Quinn appears in the hallway.
‘Tea or coffee?’ he mouths.
‘Excuse me one second, boss,’ Archer says. She shields the mic on her phone. ‘Tea, thanks.’
‘Milk and sugar?’
‘Just milk.’
Quinn nods and disappears up the hallway and into the kitchen.
Bates continues, ‘OK. Understood. I’ll see what I can do. By the way, I don’t need to remind you that Clare Pierce plummeted from grace after the arrest of DI Rees. You will need to tread carefully.’
‘I will. Thanks, Charlie.’
‘Good luck and keep me up to date.’
‘Will do.’
Archer joins Quinn in the kitchen as he pours milk into two mugs of hot tea.
‘DCI Pierce has set up an incident room. I thought we’d head there now and brief the team.’
Quinn passes Archer a mug of dark, muddy-looking liquid.
She hesitates before taking it.
‘Not strong enough?’ he asks.
Archer reaches for the milk and drops an extra slosh into the mug. ‘It’s fine now.’
*
The incident room reminds Archer of a broad glass lean-to that has been hastily bolted onto the corner of the third floor. The inside is sparse and functional and comprises a conference table, a widescreen TV monitor and two large portable whiteboards.
Archer hears voices outside the incident room and sees four people from the office bantering with Hicks. The team Mark Beattie assembled, she assumes. Her eyes focus on Hicks. His hair is strawberry blond and wiry, his skin pale with acne scars on both cheeks and he seems to have grown a paunch since she last saw him. He looks her way, with a half-smile. The others stop talking and follow his gaze.
Archer feels her stomach churning and breaks eye contact.
Two of the team enter the incident room and introduce themselves.
‘DS Joely Tozer,’ says the first, a stocky blonde woman with an open, warm smile, ‘and this is DC Os Pike. Just call him Pikey. He prefers that.’
‘Oi! I hate that name,’ replies a young black officer, carrying a laptop. ‘Ma’am,’ he says and sits at the table.
‘Hello.’
Hicks loiters outside the incident room allowing his remaining companions to go ahead of him. The first is a tall, thickset man with a shaven head and a woman with short bobbed hair and a waspish face who introduces herself as DC Marian Phillips. Hicks enters with a detached expression. He leans against the wall in a corner.
The last to arrive is a thin woman with shiny jet-black hair cut severely short and finished with a feathered fringe. Her skin is like ivory, her lips a deep red, her cheekbones like daggers. She walks to the top of the incident room, raptor eyes fixed on Archer. She folds her arms and addresses the room.
‘DI Archer, an update please,’ asks DCI Pierce, with no time for polite introductions.
Archer recounts their findings and doesn’t skimp on the detail.
Os raises his hand. ‘Ma’am, I have an ID on one of the other victims. His name is Stan Buxton. He’s homeless, like Billy Perrin.’
‘Very good, Os,’ says Pierce. ‘Let’s work on the assumption the third victim has the same background. Check if there is a connection between the men. We may have a killer, or killers, targeting the homeless.’
Archer speaks. ‘The killers, whether they are one or more, have promised more will follow. We should assume this means more victims.’
Pierce adds, ‘Find out if any more homeless have been reported missing. We’ll need a court order to have the videos and pictures of the victims taken down from the Internet.’ She looks to the woman with the bobbed hair. ‘Marian, please take care of that. Can you also look into the council records and see if an application was made for the exhibition?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Me and Pikey can handle friends and families, ma’am,’ says Tozer.
‘Stop calling me that, Bulldozer!’
Tozer punches him playfully on the arm.
‘Os, look into the ANPR system and find the details of that van.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Archer’s phone buzzes in her jeans pocket. She removes it and reads a message from Klara containing the name and address of the van owner, and three ANPR shots of a large battered Ford van. Klara’s timing is, as ever, perfect.
‘Are we keeping you, DI Archer?’ asks Pierce.
Archer hears Hicks’s snort.
