A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  ‘Yes?’ he snapped.

  It was Tran, no mistake.

  ‘Mr Grainger has not called me back, Mr Lock.’

  ‘I told you, he’s unwell. He can’t come to the phone right now —’

  ‘Then take the phone to Grainger, Mr Lock. That’s my advice.

  Or perhaps I should come over in person?’ It was an evident threat.

  Grainger’s features were flinty and drawn, as if he was very cold.

  Lock’s frustrations snapped like something stretched too far.

  ‘Sure — why not?’ he said, then thrust the phone towards the old man. ‘Why not?’ he repeated to Grainger, who crouched back from it as if from something that would brand or electrocute him. ‘Talk to your Vietnamese friend, Vaughn, then maybe I can be on my way.’

  He dropped the receiver into Grainger’s lap, where it was inspected with one shivering hand, and turned away towards the door. He closed it behind him with an emphatic noise, intending — paused.

  He’d intended to walk out, to allow his frustrated anger to propel him, not even thinking of — picked up the receiver in the hall, very gently, very slowly.

  He held his breath, held the mouthpiece away from his lips, hand over it, heard his heart thudding. What the hell was he?

  ‘- been ill,’ he heard Grainger protesting, unaware that he was being overheard. ‘My boy was killed. Scum killed my son,’ he insisted.

  ‘My old friend, my sincere sympathies. Do you think I would have intruded on your grief if matters were not urgent?’

  Silence, for a long moment. Lock heard the housekeeper rattling crockery in the kitchen, the murmur of her voice and the butler’s reply. Felt exposed and cheap hanging onto the hall telephone. The silence went on, broken only by the old man’s ragged, slow breathing. Then:

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I do not understand, my friend. You must know why we have to talk. Why I have had to come personally to Phoenix?’

  ‘Billy —’ Grainger breathed, with a kind of appalled suspicion.

  ‘It is now your problem, now that Billy … You understand that? I have given assurances — I was given assurances. I wish I could delay, but there are firm commitments to be met, and no sign of the red horse. I must have satisfactory answers, my friend.’

  Menace floated like an oil-slick on the words, giving their rhythm an ominous calm. Then Grainger’s breathing was the only sound; quicker, lighter.

  ‘You swear to me you had nothing I’

  ‘Come, my friend, let us not indulge in fantasies!’ Tran said quickly; so quickly that Lock knew he suspected an eavesdropper. You swear to me you had nothing …?

  He felt nausea churn in his stomach, bit at the back of his throat. You swear you had nothing … Beth’s composed, bluish features, staring up from the deep metal drawer in the police mortuary. No — no, he told himself.

  ‘What of the red horse?’ Tran asked. ‘When can I expect delivery?’

  ‘I don’t know’ Grainger wailed. ‘You know I don’t know these things!’

  ‘Then find out, my friend. Find out quickly. I am under a great deal of pressure. There are pledges to honour. I do not wish to lose face. You understand?’ Grainger did not reply. ‘You will find out — soon?’

  Eventually, through agitated breathing: ‘Yes, damn you, Tran yes’

  The receiver was thrust down and Lock, startled into old cunning, put his down quickly. He had no doubt that Tran knew that he had been overheard. But had not been concerned.

  He stood in the wide hall, staring at the paintings on the wall

  — American primitives and impressionists — his head whirling, his hands clenching and unclenching. Teeth noisy in his head, anger like a migraine at his temples. He glared at the telephone as if to blame it for his situation, wanting above everything not to have heard, not to guess, not to know…

  Red horse. Delivery. Commitments. You swear to me you had nothing …

  He blundered angrily into the lounge. Grainger was hunched forward on his chair, the extension still in his lap, his hand across his chest; his breathing stertorous until Lock’s anger masked it. ‘

  ‘Vaughn — what the hell is going on here?’ he yelled, rigid in front of Grainger. ‘Who the hell is Tran — what is Tran? What the hell have you got to do with horse?’

  Grainger was waving one hand feebly towards him, the other gripping the front of his slack shirt, twisting the green silk into a rag. His eyes were protuberant, his cheeks ashen. He seemed to be trying to ward someone off, someone he sensed behind Lock, someone stronger.

