Cold Killers

by Lee Weeks

  ‘Who would you get to be me?’

  ‘Have you ever met your customers before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do they know what you look like?’

  ‘Probably not. There are a few photos of me but not many and not clear. I prefer not to be recognised in my line of work.’

  ‘We have someone in mind. Now, I need to know every detail of the plan. We need to get our man in your place before the delay is too noticeable. We need to get him to your hotel room.’

  ‘How do I look?’ Maxi put his case in the boot of the car and then he got in beside Robbo and waited for him to answer before putting on his seat belt.

  ‘You look the part.’ Maxi nodded. Robbo could see he was nervous.

  ‘We’re very grateful, Maxi. I’ll explain what I know, on the way to meet Carter by the hotel.’

  ‘Just be myself, you said, but with a South African accent.’

  ‘That’s pretty near all there is to it,’ replied Robbo as he drove.

  ‘Yeah, why am I beginning to regret this already?’

  ‘Come on, Maxi, this will go down in history. They might give you a medal.’

  ‘What? Posthumously? So basically you want me to be him, Roland de Soir?’

  ‘That’s right. Carter will get all the information we need from him and you’ll take de Soir’s place.’

  ‘I have heard of him. He knows a hell of a lot more than me about diamonds.’

  ‘Don’t worry. All you’ve got to do is bullshit enough to make them believe the diamonds are worth a lot more than they are. We need them to think they’re getting a great deal. Three hundred million’s worth.’

  ‘What are the diamonds for?’

  ‘A cocaine deal.’

  ‘And is de Soir working for the dealers?’

  ‘He’s an expert brought in by them to make sure we’re not ripping them off.’

  ‘Which we are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Robbo dropped him off when they got near the hotel and Carter was waiting for him in his car.

  ‘You okay, Maxi?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Of course you are. This is going to be easy for you. De Soir was told to check in to the hotel. He didn’t need a card: all he needed to do was say his name.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Yes, I know. And, just in case there’s a problem, we have his cards here. We have his wallet. I will give you his PIN.’ Maxi nodded.

  Carter handed him a new phone.

  ‘This phone is the one that they told him to use. I have his personal one. For obvious reasons he’s not allowed contact with the outside world until you’re safe and this operation is over.’

  Maxi nodded slowly, his eyes getting bigger by the second.

  ‘Maxi, they don’t know what he looks like. They only know he’s a disgraced but very talented expert. He was told to go to the room and wait until they contact. That’s all he knew. That’s all you know. Perfect. Go to your room, settle in, order dinner, stay off the booze and wait. When they call, don’t accept any social invitations from them, say you’re here for business only. Your fee is a million dollars, bank transfer. Say you are in a hurry to get out. Anything that you are not sure about you can ring me and I will ring de Soir.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve just remembered why I really left the force now: I’m basically a coward.’

  Carter smiled and handed over de Soir’s things.

  ‘It’ll be a piece of cake.’

  Maxi got out and walked down the road, pulling his expensive case behind him. He was a good choice, thought Carter as he watched him. More than that, he was the only choice.

  Carter stared at his phone. Should he text Della to see if she made it back to the Holloway flat? Why did he find it so hard to think of her as just someone he had to protect as he would anyone else he’d put up in that flat for his or her own protection? Why did he care if she was waiting for him? She had just lost her husband. He was in love with someone else. What the hell was the matter with him? He stared at the phone in his hand and then he shook his head, put the phone back in his pocket. If she needed him she would call. He had others to worry about now, Maxi for one. Carter went home to grab some sleep.

  Chapter 55

  13 December

  Willis woke up with a feeling of panic. It was six the next morning. The sun was belting into her room; the curtains were open. She needed water badly. She was lying next to the dinner from the night before. She wrapped a towel around herself and avoided the tray of burger and chips, uneaten. She stopped in the lounge area. She’d left the balcony door open overnight, the curtains were gently blowing.

  She was cross with herself – it was something she’d never have normally done. She went to stand by the open doors and feel the breeze coming off the sea. Standing in the sunshine only made the banging in her head worse. She went to look into Ross’s open bedroom door. He wasn’t in his bed. Willis rang him but the phone went dead. She went back in his room and looked around. All his things were gone. She looked in the wardrobe, everything was gone, his neatly hung shirts, his shiny shoes. All gone. She sat on his bed and tried to think. Why was it so hard to think? She looked at her phone again and rang Garcia.

  ‘Morning, Ebony.’

  ‘Morning. Is Ross with you?’

  ‘Detective Inspector David Ross?’

  ‘Yes. He’s not here this morning.’

  ‘Did he leave a note?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is there a note from him? He said he was going to leave it for you. He’s decided to stay here.’

  Willis looked around her. She stood and looked under the bed, on the bedside tables, and then she saw the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from beneath the lamp. She pulled on it and the note from Ross slid out.

  ‘Detective Willis? You find the note?’ Garcia repeated. She held it in her hands and read it.

  ‘It just says he’s staying.’ Willis felt a flash of anger. ‘Do you know how I can reach him?’

