Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  Edie had taken her seat with Rabia Demir. A man from the bar approached them. It was almost as if he was asking for a dance. Edie shook her head and indicated Rabia, who appeared to be struggling to stay awake.

  I again forced myself to look at Madam Theresa.

  ‘What does a more permanent arrangement mean?’ I said.

  ‘We can discuss the details later. For the time being, let’s just say that none of our girls have to be home by a certain time.’ Her eyes narrowed with something like hunger and she leaned close enough for me to smell the Chanel. ‘Can you imagine the possibilities, Jack?’

  ‘I think you’re implying that none of them are going to be missed,’ I laughed, leaning back. ‘Because they’re all in this country illegally.’

  ‘Sound good?’

  ‘Just what I’m looking for.’

  Another man walked across the room and approached Edie. She again shook her head and indicated Rabia Demir.

  I saw now that a number of the women had the same long drink in their hand. One of them sniffed it delicately, as if aware that she was possibly holding a cocktail of fruit juice and Rohypnol. The women all looked scared. They all looked as if they were in deeper than they ever planned to be.

  A door at the far end of the corridor opened and a man came out muttering angrily in Russian. It was the first raised voice that I had heard in the penthouse.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Madam Theresa said, and went over to attend to the man.

  I looked at Edie, but she was totally focused on Rabia Demir. As Madam Theresa placated the Russian, a young Chinese woman in an elaborate white wedding dress came slowly out of the room he had just left. She leaned against the bar, ignored by everyone, as Madam Theresa called across a hard-faced blonde in a red dress. As I watched her deftly handle this minor crisis I glimpsed the experience of more than half a century in the whoring industry.

  Madam Theresa came back to join me, only slightly flustered.

  ‘No more fruit juice for Precious,’ she told the waiter, indicating the Chinese girl.

  ‘You use bar names,’ I said, and she smiled. I looked at her face, thinking of the men she had been linked with. JFK and Reggie Kray and Errol Flynn. Everybody’s dead, I thought, everybody except her, and I wondered which one of them was the father of her child. I nodded at the Chinese girl as she attempted to climb on to a barstool.

  ‘Her name’s not Precious,’ I said. ‘Not outside of the Hopewell Centre. But why do you use bar names if nobody knows they’re here?’

  ‘Convention. Call me old-fashioned.’ I felt she was beginning to lose patience with me. As if I was asking too many questions. I wanted to get my phone back and bring down all hell on this old crone. ‘Have you made your choice yet, Mr Dempsey?’

  ‘I like her,’ I said. ‘Precious.’

  ‘She’s a new arrival. I’m not sure we’re going to keep her on, to be honest. Why don’t you try someone else?’

  ‘I like her,’ I said.

  She narrowed her eyes and gave me that blazing white smile.

  ‘Of course you do.’

  Madam Theresa clapped her hands and it sounded as vicious as a slap.

  The Chinese woman came over, moving as if she was in a dream, the wedding dress trailing behind her. Madam Theresa took her arm, and I saw the girl flinch with pain as the old woman shook her like a dog with a dying rat.

  ‘If you upset anyone else tonight I am going to be very cross with you, Precious,’ she said, turning to me as if we had exhausted all of our small talk. She could have been a market trader losing patience with a dozy customer. ‘Do you want a room or the bar fine?’ she said sharply.

  ‘Room. Let’s see how we get on.’

  We stood up just as a door opened down the corridor.

  Bianca from the Champagne Room walked out with two Korean businessmen. The men went to the bar, laughing among themselves, while Bianca stood there smiling at me.

  I felt my stomach fall away as she came over. I had stopped breathing.

  ‘Max!’ she said.

  I stared at Bianca while Madam Theresa stared at me.

  ‘I think you’re mistaking Mr Dempsey for someone else,’ she said, not taking her eyes off me. ‘Don’t stand around with your pretty mouth open, dear.’ She clapped her hands again, an edict that must be immediately obeyed. ‘Your friends are waiting.’

  Bianca joined the two Koreans at the bar, glancing over her shoulder at me, smiling uncertainly. Precious was talking to herself in Chinese.

