by Alex Howard
She had enough images of the Butcher now. She turned away and disappeared into the crowd.
Twenty minutes later, Hanlon stood on the top floor of the car park overlooking the huge airport and the enormously long runways. The planes came and went. The wind tugged at her thick hair as jet engines screamed overhead from take-offs and landings, while more planes circled round, waiting for their allotted slots.
To her east lay London, her city that she loved with a passion; to her west, Langley and Slough, hateful place of exile. Below her, the Russians, maybe her ticket back to where she wanted to be.
She leaned across the red bonnet of her car while she scrolled through the photos. They were all there, all good enough to use. She’d study them later. Particularly Myasnikov, Charlie’s killer. She scratched her head, toying with the idea of a police-to-police request for a photo of the vor from the Russian authorities. Probably not the best idea, not if the Russian cops were as corrupt as Oksana said. She thought again of Oksana. I doubt if I’ll be able to find your husband, she thought, but at least I have an image of his killer. And you’ll be able to translate his name. That’ll be a start; we can take it from there.
She got in her car and drove thoughtfully down the labyrinthine ramps of the car park, and once through the barrier turned towards the M4 and Slough.
Dimitri and Arkady, you’ll be seeing me again, I promise, she thought.
9
Sam Curtis didn’t have a therapist bound by the rules of his trade to confidentiality. He didn’t have a priest bound by the rules of the confessional, but he did have Chantal. Right now he was quite drunk in her studio flat, one room plus bathroom, in Cowley on the outskirts of Oxford.
She listened patiently as, sprawled on her bed, he told her about Jordan Anderson and Taverner and the girl and what had happened on Monday night. She took another sip of the Baileys that she was drinking to keep him company and lit a cigarette. She didn’t want to hear any of this but her boyfriend was not to be stopped. He was out of his mind on the booze and the drugs. Totally mullered, she thought. Curtis opened another can of Stella. That was twelve so far. It was only the coke that was keeping him from collapse.
‘First we had to go to Chelsea Harbour and we met this geezer called Barry. In Barry’s car there was this other bloke, sparko. Out for the count. We put him in the Merc and I drove them up to that industrial estate in Slough where I got them that warehouse. We carried out matey, inside, that’s where, well, let’s just say that’s where it happened.’
Curtis was lying next to her in his underwear, singlet and pants tight against his muscular body. The skin was taut against his powerful frame but it was goosefleshed and coated in a sheen of cold sweat.
Chantal nodded. She was wearing the lingerie set that Curtis liked, the one she’d got from Ann Summers. She might as well have been wearing a bin bag. Curtis didn’t have sex on his mind; he wanted expiation, not orgasm. He wanted forgetfulness. He wanted oblivion.
He imitated the Russian’s voice. ‘You pass me knife, you never do this to pig before, no, “dou’shit”, what is English? Yes, must suffocate him first or blood goes everywhere, we want in bucket.’
Curtis was a skilful mimic and accurate. He could have been good at languages – he had a good ear, a good memory – but it was a road he had never taken. Education had never been his forte. He had chosen crime. Up until now it hadn’t seemed a bad choice. He had earned respect, a lot of money and an enjoyably hedonistic lifestyle. All it had cost had been a spell in a juvenile facility and a couple of months inside a low-security prison. A price well worth paying.
He did Dimitri again. ‘Go get bag for head, this is “mest”, what you say, payback time.’ But now, now he was beginning to regret working for the Russians. He was in the deep end, he couldn’t swim that well and his toes didn’t reach the bottom. Panic was setting in.
In his newfound awareness of detail – the huge empty, dark space of the warehouse, the damp concrete smell of the floor overlaid with the butcher’s smell of Jordan’s blood, the whine of the electric saw and the silencing effect of Anderson’s tissue as the teeth of the saw made swift work through his spine and neck – he noticed how Dimitri, when he spoke English, didn’t use pronouns, no the or a/an. Presumably they didn’t exist in Russian. It was a piece of information whose accuracy he guessed he would never find out.
