A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (3 page)

‘Thank you, DCI Hanlon. Please call me Oksana.’ She nodded at the stick in Hanlon’s fingers. ‘Time for you to meet the Butcher of Moscow. Charlie’s killer.’

‘And Arkady Belanov,’ added Hanlon.

‘Him too,’ said Oksana.

Hello, Arkady, thought Hanlon, still hurting women then? It’ll be nice to see you again.

Assistant Commissioner Corrigan of the Metropolitan Police, naked except for a small towel preserving his modesty, looked thoughtfully at the man, similarly attired, sitting opposite him in the steam room.

The hot, heavy damp air, like being inside a heated cloud, billowed around them, obscuring vision, deadening sound. The thick, grey marble walls, a century old, dripped and ran with condensed moisture.

Through the mist, Corrigan saw a heavily built man in his late twenties, early thirties. His body was muscular, not the overly defined, chiselled look of the gym but spectacularly solid. His waistline was beginning to carry a couple of folds of surplus fat, but he wasn’t too far removed from the boxer he had once been. Corrigan, whose family had almost all to a man worked in construction, knew strength when he saw it. Enver Demirel was a powerful individual. He had a mournful face that bore the traces of the boxing ring, a heavy drooping moustache and sad, brown eyes like a seal’s. Corrigan’s gaze dropped momentarily to the man’s right foot. There was a small, red puckered scar where DI Demirel had been shot a year or so ago in the line of duty.

DI Enver Demirel stared unhappily back at the assistant commissioner. Corrigan was a huge man, six feet five, and the towel wrapped around his waist looked like a face flannel against his massive bulk, a weightlifter run to seed. Generations of Corrigans had done nothing but heavy, manual labour, and in some kind of Darwinian way the results of centuries of coded musculature were there in the AC’s body.

Enver averted his eyes. He hated public nakedness and was very uncomfortable in these surroundings. He was also uncomfortable with deviation from routine and he suspected that Corrigan had brought him here for some off-the-record discussion that he most certainly did not want to be having.

They were in the basement of Corrigan’s club. Most of the members were military or businessmen who’d done time in the Guards, so it was old-school masculine, scuffed Chesterfields and deer heads on the wall. The walls were wood-panelled, the heavy pictures portraits of long-dead, long-forgotten generals or military events –
Rorke’s Drift
,
Saving the Colours
, that kind of genre. A huge stuffed pike dominated the bar from above the fireplace. The club was open to women, but Enver had never seen one in there. He wondered what they would make of Hanlon.

Enver knew from office gossip that the AC had rented out his flat in Notting Hill for an astronomical sum and moved Mrs Corrigan to their cottage in Sussex. Corrigan had bought the flat when Notting Hill had been predominantly Irish and Afro-Caribbean. (
No blacks, no Irish, no dogs
, the signs in rented properties had often read in those days.) Now only the super-rich could afford to live there. If you’d forecast that at the time, people would have questioned your sanity. Thirty years ago, Corrigan’s neighbours had been a squat full of dope-smoking hippies on one side and a West Indian drinking den on the other. Now he had a TV producer to the left and an alternative treatment centre for the extremely well-off worried-well on the other. Corrigan preferred the old days.

During the week Corrigan stayed in this club, which had cheap rooms for its members. When Corrigan had invited Enver there for a meeting he’d assumed it would be in the tranquil old-fashioned bar, not in the bowels of the building in this strangely accurate nineteenth-century reproduction of a Turkish steam room or hamam from the Ottoman Empire.

So now he sat uncomfortably on a marble slab – a marble banquette really. The whole room, with its high, vaulted ceiling, was a temple to marble and brass. Sweat trickled through the forest of black hair on his body, while Corrigan said, ‘What I really like about this steam room, Demirel, is it’s so hard to bug anyone. Look around you.’ He waved a thick arm at the steam room. Through the swirls of vapour, pink blobs of people – rich, white, elderly and male, Corrigan’s clubland colleagues – could be glimpsed, and a circular dais in the centre where two masseurs pummelled and kneaded their clients. There was no furniture, no nooks or crannies to embed microphones, and the watery atmosphere with its ninety-eight per cent humidity would destroy most electrics. And, with everyone being naked, there was nowhere to hide a recording device or a camera. Corrigan nodded his satisfaction. Being recorded was anathema to him. These days he had to assume everything would be made public, captured on a phone, photographed from a satellite or a car, and now there was the advent of smart glasses.

