast together and

  I’ll tell you what I’m doing over here.’

  ‘Serg,’ said Hanlon, sighing deeply, ‘I don’t care what you’re doing over here. I don’t give a rat’s arse if you’re here to kill the prime minister. But if you’ve fucked me over on this address

  …’ she leaned forward, her eyes startlingly clear and diamond hard ‘… Morris and his merry men will make sure you never see Mother Russia again.’

  Hanlon turned and left the room. The door closed on her back with a solid click. Morris Jones’s head dropped again suddenly and he scratched himself absent-mindedly. His glazed pupils never left Serg. In the Russian’s professional opinion, Jones was a highly dangerous man. He would kill you like squashing a bug.

  ‘So, just you and me, then, Mr Jones,’ said Serg pleasantly.

  * * *

  Morris Jones sighed and took some duct tape out of his bag. He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘That’s enough rabbit from you, sunny Jim.’

  He had carefully folded a bit of the tape back on itself so he could find the edge easily. He took a scalpel from his bag. Its tip gleamed ominously in the light, but he only used it to neatly cut a piece of the tape off. Even a job as simple as that called for perfection in Jones’s eyes.

  Rabbit, thought Serg, more rhyming slang, rabbit and pork.

  Mr Jones must be a Londoner.

  Morris Jones sealed Serg’s mouth with the tape and put the scalpel away, then the canvas roll back in his manbag. Then he polished his shoes with a special impregnated paper cloth provided by the room. They gleamed a fraction more.

  ‘My employer needs me to go and watch his back.’ Jones patted Serg on his head. His pupils were pinpricks, but Serg knew that the strung-out Jones would be just as deadly as he was straight. Maybe more so.

  ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ said Morris Jones. He left the room, turning out the light behind him.

  Serg was alone in the darkness.

  34

  ‘So where exactly are we going?’ Danny asked Hanlon. They were heading west, down the M40 towards Oxford.

  ‘We’re going to a farm owned by Arkady Belanov, the fat Russian,’ said Hanlon. ‘We’re going to rescue a friend of mine who he’s holding there. He’s called Enver. Enver Demirel. But first we’re stopping off to see a woman called Melinda Huss.’

  ‘We?’ said Danny.

  ‘You and me, Danny, you and me,’ said Hanlon. Her voice was clipped and irritable, her driving fast and aggressive.

  Danny fell silent. It was plain that she wasn’t in the mood for talking. That was fine by him; he wasn’t in a communicative mood either. He had come, he realized, to a crossroads in his life and he’d had enough. He was tired of being ordered around by Anderson, he’d had more than enough of Morris Jones and he was also frightened. He realized that now. He usually defined himself by his fearlessness. He had welcomed danger because it gave him a chance to prove himself. He had always felt before that he was immortal, that death was an abstraction or something that only happened to others. Well, that had changed.

  He had seen too much death recently. It wasn’t glamorous and it was happening uncomfortably close. He was twenty-six and he didn’t want to die. Until now he had never thought it could happen to him. Now he did.

  * * *

  He looked at the woman next to him, at her hard, confident face. The only person he had ever seen his boss actually like. He envied her ability to feel so confident, so sure of herself. He wondered what she’d had to say to Anderson earlier that afternoon.

  Hanlon glanced at the blond, crop-haired man beside her. She was glad he’d shut up. Tonight she was crossing a line she had never thought she would. She was about to take money from organized crime. She was about to become what she’d always despised, a bent cop.

  Yin and yang, she thought. And now that nice, pristine clean circle that represents my life is about to have an unequivocal dirty stain in it.

  She overtook a car that was dawdling along in the middle lane. Hanlon loved driving. There were so few external variables, just the car, the driver’s ability and whatever was happening on the road. It was a level playing field. It was simple and straightforward. Not like the rest of her life.

  She had bent more than a few rules in her time and she had broken a few too. But they had always been in the pursuit of justice. She had never had any doubt before that a hypothetical jury, whilst maybe rejecting her actual deeds, would applaud her motives. Maybe she had been totally misguided – she didn’t think so but she was prepared to accept the possibility – but now it was down to money. Pure and simple. Selling herself for cash. Not too different from Chantal, or even Joad, come to that.

  * * *

  Her conversation with Anderson had been short and to the point. ‘I can get the Russian, Myasnikov, off your back, Anderson, if you make it worth my while.’ They were standing in the Ibis Hotel’s car park, the jets deafeningly loud overhead, forcing an

  * * *

  unnatural rhythm to the conversation as they could only really speak in short bursts between the roar of the planes’ engines.

  ‘Off my back, Hanlon?’ he’d asked.

  ‘I mean dead,’ she said. ‘I will kill him for you.’

  He had looked puzzled. ‘What, and make it look like a botched police operation?’

  Hanlon shook her head. She had smiled mirthlessly. ‘No, it’ll look like an efficient contract killing. It’ll look like murder because that’s what it will be.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ he said, shrugging. ‘What about Belanov and Dimitri?’

