Once we got them settled in at the safe house, it was time to ask Sacha what was really going on.
“My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s almost a year ago,” he said. “I told my father and he began visiting my mother every week. Maybe there was still some love there or he felt guilty. He promised me that he would take care of my mother. We knew this was a death sentence even if it could take years. Then six months before he died, he was different, depressed, like he was under a strain. He said he believed he was going to die soon. I thought he was ill, but he said no, it was the family.”
“The Harkingdales,” I offered.
“He had suspicions and confirmed them himself,” Sacha said and nodded. “They have a history of marrying their daughters to rich men and then poisoning them to take their fortune.”
I glanced at Julia, who closed her eyes for a second. No satisfaction at being right, only a sense of grim confirmation about the nastier side of humanity.
“My father told us he was changing his will to leave everything to my mother and me,” said Sacha. “He wanted to make arrangements for bodyguards, security, but we refused. My mother wasn’t in the present. She still thought they were married. We couldn’t just put her in a hospital or a home. The Harkingdales would have had a way to get to her. Father was too preoccupied with staying alive. Then he ran out of time before we could finalize a plan. When I heard he died, I took my mother and left our flat to go dark.”
I looked at Ken and Clive, saw a mix of relief that Sacha was innocent and mild annoyance that he hadn’t turned out to be the villain they had initially suspected.
Lord Vishnu sat by the bar counter and nodded his approval at the way this story was playing out. He was presiding over revelations, the outing of truth that brings in light. I was almost moved by the tenderness in his eyes as he looked at Sacha and lay a fatherly, godly hand on his shoulder, a touch Sacha didn’t feel.
“Not to worry, Sacha,” I said. “We’ll keep you both safe here, and when you show up for the reading of the will, the Harkingdales will have lost.”
Sacha was brooding.
“My mother put up with my angry bullshit and she was always there for me, even though she was alone with her own pain. It broke my heart when my father divorced her and sent me to boarding school.”
“So what will you do now?”
“I want to look after her for the rest of her life. I want to start a company that manufactures legal, legitimate drugs that can prevent or even treat dementia and Alzheimer’s. Drugs for the memory.”
“Good on you, mate.”
“What rankles me, what disgusts me, is those fucking Harkingdales. They killed my father to get at his money and estate, now they want to kill my mother and me for it. And they won’t be arrested. They won’t pay.”
“Do you have a pound?” I asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“Give me a pound.”
He fished a coin out of his pocket and handed it to me.
“All right, Sacha, you’ve just hired me. My colleagues and I are already committed to keeping your stepmother safe, but I have the extra job of making sure the Harkingdales get some form of comeuppance for what they’ve done and what they’ll try to do to her.”
He looked at me, full of questions.
“We’re not hit men, Sacha. But there are things they fear more than death or prison. This is not just my promise now. It’s my job.”
FIFTEEN
Julia was smiling at me when we left the safe house.
“What is it?”
“I love it when you’re righteous,” she said. “It means things are about to get interesting.”
“I suppose Sacha reminded me of one of my troubled students from back when I was teaching secondary school.”
“Whatever wheeze you got in mind,” Ken said, “we’re in.”
“It will be our personal pleasure to kick off on those upper-class fuckers,” Clive said.
When we got back to the office, Boyd was waiting.
“He’s awfully needy, that one,” Cheryl said. “I’d hate to have been married to him.”
“I told him you were running point,” Roger said. “So he should talk to you.”
I could almost smell the booze on his breath along with the overwhelming stress and anxiety. Honestly, how did he survive being a private eye? He could drop dead from a heart attack just from staking out a cheating spouse’s hotel.
I introduced myself in the most reassuring manner imaginable, the way I usually spoke to clients to cajole them into some semblance of calm.
“The Harkingdales are starting to pressure me for a result,” Boyd said. “They said I should get more people to do the search.”
“Show them these photos,” I said.
“Stone me! You found ’em already? That was bloody quick!”
We had photographed Sacha and his mum a few streets outside the safe house after I explained to Sacha what we were planning to do. I promised I would keep him and Irina safe, that we would control the narrative.
“Tell them you will need extra manpower to do some additional surveillance. And ask for more money to pay the people you’ll need,” I said.
Boyd looked uncertain, started to stammer something.
“And keep the extra dosh,” Roger said. “After all, it’s your job.”
Boyd seemed relieved.
“Oh, cheers, Ravi.”
I waited till Boyd was gone before I spoke.
“Let’s assume the Harkingdales will want to bump Sacha and Irina off before they get to the reading of the will.”
“Are you thinking of a wheeze, Ravi?”
“I’m thinking of a wheeze, Mark.”
A wheeze was what Marcie liked to call an “op,” what Ken and Clive would consider a sting, a social engineering campaign that the whole team set up, planned carefully with little margin for error. A wheeze was an op where we controlled the whole environment, the narrative. It came not from assumptions, but educated guesses based on researching the subjects and knowing how they would react, so that they did what we wanted them to do and we got our result.
