My spirits soared skywards. She was asking me out on a date? My soul sang to the very heavens. A dream was coming true. However, one second later, a loud hissing sound filled my ears as my bubble was burst.
“I’m getting married in a couple of weeks and we’re having a small gathering in a pub near our office to celebrate with a few friends and work colleagues after work one evening. If you can make it, it’d be great to see you there.” She smiled at me.
“Sounds good. Let me know when.” I hid my disappointment. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Name’s Ian Gosling.”
Gosling. I knew that name. “Sergeant Ian Gosling, tall, short-haired, works for Stimpson?”
“Yes, that’s him,” she said pleasantly. “Of course, you met him recently, didn’t you?”
“I did. Always a pleasure meeting Stimpson.” It was actually more of a pleasure catching my fingers in a door.
She gathered her things and left. I followed soon after.
I wrote up an account of my day: the interrogations of several of the key players, finding Bradley dead, the arrests of Delucca and Debbie Frost, and letting Mendoccini slip through my fingers as I was pursuing him. I didn’t blame the two young officers for their diligence. It was just unfortunate they’d happened to choose the wrong time to be diligent and it had cost me a vital few seconds, allowing the person I was pursuing to gain an advantage and slip away. I didn’t mention the man I now believed to be Post Poe had been seen talking to Michael Mendoccini in the City. By me.
Mendoccini had still not been apprehended. He wouldn’t return to the restaurant now because he’d know it would be watched, as would Angela Delucca in case he tried to make contact with her. Her father under arrest and her boyfriend on the run. What must she be feeling like now?
I finished my report and forwarded it on to Smitherman. I poured a coffee and sat at my desk. I thought about Michael Mendoccini and wondered where he was now. I wondered what he’d been thinking as he’d run from the restaurant, knowing it was me in pursuit of him. What had he thought would happen if I caught up with him? Would he have accepted arrest compliantly or put up a fight? If he’d thrown a punch at me, would I have had to hurt him trying to bring him in? Could I have? Suppose he’d been cornered and produced a knife, saying that, if I wanted him, I’d better be ready to defend myself. Could I have done it? I was armed. Would I have shot him?
All I was doing was torturing myself with self-doubt. I didn’t know the answers to anything I was thinking. But I was struck by the notion I wasn’t too upset he’d escaped and it dawned on me that, if Smitherman could read minds, I’d have serious questions to answer. There was still a part of me that thought of Michael Mendoccini as the teenage guy I’d had so much fun with all those years back.
I took a few deep breaths and told myself to get a grip as all this introspection was bringing me nothing other than mental torture. I was about to go off duty and get something to eat when I received a call from DCI Carole Huttley at Bishopsgate station.
“Lois Hemsley’s been picked up. She’s here in the station.” “Oh, yeah? Where was she?”
“Would you believe at home? She was seen going back to her flat by an officer. He knew we were after her, so he called back-up and she was picked up just now. You might like what we found, so I thought you’d want a word with her.”
“I most certainly would.” I wasn’t hungry anyway.
It was now eight forty and I had to drive through the last of the commuter traffic to reach Bishopsgate station, which was convenient for Liverpool Street rail station. Fortunately the police siren helped clear a path.
I asked for DCI Huttley after identifying myself. I was led along a corridor to her office by the duty sergeant.
Carole Huttley and I had worked together briefly when I’d first joined Special Branch and I remembered her fondly. She was a very effective police officer and took no shit from anybody. I vividly recalled one of our first times out together. Some guy making the mistake of thinking, because she was a woman, he could just brush her aside when she was trying to arrest him. She’d grabbed his hand, bent it forwards and, at the same time, kicked his feet away from under him. He’d fallen heavily and she’d dropped on him, bending his arms behind his back and expertly slipping plastic hand restraints on him. I’d watched in awe. Maybe I should have told the guy she was a judo brown belt, but it’d slipped my mind.
After a brief catch-up, she brought me up to speed.
“She was seen going back across the car park to her flat. It was called in by an officer and we turned up shortly afterwards. We found her at her computer trying to delete stuff off a USB drive, and we stopped her. A technician’s trying to fix whatever damage she might have done. But we did recover this.” She passed me a memory stick. “Full of details of various accounts, money transfers, invoices and all that. Should be easy to prove what was going on there. You want to see her?”
Huttley led to me to interview room eight, which was as bleak and uninviting as any other police interview room I’d ever been in. Sitting at the table was a forlorn-looking Lois Hemsley, still wearing the same clothes she’d worn in the flat earlier that morning, a baggy navy blue sweater over a crisp white blouse, but her usually immaculately coiffured hair was a mess, with a few strands hanging across her forehead. Huttley left the room.
I sat and just looked at Lois for a while. I was attempting to unnerve her and, from the subtle shifts in her body language, I was succeeding.
“Am I under arrest?” she asked tentatively.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
She waited a moment. “So, what happens now?”
“Rather depends on you. Confession’s good for the soul, so why don’t you start by telling me what this is all about?” I produced the memory stick.
She took a deep breath and looked down at the table.
