by Alex Howard
‘No,’ said Enver, looking confused. ‘Why should she be?’
Huss glowered at him. Because I can’t stand that bloody woman, she thought, that’s why. I’m not being logical. Sod logic. She gestured at the waiter, who came with alacrity. ‘My coat, please.’ She slipped it on while Enver sat motionless, looking at her helplessly.
‘I’ll make my own way home.’
She swept out of the restaurant. There was a taxi stand across the street. Enver watched through the glass of the restaurant window as she climbed into the back of an old, grey Mercedes and he watched its tail lights as it drove off. The rain beat down remorselessly.
The waiter looked at him sympathetically. ‘Bill, please,’ said Enver.
Enver walked slowly back to his car, his clothes completely sodden now. His right foot, the foot where he’d been shot a year or so ago, ached. It did that occasionally, particularly when it was cold, and Enver’s feet were soaking.
He felt angry, depressed, sorry for himself.
He walked up the concrete stairs that led to the third floor of the multi-storey where he’d so ineptly parked. They smelled faintly of urine, damp cement and weed. He got into the car and turned the ignition on. The inside of the windscreen fogged up from his damp body heat and he turned the fan on to clear it. As he waited for it to demist he thought, Fuck.
He flapped down the sun visor and looked at his face in the mirror. The fat face of a loser. His hard, brown eyes were reflected back at him. His thick, black hair, his quite prominent nose, like an eagle’s beak. The scar on the side of his left eyebrow. He remembered that fight. Comprehensively behind on points, a Southern Counties championship final. His opponent, a black kid, he’d forgotten his name, had opened up a cut there and it had been bleeding badly. He’d known the fight was more or less over.
Demir, in Turkish, means iron; el means hand. Enver’s surname was Demirel, Iron Hand, a good name for a boxer, and true in his case. He was a poor mover – in boxing terms, awkward – but he had a big punch, and in the third round, on the point of defeat – the referee would stop it soon because of the cut – he’d caught the kid with a massive right hand. He’d gone down like he’d been shot, his legs crumpling under him. KO. Sparko. There was surely a lesson there.
He touched the scar again. He put the car in gear. He’d come from behind once; he could do it again.
Back on the farm, Melinda Huss had angrily ripped her clothes off. She stared at her buxom body in her white lingerie. A sight Enver Demirel certainly wouldn’t be seeing, she thought. Her carefully chosen clothes lay accusingly on the floor of her bedroom where she’d flung them, and she pulled the stiff fabric of the boilersuit, with its smell of engine oil, over her body. The Freelander awaited.
There was a knock on her bedroom door and she opened it, expecting it to be either her mother or father.
Her eyes widened in surprise, as did Enver’s. Huss hadn’t got round to doing up the buttons of the boilersuit. It framed her generously curved body, her underwear a geometric arrangement of triangular, vertical and horizontal white stripes. Her body was all he could have dreamed, and then some. She made no move; she held the door open with one hand.
‘I wanted to ask you out,’ said Enver, speaking quickly so he wouldn’t forget the lines he’d rehearsed in the car and so she couldn’t interrupt. ‘But I didn’t. I hoped you might want to go out with me to see this.’ He handed her the ticket. ‘If you do, call me.’
She watched as he turned and clattered down the stairs. It was an old farmhouse and the ceiling where the staircase turned was low. There was an audible thud as his forehead struck the beam above the stairs. Huss winced. Enver kept going. He had a head like a rock.
She closed the door and sat down on the bed. A Room with A View, and dinner. She raised her eyebrows, but in a good way.
Enver was sitting stationary in traffic when his phone beeped. He glanced down at the screen. Huss. She would like to come. There was a name, Sam Curtis, and an address in Cowley. Try him, she suggested. He works for Belanov. A file was attached.
He remembered the night in Basingstoke, the sweaty, noisy venue. The referee holding both their wrists: ‘A-a-a-a-nd tonight’s winner, and the NEW . . . ABA. . . Southern. . . region Middleweight champion is. . . Enver. . . Ironhand. . . Demirel!’
