White Hot Silence

by Henry Porter

  ‘Well, I am indeed honoured,’ he said. ‘It looks great – sexier.’

  ‘It’s meant to make men take me seriously.’

  ‘They already do,’ said Samson. ‘You’re the smartest person in the Met and they know that.’

  ‘Thank you! I will have the best chilled white wine that Lebanon has to offer.’

  ‘Then you shall have the Ixsir Altitudes 2015. It is grown at a thousand metres and goes very well with seafood.’ He nodded to the waiter, who was hovering.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s in Russia.’

  ‘Russia – why? What’s this all about, Samson?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘And not a peep in the media?’

  ‘If it gets out that she’s been kidnapped at the same time as her husband was thrown into jail, it will be a big story and make it much harder to get her back. I pray that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘How are you managing? Must be tough.’

  ‘Like any other job.’

  She looked sceptical while the waiter poured the wine for Samson to taste.

  ‘So, thanks for not dropping me in it at the airport,’ she started. ‘They had nothing, as you guessed. But you’re a rascal, sneaking DNA samples from the apartment. That’s how you knew it wasn’t Adam Crane on the balcony.’ She put up her hand. ‘No, I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just telling you that I know you’re a dirty rotten little shit.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Samson.

  She smiled. ‘The name is Daniel Misak.’

  ‘Whose name?’

  ‘Keep up. The man on the balcony.’

  ‘Right, and who is he?’

  ‘Well, this is the interesting part. He was a US citizen – from the West Coast. Been in London just a few days when he was abducted and killed. He was tortured in a lock-up down at the rough end of Fulham. Then he was brought back to the flat alive in a chest.’

  ‘CCTV?’

  ‘You were right about the artwork. Crane’s people took a lot of pictures out of the apartment and one or two things went in. Misak must have been in one of the larger crates. He was placed on the balcony, probably unconscious, and shot in the face at close range with a silenced weapon that was loaded with expanding bullets. He was shot three times. There was nothing left of his face to identify.’

  ‘And Crane is the chief suspect for organising the killing, if not actually doing it himself?’

  ‘I assume so, but I’m not on the investigation.’ She picked up the glass of wine and gave him a sly look over the rim. ‘You’re going to have to work harder for the next bit.’

  Samson grinned. ‘Who was Misak?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘Well, start thinking about what he was doing with Crane.’

  ‘Was he a friend?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Did he work with him? Did he work at TangKi – Crane’s company in California?’

  She smiled. ‘Warmer.’

  ‘What did he do? Was he something on the money side?’

  ‘I would love some more of that flatbread with this delicious cheesy thing,’ she said, turning and searching for a waiter.

  ‘Shanklish,’ said Samson. And then it fell into place. Misak was Hisami’s source at TangKi. Crane had suspected him, summoned him to London on an urgent pretext and tortured him to find out what he’d told Hisami. When it became clear how much Hisami knew, Crane had decamped with all his artworks.

  ‘Is there CCTV of Crane leaving?’ he asked, signalling for more bread.

  ‘Interesting you should think of that. The answer is no.’

  ‘So he came out the same way Misak went in, immediately after Misak was dumped there?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Was Misak drugged?’

  ‘GHB and a drug called scopolamine – known in Colombia as the Devil’s Breath. You blow it into someone’s face from your hand and they become a zombie. He wouldn’t have known where he was. When the place had been cleaned out someone came back, propped him up on the balcony and shot him.’

  ‘Why the display?’

  ‘Maybe for your man in prison. They were sending a message to him, as if he needed it after his wife had been kidnapped.’

  ‘Crane organised the kidnap.’

  Her eyes shone. ‘How do you know that?’

  He told her briefly about his encounter with Camorra but left out the piece of paper with account numbers on it.

  ‘You get about,’ she said.

  ‘They found me – your counterparts in the Carabinieri. They want me to help them identify the person who ordered the death of the two kidnappers.’

