Capital Punishment (39 page)

‘Even though we’re in the endgame here?’ said Boxer. ‘You’ve heard the latest exchanges?’

‘Even though.’

‘And you won’t be able to use Mercy as Isabel doesn’t know she’s with the police, so the DCS will have to brief a completely new consultant from scratch.’

‘They’re doing it as we speak.’

‘What’s the protocol for this?’ said Boxer. ‘I mean, do I tell Isabel Marks? Do I just walk away? DCS Makepeace better give me some guidelines.’

‘He will, Charlie,’ said Fox. ‘But how do you feel about playing second fiddle?’

‘I’ll do it for Isabel Marks’ sake. I’m not going to leave a client in the lurch like that. I’ll do whatever’s asked of me,’ said Boxer. ‘How she’ll take it is a different matter. I haven’t just been the consultant here, as you know. I’ve been everything.’

‘Well, perhaps she could appoint you as her Crisis Management Committee,’ said Fox. ‘That might resolve things very nicely.’

4.30 P.M., TUESDAY 13TH MARCH 2012

The Pride of Indus, Green Street, London E7

‘What we have to do,’ said Saleem Cheema, ‘and this is from the highest level from our brothers in Pakistan, is find where the kidnappers of Alyshia D’Cruz are holding her.’

He sat back in the ensuing silence and sipped sweet tea flavoured with cardamom. He was in his late twenties, slim, wearing a cream crocheted cap and stroking a wispy beard.

He’d called this council meeting in the workshop at the back of the Pride of Indus restaurant. The room was spotless. White paper overalls hung on coat hangers on a rail, electronic laboratory scales were lined up on one of the work surfaces, boxes of plastic bags were stacked in the corner. On the shelves were jars of white powders, labelled: caffeine, chloroquine, paracetamol and phenolphthalein. This was where two hundred kilos of heroin was cut, mixed, weighed, bagged and sent out to dealers all over the East End of London every month.

The council was not an organised group, neither was it part of, nor did it have any affiliation to, any underground jihadist cell, although all the members were supportive of al-Qaeda’s aims. They saw heroin dealing as a way of undermining the Christian West and delivering funds to deserving causes back in Pakistan and to the poverty-stricken farmers of Afghanistan. None of them had been trained in any military activity, although this did not mean they were strangers to violence or weapons. Two of them had shot people, but this had been out of necessity to protect their patch against the local white gangs, who carried names like Beckton Man Dem or the JC Boyz, and not out of any religious fervour.

‘That’s it?’ said one of the young men. ‘You want us to find these kidnappers, in a city of eight million people, with just the victim’s name?’

‘Who’s to say they’re in London?’ asked another.

‘The population of Greater London, including the suburbs, is probably more like
twelve
million.’

‘But who’s to say they’re
in
London?’

‘I am just telling you the instructions we’ve received from our Muslim brothers in Pakistan,’ said Cheema. ‘This is urgent. It is our duty, even with so little information, to find these people. I want ideas. That means positive thinking.’

There was a precise series of knocks at the door. Cheema jerked his head back and one of the junior members left the table to let in the latecomer, who took his seat. His neighbour briefed him while the others sat in silence.

‘I think I can help you with that,’ said the latecomer, who was a quiet, shy man with a squarish head, hair shaved up the back and sides with the top gelled into sharp spikes. He was in his early twenties and his name was Hakim Tarar.

All heads turned to Tarar, who rarely said anything in these meetings.

‘Tell us, Hakim. Nobody else has had any ideas.’

‘As you know, I live in Bethnal and train as a boxer at the Repton Boys Club,’ said Tarar. ‘My sparring partner is a local boy, English. He was telling me the latest in the changing room after our workout. Bethnal Green and Stepney are being turned upside down because a couple of gangs are looking for two men who’ve stolen a girl.’

‘Which gangs?’

‘White gangs. Old style. Nobody we know.’

‘Stolen a girl?’

‘What does that mean? Is this a sex thing?’

‘He wasn’t sure. He thought it was something to do with a shooting, or a kidnap. He didn’t have the story quite straight, but there was the police in it, as well,’ said Tarar. ‘And there’s been a lot of plain clothes guys around. It’s true: I’ve seen them. I thought it was a drug sweep, but they’re all after the same two guys.’

