‘I believe I did. Is it significant?’
His smooth tone annoyed Kathy. ‘Of course it is. They killed Litvinenko with some exotic radio isotope, so maybe now they’re trying out another of their nasty tricks.’
‘Oh, come on. You’ve got the source-that Ugandan, right?’
‘Maybe he caught it from Danny Yilmaz, not the other way around.’
The MI5 man gave a soft, condescending chuckle. ‘Kathy, Kathy-what would be the point of that?’
‘The point,’ she said, angry now, ‘is that our senior investigator and our only witness are now on the death list and the rest of our team is locked up in quarantine! Just about the most effective way you could dream up to screw an investigation, wouldn’t you say?’
She heard him take a deep breath. ‘No, that’s nonsense.’
‘Why?’
‘They just wouldn’t do a thing like that. Believe me, I know.’
‘It strikes me, Sean, that you know a lot more about this case than you’re telling us.’
‘I know that there’s absolutely no way that the Russians would release some indiscriminate biological weapon in the streets of London just to cover up Mikhail Moszynski’s death. The idea is absurd. It would be tantamount to an act of war. It’s just one of those unfortunate things that happen, Kathy, sod’s law, a bit of bad luck. Now I have to go.’
She hung up and thought about it. He was probably right, but his indifference still made her angry. This was Brock they were talking about, lying unconscious in an isolation ward.
NINETEEN
I t was Sunday afternoon before she got the call from Bren that all of the laboratory tests had been completed, and everyone except Brock, Yilmaz and Namono was in the clear.
‘I’m going home for a long hot bath and bit of home cooking, Kath,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea how wonderful that sounds.’
‘You should take tomorrow off.’
‘No way,’ he said. ‘I want to be there when Gloria gets the call from Mr X. I’ve told everyone to be there for a morning briefing.’
‘Okay, see you then.’
She put the phone down and set off for the hospital again, but still there was no change in Brock’s condition; he was feverish and looped up to a drip, oxygen and monitors.
At the Monday morning meeting Kathy had a long list of actions that she wanted taken to cover gaps that she’d identified in their investigation so far. She wanted the complete phone records of all the main players for the past two weeks re-examined, cross-referenced and analysed. She also wanted the CCTV footage from Hackney, Tottenham and Chelsea searched once again for any third-party contacts that Harry Peebles and Danny Yilmaz may have had. There were a number of people to be reinterviewed, including the head of Shere Security, who had told her on the night of Mikhail’s murder that they would be carrying out an internal review of what had happened. There were also family members to talk to again, but she wanted this left until after Mikhail’s funeral, the arrangements for which they discussed.
‘Oh and Pip,’ she added, ‘see if you can get some more samples of letters composed by Moszynski. Not necessarily to newspapers.’
All of this was routine and background to the main event that they were all anticipating that afternoon. Bren confirmed that the tap on Gloria’s phone had been authorised and established, and that they had been monitoring a stream of conversations from her business address in a small house in a quiet Chelsea mews.
‘As far as we can gather, there are no girls at that address,’ Bren said. ‘It all seems to be done by phones and the internet. Gloria is the point of contact between the punters, who get to hear of her by word of mouth or through her website, and the stable of girls that she contacts and sends out to mutually acceptable addresses. She handles all the financial transactions electronically, and keeps tabs on the girls while they’re working to make sure they’re okay. She also handles their HRM issues.’
‘HRM?’ Kathy queried. ‘What, pension plan, insurance?’
‘Yes, exactly; their private health cover, gym, hair and beauty treatments, transport, security. She’s got it all covered. We were working on building up a profile last week. It’s an expensive operation, catering mainly to wealthy foreigners visiting or temporarily resident in London.’
‘How does Harry Peebles qualify?’
‘He doesn’t,’ Bren said. ‘I can only assume he was a favour for a friend.’
‘Well, let’s hope we find out who this friend is this afternoon.’
