Hearing her voice, the people inside looked up. Rio eased into the room. Stopped when she reached the schoolgirl with the tattoo and looked down at the design on her body.
Love heart, with the words, ‘Lisa and Scottie Forever’.
‘Lisa,’ Rio said to the girl. ‘I’m sure you’re meant to be in school or something, so why don’t you and your mate hop on out of here.’
The schoolgirls looked nervously at each other, but recognised the voice of authority when they heard it.
‘No need to pay, this one’s on the house.’
The teens squealed with appreciation, one of them loudly saying the word, ‘fresh’, which Rio took to be the latest word for cool. The girls grabbed their bags and, chatting, left the shop.
Turned slowly to the male tattoo artist. ‘You do know it’s against the law to give a tattoo to someone under the age of eighteen.’
The woman and the man looked grimly at each other.
‘Now I could run this in, but you know what that will mean: this shop will be shut down and you’ll be facing a hefty fine . . .’ She shoved the photo in his face again.
He swallowed. Spoke quickly to the other artist in Russian, who quickly exited the room.
He took the mobile and gazed at the photo intently. ‘I’ve seen it before, but never done one.’
‘Where?’
He swallowed again and Rio noticed that his hand was shaking slightly. ‘It was a long time ago. I don’t remember where.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Some man came into a shop I worked in years back; he had one on his forearm. I’ve never seen it again. It’s certainly not a design that I carry in my shop.’
‘What about the writing?’
He moved the picture closer to his face.
С волка?ми жить
по-во?лчьи выть
‘It’s a Russian love saying. “Love is in the arms of the woman you love”.’
‘Are you sure, because doesn’t the red star mean the Red Army?’ Martin spoke for the first time.
‘Stars are one of the most popular designs, including red ones, which will have nothing to do with any army,’ the man responded sarcastically as he handed the phone back to Rio. ‘Now, can I get back to work?’ he added tartly.
‘If you’re lying to me . . .’ Rio threatened.
‘And why would I do that?’ the man shot back. His tone shifted from hard to weary. ‘I’m just a man, with a business, wanting to get on with his job.’
Back in the car, Rio leaned heavily back in her seat. ‘Maybe our vic was just a prostitute and got turned over by a punter?’
‘Boss, there’s something about this tattoo . . .’ Martin said.
‘What you thinking?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
Rio sighed.
Love is in the arms of the woman you love.
Damn. She just couldn’t figure out how the inscription was going to help with her investigation.
The sound of her mobile distracted her away from the tattoo. God, did her phone ever stop?
‘DI Wray.’
It was the officer on the desk back at The Fort. ‘There’s a man here to see you. Says he has some information on your murder investigation at the hotel.’
thirty-seven
2 p.m.
Getting into Club Zee was a lot easier than Mac figured. He thought it would be all intercoms, heavy-duty doors and bull-neck bouncers. But all he had to do was push open the door. He’d forgotten that during daylight hours most clubs were empty, still clearing up from the night before, so security was usually lax, most times non-nexistent. Club Zee was one of those faded art-deco buildings that were dotted every now and again across London. Some of the walls were curved and twisted, while others were panelled with raised lines that stood out like ceramic prison bars. A car siren lit up the air somewhere behind him as he pushed against the smooth walnut door.
He squinted against the change of light, a soothing red that bathed a short, tight corridor leading to a jet-painted door. The lights put Mac in mind of a brothel, dimmed enough so the punters couldn’t see the crap beneath the false glamour, and so the house girls wouldn’t have to see the men in all their creepy glory. The thought of a brothel bothered him. He could deal with Elena dipping in and out of a place full of ravers high on hippy-crack laughing gas, but a house of pay-as-you-go fucking . . . no, that would be the biggest betrayal of all.