‘Then we drove back to London,’ said Curtis. ‘Down the Euston Road, down to Marylebone. With the head wrapped up in cling film, in a couple of bags.’ Jordan’s head had been surprisingly heavy.
He was rolling a joint now, the coke, two grams of it, all gone. Traces of it frosted his nostrils, his eyes were huge and she could smell the rank coke sweat on his body, floating like a top note on the metallic alcohol sheen that beaded his skin. The room stank of weed and sweat and booze. He was in a terrible state, she thought. She wished he’d shut up about the events he’d seen. She didn’t want to know and she was certain that she wasn’t meant to know. If Belanov ever found out, well, he would. . . She shut down the thought. He would burn her. Burn her. That’s what he liked to do, and Dimitri liked to watch.
‘Sh,’ she said. ‘You need to relax, Sam.’ Chantal moved provocatively on the bed and shrugged off one shoulder of her dressing gown. Curtis stared blankly at her cleavage. He drank some more lager and lit the joint. He carried on his narrative.
‘The girl knew Jackson. She let us in. There was some bloke on the sofa. The Chinaman had said he’d be there. The girl was in on it, but the Butcher doesn’t like loose ends, so she died and he died. Bang, bang, simple as. Easy, I suppose, after what we’d just done. Dimitri gave the head a wash in the kitchen sink. It needed a clean.’
Back in the present, Curtis shuddered. ‘And then Dimitri and I dropped Jackson back in Chelsea. Back to Slough, got rid of the body. In that warehouse I told you about, you know, the one I rented for them.’
‘Poor baby,’ said Chantal, and put her arms round Curtis. The money that he’d been earning from Belanov had been great. She remembered how she and Sam had laughed for pleasure at the huge amount he’d earned in his first fortnight for the Russian. It was all cash, of course, straight from the brothel’s takings. Four grand in tens and twenties. They’d strewn it all over the bed. It had been like winning something on the TV, not like ‘earning’ it. But he had earned it; that was the problem. It had terms and conditions.
Chantal was concerned that they could easily end up very dead, and dead in some absolutely awful way.
She thought, That could be us in that warehouse. In that barrel where Anderson’s body had ended up, covered in cement. That could easily be us. And there was no way out. It wasn’t the kind of job Curtis had that you could resign from. You couldn’t give a month’s notice. Arkady Belanov had his own idea of a confidentiality clause, his own way of imposing a gagging order. It didn’t involve lawyers. And you couldn’t even grass him up, he’d got two police contacts, that sleaze-bag, that bell-end Joad who’d already been round trying to cop a feel, and once when she’d been bent over for some reason, casually pushing his groin against her chuff. Go on, Chantal, he’d said, just a quick one, I won’t take long. And now this other one, this Chinaman whoever he was, if indeed he was a copper and not just some other high-powered civilian that was on side for the Russians. Like that bloke on the council. Not the chief constable, though. She was a woman.
She caught sight of the two of them reflected in the mirror above the bed, the view that her clients loved. Curtis’s slim, muscular body and the back of his head as he buried his face into her chest and her long blonde hair, the roots beginning to show their natural mousy colour.
It had been better when he was just dealing, with a bit of debt collecting on the side, she fucking the occasional punter, five hundred to a grand a week and relatively risk free. Not this.
Chantal had a nose for trouble; her whole life had been nothing but. She could see that Curtis had responsibility but no power and the more h
e knew, the more likely it was that Belanov would decide one day to get rid of him. Thank God he didn’t know who the policeman was. Thank God he didn’t know who the Chinaman was. Ignorance was bliss. He’d delete Curtis with as little compunction as a text message and she’d probably be processed too. Or shipped off to somewhere in Russia where a British whore might have curiosity value.
She’d opened the window earlier to get rid of some of the heavy smoke from the skunk Curtis was smoking. Now a cold breeze shook the curtains and she shivered, but not from the evening air.
She pushed her nose into Curtis’s sweat-drenched hair and tightened her grip round his back to feel the comforting heat and hardness of his body. She heard him mutter something, his low voice inaudible, his mouth pressed against her breast.
He lifted his head so that he could see her and their eyes met.
