Pray for the Dying

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘I ken that now,’ Mann wailed. ‘But like I said, I didnae have any choice. Bazza’s had a hold on me from way back, since I was a cop. It’s no’ just the drink that’s a problem for me. Ah’m an addictive personality. Anything I do, I do it to the limit and beyond.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Not that: gambling. Horses, mostly, but there was the cards too. Bazza’s old man was ma bookie, and then he died and the brothers took over. Bazza gave me a tab, extended credit, he called it, but what he was really doin’ was lettin’ me pile up debt. One night he introduced me to a poker school. Ah did all right early on, but I think that was rigged, to suck me in. Then I lost it all back, but Ah was beyond stoppin’ by then. Bazza kept on stakin’ me, letting my tab get bigger and bigger. It got completely out of control, until before I knew it I was about seventy-five grand down, on top of twelve and a half that I’d owed him before.’

  He paused, and his eyes found Skinner, reversing their earlier roles. ‘That was when I was truly fucked. He pressed me for the money, even though he knew I didnae have it. He got heavy. He threatened me, he threatened Lottie and he even threatened wee Jakey, even though he was only a baby then.

  ‘I threatened him back, or Ah tried to, told him he was messing wi’ a cop and that I could have him done. He laughed at me; then he put a blade to my throat and told me that it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to be found up a close in an abandoned tenement with a needle hangin’ out my arm and an overdose of heroin in ma bloodstream. And Bazza did not kid about those things. So I agreed tae pay him off in kind.’

  ‘How?’ the chief murmured.

  ‘I became his grass, within the force. I told him everything we knew about him. Every time he was under surveillance he knew about it. If one of his boys was ever done for anything, Ah’d fix the evidence, or I’d give Bazza a list of the witnesses against him and he’d sort them.’

  ‘You mean he killed them?’

  ‘No, he never needed to go that far. That would have been stupid, and he wasn’t.’

  ‘So you were his safety net within the force?’

  ‘Aye. And I got uniforms for him, once before.’

  ‘You did? When?’

  ‘About six months before I was kicked out. He gave me the same story: a fancy dress party. That time he did give me them back, after they’d been used in a robbery at an MoD arms depot. All the guys that were in on it were caught eventually, apart from Bazza.’ He frowned. ‘That was a funny one, a Special Branch job rather than our CID.’

  And I know why, Skinner thought. Bazza was off limits on the NCIS database because he’d grassed on his accomplices in the robbery . . . or possibly set the whole thing up for MI5.

  ‘How did you get the uniforms, then and this time?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got a friend who works in the warehouse. I asked for a favour.’

  ‘I don’t imagine it was done out of the goodness of your friend’s heart.’

  Mann shot him a tiny smile. ‘It was, as it happened.’

  ‘Eh?’ The chief constable was taken aback. ‘So why did you have that cash from Bazza Brown?’

  ‘Ah told him that Ah had to pay the supplier.’

  ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

  ‘Aw, sir. Do ye really need it?’

  Skinner stared at him, then he laughed. ‘Are you kidding me? Of course we do. The guy’s as guilty as you are, almost. Name, now.’

  ‘Chris McGlashan,’ the prisoner sighed. ‘Sergeant Chris McGlashan. And it’s no a guy; it’s Chris, as in Christine. Please, sir,’ he begged. ‘Can ye no’ leave her out of it? Can you not say I broke intae the warehouse and stole them?’

  ‘Why the bloody hell should I do that?’

  ‘She’ll deny it.’

  ‘I’m sure she will, but we’ll lift her DNA as well, from the package and the equipment.’

  ‘Aw Jesus, no! Lottie . . .’

  The obvious dawned. ‘Aw Jesus, indeed!’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘You stupid, selfish, irresponsible son-of-a . . .’ he snapped. ‘This Chris, she’s your bit on the side, isn’t she? You’re an addictive personality right enough, Scott. The booze, the horses, the women . . . Is she the only one you’ve been two-timing Lottie with, or have there been others?’

  Mann seemed to slump into himself. ‘One or two,’ he sobbed.

