by Parker Bilal
Over the top of the office unit dividers they could see the superintendent coming through the door.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said Wheeler, as he reached their corner of the room. ‘I was looking for you earlier.’
‘Just popped out for lunch, sir.’
‘Right, well, bring me up to speed. Where are you on the Tube murder?’
‘Officially, we’re not involved.’ Marsh sifted through the paperwork on her desk. ‘Right now we’ve got a stabbing in King George’s Park. A couple of serious assaults. A joyriding incident that ended in tears and a domestic battery charge in Freetown.’
‘Good, sounds good.’ Wheeler cleared his throat. ‘Am I right in thinking that you are … er, in contact with Cal?’
‘Well …’ Marsh glanced at Milo. Wheeler raised a hand.
‘I’m not looking for someone to blame, DS Marsh.’
‘I have been in touch with him, yes.’
‘Is he making any progress? With the case, I mean.’
‘Hard to say, sir.’
‘Okay, well, try to keep up with developments.’
‘Will do, sir.’ Marsh paused. ‘Do you think DCI Pryce will change his mind about the case?’
‘Stranger things have happened at sea.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Carry on, Detective Sergeant. Just carry on.’
As Wheeler walked out of the room, Milo turned to Kelly. ‘Do you ever get the feeling you don’t really know what’s going on around here?’
‘Tell me about it.’
32
Puntland Private Cars was run by a Somali by the name of Lal Ferit, a rotund man in a brown checkered shirt with a receding hairline. His office was a hole in a wall in Union Street in Southwark. A medium-sized kitten could have swung happily in that confined space, but not much more. Ferit sat behind a window plastered with lists of rates and destinations, along with a blizzard of notes advertising everything from rooms for rent to Kerry’s Curried Goat and the Taipan Massage Service (discreet).
‘Mr Ferit?’
The jaundiced eyes ran up and down. ‘Salesman?’ he asked wearily.
‘No.’
‘Journalist?’
‘Wrong again.’ Drake placed a business card on the narrow counter. Ferit turned his head to read what was written there without lifting it.
‘Crane & Drake Investigations.’ He gave a half laugh and reached for a drumstick inside a box of ‘halal’ fried chicken. ‘What’s this, some kind of insurance pitch?’
‘I’m interested in one of your clients.’
‘Yeah? Well, we’re running a cab service not a gossip column.’
‘Can I explain how this works?’
‘Don’t mind me.’ He chewed steadily.
‘Well, as you may know, like everything else nowadays, the government no longer has the resources to keep on a staff of their own investigators, so when, say, the Inland Revenue wants to conduct an enquiry into a business they call in an outside agency to do the legwork.’
‘I knew it.’ Ferit’s jaws stopped moving. ‘You’re asking for money.’
‘I’m not here for money.’
Ferit tossed the half-finished chicken leg back into the box and dragged a greasy napkin across his mouth.
‘All my books is in order, innit.’
‘Well, that’s good start. But I’m afraid I can’t just take your word for it.’
The man looked at him for a moment, then he spoke in a language Drake didn’t understand. There was movement inside the room and Drake saw there was someone else in there with Ferit. A much darker man sitting against the wall in the shadows. He got to his feet, opened the door of the office and looked Drake over before stepping out into the street and disappearing. Ferit sniffed.
‘Must be another way of dealing with this.’
‘Maybe there is.’
Ferit reached under the counter for a packet of cigarettes and lit one, blowing a stream of smoke over his shoulder.
‘Who you interested in?’
‘A solicitor by the name of Nathanson.’
‘I know who it is. He’s a regular.’ Ferit studied Drake. ‘I start talking about my customers and their affairs … I mean, where does that leave me?’
‘That’s not really my concern.’
Ferit considered his position. ‘We don’t have nothing to do with his business.’
‘Once a person comes under scrutiny we have to look at everyone connected to him.’ He glanced round at the office behind Ferit. ‘You understand that, right?’
‘You’re saying this could come back on me?’