We set about researching the Harkingdales. Julia, Mark, and Marcie took it upon themselves to suss out how they thought. The Harkingdales followed the direction of Tobias, the patriarch. They were all about keeping the family name going by any means possible and at the cost of anyone and everyone else. Their main MO was poisoning, and they could only do that if the victim was in their household. At the moment, Sacha and Irina were out of their grasp. That couldn’t last forever, though. We had to do something to break the stalemate, and that would be when Sacha and Irina emerged from hiding. When that happened, we had to control the circumstances, especially with Irina in a state that could be legally defined as mentally incompetent. I also wanted to keep my promise to Sacha and use that opportunity to trap the Harkingdales.
“Fancy creating a website?” I asked Olivia.
“If I must,” she said, shrugging. This was not even going to be a challenge for her. Indeed, I wondered what could ever constitute a challenge for her.
SIXTEEN
I really don’t know what to say, Ravi,” Mrs. Dhewan said.
“Auntie, this is well out of order,” I said, trying not to shout.
Oh shit, Kali was there with us, wagging her tongue at the aftermath of the evening. I wondered if she’d anticipated the chaos, but caught myself: she was inside my head. She was a projection of my anxieties. How could I have known what would happen when I left my parents to their own devices?
“I never thought your father had it in him.”
“Well, Dad can be a very passionate man,” I said. “Especially when his ire is up.”
“Indeed,” she said.
We were in Mrs. Dhewan’s living room, watching the surveillance footage on her laptop. My mother was closing up the food bank for the evening and my father had arrived to pick her up. The men in the balaclavas burst in the door before my mother cou
ld lock it, and before they could even menace my mother, Dad went completely batshit with his cricket bat. He was like a mad dervish as he swung the bat at the would-be thieves, connecting with their arms and torsos, doubling them over in pain.
“He’s quite the hellion,” Mrs. Dhewan said.
“My parents were not supposed to get mixed up in this kind of thing.”
“I apologize, Ravi. I’ve had my boys remove all the boxes from your house by now. Having civilians like your parents involved in my business only makes everything more complicated.”
“I told my dad he should have let them steal a couple of boxes. You can track them by the RFID chips Benjamin tagged them with.”
“That’s why I’m putting the boxes back in the storeroom of the food bank. Better location for the bait.”
“Well, please keep them out of this,” I said. “I’m going to tell my mum she doesn’t need to come back to work at the shop.”
I left and went back to my parents’ house. My sister and Vivek were just coming out.
“How are they?” I asked.
“They’re . . . all right,” Vivek said.
“Why the pause?”
“They’re more than all right,” Sanjita said. “They said you don’t need to drop in.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“It seems Dad becoming all manly and heroic was the cure for their dry spell,” Sanjita said. “A reaffirmation of his masculine identity, as it were.”
“They’ve retired to the bedroom for the night,” Vivek said.
“Do you mean—?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“They’re off happily bonking and don’t need you to interrupt, Ravi,” Sanji said.
I winced.
“Too much information, Sanji.”
“It’s brilliant!” Sanjita said. “It gets them off our backs at last! Now they won’t be harping on about us giving them grandkids.”
“And we can at least bonk in peace ourselves.” Vivek beamed.
“Again, too much information,” I said.
“All’s well that ends well,” Sanji said. “You might as well go on home. Isn’t Julia waiting for you?”
I got back to my flat and told Julia what had happened. She laughed and laughed.
“This has the makings of another cosmic joke,” Julia said.
“I’ve been on the receiving end of way too many of those.”
“It’s almost as if you planned it,” Julia said.
“What? I would never send a bunch of thugs after my parents to jog their sex lives. There’s no way I could have predicted Dad would become Rambo with a cricket bat.”
“I’m just joking,” Julia said. “You’re wound up too tight, with the weight of the world on your shoulders, as usual.”
“I could certainly use some relief.”
“Well, seeing as everyone’s having a celebratory shag tonight, it’d be churlish for us not to go along with it.”
“Not sure I’m in the mood,” I said.
“Why don’t you lie back and let me help?”
It took a bit of doing on her part, but Julia finally took my mind off my parents. Sex when she was happy brought a kind of joy that almost made me believe in heaven.
And the gods left us alone.
SEVENTEEN
The next day, Boyd came into the office, sweaty and hyperventilating. Was he having a panic attack? Cheryl waved him towards Roger’s office, and he barreled right in.
“You watch,” Cheryl said. “He now thinks Roger is his rabbi. Or his confessor.”
“Or his psychiatrist,” Marcie said.
“Roger’s silver tongue does have that effect on people,” Olivia said.
We pretended not to watch while Boyd ranted and gesticulated wildly before Roger put an assuring hand on his shoulder and led him out to us.
“Tell everyone what you just told me,” Roger said.
“Showed ’em the photos of Sacha and Irina Mayakovsky you gave me,” Boyd said. “They were bloody chuffed, and not in a good way.”
“You didn’t tell them where Irina and Sacha were, did you?” I asked.