‘No, ma’am. I have the delivery van registration details from the NCA. Perhaps DS Quinn and I could head there immediately.’
‘The NCA . . .?’
‘The pictures have gone viral. One of their analysts has jumped on the case.’
Archer can almost feel Pierce bristling. ‘Have they now? How fortuitous that you have a direct line.’
Archer holds Pierce’s gaze but doesn’t respond.
‘Go,’ says Pierce.
Archer addresses the thickset officer next to Hicks. ‘What’s your name?’
‘DC Felton,’ he replies, ‘ma’am,’ he adds as an afterthought.
She turns to Hicks, who wears a faux smile. ‘DI Hicks and DC Felton. Could you go to Trafalgar Square and start asking round local businesses, shops, bars, restaurants and check if anyone saw anything early this morning.’
Hicks’s smile disappears from his face.
‘Thank you all,’ says Archer and hurries out of the incident room with Quinn by her side.
5
A
RCHER AND QUINN SIGN OUT a squad car and make their way to Streatham and the home address of Josef Olinski, the registered owner of the van used to deliver the three bodies to The Connection at St Martin’s.
Archer has typed the address into the satellite navigation system. As Quinn drives, Archer uses her phone to find the address on Google Maps, zooming in on the photograph of the property, a tired-looking Victorian red-brick house with a faded pale blue door. It takes them twenty-five minutes to steer through traffic and navigate the backstreets of the Streatham estate.
‘There,’ says Archer, pointing at the house.
Quinn pulls over. They step out of the car and scan the surrounding area. The houses are shabby, the gardens overgrown and the road pitted with holes. To Archer this is just another forgotten estate, neglected by an underfunded, or uncaring, council. A scruffy, one-eyed cat leers at them from the top of a weathered power-box.
As they walk to the front door Archer glances at the ground-floor bay windows for a sign of life. She sees a shadow move behind net curtains.
‘Someone’s home,’ she says, ringing the bell.
After three unanswered rings she peers through the letterbox. A door in the inner hallway opens. A pair of legs covered in pink leggings appear. The owner of the leggings opens the front door and a short woman frowns at them. She is holding a furious red-faced baby with streaming eyes and a snotty nose.
‘What is it?’ asks the woman, her eyes darting nervously between Archer and Quinn, her accent unmistakably Eastern European.
Archer shows her ID. ‘Detective Inspector Archer and this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Quinn.’
‘What do you want?’
‘May we come in?’
‘Why?’
‘We’d like to speak to Josef Olinski, please,’ says Archer.
‘He is working. Why you want him? What has he done?’
‘May we come in?’
The woman seems unsure and considers this for a moment before reluctantly leading them into the living room, which is sparsely furnished but tidy and clean, with an overpowering scent of fake pine. On the wall above the fireplace is a framed family photo of the woman, the child and a slim man Archer presumes is Josef Olinski. He is smiling with his arms wrapped tightly around the woman and child. It’s a happy scene.
Archer notices the wedding band on the woman’s fourth finger. ‘Are you Mr Olinski’s wife?’
The baby starts to cry. The woman sits
on the edge of the sofa and tries to comfort it with soothing words.
After a moment, she responds, ‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name?’ asks Quinn, politely.
‘Agata.’
‘Can you tell us where he is, Agata?’
‘Why?’
‘We would just like to ask him a few questions.’
‘But what did he do?’
‘We’d just like to talk to him. That is all,’ says Quinn.
The baby squirms and tries to break free from her grip.
‘He isn’t here.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Working.’
‘Can you give us the address?’
‘He works with his brother Herman. They have delivery firm.’
‘Is he there now?’
‘He could be.’
The baby is becoming more restless. Agata sighs heavily and places the child on the floor, allowing it the freedom to crawl around and do its own thing. There is a small cabinet to the side of the sofa, with a mobile phone on top. The woman reaches across and retrieves a folded sheet of glossy paper from the top drawer. She hands it to Archer. It’s a flyer containing the address and contact details of the Anytime Delivery Brothers.