The door at the end opened up under Mac’s firm push and he entered a reception area. Wide, quite tastefully kitted out with a tanned wood reception desk, jungle green couch and accompanying single chair. There were pictures on the wall, framed prints, not of buck-naked chicks or Al Pacino doing Scarface, tooled up with that killer stare, but replicas of well-known paintings. Then he noticed that another framed picture wasn’t a painting but photos, lots of photos mixed up together. But Mac wasn’t paying attention to the walls; the only thing that got his attention was the fact that there was no one around. Good – gave him time to stick his snout where it didn’t belong.
He started up a narrow flight of stairs that took him to the next floor. Black carpet, freshly vacuumed, over a space that was slightly bigger than downstairs. Another door at the end. He lengthened his stride, the sprayed air freshener stinging the insides of his nostrils as he neared the door. Pulled it open. Massive dance floor, its walls gleaming with the brightness of a metallic, silver shell. No one at the bar. No one anywhere. Mac rubbed his lips together in frustration. This was a large club, so how the heck was he going to find out about Elena’s connection here? He didn’t know the layout of the place. Which were the offices, the private rooms, or even those that might be reserved for one-on-one striptease?
‘What are you doing there?’ a voice called, taking Mac’s decision from him.
He turned to find an older woman, maybe a few decades on him, with a green overall, the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner in her hand and skin around her mouth that was as tightly pulled back as her greying hair.
Mac stared back, letting his gaze drop directly into hers. He didn’t blink as he answered. ‘I’m looking for the manager?’
The woman scoffed. Twisted her thin lips. ‘Manager? That’s a laugh. But if you’re looking for Jeff, the ponce who pays me a pittance, he’s in the office in the back near the basement dance floor downstairs.’
And with that she turned her back on him and revved up the vacuum. Mac knew seeing the manager was taking a chance, but sometimes the best way to find out stuff was straight from the horse’s big mouth. The sound of clinking glasses hit Mac as soon as he reached the dance floor downstairs. A man stood behind the slim bar, stocking up for the coming night, and a pole dancer, in an eye-hurting lemon crop top, did her thing upside down, her shock-blonde hair falling over her face. He passed her and approached the man at the bar.
‘Looking for Jeff,’ he threw out.
The man stopped. Gave him the quick once-over and then pointed his thumb at a door buried deep in another corridor past the Ladies and Gents. The door was slightly open, so Mac pushed and stepped inside. It wasn’t big, but had enough space in which to fit the table that a young man sat behind. He was kitted out in a polo shirt and a sharp suit, his thumbs moving wildly as he played a computer game. In front of him were piles of papers, an open bottle of brown liquid that left a sweet odour floating in the air and a mirror with a single line of coke. No, Mac peered closer at the drugs; from the size of the grains, he bet it was Special K.
‘Yesss,’ Jeff let out in a gravelly London accent, and then made a loud whooping sound. ‘Got you, sucker.’
Abruptly he flicked his head up, realising he wasn’t alone. His skin was young but his eyes were red-rimmed and ancient. He threw the console on the table and leaned back. ‘If you’re looking for a job, we ain’t hiring today. The only way we dish out work is on a strictly mouth-to-mouth basis, you get me?’
‘The cleaner told me where to find you.’
Jeff smiled. ‘Oh, you
mean my mum.’
‘I’m here on behalf of Reuben – Reuben Volk sent me.’
That got the effect that Mac was after. Jeff straightened up in the chair, running his palms down his polo shirt, as if trying to iron out any wrinkles. ‘Tell Mr Volk that I’m looking after the place real well . . .’
So Reuben owned the place. He let Jeff prattle on as he made a real drama of shutting the door slowly and firmly. ‘Reuben wants to know what’s happened to his brother’s lady friend. Seems she hasn’t been seen for a while.’
Jeff ran his gaze nervously over Mac as he hitched himself onto the edge of the table. ‘Grapevine is saying you were one of the last people to see her.’
Jeff rapidly shook his head, the ends of his sandy hair bouncing in the air. ‘Well, that just ain’t true; lots of other folk saw her at the club a few days back. I heard some of the other girls saying that she was up the duff . . .’
‘Pregnant?’
The pregnancy testing kit Mac had found in Elena’s flat, now tucked up in his pocket, flashed through his mind.