  ‘Room four,’ Madam Theresa told the waiter.

  ‘Follow me, sir.’

  I took Precious’s hand. She stared at me as if noticing I was there for the first time. Her long slim body leaned into me as we followed the waiter to the room. There was a splash of red wine on the wedding dress.

  ‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘I want to go home.’

  The waiter opened the door and Precious lurched inside.

  I followed her and somebody hit me from behind with a hammer. It cracked across the back of my neck, hard enough to buckle my legs with shock and pain but not accurate enough to put my lights out.

  So they hit me again.

  The hammer struck the back of my skull this time and my vision immediately exploded into a billion tiny lights. I was suddenly down on my knees without having any idea of how I got there, and the sickness that comes with excruciating pain was rising up inside me. When my vision cleared, I saw that I was in a room with a large shallow bath and a single bed. The bath was empty. Precious was on the bed, the wedding dress hiked up over her thighs.

  And Troy was standing above me – Troy of Imagine, who I had last spoken to in the Grande-Synthe camp and who I had last seen stomping on the face of the young uniformed policeman during the riot outside West End Central.

  His tattooed face split with a delighted grin.

  ‘Good evening, Constable,’ he said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

  A CCTV camera fluttered its black-and-white images high on the wall behind him. I could see the Mercedes and the man with the iPad. I did not even need Bianca to betray me. They had seen me coming all the way.

  ‘Get his clothes off and hand me that hammer,’ Troy said.

  30

  The dreadlocked goon that I recalled from the Grande-Synthe camp tore off my clothes and rolled me into the shallow bath where I settled on my back, the pain in my skull radiating out through every limb in my body.

  Without water, and with Troy’s grotesquely blackened face hovering above me, moving in and out of my blurred vision, the bath felt like a shallow grave.

  Precious was moaning a request.

  ‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘I want to go home now.’

  Troy gestured at her, the hammer already in his hand.

  ‘Shut that bitch up while I do the pig,’ he said.

  The goon moved towards Precious on the bed and after that she was silent. I closed my eyes and fought down the bile in my throat. When I opened my eyes, Troy was kneeling above me, perched on the edge of the shallow tub. Behind him, high on the wall, the CCTV revealed dark figures pouring into the lift to the penthouse.

  I wondered if they would reach us in time or if this was the night that I died. I thought of Scout, and I thought of Edie. If Troy and the goon saw me coming, did they also know that Edie was here? No, I thought. So that was one good thing to cling to.

  ‘How’s the revolution going, you ugly freak?’ I asked.

  ‘You dumb bastard,’ Troy told me. ‘You have no idea what you’re messing with, do you?’

  He lightly tapped the head of the hammer against the bridge of my nose.

  Then Madam Theresa was in the doorway, peering through reading glasses at something in her hand.

  ‘DC Max Wolfe, West End Central,’ she read from the card I had given Bianca. Then she threw it at Troy. ‘He’s a police officer!’

  ‘Yes, you old witch,’ Troy said, nodding towards the CCTV. ‘We clocked him the moment he got out of t
hat Merc. We were on to him when your flunkies were still holding the door for him and kissing his arse.’

  ‘The boss is not going to like it!’ Madam Theresa shouted, her accent growing less Boulevard du Montparnasse and more Bolton with every second.

  ‘I’m dealing with it!’ Troy screamed back at her.

  I chanced a look up at the black-and-white CCTV screen. The Mercedes was still parked by the penthouse lift but there were no signs of life.

  I closed my eyes again. They had to be on their way up.

  Troy raised his hammer.

  ‘Not in here, you abomination!’ Madam Theresa said.

  Troy sighed.

  ‘Where would you like me to do it, you mad old bat?’ He waved the hammer at the bath. ‘I do him in here. We chop him up. Hands off, head off, teeth out. Take him out with the rubbish. Get a few of your tarts to give this tub a good scrub and it’s business as usual.’

  She thought about it, clearly a bit happier.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Mind my tiles with that hammer.’