  ‘A lot of bodies are piling up – one here, two in Italy, two in the sea. There’s a kind of desperation about it.’

  Jo was smart and could look after herself, but she was also a natural companion and Samson found he was enjoying himself, even though the obsession with freeing Anastasia was not far beneath the surface. He asked her about her life, and she told him, without fuss, that she had just been ‘given the heave-ho’, as she put it, by an architect from Sussex whom she had met on a dating site. ‘In point of fact, he saved me the trouble – he needed looking after too much, but it was annoying that he got in first. This bloody job! I didn’t have time to phone and tell him, and then the bastard dumps me in a text.’

  ‘Miss him?’

  ‘Nah. It’s nice to have someone to do things with, though. In this line, you’ve never got time to organise things, so you end up dating colleagues, who are just as dull and unreliable as you are.’

  ‘What about your friends in the Security Service?’

  ‘To go out with! You have to be joking.’

  He smiled. ‘No, what do they think about this story?’

  ‘They’re interested and they want to know what you know.’

  ‘Yes, I believe I had a visit when I was away in Italy – the office upstairs. Doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘Are they here now?’

  ‘No, Ivan always knows who’s here.’ With business and embassy people from the Middle East dining at Cedar every night, the table plan was a complicated part of running the restaurant. Ivan kept a list of people who could not be placed next to each other and those who required one of the three booths along the side. He was familiar with all the customers and those who tried to book that he didn’t know were either put in the Siberia at the rear of the restaurant or found they couldn’t get a table.

  ‘It runs pretty smoothly,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve changed a few things – painted it, lowered the lighting, took down the pictures my dad bought and introduced these,’ he said, tapping the little oil lamp on the table. ‘And those green cushions were my idea.’

  ‘Your feminine side,’ she said.

  He studied her. ‘Have you got anything else to tell me, Jo? Seems like you might.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘You have something, I can feel it.’ He topped up her glass.

  ‘You’re trying to get me sloshed. You should know that I can drink the whole of West End Central under the table.’

  ‘Didn’t enter my mind.’ He grinned.

  ‘You asked me, so I’m going to ask you. Did you miss her when she went off and married Hisami?’

  ‘Yes, but you get used to it.’

  ‘Any girlfriends since?’

  ‘Yep, a couple, but you know …’

  ‘They weren’t what you were looking for.’

  ‘Other way round, plus, I have all this to worry about,’ he said, sweeping the restaurant with his gaze. ‘I hadn’t realised what a lot of work my mother did every day.’

  ‘And she was …’

  ‘A terrific person,’ said Samson. ‘Always wanting me to get married, though. But the place got on top of her, and that’s probably why she had the stroke that killed her. The problem was that she didn’t share her wor
ries – didn’t want to burden us, and I suppose there was some pride involved. She wanted to make it work and had just about got control of the cash flow and, well, it ran away from her.’

  ‘You’ve had a rough couple of years.’ She touched him on the arm.

  ‘I guess,’ he said, and put his hand on hers. ‘Is there something I should know? Nyman warned me off. Why? After all, I’m just investigating a kidnapping in Italy, and they’ve successfully suppressed the identity of the murder victim for the time being. So, what’s he so worried about? All I had to say was that I knew Crane wasn’t dead and he let me go.’

  She said nothing but withdrew her hand and continued to eat while flashing him a smile. She waved her knife in his direction. ‘You nearly got me into a heap of trouble in that apartment. How can I trust you?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I …’

  ‘You were fucking with my career, Samson, and that isn’t funny.’

  He filled his own glass and decided to leave it at that. The more you asked at these moments, the less likely you were to get the answer. She would tell him if she wanted to. No point pushing it.

  ‘When are you going to the States?’ she said eventually.

  ‘How do you know I’m going?’

  ‘You aren’t in Russia, so you have to be going to the States.’ She turned away from customers. ‘And leave the phone behind.’

  ‘My phone?’