‘Thank you.’
Agata looks down at her phone. ‘My husband is good man. He isn’t criminal.’
‘We just want to ask him a few questions,’ repeats Archer.
‘Whatever you think he has done, he hasn’t done it. He is honest man.’
‘Please do not phone your husband, Agata,’ says Quinn.
The woman’s neck flushes. Her hand tightens on the mobile phone.
‘It will only make things worse.’
Agata pales and reluctantly places the phone back on the cabinet.
*
The Anywhere Delivery Brothers’ offices are located out of Streatham in a remote site off the A23. Archer sees a spiral of black smoke above a row of abandoned boxy one-storey office buildings.
‘It’s one of those,’ says Quinn.
‘I don’t like the look of that smoke,’ says Archer.
‘Me neither.’
Archer jolts back as Quinn steps on the accelerator. She grips the dashboard, unhooks the car radio and calls for backup. Quinn steers the speeding car around a tight bend and up a bumpy, gritty slip road. Ahead, parked outside an office at the far end of the road, Archer sees an Anytime Delivery Brothers delivery van and two other vans engulfed in flames. Through the office windows she sees smoke billowing inside. Quinn skids the car to a stop and they both jump out. The stench of kerosene fused with an unsettling burnt pork smell fills the air. She notices that one of the van’s windscreens is shattered with a small hole at the centre.
A bullet hole.
‘Someone’s in the van!’ shouts Archer.
Quinn rushes to the police radio and calls for an ambulance, but Archer knows it’s already too late. She hurries to the rear of the van and tries to open the doors, but the fire has spread inside and they are too hot to touch. Above the flames she hears a harrowing scream from inside the burning building. She looks around and through the window sees a shadowy figure limping blindly through black smoke. Archer sprints toward the office, pulls open the front door with the cuff of her coat and is punched by a giant fist of heat and smoke from the flames blocking the doorway. Coughing, she backs away as the door slams closed.
‘Hello!’ she calls through the window.
The fire crackles and spits and within seconds it seems to roar in fury.
‘Help is on the way!’ shouts Quinn.
‘Someone is inside!’
Quinn is suddenly beside her. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’
Archer steps back, shielding her eyes from the heat and smoke. She hears a thudding sound and looks across to see the blackened figure of a man pounding at the windows. A shudder surges through Archer’s body at the sight of his face. Fire has engulfed his whole body and has disintegrated his lips leaving him with a ghastly grimace; his terrified, pleading eyes widen with pain in the searing hot temperature. The heat causes the windows to blow, one by one. Quinn rushes forward and with his hands tucked into his sleeves hauls the man through the shattered pane. He falls to the ground like something inhuman, his flesh charred, his jacket and trousers ablaze.
Fire extinguisher.
Archer sprints to their vehicle and scrambles through an untidy jumble of standard issue police equipment – forensic suits, an enforcer, cones, a torch. There’s no extinguisher, but there is a fire blanket. She unfurls it, runs back to the man from the building and throws it over his burning body. Both she and Quinn pat down, killing the flames. She is thankful to hear the sound of sirens approaching.
Police. Fire. Ambulance.
At last.
The paramedics waste no time in taking the badly burnt man to the nearest hospital, St George’s on Blackshaw Road. No one could survive that, Archer thinks, as she watches the ambulance charge away from the scene, its siren screaming for the roads ahead to clear. She wonders which of the brothers it is and tries not to think of the family portrait in Agata Olinski’s living room. Instead she clings to a fragment of hope that not all is lost for the poor man. A second vehicle – the death car – has arrived to remove the charred remains from the van. With two constables keeping passers-by at bay, Archer watches as the Fire Brigade finishes bringing both fires under control. The body is removed from the van and the Chief Fire Officer, a broad man called Flynn, approaches them and removes his helmet.
‘There was a lot of kerosene used on the body in the van and inside the office,’ he says.
‘Did you find anyone else inside?’ asks Archer.
‘We didn’t, fortunately.’
