A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series)

by Alex Howard

  The pavements of the narrow street were busy with purposeful-looking young people in casual, expensive clothes. Post- and pre-production film and TV offices were the main employers here, the main visible employers. Sex and drugs had been Soho’s main trade for years and, although hit hard by rising rents, they were here to stay. They’d been here since the outset, the eternal verities. Blake had been born in Soho, thought Hanlon. It was here he’d seen angels, seen the New Jerusalem shining amongst the filth and the squalor. Nothing changed here in the magic kingdom. Soho was still the same mixture of heaven and hell. It would see off any new technological advance with ease. The eternal verities, the unchanging faces of Los and Orc.

  She saw her destination, a tiny alleyway between a Thai restaurant and a property that was being redeveloped, draped in dark green plastic mesh and shrouded in heavy, waterproof canvas sheeting to keep noise and dust levels down. Two hard-hatted builders, their hi-vis jerkins smeared in grey dust and cement, crouched outside, having a cigarette break. One of them gave his opinion loudly as she squeezed by to get into the alley.

  ‘Nice arse.’

  Hanlon stopped, turned and looked him up and down. Her gaze swept speculatively down, from his yellow safety helmet to his ripped jeans, scuffed black knee-protectors and workboots, the leather worn away at the front to reveal the metal toecaps. He was wearing a sleeveless vest showing his powerful forearms and muscular biceps, the main vein prominent under his tanned, dusty skin. He had the kind of vascularity in the muscles that bodybuilders would die for.

  ‘Nice arms,’ she said to him as she passed, staring straight into his eyes. ‘Shame about the face.’

  As she knocked hard on the big red door in front of her she heard the other say, ‘Look, Dave, you’re blushing.’

  The door opened and Hanlon stepped across its threshold into the dark portal of the Krafft Club. Iris Campion’s house. A place of pain and correction.

  Tea, dear?’ asked Iris Campion solicitously.

  Hanlon nodded. ‘Yes please.’ She watched as Iris Campion, her bulk shrouded in a floral kaftan, poured from a Clarice Cliff floral-decorated teapot into a matching art deco porcelain cup. Hanlon looked round Campion’s windowless sitting room. It was as chintzy as she remembered, every square centimetre of available surface covered in knick-knacks with no unifying theme. There were china shepherdesses, toby jugs, glass swans, Wedgwood vases, art deco figurines, art nouveau flowery ceramics. On the walls were sentimental, kitsch paintings.

  Hanlon’s cold eyes studied Campion. The twin scars, like tribal markings incised deeply into the flesh of each cheek, were deliberately uncovered by the thick foundation that Campion used. They had been done by a pimp as a punishment decades ago when she’d been a teenage whore. The pimp was long dead; his handiwork lived on in her cicatriced face.

  She could have had corrective plastic surgery but she elected to leave her face as it was. Her two fingers up at the world. Soho Iris, she was called around here, her world bounded by a kilometre square. Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road, the four borders of her kingdom. She never left the place.

  ‘Who’s the polone?’ the man in the guest armchair asked, in an unfriendly voice. He was, Hanlon guessed, in his seventies, red trousers, pink, tiger-print brothel-creeper shoes and a lilac shirt. Despite his age and his camp mannerisms, his eyes were hard and contemptuous. Mind you, thought Hanlon, she was in the reception room of London’s leading S&M brothel, not a drop-in centre for the over-sixties. You weren’t going to meet upstanding members of the community here. Well, you might, but only as paying customers.

  His white hair had a faint pink hue to it. Like candyfloss. One hand held an ebony walking stick with an ornate silver head. It caught her attention.

  ‘Looking at my knob are you, dearie?’ he said, angling the polished metal head in Hanlon’s direction. She ignored the suggestive double-entendre. Hanlon had been wondering if it was actually a swordstick, a Victorian relic still deadly after all these years. Maybe a little like this pensioner. He looked the kind of man who would be perfectly willing to use such a thing.

  ‘Milk?’ asked Campion.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Hanlon. Campion shrugged and sat down on the high sofa, which sagged noticeably under her weight. Hanlon noticed her ankles were badly swollen. She put her tea down on a small table and topped it up with an aged single-malt Macallan. I wonder what on earth that tastes like, thought Hanlon with a repressed shudder.

