by Tim Sullivan
The mother had left the room. Kostas turned to his father. 'Why? What were you thinking?'
'I was just trying to help,' said his father.
'What? Why? Why would you do that?'
'Because he was so desperate. He wanted to win this race very much and why shouldn't he?'
'Did he ask you or did you offer?' Kostas asked. Philippos hesitated, as if he was calculating which answer would cause less controversy.
'I offered,' he said.
'I don't believe you.'
‘I did.'
'How would you know anything about drugs for cycling? I'm not stupid. He asked you and look what's happened. You're in a fucking wheelchair!'
'Don't swear at me,' he said.
'Seriously, you're going to say that after what you've done. You're a fucking idiot. The both of you are a pair of fucking idiots. I'm going downstairs,' Kostas said and left. Cross followed him.
As Cross was leaving the restaurant, following a protracted argument about his paying for the bill, Kostas said,
'I can't believe Alex would do that. I mean, where was his head? It's just a bike race. It's just a hobby. Did Debbie know about the drugs?'
'Only recently,' said Cross.
'But Alex knew Dad was getting more fragile. This is the third break in seven months. How could he think that was okay? I mean we discussed it. Talked about going private, getting another opinion, and all the time he knew it was because he was taking my father's medication,' he said, confused.
'Tell me about Tony,' Cross said.
'Tony? What Tony?'
'He was here tonight? Big individual with three male companions,' explained Cross, even though he knew full well that Kostas knew who he was talking about.
'Oh yes, good customer.'
'Such a good customer that he doesn't even have to pay? Does he have an account, maybe?'
'No, no, he was a friend of Alex.'
'Where did they know each other from?' Cross asked.
'I'm not sure – the gym, I think.'
Cross said nothing; he just looked at Kostas in his uncompromising way. The way that implied he'd asked Kostas a question and was still waiting for the real answer. Kostas looked uncomfortable then said, 'Alex owed him money. He borrowed it. That's one of the things Tony does, lends money.'
'And the interest is extortionate?'
'Yes, he ended up owing him more money than he'd borrowed. But now Tony, well he wrote off the debt when Alex was killed. He was very upset.'
'How much was it at the time of Alex's death?'
'It was down to only a few thousand.'
'So in return for writing it off he gets free meals?' said Cross.
'No, not so much. This was the first time he'd been in since Alex died. I offered it. He didn't ask.'
'He frightens you,' Cross suggested.
'No! He's our vegetable supplier. He runs a wholesale business but also organises all the other suppliers. They help each other out when they need to. But he has lots of other businesses,' Kostas said. Cross nodded as he took this in then turned on his heel and left.
A few days later the CCTV crew, well, that is to say Catherine, had been making some progress. She called Cross and Ottey into her office. What she showed them was some blurred footage of a van going down a side street that led into the garages. Cross asked her to repeat it time and time again.
'It could be something or... nothing,' she said.
'I'm tempted to go with something,' Cross replied.
'Particularly as we have absolutely nothing else to go on right now,' added Ottey.
'Someone had to get the body there somehow,' said Cross.
'A plate or some idea of the logo would be helpful,' said Ottey.
'Alisha's trying to enhance it as we speak,' said Catherine. Ottey looked over at a girl glued to another computer screen and gave her a smile of encouragement.
'Anything on Alex?' Cross asked.
'Still working on it. We've got him leaving the restaurant at just after five thirty. He's heading sort of south-east,' Catherine replied. Cross turned and left.
'Thanks Catherine,' said Ottey.
'It's not much. I'm sorry – we'll keep plugging away.'
'It's a start,' said Ottey, and left.
Chapter 16
In many ways, Mackenzie's impatience with cases was similar to Cross' when he first joined the force. She wasn't experienced enough to appreciate the fact that investigations were, for the most part, a series of tiny steps. Small pieces of seemingly innocuous information, whether it be names, locations or dates, often had an incremental effect when placed together or in a certain, not immediately obvious, order. She thought going through Alex's old phones was pointless. She comforted herself, though, by thinking that she was actually handling pieces of evidence. This cheered her up a bit. She wondered whether she should be wearing gloves to handle them. She wasn't at all sure, and it delayed her for a good ten minutes as she weighed up the options of just finding a box of latex gloves, putting a pair on and risking widespread laughter if she was wrong. But if she asked someone, they might well tell her she should, knowing full well she didn't need to, just for a laugh and to set her up for widespread ridicule anyway. So she decided to go ahead without them, and if she was wrong risk admonition from Cross – which on balance she thought would be a lot less humiliating than a widespread piss-take.
She decided, in order to make her task more interesting, to google the models of all the phones then go through them in order of manufacture. There were about ten of them. Alex liked tech and new stuff. She thought he must've been one of those people that had to have the latest version of the phone they happened to use. She could never understand the annual news item that appeared on TV, without fail, about people queuing for days, some even with tents and Primus stoves, to get the latest version of the iPhone. Why such urgency? Why did they have to have it right now? Right this minute? How could the phone in their pocket, which they had queued for with the exact same desperation and anticipation only twelve months before, be so old fashioned in such a short amount of time? Have gone from the indispensable "must have as soon as possible, if not before" to the absolutely dispensable, replace as soon as possible?