Contentedly, he turned the car round at the next roundabout and followed the signs for Cowley back into Oxford. He felt euphoric. Everything would work out just fine.
Enver Demirel walked past the door to Chantal’s flat twice before he found it, the entrance squeezed between a betting shop and a fast-food outlet. He’d read the documents in a car park off Cowley High Street. Huss had sent him a PDF file that contained what little relevant information she had on the Russian duo of Arkady Belanov and Dimitri. It had more information on Curtis, including the fact that Chantal was his girlfriend. It was a lot better than walking around pubs with dodgy reputations to ask about Curtis, whose name he knew from his previous run-in with the Russians. This information wasn’t official police intelligence; it was part of Huss’s vendetta against Joad.
The Russians were only of tangential interest to Huss. It was Joad that she was focused on. Huss hated Joad. It wasn’t solely because Joad was bent. There were several police she worked with who fell into that category, from the trivial, falsifying expenses, fiddling overtime, to the more serious, turning blind eyes in exchange for favours, particularly sexual, and leaking information to media and suspects’ lawyers for cash. But there was only one Joad. She wouldn’t have cared if the man turned over a new leaf and became pope; nothing would change her visceral loathing of the man.
Joad was Belanov’s man in Oxford CID and Huss was busy preparing enough hard information to present a rock-solid case against him. It was difficult because of Joad’s innately furtive nature and his inexplicably numerous mates in the force, all fifty-year-old men. They would close ranks; there was no doubt about that. They were the kind who would hear nothing bad against Joad, saying he was old school (dinosaur, thought Huss), or ‘a bit of a character’ (rude, unhelpful) or ‘not PC’ (porn-obsessed, lecherous, racist, homophobic) and ‘one of the lads’ (drink problem, aggressive). The strength of his involvement with the Russian pimp was still a matter of conjecture.
Belanov was out of bounds to Enver. He’d only met Dimitri once: it was unlikely Dimitri would have forgotten. An enraged Enver had hit him in the face, shattering his already fractured cheekbone, then dragged him out of the van he’d sat in and given him a good kicking.
But Sam Curtis didn’t know Enver and Huss had information he was at his girlfriend’s address. Chantal Jenkins, twenty-three, two counts of shoplifting and one of soliciting, later dropped. Curtis had a lengthier, more professional criminal record.
Enver stood irresolutely by the shabby, narrow entrance and looked at the row of buzzers, the name Jenkins in a curly feminine script written on a peeling white sticker. ‘Off the record,’ Corrigan had said. To this end he’d taken a week’s leave, told his colleagues he was going to France. He’d give it a week; he owed Corrigan that much. He had decided he wasn’t going to bust a gut; he had a date with Huss at the cinema on Wednesday.
‘Shake the tree, see what falls out.’ Those had been Corrigan’s words. Well, Enver wasn’t one for confrontation; the Dimitri incident had been atypical. But he’d do enough to credibly claim a tree had been shaken. He’d see Chantal. She’d tell him where to go, or Curtis would. He’d leave. They’d tell Belanov some copper had been making enquiries and presumably Joad would go into overdrive trying to find out what was happening, who had authorized it, what was known. Then Huss would monitor whatever he was up to. It was a nice, simple plan.
Best of all, he wouldn’t be involved. All he had to do was alarm Curtis.
It was a bit like the kids’ game of ringing the doorbell and running away, and that simple. He wasn’t interested in results, just doing enough to satisfy Corrigan.
He took out hi
s warrant card and studied the photo under the Metropolitan Police banner. He only had one chin in that picture. Now that was no longer the case. He should exercise more. Maybe jogging? God, the very thought. He hadn’t run since he’d given up boxing. He was beginning to lack confidence in the ability of his legs to carry him at speed. Any speed. Sometimes Hanlon’s training involved running up and down a hill for an hour to increase her power and endurance. Enver shuddered. Even the idea of running was becoming strange, alien. Like being asked to tango or to belly dance.
Top-floor flat. He rang the bell and a girl’s voice answered.