‘Small mercies. Thank you, Chief.’
‘We’ll get going, but two of my team will remain to check the building is safe for Forensics. I should stay out of that building if I were you. It’s not safe.’
‘We will,’ replies Archer, who has every intention of doing the opposite.
She returns to the boot of the car as Flynn and his crew leave, grabs the torch she spotted.
With the Chief Fire Officer gone, Archer addresses his two staff members. ‘The boss said we could have a quick look around.’ It is a small white lie, but one that could yield results.
One of the men replies, ‘Erm . . . I’m not sure—’
‘We won’t be long,’ Archer interrupts, and makes her way inside to avoid any negotiation.
The inside is black and reeks of damp ash. The walls and ceiling are sodden. Water drips and splashes into pools like dark mirrors scattered across the floor. The space is smaller than she expected, comprising a ten-by-ten room, a kitchenette and a toilet.
‘Someone evidently wanted this place wiped from the face of the Earth,’ comments Quinn.
‘By burning the evidence,’ agrees Archer.
‘Doesn’t seem to be the kind of place to put bodies inside large cabinets,’ says Quinn.
‘My thoughts exactly. Still, there were secrets here. Secrets possibly that the Olinskis knew nothing about.’
‘So you think they weren’t complicit?’
‘I’m not concluding anything yet. However, if you press me, I’d say they were just two stooges caught up in something they knew nothing about.’
A fruitless search reveals nothing. Everything, all paperwork, computers and records, have been destroyed.
*
Archer and Quinn make the trip to St George’s, where the receptionist directs them to the ICU.
‘He’s in a bad way,’ says a nurse, a young Spanish woman. ‘We’ve cut away what was left of his clothes and treated him as best we could. Now we just have to wait.’
‘What are his chances?’ asks Quinn.
‘I couldn’t say, just yet,’ replies the nurse.
There is a sombreness in her tone that suggests she knows more than she is willing to admit.
‘Where are his clothes?’ as
ks Archer.
‘I don’t know. I expect they are in in a bag somewhere.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
‘Of course.’
Quinn says, ‘He was in a bad way. Don’t you think that might be clutching at straws?’
‘It’s worth a shot.’
The nurse returns with a clear plastic bag of charred clothing and hands them across.
‘May I borrow some gloves?’
The nurse hands across a box of blue disposable gloves. Archer pulls them on and begins to fish through the items in the bag. She takes out what looks like the remains of a jacket and turns it over. Something falls to the floor. A damaged pocket diary. She feels her heart quickening as she picks it up and pages through it. Josef Olinski’s name and company address are written on the inside cover. The pages are blackened but there are scant details, written in Polish, entered on the date the bodies were delivered to The Connection. A large tick has been drawn on the cabinet delivery date. There is also the scrawl of a mobile number.
‘Bingo,’ says Quinn. ‘Could be the killer’s number.’
Archer takes a photo with her phone.
‘Possibly. I’ll have my contact at the NCA run a check on it. There may be some more leads in this diary. I don’t suppose there are any Polish speakers at the station?’
‘Not that I know of. I’ll get the word out for a translator.’
‘In the event that Olinski makes it, we need a round-the-clock police guard.’
‘Leave it with me.’
6
F
OUR HOURS HAVE PASSED SINCE Archer and Quinn tried to put the flames out on Josef Olinski’s body. At the time, adrenaline and training had kicked in, forcing Archer to act quickly, and the gravity of what she witnessed hasn’t quite hit her until now. She feels a cold shiver inside, but keeps it to herself as Quinn fumbles with a cable connecting a laptop to the incident-room monitor.
‘Neha is on her way to Agata Olinski’s,’ he says as he shakes the cable plug, ‘and Os is looking into a translator.’
The monitor blinks into life.
‘It seems to be working,’ says Archer.
Quinn opens the CCTV file Os has acquired, and displays the recording of the cabinets being delivered to Charing Cross Road earlier that morning.
The Art of Death Page 4