“You were caught deleting files on this. That tells me you know exactly what’s contained on this stick. The computer techies are in the process of recovering some of the stuff you thought you’d wiped.”
I wasn’t actually sure if that was even possible, but it had the desired effect on her. She looked even more forlorn. Sometimes a white lie does wonders.
“Look, I’m offering you a chance. Tell me what I wanna know and maybe things’ll go a little easier for you. As it stands, the music’s stopped but you haven’t got a chair, Lois, so you’re the last one standing. What do you think that means?”
I waited for her to reply. She closed her eyes. Her face was devoid of any colour and she looked like she wanted to cry.
“We have the full story from Darren Ritchie and Nigel,” I assured her. “We know what was going on with regard to money laundering and who the money was going to, and I suspect what we’ll get from this here memory stick” – I jutted my chin at it – “will prove everything.”
I paused. She didn’t reply. I waited a few moments longer. She sighed audibly.
“Who killed Ritchie?” I asked.
“Poe,” she said, very softly.
“And Bradley? Was that also Poe?”
“He followed me to the flat after I’d been there a little while. Bradley was about to pack up and run, so Poe hit him with something when he wasn’t looking. Hit him twice. We left just afterwards.”
“Must have upset you, seeing lover boy killed before your eyes.”
She looked at me and said nothing. Her eyes were hard to read.
“Your job was to get him there and wait for Poe, wasn’t it?” I said.
She didn’t reply.
“Why kill those two? I thought they were integral to what was going on. All the laundering couldn’t have happened without those two, surely?”
“It was being wound up. The Italians found Bradley had been short-changing them. Had been for a while.” She sighed. “Roger told me about it at the end of last week. He’d been diverting money into his own account. Someone in one of the offshore banks told the Italians about
it because whatever Bradley’d done had made tracing the money chain easier. That nosey bloody journalist had found evidence of this, so he was taken out.” She made it appear as though this were all so obviously logical.
“Who orchestrated all the killings? Did Poe just decide to kill Bradley and Ritchie or was he following orders?”
“Some Italian working with Poe. He came over with orders to plug the holes in the operation. He knew Nigel’d been talking to that journalist, so . . .”
“So he got Poe to kill him,” I cut in.
“He was here trying to see if the operation was still viable but, if it couldn’t be rescued, he was going to wind the whole thing up. Bradley’d made a couple of major errors which were causing concern and the thing was about to fall apart. So this guy gave Poe the targets” – she shrugged her shoulders – “and Poe did the rest. He’s pretty good at killing, in case you didn’t know.”
“Which Italian guy was this?” I immediately felt a burning sensation in my solar plexus, like I’d been hit by a sucker punch.
“I think he’s called Michael but I don’t know the surname.”
I described Michael Mendoccini to her.
“Sounds like him, yeah,” she agreed.
Mendoccini had arrived in London three days ago and Ritchie and Bradley had both died within the last twenty-four hours. As Red Heaven’s money man he’d have known about the money trail and would have been in a position to do something about protecting it. I’d seen Poe and Mendoccini together earlier today as well. Poletti had asked Mendoccini to come back to London and clean up, was my guess. Proving it would be problematic, however.
“Funny. Even with the skimming, we might just have got away with it if bloody Nigel hadn’t seen fit to take it upon himself to go after Bradley.” She sounded bitter.
“You don’t sound too upset your husband’s dead.”
“I’m not, fuck him.” She sounded vitriolic. The words sounded ugly coming from her mouth.
Nigel Hemsley had done the right thing and the pressure he’d brought upon himself had led him to take his own life. I was certain she was complicit in his suicide, though I’d never be able to prove it.
“So, where’s Poe now?” He was definitely a murder suspect now.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “After we left my flat . . .”
“That was Poe whacked me from behind,” I said.
“Yeah. As I was saying, when we left my flat, we were supposed to be leaving the country, but I remembered the memory stick, so I came back for it. I thought, if I could wipe it clean, any evidence against me would be circumstantial because both guys were dead. Poe took off without me, and it looks like I’m fresh out of luck, doesn’t it?”
“Where would he be likely to go?”
“Don’t know, but he’s gone. The bastard’s a pig. Do you know he wanted to screw me in Bradley’s flat right after he’d killed him? Said it turned him on, having sex in front of one of his victims.” She sounded righteously indignant.
“He obviously didn’t know how seriously you take the marriage vows.”
It took her a second to catch my sarcasm. Her expression told me she didn’t appreciate it.
“What about this Italian guy? Where’s he?” I continued. “I don’t know. Roger did tell me, though, this Italian guy was going to meet up with a police officer while he was here because he thought he might be able to buy him off, bribe him or whatever. Evidently he knew this police guy from way back, said they were old friends and thought he could get him to back off, look the other way. But Bradley and Ritchie both being killed, doesn’t look like he succeeded.”
Mendoccini had thought I was susceptible to being bribed? Was this why he wanted to meet up with me the other evening? Had this been on his mind since we’d reconnected in the Chinese restaurant? Had he returned to England just to see if I could be put on Red Heaven’s payroll? I felt a temporary shudder but continued.