Despite the multitude of tasks, the time dragged until two fifteen, when the sound of an incoming call came over the speakers. A small crowd had gathered in the incident room to listen in, including a phonetics expert, Dr Jenny Doyle, whom Kathy had arranged to be present.
‘Hello, this is Gloria’s Parlour.’ Gloria’s voice was warm and seductive, just this side of a pastiche of a sexy callgirl.
‘Hello, Gloria.’
Bren and Kathy exchanged a frown, trying to identify the wolfish growl.
Gloria chuckled. ‘Hello, darling. Thought it might be you. Same as usual?’
‘Four, if you please. Chloe free?’
‘Let me check… Yes, that’ll be fine.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Bye, darling.’
The line went dead.
There was an expectant hush, then Zack spoke. ‘Yes, that was the mobile number all right.’
‘Where was he calling from?’ Kathy asked.
Another long pause, then Zack said, ‘SW7 or SW3.’
‘Kensington and Chelsea,’ Kathy said. ‘Can you get a closer fix?’
‘Give us a moment.’
‘Okay.’ Kathy looked up. ‘Back to work everyone. Bren, Mickey, Pip, Jenny, gather round. Let’s see what we’ve got.’
They sat around a table and listened several times to the recording of the telephone conversation, each making notes. Then Kathy said, ‘What do you think, Jenny? What can you tell us about him?’
‘Hm, nine words, that’s all. Not much to go on.’
‘Best guess.’
‘Well, on the face of it it’s Standard English RP-Received Pronunciation. Probably what we’d call Conservative RP, associated with older speakers of certain backgrounds, such as Home Counties, upper middle class. But it sounded to me like he wasn’t using his usual voice. Did you get that impression? Like he was playing the part of a roguish Don Juan, for her benefit, as if this was a game they’d played before.’
‘Yes.’ Kathy nodded. ‘She seemed to respond in the same way once she recognised him. But you think he’s a native English speaker?’
‘Rather than Russian, you mean? The trouble is, RP is what’s usually taught to people learning British English, and there’s so little to go on with accent and register. That phrase “if you please” sounds to me like a native speaker. But he may just be a good mimic.’
Zack at his screens called back over his shoulder. ‘Within a hundred yards of South Kensington tube station.’
‘Can you track it?’
‘Sorry. He’s switched it off.’
‘Damn.’ Kathy looked at Bren, who was tapping his pen impatiently on the table. ‘What do you think?’
‘What does “four” mean?’ he said. ‘Is he asking for four girls? Or is that code for the kind of service he wants? Or is the meet at four o’clock?’ He checked his watch.
Kathy looked over to Zack. ‘Check Gloria’s website, Zack. Does she advertise a Chloe?’
Bren shook his head in frustration. ‘I thought they’d confirm the meeting place, at least. They gave nothing away. It’s as if he knew the line was tapped.’
‘Yeah, he’s careful, isn’t he?’ Mickey said. ‘A phone he uses only to talk to Gloria, and then says as little as possible in a made-up voice.’
‘Yes, there’s a Chloe,’ Zack said, and they went over to look at the images on his screen of a pretty, wide-eyed blonde girl. ‘Looks young, doesn’t she?’
‘Let’s hop
e we’ve heard of her,’ Kathy said, and ordered everyone available to drop what they were doing and join in a search of the PNC database.
It was almost three thirty p.m. when they came upon Abigail Courtney Tierney, age twenty, charged three years before with four counts of shoplifting from stores in Saffron Walden. The woman in the police photograph lacked the make-up and hair styling of Chloe on Gloria’s website, but the similarities were nevertheless striking. A check of her driver’s licence and phone records gave an address in a modern waterfront apartment block, just across the Thames from Chelsea, in Battersea.
They took two unmarked cars, arriving at the riverside development at three minutes to four. Kathy went to the entrance door and spoke on the intercom to a resident caretaker, who let her into the lobby, a place of glass and marble that might have served as an upmarket art gallery.
‘We’ve had reports of a serial rapist operating in the area,’ Kathy said. ‘Targeting young women living alone. We’re checking possible people at risk.’