‘Police,’ he said. The door buzzed, he pushed and it opened. He stepped inside and sniffed the air. It was dark inside and the light grey walls were scuffed and discoloured. The stair well smelled faintly of skunk and damp carpet. The grey, stained stairway stretched upward, gloomy and uninviting. Laboriously, the stairs creaking under his weight, he started the ascent.
At the top of the stairs, quadriceps aching, he knocked on the shabby white door, warrant card in hand. It opened and the girl who stood facing him asked, ‘What do you want?’
It was probably the question that Enver heard the most in his life as a policeman. If the party concerned was innocent it usually came out as, Can I help you, Officer? but it was essentially the same question, and it came with a variety of intonations – curiosity, worry, fear, sarcasm. Rarely was it welcoming. The tone this time was unmistakeably one of fear.
‘Chantal Jenkins?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m DI Demirel. Can I come in?’
She turned and indicated the flat. Enver walked into a small bed-sitting room. The window was ajar and there was a strong smell of stale smoke and grass, overlaid with incense.
He looked at Chantal Jenkins. Like Huss, she was blonde, pretty and female, but there the resemblance ended. Chantal had a narrow face, pallid, and her complexion was poor. Huss looked like the farmer’s daughter she was, broader-faced, broader-beamed. Huss too was sturdy; she had a solid, powerful frame. Melinda Huss also always looked ridiculously healthy – tanned in the summer, glowing in the winter. The result of a lifetime spent outdoors.
The girl before him looked as if she had never seen sunshine or natural light. Chantal Jenkins was slim to the point of thin, her eyes restless and haunted. Enver felt enormous standing in front of her. She looked so fragile – a sudden movement, a harsh word and she’d break. Enver felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for the girl with her worried and careworn face. He knew she was about twenty-three, but she could have been a decade older.
‘What do you want?’ she asked. She looked round the untidy, grubby room with an air of hopelessness. Discarded dirty clothing lay here and there. Her voice was nervous, as if she thought he might be bringing bad news.
He looked around him. ‘Can I sit down?’ he said. Chantal looked at him blankly and he gestured to the only seat, a stained armchair, cigarette or joint burns in the arms. He felt he would be less intimidating sitting down than looming over her.
‘Please do,’ Chantal said. She indicated the kitchen area of the bedsit. ‘Do you want a coffee or something?’
Her gesture took in a sink piled with dirty dishes, a hotplate and plug-in convection oven to the left, a microwave and toaster on a shelf above. Three of these were connected to a single multi-adaptor. The shelf with the microwave and toaster, a dip in the middle from where the melamine bowed under the weight, was more or less directly over the sink. It looked potentially lethal.
Enver’s childhood and adolescence had been largely spent in family-run restaurant kitchens and he found himself looking at Chantal’s rudimentary cooking arrangements with almost an environmental health officer’s eyes.
That set-up, electrical appliances over water, a death trap waiting to happen. He could only too easily imagine either the rickety shelf giving way or the microwave toppling into the scummy liquid that filled the washing-up bowl in the sink, while a zonked-out Chantal was going through the motions of washing up. Water and mains electricity. Enver shuddered.
The oven and microwave both had a patina of burnt food engrained onto the inside of their glass fronts.
The overloaded socket was yet another hazard, this time with an added element of fire risk. He could see a filthy-looking fridge by an overflowing bin. Campylobacter heaven. He very much did not want a coffee. He didn’t want his lips touching anything in here.
‘No, thank you,’ he said.
Chantal sat down on the bed, the only other place to do so. She was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt that outlined the top half of her body. She had a good figure. If she hadn’t looked so defeated, if she cleaned herself up, she could have been really attractive. But, then, thought Enver sadly, why would she be bothered to do that – for clients? For Curtis? He thought, She’s too sad and unhappy to want to do it for herself.
He wished he wasn’t here. She crossed her arms in what he guessed was a classic defensive gesture.
Time to shake the tree, he thought. Just like Corrigan instructed me to. He felt a stab of self-disgust. Chantal looked as if she might cry any second. I’ll shake it gently, thought Enver.
‘I’m investigating the activities of a Mr Arkady Belanov and a Mr Dimitri Kuzubov. I believe that you know them, or know of them, and I was wondering if you had any information you would like to share with me.’