  ‘Mr Skinner,’ Viola Murphy ventured, ‘is this relevant to your investigation?’

  ‘Probably not, but it does demonstrate what a weak, untrustworthy apology for a husband and father your client is . . . let alone what a disgrace he was as a serving police officer.’

  He turned back to his subject. ‘How did Bazza react when you were chucked out of the force, Scott? I don’t imagine you could have worked off all that ninety-odd grand, just in doing him favours.’

  ‘He was okay about it, more or less. He told me he’d still come to me for info, and that he’d expect me to get it through Lottie, but he never really did, no’ until this business. To tell you the truth, I half expected tae wind up in the Clyde, but nothin’ happened.’

  ‘No, you idiot,’ Skinner’s laugh was scornful, ‘because the debt was never real! The poker school, where you supposedly lost all that dough. Did it never occur to you that it wasn’t just the first few hands that were rigged in your favour, but that the whole bloody thing was rigged against you, to set you up? Who were the other guys in the school? Did you know them?’

  ‘A couple of them; they were Bazza’s drivers in the taxi business.’

  ‘Then they must have been on bloody good tips, to be able to sit in on such a high-roller card game. You got taken, chum, to the cleaners and back again, just like everyone else who was involved with your friend Mr Brown. Did you really never work any of this out?’

  ‘No. Now you say it, I can see how he done it, but honest, sir, he had me scared shitless most of the time and on a string. He was even the reason I got chucked off the force.’

  ‘What? Are you saying he fed you the booze?’

  ‘It had nothin’ tae do wi’ the booze. The station commander caught me liftin’ evidence against Cec, one time he got arrested for carvin’ up a dope dealer that had crossed the pair of them. I photocopied the witness list. He walked in on me while Ah was doing it, and saw right away what it was about. He gave me a straight choice: either Ah resigned on health grounds and blamed alcoholism, or I’d go down for pervertin’ the course of justice.’

  ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘For Lottie’s sake, he said.’

  ‘And who was this station commander, this saviour of yours?’

  ‘Michael Thomas,’ Mann replied. ‘ACC Thomas, he is now. He was a superintendent back then.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Skinner murmured. ‘And what happened to Cec? I don’t recall any serious assault convictions on his record.’

  ‘The charges were dropped anyway. The two key witnesses withdrew their evidence. They must have got to them some other way.’

  ‘Not through you?’

  ‘No. I never knew who they were. Ah never got that far. They must have had another source in the force.’

  Forty-Three

  ‘Do you ever feel like you’re in a movie, or a TV series?’ Lowell Payne asked.

  Neil McIlhenney laughed. ‘All the bloody time. My wife’s an actress, remember. As a matter of fact, she’s just been offered the lead in a new TV series, about a single mother who’s a detective, but it would have meant spending months at a time out in Spain, so she turned it down. Why d’you ask? Are you a frustrated thesp?’

  ‘Hell, no. No, it’s being down here, in this place, where all the names come straight off the telly. Highbury earlier on; now it’s the Elephant and bloody Castle, for God’s sake. Makes me feel like Phil Mitchell.’

  ‘Nah, you’ve got too much hair, mate.’

  ‘Where does the name come from anyway?’

  ‘I’m told by my cockney colleagues that it goes back to one of the worshipful companies that had an el
ephant with a castle on its back on its coat of arms. Somehow that became the name of a coaching inn on this site, about two hundred and fifty years ago.’

  ‘So it’s got fuck all to do with real elephants, or castles.’

  ‘Absolutely fuck all.’

  The two detectives were standing on the busy thoroughfare they had been discussing, having been dropped off by their driver in the bus lane that ran past the Metropolitan Tabernacle Baptist Church, a great grey pillared building.

  ‘Where’s the office?’ the visitor asked.

  ‘On the other side of the road, on top of that shopping complex; that’s what I’m told.’

  Payne looked at the dual carriageway, and at the density of the fast-moving traffic. ‘Crossing that’s going to be fun,’ he complained.

  ‘No. It’s going to be dead easy,’ his companion replied, heading towards a circular junction. At the end of the road was a subway, running under the highway and surfacing through the Elephant and Castle tube station. ‘The office should be just around the corner here,’ he said, as they stepped out into the sunlight once more.

