by James Deegan
‘A beautiful thing, Peter,’ said Gjergj, like he’d designed and built the fucker himself. ‘Is accurate to fifty metres.’
‘I’ll be a lot closer than that if it comes to it,’ said Callaghan, with a wolfish grin.
An hour after he had arrived in Coventry, he was on his way again, picking his way back north to the M6 through the late evening traffic.
This time he was singing to himself, and tapping out a ska beat on the wheel with his thumbs.
‘This town,’ he kept intoning, in a cod Jamaican accent, ‘aaahhaaahh, is comin’ like a ghost town.’
49.
OLEG KOVALEV WAS back at Carr’s flat very early the following morning, his face alive with glee.
‘Come with me, Johnny,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘I have something to show you.’
Outside, it was another beautiful winter’s day, crisp and clear, and the Russian’s breath trailed behind him in the still air as Carr followed him to his pearlescent white Range Rover – a five-litre V8 monster, with Overfinch carbon-fibre body-styling, calfskin leather seats, and more wood than you’d find in a small forest.
Nothing if not big-time, Oleg.
‘Where we off?’ said Carr, as he slid into the passenger seat.
‘Boss’s place in countryside,’ said the Russian, with a sideways look.
Avilov’s private estate near Petworth in Sussex – a huge Georgian mansion with fifty-odd rooms full of gold leaf, electronics and bling, set in 150 acres of parkland.
‘What for?’ said Carr.
‘Some people the boss wants you to meet.’
‘Who?’
‘One of them is Mr Dima Goncharenko, owner of Konstantin’s favourite Mayfair restaurant,’ said Kovalev. ‘Other is a friend of Dima, name is Andriy Dzyuba.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why, John.’
‘Stop the car,’ said Carr. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’ve got planned, you crazy Russian bastard, but I’ve got an idea.’
‘Please,’ said Oleg. ‘Come with me. When we get there, you talk to Konstantin. After that, you leave. Not a problem for you, I promise.’
Carr looked at him, weighing the decision.
In the end, he decided to go with it, for now.
‘You’d better not be fucking with me,’ he said.
Oleg shook his head.
He was silent for a few moments, and then he said, ‘Glovebox. Confidential files from Metropolitan Police and Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny. You know? Ukrainian internal security service?’
Carr nodded. He considered asking Oleg how he’d managed to get hold of Met and SBU intelligence, but he wouldn’t get an answer, so why bother? He was an old KGB/FIS hand: the Russian spooks had their ways, and that was that.
He reached into the glovebox and took out a thin manila folder.
Started reading.
It showed that the two men concerned were both thoroughbred vermin.
They had come to Britain as part of the Ukrainian diaspora, and – on the surface – were legitimate businessmen. Dima Goncharenko – the older of the two – owned the restaurant in which they had eaten the other night, along with a portfolio of flats and houses in north and west London. Andriy Dzyuba, his right-hand man, ran a large door security firm in the city.
But behind the scenes, Goncharenko was a rapist and racketeer who had trafficked women, arms and drugs across Europe. Dzyuba handled their heroin operation. He’d taken on and defeated various groups of Turks, Kurds and Snakehead Chinese in setting it up, which told you something. He had also served four years in a British jail for beating a high class prostitute so badly that she had lost an eye. The girl had later committed suicide after being told that she would be further disfigured with acid for giving evidence against him. She’d been from Edinburgh, as it happened, which endeared Andriy Dzyuba even less to Carr.
‘You know this Goncharenko,’ said Oleg, when Carr had finished reading. ‘He is the employer of Sasha the gunman. We know this.’
‘How?’ said Carr.
‘Sasha’s phone,’ said Oleg. ‘You know my friend cracked it? Sasha was in touch with Goncharenko few times.’
‘That’s careless.’
‘Is very careless. Maybe Sasha thought he would kill us all and walk away, no problems. If you didn’t save us, maybe he is right.’
