by Adam Creed
‘Lovely.’
‘Beetroot and herring bones. She had one of her teeth capped. A classy piece of dentistry, apparently. But no match so far.’
‘Tell Josie the victim was East European.’ He sees a woman at a window on the first floor. She has full lips and olive skin, the darkest eyes which appear to have smudged their mascara.
*
Josie hears the vibration before the ringtone. She looks at the gold Nokia. ‘The Carnival Is Over’ chimes up and she wishes Staffe was here.
Bobo calling.
Trying to calm herself, Josie turns on the interference track on the field recorder and places a tissue over the mouthpiece, clicks green.
‘Lena,’ says a man’s voice. He is foreign.
Josie says nothing.
‘Lena, are you there? Hello!’ The man is agitated and sounds young. He says something Josie cannot decipher, presumably Russian or Polish.
‘It’s me,’ says Josie, softly, ironing out her vowels.
He continues in a foreign tongue.
Josie says, ‘In English, Bobo. You need to practice.’
‘Where are you?’ says Bobo.
Rimmer comes into the room and she waves him away but he paces around her. ‘What are you doing?’ says Rimmer. ‘Is it for her?’
‘You come over, Lena. You come to me. I am worried. He knows,’ says Bobo.
Josie checks the prompts Staffe gave her, says, ‘Who knows?’
‘Tchancov. You know.’
She scribbles the name, her heart thudding. Rimmer puts the palm of a hand to his forehead.
The phone has gone quiet and Bobo says, quieter, more circumspect. ‘Lena? … Lena, is this you?’
Staffe said to trust her instincts, and she removes the tissue, turns off the interference, says, ‘Bobo? I’m sorry. This is not Lena.’
‘What happens?’ He immediately sounds more afraid.
‘Was Lena in danger, Bobo?’
He cries out, like a baby. His breathing is heavy, irregular.
‘We are police. We can help you.’
‘They kill her?’
‘Who is they?’
He begins to wail.
‘Where does she live?’ says Josie, but all she can hear down the phone is a low sobbing. ‘Bobo? Bobo! What is her name? Her surname!’ But the phone clicks dead.
Rimmer peers at her notes and sits down, says, ‘Tchancov?’
Josie phones Staffe, says, ‘Bobo Bogdanovich just called her phone, sir.’
‘What did he say?’
‘She’s called Lena. He knew she was in some kind of danger. He mentioned someone called Tchancov. He said this Tchancov knew something.’
‘Anything else?’
‘He broke down, sir. Cried like a baby.’
‘Did you tell him she was dead?’
‘He guessed it.’
‘He didn’t know already?’
‘I’d say not. Would he have called her if he knew that?’
Staffe says, ‘A good ruse if he realised he had left her phone at the scene – with him trapped inside it.’
Six
Snow falls steadily on the city. Staffe knocks on the door of Bobo’s peeling, deck-access council flat on the Atlee and stamps his feet, to keep warm, as he waits for a fragile-looking fellow, probably from Poland or Russia. Josie had said he had a ‘tiny voice, like a girl’s’.
The locks clatter back and the handle turns; the door swings violently open and Staffe finds himself looking into the broad-vested chest of a brute. The vest sports a gold skull on a Chelsea blue background with HEADHUNTERS writ large. Staffe casts his eyes slowly up, taking a step away as he does. The man has a neck like a 30 K dumb-bell weight; a face like a 20 K. His scalp is shiny, the nose broken and the eyes red, raw, glistening with grief.
‘You police?’ he says.
‘Are you … Bobo?’ says Staffe, off guard.
‘She’s dead? Tell me no. Tell me this not so.’ He talks in fits, starts again with the sobbing, gasping his words out like a child who has fallen badly, is still in shock. ‘I kill the fuck. I kill the fuck.’
‘Who’s dead, Bobo?’ You don’t often get moments like this, when the bad guys are on the back foot, when the strong are weak, so Staffe walks up to the brute, crossing the threshold to the flat and saying, in his softest voice, raising it a pitch – as close as he can to Bobo’s falsetto, ‘Tell me about Tchancov, Bobo. I can help.’ Staffe reaches up with his hands and puts them on Bobo’s shoulders, like laying hands on weathered gritstone.