  ‘Not your phone, you idiot! Her phone! And hide it!’

  He said nothing and she returned to pick a few bones out of the sea bass.

  ‘They didn’t know you had it when you came through Heathrow this morning,’ she said, with rather too much in her mouth. ‘But the Italian police tipped them off just afterwards. I know because I tracked down the guy in charge in Italy because I wanted to find out a few things, and he assumed I was working with Nyman, so I did nothing to disabuse him of that idea.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot about all this.’

  ‘I’ve made it my business,’ she said, finally giving up on the fish and leaning close to him, ‘because I want to know what I’m getting into here. You see, the dinner was their idea. They want me to find out if you have the phone and when they can lay their hands on it.’

  ‘I don’t. It’s on a plane to America right now, so it can be returned to Hisami when he gets out of jail. Whose idea was this?’

  ‘My old colleagues.’

  ‘I’m sorry you can’t go back to them with anything.’

  It was plain she didn’t believe him, and also that she wasn’t going to push him.

  They had Cedar’s famous mint sorbet and a glass of dessert wine. ‘There’s something else,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to have to tell you somewhere very safe.’ She moved closer and whispered to his sleeve. ‘By which I mean in bed.’

  Samson smiled. ‘Were you told to seduce me, too?’

  ‘No, that part was my idea. And anyway, you’re seducing me to find out what I know, in case you didn’t realise. Unless, of course, you’ve sworn a vow of chastity?’

  ‘She’s another man’s wife and he’s a client. I have that straight in my mind,’ he said for the second time that day, not sure what he was going to do.

  ‘Liar, but I’ll choose to believe you because, to be honest, Samson, I want you even if it’s only a one-night stand.’

  ‘I don’t do one-night stands.’

  ‘All the better,’ she said.

  Later, they made love in Samson’s big first-floor flat in Maida Vale. Jo had none of Anastasia’s playfulness in bed. She considered sex a serious subject and at one stage told him to stop smiling and concentrate. He replied that he was smiling because he had not expected a senior police officer to be quite so beautiful without clothes. This made her relent and kiss his eyes. ‘Yes, you will do fine,’ she said, as though concluding a rental agreement, and pulled him on top of her and held his face between the palms of her hands as they began to move together.

  ‘You were going to say,’ he murmured afterwards.

  ‘Yes, I was. They know where he is. They’re on to him.’

  ‘Crane?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake – are you slow, Samson? Yes, Crane, you fucking bozo!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Simple. They have the number of one of his phones.’ She paused and yawned then kissed him. ‘I like you, Samson, but I’m not expecting anything – understand?’

  ‘This is a speech I’m getting used to,’ he said, the back of his hand brushing her breast. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He used the phone to call Misak when he landed in London, and they found Misak’s phone in the lock-up and scrolled through the recent calls. People always fuck up. Crane fucked up.’

  ‘How did they find the lock-up?’

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  He waited until she was asleep then left the bed.

  They gave her another shot during the night, at least they thought they had. The needle entered her buttock through her filthy chinos then exited a couple of centimetres away and she felt the liquid shoot down the back of her leg. But she wished that they’d knocked her out. Though no longer trussed up in the bag in which she had been removed from the ship, she was bound and blindfolded and gagged with tape. In her previous enforced confinements – in the container and the box – she had done everything she could to keep track of time and to work out where she was, but now she existed in a state of resigned dread which no thought penetrated, apart from the awareness that it was very cold and she couldn’t feel her hands and feet.

  She understood that she was in a truck because she heard the gear changes and the engine labouring as they ground up a hill, but that was all she took in. Like a torture victim, she had got used to the routine of abuse, expected no release from the discomfort and pain, and now could not imagine a future without it. She told herself they wanted to keep her alive, but the appalling Russian creep who called himself Kirill was evidently as happy to snuff out her life as keep her alive, and the realisation of her worthlessness to them had somehow filled her being. She did not think of Samson to distract herself, or of her husband, who seemed a weirdly distant memory. She could not even summon his face, and all the experiences they’d shared in the last two years seemed like a fantasy. The work she had done with his money seemed suddenly futile, ridiculous.