‘Why would Goncharenko want to kill Konstantin?’
‘For money,’ said Oleg. ‘Look, he is gangster, yes? First in Ukraine, now London. Trust me, John, he has killed many people. To have Konstantin Avilov killed is not problem for him. Just another body. Plus also, you and me, he doesn’t want witnesses. No way he would let us live if he can kill us.’
Carr thought about that for a moment: he decided that Kovalev was probably right.
‘So who paid him?’ he said, eventually.
‘That’s what we find out.’
50.
MICK PARRY’S PARCELFORCE van left the Huyton depot at just after 7.30am, and headed north on the A58 to Ashton-in-Makerfield, to make the first of its drops for the day.
Parry had a stonking headache – he’d been out for a few beers with an old Army mate the night before, and ‘a few’ had turned into ‘a lot’.
It had led to a major bollocking from his wife: he hadn’t got home until gone midnight, with Stevie in tow, and they’d both been completely banjaxed.
So he drove cautiously; he strongly suspected that he was still over the limit, and he didn’t want to attract any police attention.
He’d never been trained in counter-surveillance, and he had no reason to be concerned that anyone might be following him, and in any event his van didn’t have a rear view mirror, so he didn’t notice the black Ford Mondeo which had been parked down the road from the depot, and was following him now, three or four cars back.
Dessie had carried out a recce of Parry’s home the previous evening, and had nearly taken him out as he staggered home from the pub, but he’d had another guy with him – a big fella, looked handy – and they’d disappeared inside while a taxi was called to take the mate home.
A proficient burglar, Callaghan had briefly considered a change of plans, and breaking in, once Parry and his missus were alone. It appealed to his sense of the dramatic, but he’d decided against, not because he didn’t want to kill the woman – he was perfectly happy to kill her, too – but because two people murdered in their beds was a much bigger story than a robbery gone wrong, and he didn’t want the heat that those headlines would bring.
No: Robbery gone wrong. That was still the way to play it.
The hardest thing had been establishing which of the many vans leaving the depot was being driven by Parry, and even on a busy industrial estate he couldn’t spend too many mornings just plotted up, waiting, without people starting to notice him.
That meant he was doing it today, as soon as the moment was right.
For now, he bided his time, tucked in well out of sight in a line of morning traffic.
51.
IT WAS COLD and damp – when was it not cold and damp in Belfast? – and the sun was barely visible through the grey morning clouds.
The old man was an early riser, a legacy of forty years carrying hods and mixing muck on building sites, and the streets outside were empty and quiet.
He opened his door to let the dog out into the front garden.
In the near distance, the Black Mountain loomed over the streets of the Turf Lodge.
The dog had done its business, and he was about to walk back into the house when he noticed something lying on the small square of grass in the centre of the cul-de-sac.
Something pale and long which he couldn’t make out.
‘What’s that there?’ he said to himself, and went back inside to fetch his glasses.
He found them by the toaster, slipped on his wife’s pink housecoat and a pair of slippers, and walked back out and along the garden path to the gate, and started across the road.
&
nbsp; The little dog ran ahead of him, but it stopped a few feet from the object and started to bark.
And it was at that moment that the old man started to feel sick.
Because now he could make out what it was that was lying on the grass.
It was the semi-naked body of a woman.
It was not the first body he had seen, but it was a while since the bad old days.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered, crossed himself reflexively. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’
He walked a step or two nearer.
She was lying face down in the dew, in a crucifix position, beaten black and blue and then shot in each ankle, each knee and each elbow.
Only then had she been released from pain by the coup de grâce – a bullet to the back of the head.
Whoever had done it – and the old man had lived long enough to know that it had been an IRA punishment squad – had clearly been sending a message: We’re still here, and you don’t want to fuck with us.
They’d afforded her the small dignity of allowing her to keep her underwear on.
The old man hesitated.