He spoke slowly and clearly; he didn’t want to intimidate her. Chantal looked absolutely terrified now.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t know anything about them, nothing,’ she said over-emphatically.
‘No?’ said Enver. It was such a transparent lie.
‘No,’ said Chantal. ‘I’ve never heard of them. They sound. . .’ she paused, searching for an appropriate word ‘. . . foreign.’ She stared fearfully at the door as if she expected it to come crashing down and the huge figure of Dimitri appear in front of them. The big, bad wolf.
‘Please, please go,’ she said. ‘Someone’s been winding you up. I can’t help you, I’m sorry.’
Enver thought to himself that maybe he should take the Hanlon route. She would have kept on at Chantal until she broke down and gave him something useful. But Enver wasn’t Hanlon. He was kind-hearted. Besides, he thought, erroneously, Chantal wouldn’t know anything important. Curtis wouldn’t be stupid enough to unburden himself to someone so fragile.
‘OK,’ said Enver. He took his wallet out of his jacket pocket and took out a business card.
‘Here’s my card. It’s got my mobile number on and my email. If you do have any information on the Russians, or if your boyfriend does, just get in touch.’
He gave the card to Chantal, who stared at it as if it were a court summons.
‘I’ll let myself out,’ said Enver. Chantal nodded silently and Enver heaved himself out of the armchair and left the flat.
Across the street from Chantal’s flat was a Starbucks. Sitting in the window was Dimitri, having a double espresso before he paid a visit to Chantal. Dimitri had been in the flat before and had drawn similar conclusions to Enver as to the advisability of consuming anything while there. He liked to have a coffee in more salubrious surroundings while he thought about Chantal. He liked the way she was terrified of him. He liked it a lot. He knew that Curtis would be away for a few hours, running errands, and Chantal would be in there alone. Dimitri enjoyed Chantal’s vulnerability. He savoured her weakness and her terror. He loved frightening women; it turned him on.
He watched Enver leave the front door and step into the street. At first he thought he was one of Chantal’s clients, then he turned and Dimitri saw his face. The Russian’s eyes widened in surprise and anger. His fingers automatically touched his cheek. This was the man who had punched him through the open window of a van in East London, breaking the bone. This was the man who had dragged him out of the van, semi-conscious, and kicked him several times in the head and crotch. A professional, hard and vicious attack. He doubted he could have don
e much better himself.
He hadn’t been beaten up; he’d been processed.
What was he doing here? He stared intently through the glass of the coffee-shop window to make sure it was him. The bull neck, the thick dark hair, the drooping moustache, he recognized those. Then, with a professional eye, he noted the swell of the arms through the cheap thin fabric of Enver’s suit, the powerful-looking legs. Even Enver’s paunch looked hard and dangerous. He’d have a low centre of gravity and if he launched himself at you, you’d better brace yourself.
Enver turned and walked away up the street. Dimitri watched him go. He noted Enver’s confident, heavy tread, a man used to people getting out of his way.
He shook his head in wonder at Myasnikov’s foresight. The Butcher was so right to have identified Curtis as a possible weak link in a chain that could incriminate them. And this man, well, soon he would know exactly who he was and what he was after.
God was great. He had delivered his enemy to him. He had prayed for this moment every night since his encounter with the man, and now he would have his revenge.
Slava Bogu! Thank you, God, he said to himself.
They’d meet again; this time he’d be ready. He drank his coffee and put the small cup down, like a thimble between his large fingers.
He stood up. Time to go and see Chantal. The girl had some explaining to do.
14
Hanlon paid off the taxi driver at the bottom end of Dean Street, near Piccadilly. The pavements of Shaftesbury Avenue were thronged with tourists, but as soon as you walked a couple of metres away from the main road the crowds magically vanished. Soho was almost peaceful.
She walked past the church at the bottom of the street, surrounded by its outwardly curved hard-mesh fence that kept rough sleepers out of its graveyard at night. She eyed it speculatively. She could climb it easily, she thought. The overhang would pose no problem. Hanlon was the kind of woman who could do a one-armed pull-up without batting an eyelid.