The Fire Man

by Iain Adams

  He was in no doubt that, at last, his theory, nay, certainty was being taken seriously and, more than that, taken seriously by a very impressive woman. She really was something. He was, he concluded, in danger of becoming obsessed with Tina Forsyth. What excited him above all was that he could not help but believe that she, for some unaccountable reason, was equally attracted to him. Why? He owned a mirror. He knew that he was no Brad Pitt, whereas Tina Forsyth was stunning. Could it be a sort of Beauty and the Beast thing?

  The only blot on his horizon at the moment was that nothing much could happen until their next meeting.

  Shame, he thought, things could get seriously interesting if he was right and that factory in Whitechapel went up in smoke sooner rather than later. Still, right now, in his present state of elation, he realised that his interest in Tina was taking on a greater importance than his pre-occupation with Kanelos and Co. It was that serious.

  He left the cemetery and crossed the road. Almost opposite the cemetery gates was a small side street, upon which, to his certain knowledge, there was an unnamed and decidedly anarchic bar. He hadn’t been there for years and he felt like yet another drink. To his disappointment, it turned out that the bar with no name had disappeared and had been replaced by an ordinary-looking establishment that held not the slightest appeal. He decided he might as well go home.

  * * *

  The door gave nothing away. Same old boring pine laminate, same old brass number. The key slipped into the latch easily enough. He turned it and opened the door – then his world turned briefly upside down.

  Two framed contemporary prints, which had enlivened the small hallway, lay smashed on the floor and the broken glass crunched beneath his shoes. A small Japanese hall table was upside down with two legs snapped off. Without even entering the open-plan kitchen/living room, he could see clearly that it had been trashed. Coffee, sugar and flour had been liberally scattered across the floors and upholstered furniture. The plasma-screened TV lay face down on the carpet where it had been toppled. His computer screen was cracked where it had been struck violently, and the processor appeared to have had its hard drive removed. The filing cabinet next to it had clearly been rifled. It was a scene of controlled devastation.

  He held his breath as he opened the bedroom door. Not quite as bad, thank God. There were clothes and bedding scattered everywhere, but, apart from the pictures that had also been smashed, and the bedside lights that had been hurled against the walls, it was okay. He slumped onto the bed.

  He was more than shaken. His heart was palpitating, his breathing was erratic and his stomach was churning. For a moment or two he felt as if he would pass out, but slowly he gathered his wits. For a few minutes he lay on the bed, before wearily getting to his feet and crunching through the debris back to the kitchen.

  He poured himself a scotch, thankful that the bottle had remained intact. While he sipped the drink, he prowled through the rooms, but this time with a colder, clearer mind.

  Unless the thieves were deranged, this wasn’t a theft. There was no obvious sign of anything missing for a start – apart, strangely, from a few bits and pieces from the bathroom, including his overnight wash bag that contained his toothbrush and electric razor. It was virtually the only thing that appeared to be missing. Weird; it wasn’t even as if the place had been thoroughly searched, although it was conspicuous that the computer hard drive was missing. No, it looked like there had been a search for information with a soupçon of gratuitous vandalism thrown in.

  As he returned to the kitchen for a top-up, he saw it. A single jarring note; a foreign object. Indeed, propped up next to the kettle on the kitchen worktop was a neatly folded newspaper. He picked it up and immediately saw that it was neither a local free paper nor a national rag… The Liverpool Echo. It wasn’t a paper that he had seen for years.

  He knew instinctively it was a simple message. They knew he had been prowling around the Malinka site. They had guessed he was on to them, but how the hell had they discovered that?

  Good old friendly blabbermouth Sammy Shah, that’s how! But how had they known where to find him? That was the real concern. He thought about it; he hadn’t given Shah a visiting card, he wasn’t that stupid. He had used a rented car, so how had they traced him? His mind raced before he finally concluded that they had probably got to him via the hire car records. Shah must have taken his number, the sly so-and-so.

  McRae had no immediate idea what to do. Instinctively, he thought of calling Tina Forsyth, before quickly dismissing the idea. It could wait. If they had wanted to hurt him, it would have been easy to do so. He didn’t want to look like a pansy in Tina’s eyes either. Anyway, the damage wasn’t that bad; it looked worse than it was. No, he told himself, they were just letting him know that they knew all about him and his detective work. What the fuck did they want?

  Presumably, of course, for him to stop sniffing around. Well, that was okay, he had done. Tina had agreed to escalate matters, but until that happened, really, he was out of it. With any luck, the police would nab them before they had a chance to do anything else. The thought was consoling; he felt his state of anxiety begin to ebb.

  Filled with a new energy, he began to sort out the mess. He swept up the broken glass, vacuumed everything that didn’t move and took the broken remains of the hall table and picture frames to the rubbish collection area in the basement.

  For a second or two, as he entered the empty basement with an armful of debris for the second time, he felt a return of his nerves as he fell to wondering whether the flat was under surveillance. Somebody must be checking his movements, surely?