The last thing he wanted to do – the very last thing – was to get involved, but the local kiddies would be walking past on their way to school in the next half-hour or so, and he couldn’t let them see this.
He took off the housecoat, laid it over the body and, head down, hurried back inside to call the confidential hotline.
At about the same moment, on a patch of waste ground in Andersonstown, a guy in his late teens – name of Tomas Kelly – was stepping from the white van which had been stolen the day before and used by the interrogation team.
He had done as instructed and kicked the body out in the Turf well before dawn, but it had not sat well with him. In fact, he felt sick to his stomach: the woman had been not far shy of his grandmother’s age, and the sound of her screams, mixed with her begging and protestations of innocence, and the laughter of the two men who had tortured her… He knew that it would haunt him.
Still, he shouldn’t have joined if he couldn’t deal with this kind of shit: she was a tout, they’d said, and that was how you dealt with touts.
He opened the back of the van and looked at the bloodstained interior. On the floor were two fuel cans. He unscrewed the lids of each and liberally splashed petrol over the inside of the vehicle. Then he picked up a milk bottle with a petrol-soaked rag sticking out of the top.
He retreated twenty feet, lit the rag and threw it at the van.
The whole thing went up with a whoof and then quickly settled back down to a steady blaze.
He felt the heat, and watched the flames for a few seconds, and then he turned on his heel and walked away.
52.
IT TOOK ALMOST two hours, but eventually Oleg Kovalev turned into the driveway of Konstantin Avilov’s place in Petworth.
The security team at the gate verified them and opened the gates, and Oleg crunched on down the half-mile driveway to the main house.
He drove round the house and parked up at the large row of garages which housed Avilov’s collection of classic cars.
A couple of Russian security guys were standing outside the garage at the extreme left, and now one of them disappeared inside.
A moment later, he returned with Konstantin Avilov himself.
‘John,’ he said, holding out a hand and smiling fondly. ‘Good to see you. I want to show you something.’
Carr and Oleg followed Avilov back inside the garage.
Several more of his Russian security detail were standing around, sleeves rolled up. One or two were breathing hard, as though they’d just been working out.
Two men were suspended by their wrists from the ceiling in the centre of the garage, their bare feet a few inches above the floor.
Which was spattered with blood and vomit.
One of the men was either unconscious or dead.
The other Carr recognised – which wasn’t easy, given that his face was a puffy mass of cuts and welts and bruises.
A pink snot bubble popped.
He was still in the land of the living.
‘You remember this guy?’ said Avilov. ‘Runs the restaurant in Mayfair.’
He walked up to the man, who flinched.
‘Dima, I want you to tell my friend John what you just told me,’ he said.
Dima Goncharenko looked at Carr through one swollen eye – the other was shut – and whispered something.
‘I cannae hear you, pal,’ said Carr.
With a supreme effort, the Ukrainian raised his voice.
‘We arranged the hit on Mr Avilov,’ he said. ‘On behalf of a man in Russia called Vitaly Vasiliev. He paid us thirty thousand pounds. We agreed five thousand with Sasha.’
‘You see, John,’ said Avilov. ‘Not even a proper price for me. Very insulting. What else?’
‘Vitaly was very angry that the hit failed. I was supposed to find another man to kill Konstantin, also Oleg, also you.’
Carr looked at him. ‘That’s just fucking bad manners,’ he said. ‘Mind, you wouldn’t be the first to try.’
‘Sorry,’ said Dima. ‘I promise… We will go to Russia and kill Vitaly instead.’
Avilov chuckled. ‘I trust you, of course,’ he said.
Carr hardly heard them. He was too busy computing what level of shit they were all now in, and how best to get out of it.
The Russians were being unbelievably casual about all of this: it could only be that they’d grown used to getting their own way in Moscow.
Over there, rich men could put a stop to police investigations with a simple phone call – and that was the sort of luxury that could make the best of guys sloppy.