  ‘Isn’t he answering his phone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me try for you, too, and then get back to you. What time is your flight today?’

  ‘At one. I have to check out of here at ten. I suppose he’s left me the hire car. I need to return that.’

  ‘I will send a car to pick you up at the hotel and take you to the airport. You don’t have to worry about the hire car: my officers will return it. Ross is very bad to do this to you, his colleague. We’ll pick you up in an hour.’

  ‘I want to be kept informed of the progress looking for Francisco and his daughter. I saw evidence that she was there. What is your plan now with that?’

  ‘I will pass on your concern.’

  ‘I will bring a team back out myself if necessary. This needs cadaver dogs and helicopter searches of the wasteland behind the house. I will be submitting my report as soon as I get back and I will recommend all these courses of action be taken.’

  ‘I hear what you are saying. Trust me, I will get on with it. I hope you have a pleasant flight.’

  Willis walked numbly back into her room and she saw the hire-car keys on her bedside table. For a minute she wondered whether Ross had put them next to her while she slept, then she remembered that she had been the one to have them last. She looked around her room. There was a white carrier bag with the girls’ flamenco dresses in it. She had carried it in with her blouse and the sunglasses from the market. She had forgotten to give it to Ross. She looked at her phone again. Was this Spanish time or UK time? Was she going at the right time to the airport? Her head banged. She felt drained of all capacity to think straight. All she knew was that Ross had left her in the middle of the night and he hadn’t even bothered to wake her up to explain.

  Chapter 56

  Carter took an early call from Maxi while he was getting showered and ready for work.

  ‘A man named Marco has just left my room.’

&
nbsp; ‘What happened? What did he say?’

  ‘He brought me a rough diamond to look at. It wasn’t hard to be impressed with it: it’s the biggest and the best diamond I’ve ever seen. Where did he get it? I thought about asking him, but I didn’t dare. He looks like a member of a death squad: no taste in clothes but plenty of money to buy the designers, scars everywhere and a snappy way with a knife, which he demonstrated on the fruit. He carved his name into an apple.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Shit, Carter, this isn’t funny.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re seen as the good guy in all this. He obviously bought your story.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because he didn’t kill you.’ ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I mean it. Great job. What does he want you to do next?’

  ‘Nothing, until he calls again and that should be in a few days, he says. Meanwhile, I can rack up the bill here, enjoy the casino, get some girls, all his words of course, not mine, but he’s left me close to half a million in cash for any extra expenses.’

  ‘You see – not all bad. Enjoy.’

  ‘It would be but I need to get back in the shop. People will be contacting me about the diamonds on loan. They will be bringing them to the shop. Now I feel a double responsibility to give myself a chance of pulling this off.’

  ‘You go back, as long as you return to the hotel to sleep. Make sure no one follows you. They won’t be looking for trouble. You should be fine.’

  Carter headed into work. He went straight to a meeting about Manson and the possible locations for the cocaine laboratory.

  ‘Robbo pinned a map up on the board; at its centre was Swanley and The Paddocks. It was circled in blue, and the red dots signified where the business parks and industrial estates were.

  ‘We know Manson has a van, which we presume is either parked at The Paddocks or the fireplaces’ destination.’

  ‘It’s a softly-softly approach right now,’ said Carter. ‘We just want to find it; we don’t want it closed down. The deal relies on it.’

  ‘If there is just one facility, which is both the storage for the fireplaces and the laboratory to extract the cocaine, usual choice would be close to a motorway, so I’ve highlighted these parks first. There are an awful lot of them. We presume it would have strict security. No one is going to want that broken into. It would have to be fairly empty apart from the cocaine lab.’

  ‘Unless it’s a front for something legitimate.’

  ‘Going on the laboratories found in Spain, they were not. They were large facilities. It takes a big laboratory to process a ton of cocaine, dissolve it and extract it.’

  ‘An old chemical factory?’ suggested Pam. ‘A place that makes cleaning fluids? If you think about it, there is the opportunity to hide it behind something that sounds innocuous.’

  ‘But you still wouldn’t want someone knocking on the door and asking to buy some Jif?’

  ‘No, so something that is necessary but no one wants to go near it.’

  ‘Somewhere not very smart, not super-swish. You don’t want people wanting to know your business.’

  ‘We’ve got several officers working on this right now,’ said Robbo. ‘They’re all posing as prospective manufacturers looking for premises. We’re working our way through the list around the M25 first.’

  ‘I take it you’re not going to bring Manson in and ask him, then?’

  Carter shook his head. ‘There’s so much at stake. How many other shipments from any of Manson’s firms have there been, Pam?’

  ‘So far I have found six in the last six months. They range from ceramics to bespoke art pieces. Some of them must be genuine, I suppose.’

  ‘Which port? Do they always come in at the same place?’

  ‘Mainly to Felixstowe, then they are picked up by a haulage company and delivered to The Paddocks. They used a different haulage company each time. The driver is not in the equation. Manson always met the driver there and helped unload the goods.’

  ‘So, we can expect them to get delivered there again,’ said Robbo.

  ‘Different cartel, I don’t know,’ said Carter.