  ‘Billy? Billy and heroin?’ Lock bullied, leaning over Grainger, their faces almost touching. The old man’s breath on Lock’s mouth was moist and urgent. ‘Red horse? Coming out of — Jesus, Vaughn, you? You and Billy together?’ He could not, could not, add the next terrible link … Beth’s murder. There was a reason for her death and it was called heroin. He rubbed one hand across his damp forehead. He seemed to be burning with a fever.

  ‘No!’ Grainger groaned, his mouth crooked. ‘Not Billy, not me-!’ He winced with pain. Lock was unconcerned; the old man was faking. ‘Nothing to do with it … Billy was going to put everything right, he was — was looking into it, going to stop it — people in the corporation, we didn’t knowY

  He attempted to rise to his feet, hand pressed flat against his chest, eyes wide, his other hand grabbing at Lock’s shirt, twisting it into belief in his words, knuckles grinding against Lock’s breastbone.

  Then he fell; awkwardly, heavily, striking the carpet before Lock could grab at him. His hand was still pressed against his chest, his eyes stared sightlessly.

  The police garage was icily cold, even at mid-morning. Vorontsyev wished he’d brought down his fur hat as he stamped his feet, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his fur-lined parka.

  Forensic seemed dilatory and unenthusiastic amid the toylike disassembly of the Iranian’s black Mercedes. He suspected the windscreen wipers, the radiator grille, the badge, maybe most of the car, would eventually disappear, cannibalised. For the moment, however, it lay around him like the shells of long-dead sea creatures thrown by waves onto a concrete, oil-stained beach.

  A patrol car pulled out from its parking spot and growled up the ramp towards the street, its noise hardly distracting him.

  Lubin, limping exaggeratedly, shuffled around the chassis, then the front seats, the other two overalled detectives smoking as they dusted the windscreen and windows for prints. The setting might have been a backstreet garage and their task the respraying of a stolen vehicle.

  Vorontsyev looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. A dozen hours since they’d raided Teplov’s brothel and put this bird up into the air and towards their guns.

  There were no drugs in the Merc — though that had been Dmitri’s fond, concussed hope in the shocked, excited aftermath of the collision, before Vorontsyev had had him taken home.

  The passports meant nothing. He’d locked them in his desk drawer. The Iranian had no address in Novyy Urengoy, but neither did he stay at one of the R &Ś R hostel blocks when enjoying his fortnightly breaks from the gasfield. He stayed at the Gogol, in a suite … three hundred dollars a night, hard currency only or credit card, preferably American. Vorontsyev had taken a photograph around the best hotels as a joke — and the joke had been on him.

  ‘Anything yet?’ he called out, impatient with cold.

  Lubin looked up, his cheerful obsessiveness undiminished.

  And shook his head. Vorontsyev shrugged himself deeper into the parka, stamping his feet more militarily.

  He’d had to send Marfa, with a junior detective she said she could trust, up to the gasfield to check the Iranian’s — well, it was a cover story now, wasn’t it? To check his background, length of employment, acquaintances … to check whether he was even Iranian, since it was what his passport alone asserted, and he had a dozen of them available …

  … and one, only one, with a picture already in it. A Cauca
sian face, a Dutch name, and an innocuous occupation as an accountant. Who was that man, for God’s sake?

  Teplov had known little or nothing of the Iranian. Vorontsyev almost believed him. He rubbed his numb, weary face with his gloved hands as if to imitate the wash he had missed that morning, not having returned to his flat. He’d dozed in his swivel chair at the office. Teplov had said he thought the Iranian had had a racket, but he hadn’t wanted to know and hadn’t asked.

  The girl who’d served him knew him as a regular. She believed he was Iranian. He didn’t want anything unpleasant or rough or back-to-front or upside down, so she had no complaints.

  He’d paid in dollars, always welcome, with a satisfactory tip for the girl.

  What would the post-mortem tell them, anything or nothing?

  He yawned.

  If the Iranian was into something, then he’d have known it was drugs the police were interested in, and if that wasn’t his racket, why had he run? What panicked him if he wasn’t linked to Hussain?

  ‘Sir!’ Lubin called, waving his hand urgently as he bent over a microscope balanced on a rickety folding table beside the wreckage of the dismembered limousine. ‘Sir!’

