by Michael Kerr
Filling and switching on the kettle, Veronica went out into the corridor and headed for the stairs. She made a point of seeing each of the three nurses on duty at irregular intervals throughout the night. No one slept when she was at the helm.
“All quiet?” Veronica asked nurse Natalie Callard on the first floor.
“So far, so good,” Natalie replied.
“How’s the old goat in 106?”
“Sleeping like a baby.”
The old goat in question was one Lewis King, an ageing actor of the lovey variety, who spouted Shakespeare endlessly, though had not trodden the boards for at least a Decade. He was a terminal case, and although they would not be too sad to be rid of him, they hoped he would not turn up his toes on their watch. It made for a lot of paperwork.
“Okay, I’ll see you later,” Veronica said.
“Did you hear those popping sounds?” Natalie asked.
“No. What kind of popping sounds?”
“It sounded a little bit like light bulbs exploding.”
Veronica shook her head. “Probably just air in the pipes.”
As she pushed through the swing doors to the second floor, Veronica was met by a sulphurous smell that reminded her of the fumes left in the air after a firework display.
Maureen O’Brien was not at her desk, or to be seen on the corridor. Maybe she had gone for a pee, or was with a restless patient. She would wait.
Moving behind the counter, it took a few numbing seconds for Veronica to assimilate and react to the sight that met her. Maureen was lying in a pool of blood, and more of it spattered the wall behind her in spotted lines that looked as if a loaded paint brush had been whipped through the air to create them. She studied the body. The young nurse’s right eye was a crimson crater; the left was wide open and stared up towards the ceiling.
Veronica snapped free from invisible constraint and went to the body; to feel for a pulse that she knew would not be present. She then rushed back downstairs to her office to call the clinic’s director, before ringing the police. The soles of her moccasins were tacky on the vinyl, and left pillar box red footprints in her wake.
Tom looked at the display on the radio alarm as he picked up the phone from his bedside table. It glowed: 1.06 AM.
“This had better be good,” he said into the mouthpiece, before the caller could speak.
“It’s Pete Deakin, boss,” the DS said. “The Whitfield Clinic got hit. A nurse and an elderly female patient were shot. Both dead.”
“Fuck!”
Pete continued undaunted. “Uniforms are at the scene. What do you want me to do? I’ve jacked up a forensic team and contacted the duty pathologist.”
“Get over there. I’m on my way.”
What about the Page woman, boss?”
“I moved her, Pete. I’ll explain when I get there,” Tom said before hanging up.
“What is it, Tom?” his wife asked as he dressed in the dark.
“Just work, love,” he replied.
Jean Bartlett turned on the bedside lamp. “You got time for a coffee?”
“Yeah, instant, and not too hot.”
Jean got up, pulled a dressing gown on over her nightdress. Went downstairs and put the kettle on.
Tom counted his blessings. Matt and Beth Holder had convinced him that Penny Page had to be moved. If he hadn’t gone along with it, then the only person who could identify the killer with any certainty – apart from Matt, who only got a fleeting glance – would now be dead. Whoever was on the inside had attempted to sell them out…again.
As Tom joined Jean in the kitchen and picked up his mobile to phone Matt, it rang.
“Bartlett.”
“It’s Nick, boss. I just got back from driving two of Santini’s gorillas to Vic Pender’s house. He’s your man. They roughed him up a bit and told him to find out where you’d moved the woman to. He thought she was still at the clinic.”
“Ace, Nick. What do you expect will happen when he can’t come through for them?”
“I reckon I’ll get to witness a bad cop get whacked, boss. How do you want me to play it?”
“Keep with the programme. We need you on the inside as Lansky. I’ll deal with Pender.”