She knew that Cross would appreciate her manufacture timeline approach, as pointless as it was. These things appealed to him. There wasn't much to look at in the old flip phones. Basic texts and the directory, but things got more interesting as technology moved on. She was quite shocked at how much the old iPhone had weighed when it first came out. But as she went through the later phones, when technology advanced to the point that they were now cameras, she found her attitude to the whole case changed. Here were hundreds of pictures of their victim with his brother. They were obviously close. They were a tight family. So many pictures were taken in and around the restaurant with their parents. Bad haircuts featured, along with many questionable sartorial choices that she couldn't believe were ever fashionable.
What was happening, of course, was that a picture of Alex was forming in her mind. He went from victim to real person with a life and people around him. She found this surprisingly affecting. She actually got to know this young man. His character, his attitudes, his sense of humour. She didn't know it, but this was a major lesson for her in her police work. Getting to know the victim was so much easier these days, even after their death, because of phones and social media. Before the advent of this technology, police officers' knowledge of their victim was pretty sketchy, to say the least. Cross knew all of this, and his giving her the phones was actually deliberate. Not just to do the donkey work of going through all the information. He knew from experience that if she was any good, which he was beginning to suspect she might be, this would be an invaluable lesson.
She actually found some interesting activity on one of the older phones. Not a smartphone. All of the phones had activity on them – calls and old texts – but they related to the time that the phones were in use. However, Alex had
suddenly started to use one phone again which he hadn't used for many years, about twelve months previously. There were several calls made from it in the last year. Also texts about meets and drops. She was tempted to analyse it all and present Cross with a dossier of dates, times, numbers and all sorts of amazing correlations. But he had instructed her that as soon as she found anything on them she was to let him see.
He took the phone and asked her to close the door as she left. Ottey looked up. 'Whatever you found has impressed him,' she said, looking at Cross in his office, now poring over the phone Alice had just given him. 'Well done. What was it?'
'Seven-year-old phone that he suddenly started using again about a year ago,' she replied.
'Excellent. Let's wait and see what he gets out of it.'
Mackenzie was pleased but disappointed at the same time. Cross got to do the juicy bit now. She was annoyed he hadn't been out of the office, which would have given her the opportunity to go through it and present him with her findings. Another time. There would definitely be another time. Maybe next time, instead of being carried away with her excitement of finding something relevant and rushing into Cross as soon as she'd found it, she would bide her time and delve a little bit deeper. Do some investigating of her own. Might even impress him. Unless it was time-sensitive of course. Then she would take whatever it was straight into him.
It was clear from Alex's bank statements that his spending seemed to have peaked at the beginning of the year and that by the time he died he was in a fairly precarious financial situation. Another conversation with Kostas had confirmed this. Alex had tried to borrow from him. This wasn't unusual, Kostas had said. It'd been like that since they were young. Alex would spend any pocket money he got from his parents almost immediately. The same with the bits of cash they got in their early teens when they helped in the restaurant. Initially it had been on sweets and football magazines. Then Playstation games. He was the first in their family, including his parents, Cross was amazed to discover, who had a mobile phone. His father thought they were unnecessary. He said he was always in the restaurant, where he had a phone with which he could make all his work calls. Why would he need a mobile and spend all that money? He was of the "why text when you can phone" generation, whereas with the new generation it was "why phone when you can text", and now it had gone even further with WhatsApp and Messenger. Cross often wondered whether technology, having irrevocably damaged the literacy and willingness of the general public to write, would now discourage them to even bother to speak. Virtual life – life on a smartphone – seemed so much more important than actual life these days. Why was it, when talking to people, that if their phone buzzed with whatever it was, text message, whatever, it required their immediate attention and interrupted whatever was actually going on in "real life"?
It took a few days for all the information from the USB drive and the phone to be collated. In the meantime, Cross had had the last of his Thursday dinners with his father. They had more to talk about than usual, and instead of watching a recorded episode of Mastermind, Raymond brought up his talk that he was giving at the air museum the following week about Concorde. He'd written the first draft and was quite pleased with it, he told George. He was then completely surprised by his son's offer to look through it. Or, if he preferred, to hear it. This was so unlike George, he wondered whether this was to do with Josie's influence. He suspected it was. Unbeknownst to Cross, he and Josie had been in regular contact since George and he had gone round for Sunday lunch. It was actually a real pleasure, a relief even, for Raymond to have someone to discuss his son with. He'd actually never had this throughout George's grown-up life. And he was right. Cross was trying to change the way he interacted with people at Ottey's instigation. He’d concluded that there was no reason his father should be left out of this experiment, as he saw it.