‘What, babes?’ she whispered.
‘I’m shit scared, Chantal,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Me too.’
10
Corrigan left the meeting room at the Home Office in a foul mood. He walked down the front steps of the startlingly ugly modern building, its facade reminding him of slatted blinds. It had won an architectural award. Of course it bloody well had, he thought angrily. Bloody idiots. He turned on his heel and glared venomously at 2 Marsham Street, a ten-minute walk from his office at New Scotland Yard.
He noticed a camera crew on the steps, filming a well-known TV political correspondent. They always liked this shot. It was emblematic of the Home Office, like Westminster Green for politicians or New Scotland Yard for police stories.
There had been two main issues on that meeting’s agenda. The first, dictated partly by the surge in popularity of anti-European sentiment in the country, had concerned East European prostitution in the capital. The government was worried by the growth in support for anti-immigration policies and had decided it was time to get tough, or rather to be seen getting tough, on sex crime, tax evasion and non-EU issues. Hence Operation Tomboy, a crackdown on brothels and street prostitution.
The second was budget cuts.
As he’d sat in the meeting, watching a PowerPoint presentation on the ‘Nordic approach’ to prostitution – criminalizing the customer – Corrigan idly wondered where the spokespersons were from the English Collective of Prostitutes. Surely, he thought, if anyone knew about the sex industry it would be somebody who worked at the coalface, so to speak. Did an academic from the University of Sussex really know as much as someone who actually worked the streets, or shouldn’t they at least be allowed their say? Evidently not. As far as policy was concerned the prostitutes could be studied like, say, macaque monkeys, but not allowed any voice or input. That had to be done by a specialist in prostitution. Not, God forbid, by a working girl.
He had tried raising the point and had been asked, patronizingly, if he was in favour of inviting, for example, murderers or armed robbers to comment on Home Office policy on police tactics.
Polite laughter.
Corrigan’s sympathies were with the whores. They got shafted every which way, literally and figuratively.
Corrigan thought of all the outreach and consultancy work that went into community and gang-related crime and relations. Not into prostitution. It reminded him of mental health care, the right ignored it because of cost implications and fear of ‘nanny state’ accusations; the left because of complex libertarian issues. As per usual it would be the police responsible for the mess. The civil servants at the table and the representatives from the London Assembly didn’t care what he thought. He was old and out of touch, and nobody liked the ECP because they didn’t toe anybody’s line but their own and, like him, they didn’t have academic qualifications, which evidently meant their opinions didn’t have any validity.
Poncey university bastards.
He didn’t have a degree. Perhaps that was why he felt they secretly despised him. Them and their degrees. Their cherished bits of paper.
He increased his pace as he walked along Horseferry Road towards the pub in Pimlico where he’d arranged to meet Mawson. People moved out of his way as he bore down on them. At six feet five, with his battered, raw-looking face currently wreathed in a scowl, the assistant commissioner was an alarming sight. He looked like a doorman untethered from a nightclub entrance rather than a senior policeman. A bad-tempered doorman at that.
He passed a bar that purported to be an Irish pub. It advertised the joy of the ‘craic’ as well as Guinness. It was the kind of pub that would have kitsch Irish decorations like an oversized wooden spade labelled Finn McCool’s spoon, and a Blarney Stone. Leprechauns! London Irish himself, he hated phoney Irish bars with a passion.
They could kiss his fucking Blarney Stone. His frown deepened.
He felt his blood pressure rise another notch with every step of his large Dr Martened feet. They beat out a rhythm of resentment. Civil servants, bastards. Stamp. Fake Irishry. Stamp. Unfair hounding of the police. Stamp. Being forced to use unorthodox methods for fear of his emails/mobile being hacked. Stamp.
He felt the blood thundering through his heart, felt a vein pulse in his temple. Calm down, for God’s sake, he told himself.
Make an omelette, but don’t, for God’s sake, break any eggs.
He tried to remember if he’d taken his morning beta blocker. Thank God it’s Mawson I’m meeting, he thought. He’ll calm me down. Despite his degree. And fill me in on Hanlon. I hope to God she’s behaving herself.