“Better make it quick, boss. Pender’s on the clock. They’re expecting him to call with an address within the hour.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MATT was on the edge of sleep. His thoughts were almost dreams, taking shape and then melting, skipping from one disparate scene to another like a reel of film edited together badly from separate movies, with no continuity. Linda appeared. She was walking away from him along a dusty blacktop road that could have been in Arizona or Utah. Maybe Monument Valley. Red buttes towered above the desert floor. If Robert Blake had ridden up in the cop uniform he wore in the cult movie Electraglide in Blue, he would not have been surprised. And then he was at the kitchen table eating Chinese food with Beth. The killer in the baseball cap appeared behind her, smiled at Matt, and shot Beth in the back of the head. Her face snapped forward and down into a plate of steaming sweet and sour chicken and noodles.
Matt came fully awake. His leg hurt. It was itching as it healed, and the coiled springs in the thin mattress of the sofa bed were pressing through, probably leaving circular imprints on his back. The pain and the sudden chirp of the phone brought him out of what had been stacking up to be a full-blown nightmare.
He reached out and picked up.
“I can’t get to the phone at the moment. If you’d like to leave a mess¯”
“You don’t have an answering machine, Matt. Remember?” Tom said.
“You know that, and I know that, but most people don’t. What depressing news do you have for me?”
“That it’s official, you’re not safe there, Matt. I want you out within the hour.”
“Convince me.”
“The clinic just got hit. Two dead. I’m sending a team to extract you, so get dressed. And this isn’t a request.”
“I’ll be ready. Give me some details.”
“The perp popped an elderly female patient and a nurse. Main thing you need to know is that we found out who’s in bed with Santini. You won’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Vic Pender.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish. Our inside man just drove some muscle over to his place. They slapped Vic around and told him to get back to them with Penny Page’s current location.”
“So you did move her again?”
“Yeah. You and Beth put up a good argument. She’s safe. We’re going to lift Pender now, before he gets himself offed for not being able to give them what they want. He can help us set Santini up.”
“You can’t seriously be considering cutting him any slack.”
“Do me a favour, Matt. He’s going down for his part in what happened to Donny and the others. I’ll just give him the choice of talking to me or being fed to Santini.”
Vic knew that it was over. If he came clean, then his family would pay the price. The scene of Joey Demaris being clubbed to a pulp before having his throat cut was still vivid in his mind. And anyway, he couldn’t harm Santini. His word alone without any corroboration wouldn’t be enough to get the CPS to take it to court. He was between a rock and a hard place. And he couldn’t face the prospect of doing time. How long could he expect to last before he was knifed in the shower, or held down in a cell and shot-up with an overdose of bad shit? Santini could reach inside and have anything done. The gangster may even make an example of his wife and daughter, and let him rot in prison with yet another even more personal atrocity on his conscience.
Fear and self-loathing for his weakness and past actions overwhelmed Vic. Had he known the woman’s new location, he was sickened to admit to himself that he would have given her up. It had to end. He needed a way out that would ensure his family’s and other peoples’ safety.
Time passed.
He drank a lot more brandy, too quickly, as if it was water he was chugging down, which didn’t help or change anything, but numbed the mental anguish a little. After a while he phoned the casino and asked for Frank.
“Give me good news.” Frank said.
“I can’t,” Vic slurred. “A DCI, Tom Bartlett, is heading up the case, and he’s moved her without even telling his own team.”
“You expect me to buy that?”
“Yes. I’m shit-scared for my family. If I could give you an address, I would, you know that. Bartlett isn’t stupid. He knows it was inside information that led you to Little.”
Frank gave the situation all of five seconds intense consideration. He believed Pender. The cop had everything to lose and nothing to gain by holding out. He was already in far too deep to start playing games.
“I’m disappointed. If you were my only source, then I’d be in big trouble. Just sit tight. We’ll be in touch.”
Vic’s mind raced as the phone clicked and purred. The gambler in him studied the odds and various permutations of the game he was playing. The cards he held were never going to be a winning hand. For the first time in his life, he knew when to fold and walk away from the table.