Whereas, over here…
He turned to Avilov. ‘Listen, boss,’ he said. ‘And listen well, yes? I’m not squeamish, and I havenae any moral problem with fucking people up, as long as they deserve it. And this pair truly deserve it. But this is fucking amateur hour. You’re playing with fire, here, and you’re in danger of getting very badly burned. I don’t know what you’re planning to do with these cunts – and I do not want you to fucking tell me, ever – but look at the floor. Have you never heard of polythene sheeting? I know you don’t rate our police very highly, but they’re shit hot on forensics. All that blood…’ He paused, and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Jesus. If you have what you need then, whatever you’re going to do, do it quickly. Then this place needs bleaching and steam-cleaning.’
‘Please,’ said Dima Goncharenko, his eyes widening. ‘No…’
Avilov looked at Carr, slightly taken aback, his brow darkening.
‘Let’s talk outside, John,’ he said.
They walked out of the garage, the Ukrainian shouting hoarsely behind them, and shut the door.
‘And the bleach and steam-cleaning is just a quick fix,’ said Carr. ‘You need to have this floor taken up and relaid as soon as you can get a contractor in. Like, tomorrow. Pour a couple of litres of oil on the floor and have the guys smack it about with hammers so that it looks like it needs replacing, too. The builders probably won’t get nosey, but you never know.’
He looked at the two Russians, and sighed.
‘I’m going to speak frankly, Konstantin,’ he said. ‘If you don’t like it, fire me now. But please listen. You’re in the shit here, even if you can’t see it, and the reason you’re in the shit is because you didn’t take my advice in the first place. I told you to take your security seriously, and you didn’t. Remember?’
The Russian nodded.
‘This isn’t Russia, boss,’ said Carr. ‘I know guys like you can do whatever the fuck you like over there, within reason, but this is England. You havenae got the British government onside, and you cannae pay the Met police off. If they’re onto you, you won’t be able to bribe your way out of it, not with a million pounds. Not with a billion.’
‘If, Johnny,’ said Oleg. ‘How they get onto us?’
Carr nodded towards the garage. ‘How did
you get hold of them?’ he said.
‘Two of my guys picked them up last night. Dima outside his restaurant. The other at his flat.’
‘How do you know they weren’t seen? What about CCTV?’
‘They’re professionals,’ said Oleg.
‘I’m sure they are,’ said Carr. ‘But the best people make mistakes, get caught out.’ He paused. ‘How did they get them here?’
‘Transit van,’ said Oleg.
‘So let me paint a picture for you,’ said Carr. ‘Tonight your man there is not going to turn up at the restaurant. Okay, maybe he misses the odd night. But two nights? With no phone call? Sooner or later, someone’s going to wonder where he is. It’s going to get out. Maybe via the rumour mill. Maybe someone just calls the police – one of the legit employees at the restaurant, say. Either way, it will get to them, and the police will be very interested. Don’t forget, they know exactly who and what this Dima guy really is. So they’ll do the cameras, and they’re going to see two men carrying something into a Transit van somewhere in Mayfair.’
He looked at them.
Both had their eyes fixed on him.
He had their full attention now, that was for sure.
‘Have you heard of ANPR?’
Oleg nodded, and then looked away, embarrassed at his own carelessness.
Avilov shook his head.
‘All the major roads in the UK are covered by cameras that record the traffic. Chances are they’ll follow that van all the way out to somewhere near here. And then they’re going to start wondering who has property out this way, and they’ll be especially interested in talking to anyone with a name that ends in ov or ski.’
‘So what you suggesting?’ said Avilov.
‘Where are the two guys who brought them here?’
Oleg nodded at the men standing outside the garage.
‘Okay. These guys need to take their phones a long way away and destroy them. The SIMs, too. Cell site analysis will show them there and here. That’s some bad juju, Oleg, you know that.’
Oleg Kovalev nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re right, Johnny. Fuck.’