  Campion looked at her two guests with amusement. ‘Albert Slater,’ she indicated the older man with a slight hand movement ‘. . . meet DCI Hanlon.’

  The old man looked at her with unalloyed displeasure. ‘I thought you was Lilly Law, when I vardad you.’ He looked at Campion. He had the old queen’s dated habit of using he for she and vice versa. ‘Didn’t think he was one of your polones. He’s a bit naff, inne?’

  He looked witheringly at Hanlon.

  ‘Cat got your tongue, dearie?’ he asked.

  ‘I hope you mean naff in the original sense?’ said Hanlon coolly. ‘If you mean “not available for fucking”, then yes.’

  The old man smiled despite himself. ‘Ooh, sharp, aren’t we. Mind you don’t cut yourself. So you know Polari?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hanlon. She could have added, I learned it from my colleague and friend, Mark Whiteside. But, of course, she didn’t.

  She thought of him lying in his bed in hospital. Asleep in hospital. She never thought of him as in a coma or on life support, or in a persistent vegetative state. Just asleep, and one day he would wake up. She would make sure of that.

  Mark was an omi-palone, as the old man would have called him, gay as it was now known. She smiled inwardly, her face externally as hard as ever. He had loved the old camp language of Polari. She remembered when she used to stay sometimes at his flat, Mark naked except for a pair of Calvin Kleins, the corrugated ridges of his abdominal muscles. ‘How about that for a basket, ma’am?’ he’d asked, indicating his well-packed underwear. ‘Fantabulosa, Mark,’ she’d replied.

  Alone now in his hospital bed, the only physical contact when the team of gentle, patient nurses turned him periodically, like a piece of meat, to prevent pressure sores from developing.

  She’d killed the man who’d put him where he was now. Fat lot of good it had done.

  ‘So, Detective Chief Inspector,’ said Iris Campion, bored by this lengthy pause, ‘other than a linguistic trip down memory lane, how can I help? Or is this a social call?’

  Hanlon looked enquiringly at Albert Slater.

  ‘Bert’s practically family,’ said Iris Campion. ‘You can say anything you want in front of him.’

  Hanlon shrugged. ‘Who owns 50 Beath Street?’

  Campion had a comprehensive knowledge of the who’s who of the London brothel world. She took a hefty sip of her whisky-enhanced tea. ‘Dave Anderson. He’s a mate of yours, isn’t he? I’d have thought you’d have known that.’

  So I was right, thought Hanlon.

  ‘Tell her what’s been going on.’ It was Albert Slater who spoke. Hanlon noted the change of pronoun. Now he’d given her back her feminine identity, a form of politeness, she guessed.

  Iris Campion frowned; she didn’t like anyone telling her what to do. Then she relented.

  ‘Someone’s been killing Anderson’s toms,’ she said. ‘And the clientele.’ With that, she filled Hanlon in, more or less accurately, on what had happened at Beath Street.

  ‘So far it doesn’t seem like the Old Bill know,’ said Campion. ‘Anderson’s boys don’t shoot their mouths off, but I know because one of them talked to someone one of my girls knows and working girls share stuff like that, and these days news gets about faster than a dose of the clap.’

  Hanlon sat in her chair, expressionless. It was a gangland killing designed to intimidate, designed to send a message.

  Anderson would try to keep it private, and he might just succeed. The dead prostitute, well,
working girls tended sadly to be friendless. That left Charlie Taverner and no one was busting a gut over him.

  Only Oksana and her.

  She knew now that Taverner was dead; she knew it for sure. She was police. There was no doubt as to what she should do, but she felt strangely reluctant to act. It was as if Oksana Taverner’s scorn of officialdom had been contagious. The Metropolitan Police had let her down, packed her off to Slough, had made no secret of the fact that they considered her a liability rather than an asset, and she felt disinclined to share her knowledge.

