Lucy went to the window and looked outside for the two officers, but they were gone. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself as she turned to me. ‘You need to tell me everything. Then we can decide what to do next. Together. Like we always do.’
‘You should get back to James.’ I got up from the sofa and headed towards the door to let her out. ‘This isn’t your problem.’
She hadn’t moved and was giving me one of her looks, the one that meant that was never going to happen, and I felt stupid for trying to push her away.
‘We need to find out who took the money from Mark’s bank. You’re an accountant – if you look at the crypto account, you might be able to work out who took it. I have the password.’
‘I can have a look, but the police would surely do a better job?’ Lucy looked doubtfully at me.
‘We’ve got to try ourselves first. It might be Mark’s only chance. If we go to the police and Jonny’s lot find out, then they might hurt him.’
Lucy sighed and then nodded. ‘Okay, but if we don’t get anywhere you need to go to the police.’
‘I will.’ I nodded, but all I could think about was Jonny bleeding and what I’d done. When I thought Mark was dead, I didn’t care, but now there was the possibility he was still alive, I could have made things much, much worse for him and for us.
Chapter 27
Alana Loxton
Thursday
Loxton looked around the Night Jar Bar. It had been a shabby nightclub best avoided a few years back, but a lick of paint, some distressed wood and dim lighting had turned it hipster. And made the prices soar to astronomical heights. To her it would always be the dodgy nightclub with the highest stabbing rate in Southwark, with an owner who had a reputation for using extreme violence to solve disagreements.
Rowthorn’s credit card statements had shown he frequented this place every couple of weeks and he spent hundreds when he was here. She dreaded to think where the cash went. There was one intelligence hit that Jonny Cane worked here, even though he was registered as unemployed and was on jobseeker’s allowance.
Kowalski was arguing with a man with a shaved head behind the bar. They were both well over 6 foot and heavily built, but the barman was stockier compared to Kowalski’s more athletic figure. She wasn’t sure Kowalski would win in that fight.
‘We’re looking for Jonny Cane,’ he said. ‘He’s not in any trouble, we just need to speak to him.’
‘There’s no Jonny working here.’ The man’s eyes were blurry and he had stubble on his face.
‘Can you give me the manager’s number, then? We need to speak with him.’
‘He on holiday.’ The man shrugged. ‘You want drink?’ He poured himself a large vodka, despite it being only 10am.
‘We’re going to need your CCTV footage,’ Loxton said.
The man glared at her and downed his vodka in one. He had a thick scar under his chin which she hadn’t spotted until he tipped his head back. ‘It’s not working. We’re waiting for man to fix it.’
‘Let me have a look. I have a knack for these things.’ Loxton smiled at him and tried to pretend she didn’t know he was playing a game.
‘I don’t know. You could break it.’
‘I thought it was already broken? What harm can I do?’ She smiled sweetly.
He sighed and stomped towards the side door. ‘I don’t know why you people never believe me.’ He shook his head and grumbled to himself in his mother tongue.
He led them into a corridor with side offices on either side and into a tiny office. It was difficult for the three of them to fit in there. The CCTV was high tech and she struggled through the options, but couldn’t get it to work. She checked around for a manual, but there wasn’t one in sight.
‘Told you.’ The man folded his arms in front of him. ‘A man is coming to fix it.’
‘You’ve said that,’ she muttered.
She tried a few more buttons and nearly jumped for joy when the screens sprang to life, showing different angles of the building.
‘Looks like it’s working fine.’ She smiled at the man, who didn’t seem as happy as she was about her managing to turn the machine on. She flicked through the cameras to see how many there were. She counted ten covering the back offices and five in the actual club, three of those covering the tills. Seemed like the owner was more worried about his takings than the punters’ safety. There were another two covering the main entrance and one on the back.
‘We’re going to need to take the hard drive,’ she said. ‘I can’t download it now.’ She’d had enough trouble checking to see if it was working.
‘You can’t,’ he said.‘We need for tonight. What happens if there’s a fight or we’re robbed?’
Loxton doubted anyone would dare to burgle this place. ‘Okay, well we can download the data we need onto this stick.’