Bobo has scars all over his head: some deep and long, some fine. It is like the surface of an old and neglected windscreen. ‘My Lena,’ he mumbles.
‘Lena who, Bobo?’
‘My Elena,’ he says, the words petering to nothing and Staffe sees Bobo’s head come towards him. Staffe closes his eyes, raises his fists, readies himself to fracture his knuckles on this man of rock.
But Pulford shouts out, ‘No! Sir, no!’
Staffe feels a great weight on him and, opening his eyes, has Bobo’s face in his, the great weight of the man pushing him down.
‘He’s passed out, sir,’ says Pulford, on his haunches, trying to hold Bobo up. ‘Get hold of him, sir,’ he wheezes. ‘He’s crushing me.’
Staffe puts his arms as far around Bobo as he can, gripping him under one arm and pulling him off Pulford. He tries to lower him gently to the ground, but Bobo crumples to the concrete, makes a sound like a side of beef slapped onto a butcher’s block.
Staffe and Pulford look down at him, then at each other.
‘What the hell do we do now?’ says Pulford.
Staffe peers into the flat. ‘You watch him.’
‘You sure, sir?’
‘Sometimes you’ve got to take sweets from the baby.’
‘Some bastard baby, sir.’
The Atlee is rough, but Bobo’s living-diner is painted a rich, high-glaze plum, with a long, glass dining table and high-backed chairs with pale pink silk skirted covers. The kitchen is simply one wall of black units and steel appliances. It is sleek and Bobo, for sure, keeps it spick and span. Above the stereo is a large black-and-white photograph of the beautiful woman. Elena. She is laughing and her fair hair is blowing back. She crinkles her eyes against the sun and looks beyond the photographer, as if seeing something unintended. Behind her, white horses in a high, breaking sea. At the corners of her mouth, the smile fragments.
There is a notepad on the marble counter. The top sheet says ‘BCTPEчA V. B’ Staffe lifts it daintily with the very tips of his thumb and forefinger, as if the sound of the paper might wake the dead. The next sheet is blank.
‘V,’ he whispers, to himself. As in Vassily. Vassily, as in Tchancov. ‘VB?’
He glances back down the hallway where Pulford looks anxiously up from Bobo, gesturing insistently for Staffe to come, be done with his trespassing, but Staffe sees there are two more rooms to inspect.
The first is the bathroom, boasting nothing untoward in its mirrored cabinet, save two gramme bags of what he assumes to be coke. There are two bottles of prescription drugs: one an antihistamine, the other an antidepressant, Molaxin.
‘V,’ says Staffe, making his way into Bobo’s bedroom. He closes the door and drops to his knees, lifting up the valance. Under the bed is a folded-down rowing machine and some weights. Staffe looks in the drawers by the bedside and smiles to himself. Wrapped in black silk ribbon – a stack of letters written on thick, pale lilac paper – almost parchment. Luckily for them, Bobo is a romantic. And his girlfriend, according to the second sheet, is a girl called Elena. Was a girl called Elena. Staffe sits on the edge of the bed and begins to read, but the script is foreign, written in a long and beautiful hand.
He knows that if he comes back for the letters, armed with a warrant and a translator, Bobo may well have disposed of them. So he looks at the dates and selects two, puts them in his pocket and begins to tie, but he hears a creak. The vast bulk of Bobo fills the bedroom
doorway.
‘What the fuck,’ says Bobo, reaching towards Staffe who shuffles back on the bed, working out whether, if he can roll away from the first punch, he can get away. But Bobo, quicker than thought, flicks his fingers into Staffe’s throat.
Staffe can’t breathe. He clutches at his neck, dropping the stack of letters.
Bobo picks up the letters and kicks the door shut in the face of the advancing Pulford. ‘You read these letters?’ he sobs.
Staffe can smell Bobo’s breath as he speaks. Fish and pickles and woe. ‘Elena had her own place. Where is it, Bobo? I have to know. If you save me time, it will help.’
Bobo raises his hands to his head. He moans, ‘Livery, she calls it.’
‘Livery Buildings? On Cloth Fair?’ says Staffe.
‘Now you leave me.’
‘Do you work for Vassily Tchancov?’
Bobo drops his hands. Despite his bulk, and the scars, Bobo’s face is washed over with fear. The blood drains from his face and he looks to the floor. He mumbles, ‘You go.’