Jeff leaned forward and raised a palm in the air, as if that would add to the importance of his words. ‘Look, I keep my fingernails clean and just get on with my job, that’s all.’
Mac pushed up a semi-smile. ‘There’s no need to be nervous. All Mr Volk wants to know is where she is.’
The other man’s eyes skated to the drugs laid out beside him. Flicked back to Mac. ‘Do you mind?’ His gaze went back to the white line. ‘Haven’t finished my lunch.’
Mac almost went into automatic sneer, he didn’t have time for people who included drug taking in their leisure activities, but he relaxed his face and nodded. Jeff took the line with a noisy wheeze, pinched his nostrils and slumped, crooked, back in the chair.
His eyes blinked with the intent of the shutter of a camera as he looked back at Mac. ‘That Katia was a real raver, although she never name-checked herself using that name here. She always called herself Annalisa or Anna . . .’
‘So what does this real raver look like?’
Blink. Blink. Blink. ‘Not my type, a bit bony for me . . .’ He jackknifed to the front of his seat. ‘Not that I’m saying I wanted to get down and dirty with her; I would never stare at Sergei’s girl with the wrong expression in my eyes . . .’
Mac leaned his palms on the desk. Bent his body deep into the younger man’s space. ‘Mr Volk isn’t interested in where your cock’s been hanging out; all he wants to do is help his brother find his girl, so just tell me what she looks like.’
Mac guessed that Jeff was too far gone in ketamine heaven to suss out that surely Sergei would have given his brother a description of his girlfriend.
Jeff closed his eyes, deep thinking. Pushed them open again and went straight back into blink-blink mode. ‘About five six or seven. Pretty snub nose with short-cut dyed-black hair. Well, it looked out of a bottle to me. And the tattoo . . .’
Mac froze. ‘What tattoo?’
Sensing the change in the room, Jeff came over all nerves again, his hands jutting back in the air. ‘Look, man, if I ain’t meant to see no tat, I ain’t . . .’
Mac jerked to his feet. ‘What tattoo?’
‘On her arm. A red star with some yellow and some fancy shit foreign writing?’
thirty-eight
‘Did this Katia ever call herself Elena?’
Mac made himself ask the question. His mind was reeling with the information that he’d never prepared himself for. No, he wouldn’t allow himself to entertain the idea. No way . . . No, it just couldn’t be. But the stoned man in front of him was telling a different tale.
Five six or seven.
Snub nose.
Short-cut black hair.
Red star tattoo.
Elena. Was Sergei’s missing girlfriend Elena? Elena wouldn’t be screwing him and some other bloke at the same time. Would she? He tried to deny it but the description and the tattoo just kept hitting him back.
Jeff’s voice tore over his twisting thoughts. ‘I only ever heard her called Anna, Annalisa or Katia. Loads of the girls here have different names. I don’t ask to see no birth certificates. Sergei must be keen on finding this girl because you’re the second guy his brother has sent my way today.’
‘Who else has been here?’
But Jeff didn’t answer. Instead the corners of his eyes crinkled as he stared deeply at Mac, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘How come you don’t know Mr Volk sent someone else?’
Think quickly. Quickly. ‘Because maybe this man was never sent by Reuben.’ Mac added with menace, ‘If you’ve been flapping your lips about Mr Volk’s business to—’
‘Hold up. When the guy limped out of here, he only had the same information I’ve given you . . .’
‘Limped?’
‘Yeah. Well, sort of limped; took it slow each time he raised his right leg.’
Calum. What the fuck had he been doing here?
‘Maybe Sergei’s woman has gone off to get rid of the kid and don’t want him to know.’
The baby. He couldn’t ignore the presence of the pregnancy kit in his jacket any more. If this was Elena, had she been murdered while carrying his child?
Mac threw up in the sink as soon as he got into the toilet not far from Jeff’s office. Not my kid, not my kid. Please not my kid again. And how was he going to deal with another child dying before its time? The feeling was crushing, overwhelming. Like a jackhammer brutalising him, over and over. He lifted his head as his hand wiped his mouth. Stared at his face in the mirror, but another scene reflected back at him.