  ‘We don’t know which port or where it will be taken? It’s not looking easy, Carter,’ said Robbo.

  ‘No, and all we have is the cheap diamonds to pay for it.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they take them straight to the laboratory?’ asked Pam.

  ‘I don’t know, perhaps they don’t have the facility for storing much there? Maybe the batch is mixed, some boxes are genuine, like you said, Pam.’

  ‘We need to get another twenty officers out driving to these sites then, Robbo. Make sure they know what they’re supposed to be looking for. The van would be great to find. Meanwhile, any luck with working out who Manson is talking to in the café? Justino? Did you find any more images of him?’

  ‘No, it’s just not clear enough. We’ll keep looking.’

  Chapter 57

  Carter was walking back to his office when he met Willis as she came out of the lift on the third floor in Fletcher House.

  ‘Ah, back from sunny Spain. You okay? You look like you’re about to throw up.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Come with me.’

  He took her elbow and thrust her into the nearest bathroom and stood outside the cubicle until she’d finished retching. He talked to her while she washed her face.

  ‘Jesus, what have you been doing out there, or have you got a bug?’

  She stood over the sink and looked into the mirror as she shook her head.

  ‘Ross is gone,’ she said, shaking her dripping face, holding on to the sides of the sink for stability.

  ‘What? What are you saying, Willis? Make sense.’

  ‘Ross stayed out there. He disappeared on me.’

  ‘When? How? What do you mean?’

  ‘He didn’t come back to the apartment last night, or I thought he hadn’t. Turns out he came and took his things and left in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Without a word?’

  ‘He left a note. I don’t know whether it was genuine.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I don’t have it.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Willis, what the bloody hell has been going on?’

  ‘I tell you, nothing untoward happened.’ She focused on Carter in the mirror. ‘Nothing that seemed unusual, until these last few hours when everything seems weird. I think I’ve made a massive mistake leaving Marbella.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘We were out for the evening with the two local detectives we’d been working with and I went home early. I left him to stay out with them. It was all fine. And that’s it. I woke up, and all his things were gone.’

  ‘Were you drugged?’

  ‘I don’t know. I came home earlier in the evening, a bit pissed. Teen said I seemed really pissed when I Skyped her but I was drinking loads of water. I’ve drunk way more than that and not been so legless. I woke up next to the tray of food.’

  ‘With food still on it? Okay, okay, I’ll take it from here. You go home and sleep it off. You’re no good to me like this.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, sir.’

  ‘I know. Give me your phone.’

  Willis handed it over; she was struggling to stay upright as she leaned back onto the basin and closed her eyes.

  ‘You know what? I’m going to get you home by squad car. Where’s Tina now?’ Willis shook her head. ‘Well, I’ll find her. I’ve seen her this morning. She must be working in the canteen. I’ll phone and get her the day off. She’s going home with you now. She’ll look after you. Something’s happened here. I don’t know what, but you need to get to bed.’

  He copied the things he needed from her phone and then handed it back, zipped it up in her jacket pocket. He put her in a taxi with Tina.

  ‘Teen, you ring me if Willis doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Go via the Whittington. I want a blood test taken. Dr
Harding will be waiting in pathology.’

  Carter went to see Robbo.

  ‘Did you manage to get hold of the Spanish detectives?’

  ‘They’ll be on Skype in a minute. How’s Eb?’ asked Robbo.

  ‘I think she’ll be okay later. She’s working whatever it is out of her system. I’ve organised a blood test but I think it’s unlikely we’ll find a trace of anything this long after she remembers having anything to drink. Tina saw her on Skype, talked to her at just after eleven when she said Willis seemed very drunk.’

  ‘Here we are; they’re coming online,’ said Robbo.

  ‘Okay, I’ll come over,’ said Carter.

  ‘Hello, Inspector Ramirez,’ said Robbo as the webcam came to life and they were looking at the face of the world-weary detective. ‘I’ll pass you across to Detective Inspector Carter,’ he said as he turned the screen towards Carter. Carter leaned on the desk as he talked. He was agitated, worried.

  ‘Morning, Inspector. I hope Detective Sergeant Willis got home all right. The police car that gave her a lift said she seemed a bit ill. I was worried they might not let her on the plane. Very strange. Is she okay?’

  ‘She made it back, at least, that’s more than can be said for Inspector Ross. Where is he? Can you explain to me, please? I want to understand how one of my detectives comes back apparently having been drugged, and the other doesn’t come back at all.’

  ‘I know nothing about why Detective Willis is ill. She is not used to drinking, perhaps. I am sure she was not drugged. She had a few drinks before she left us yesterday evening. As for Inspector Ross, I think he always had his own agenda when he came out here. I think he’s working for a different boss, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Please explain where he is right now.’

  ‘Right now? I have no idea. We spent the evening with him until two in the morning and then he told us he intended to stay in Marbella and continue his investigations alone. He didn’t need our help, he said. It was a big shock to us too.’

  ‘He’s not answering his phone. Can you put out a search for him, please?’

  ‘I wish I could help, Inspector, but, if Ross has decided he can do better on his own, what can we do about it?’