He passed a newsagent’s, where the paper on display caught his eye, its headlines shouting.
Police Corruption, Scandal Deepens.
His blood pressure rose another couple of mmHg.
And I’ll have the pasta melanzane, please,’ said Mawson, handing back the large, stiff pseudo-parchment menu to the waitress. He looked around the airy, modern Italian restaurant with pleasure, a man at ease with his life, his surroundings and his character, and beamed at his dining companion, Assistant Commissioner Corrigan.
‘Still not eating meat?’ asked Corrigan. The two men looked at each other affectionately. He’d calmed down now. Mawson had that effect on him. They’d known each other since Hendon, more than thirty years now. Corrigan’s career had taken him more or less to the very top of the career tree but Mawson’s, although not unsuccessful, was considerably more low key.
Mawson pulled a face at the thought. ‘I don’t like killing things,’ he said.
Corrigan replied, ‘Yeah, but it’s only natural, nature’s way.’
‘What, like murder, then?’ Mawson replied.
Corrigan smiled bleakly. ‘It’s always been there, Harry. I suppose it keeps us in a job.’
‘Oh well,’ said Mawson, ‘I guess it does.’ He leaned forward. ‘I’ve been reading a book, the Tao Te Ching. That in a way makes the same point.’ He closed his eyes and quoted from memory.
‘Heaven and earth are impartial, to them all things are straw dogs.
The Sage is impartial, to him the people are straw dogs.’
He smiled at Corrigan. ‘In other words, Eamonn, we’re all utterly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. None of it matters.’
‘Well, there we are, Harry, very comforting.’ Corrigan shrugged. ‘I can’t say they’re sentiments I’d disagree with, but in the meantime there are still villains to nick.’
‘Or,’ countered Mawson, ‘we could be concentrating on reducing crime, thus freeing ourselves from the need to nick so many people.’
‘You’re such an old hippy, Harry,’ said Corrigan. He waved his fork. ‘All this airy-fairy mysticism.’
‘Peace and love aren’t really that silly, Eamonn. Not really. And I’m doing my bit, aren’t I, promoting user-friendly police interfaces and, yin and yang, I’m teaching the firearms unit to shoot straight. That’s an uphill task, believe me.’
It was a classic case of opposites attracting, the differences between the two men widening as the years rolled by. Corrigan, enormous, raw-faced, a b
ull of a man, and the small, sleek figure of Mawson, who looked more like a teacher or a librarian than a policeman. Mawson was the bookish one. He even had a degree, a BA from SOAS in London. He was also a highly experienced firearms officer and, of course, former Bisley champion, although he no longer worked in that sector of the police. Corrigan, by contrast, had left school at fifteen and the only exams he ever passed were internal police ones. But the two men had always got on well despite, maybe because of, in Corrigan’s eyes, an eccentric streak of mysticism in Mawson. Mawson’s Taoist quote was typical. Harry Mawson would have said it was his yin to Corrigan’s yang.
‘I’ll have the beef carpaccio followed by the saltimbocca,’ said Corrigan to the waitress, ‘and another large Barolo.’
Mawson said, ‘Di me acqua minerale frizzante per favore,’ and added something in Italian that made the waitress laugh. Corrigan rolled his eyes.
‘Show-off,’ he said. For all his modesty, Mawson liked parading his achievements, his abilities.
Mawson smiled. ‘You know I don’t eat meat, Eamonn. I just don’t like killing things.’
Corrigan looked at him quizzically. It was odd that a man who could hit a playing card dead centre at five hundred yards with a bullet should be so implacably opposed to killing animals. Particularly as Mawson had shot and killed two criminals in the course of his career as a police marksman. Maybe that had put him off.
Mawson smiled at Corrigan again. It was almost as if he was psychic. ‘That was years ago, Eamonn, and, besides, the last thing I shot was a runaway bullock that had escaped from a field. And that was with a dart. I’m not even an authorized firearms officer now. Although they let me train still, in an “advisory capacity”. But really I’m just Missing Persons and Community policing, you know that. And, of course, your chaperone.’