‘Did Elena know any bankers?’
‘Go!’
‘She called the Colonial Bankers’ Club, the day … the day it happened.’
‘Leave me.’ His voice breaks down. Bobo looks up, as if it takes his last drop of strength, and he reaches for the bed. He sits, lets all his weight go, and curls up like a foetus.
*
‘Just because Bobo called Elena and let us keep a couple of letters doesn’t mean he’s not a suspect, sir,’ says Pulford, sifting through the Companies House secure-access files on Vassily Tchancov’s declared businesses.
‘VB.’ Staffe’s finger rests in the margin of the page, next to VodBlu. The registered address is in Jersey. ‘You saw how much he loves her. He’s not our killer,’ he says, typing in VodBlu.com.
‘What if the foetus wasn’t his?’ says Pulford. ‘Perhaps you have to love somebody enough, to be able to kill them.’
‘Does this look like a crime of passion?’ says Staffe, looking at the ice bar’s homepage. He goes to the window and looks up towards Cloth Fair, trying to pick out Livery Buildings and Elena’s flat. ‘It seems that VodBlu is owned by a company registered in Jersey, run by somebody called Desai. It turns over nine million a year.’
‘We should go to Elena’s place,’ says Pulford.
‘Tchancov will soon get wind of our visit to Bobo. If we move quick, he might not know Elena’s dead.’
‘He’d know if he killed her.’
‘Why would he kill her?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘So let’s go talk to him.’ Staffe tosses his car keys to Pulford and makes his way down through the building, scrolling through his phone menus to find the number of his old mucker, Smethurst – over at the Met. ‘We’ll keep Livery Buildings under our hat. I don’t want Rimmer rummaging through Elena’s life before we can.’
Making his way down Leadengate’s dark corridors and winding stairwells, Staffe thinks of older times, when he was the young pup to Jessop and Smet. Pulford rushes ahead, takes the stairs two at a time and Staffe wonders whether his sergeant will ever be an old dog.
Leadengate is unsuitable for modern policing, was never intended to uphold the law; in fact, quite the reverse. It was previously the Saracen’s Head, an old inn of bad repute.
They spill out into the dungeon-like reception and Jombaugh gives Staffe a sarcastic, am-dram salute, calls out, ‘Take it easy, Staffe,’ his head sticking up above the high counter. He is leafing through The News by lamplight.
‘Easy?’
‘I don’t see Rimmer running at all that fine china.’
‘You calling me a bull, Jom?’
Jombaugh smiles over his glasses. He is a tall, broad man piling on the half-stones since he became desk sergeant. At least he’s still married, though. ‘You just take it easy.’
Outside, the snow reflects a pale orange hue. Smet answers and Pulford starts up the Peugeot. You can see the shapes of its splutter in the chill.
‘Staffe, you old bastard! What kind of trouble are you in now?’ says DI Smethurst.
‘It’s the season of goodwill, Smet, don’t you know?’ Staffe presses 0 on his phone and pulses it three times. ‘I’ve got to go, there’s another call coming in.’
‘What was it you wanted?’
‘Vassily Tchancov.’
‘Tchancov? He’s keeping his nose clean as far as I know.’
‘He just cropped up on something to do with one of Taki Markary’s girls.’
‘There was a coming together, a couple or three years ago.’
‘Over what?’
‘A gambling licence.’
‘Who got it?’
‘Neither. Two rabid old dogs in the manger.’
Staffe presses o again, gives it a long beep and says, ‘Cheers, Smet,’ clicking off.
*
They park up on Wardour Street, three doors down from VodBlu, which loses £600,000 a year on a turnover of £9 million. That’s a lot of vodka amounting to nought, but Staffe’s gut tells him that VB was never conceived for profit, but to spit out clean cash and tax credits. VB, says the sign, sculpted from ice, dyed blue. It is so cold out, today, that the sign doesn’t melt at all. In summer – according to the website – they sculpt it fresh every day.
Four doors down from VodBlu, two lean, chiselled and suited men are smoking next to a blacked-out Bentley. Staffe raises a hand to them, is amused when they seem puzzled.
As they go in Pulford’s words plume up from his mouth. ‘Christ, sir! Is this …’ He looks around, open-mouthed, ‘… is this all ice? Even the bar is ice.’