What he had to say was for Enver’s ears only. He wanted no record – no email, no paperwork, no photographs, no witnesses – just nice simple deniability if things went wrong.

‘Yes, sir,’ Enver Demirel said. He wondered if Corrigan had a particular reason to feel paranoid or if all one-to-one briefings would, in future, be conducted in spas, plunge pools, showers. Maybe swimming pools. Hanlon would like that, he thought. He had seen her swim, elegantly, effortlessly, tirelessly. He floundered in water. He felt he looked ridiculous.

He hated being here. He looked down angrily at the swell of his stomach. It used to be flat; now it billowed out, straining his skin. I’m obese, he thought with self-loathing. Fat. I look pregnant.

‘I take it you read my briefing notes on the people-trafficking debate we’re having in London?’ asked Corrigan.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Enver. He quoted, pleased to be able to take his mind off his body issues, paraphrasing freely, ‘Conservative estimates would place the number of cases of trafficked sex workers in the UK in the thousand to two thousand mark. CEOPS reckon that there are about five hundred children trafficked for sex purposes and in London we’re dealing with about a hundred cases, each on average involving about a dozen people.’ Enver had a retentive memory for facts and figures and he could see Corrigan beaming at him through the steam, a teacher whose prize pupil had done well as usual.

‘Yes,’ Corrigan said. ‘But what particularly concerns me at the moment is the growth in crime from the former Soviet Union, Russia in particular.’

Russia was back in the news as enemy number one again. Not quite the heady paranoia of the Cold War days, but there was pressure on Corrigan from his political masters to provide hard information and to be seen to crack down. The last thing the government wanted was to be made fools of domestically as well as internationally. Some form of crackdown on Russian criminals was called for, in their opinion. It would look as if they were doing something and it would be popular with the public. Above all, it would be relatively uncontroversial. It wouldn’t upset, for example, the black and Asian or the Islamic community.

It wouldn’t upset Brussels either.

Enver looked round the steam room, ghostly glimpses of naked men seen through the swirling hot mists. Sweat was pouring off him now. He’d used saunas in the past to make the weight when he’d been a boxer, shaving grams off before a weigh-in. He’d be a super heavyweight now. It was a depressing thought.

‘Sir?’

Corrigan leaned forward. He spoke softly but Enver could hear the anger in his voice.

‘I should be chairing a meeting right now involving the Borders Agency, HMRC, CEOP command and the NCA. Our star turn was to have been a man called Charles Taverner, a Foreign Office expert recently moved to the private sector and well informed on Russian crime syndicates, particularly prostitution, the one that concerns me.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Enver.

Corrigan looked irritatingly composed, relaxed in the intolerable heat, like a huge lizard.

‘Taverner was supposed to give us a presentation on something called a
skhodka
,’ he said, ‘a special meeting of criminals in which a
vor
v
zakone
, that’s a kind of Russian crime boss, a sort of Godfather figure, would be elected or chosen to further Russian interests in the prostitution sector in London.’

‘That’s fairly clear, sir,’ said Enver. It was obviously a case for Serious Crimes, not for him. ‘Why would they want to come over here? Aren’t they busy enough in Russia?’

Corrigan smiled mirthlessly. ‘For much the same reason as the oligarchs; it’s a relatively safe place to do business and to bank your money. Particularly with the rouble going tits up.’ There was a brass tap on the wall and a small, metal basin. The AC filled it up and tipped it over his head, the cold water soothing him. He pushed his greying, dark hair back, obscuring his bald patch. ‘If you’re Russian and legit you’re always worried that the government are going to confiscate your assets, the way that happened to Berezovsky or Khodorkovsky, and if you’re a criminal they might crack down on you because a rival has paid the police off to eliminate you. It’s a murky world, Demirel.’

‘I daresay it is, sir.’ And it’s not my problem either, Enver thought smugly. I’m busy liaising with the London Turkish community. I’m building bridges, as they like to say.

As if reading his mind, Corrigan shifted his weight and leaned forward confidentially. ‘It’s always good to learn new things, isn’t it, Detective Inspector?’

‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Enver reluctantly. The mention of his rank alarmed him. It was a none-too-subtle reminder that he owed it to Corrigan’s influence. He felt this was an overture to something he did not want to hear. There was a jocular, wheedling tone now in Corrigan’s voice. He’d heard it before; it was a softening-up tactic that the AC was fond of.

‘Here’s a new word for you,
smotriashchya
.’ Corrigan said the word again, as if savouring its exotic syllables. ‘
Smo-tri-ash-ch-ya
. It means a watcher, a watcher who looks after the interest of the
vor
. Taverner was going to tell us the name of the watcher and the
vor
, but he wasn’t at the meeting.’

‘No, sir?’ said Enver innocuously. Corrigan shook his head.

‘A no-show, Detective Inspector. And he wasn’t at Monday’s meeting either. Now. . .’ he tapped Enver on the knee for emphasis ‘. . . I know Charlie Taverner well. He’s not that kind of man.’ The assistant commissioner sighed. ‘I enquired about him. Missing for two days. Men like that do not go missing. He’s not some bloody teenager.’ He shook his head.

‘Something tells me I shan’t be seeing him again in this life.’ Corrigan leaned further forward so his battered face was nearly touching Enver’s. ‘There are always leaks, as you know, DI Demirel, in the police, but this information was restricted and I need to know who gave it out. We’re not talking about someone giving info to the papers or blabbing when they’re pissed in the pub. This is high-level leakage with very serious consequences. We’re talking major corruption. The Russians talk about a
krysha
, a roof or protection. In this case an officer, a senior officer, probably in Serious Crimes, is acting as the
vor
’s
krysha
. Are you with me so far?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Enver. It was fairly clear. That someone was presumably responsible for Taverner’s death and would also be in a position to monitor all details of any police investigation. Corrigan wanted a parallel investigation, an unofficial one. PR was part of Corrigan’s job and this would be a disaster if it got out.

He had realized immediately that Corrigan was terrified this would get into the press. There was almost an alphabetically long list of embarrassments and scandals surrounding the police right now. This would be horribly newsworthy – murder, Russians, corruption, bribery. No wonder Corrigan was concerned.

‘I’m not going to put anything in writing,’ the AC said.

Of course you’re not, thought Enver somewhat bitterly.

‘But, informally, I want you to look into something for me.’

‘What might that be, sir?’ asked Enver. He regarded the affable giant opposite suspiciously. The last time the AC had made a similar request he had come close to being killed, the circular scar in his foot from a .22 bullet a permanent reminder.

Equally, he knew he owed his last promotion to Corrigan’s patronage and Enver had found his first real grip on the career ladder exhilarating. He was not the kind of man to admit it, maybe not even to himself, but Enver Demirel was an ambitious man. He knew he had the qualities it took to climb all the way to the top of the ladder and he knew Corrigan could make or break him. If you wanted to get to the top table, you had to take risks. Corrigan’s smile broadened and Enver had the uncomfortable feeling that the man could read him like a well thumbed copy of
PACE
.

‘There is a Russian in Oxford called Arkady Belanov,’ began Corrigan. Enver’s face remained impassive but he was thinking furiously. He knew Belanov courtesy of DCI Hanlon and he certainly knew Belanov’s minder, Dimitri. He knew him because he had beaten Dimitri up in East London, late at night in a deserted side street in Bow. GBH, Section 18, added Enver’s remorselessly tidy mind. ‘I think he’s the
smotriaschchya
, the watcher for the
vor
. That’s Thames Valley CID’s patch, not ours, so walk carefully. This Belanov lives off immoral earnings. That’s who I would like you to look at for me.’

‘Unofficially, sir?’

‘Exactly. Say his name came up in some routine context, any questions you can refer them to me. But I’d rather you kept everything off the radar. Presumably you know one or two of the Oxford lot from courses, that kind of thing. Plus you were down there a few times for the Philosophy Killer, I believe.’

‘Won’t that raise suspicions, sir?’

Corrigan looked at him levelly. ‘Always good to shake the tree, Detective Inspector, see what falls out. If Belanov is the watcher, we can maybe find the
vor
. If we find the
vor
we can find his police contact. I surely don’t need to remind you, Demirel, that police corruption is very much in the public mind at the moment. I want to nip things in the bud. I’m fed up with officers on the take. Is that all clear?’