‘I’m saying when it comes to financial misconduct we have to look under every stone.’
‘Come on, we just drive the man.’
Drake gave a shrug. ‘It’s how it works.’
‘Okay, so back up a bit, right? I can’t tell you more than I know.’
‘Well, then, let’s start there.’
Ferit tapped the keys on the grubby computer next to him. ‘Most of the time it’s a regular late-night job. Dalston Junction to Pimlico. Kingsland Road to Alderney Street.’
‘That’s quite a good ride. You must make some money out of a regular customer like that.’
‘We offer a reliable service.’
‘I’ll bet you do. How does Mr Nathanson pay you?’
Ferit’s eyes were wary. He looked at Drake as a man might look at a con artist who you know is trying to pull a fast one, you just haven’t figured out how yet.
‘He doesn’t.’
‘How so?’
Ferit shrugged. ‘Company account.’
‘Who runs the account?’
Ferit pulled a face.
‘Look, we’ve just been through all this, remember? We’re on the same side. I’m the human face of the system. If I’m happy, everyone’s happy. End of story. If not, then I file a report and things take their own course. I can’t help you after that.’
Ferit mulled over that one for a while, before reaching down to dig out a box file from under the counter. He flipped it open and licked his index finger. While he searched through his accounts, Drake let his eye roam over the office behind the man. It was furnished with odds and ends: tubular chairs with torn covers, filing cabinets, a tan sofa covered in PVC, an acrylic rug on the floor like a dirty zebra. On the wall was a calendar. The picture was an image of the faithful gathered in Mecca, circling the strange black cube of the Ka’aba. Across the top of the picture was the name Green Gardens Halal Meat Packing, Southall.
‘There you go.’ Ferit passed over a strip of paper. ‘Just keep me out of it, yeah?’
‘I’ll do my best.’ Drake hesitated. ‘Let me ask you one last question. If I wanted to transfer money to somewhere in the world, could you do that for me?’
‘Why don’t you try Western Union?’
‘I don’t like Western Union. They charge too much in fees.’
‘I hear you.’ Ferit tapped the counter in front of him, still unsure what he was dealing with. ‘Come back in a few days, maybe I can help.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said Drake.
33
When Jindy looked up from his telephone, he didn’t quite believe his eyes. He was sitting on a bench outside the synagogue in Bevis Marks. The little yard was quiet. His lunch was arranged alongside him. A large plastic cup held what looked like a raspberry smoothie while on his lap was a Styrofoam container and a mound of pasta out of which a plastic fork protruded.
‘You look surprised to see me,’ said Crane as she sat down.
‘I … I didn’t expect to see you again.’
She leaned over and lifted his Top Gun shades. The bruise under the left eye was now an array of colours.
‘That’s coming up nicely. What did you tell people at work?’
‘That I’d walked into a door.’
She gave a snort of laughter. ‘Not very original. Did they believe you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When are you going to Germany?’
‘In about a week.’
‘I need you to do something for me.’
Jindy shifted in his seat. ‘Something? What kind of something?’
‘There’s a company I need to find out about.’
Jindy began to relax. He realised that he was not in immediate danger, that she had come to him for help.
‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? Financial advice?’
‘Among other things.’ He reached for the smoothie and took a slurp.
‘I want to know if there is a connection between two companies. Can you do that?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, I’m really busy these days with the move and everything.’
Crane looked at him but said nothing. Jindy put down his cup.
‘I mean, I’ll see what I can do.’
‘That’s not going to be good enough, I’m afraid.’
Jindy gave a half shrug. ‘I can’t promise.’
Crane slid along the bench towards him. Jindy instinctively drew back.
‘What do you think will happen if you don’t help me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘What kind of a person are you?’
Jindy frowned. ‘I’m sorry? I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean, you have a job. A nice job. You make a lot of money. You’re about to transfer to Germany. That’s all fine. But what if someone was to start digging?’
‘Digging?’ His expression froze.
‘Looking into your past, say. The kind of people who know you for who you really are.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked slowly.