  They walked up a ramp that led into a shopping centre, and found the block without difficulty, and the board in the foyer that listed the tenants, floor by floor.

  ‘There we are,’ McIlhenney declared. ‘Rondar Mail Order Limited, level three, north. Just two floors up.’

  They took the elevator, at Payne’s insistence. ‘I’d an early start, and I am knackered. Buggered if I’m walking when there’s an option.’

  As they stepped out, they saw, to their left, the Rondar logo, emblazoned across double doors of obscured glass. There was no bell, no entrance videophone, so the two officers walked straight through them, into an open space furnished with half a dozen desks and a few tables. At the far end, there were two partitioned areas, affording privacy. They counted five members of staff, all female, all white, all dark-haired, all in their twenties.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Payne whispered, ‘it’s like a room full of Amy Winehouses. I’m sure you don’t have to be Jewish to work here, for that would be illegal, wouldn’t it, but I’m even surer it helps.’

  The woman seated at the desk nearest to the entrance looked up at them. They judged that she was probably the oldest of the five. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Radnor, please,’ the DCS replied, showing her his warrant card. ‘Police. I’m Chief Superintendent McIlhenney, from the Met, and this is Chief Inspector Payne, from Strathclyde.’

  ‘Aunt Jocelyn’s busy, I’m afraid. She’s making a new product video, and can’t be disturbed.’

  McIlhenney smiled. ‘I think you’ll find that she can. But we’d all prefer it if you did it, rather than us.’

  For a moment or two, the niece looked as if she might put up an argument, but there was something in the big cop’s kind eyes that told her she would lose. And so, instead, she sighed and stood. ‘If you’ll follow me.’ They did. ‘Can you tell me what this is about?’ she asked as they reached the private room on the right.

  ‘Family matter,’ Payne told her.

  ‘But I’m . . .’ she began, swallowing the rest of her protest when he shook his head. ‘Wait here, please.’ She rapped on the door and stepped inside.

  They waited. For a minute, then a second, and then a third. McIlhenney’s fist was clenched ready to knock, when it reopened and Jocelyn Radnor, glamorous, late fifties and unmistakably Golda’s mother, stepped out. She did not look best pleased, even under the heavy theatrical make-up that she wore.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she exclaimed, ‘I haven’t a clue what this is about, but it had better be worth it. I’ve been trying to get that bloody promo right for an hour now, and I had finally cracked it when Bathsheba came in and ruined it.’

  ‘We’re sorry about that,’ McIlhenney said, lying, ‘but it is important, and better dealt with in your office.’

  ‘If you say so,’ she sighed. ‘Come on.’ She led them into the other room; they found themselves looking down the Elephant and Castle, back towards the tabernacle. The furniture had seen better days, but it was quality. She offered them each a well-worn leather chair and sat in her own. ‘What’s it all about, then? “A family matter,” my niece said.’

  ‘We want to talk to you about your son-in-law,’ Payne replied.

  She tilted her head and looked at him. ‘You’re one too?’ She chuckled. ‘Scotland Yard is finally living up to its name. What about my son-in-law?’ she asked, serious in the next instant. ‘Why are you asking about Byron?’

  ‘We’ll get to that. Can you tell us, how did he come to work for you?’

  ‘We needed a buyer, simple as that. Jesse, my late husband, always handled that side of the business, from the time when he founded it. That was the way it worked; he bought, I sold. Eventually, there came a time when he decided to plan for what he called “our retirement”. What he really meant was his own death, for he was twenty years older than me and had heart trouble, more serious than I knew. So he recruited Byron.’

  ‘How?’

  She frowned at the DCI. ‘I don’t know; he recruited him, that’s all. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Think back, please. Did he place an ad in the newspapers, or specialist magazines? Did he use headhunters?’

  Her eyebrows rose, cracking the make-up on her forehead along the lines of the wrinkles that lay underneath. ‘That was it. I asked where he found him and he said he had used specialists.’

  ‘Do you know anything about his career before he joined you?’

