Capital Punishment (3 page)

‘You know why I didn’t want to come?’ she said, winding up to deliver.

‘You said. Your exams. Although I don’t remember you being such an assiduous student.’

‘That’s because you’re never around.’

‘Which was why we were going away together for the weekend.’

‘Was it?’

‘It was.’

‘The reason I didn’t want to come is that I knew you were going to leave me all night to go and play in one of your stupid card games.’

‘That was absolutely
not
my intention.’

‘So why did you book a hotel in the Parque das Nações, rather than in the centre of Lisbon?’

‘First, because it’s near an old client of mine, Bruno Dias, who wants to meet you, and second, because it’s close to the Oceanarium, where you said you wanted to go.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘It is.’

‘I looked it up online and, you know what, it’s even closer to the Lisbon Casino. A hundred metres, I’d say, and I know you: you’d come back at seven in the morning, in a good mood if you’d won and a bummer if you’d lost,’ she said. ‘And that was not how I wanted to spend my weekend: everything dependent on how the cards went for
you
.’

Boxer swung his legs off the bed, rested his elbows on his knees. The black hole was back, about fist-sized in his centre. He’d felt it there since he was a seven-year-old when his father had left him, disappeared, never to come back, never to contact him ever again. It was the rejection hole. Over the years he’d got it down to a point where he almost believed it had disappeared. But recently he’d found he had less control over it, especially where Amy was concerned. She was the one who could open it out in him with a look, a line, a curl of lip, and he’d feel the dark, swirling emptiness of something lost.

It was like this now. Eighteen months ago he’d given up his salaried job as a kidnap consultant with GRM, the private security company that ran seventy per cent of worldwide kidnap negotiations, in order to go freelance and give himself more time to spend with his daughter. And that had been the start of it. The loss of that corporate structure and the camaraderie of close colleagues seemed to have done something to his mind. Freed it up in a way—a bad way.

Amy had responded to his new ubiquitousness by reminding him for how much of her short life he’d consistently
not
been around. Standing him up for this weekend in Lisbon was her way of telling him that his little sweeteners were no recompense for more than fifteen years of abandonment. What opened up the black hole was that she was right.

He’d done mental battle with his inability to connect with her, thinking it was because he was too used to being a loner, holed up in Mexico City, Bogota or Karachi, reading thrillers, playing cards, waiting for a gang’s next move. Now he knew it was far more dangerous than that; this feeling, the deadliness of it, and what he had to do to make it go away. Or nearly go away.

He needed help.

He had to learn a new way of being.

But not tonight. That was too much for tonight.

‘How d’you like that?’ said Skin, furious, Hammers cap back on, taking rip drags from his cigarette, cornered against the door of the van, foot up on the dashboard.

Dan said nothing, drove, still shaken from his first killing. Why did it have to be strangulation? He still had the feeling of it in his hands and forearms.

‘Not “thank you very much for delivering the girl in perfect condition”. Not “thank you very much for killing the two sheep who weren’t in your fucking contract”. Not “thank you very much for remembering to get the alarm code to the bitch’s flat”. Not “thank you very much for putting the whatsitsname in her arm”. No. It’s “fuck off and get shot of the mutton ... and be careful about it”. I fuckin’ hate that.’

‘What?’ said Dan, barely thinking, irritated by Skin’s ridiculous outrage.

‘Offing people when I’m not jacked up for it,’ said Skin.

‘Right,’ said Dan, thinking: ‘offing people’, is that what I do now? Why did I do that? ‘It’s called a cannula, by the way ... the whatsitsname.’

‘And where did you learn that fancy needlework?’ asked Skin. ‘You a junkie or what?’

Silence from Dan as they crossed the Royal Albert Dock, him thinking how easily he’d stepped over the line. What had made him do that?

‘Hey, fucker?’ said Skin. ‘It’s just you and me.’

Dan looked across at him and back out through the windscreen.

‘I used to be a nurse,’ he said.

Skin guffawed, took his cap off, scratched his shaved head with a thumbnail.

‘You’re a big fucker for a nurse.’

‘You should have seen the girls,’ said Dan.

‘Fuck me,’ said Skin, shaking his head. ‘How d’you end up in this game?’

Good question.