“I told them that my ‘people’ found ’em in London, no specifics just to keep ’em on the hook, yeah?” Boyd said. “Just like you said. I said ‘we’ were watchin’ the place, and I could find out the phone number where they could just contact the kid and his mum directly. They said no need. They wanted me to go in and bump them off. They came out and fucking said it! ‘We need them disposed of,’ the buggers said, like they were asking me to take some rubbish out to the recycling bin on my way out!”
Boyd took a stiff drink, one Roger had poured for him, if a bit reluctantly. Boyd’s hand shook.
“Said they wanted the kid and widow to be ‘looked after properly.’ ”
“Well, we know what their idea of ‘looking after’ is like,” Cheryl said.
“Do private investigators often get hired to bump people off?” I couldn’t help asking.
Ken and Clive looked at me like I was stupid, then shrugged.
“If I wanted to be a bloody hit man, I’d have done it,” Boyd cried. “You gotta draw the line somewhere. And I’m not a fucking psychopath.”
“The sheer cheek of it.” Roger sagely shook his head sympathetically at Boyd.
“Sounds like a psychopath is what the Harkingdales are desperately looking for,” Cheryl said.
“So what did you tell them?” I asked.
“We told you this could happen,” Roger said to Boyd.
“Fuck me,” Boyd said. “They want to stick me well in it, don’t they?”
“Did you turn them down?” I asked.
“I said they needed to think about this very seriously, that it was a criminal act, a big decision, and one there was no coming back from,” Boyd said, voice quivering. “And I said it would cost ’em extra.”
“Good man.” Roger smiled. “You can keep that cash if they bite.”
“Well, I said it wasn’t really my field of expertise, and it might require a professional, someone we could trust. They asked me for a recommendation. I said I would make some inquiries. Fucking hell! This is all incriminating shit, and I’ll be the one taking the fall, won’t I?”
“Now now, Dickie,” Roger said. “We have your back on this. Tell him, Ravi.”
“Go back to the Harkingdales,” I said. “Tell them it’s best for you and them to put several layers separating you all from the act. That means you lot can’t be seen to be anywhere near this. Then tell them about this website.”
I handed him a piece of paper with a URL jotted on it, and how it could only be accessed through a Tor-style proxy server, which had really been set up by Olivia.
“What’s this?”
“Something that removes all responsibility from you,” I said. “Tell them you want a commission for finding them the website and walk away.”
“I want to see what this is,” Boyd said. “Ignorance won’t save me if I get hauled in for an interview.”
Olivia handed Boyd a laptop and he linked to the site.
“Stone me!” Boyd cried. “This is some frightening shit!”
“That’s the Dark Web for you,” I said.
“I heard about sites like this, never wanted any part in ’em!”
“For them it’s just business,” Olivia said.
I then remembered we had all neglected to tell Boyd that this was a completely fictitious site that Olivia had whipped up at my request. Mark and Benjamin had written all the posts for contract killing services, and took the darkest recesses of their imaginations for a walk as one would the family dog.
Poor Boyd was shitting bricks at each advert he read from prospective contract killers.
“Disappearances guaranteed. Untraceable body disposals.” “Defenestrations a specialty.” “Dismemberment fees extra.” “The best use of chemicals to dissolve a body.” “Best deaths by drone—fees and payments structure.” “Arson specialist.” “Top Behe
ading Experts—Special Rates.”
Mark, Marcie, and Benjamin probably had too much fun writing those entries, especially the descriptions. Between the three of them, a few tens of thousands of words’ worth of prose was on that site going into intimate, technical detail about the various methods for murdering and disposing of bodies, comparing the merits of leaving a corpse behind to be discovered with disappearing someone altogether, and what kind of message each act sends, which was also why there were different pay rates for every act of murder, dismemberment, burial, chemical dissolution, burning, and even mummification. It was indeed dark shit. I did not want to find out how they knew all this stuff.
“This is ordering a murder as if you order a pizza!” Boyd cried.
Boyd was almost dry-heaving by the time he read the tenth entry. I had to put the poor bastard out of his misery and tell him the site wasn’t real.
“The point is for the Harkingdales to hire Ken and Clive. It’ll be Ken and Clive no matter who they pick. Then we get them bang to rights,” I said.
“Hang on, that’s entrapment!” Boyd said.
“We’re not coppers anymore, Dickie,” Ken said.
“And we won’t get done for this,” Clive added. “None of us.”
“How do you reckon?” Boyd asked, still unconvinced.
“If they find out this is fraudulent,” David said, stepping forward, “they’re not likely to report you, are they? You would have been defrauding them for trying to arrange a murder for hire. We’re in a territory where the police are not even part of the equation. It’ll be the Prisoner’s Dilemma. You’d only incriminate each other.”
“And if you get picked up by Old Bill,” Roger said. “David will have your back as your legal counsel.”
“Quite,” David said, wincing.
“Just stick to this plan and you’ll be off the hook,” Roger said to Boyd, the smile never leaving his face. “And remember, you keep the money you charge them for yourself. It’s only fair.”
“Still blood money, innit?” Boyd muttered.
“It’s not blood money if you don’t spill any blood for it,” Roger said cheerfully. Roger and his moral calculations. The gods whistled in admiration. Vishnu was impressed.
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