  ‘So how does it work?’ I said, wincing from the pain in the back of my skull. ‘You find these women in the camps? Or does it start much earlier? Where does it begin? Belgrade or long before that?’

  I thought of Rabia Demir, the prettiest girl in the village.

  ‘Tell me how it works, you ugly bastard,’ I said, reaching up and lunging at his throat, wanting to tear it out.

  He easily swatted my hands away.

  ‘No more words,’ he said.

  He lifted the hammer high above his head.

  Then he brought the hammer down.

  I rolled on my side and the hammer smashed into the tiles of the tub, splintering them with a metallic crack. I lashed out with the heel of my foot, connecting with nothing, and he adjusted his stance, bringing the hammer down again.

  Pressed up hard against the side of the tub, there was nowhere left to roll. So I covered my head with my arms and brought my knees up to my chest as the hammer came down again, banging hard against my left elbow, sending an electric shock through my arm, and coming down again, smashing the tiles by my right ear.

  There was a fleck of white froth at the corner of Troy’s mouth.

  The dreadlocked goon was shouting his name.

  Troy had missed something.

  He had missed the sound of the front door being kicked down.

  But now we heard them out there. It was very loud and just the other side of the door. Women were screaming and men were shouting, there were cries of fury and pain, the unmistakable sounds of breaking glass and breaking bones.

  The door to the room opened and a heavy-set Chinese man in his forties suddenly stood there. He hit the dreadlocked goon across the face with his forearm and the goon went down with his lights out before he hit the ground.

  Another Chinese man entered the room, this one twenty years younger, tall and lean, and he bent over the girl on the bed, talking to her in Cantonese, the tongue of Chinatown.

  Then Keith Li was there, moving slowly into the room as if he had all the time in the world, taking it all in – the young woman in a wedding dress on the bed, the unconscious goon, Troy with his hammer and me cowering naked in the bath, spitting fragments of smashed tiles out of my mouth.

  There was a moment when everything seemed to stop, and Troy and I stared at Keith Li, neither of us understanding what he was doing here.

  ‘Did Edie call you in?’ I said.

  ‘Nobody calls me in,’ he said.

  The head of the Wo Shing Wo moved as casually as if he was taking a stroll down Gerrard Street on Spring Festival, so relaxed that at first I did not notice the machete he held by his side.

  He looked more carefully at the young woman on the bed and I saw his body stiffen with anger at the bruising around one eye and the splatter of blood across the shoulder of the wedding dress.

  He barked an order in Cantonese.

  The two Chinese men seized Troy’s arms, and I heard the hammer clatter between my feet.

  Keith Li murmured some brief instructions. The younger Chinese man shoved Troy’s left arm halfway up his back while the older one slammed down Troy’s right arm as if it was a roast duck going on the chopping block.

  Troy’s fingers flexed and tensed by my face.

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ he said.

  Keith Li lifted his machete and there was a moment of total stillness in the room as he brought it down on Troy’s arm at its thinnest point, removing the hand and perhaps three inches of wrist from the arm where the radial artery rises close to the surface.

  It is exactly where you take a pulse, looking for signs of life, and now a bright arterial spurt of blood announced the end of a life, and Troy’s scream seemed more of shock than pain.

  Then I was scrambling away from the severed hand that had fallen inside the tub, unable to breathe, so much blood still flowing, looking at Troy’s body twitching on the floor with his final scream still ringing in my ears. Keith Li had the girl in the wedding dress in his arms. The other Chinese men were already leaving, the younger one dragging the dreadlocked goon by his feet, still groaning, and the older one hefting Troy’s lifeless body and throwing it across one of his shoulders.

  Keith Li followed them, whispering something to the girl in the wedding dress, until my voice called him back.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said, desperately pulling on my clothes. ‘There are other people who need your help.’

  Keith Li shook his head. He didn’t even turn to look at me.

  ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘We look after our own.’ A pause. ‘Now perhaps you will believe me.’

  ‘Keith, please – there’s a woman who needs help out there.’

  But he was gone.

  I was expecting to find a war zone in the drawing room. But beyond the front door hanging from its hinges and a frosting of broken glass over the thick carpet, the room was untouched apart from a chair that appeared to have been broken over someone’s head.