  Slowly his heart rate returned to normal and with the calm came a quiet anger. He realised for the first time that he wasn’t scared of these people. He was determined to defeat them. He smiled to himself as he calculated how little they knew. He was, he concluded, light years ahead of them. They obviously thought he was just some nosy insurance guy with an obsession. They had sorted him out once and, no doubt, they would think that they could do it again.

  Doubts flooded back, before logic pushed out the fear. He was in the driving seat. The gang had shocked him, even momentarily scared him rigid, but surely he still held more cards?

  He hoped and prayed that the gang had no inkling of his connection with Tina. He couldn’t see how they possibly could have, unless he had been followed? Either way, that was a secret that must remain concealed until the right time.

  * * *

  After tidying up as best he could, McRae had decided to treat himself, not for the first time that week, to a pizza – the contents of his fridge had been woefully uninspiring.

  The Pizza Express on Curtain Road was located in a warehouse conversion and occupied two floors. He chose a table by the window on the upper floor and made his usual selection, a Quattro Stagione with a side salad – the salad being strictly for appearance’s sake – accompanied by a half carafe of Barolo. Where pizza was concerned, McRae was a man of habit.

  Thirty minutes later, having finished the pizza and drained the last of his wine, McRae requested his bill. Purely instinctively, he patted his inside pocket to check he had remembered his wallet – he had made that embarrassing mistake too many times in the past. Comfortingly, the wallet was indeed where it should have been. However, alongside it, he also felt an unfamiliar slim paper parcel.

  As the waiter placed the small steel dish bearing the bill on the table, he pulled out the envelope, slid his index finger beneath the flap and opened it. A small sheaf of typewritten pages was inside.

  Suzanne had searched, methodically so far as he could see, all the suggested social media sites, including many he had never heard of, but to no avail. Well, to no avail so far as Kanelos himself was concerned, but, amazingly, Suzanne had found a Facebook page devoted to his former wife Geraldine Faulkner. Suzanne had even printed off a couple of pictures of the woman – with her kids, on a beach, having a meal, but, despite what appeared to be a pretty hectic socia
l life for the divorcee, there was not a single reference to her former husband. This was no surprise; it was a pity, but, as he had guessed, Kanelos and his mates were hardly the Facebook type.

  But Suzanne clearly hadn’t stopped there. She had had the intelligence and imagination to use what little information McRae had been able to provide to startlingly good effect.

  Because the only individual he had any factual information on was Alex Kanelos, she had concentrated on him. Somehow, God only knew how, she had traced his new address and even found a list of the members of his gaming club. It contained several Greek sounding names and even a single O’Connell, but no matches with the Hellenic men. Remarkably, she had even been able to turn up a complete roll-call for Alex’s year at Westminster School. He couldn’t help but notice that two well-known current politicians had been listed amongst his contemporaries.

  McRae shook his head silently in admiration for the job she had done; she really was repaying his faith.

  Turning the second page of her report, he saw that she had failed in one regard: she had been unable, as had Tranquil, to find any record of Kanelos’s qualification as an accountant. He was, he admitted to himself, slightly disappointed at that, because of all the areas he would have expected that detail to be the easiest to confirm. It didn’t matter, though, because better was to follow – much better.

  She had opened with a ‘teaser’ but left the best till last, the classic sign of a talented report writer, he smiled to himself.

  In the process of checking out Kanelos’s time at Trinity College, she had turned up some fascinating details. Yes, Kanelos had dropped out of his Politics and Economics course before graduating. But, what thrilled him to the core was the fact that a certain Michael O’Connell had qualified in the same discipline. As Suzanne had sensibly caveated in her asterisked side note, there was no guarantee that this was the same O’Connell, but… Finally, the jewel in the crown, so far as McRae was concerned, was that a certain Derek Ewart Smythson had graduated from University College Dublin with an MA in Architecture only one year later.

  The three partners in crime had all been students in Dublin at the same time, with two of them having actually studied the same subject at the same college. Of course, the information was not definitive, but it was good enough for McRae. So far as he was concerned, the circle was being completed.

  Suddenly, he realised he had done nothing about the bill. He extracted a credit card and dropped it onto the plate. While he waited for the waiter to spot that he had emerged from his reverie, he pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket.

  She answered almost immediately. ‘You’re my heroine, Suzanne!’

  He could almost hear her blush with pleasure as she replied with an attempt at nonchalance, ‘Oh, it was nothing, Drew, honestly. Just needed a bit of digging.’

  ‘Digging! I couldn’t have dug up all that with a JCB! Seriously, you have done a fantastic piece of work. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I just wanted you to know what a cracking job you’ve done.’

  ‘Thanks, Drew, but you really aren’t disturbing me at all. I’m just having a couple of beers with John.’

  Mmm, thought McRae, I thought those two were getting a bit close, but he managed to smother his surprise as he said, ‘Oh good. Well, I tell you what, save the receipt for the drinks and put it on your expenses because you’ve both done really well. See you tomorrow.’

  He ended the call, paid the bill and emerged into the evening street whistling. For some, no doubt predictable, reason, he realised he was whistling Molly Malone.