  ‘Jesse said he had worked for other mail order firms, in his time, and for a bank, but he never specified any of them.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have a personnel file, Mrs Radnor?’ McIlhenney asked.

  ‘Please, officer,’ she sighed, with a show of exasperation. ‘This is a family business. We don’t need such things. I know he was born somewhere on the south coast, although I can’t remember where, I know that he never had a father and that his mother is dead, I know that he’s nowhere near as good a buyer as my husband was, I know that he’s a very good husband to my daughter, and I know that he spent some time in Israel, a lot of time.’

  ‘How do you know that last bit?’

  ‘The accent would have told me, if he hadn’t. He didn’t get all of that in Sussex. I asked him about it, not long after he joined us; he said that after his mother died he went to work in a kibbutz.’

  ‘Do they have mail order in kibbutzes?’ Payne murmured.

  ‘Of course not, but after that he stayed in Tel Aviv for another few years, or so he said.’

  ‘You didn’t believe him?’

  ‘Let’s say he was never very specific.’ She paused. ‘Look, to be absolutely frank, my guess has always been that when Jesse took him on he was doing a favour for a friend from the old days.’

  ‘The old days where?’ the DCI asked.

  ‘My late husband was a soldier in his earlier life, a major in the Israeli army. He fought in the Six Day War, back in sixty-seven. He didn’t come to Britain until nineteen seventy-two.’

  ‘But he kept his links with Israel? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, through work with Jewish charities. He had a couple of friends at the embassy as well.’

  ‘So, Mrs Radnor,’ McIlhenney murmured, ‘if we told you that the man you’ve known all these years as Byron Millbank was known before that as Beram Cohen, am I right in thinking you wouldn’t be all that surprised?’

  ‘Not a little bit.’ She gazed at the DCS. ‘So what’s he done, that you’re here asking about him?’

  ‘He’s died, I’m afraid.’

  Jocelyn’s hands flew to her mouth, but she regained her composure after a few seconds. ‘Oh my. That I did not expect. Golda, my daughter, does she know?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve just left her. You’ll probably want to go to her when we’re finished here.’

  ‘Of course. When did this happen? Where? And how?’

  ‘Last week, in Edinburgh, of natu
ral causes.’ He carried on, explaining how it had happened and what his companions had done with his body.

  She listened to his story without a single interruption. ‘What was he doing with these men?’ she asked, when he was finished.

  ‘Planning a murder,’ he replied. ‘You’ve probably heard of the shooting of a senior police officer in Glasgow on Saturday evening. Your son-in-law organised the whole thing. The two guys who buried him were his comrades, soldiers like he was in Israel, working these days for money, not for flags.’

  ‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, ‘I read of it. His buddies, they’re dead too, yes?’

  ‘Killed at the scene.’

  ‘So Byron was a soldier. That’s what you’re saying?’ McIlhenney nodded. ‘Israeli army, I guess.’

  ‘That and more. Latterly he was Mossad, the Israeli secret service.’

  ‘So was my husband,’ she told them, ‘in the old days, and for a while after he came to Britain. It all fits. So why did they send him over here?’

  ‘From what I’m told, he’d become an embarrassment, so he was relocated. He kept in touch with his old community though. The concert hall killing wasn’t the only job he did, not by a long way. I guess it all helped pay for your daughter’s lifestyle.’

  ‘I have wondered about that,’ she admitted. ‘And Golda, does she know any of this?’

  ‘Only that her husband had another identity.’

  ‘Am I allowed to tell her the rest?’

  ‘If you want to, but do you? Isn’t being widowed enough for her to be going on with?’

  ‘True,’ she agreed. ‘So why did you tell me?’

  ‘Because you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’d fall for a phoney cover story when we say we need to take Byron’s computer and all the other records he kept in this office.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Jocelyn said.

  ‘So, can we have it?’

  ‘I imagine that’s a rhetorical question, and that you have a warrant.’

  ‘Call it a courteous request, but yes, we do.’

  ‘Warrant or not,’ she retorted, ‘I’d be happy to cooperate, and let you take everything you need. Unfortunately, someone’s beaten you to it.’