  But everyone was gone.

  I searched the bedrooms.

  They were all exactly like the room I had left, these bleak little sex cells with a large shallow bathtub and a single bed. Rooms to seal the deal. In the room at the very end of the corridor I found Edie Wren bending over Rabia Demir. She was not moving.

  ‘I just called it in on the landline,’ Edie said. ‘But I think it’s already too late.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘The women in here are on a diet of Rohypnol,’ Edie said. ‘But they’re been experimenting with Rabia. She’s on something more powerful than Roofies.’

  ‘Fentanyl,’ I said.

  Edie nodded.

  ‘And it’s killing her, Max.’

  Fentanyl is one hundred times more powerful than pure, pharmacy-grade heroin. Fifty times more powerful than morphine. It is a painkiller so powerful that it can kill you without you caring very much. It is often called the most powerful drug in the world.

  ‘Where are our people?’ I said.

  ‘Someone jammed the penthouse lift. They’re using the stairs.’

  ‘Fifty floors? The stairs are not going to be fast enough.’

  ‘I’m going to try to get the lift working. Stay with her, Max.’

  Edie left the room and I sat on the bed with Rabia Demir. I took her hand and she half-opened her eyes. They were the darkest eyes I had ever seen. In the distance I could hear sirens but they seemed to be coming from another world.

  She tried to speak and I took both her hands in mine.

  ‘No need to talk,’ I said.

  But she wanted to talk. There were things she wanted to say. And even in the middle of the Fentanyl fog that was killing her, she was aware that there was not much time.

  ‘I am not a bad woman.’

  ‘I know that, Rabia.’

  Her mouth moved.

  ‘You know my name. Not the name they gave me here. My real name.’

  ‘Because I looked fo
r you. I have been looking for you for a long time.’ I felt my eyes flood with useless tears. ‘I’m sorry I did not find you sooner.’

  ‘I never wanted this life.’

  ‘I know.’ I could hear Edie shouting on the telephone in the main room. Then everything was silence. Even the sirens seemed to have given up.

  ‘What did you want, Rabia?’ I said. ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘I am a nurse,’ she said proudly, and then she closed her eyes, and I held her hands long after she had gone.

  31

  This was the ritual.

  The day after we shut down the penthouse, Edie Wren and I drove to a small terraced house in Tottenham where the mother and the fiancée of our colleague TDC Billy Greene were waiting for us.

  Mrs Greene and Siobhan had prepared tea and lemon drizzle cake for our arrival. It sat untouched on a coffee table between us as Edie began to talk. The ritual demanded that Edie speak to the bereaved first because she had known the deceased the longest.

  ‘I knew Billy from Hendon,’ Edie said, the name our people always use for the Peel Centre, the training centre of the Metropolitan Police College. ‘You meet people at Hendon who are not sure if this life is for them. But not Billy. Being a policeman was all he had ever wanted.’

  Her eyes drifted from the mother and fiancée to the family photographs on the mantelpiece, settling on the grinning, gawky figure of PC Billy Greene with his arm around his mother on the day he graduated from Hendon.

  ‘Then we were in uniform at New Scotland Yard,’ she said. ‘And then he followed me to Homicide and Serious Crime Command at West End Central, where we both trained to be detectives.’

  Edie paused, lost for words, aware that all this was sounding more like a CV than a eulogy. She wrung her hands, and then stopped and looked at me.

  I picked it up.

  ‘Billy was still in uniform when I met him,’ I said. ‘And there were people who didn’t think he would make it because he was kind and decent. But these were the things that made him a great policeman. He was the bravest young man I ever met. Not because he was never afraid but because he always did the right thing, no matter how scared he was. Every day of his working life, he brushed up against the worst of people – cruel, violent men with all their lies and greed. And he saw people who were hurt and scared, innocent people, good people. In most of us, that leaves a hardness, but not Billy. He was not lessened by it as most of us are. He remained himself.’ I shook my head at Mrs Greene and Siobhan. ‘And I don’t know what else to tell you.’