She slid closer, until they were almost touching. ‘How many women have you hurt? The other night wasn’t the first time, was it?’
Jindy decided enough was enough. He made to get up. Crane took his hand and twisted it until he sat down again. The smoothie toppled to the ground and rolled, painting a crimson smear across the paving stones. A woman walking by glanced over at them.
‘You’re hurting me,’ he whined.
‘You have no idea.’ She kept the pressure on, turning his hand over across his wrist. ‘You don’t like taking no for an answer, do you.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘I have the names of two women who lodged complaints and then withdrew them. You like intimidating women, making them do what you want.’
Jindy stiffened. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You’ve never had any trouble with your employers. It’s never come up, or if it has it was never considered a problem. That’s about to change. Do you know the name of your new boss in Frankfurt?’
‘What’s that’s got to do with anything?’
‘I’ll tell you. It’s Schact. H.L. Schact, to be exact. Or Frau Hilda Schact. She takes a different view.’
‘What?’
‘She takes a dim view of men who enjoy hurting women. She was herself a victim of domestic violence and she will not tolerate any form of chauvinism under her command.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Why? I thought you of all people would understand that. Because I can.’
Jindy stared down at the floor. ‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘Tell me what you want.’
34
The name of the accounting firm turned up little of interest. Drake sat at home on his sofa with his laptop and dug up as much as was available to the public online. He made a couple of calls but by the end of it couldn’t really say that he had much more than what he already knew.
Barnaby Nathanson’s expenses were paid by an accounting firm that, by coincidence or not, also happened to do the accounts of one Marco Foulkes. So far, so unremarkable. Foulkes was there on their company website. No doubt someone had decided that there was value in advertising the fact that they were taking care of a celebrity writer’s tax returns. Drake made a note of the firms that were listed. He would try and get Milo to do a little more digging, assuming he and Kelly were still willing to play.
Drake went to the kitchen and reached for the bottle of Jamaican rum. He squeezed the last drops out of half a lime before dropping the shell into the glass for good measure. Then he stood for a moment staring out of the window, his eye following the flashing lights of a helicopter that buzzed across the night sky. Some wealthy crook on his way home from the City to his pile in Surrey. The skyline was like an upturned crystal ball in which the fortunes of the obscenely rich showered sparks of light down over the ordinary lives of mere mortals.
Drake took a long sip from his drink and turned his attention to the other thing that had been nagging him all afternoon. The calendar on the wall of Lal Ferit’s office. He typed in the words Green Gardens Halal Meat Packing and a link came up to a website that was both rudimentary and unhelpful. It showed a picture of a warehouse and an address in Southall. Parked alongside the loading bays were half a dozen vans ranging from compact vehicles to large white box trucks. There was something about that picture that was familiar. He just couldn’t place it. That night he slept badly. He woke in the middle of the night and rolled over to stare at the liquid digits that read 03:36 and knew he wasn’t going to sleep again.
The turmoil in his head kept leading him in circles and all of them led back to the inquiry. He hadn’t thought about it for ages. Or rather, he had tried not to think about it, which was a different thing altogether. It had been the source of countless nights like this, tossing and turning, unable to rest. Now that demon was back to haunt him again.
He could still picture the conference room on the third floor of the Curtis Green Building. The newly refurbished Scotland Yard appeared to be made of glass. The entrance, the tables, the walls and the long windows overlooking the Thames. Transparency. The catchphrase of a new era. Drake had put on his best suit for the occasion. Shiny around the knees and elbows, with a couple of threads waving loose on one lapel. He’d even managed to find a clean shirt and a tie. None of that was enough to lift the feeling of a caveman being brought out of the darkness to be scrutinised. Generally, he was uncomfortable in such places, a reminder that when it came down to it he was a small and ill-fitting cog in a very large machine.