  He stamped over to Lubin’s table. The other two had already lit new cigarettes and taken their relaxed places on the detached front seats of the Merc.

  ‘What is it? Pond life?’ Vorontsyev grumbled. ‘A biology lesson?’

  Lubin grinned. His good humour was — almost — infectious; would have been at a more reasonable temperature and after proper sleep.

  ‘Fibres. From a coat. I can’t swear to it, sir, I’d have to check it in the Lab’

  ‘He had a coat on. I saw that.’

  ‘No. These fibres — foreign, like his cashmere, granted, but not his. Don’t get too excited, sir, but I think that they’ll match Rawls’ overcoat. The one he died in.’

  What?’

  ‘There’s no blood, sir. Only his. Rawls didn’t die in the car if he was in it — nor was his body carried in the rear or the boot.

  But he sat in the passenger seat at some time, if these fibres match. Expensive wool mixture, colour, weave — they match, I’m sure.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Fingerprints. Perhaps we’ll find Rawls’ among them.’

  ‘Or some of the local mafiosi, maybe?’ He grimaced. ‘OK, get back to the Lab with the prints and the fibres. Confirm Rawls was in the car and who else was with him if possible …’ He rubbed his chin. ‘I’ll get out to the Grainger Hospital and check on the post-mortem. Or hold the pathologist’s ballocks until he does finish!’

  Lubin grinned. ‘Is Dmitri coming in today, sir?’

  ‘I told him not to — I don’t suppose he’ll listen. Good work, if it works. Call me when you have anything. On the mobile.

  And don’t go yelling this all over headquarters.’

  ‘Sir.’ Lubin appeared offended. He added: ‘You ought to check up on Dr Schneider while you’re there’

  Vorontsyev glowered. ‘I will!’ he snapped.

  Vorontsyev hadn’t wanted — still didn’t want — to think about Dr David Schneider. He hadn’t told Dmitri what Marfa had found out from the taxi driver. Perhaps he should have let her talk to Schneider. It was sensitive, but a junior officer’s blunder could be apologised into insignificance. Once he spoke to the deputy director of the Grainger Foundation Hospital Addiction Unit, about his connection with the dead Rawls, then he …

  … might trip alarm bells, he admitted. Rawls’ death was a warning. That much had been obvious. He’d been warned off, too, by Teplov’s pleas of ignorance and veiled hints, by the murder of Hussain and the others in the block of flats. Alarm wires.

  He’d been blundering into them all the way along the path he’d been thrust on.

  He stared at the Iranian’s meatlike corpse on the stainless steel bench. The blood had gone, leaving only its smell, the organs had been removed, the breastbone and ribs parted as neatly as on a chicken served for lunch. The top of the head was missing.

  There was still the faint scent of bone heated by an electric saw, like the smell of teeth being drilled at the dentist.

  All for nothing.

  ‘He hadn’t laboured much at all, and probably not recently,’ the pathologist, Lensky, muttered, his voice gravelly, his grey eyes protruding above his glasses. He was wiping his hands on a towel. Beneath his robe, patchily stained, was the knot of a broad silk tie, vividly patterned. Lensky was well paid by the Foundation. ‘The musculature is soft. The man’s lifestyle was cushioned. You said a rig worker? What’s the matter, Alexei losing your touch?’

  ‘That’s what his papers say.’

  ‘Expensive dental work. A neat, private-clinic scar where he’d had an appendectomy — sometime ago, by the look of it. He’s been well off for a long while now, 1 imagine-.’ He sighed and scratched at his wiry grey beard, then adjusted his bifocals, at once studying Vorontsyev intently. ‘I take it you haven’t any idea who he is?’

  Vorontsyev shook his head gloomily.

  ‘There was alcohol in the stomach and the bloodstream. Not a very devout Moslem, was he?’

  ‘I’d imagined not. Mr Al-Jani, from a village outside Tehran, is not at all what he seems. He stayed regularly at the Gogol, in a suite, he tipped generously, he threw parties, he met a great many people … all of whom, apparently, hadn’t a name between them!’ He snorted with a kind of weary disgust; or defeat. Lensky’s expression indicated that he was unsure.