Cross made several changes and edits to the talk. This wasn't so much a collaborative effort, as he just took Raymond's pad away from him and concentrated on the text. He didn't ask his father whether it was all right for him to cross great big swathes of the talk out and rewrite several paragraphs. He just did it. Raymond put aside his pride and let his son get on with it, as he was actually thrilled that they were doing something together. Well, all right, not entirely together, but as together as George was able to do anything together. It was a hopeful step forward. Cross asked his father to read the piece out to him again. If Raymond was expecting any praise or encouragement, which of course he wasn't, none was forthcoming. No sooner had he finished the last sentence than George was clearing up their Chinese takeaway and was out of the door.
Cross was reading all the information from the phones and USB at Tony's cafe early the next morning. He had got Alice to print everything up, which obviously for someone of her generation was completely puzzling, but he liked hard copy. Although he worked on a computer most of the time, he liked annotating facts on paper. He would put the sheets into a ring folder in different sections so he could access them easily. He then collated all of this with his actions list and calendar, all of which was printed out. He had done this since his A levels, and as that had been incredibly successful he had seen no reason to stop.
He was preparing everything for Ottey to present to Carson, who had called a meeting. The reason he was doing it in the cafe was that here he was left in peace. At the office, with the impending meeting, people would've been constantly sticking their head into his office, despite the fact that he'd closed the door, to check on various things before the meeting. He wrote all the pertinent points down in a bullet list in capitals for Ottey. The latest question that needed answering, to his mind, was who and what was "Hellenic"? She was up to speed with everything, of course, but he liked it to be presented in a certain order. He had to do this, as he found himself incapable of conducting the staff meetings himself, being much more comfortable listening and commenting if needed.
Cross liked to listen. He liked to hear the team's progress. Where they were going next. Which actions had been completed. New ones assigned. All listed out loud. He found it really useful to hear it all laid out in this way so he could picture the overall operation in his mind.
'We're opening another line of enquiry into our victim's finances. He definitely over-stretched himself about twelve months ago. We don't really know why...' Ottey started.
'Optimism. Unfounded. But optimism,' said Cross, interrupting.
'What George is referring is to Alex's plan to open in London and then roll out nationwide. He was quite far down the road with it. But it was contingent on his brother buying him out of the Adelphi, which Kostas wasn't willing to do. It would've stretched them too far. Alex was unhappy about this, particularly as his father, unexpectedly, supported him and tried to persuade Kostas to change his mind. Even though this meant possibly jeopardising everything he'd built up, he was insistent. This caused a certain amount of friction in the family with Alex and his father on one side, Kostas and his mother on the other. It was all resolved at the beginning of the year when Alex had a change of heart. This is a strong family, but he could see how he was tearing it apart. So the project was off. But Alex was now in a hole financially. Kostas helped him out as much as he could, but Alex never revealed to his brother the true extent of his financial woes. This is when he found a new source of income and a new investor – Hellenic, who we’re looking into. He started supplying drugs to other amateur athletes in the area for short-term cash flow, presumably. Getting his supply from the internet. He made quite a fist of it. Maybe people were willing to pay him for the convenience, I guess. But it could have something to do with his death. Johnny?' he said to a detective sitting at the front of the room.
Cross sat up at this point. DI Johnny Campbell was very much not part of his brief. He tried to get Ottey's eye, but she was studiously looking elsewhere.
'The performance-enhancing market is one of the fastest growing in the whole of the UK. Don't ask me why, but people seem to be taking their sp
ort a lot more seriously these days for some reason – if you can call it that. Now, there is money to be made, obviously, and when that happens it's no surprise that the dealers who deal in cocaine, heroin and crystal meth all want in on the action. So it is possible our victim found himself in hot water with one of these guys,' said Campbell.
'Pure conjecture, complete theorising ,based on what? Nothing,' Cross blurted out. 'Can we please save some time and get back to what we know? However little that may be.'
'George, this is a credible theory,' Campbell said.
'Credible theorising is, in the main, based on some sort of factual foundation. This is nothing more than water cooler gossip,' Cross replied.
'You're such a fucking wanker when you want to be,' spat Campbell. Cross flinched as if he was about to be hit. He sometimes did this when under attack. Years before, this would have been the end of the meeting for him. He would've reacted by leaving through the door, which he always sat next to. But he now consoled himself with the fact that such a virulent reaction was because he'd said something near the knuckle.
'Okay, Johnny, I think you can go,' said Carson.
'Seriously? This is a joke. Why do you always let him get away with this?’
'Probably because when this kind of thing happens I generally happen to be in the right,' said Cross, which made Mackenzie laugh out loud. Ottey glared at her. She apologised and looked back at the floor. Ottey was, however, laughing inside. She didn't like Campbell and, truth be told, when he’d insisted on presenting his theory, she let him because part of her knew this might happen and it was better it was dealt with now.
Campbell left the room.
'While there is no evidence that the drug dealing community were involved as yet, I think you'll agree, George, that while not pursuing it, we should be open to the possibility if evidence leads us that way,' said Carson. Ottey was thinking that this was an especially long-winded piece of man-management speak from her boss.