* * *
Tom prioritised. Lifting Pender was more important than his attending the crime scene at the clinic. Deakin could mop up there.
When they arrived, the house was in darkness. They covered it front and back, and Tom pounded on the front door. A bedroom light came on, and within seconds Tom saw the shape of someone coming down the stairs as he peered through the frosted window set in the top half of the door.
Pender’s wife opened the door and stared at Tom with a confused expression on her face.
“Where’s Vic?” Tom asked.
“I...I don’t know. I thought he was in the lounge,” she replied.
“I need to talk to him urgently, Mrs. Pender.”
“I don’t understand. When I went to bed he was watching television.”
“Let’s go inside,” Tom said. “No point putting on a show for the neighbours.”
Sonia Pender stepped back woodenly and allowed Tom and other officers to enter. Before they reached the lounge, DC Marci Clark tugged Tom by the sleeve of his jacket. He turned. His DC’s expression, pale face, and her overall demeanour conspired to relay unspoken bad news.
“I need a word, boss,” she said. “Outside.”
Vic was in the garage. He’d strung himself up with a short length of blue nylon rope that was tied off to a crossbeam. An old plastic crate lay a foot away from where his feet hung barely an inch above the concrete floor. There was little doubt that he had stood on the crate, secured the noose around his neck and then kicked the makeshift platform away.
It didn’t look much like Vic anymore. His face was almost purple, and his eyes were bugging out. But it was his tongue that Tom had difficulty in looking away from. It was blue now, not pink, and hung out and down over his bottom lip and chin, impossibly long. The front of the dead cop’s trousers were wet, and drops of liquid dripped from one shoe to ripple the puddle of piss beneath it. Tom took a deep breath, and then another. Vic was no longer tense with guilt, shame and fear. All his muscles had relaxed. The malodorous stink that permeated throughout the garage vouched safe for that. He had found a way out of one mess; to leave another that he didn’t give a rat’s arse about.
In the last few seconds, as he had jerked in his death throes and clawed at the rope biting into his throat, Vic found the optimism to believe that his self sacrifice would go some way to absolving him of his actions. He was also sure that his wife and daughter would now be safe. It would serve no useful purpose for Santini to harm them with Vic gone. It was true that flogging a dead horse was pointless.
Ballistics made the recovered slugs from the clinic shootings a priority.
Matt was in Tom’s office when the call came through the following afternoon.
“The bullets that killed the nurse and patient were a match, Matt,” Tom said. “The same gun was used on you and the others at the safe house.”
“Pender got off too lightly,” Matt said. “I hope he lasted a long time. I’d hate to think it was quick.”
“It’s the wife and daughter I feel for, Matt. As far as they knew, he was a good husband, father and cop. Santini must have had him by the short and¯”
“I don’t want to hear excuses for him, Tom. Whatever shit he was in wasn’t a good enough reason to sell out. Now we know who fingered Joey Demaris as well. Christ knows what else he was responsible for. He should’ve come clean as soon as Santini braced him.”
“You think it was just for money?”
“Who knows? Maybe he gambled himself into a deep fucking hole. Santini could have offered to tear up his marker if he played ball. It might have just been small stuff to begin with, but once he’d crossed over, there was no turning back. His family would’ve also been under threat. He got boxed in, but it was his choice. It can only happen if you say yes.”
“Whatever. It puts us back to square one. Unless my guy on the inside hears anything else.”
“We’ve still got Penny Page. And the hitter obviously wants Santini to locate her, but he won’t be able to. Now we can use the situation to put them head to head. With a little encouragement, both parties might think it would be safer if the other was eliminated. Paranoia is a powerful weapon, and I think both of these sickos’ suffer from it by the bucketful.”
“What exactly are you suggesting?”
“We set it up. Push hard and play dirty.”
“How?”
“I meet with Santini. Show him the artist’s impression of the killer. Let him know that we know who the shooter is, and that it’s only a matter of time before we lift him, and that when we do, we’ll deal with the guy to finger Santini as the contractor. He knows that the Page woman can ID the killer.”