‘This shooting? Is that the one they’re all talking about in Grange Road?’ asked one of the other members. ‘They were talking about that on the radio.’

‘Have we got any names?’ asked Cheema.

‘The only name I’ve got is of one of the gang leaders,’ said Tarar. ‘Someone called Joe Shearing, who does a lot of work at the Repton Boys Club. I know him because he brought some kids over from Pakistan after the floods in 2010.’

‘Get back to your sparring partner, or maybe Joe Shearing himself, if you know him well enough,’ said Cheema. ‘Get some names. Let’s listen to all the local and national news. If the police are involved, they might go countrywide asking for information. We need photos, we need addresses. And fast. Anybody gets any information, I don’t want you to talk about it on your mobiles, even your throwaway ones. You send me a text with this week’s code and I’ll make sure I am by my landline at home. Everything else stops until we’ve found this girl.’

Dan was in the back room of the Flask pub in Hampstead for the six o’clock news. He was pursuing his successful strategy of Bushmills and Young’s and sitting in one of the quieter back rooms. The news passed without incident.

‘Bullshitters,’ he said to himself. ‘Fucking bullshitters.’

A meanness tempered inside him at the thought that they were stringing him along. They had the money, maybe not five million, but a fuck sight more than a hundred grand. The address she’d given him was in Kensington. Let the rich bitch sweat. That’s what he was going to tell Skin.

His knees creaked as he got up from the table. His whole body ached from having been out in the cold on the heath that afternoon. The beer and whisky had done something to his muscles, and had left his brain feeling slapped about. He came out of Flask Walk, turned down the high street away from the tube station. Thought he remembered an Indian down the hill where he could get something to eat. He glanced into upmarket clothes shops, peopled by women for whom money didn’t seem to be a consideration.

The Shahbagh Tandoori was more his level. He ordered some chicken, rice and a vegetable curry with a pint of lager. He wasn’t quite admitting it to himself but he was enjoying this freedom. There was a large part of him that didn’t want to go back to Skin and Alyshia in the Colville Hyatt.

After a long pee in the Shahbagh toilet, he came out into the same icy wind blowing up Rosslyn Hill. He drifted down towards Belsize Park tube, even though it was a longer walk, but it would take him past the Royal Free Hospital. He even entertained the notion of going in there, looking up some old mates, take them out for a drink, tell them about his new life, of killing and kidnap.

It was gone seven o’clock when he pulled up unsteadily in front of the exclusive electronic goods shop of Bang & Olufsen on Rosslyn Hill. Jon Snow was talking silently to the shop window on the Channel 4 news from a television priced at £6,000. Abruptly the image changed to a young woman, who seemed to be giving a different type of news. Then he was looking at a picture of himself with the name Gareth Wheeler underneath, aka ‘Dan’, and next to him a shot of someone called William Skates, aka ‘Skin’.

A couple joined him at the window. They, too, stared at the television and, after a moment, the guy leaned across to him slowly and said out the corner of his mouth: ‘I think we’ll be going to Dixons in Brent Cross.’

The new consultant sent from Specialist Crime Directorate 7 introduced himself at the front door.

‘I’m Rick Barnes, from the Met Kidnap Unit,’ he said.

Boxer shook hands, took his coat.

‘We’ve met before,’ said Barnes.

‘Have we?’

‘In the pub, with Mercy.’

‘Don’t mention Mercy being a cop to Isabel,’ said Boxer, who remembered him now. He’d taken a fancy to Mercy and she’d asked Boxer along to make sure it didn’t go anywhere.

He led Barnes through to meet Isabel, who wasn’t interested in him, her mind too full of the afternoon’s phone calls to fit another person in. Barnes sat opposite her. He had dark, short hair, thinning on top, blue eyes, sharp cheekbones and a thin-lipped mouth. He was lean and hard, as if he trained a great deal. He was dressed in a grey jacket, red tie and white shirt. He leaned slightly as if he was about to suddenly leap forward and hurdle Isabel and several pieces of furniture around the room. His intensity filled the air, crowded Isabel out of her own home. Boxer started to brief him on the afternoon’s developments.

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Barnes. ‘I’d rather hear this from Ms Marks.’

‘I’ve just appointed Charles as my Crisis Management Committee,’ said Isabel. ‘He will brief you on everything you need to know.’