  ‘Where will you look — for the real him?’ he asked, gesturing towards the tidy, aseptic remains on the steel bench.

  ‘Powder?’ Vorontsyev suddenly blurted, staring down at the sightless eyes. ‘Traces of anything on his fingers?’

  ‘Explosives, you mean? No. Why?’

  Vorontsyev was recalling the man’s flight, his escape in the Merc, the sense he’d had of purposefulness rather than panic as the big German car had been coming at him.

  ‘Just — like a double exposure on a snapshot, I keep remembering, seeing something professional… Never mind.’

  ‘No,’ Lensky murmured. ‘You sleeping well?’

  ‘Well enough.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘What about the bodies from the flat that blew up?’ Vorontsyev asked hurriedly, as if resisting the pressure of something closing around him.

  ‘Your young man, Lubin, was right. Fragments of rubber from a balloon, shards from a fragmentation grenade. They were murdered.’

  ‘That nurse who was there?’

  ‘I didn’t know him. As I told you, he wasn’t an addict. He must have been a friend — or a pusher. Or both.’

  ‘I’ll take the autopsy report, have a look at it.’

  ‘As you wish. What’s the matter with you, Alexei? We don’t even play poker together any more. You’re hiding yourself away ‘

  ‘Don’t start, Ivan — not that tack again, please.’

  ‘You used to be a good officer, Alexei. Too good. Just as I was once an idealistic doctor. Now …’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Something tells me this is looking as if it’s too big for you.

  Forgive my bluntness, Alexei. If it made you happy hiding away, I’d say nothing. It doesn’t. Me — I quite like the quiet life, the routine and the good pay in US dollars. But not you. You’re sitting on your hands and you don’t like it!’

  Angrily, Vorontsyev growled: ‘What are you — my mother or my priest?’

  ‘Just your friend. Your oldest friend in this frontier town. As I said, forgive my intrusion into what is a private grief.’

  ‘Grief?’

  Lensky’s eyes were wetly sad. Irony sat strangely on his short, dumpy, comfortable form.

  ‘The town’s got away from you, Alexei, and you can’t forgive it or yourself.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘It is. You’ve got a good team of people — not like the riffraff in Vice or the dozens on the take in other dep
artments. Lubin, for example. You should cherish him. And the girl — Marfa?

  Sharp as a knife, shines as brightly. And poor old Dmitri, the faithful borzoi … And you. The man who’s lost his purpose ‘

  ‘Have you been saving this homily for just such an occasion?’

  Lensky grinned through the hedge of his beard, his teeth displayed like white eggs in a nest.

  ‘Maybe. But once you’d have been twitching like a bloodhound on a lead, badgerjng me for every detail, climbing up the walls because you couldn’t solve a mystery! Now look at you!’

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk. How’s the latest bimbo?’

  ‘I don’t need to be just, Alexei. Something in you does. That’s the difference between us.’

  ‘And if you’re right? If I have this hunger for justice? What do I do — confronted with this town, which is just a microcosm of the whole damn country anyway?’

  ‘You’d better pull the whole temple down, then, Samson — if that’s what it lakes.’

  ‘You think I can?’

  ‘Be a middle-aged idealist — before it’s too late. You’re fated to be a visionary of some kind, after all.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Take my word for it.’

  They stood in silence, for perhaps a minute, as if confronting one another, the Iranian between them like a wasted career, a spent life. And beyond him and the mortuary was Dmitri’s daughter, Dmitri’s ruined wife, the dead Hussain, the murdered Rawls … and the unspeakable, corrupt town.

  ‘Jesus — you don’t want much from me, do you?’ Vorontsyev breathed.

  ‘It’s what you want — really want. After all.’ Lensky smiled like a patriarch; then at once like a comfortable, lazy, clean-nosed, eye-on-the-pension friend who could be easily ignored.

  ‘What do you know about Dr Schneider, Ivan?’ Vorontsyev snapped out, grinning.

  ‘Of the Addiction Unit? Not much. Young, idealistic, energetic

  — very Ivy League American. Or how I imagine such people to be. I quite like him. Pleasant company. Why?’

  Vorontsyev shook his head.

  ŚNothing special. He was a friend of Rawls, the dead Grainger executive.’