“That’s not by the book, Matt. We could foul up any case that comes out of it.”
“Fuck the book, Tom. We need to make things happen. You got a better idea?”
“No. But you may not survive a meet with Santini.”
“I’m already a target. Give me the okay to put the cat among the pigeons, and let’s watch the feathers fly. If it works out, they’ll solve our problem for us. We need to flush them out. And at worst we’ll have lost nothing.”
Tom poured coffee that was thick and bitter from being reheated too often. He lit a cigarette, breaking another rule, and smoked it halfway down before nodding to Matt.
“You tell Santini that your back is covered. No heroics, right?”
“You got it.”
“So do it.”
Matt used his mobile to call Rocco’s, gave his name, asked for Frank, and was put on hold for over three minutes.
“This is Dominic Santini. What can I do for you?”
“I asked to speak to Frank,” Matt said.
“Asking for something and getting it are two different things. My father is away on business for a couple of days. You got anything to say, say it, and stop wasting my time.”
“I wanted to discuss a friend of mine, Vic Pender. He told me a lot of stuff. I’m in a hole. I thought you might want to help me out of it.”
“I’ve never heard of a cop by the name of Pender.”
“Have you heard of me? I’m Barnes, the cop who survived the hit on one of your late employees…Lester little.”
“You’ve lost me, Barnes. I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”
“I need the hitter off my back, Santini. And so will you, soon. I’ve got an address you might be interested in, to show good faith.”
“You’ve got your wires crossed somewhere along the way. I run a legit club, not Murder Incorporated.”
“That’s not what Vic said, before he checked out.”
A long pause. “Drop by the club tonight at about ten. I’m sure I can set you straight on a few points an
d clear the air. I’m all for co-operating with the law.”
“I’ll be there,” Matt said.
“Well?” Tom asked as Matt closed his phone.
Matt smiled. “He bit. He obviously played dumb over the phone, but I got an invite to call in at Rocco’s this evening.”
“I’ll have a team outside, just in case he plans on taking you on a one-way ride. Don’t forget what happened to Joey.
Matt took a cab back to within limping distance of the no frills hotel he had moved into. It was on a side street off Tottenham Court Road. He cut through a mews and entered the Kenton Court Hotel by the rear door. It was basic. The antiquated lift groaned up to the second floor and jerked to a spine-jarring stop. Once in his room, Matt peeled off his clothes and put his cigarettes, lighter and mobile on the cabinet next to the bed. Lying down on top of the faded bedspread, he interlocked his fingers at the back of his head and stared up at the ceiling. He was hot. The room was stuffy, had no amenities, but was adequate for his needs. He had registered as John Gabriel, and had a driving licence in that name, courtesy of the Yard’s Document Section.
The hotel owner, Ron Quinn, was a soft-spoken west countryman with a ruddy face, red hair and matching beard. Matt adjudged him to be in his early fifties, over six-four, and to have been either a boxer or rugby player in his younger days, judging by the shape of his nose and slightly cauliflower ears. Matt liked him. He was polite, didn’t ask awkward questions, and more importantly kept the small residents’ bar open very late.
Matt let his thoughts drift. The bed was a little short, but more comfortable than the sofa bed at home. He had no real wish to ever return to the maisonette at Harrow. There was nothing there for him but bad memories. Linda had been the reason he had played house. He didn’t need the space. Up until buying the place for the two of them, he had rented a basement flat in Dulwich, and even paid the Hungarian woman in the ground floor flat above him to muck it out once a week and do his laundry. Being alone again had its advantages. He wasn’t good at all the small stuff that was needed to make a relationship work. It struck him that he just hadn’t met the right woman, or that he was too damn selfish to make the necessary adaptations to be able to find middle ground and learn to, or want to compromise. Maybe it was a combination of the two. He had always been a loner at heart.