Barnes took a long, hard look at Boxer and remembered how much he disliked him. The feeling was mutual. Five minutes into the briefing, Isabel cut in.

‘Why hasn’t he called?’ she said. ‘It’s been more than an hour since his last call. You said he would get back to me in—’

‘He seemed a bit drunk,’ said Boxer.

‘How did that manifest itself?’ asked Barnes.

‘This morning he was nervous and tentative, said he was going to call us back in two hours’ time, which turned into something like seven, and he was considerably bolder, with a thickness to his voice,’ said Boxer. ‘You’ve heard the recordings?’

‘But why hasn’t he called back?’ asked Isabel.

‘By now he will have seen the Channel Four news. He’s paranoid about using mobile phones. I think he’s going back to where they’re holding Alyshia to talk to his partner. Because he’s had a few drinks and is on his way down from a high after securing a hundred thousand pounds from us, he might have lost some of his focus.’

‘He threatened to send me her finger.’

‘That was just the frustration talking.’

‘And where the FUCK is Chico?!’ shouted Isabel, hammering the glass table top with both fists.

‘That’s the ex-husband, Frank D’Cruz.’

‘I
have
been briefed,’ said Barnes.

‘I presume Martin Fox is no longer the director of operations,’ said Boxer. ‘Can your boss find Frank D’Cruz? He’s supposed to be bringing us the money, so...’

‘They’re working on it,’ said Barnes, not enjoying this situation, having his professionalism picked over by a fellow consultant. ‘Are you going to be the delivery boy?’

‘Isabel Marks has entrusted me with that task,’ said Boxer, ignoring the slight.

Saleem Cheema came out of his armchair like a rocket when he saw the Channel 4 news. He went straight to his computer, found the shots on a news website and printed them off.

He sent a text to Hakim Tarar with the code. Five minutes later, Tarar called.

‘Did you see the piece on Channel Four?’ asked Cheema.

‘I saw it.’

‘Do you know either of those guys?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘They’re from your part of town: Stepney, Bethnal Green.’

‘They’re not anybody I’ve ever dealt with.’

‘One of them used to be a nurse. Gareth Wheeler, aka “Dan”. He got struck off for stealing drugs, selling them in clubs, did some time in Wandsworth.’

‘OK. I’ll ask around, see if he’s in the business. But I don’t think he’s in my area. I know them all, even the ones who don’t deal our stuff.’

‘Start checking in other areas: Haggerston, Hoxton, Shoreditch, Dalston. The police think they’re still local. They had their van crushed in a Bethnal Green breaker’s yard.’

‘They both did time,’ said Tarar, ‘so there’s a chance they’re users rather than dealers.’

‘If you need to, you can make some promotional offers: buy two get one free. That sort of thing might help jog your dealers’ memories.’

‘You’re making this sound really important.’

‘I’ve been told it is, but I don’t know why.’

Dan bought a torch and came in the way he’d gone out, down the canal, except that he carried on a bit further and came out on the other side of the tower blocks of the Colville Estate. The wind was bitterly cold and whipped up the rubbish in the street, sending it flashing across the road, where a paper plastered itself against a set of railings. Dan lunged at it, peeled it away, took a while to get it into focus. It was a police flyer with shots of Skin and himself, face on and in profile. Skin’s tattoo was unmissable. He stuffed it in his pocket, trotted through the estate and into Branch Place, let himself in through the double doors and sprinted up the stairs to the flat.

Outside the flat door he calmed himself and eased the key in silently. He heard voices as he closed the door, walked down the corridor, veered off into the living room, put on a hood and listened outside the bedroom door.

They were laughing.

He pushed the door open.

Skin had no hood on. He was lying on the bed with Alyshia, both of them smoking weed.

‘It’s the masked man,’ said Skin. ‘Fancy a toke?’

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’

Skin looked around, as if to check on unusual disturbances that had escaped his notice.

‘Not a lot.’

‘Why aren’t you wearing your hood?’

‘Too fucking hot.’

‘Surprised you didn’t send her down to the shops for a takeaway.’

‘Not when there’s all those ready-cooked meals you bought.’

Dan saw the two empty plates on the floor by the bed, four fag ends and a dark, oily weed butt stubbed out in the remnants of a white sauce. Two cans of Stella.

‘If she had gone, she could have bought one of these back for you to look at,’ said Dan, throwing the balled-up flyer at him.