He took her into his office and gave her the names of three single women residents of the block, one of whom was a Ms Abi Tierney.
‘Do you know if any of them are at home at the moment?’ Kathy asked.
A check of the security system showed that the alarms in two of the apartments were activated, whereas that in Ms Tierney’s apartment was switched off.
‘I saw her come in half an hour ago,’ the caretaker said.
‘Alone?’
‘That’s right. Lovely young lady. She’s a model. You want to speak to her?’
‘No, we don’t want to cause panic. This may be nothing. Do any of these women bring men back here, do you know?’
‘Well, I don’t spy on them, but no, not really. Even Ms Tierney, attractive as she is, doesn’t have a boyfriend to my knowledge.’
‘Right. I noticed you’ve got a camera at the front door. I’d like to check your recordings if that’s okay. Say the last couple of weeks?’
‘Not a problem.’
Kathy returned to the car with the disks and they settled down to wait. By five p.m. the only people to enter or leave the building were a young woman with two small children.
When they got back to Queen Anne’s Gate they ran the CCTV images for the previous Monday afternoon. Once again, Abi Tierney had returned to the block mid-afternoon and not left again until seven that evening. But on the following day she had done the opposite, leaving her apartment at three thirty and returning at eight.
‘That makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Kathy said. ‘If he wants a particular girl, it would be a bit late to phone up that same afternoon and hope she’d be free. Maybe he phones the day before the meeting. We’d better go through all of this footage and get a timetable of her movements last week. The appointment could be for four o’clock two days later, or three.’
‘If that’s what “four” means,’ Bren grumbled. ‘And if Abi Tierney is Chloe.’
‘Come on, Bren,’ Kathy urged. ‘Abi didn’t get herself a luxury Thames-side apartment by shoplifting.’
After an hour they had established that, as far as they could tell from the CCTV records, Abi could have kept a four p.m. appointment elsewhere on any day of the previous week apart from the Monday.
‘Then we put a tail on her,’ Kathy said, ‘and identify all of her clients until we find something.’
TWENTY
T he Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God and All Saints looked to Kathy more Italian than Russian. With its basilican front flanked by a stone campanile and not an onion dome in sight, it looked like a Tuscan hill town church that had inexplicably found itself dropped at the end of a London cul-de-sac beside a small park. When she arrived, the end of the street was crowded with mourners in dark suits and darker glasses, conferring together with that sombre camaraderie that funerals inspire. She looked around and caught sight of one of her team standing discreetly to one side, taking photographs of them all.
Inside, the atmosphere was more as Kathy had expected, the dark interior glittering with the light of candles, perfumed by clouds of incense and reverberating with the deep mournful sound of a male choir. There were no seats, the mourners standing packed together in the nave, overlooked on three sides by a balcony. Kathy took an order of service sheet, printed in English and Russian, and found the stairs to the upper level from which she could get a view across the congregation towards the east end, where three bearded priests, wearing heavy silver and gold robes, stood in front of an altar and a panelled screen hung with icons. They faced Mikhail Moszynski’s coffin, around which his family clustered.
The harmonies of the choir subsided into an expectant silence, broken at last by the voice of one of the priests. ‘Blessed is our God,’ he chanted, ‘now and forever and to the ages of ages.’ There was a murmur from some of the crowd, and the priest continued, alternating between English and Russian.
It was an impressive service, Kathy thought, with its sense of ancient ritual, and most of all the spine-shivering voices of the choir, unaccompanied by any instrument, whose deep chords throbbed through the whole building and every body inside it. There was only one discordant moment, when the priest gestured to the family and both Mikhail’s mother and wife got to their feet. Marta tottered and Shaka made to take hold of her arm, but the old woman shook her off with a hoarse cry, clearly audible in the silent cathedral, that sounded very like a curse.
Afterwards, blinking outside in the sunlight, Kathy watched the people queuing to pay their respects to the bereaved family, all except Shaka, who was somewhere among a mob of photographers heading towards a limo. As Kathy wove her way through the crowd her ears were straining for voices, hoping to catch something.
