A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (12 page)

At the table outside the pub, Hanlon drank some of her tonic water and looked at the photos on her phone taken at the airport.

In Danny’s head, Jackson’s voice resumed its monologue from beyond the grave.

‘“OK,” Jordan said, “give the big man a bell. I want to speak to the organ grinder, not the fucking monkey.” “I don’t understand,” said the shestiorka. Hardly surprising really. “What, don’t you speak fucking English?” said Jordan. I could see he was getting angry. He was quite pissed and he’d been taking jellies. He was out of it, really. Really fucked, and nasty with it. You know how he loved downers. Phone your boss, I said. That’s what he means. The Russki was mystified by Jordan, hadn’t got a clue what he was on about. Phone your boss, I said.’

So there was Dimitri, mused Hanlon, man mountain, six and a half feet of pointlessly sculpted muscle; there was Joad, his head and mouth reminding her of an eel, and there was the
vor
, the crime boss, the man responsible for the death of Oksana’s husband, looking like an unimportant, unassuming businessman.

Danny dragged himself away from the window and got on with his job of checking the flat to make sure that all traces of the killing had been removed. All of Tatiana’s clothing and personal effects were now gone as well. He forced himself to look at all the rooms, inspecting everything for traces of blood or forgotten personal effects. It didn’t have to withstand a police forensic team, it just had to look presentable until Anderson moved another girl in. That would be easier said than done. Rumours were spreading. The Anderson name was becoming synonymous with being killed.

He sat down on the sofa and the interior recording of Barry Jackson’s voice resumed.

‘The Russian stank of sweat and cheap aftershave. He spoke into the phone in his own language, he waited, then he said to Jordan, “Is
‘vor’.
Big boss. You want to speak to him.” Jordan had one hand in front of him, the other behind his back. He took the phone from the Russian, spoke into it. “Can you hear me?” he said.’

Danny took his wallet out and chopped himself a line of coke on the glass coffee table. The new glass coffee table, not the old one, which was irreparably stained where Jordan’s disembodied head had rested. A nice new glass one from an expensive interior design shop round the corner. He snorted the coke down and sat back on the sofa. The new sofa, not the one where Tatiana and the client who looked like a Conservative MP had died.

‘The Russian sneered at Jordan and started to speak. He said, “Is offer you can’t—” The next word he said should have been “refuse” but Jordan’s other hand appeared from behind his back. He was holding a gun and he shot the Russian in the kneecap. The Russian screamed and clutched at his shattered leg. Blood was everywhere, blood through his fingers as he tried to stop the flow, blood soaking his trouser leg. Jordan’s eyes were big with killing lust. He held the phone near the guy’s head so the vor could hear the screams. “Hear that?” Jordan shouted. “Hear that, you Russian cunt?” Then he brought the gun up and shot the Russki between the eyes. “Hear that? That’s my answer.”

‘Arkady arranged everything,’ Jackson said. ‘He found me. He said you were history, Boss, his words not mine. He said they wanted number 50 and he was going to take it. You’d been offered a fair price and said no.’

Anderson had looked bored. ‘Arkady,’ he’d said. Jackson nodded. ‘Arkady Belanov, based in Oxford.’ Anderson had smiled thinly. ‘Well, well, well.’ He’d looked at Morris Jones and said, ‘I’ve heard enough.’ Jones had picked up the heroin-filled syringe and Jackson had swallowed and closed his eyes.

Again he saw Anderson, a look of bored disinterest on his face, as Morris Jones had gently inserted the silver sliver of the hypodermic needle into the thick vein in the crook of Barry Jackson’s forearm, Jackson looking away, sweat pouring off his forehead, biting his lip to try to control himself. The swirl of red blood as Jones gently drew back the plunger to check the correct positioning of the needle, and then the slight pressure forcing the lethal dose of smack into Jackson’s arm. Jackson had grunted with pleasure as the morphine rush hit him like a freight train before it carried him away into a final oblivion.

He’d sighed and stiffened, then his body had slumped as unconsciousness had claimed him and the black waters had closed over his head.

They’d watched him die dispassionately.