‘I don’t know how, but there’s a manual somewhere.’ He shrugged at her and half-heartedly opened drawers. Loxton rolled her eyes.
‘I need around fifteen hours’ worth of footage, here are the different days and times.’ She pulled out her notes of the times and dates Rowthorn’s credit card had been used in the club.
‘Fuck.’ The man stopped his search and sank onto his seat. ‘That’s impossible. I’ve got things to do.’
‘We need it urgently and as part of your licence you need to comply. Or we could just take the hard drive back to our tech guys, as I say, and they could download it for us overnight? We’ll get this back to you first thing tomorrow morning. What do you say?’
‘Take it, then.’ He looked annoyed.
Kowalski pulled on his gloves and stepped towards the CCTV recorder. ‘Won’t take me five minutes to package this up.’
‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’m just going outside to make a call. You all right here?’
‘No problem.’ Kowalski turned off the CCTV. ‘Could you give me a hand with this? Don’t want to break it.’ He smiled at the bouncer as he took hold of the CCTV recorder to put it into a large exhibit bag.
Loxton slipped out of the office and walked down the corridor. She listened outside the doors but there was no noise. She tried the handles. One was a stock cupboard stacked with alcohol bottles; a couple of metal baseball bats propped up against the wall.
There was a kitchen the next door along. The last door was locked. There were stairs at the end of the corridor and a fire exit. She heard a man talking on the floor above and his voice grew louder. He was coming towards the stairs. She pushed open the fire exit and slipped outside, leaving the door slightly ajar behind her. She found herself in an alleyway with industrial grey bins on wheels. The smell of alcohol and rotting food hit her, as if it was an invisible wall.
She heard the man coming down the stairs. ‘Boss, the pigs are here . . . I don’t know. I saw them on the CCTV monitors upstairs. Valon took them into the CCTV room and they’ve turned it off. They’re taking it . . . I don’t know. Maybe Rowthorn’s girl called them . . . I don’t know, boss. We’ll get rid of them as quick as we can.’ There was silence for a moment. ‘Wait a sec, the fire exit’s opened.’
She ducked between the bins and crouched down, trying to quiet her breathing. She heard footsteps coming towards her and then they stopped before retracing their path back to the club. Had she heard right? Rowthorn’s girl?
‘Fucking Valon’s left the fire exit open again. He does it every time he goes out for a fag.’
The fire exit slammed shut. She text Kowalski to warn him that there was another one incoming. As she put her mobile in her pocket, she noticed something sticking out from behind the dumpster, jammed between the wall and the lower part of the bin.
A pair of black trainers. But then, as she craned her neck, she saw legs.
A knot tightened in her stomach. It didn’t matter how many dead bodies you’d seen; it never got any easier. She tried to close down her emotions, hardening her for what was about to come, as she stood up and pulled the bin towards he
r. First she needed to check if the guy was still alive. The body rolled forward onto its side, into the recovery position. But there was no recovery for this man. She climbed alongside the body and brushed the rubbish out of the way, revealing a man’s torso and face.
Jonathan Cane.
He had a nasty gash on the side of his head. It looked like he’d been struck by something sharp. His eyes were half-closed. They looked like glass: too still to be real.
Loxton touched the waxen skin on his neck but there was no pulse. The skin was cool, the texture strange with no blood flowing beneath. A shiver rippled down Loxton’s back. It felt like Cane’s ghost was stood right behind her, demanding justice.
Loxton’s skin crawled and a surge of irrational fear overwhelmed her. The primeval part of her brain told her to run as fast and as far away as she could from the unseen danger. Instead, she counted for five seconds, waiting for her logical brain to kick in, and began to assess the scene.
There was an empty syringe beside his arm. Jonathan Cane had a shaven head, and his dark blue shirt and jeans were designer. She didn’t like to make quick judgements, but it looked like a typical night out overdose. Southwark was a busier borough than she’d expected. It was a strange place to get high, though. Open to the elements and at risk of being found by teenagers messing about. And how had he got the wound to his head? She checked his arms but there were no track marks. Not a regular user, then.