  Knowledge was power and what Hanlon needed above all was the power to get Sergeant Mark Whiteside transferred to somewhere private where he could be operated on. Whiteside was too high risk and the cost of the op too exorbitant for it to happen on the NHS. So she stored this nugget of golden information away while she thought of how she might use it.

  Hanlon knew that Whiteside’s days were numbered. His next of kin wanted the machines that kept him alive withdrawn or, the equivalent nutrition denied him, so he would pass on.

  Over my dead body, thought Hanlon. I’ve lost faith in the system, she thought.

  ‘Who did it?’ she asked Campion.

  ‘The Russians, I believe, dearie. Anyway, you remember Yuri.’

  Hanlon nodded. He’d been Campion’s manager. ‘He fucked off once he heard, scarpered he did, couldn’t see his heels for dust. Something about the Butcher of Moscow.’ As Oksana thought, noted Hanlon.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Hard to get good staff, I guess.’ Yuri will be no loss, she thought. ‘What was it all about?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Campion. ‘Turf war maybe, revenge. Who knows. To be honest, I don’t give a flying fuck.’ She yawned ostentatiously. ‘Dave Anderson’s your boyfriend, not mine. He’s a nutcase.’

  ‘He’s not that,’ said Hanlon. ‘I’ve seen his psychiatric notes. Dr Stein assessed him, the last time he was banged up. He’s a prominent forensic psychiatrist. He knows them all, Iris. All our prominent killers. Dave Anderson is officially evil, not a nutcase at all. He’s saner than you or me.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Iris Campion. She looked at her shrewdly. ‘You don’t seem overly excited by any of this, do you, DCI Hanlon.’ She added some more expensive malt to her tea. ‘You going to old man Anderson’s funeral?’

  ‘I wasn’t invited.’ The last time she had seen Dave Anderson’s father, Malcolm Anderson, he had been dying of lung cancer. Hanlon had liked him, he’d retained a mordant sense of humour as the shadows had lengthened around him and the pain ratcheted ever upwards. Not only had he been stoic in the face of death; he’d managed to joke about it. Hanlon had found that very impressive. And now the old man was gone, leaving Dave Anderson to run things.

  The king is dead, long live the king, she thought. She felt strangely hurt that she hadn’t been told.

  ‘You are invited,’ said Campion. ‘I saw Malcolm the day before he died. He said to ask you. It’s next week, Wednesday, ten thirty a.m., Edmonton Cemetery.’

  ‘I’ll make it if I can,’ said Hanlon. ‘How were you going to find me anyway, to tell me?’

  ‘Slough’s not far away, dear. Auntie Iris knows where to find anyone, doesn’t she.’

  It seems like everyone knows my business, thought Hanlon. First Oksana, now Iris Campion, and there’s me not even on Facebook.

  15

  Curtis repeated his journey of a week ago with Dimitri. There were, however, major differences this time around.

  The most obvious was that it was daylight. The huge industrial area was busy now. It was the largest privately owned trading estate in the country, maybe in the whole EU, and by day it showed. It was spacious and the roads wide, so it didn’t feel unpleasantly over-crowded or polluted, just quietly humming with activity, in contrast to the blank, shuttered, necropolis look it had at night. Another crucial difference was that Curtis wasn’t carrying anything incriminating in the back of his van, just three empty oil drums, similar to the one that occupied the leased warehouse. There were also six bags of ballast and three of cement.

  Curtis was feeling resentful, again at Dimitri’s treatment of him. He glanced at the empty place in the van where his huge companion, sitting next to him, had radiated sour dislike. OK, buying used barrels and cement from a local builders’ merchant might not be the hardest job in the world, but he’d done it efficiently and, best of all, anonymously. Dimitri couldn’t have managed that. Not with his build, accent, looks and tattoos. And he’d done it perfectly. And it was he who had found this warehouse.

  Did anyone say thank you? No, they bloody well didn’t.

  Curtis had never worked with anyone who really detested him before and he found Dimitri’s hostility hurtful. If he’d written a CV about his criminal past he’d have had about four employers and, on the whole, he’d got on well with both them and the people he had worked with. And you get close to people if you break the law together. Not so with the Russians. He still, however, clung to the illusion that Arkady Belanov liked him, that he was really an OK guy, that it was Dimitri who was the problem.