‘Had a girlfriend in the club scene, with a bunch of celebrity friends into prescription drugs. I lifted them, she flogged them until...
I
got caught. Did three years in Wandsworth. So here I am: in
this
game.’

‘Ah right, is that where you met Pike?’ asked Skin. ‘He had the Royal Suite in Wandsworth.’

‘I administered his daily medication,’ said Dan. ‘He didn’t want some harebrained junkie doing it for him.’

Skin chuckled, playing with that bit of gossip in his head.

‘Still see the girlfriend?’ he asked.

‘What do
you
think?’ said Dan, making a big ‘O’ with his thumb and forefinger. ‘That’s how many times she came to see me inside. Anyway, where are we going to dump these two?’

‘The only place I know,’ said Skin. ‘Keep going up here, take a right onto Barking Road.’

‘I thought you were lost east of Limehouse.’

‘I’ll tell you when we get there,’ said Skin, enjoying himself. ‘No speeding. Don’t want the cops stopping us with this lot in the back.’

‘By the way, d’you know who she is?’

‘Who?’ asked Skin.

‘The girl we just delivered.’

‘No,’ said Skin. ‘She was pretty tasty, mind. Not Pike’s normal line of work. You reckon he’s moving into the sex business? Trafficking girls? There’s money in that.’

‘What do you know?’

‘Been to a house in Forest Gate a few times. Nice girls from Moldova or Moldavia. I dunno. Belorussia. Those kind of places. Can’t speak a word of English, mind. Who does with their mouth full?’

Dan looked across at him slowly, not impressed. Skin laughed to himself.

‘Take a right under the flyover,’ he said. ‘Don’t go up on it. There’s a little road right next to ... that’s the one.’

They drove past some factory buildings, the odd car flashing past on the flyover.

‘Take a left here and pull up on the bridge,’ said Skin.

Dan turned, slowed and stopped. They sat in silence. Dan still wrestling with himself. Skin leaning forward. The peak of his cap pecking at the windscreen.

‘Now let’s take a good look around,’ he said. ‘A gander. That’s what my old man used to say. Let’s take a gander.’

‘I thought a gander was a
quick
look,’ said Dan.

‘You know fucking everything, don’t you, Nurse?’

‘I’d get shot of the cap if I was you,’ said Dan.

Skin tossed it in the glove. They got out the van. No cars.

‘What’s this?’ asked Dan, looking over the rail of the bridge, shivering.

‘Don’t know, but it ends up going past the Beckton Sewage Works,’ said Skin. ‘Looks clear to me. Let’s do it.’

They lifted the first body out, humped it up onto the rail, Skin grunting with effort, Dan breezing it.

‘Hold these tarps back,’ said Dan. ‘Our prints are all over them now.’

They held onto the nylon ropes at the corners, rolled the body forward. The tarp unfurled. The body dropped with a loud splash. ‘Fucking noise of that,’ said Skin.

They did the same with the second body. Folded the tarpaulins, stuck them in the back. Glanced over the rail, the bodies not visible in the black water.

Back into the van. Dan pulled away while Skin flexed his biceps.

‘I suppose you did a lot of that, you know, when you were a nurse,’ said Skin.

‘Dumping bodies in the river?’ said Dan. ‘Did it all the time.

’ ‘No, you twat,’ said Skin. ‘Lifting bodies, you know,
Casualty
—one, two, three, hup.’

‘I did weights when I was inside. Helped pass the time.’

They got back onto the Barking Road, heading home.

‘I fuckin’
hate
that,’ said Skin, cap back on, taking rip drags from another cigarette.

‘What now?’ asked Dan.

‘Those two,’ said Skin.

‘You mean, if it can happen to them, it can happen to us?’

Skin shrugged.

‘The difference being,’ said Dan, hopefully, ‘they’re not missed.

’ ‘They will be, by somebody, somewhere,’ said Skin. ‘The older one had plaster down his front. Means he’s working, so...’

‘So what?’

‘You ask me, this isn’t over yet,’ said Skin. ‘Not by a long way.’

Boxer got the call from Bruno Dias just before midnight as he was finishing a plate of sashimi at a Japanese restaurant near the Oceanarium.

Ten minutes later, he was walking through the modern development that had grown up around the Expo ground and passing the black glass casino where he knew he’d end up later. He headed towards the swooping roof of the new railway station and one of the landmark towers of luxury apartments in front of it.