  Hanlon said, ‘No promises, but if they get in the way, then, sure.’

  ‘And what’s the price, Hanlon, how much is this going to cost?’ he had asked, reasonably enough.

  ‘Two things,’ she said. ‘The dead people at Beath Street. I asked you before, I’m asking again. Charlie Taverner. I’d like what’s left of him back.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Anderson, shaking his head. ‘Second?’ ‘You remember my colleague, Mark Whiteside?’ ‘Coma Cop?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘Yes, him,’ biting her tongue to stop an outburst, How dare you call him that. ‘The
cost of his operation and subsequent treatment.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll be at least five hundred K,’ said Hanlon. ‘That’s very expensive,’ said Anderson.

  Hanlon shrugged. ‘Of course, but who else would do it, who else could do it, and I can do it tonight.’ Anderson looked at her hard, attractive face. The gritty breeze in the car park ruffled her dark corkscrew hair. He was running out of time and resources. He had nothing to lose. If she failed, on her

  * * *

  head be it. The monetary cost was liveable with. Myasnikov wasn’t.

  Anderson had looked up at the skies, at the wheeling air traffic. ‘I’ll guarantee his treatment up to seven fifty K,’ he said. ‘Things always cost more than you expect. For that, I would like Belanov or Dimitri too, and that hitman of theirs, the Chinaman. I don’t want to be walking around knowing Charlie Chan’s going to blow my head off at any minute.’ He looked at her; his eyes pierced her. ‘But you know about cost, don’t you, Hanlon? Anything else, that’s your problem. I’ll send Cunningham over; he’ll sort out the legal bit. You’ll need some kind of independent escrow account to pay the bills. Something not associated with me. Even the dickheads the Met employ might notice if I start writing cheques for them.’

  Hanlon nodded. Anderson was wearing a long, black leather

  coat with jeans and a T-shirt. The wind whipped at his stringy hair. He looked as sinister as he was. It’s funny, though, thought Hanlon, I know I can trust him implicitly. If he says he’ll do something, he will.

  Then Anderson said an odd thing. He looked at Hanlon. ‘You should stop torturing yourself about Coma Cop,’ he said mildly.

  ‘His name is Mark Whiteside. He’s a friend of mine,’ she said angrily.

  ‘Whatever.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘You didn’t shoot him in the head. Stop feeling guilty.’

  ‘How do you know what I’m feeling?’

  Anderson had laughed. ‘I never feel guilty, Hanlon. I’m not wired that way. But, Hanlon, when I see you asking me to help you out with money, money not for you but for your injured colleague, I can recognize guilt.’

  Hanlon said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  * * *

  ‘You can use Danny if you want him,’ said Anderson offhandedly. He opened the door of his Range Rover. ‘Not Morris Jones, he’s too useful to me. Good luck with the Russian hunt. I’ll be lying low until the dust settles. Cunningham can always find me.’

  The door of the Range Rover slammed shut and Anderson drove away.

  * * *

  She turned her attention back to the driving. She glanced at the man beside her. You can use Danny, not Morris Jones. Danny was disposable, then. That was Anderson’s subtext.

  They drove through the dramatic gap in the hills that marked the descent from Buckinghamshire into Oxfordshire. Not far now, thought Hanlon.

  And now I’ve become Anderson’s woman. She had a horrible feeling that the high price he was prepared to pay her would end up leading to more favours done. I’ve sold my soul, she thought bitterly.

  Danny looked up from his reverie as Hanlon, following the instructions on her satnav, turned off the main road on to the track that led down to the Huss farm. Towards the top of the track was a small stone building that stood near to where Joad had blocked Huss’s path the other day. Huss’s car was parked outside and Hanlon pulled in next to it.

  Huss heard the engine noise of Hanlon’s Audi and opened the door of the outhouse. Hanlon parked and she and Danny got out and joined her. The storehouse was large inside, tools and bags of feed for pheasant and various other agricultural products were stacked round the walls. There was a table in the middle of the room under the single, bare light bulb and Huss had spread out an Ordnance Survey map of the area.

  * * *

  She pointed out the layout of the farm. Access was similar to her own property, down a tarmacked private drive. They looked at an image from Google Earth on Huss’s laptop, also open on the table. The fields on either side were large, wide and flat.

  At the end of the fields was the farm itself. It was small. The aerial view showed a barn, some outhouses and the farmhouse itself. Like most farms, everything centred around the farmyard. Farms looked inward, not outward. They were introspective places. Huss pointed at the farmhouse.