From his left came the nasal hissing of his union rep. A sandy-haired man with nicotine stains on his fingers and what sounded like a bad case of asthma. He spoke in monosyllables, none of which added up to much. So far he hadn’t said anything worth repeating. Opposite Drake sat Superintendent Marshall. A tall man with an egg-like dome of a head. He lifted his eyes from the pages in front of him only to make sure that Drake was still there and hadn’t nodded off.
‘For the record, this is the closing session of the hearing into the shooting of Goran Malevich. Present are Detective Sergeant Patel and myself representing the DPS. Also present are Detective Inspector Drake and his representative, Mr Stoughton, along with Detective Inspector Pryce, who is here in observer capacity only.’
Drake recalled pointedly not looking in the direction of Pryce. He knew that there was something else going on here and that Pryce was the driving force. If not for him, this whole matter would have been laid to rest months ago. To say he blamed Drake would be an understatement. Pryce appeared to have decided to make this his life’s mission, to see Drake taken down for this.
‘Let us quickly summarise the details of the case,’ Marshall went on. ‘DS Patel?’
The junior WPC shuffled her papers and made the appropriate bleating sounds. Clearly she was present to stamp out any possible accusations of racial bias. Drake had deliberately not made any such claims. He’d also kept out of the report and all of his subsequent accounts any reference to Pryce’s behaviour. He didn’t want to give him an excuse to keep going with this one. Keep it clean, for the moment at least. If the case went against him, he was going to need everything he could get his hands on to launch an appeal.
While Patel outlined the facts of the case Marshall was starin
g at the ceiling. They were all familiar with the details by now. Drake had given in and glanced up casually to find Pryce glaring at him. He found himself thinking back over his time on the inside of the organisation.
Goran Malevich was a beast who had crawled from the mud of another age, or so it had seemed to Drake the first time they crossed paths. The White Knights had emerged from the Serbian militias in the Balkans in the 1990s conflict during the breakdown of the old Yugoslavia. To Goran and his people, the war was nothing less than the last crusade, defending Europe against an encroaching Islam. He once pulled a gun on Drake: a gold-plated Colt .32 automatic with mother-of-pearl grips. It had been the proud possession of a young Saudi prince who had gone to Bosnia seeking glorious martyrdom. Goran made that particular wish come true and confiscated his toy in the process.
This too provided motivation for Drake. He knew from his dealings with Goran and his men that they regarded him as a necessary evil. They dealt with him because they needed to, despite the fact that he was part of the racial degeneration, as they saw it, that was London. They never left him in any doubt that they viewed him as inferior. There were comments, jokes, laughter, insults that did not require an understanding of the language to grasp the gist.
For eighteen months Drake and his team had done everything they could to track Goran’s operations and there was a lot of it. Illegal gambling, prostitution rings, human trafficking and drugs. Over a year or so they built up contacts within his organisation, but it was hard to find anyone willing to speak out openly against the man, or even inform on him. Goran was incredibly secretive. The slightest suspicion of disloyalty was enough for him to take someone out. Whether the person in question was actually guilty or not didn’t bother him. Goran felt it showed weakness not to act on mere suspicion. That was the ultimate concern; you couldn’t have people thinking you were weak. People disappeared, those who remained lived in terror, but still nobody was willing to speak up. Then they had a stroke of good luck. Drake managed to find one person who was willing to help.
Zelda was in her late thirties when he first met her. She had been passed from one man to another for over twenty years. She was fourteen when she ran away from home. The way she told it she had been sold off by her family after having been abused by her stepfather and his friends. Her father was killed in the war. Her mother was weak. When the opportunity arose to move to London, Zelda didn’t hesitate. It was a chance to make more money, to break free. She was intelligent and resourceful. Smart enough to know that one day her looks would not be enough to make her a valuable asset, so she hatched a reckless and very dangerous plan, one that would have got her killed if Goran had ever caught wind of it. Over time, she had collected evidence, memorising names, places, documents, transport routes, police and customs officers on the take all over Europe. Over a two-year period she had kept track of everything she heard and saw, the people she met, the telephone numbers. She wrote it all down in a notebook that she hid behind a vent grille in the kitchen of the flat she shared with four other girls.