She pulled on two pairs of blue plastic gloves. She patted his pockets and found his mobile still there. She checked the number and called it in to Patel.
‘We have a few hits on our intel systems,’ Patel said. ‘The most recent is an intel report linking this mobile to your missing persons case.’
‘The drug dealer contacting Rowthorn?’
‘Yes, you got it.’
So now they had evidence that Jonathan Cane was Mark Rowthorn’s drug dealer. Steele hadn’t been lying. She glanced at the body, wishing it could tell her Cane’s secrets. She stood up and took five steps backwards, surveying the scene again. She crouched down next to the corner of the bin. There was blood on the edge, turning brown but still wet.
She pulled out her own mobile and called Kowalski. ‘You free to talk?’
‘Give me a second. The CCTVs in the boot. I was just taking a statement from Valon here and his friend who’s just turned up. Two minutes, my friends, urgent call.’ There was a pause. ‘Okay, shoot.’
‘There’s a body in the alleyway. It’s Jonathan Cane. Looks like an overdose but I don’t buy it. He has a nasty cut to the side of his head, and there’s blood on one of the dumpsters. His body’s been deliberately hidden, but they’ve tried to make it look like he’s fallen and banged his head, crawled behind the bins and died, and then the dumpsters got pushed into the wall without anyone realizing. Can you get Winter to call the murder team?’ Her stomach clenched as she thought of seeing her old colleagues. She knew she couldn’t hide for ever, but she thought she’d have longer than this before she’d have to face them again.
‘Not sure there’s enough to call out the murder team,’ Kowalski said. ‘Are you sure about this? Perhaps Winter should come down first.’
‘I worked murder for five years, Kowalski, and I’m telling you this doesn’t feel right to me. Cane was dealing drugs to Rowthorn, had those photographs, and now he’s got a head wound and his body’s been stuffed behind dumpsters.’
‘Okay, I hear you. I’ll call them. You need a hand up there?’
‘No, you hold onto those witnesses. The other one mentioned that Rowthorn’s girl might have called us. I want to know what he means. I don’t want them disappearing or trying to clean anything up when they realize what we’ve found.’
*
Kowalski stretched and rubbed the back of his neck with his strong hands as he stood with Loxton near the body. Her shoulders and neck ached, and she longed for a hot shower and then to sink into her bed. That wouldn’t happen for hours now. Winter was on his way, eager to try to convince the murder team that this was their job and to take it off his already strained CID.
‘It looks like an overdose,’ Kowalski said. ‘Like he’s taken too much and at some point cracked his head on this.’ Kowalski motioned towards the large metal bin.
‘This man isn’t a regular user.’ Loxton pointed at his arms. ‘Dealers normally aren’t.’
‘So, he wasn’t used to taking drugs and took a little bit too much?’ Kowalski shrugged at her. ‘Maybe something was troubling him?’
‘Or Cane was blackmailing Rowthorn, who couldn’t pay, so Rowthorn took things into his own hands and killed Cane.’
‘Not such a straightforward overdose then. You can be a real killjoy sometimes, has anyone ever told you that?’ Kowalski shook his head at her.
‘Plenty of times.’
‘One thing’s for certain,’ Kowalski said. ‘It does look like our Rowthorn’s cursed. Everyone he comes across dies. First McGregor and now Cane.’
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t try so hard to find him.’ She smiled at Kowalski.‘One of the henchmen said Rowthorn’s girl had been here.’
‘Julia Talbot?’
‘Unlikely. Maybe this other woman Steele mentioned. Maybe she worked here? The CCTV might help.’ She pointed at the camera.
‘It only covered the fire exit. It didn’t cover the bins.’ Kowalski sighed. ‘If the body was brought out of the club we’ll have a great image, but if the killer came up the alley and dumped the body behind the bins the CCTV doesn’t stretch that far.’