  ‘The stockman who works for my dad, Derek, used to work for Old Man Miller who had Tragoes Farm till he died about twenty years ago. He said the house was in a real mess, nothing had been done to it since the Second World War. The electrics were lethal. But he did say that off the kitchen there was an old-style meat store, no windows, to keep flies and insects out, really thick stone walls, big old door. It’s probably there they’ve put Enver. It’d be soundproof as well as escape proof.’ She thought briefly back a few hours. Dimitri had phoned Joad on some pretext, and at some point he had stopped and said, ‘Say hi to the police, Enver.’ Through her tears, tears that she’d held back so Joad wouldn’t see, Huss had heard Enver swear at him, then a gasp of pain as Dimitri had kicked him.

  You’ll pay for that, she said to herself.

  Chantal, too, had told them that it was Dimitri who had tortured Enver. The Huss family don’t forget things like that, she thought. Huss’s family had been in their village for at least six hundred years, almost certainly much, much longer. Huss’s ancestors had fought in the Civil War at Oxford, dying by the side of Colonel John Hampden the Parliamentarian, at Blenheim, and in both world wars. Their bones had littered battlefields before now and, if necessary, would again, thought

  * * *

  Melinda Huss savagely. The Huss clan knew how to fight; the Huss clan knew how to die.

  Hanlon nodded. ‘Access?’ she asked.

  Huss pointed at the track. ‘Down here obviously, but, as you can see, there’s this wood here.’ She pointed at the image. ‘And there’s a path through the woods, quite well used, it’s part of some sort of heritage trail. Anyway, it comes out down here, the other side of the farm. Then it skirts the farm itself and runs more or less parallel with the track, up to the main road.’

  Huss and Danny looked expectantly at Hanlon, the de facto leader. Quickly, Hanlon explained what they would do. It didn’t take long.

  When she was finished, Huss said, ‘I think we should call the police, get backup. I don’t see the point in us doing this alone.’

  Hanlon looked at her. The point was that she was hoping to kill Arkady Belanov, and Myasnikov were he around, and, if not, to find out where they were so she could get at them. She could hardly tell Huss that.

  But it wasn’t going to be straightforward. Simply finding the Butcher could be a problem. Myasnikov would have to be very careful where he slept at night. Anderson was a formidable enemy. He too had contacts in the police as well as his own extensive criminal connections. Then there was Serg Surikov. It wasn’t just Anderson interested in his movements; the FSB were – that meant either the Russian state or Myasnikov’s Russian rivals. And, of course, to a lesser extent, Corrigan.

  It was all too simple to see Myasnikov as some sort of deadly, criminal mastermind, which in a sense he was. But as well as being the hunter, he was himself the hunted. Easy, too, to forget, in the wake of the deaths he had caused and the human misery, that Myasnikov was in Britain because Russia was too

  * * *

  dangerous for him. Bigger and more dangerous predators swam in those cold, faraway seas.

  So finding Myasnikov might be far from easy. But in Myasnikov’s death lay Mark Whiteside’s potential rebirth.

  ‘The point is that the Russians’ man in the force will tip them off, Melinda,’ said Hanlon. ‘And we’ll end up with either them moving him so we’ll never find him, and he’ll be dead, or there will be some sort of shoot-out or a prolonged hostage situation. Then, when – if – they are all nicked, they’ll be out on bail and I would imagine they’ll come looking for you and your lovely family, who have conspired to deprive them of their liberty an
d put them inside where Anderson can probably get to them. Isn’t that right, Danny?’

  Surprised to hear his name, Danny almost jumped.

  ‘Oh, yeah. If they end up on remand they might as well top themselves, save someone the bother of doing it. The Russians are dead men if they get banged up. Anderson will see to that.’ He shrugged. ‘But they’ve got a lot of money, a lot of pull probably. They’ll be able to buy a judge to keep them out, I’d have thought, or good enough lawyers. They can claim their human rights would be infringed, that they won’t be treated fairly inside. I bet someone like Cunningham could get them out. The human rights issue will probably do the trick. Lack of a fair trial, questionably obtained evidence, that kind of thing. Plus they’d have a good chance of getting at the jury.’

  Hanlon looked at Huss levelly. ‘So, who do you trust more to keep Enver alive? Us, or the British justice system?’

  Huss rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not happy about this,’ she said. She stood up and walked over to where the tools were propped against fertilizer sacks, and came back to the table with a bundle wrapped in a plaid blanket in her arms. She put it down on the table and opened it up.

  * * *

  ‘None of us are happy, Huss,’ said Hanlon.

  Huss passed Hanlon the .22 rifle that had been wrapped in the blanket. ‘It’s Derek’s. He uses it for foxes. That’s a night scope on it; sights are set to two fifty metres.’

  Hanlon nodded. She’d have preferred her own gun, still in the boot of her car, but she needed a night scope.

  Next to the rifle was an up-and-under pump-action shotgun. ‘Is that for me?’ asked Danny.

  ‘No, it’s mine,’ said Huss. ‘Can you use it?’ asked Danny.

  Huss shook her head disbelievingly. ‘I live on a farm, Danny, and I’m the third best shot with a twelve bore in South Oxfordshire. That’s official. Have you won many cups for shooting?’