  He couldn’t stand much more. Like most workers, he needed the validation of feeling valued. He needed banter, he needed appreciation for the hard work he put in and he didn’t need Dimitri’s constant intimidation. He had come to hate him as well as to fear him. He felt he could have put up with either one, but not the two together.

  The problem was, now he had his job with the Russians he couldn’t leave.

  Curtis was beginning to formulate a plan of escape that involved getting nicked for some as-yet-to-be-decided offence. Something that would get him sent down for maybe a year so he’d be out in six months. GBH maybe, or possession with intent to deal. Long enough to get him away from the Russians, not serious enough to annoy them, something that could happen to anyone. Then he’d be behind bars and out of their reach, and for long enough to show them he wouldn’t grass them up. And he’d be replaced, and still alive.

  He pulled into the small car park with its reserved section for the Russians’ warehouse. Warehouse was a slight misnomer. It was essentially two large workshops with a reception area in the middle, two very large rooms and a smaller space inbetween. The design was basically box-like, the only windows set under the roof about six metres off the ground. You couldn’t look in from the outside, not without a cherry picker or a very long ladder.

  The entrance to the warehouse was a double door, secured by three locks. Two of them were Yale and mortice, which Belanov had ordered upgraded from the originals. They were intricate and expensive, designed to ward off any stray burglar. A steel strip ran down the join of the doors to make crowbarring them open impossible. They also had hinge bolts set into the door and a steel kicking strap reinforcing the inside. It would have been easier to smash your way in through the walls than break those doors down.

  The third lock was a magnetic one operated by a swipecard. It was an impressive display. Nobody was coming through these doors that shouldn’t be. It was impregnable.

  Curtis backed the van up so the doors were level with the lip of the loading bay near the entrance, unlocked the doors, swung them open and unloaded his cargo.

  He started bringing it inside. The huge room with the one oil drum in it, containing the headless body of Jordan Anderson, was cold and shrouded in gloom. North-facing windows did little to dispel the permanent, crepuscular twilight. Curtis eyed the oil drum, squat and menacing, with almost fear. The place was like some strange art installation, unsettling. He placed the first of the three new drums by the old one, and shuttled backwards and forwards until the job was done.

  Three oil drums. Three new repositories, metal reliquaries awaiting their contents.

  He wondered who they were for.

  He looked up, startled from his thoughts by the noise of an engine outside. Then footsteps, the noise of a door being slammed and Dimitri appeared. Curtis’s heart sank. But big as Dimitri was, the warehouse dominated everythi
ng. The huge, cavernous room was shadowy and dark, with a smell of damp and cement. The oil drum that contained the body – Curtis had forgotten his first name, he just knew it was one of the Andersons – exerted a kind of magnetic attraction on his attention. He had been unable to get it out of his head for the past week.

  Now he was standing in front of it, waiting for instruction, as Dimitri sauntered towards him.

  The unlikeliest of things reminded him of Anderson’s fate. He’d been in a supermarket and seen a jar of stem ginger in syrup. The sight of the ginger lying there in the thick, viscous solution reminded him of the body folded into its foetal position in the drum, covered in concrete.

  Anything in a can brought his mind back to this place.

  To the right of the filled drum stood the three others, patiently awaiting whoever the Russians would choose to fill them with.

  Not whatever, thought Curtis, whoever.

  Curtis breathed deeply. He was morbidly fascinated to see if he would be able to smell anything of the dead man, but all he was aware of scentwise was the lingering hint of oil from the four drums, the neutral damp smell of the empty warehouse and the cement from the half-dozen bags that stood awaiting use by the empty oil drums. There was also a spade resting on some tough polythene bags of ballast and a heavy, stained piece of tarpaulin that would be used for mixing the concrete on when the time came. It was these items that Dimitri was checking.

  ‘Everything OK, Dimitri?’ asked Curtis, his tone light and jocular, as if he hoped it would rub off on the Russian.

  Dimitri scowled at him. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his biceps massive.

  ‘Zasranets,’ he growled at Curtis. Curtis rightly assumed this meant something uncomplimentary.