‘Not a bad way to go,’ said Morris Jones thoughtfully.

Danny stood up, put his wallet back in his pocket and left the flat. He locked the door behind him and thought, I wonder who’ll be next.

From her table across the road, Hanlon saw him leave. She’d met him before once, a long time ago it seemed now. She didn’t know his name, but she knew his face and she knew who he worked for. She wouldn’t need to see Tatiana now. The jigsaw puzzle was becoming clearer. The
vor
and now Taverner’s contact.

What part did Anderson have in this? she wondered.

Well, she knew one way to find out. She stood up and flagged down a black cab; she leaned into the open window,

‘Dean Street,’ she said to the driver as she crouched down and stepped inside. ‘Soho.’

Lunch at the Lebanese restaurant was not going well. The two of them sat unhappily opposite each other at a table by the window overlooking the High Street like an illustration from an article about unhappy relationships.
Broken Dreams
might have been the title. Melinda Huss was low-key elegant. Back home she had changed into a low-necked blouse that discreetly but emphatically emphasized her chest, and trousers that slimmed down her muscular thighs.

Rubens would have liked painting Huss, there was quite a lot of her and it all looked good.

She’d picked the restaurant to flatter her partner. To allow Enver, who was highly knowledgeable about the cuisine, to sparkle with information, to maybe entertain her with some funny anecdotes about working in the family restaurants or the eccentricities of his Anglo-Turkish family. She’d have been more than willing to listen, applaud his insights, laugh at his jokes.

What could go wrong?

Enver, unused to driving in Oxford, unused to driving full stop, nearly collided twice with cyclists (angry exchanges), stalled the car in traffic on Broad Street (multi-horn honkings) and made a meal of parking in a multi-storey, reversing in and driving out of a bay about four times. Huss was a highly competent driver who not only was police-trained but had grown up manoeuvring tractors and horse boxes in confined spaces. If it had been anyone else, she’d have ordered them out of the driver’s seat and done it herself. She’d noticed Enver’s powerful fingers tightening on the wheel, the muscles in his arms beneath the fabric of his cheap suit swelling with impotent rage at the unusual stress of handling a car. He never drove in London.

They left the car, angled at a slight – but to Huss irritating – diagonal in the bay. Outside, the drizzle turned to rain. She had an umbrella; he didn’t.

‘Do you want to share my umbrella?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ll be fine.’ His voice was tight and stiff with irritation. Typical, thought Huss as Enver strode beside her, relishing his discomfort, silently blaming her for his driving incompetence and the Oxford weather. Huss’s blue eyes narrowed. She was getting cross.

The restaurant was deserted apart from an irritable-looking bald man at a nearby table, expensively dressed and reading a copy of the
Economist
. Enver noticed, with a pang, that the fellow customer was quite slim. As he breathed he could feel his stomach pressing against the fabric of his shirt, tight against his belt. How had it got so big? How come he wasn’t doing anything about it?

Conversation was stilted, awkward silences cropped up with increasing regularity and grew wider and wider, cracks widening into chasms. The lack of any kind of buzz in the restaurant, the absence of distractions, only deepened their mutual discomfort. Their conversation became brittle, disjointed and stalled. Enver wished he wasn’t there.

Huss sat opposite him, stony-faced. She felt her artfully chosen clothes, flattering with more than a hint of sexy, were lost on Enver. She might as well have kept the boilersuit on. Silence enveloped the table. The waiter took their order, trying to jolly things up with smiles and remarks about the weather. He guessed they were an old-established couple. He’d have put them down as married but they had no rings. It was usually the married people who chose to come to an expensive restaurant to argue about things. You’d have thought you could do that at home. For free. Where was the sense in paying good money for a bust-up? Soon they’d probably start hissing at each other, the way the middle class always argued, quietly, venomously. In a
let’s not make a scene
kind of way.

‘It’s all your fault.’

‘God, how I despise you.’

‘No wonder the children hate you.’

He doubted he’d get much of a tip.