‘Inspector.’
She turned to see John Greenslade at her elbow. Toby and Deb from the hotel were standing behind him, all three beaming at Kathy, like the best of friends, out for the day to see the sights.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here.’
Toby’s smile widened. ‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. What about that singing, eh?’
‘Yes.’ She turned to John and said quickly, ‘I’m getting some more letters for you.’
‘Great.’
‘See you.’
She moved off to the edge of the crowd, where chauffeured cars were picking people up. From somewhere behind her she heard a woman’s voice, flirtatious.
‘And what about you, Nigel? Can we offer you a lift?’
And the reply, ‘If you please, darling. If you please.’
Kathy held her breath and turned slowly around. An elegant female leg was disappearing into the rear door of a car, and following it, leaning forward as if he might pounce on it, was the bulky figure of Sir Nigel Hadden-Vane.
Kathy pulled out her radio and spoke rapidly to Pip Gallagher, who she knew was sitting in a car further down the street. ‘There’s a black Mercedes coming your way,’ she said, and gave the registration number. ‘See where it goes.’ Then she made a call on her mobile to Bren, back at Queen Anne’s Gate. ‘I think I’ve got him, Bren, our Mr X. It’s Hadden-Vane.’
‘Bloody hell. You sure?’
‘Not a hundred per cent. I think he’s on his way to the function for invited mourners. It’s in a club in Kensington. Pip’s on his tail. I’m coming back.’
The private function centre was on a rooftop, landscaped with pergolas, pools and groves of trees, and with sweeping views across the city. In the streets below, unmarked police cars took up position and waited for the MP to reappear, which he did at three thirty p.m., bustling out of the front door as the taxi he’d ordered drew up at the kerb. At the same time a call came through from the car waiting outside the riverside apartments in Battersea. ‘Chloe’s on the move,’ the officer reported. ‘Catching a cab.’
At Queen Anne’s Gate Kathy and Bren watched the routes of the two taxis converge on West Kensington. Almost simultaneously the following cars reported their destina
tion: the Wintergarden Hotel.
‘I want pictures of them together in the lobby, if you can,’ Kathy said. ‘But don’t let anyone see you doing it.’
Bren swore under his breath. ‘You were right, Kathy. It is him. This is going to put one hell of a cat among the pigeons. I want to see Sharpe’s face when we tell him. But even more, I want to see Hadden-Vane’s face when we knock on that hotel room door.’
Kathy shook her head. ‘No, Bren. We need more, much more. And he mustn’t know we’re on to him while we get it.’
After a couple of minutes a report came back from one of the cars. ‘We’ve got a couple of shots of them together. They went up to the sixth floor. From the look on the receptionist’s face he’s a regular here. Shall we speak to her?’
‘No,’ Kathy said. ‘Take pictures as they leave and follow them.’
She took a deep breath and stared at Bren. ‘Why? Why would he want Moszynski killed? They were great mates.’
‘We know he’s a corrupt bastard with some very dodgy friends, Kathy. Remember the last time? We knew he was tied up with Spider Roach, but we couldn’t prove it.’
‘That’s why we have to be careful. He made mincemeat of us the last time. He destroyed Tom Reeves’ career and very nearly took Brock and the rest of us down too.’
‘Tom Reeves cut corners. He was a maverick, you know that. And Hadden-Vane destroyed him from behind the screen of parliamentary privilege. But he won’t be able to hide from this.’
‘All we’ve got is a record of three very brief phone calls between Harry Peebles’ and Hadden-Vane’s mobile phones. We don’t know what was said. We need further proof of contact between the two of them and we need a convincing motive.’
Bren thought for a moment. ‘Maybe there’re others involved. Vadim Kuzmin, for instance.’
‘A family coup, you mean? Yes, I’ve wondered about that.’
‘Maybe Vadim got Hadden-Vane to use his criminal contacts to do the deed while Vadim was safely out of the country.’
Kathy nodded slowly. ‘That’s possible.’
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