“Did he name this police officer?” I tensed up.
“No.” Phew.
“How did Bradley get involved in laundering money for Red Heaven? What would be in it for someone like him?”
“Money, mainly. He told me he’d made quite a little pot of money helping them out. All hidden away offshore and out of the taxman’s grasp. At some point he and I were going to hide and live off this money somewhere in the Caribbean.”
“And you bought into that. That’s why you helped him. I did some checking. You’re not in Human Resources, you’re a financial manager. That’s why you were trying to wipe this memory stick clean, because your fingerprints were all over the accounts in there. You’re as much a part of this as he is. Or was. You helped Poe kill him, didn’t you? You set him up. That’s conspiracy to murder. Bradley set up Ritchie for Poe to kill him. Quite the virtuous little circle, isn’t it? I’m old enough to remember when there was honour amongst thieves.”
“Honour,” she said softly, more to herself than to me.
“So it was just for money. Nothing ideological.”
“He hated his father as well. He did it also because he thought it would embarrass his father politically if he knew what he was doing.”
“Did his father know?”
“He never said.”
There was nothing more to be gained from talking to Lois Hemsley. She’d confirmed her role in the laundering scheme and she was bound for prison, though, as Smitherman had said, any trial would be for being a party to murder, not for participating in acts likely to facilitate terrorism. Huttley came back and took her away. She, Delucca and the delightful Ms Frost were all now in custody awaiting arraignment. Quite the day.
In the office it was the end of a damn long day. Smitherman was congratulating me on the various arrests made and filling me in on proceedings. I told him about Lois Hemsley but I omitted her reference to Mendoccini thinking about trying to buy me off. If word of this ever reached Stimpson, he’d claim I’d deliberately let him go when chasing him through Soho.
“Lawbury’s going over what’s on that memory stick. He knows finance and he’s working with the bank’s senior management to keep as much of this under wraps as possible. He seems to think they got away with it because two sets of accounts were submitted. The auditor signed off one set, which was the one going into the records. The other was the one those involved elsewhere got to see. This way the bank’s senior management could deflect any criticism about what was happening under their noses. Took some organising, which was Lois Hemsley’s function.”
“I’d have preferred it if they’d been ideologically motivated. Just doing all this for money seems so . . .” I shrugged. “I don’t know, just seems wrong, helping terrorists for money.”
“Money or a cause, taking innocent life for any reason is wrong and we’ve stopped a terrorist group getting its hands on more funds to help them do it. That’s a result, Robert.”
I agreed it was.
“But what might not be a result is Debbie Frost walking.” “What?” I was shocked by this.
“I’ve heard from my friend Warren. Her benefactor, Christian Perkins, has interceded and he’s apparently claiming she was working undercover attempting to stop all this.”
Kenny Warren was a senior MI5 officer who occasionally passed on to Smitherman any interesting pieces of information useful to us in Special Branch.
“That’s bullshit,” I exclaimed. Smitherman looked aghast at my vehemence. “I’m sorry, sir, but it is. I’ve got Darren Ritchie on tape admitting his complicity and also her statements to me earlier when I questioned her. She egged him on to help get herself on the preferred candidates list. She told me this herself.”
“Perkins is going to claim she just told you what you wanted to hear, because she knew what Bradley was doing and she was trying to protect Bradley’s father. Ritchie, of course, isn’t around now, so he can’t be cross-examined about his comments. Which means . . .” His words tailed off. I knew what he meant.
“She was obs
tructing justice, then.”
“Not if she was acting in the national interest, which is what he’s claiming she was doing.” He looked almost apologetic saying this. “Perkins is MI5’s man, has helped them out considerably in the past, and for him to make this claim means they’ll take it seriously. We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? As I told you, no details of money laundering will ever be made public so it’s hard to see what she can be charged with, especially since Ritchie and Bradley are both dead.”
I sighed and looked out the window at the dark night sky. Somehow the colour of the sky summed up how I felt at that moment.
“She’s made from fucking Teflon, that woman.” I was disappointed she was in with a chance of evading liability for something yet again.
“Delucca and Lois Hemsley are both going down, the laundering has been stopped and Red Heaven’s losing a lot of money. We also know the identity of the bomber of the synagogue and have discovered Kader was deeply involved. Lois Hemsley’s admitted to Poe killing Ritchie and Bradley, so we know who to look for and we’ll get him. As I said, we got a result. Substantive justice was done. All things considered, it’s probably as good as we could have expected.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” I was unconvinced.
“Just a pity we lost Mendoccini. But at least you flushed him out and he’s on the run. Can’t go back to his girlfriend’s place now. Place was searched earlier but they found no passport or anything incriminating. They’re on the lookout for him as well, so we’ve put a big hole in one of their operations.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Nigel Hemsley was your original source for all this, wasn’t he?”
It was actually Richard Clements, but I wasn’t telling Smitherman that. “Yeah. We were undergrads at King’s together.”
“I wonder if he knew my son-in-law,” Smitherman mused.
T W E LV E
Saturday evening, ten days later
Mendoccini Page 23