The girl behind the bar has black hair and powder-blue eyes. She wears a polar-white fur hat, a cropped, quilted gilet that shows her tummy, and knitted hot pants. Staffe wonders how long her shifts are. She looks happy enough and holds up a cone of black ice with a bottle embedded within. She wears white leather gloves, jiggles the bottle. ‘Absolut, gents? Today’s special.’
‘Water,’ says Staffe. ‘Two, please.’
The bar is full of small groups of media types in thick vintage coats and porkpie hats or berets. One of the barmaids jokes as she goes out, cigarette at the ready, ‘to get warm’.
Pulford brings the drinks and Staffe keeps an eye on a door between the end of the bar and the toilets. It is the only place that might accommodate an office, and, soon enough, a small, wiry man in a suit emerges. He has dyed-black hair with a widow’s peak and electric blue eyes, like beads pressed into deep scars. He comes across to Staffe and says, ‘You gentlemen have everything you need?’
‘Elena sent us,’ says Staffe, scrutinising the reaction.
‘Elena?’ says the man, convincingly deadpan.
‘A friend of Vassily’s?’
‘Maybe you should go.’ The man takes a hold of Staffe’s elbow. The grip is tight as a nut and Staffe shakes his arm, can’t shift it.
Pulford takes a step towards the man but Staffe says, ‘This place does all right, I suppose. But you’re not turning over nine million a year. No way. Maybe we’ll have the DTI look at things.’
‘You have a strange attitude, coming into my bar with such menaces,’ says the man, in a clipped Eastern brogue. He turns to the hot-panted girl. ‘Bring the gold Bison.’
‘Mr Tchancov?’ says Pulford.
‘Vassily. Now,’ he places a hand on the small of Staffe’s back, ‘Elena, you say?’
‘She is with one of yours. Bobo Bogdanovich,’ says Staffe.
The girl brings the vodka and three glasses. Tchancov tips her £10 and she strokes his arm, whispers something in his ear that makes him smile.
‘Bobo does a little work for me.’
‘And Elena?’
Tchancov shrugs.
‘You have any dealings with Taki Markary?’
Tchancov smiles, blinks rapidly as he pours the vodka, as if his ice-cool bravado might have a thin surface. ‘We’re different kettles of fish, him an
d me.’
‘You’ve crossed swords.’
He hands Staffe and Pulford a glass each. ‘I don’t believe in weapons, Inspector.’
‘Bobo is very upset.’
‘What has she done now?’
Staffe sips the vodka. It is ice cold and has herbal hints of the prairie. He watches Tchancov drink his in one, and notices an emerald ring on the little finger of his right hand.
‘The ring. Your intaglio – it’s from the Urals.’
Tchancov nods and his smile tightens. ‘She was a bright girl. Ambitious.’
‘Was? What was her name? Her surname.’
‘All I can tell you is, she loves her work, Inspector. No matter what you hear from anyone, I know this for a fact. And that’s a risky business.’
Staffe mulls what he knows about Tchancov, from the couple of hours’ research back at the station: that he has a house on the Bishops Avenue, a yacht in the western Med; hunting lodges in Belarus. He left Russia with a modest fortune from pyramid-selling bearer certificates in his cousin’s computer business. Vassily was moved on when his uncle, Ludo, ran for governor. ‘You take your share of risks, Vassily.’
Tchancov laughs, takes hold of Staffe’s glass with his right hand. ‘I like you.’
Pulford’s phone beeps and he studies the screen. Both men look at him, frozen for a moment. ‘We have to go, sir.’
Tchancov leans in, alcohol fresh on his breath. ‘You were right about my ring. Very clever. But you’re looking in the wrong place. Take my word for it, or find out for yourself. But don’t come round my place fucking things up. I know my rights.’
‘And Elena? You knew her.’
‘You can go now,’ says Tchancov. ‘I have things to do.’
‘I’ll go as I please and I’ll come as I please, Mr Tchancov.’
‘We shall see.’ Tchancov turns his back, goes back into his office; presumably, a warm place.
Seven
Flecks of snow float between the buildings on Cloth Fair. Staffe mounts the kerb outside the Hand and Shears, where Josie is waiting for them. He looks across to St Bart’s church with its flint, patchwork stone and its dark, garden cloister.