  This third incarceration delivered a profound depressive shock, as well as much physical pain. She could not bring herself to acknowledge that she was starving and desperately thirsty. They clearly didn’t believe she needed food and water so she concluded she probably wasn’t worthy of them. Only when she asked herself if the drug they had given had caused the terrible blackness in her mind as well as the toxic feeling all over did she begin to think that it was reasonable to expect food and water. She had long given up trying to hold her bladder, yet urinating did little to relieve the persistent ache in her stomach, which she realised must be constipation, possibly brought on by the terror and anxiety. She didn’t know, she didn’t care – she supposed she couldn’t give a shit. That joke to herself generated a tiny light in her mind, and she tried desperately to think of other humorous things, but she was soon back in the deathly trance, lying there for mile after mile, hour after hour.

  She was asleep when the brakes screeched and the truck pulled up. The whole vehicle shuddered then bounced a little with the sudden halt in momentum. She expected nothing. They were getting fuel, she told herself, but a moment later there was some clanking and she smelled food – she was certain of it, a kind of sausage smell, onions maybe. Her empty stomach began to rumble. Then she felt hands all over her. She was pulled upright and the blindfold was removed. She saw three figures in the dim overhead light. A man took hold of her head and ripped the tape from her mouth. He forced the nozzle of a water bottle between her teeth and squirted a jet so she had to jerk her head away to avoid choking. He kept doing this until she had finished the bottle. In the background she recognised Kirill’s voice mur
muring instructions to the man in Russian. Kirill came forward, bent down and cut the plastic tie from around her wrists. He picked up a tray that he had placed on the floor of the trailer. ‘You will eat hot dog – make you feel at home.’

  She rubbed her hands and tried to knead the blood back into her fingers. ‘I can’t feel anything I’m so cold. Why are you doing this?’

  He guided her hands to the oblong tray, in which lay a spiral-cut sausage covered in sauce inside a bun.

  ‘We have microwave on truck,’ he said. ‘Best hot dog in Russia.’

  She bit into it and looked up. ‘Why are you treating me like this? What have I done to you?’ she said, her mouth full.

  He didn’t answer.

  She felt the warmth spread through her hands and her stomach, and some of her strength returned. ‘I can’t escape. Look at me. I’m too weak and I don’t know where I am. For God’s sake, don’t tie me up again.’

  ‘It is necessary. You bang side of truck and make noise and people think migrants are inside and police come and find you.’

  She shook her head. ‘Please! It’s too cold and I’m sick.’ It was true she felt so lousy she wondered if she was coming down with an infection. She looked up at his portly profile and his breath smoking in the cold of the truck. ‘You need to treat me better if you are going to get what you want from my husband.’

  ‘Eat, or I will take hot dog,’ he snapped.

  The only thing she had control over was the speed of her consumption. She ate slowly, chewing every mouthful far more than necessary. He grew impatient, stamped on the floor of the trailer and in the end tried to seize the tray from her, but she was too quick for him and clasped it to herself so he couldn’t get it without a struggle. She knew that Kirill probably thought it was beneath his dignity to wrestle with a woman over a half-eaten hot dog. He walked the few paces to the tailgate and exchanged some words with the men, then let himself down into the dark and lit a cigarette, which made him cough in the cold air.

  She had eaten as much as she wanted and let the tray slip to the floor, and then, quite suddenly, she found herself silently crying with anger at her powerlessness.

  One of the men came towards her and held her arms together while he slipped and tightened a plastic tie around her wrists. ‘Four hours,’ he murmured. ‘Four hours max.’ He pushed her down gently on her side and covered her with an unzipped sleeping bag, then left the trailer and closed the doors. She might have a friend among the people who held her, at least someone whose heart could be moved by her plight.