Enver wanted to tell Huss how nice she looked, how he’d missed her and would she like to go to the cinema with him. There was an old art deco picture palace near where he lived in Tottenham and it had been lovingly restored by a friend of one of Enver’s brothers. An up-and-coming local chef, he’d worked at Le Gavroche and the Square, and was running a pop-up restaurant there. Enver had bought two tickets for a ‘romantic evening’ that included a three-course set dinner and a film viewing of the old classic,
A Room With a View
. They were in his pocket. Huss was free that night; he had checked with one of her colleagues that he knew.

Huss would love it.

Physically, Enver was a brave man. It took real guts to climb through the ropes of a boxing ring and face someone, a fit, trained athlete who has devoted his life to basically beating people to a pulp. In the police force he’d encountered varying levels of intimidation and violence and a certain amount of attempted bullying. He had even experienced being threatened with a gun. He had been shot. But he was nervous with women and he was not only attracted to Huss physically; he felt disturbed by thoughts bordering on obsession for her.

If I ask her out, and she says no, what then? he thought. He even worried that she might laugh at the idea, that he was out of her league. He feared rejection; he feared ridicule. A fat, has-been ex-boxer who might – if he was lucky – do OK in the Met. A man who came from a background of kebab shops and who lived in a studio flat in south Tottenham.

Enver, although born and brought up in London, had been instilled with his father’s essentially peasant values. While some of them had stood him in good stead – thrift, hard work, a mulish refusal to be intimidated – he felt ill at ease in social situations like this. Huss, he felt, was a cut above him, a landowner.

He was nervous and out of his depth. He felt tongue-tied, clumsy, awkward. He kept putting his hand inside his jacket to check the tickets were still in the pocket, as if touching them would give him the courage to ask her out.

‘So what brings you down to Oxford?’ asked Huss. She wished he’d stop fiddling about in his jacket pocket. It was beginning to annoy her.

‘Corrigan wants me to look into Arkady Belanov’s business dealings,’ said Enver. He’d maybe wait for a better time to ask her out. He knew he had bottled it. He was going to stick grimly to business.

Huss raised a quizzical eyebrow. The gesture mesmerized Enver. Her eyebrows were very shapely. They were light brown. His heart lurched.

‘Oh. Does he?’ said Huss flatly. Enver didn’t recognize the danger signs. He carried on, marching to his doom.

‘Yes,’ said Enver, ‘in an off-the-record kind of way.’ He smiled winningly. Huss found it infuriating.

‘So that’s why you wanted to see me, is it?’ asked Huss. She didn’t like being made to feel a fool and she felt like one now. So much for her romantic expectations. ‘To help you and Corrigan in some secretive Met enquiry?’

‘Well, no, yes.’ Enver could see the whole thing was going terribly wrong. He wasn’t quite sure where, but he recognized the signs. Surely talking about work was like the weather, a neutral subject, something they both had to endure. He had thought they’d be on common ground, which evidently wasn’t the case. He floundered on, flailing. ‘Sort of.’

Huss stood up. ‘Sort of!’

She was very angry indeed. She could easily imagine the conversation:
Sweet-talk Huss into helping you, she’s a size 12, she’ll do anything for a date
. And to think that she was harbouring feelings for this idiot. She glared down at Enver. ‘You can get the bill, Enver. You can direct any further police-related questions to me at the nick via the proper channels.’ A sudden horrible thought struck her. ‘Is DCI Hanlon involved in any of this?’

‘No,’ said Enver, looking confused. ‘Why should she be?’

Huss glowered at him. Because I can’t stand that bloody woman, she thought, that’s why. I’m not being logical. Sod logic. She gestured at the waiter, who came with alacrity. ‘My coat, please.’ She slipped it on while Enver sat motionless, looking at her helplessly.

‘I’ll make my own way home.’

She swept out of the restaurant. There was a taxi stand across the street. Enver watched through the glass of the restaurant window as she climbed into the back of an old, grey Mercedes and he watched its tail lights as it drove off. The rain beat down remorselessly.

The waiter looked at him sympathetically. ‘Bill, please,’ said Enver.

Enver walked slowly back to his car, his clothes completely sodden now. His right foot, the foot where he’d been shot a year or so ago, ached. It did that occasionally, particularly when it was cold, and Enver’s feet were soaking.