Bruno Dias was a Brazilian businessman who had been Boxer’s second client as a freelance kidnap consultant for the private security company Pavis Risk Management. Boxer had conducted the kidnap negotiations for the return of Dias’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Bianca. Everything seemed to have gone perfectly. The kidnappers had appeared to be calm and non-violent and only interested in the money. At six hundred thousand dollars, they’d agreed a ransom larger than Boxer would have liked to pay, but Dias had been desperate to settle. A final proof of life had been received and verified. Dias’s brother had driven Boxer out of São Paulo and dropped him at the side of a country road. The chief kidnapper had directed him to a deserted farm building where he’d left the money.

In the two hours after the ransom delivery, Bianca had been brutally raped, beaten and left for dead on a deserted stretch of road a few hours outside São Paulo, where she was found by a labourer the following morning. Subsequently, two of the gang were caught, tried and given life imprisonment in a Brazilian jail, where sex offenders were not tolerated by the other inmates. They survived less than six months. The third, who the other two had named as Diogo Chaves, was never found and it was assumed he’d fled the country with the money, had plastic surgery and disappeared.

Boxer took the lift up to the eighteenth floor of the São Rafael Tower where the maid was waiting for him. She took him into the stupendous living room, whose glass walls showed the lights of the city spilling out towards the leathery blackness of the Tagus. The glowing causeway of the Vasco da Gama bridge stretched out across the wide river estuary towards the far glittering shore of Montijo in the south. Dias dismissed the maid and the two men embraced. They’d become very close during the kidnap because of their daughters’ similar ages and Boxer’s evident empathy and willingness to stay up drinking late into the night. Dias had been adamant that no blame should be attached to Boxer for what had happened; rather, he seemed to take all that on himself.

The last sixteen months had not been kind to Bruno Dias. His fitness regime had been unable to iron out the care that had piled into his face from the moment Bianca had been taken. He went to the drinks tray and poured a whisky on the rocks for Boxer and a brandy for himself. They stood in front of the glass doors, looking out onto a wooden-decked terrace.

‘How’s Bianca?’ asked Boxer.

‘No improvement. She’s still in a wheelchair, can’t move from the waist down,’ said Dias, shaking his head at his ghostly reflection in the sliding doors. ‘She hasn’t said anything coherent either. I’m told it’s psychological. She could come out of it. She might not. We’re doing everything we can. She’s just had a whole bunch of neurological tests at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. We’re waiting for their findings.’

‘I’m sorry, Bruno,’ said Boxer, resting his hand on the tall Brazilian’s back. ‘There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about her. She’s one of those that never leaves me.’

‘Where’s Amy?’ said Dias, to change the subject. ‘I thought she was coming with you?’

‘’Fraid not. Pressure of exams,’ said Boxer. ‘Apart from that, she’s fine.’

Dias checked him in the dark glass, didn’t believe him.

‘We’re going through a difficult time,’ said Boxer, giving in.

‘Be thankful,’ said Dias, putting an arm around Boxer’s shoulders.

‘I know, I should be.’

Silence. The wind buffeted around the high apartment. Dias withdrew his arm, sipped his drink, breathed in. He was gathering himself as if there was something big inside that he needed to get out.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ he said, ‘and I wasn’t going to mention it because I thought Amy would be with you. I was here on business last September. I went out jogging one morning, down by the river. I’d just gone past the Camões theatre and there were some people sitting outside a café having breakfast. There was a guy on his own, smoking a cigarette and drinking a
bica.
You know who it was?’

Boxer shook his head, not ready to believe it.

‘Diogo Chaves,’ said Dias, nodding. ‘The only change to his appearance was a moustache and goatee. I tripped, almost dashed my brains out on the cobbles.’

‘You told the police?’

‘I had to be sure,’ said Dias. ‘So I brought one of my security people over from São Paulo, Cristina Santos. She found out everything about the man I’d seen, got to know him. He has a nice apartment overlooking the river above the café where I first saw him, which he owns. He wasn’t working, didn’t need to, and he’d changed his name but, luckily for me, his face not quite enough.’

‘And what are you going to do about it, Bruno?’

‘I’ve seen him again, you know,’ said Dias, turning to Boxer, sidestepping his question. ‘I’ve been as close to that son of a bitch as we are now.’