‘He’s dead because of you,’ Donna screamed at him. ‘You were meant to be looking after him. How could you have taken Stevie away from me . . . ?’
Her face became Elena’s, staring up at him in the bath in that ice-cold bathroom. Her hand was curved protectively across her tummy. ‘What shall we call him? Stefan in honour of Stevie?’
Her image disappeared as the room began to close in on Mac. He started shaking. Stevie had died because of him. And now another one of his children was gone. The pressure pulled him under. He took out his Luger and shoved the barrel in his mouth.
thirty-nine
2:20 p.m.
‘I understand that you’ve got some information about a crime that was committed at the Rose Hotel, Mister . . . ?’
Rio wasted no words with the cab driver who sat opposite her in Interview Room Number Four. The room was compact, square, with no window but a single table and three plain black chairs. The cabbie was somewhere between late fifties and sixty, with strands of grey hair peeping through a thin, dyed-black patch, and a belly that eased ever so slightly over his belted dark trousers, which had an immaculate crease down each leg.
‘Miller. Lucas Miller.’ He turned a saucy smile on her. ‘Most just call me Lucky.’
Rio didn’t smile back. Instead she said, ‘I’ll need to tape this conversation.’
She popped the tape on but also opened her notepad onto a clean page. ‘So how can you help my investigation?’
‘Well, he got into my cab . . .’
Rio quickly wrote.
Male.
‘I’ve been driving a cab for the last twenty years, love,’ the cabbie smiled slightly, displaying a gold tooth. ‘Passed “The Knowledge” on my first go . . .’
‘Where did you pick him up?’ she cut in. She didn’t have time for the cabbie to take her on a nostalgia ride through the streets of London. Over the years she’d learned that it was sometimes a good ploy to let those sitting on the other side of the table go off the beaten track. Made them more relaxed and the more loose they were, the more they started feeling they were your mate, which usually meant that they’d be more likely to give you the information you were after. But she didn’t have time for that today, not with a faceless victim who still hadn’t been identified.
Lucky Miller shifted forward as he sniffed through one nostril. ‘On the same road that that murder happened.
Picked him up on the street. He had a bag on his shoulder, a rucksack, so it looked like he’d come from one of the hotels.’
‘How do you know he’d come from one of the hotels?’
‘Well I sort of asked him, didn’t I? I says to him, you gotta know something about what the Old Bill are doing all over the place, because you’re a guest in one of the hotels. And he never denied it.’
Rio wrote:
Hotel on Crawley Street. Names of the other hotels?
She pressed on with her questions. ‘What did this man look like? How tall was he? What age? Did he have any distinctive marks?’
The cabbie screwed his face up. Relaxed his facial muscles as he sniffed high up into his nose. ‘Hard to say how old he was. I’d say maybe about the age of my Kevin, or a tad older.’ Suddenly his face lit up. ‘He’s my firstborn. Had his thirty-second last week.’ Rio almost jumped in, but let it go. ‘Had a big birthday bash, which caused a bit of bother between the missus and his wife. Who was doing what; you know, power-play over who was going to make the cake.’ He let out a small laugh mixed with the thickness of memories and phlegm.
Rio kept writing.
Thirty-two years old. Maybe older, mid-thirties?
‘What about what he looked like?’
The cabbie closed his eyes and Rio knew he was trying to imagine the scene in his cab again. She was a visual learner as well, having a knack for going back to a scene inside her head without having to be there. A very handy tool for a detective. Snapped them open. ‘Can’t remember too much about his clothes, but he wore a hood . . .’
‘Like he was trying to hide something on his head?’
‘Dunno. I mean, all the young kids are decked out in those hoodies these days. If you ask me, I think they should be banned. Only one reason you’d want to keep your face hidden.’ He pulled some air through his nose again. ‘I think it was part of his jacket . . . Yeah that’s right, a jeans jacket. Mind you, I couldn’t see properly, what with him being in the back.’
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