‘There’s something we’re missing. If I—’
She was interrupted by footsteps from behind her. She flinched at the sight of DC Tim Bale from her old team striding towards her. Heat prickled her skin as she remembered their last encounter a few months ago. The look of disgust he’d thrown her as she’d swept her belongings into two cardboard boxes and fled the murder squad. She’d hoped she’d never have to confront him again, now that she was in CID borough. Just her luck it was him that was called out. Or had he come looking for her to gloat?
To her surprise, Bale looked right through her, as if she didn’t exist. She was shocked by how much his dismissal annoyed her. He addressed Kowalski. ‘DC Bale, MIT south on-call team. Your DCI gave us a heads-up and I wasn’t far, so I thought I’d take a look for myself.’
So, he had come out of his way to gloat.
‘Adult male,’ Kowalski said. ‘Looks like an overdose but it doesn’t feel right to us. See the gash on the head?’
‘Got a name?’ Bale asked.
‘Jonathan Cane,’ Kowalski said. ‘The mobile on him is a drug dealer’s phone and he’s been dealing to a missing man we’re trying to find.’
‘You brought me here for this?’ Bale shook his head. ‘He’s died of an overdose. Even the uniform would be able to call it.’
‘Bale, that’s not going to work with us, so drop the act,’ she said. ‘His body was jammed behind the dumpster and he didn’t get there himself.’
‘You disturbed the crime scene?’ His voice was indignant, and he had that righteous look on his face which signalled he was about to launch into a rant.
‘I needed to check his vitals. I couldn’t do that with just his feet sticking out.’
‘Our DCI’s on his way,’ Kowalski interrupted. ‘We might have to join up a bit for this one. It’s got links to the high-profile missing person we’re working on – Mark Rowthorn.’
‘The missing banker hitting the headlines?’ Bale rolled his eyes. ‘That’s all we need. The press are going to love this.’
‘They won’t know it’s linked,’ Loxton said.
‘Don’t be naïve,’ Bale said. ‘Of course they’ll know. They always find out, don’t they, Alana?’
She opened her mouth to challenge him, but nothing came out.
‘Your DCI can keep this whether he likes it or not.’ Bale shrugged at her. ‘It’s just an overdose.’
Loxton turned as footsteps approached
. DCI Winter strode up the alley towards them and he wasn’t smiling. ‘They train you murder officers well. You haven’t even checked the body and you know it’s an overdose? Impressive. We have a high-profile missing banker which the press are all over, and people who have been in contact with him keep turning up dead. Jonathan Cane was a suspect in our case.’
Bale looked to Loxton and then Kowalski in confusion.
‘Rowthorn’s watch was on the wrist of a Robert McGregor, a missing man who washed up from the Thames three days ago,’ Kowalski said.
‘Rowthorn’s fiancée believes he hadn’t lost the watch before he went missing,’ Loxton said.‘And now Rowthorn’s drug dealer is found dead outside this club and we suspect he might have been blackmailing Rowthorn. And one of the staff said Rowthorn’s girl called us, so we need to find out who this other woman is and what she knows.’
Bale’s eyebrows knotted together. He threw a furtive glance at DCI Winter, who was still glaring at him. The job was everything to Bale and upsetting the bosses was the last thing he wanted. Loxton still remembered the mortified look he’d given her as she’d been ousted from their murder team.
‘I want Robert McGregor’s plunge in the Thames raised to a murder investigation.’ Winter stared at Bale, as if daring him to argue. ‘And I want Jonathan Cane’s death to be treated the same.’
‘If we had all the resources in the world, sir, we would definitely oblige you. But we don’t. You’re going to have to hold onto these two until it’s confirmed that they’re murders. I’ll see what my boss says about lending you a few extra officers, though.’ Bale moved away from them, pulling out his mobile to put the call in.
There was a painful silence.
‘I’ll get Cane’s mobile downloaded straight away and get Patel to prioritize exchanges between him and Rowthorn,’ Loxton said.
‘Good. We don’t want to miss anything obvious. And I definitely don’t want egg on our faces in front of the MIT,’ Winter said.‘Especially not in front of that arrogant dick.’ He nodded towards Bale. ‘If he causes you any trouble, let me know.’
‘Of course, sir.’
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