  34

  Henley-on-Thames, August 2011

  During the days that followed, Tina Forsyth was busy. Firstly with her Bramshill course and then with her daily routine; so much so that she could devote little time to McRae’s conspiracy theories. Even so, they were never far from her mind. She had a dilemma. She was attracted to McRae – an attraction that she was experienced enough to recognise was real – but she was not a love-struck teenager. She was a cool (most would have said “cold”) and tough woman, who was only just the right side of forty.

  Women like Tina had massive opportunities in the police these days. The “glass ceiling” had been shattered over the past decade and, if she wanted it badly enough, there would be some great openings in the Met in a year or two. It was necessary to be a politician and Tina was as cute as the best of them.

  In truth, she knew should just stay out of the business completely. The more she thought about it, the more obviously the case was one for SOCA – the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. SOCA was the nearest thing the UK had to the FBI.

  The great benefit, from Tina’s perspective, was that referral to SOCA would sidestep the embarrassment of speaking with Ray Anderson. The question, however, was whether she should report the matter to SOCA directly or get McRae some form of introduction. Did she know anybody who she could contact to set up a meeting that kept her completely out of the picture? No one immediately came to mind, but she decided to make some internal enquiries.

  Technically, SOCA was a completely separate entity from the various regional police forces, with its own management and agents, but police officers were seconded to SOCA investigations. From time to time, some of them even made permanent transfers. Somebody she knew must have switched at some point, but whom? She determined that she would carefully bring up the agency in casual discussions with her colleagues and hope that some useful titbit would fall her way.

  The other, more distant, possibility was to involve the City of London Fraud Squad, which tended to have responsibility for most conventional fraud crimes faced by regional police forces. From Tina’s point of view this was a little too close to home, but she didn’t automatically rule out the possibility. Again, she concluded, she would need to find a discreet route to follow.

  In the meantime, she was taking every opportunity to interrogate the National Police computer, as well as the wittily acronymed ‘“Holmes” – the Home Office Major Enquiry System – for anything remotely relevant to the names that McRae had provided. Contrary to general opinion, it is not easy for even senior police officers to “dig up dirt” on suspects without providing the system with proper justification. The Data Protection Act and numerous other pieces of Human Rights legislation had seen to that.

  There was virtually no interesting information. Nothing that indicated that any of the names McRae had provided were the subjects of enquiries by her colleagues. In short, it was a big fat zero. There was, so far as she could find, nothing known of Alex Kanelos apart from a few traffic offences. The name Smythson had produced a number of probably irrelevant possibilities, dependent on the date of birth of the individual concerned, but in the absence of this vital piece of information she could go no further. As for Michael O’Connell, well, the sad fact was that there were simply too many O’Connells to count.

  If McRae expected some magic wand to be waved, he was going to be seriously disappointed. With the exception of Kanelos, he had provided no relevant information to work with.

  Since their meeting, there had been no further contact and Tina was not about to use her work computer to communicate with McRae. But when she got home one muggy evening, she sat down at her laptop and pulled out the visiting card he had left with her. On the reverse, he had jotted down his private email address.

  With a glass of Sauvignon at her elbow, where it was busy forming an annoying circular stain on the polished wood of her desk, she dropped him a brief message as she had promised. She spelled out to him, almost brutally and in very formal, neutral language, that the matter would require delicate handling and that the information he had provided was a little too unspecific to be useful.

  Acutely conscious he would be confused, not to mention alarmed, by her carefully chosen but, no doubt to his eyes, provocative words, she finally concluded: “If you would like to discuss the matter further, kindly call me when convenient. Looking forward to it. Regards, Tina.”

  As she p
ressed the send key she smiled to herself. She was certain he would call her in double quick time. She was looking forward to hearing his voice.

  35

  London, August 2011

  He adjusted the cuffs of his signature pink shirt, turned his head slightly, raised his chin and examined his profile with approval. In the dingy surroundings of the men’s room on the ground floor of Le Copa, Alex Kanelos’s pristine appearance was a distinct anachronism. The filthy wash basin, the greying roller towel and a floor that was littered with discarded paper served only to exaggerate the clinical perfection of his appearance.

  His concern was not to impress his colleagues, who waited impatiently in the first-floor office, but to ensure that he was looking his best for his lunch appointment. She was, undoubtedly, worth impressing.

  He left the toilet and climbed the stairs athletically, two treads at a time, before pushing open the door marked “Private”.

  They were all there. Mike and George were sprawled across shabby velour armchairs that were arranged around a low coffee table, which was littered with cigarette burns. They were both smoking, while Derek, who shared his own pathological distaste for the habit, was inclining his angular body against the wall, staying close to the venetian blind that concealed the room’s only window. He was gulping in as much oxygen as possible before their discussion commenced.

  They looked at him, silently, until Mike opened his mouth, ‘If you want a coffee, give the girl a shout.’ Kanelos shook his head. ‘Right, let’s get going then. Where are we up to with the stock, George?’

  ‘Almost there, Mike, just one more delivery to come in and we’ll be ready.’