Cold (8 page)

She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. Pinky-white stuff – foam – was on her lips, dripping down from her nostrils.

‘Wha—’ The whites of her eyes fluttered in their sockets; the foam bubbled out of her lips, nostrils. It was not meant to happen quite like this. Too instant, too unsubtle. He would need to have a quiet word with the technical department.

The whites of her eyes gave one last swivel and then she slumped in her chair. He went to the toilet and came back with some tissue paper, which he used to wipe the pink foam from her lips, nose and the front of her dress. She appeared not so bad now, as if she had fallen quietly asleep in her chair, apart from a strange, vivid blueness around her nose.

Satisfied that the contract was complete, he closed down the camera, snapped shut his suitcase, left the flat and pressed the lift button. He walked out of the block of flats, got into the Mercedes and said, ‘So, all done. Where can you get a decent meal in this town?’

Iryna was out of the front seat with unimaginable speed, running towards the block. Reikhman’s rear door had somehow been locked – she must have reactivated the child lock. He barked a command at the moron of the driver to open his door but by then it was too late: Iryna was inside the block, going up in the lift. Ever the professional, Reikhman waited in the dank, lightless lobby for Iryna’s return. The lift pinged, the door opened and she stood there, full of loathing. ‘Why poison that old lady? You’re sick.’

‘Higher authority,’ he started, but got no further.

‘So higher authority is a bastard. Who cares? Who gives a damn? What kind of country is this that it’s considered necessary to go round murdering people in case they might embarrass higher authority?’

Something inside Reikhman’s head flickered. Lunging into the lift, he went for her throat with his left hand and tried for his gun with the right. Iryna twisted sideways, grabbing his left hand, plunging her teeth into his palm and kicking her feet underneath her, to add the force of gravity to her bite. Reikhman roared with pain and threw his gun into the far corner so he could free up his right hand, smashing his fist repeatedly into her face, neck and throat. In the flaying of arms and legs and teeth, the lift door closed and the lift jerked into motion, upwards.

On the seventh floor, the lift door pinged open to reveal Reikhman with his back to the hallway, one knee on Iryna’s chest. Her legs, which were kicking up and down with manic energy, slowly lost their power and came to rest. Reikhman sensed something behind him and shifted his weight. He saw a very young soldier, more boy than man, in uniform, with a shock of white hair, no beard to speak of. The boy soldier was aiming his camera phone directly at the man who had his thumbs deep into Iryna’s throat.

‘Hey you, come here,’ Reikhman said, but the soldier had gone, leaping down the stairwell.

Reikhman stood up awkwardly and slipped on the puddle of blood oozing from Iryna’s body. Recovering his balance, he ran along to the stairwell, saw a figure moving extraordinarily fast three, four landings down, and fired off two rounds, the noise of his gun dizzyingly loud in the close confines of the block. Down the corridor a door opened and an elderly man popped his head out, saw the gun and closed the door fast.

There would be hell to pay if Reikhman had to delete more witnesses. He, or they, could catch up with this cretin of a soldier later. He rode the lift down and at ground level pulled Iryna’s corpse halfway out of the lift, so that the door couldn’t close automatically. He walked fast to the SUV, holding his jacket across his white shirt, which was sodden with her blood.

Konstantin asked, ‘Where’s Iryna?’ Then he saw the blood on the shirt, and yelled ‘What have you done?’ and got a bullet in his brains.

Reikhman pulled the corpse down into the passenger seat footwell, got behind the wheel and reversed the Mercedes up to the entrance of the block of flats. He went inside to find that the lift door, programmed to close, was automatically slamming repeatedly into Iryna’s ribcage.

Reikhman picked up Iryna’s corpse and hurried back to the SUV. From round the corner came a young mother holding the hand of a small, dark-haired boy, about five years old. Mother and son looked on, aghast.

‘Keep it zipped, or you lose the kid!’ yelled Reikhman. The mother turned her head to look at where she had just come from, as if understanding something that only now made sense. Moving forwards a few steps, the corpse still in his arms, Reikhman glimpsed a shock of white hair vanishing down a row of forty or so garages facing each other, culminating in a dead end. He dumped Iryna across the back seat of the SUV, got behind the wheel and drove towards the garages at a walking pace.

The white-haired soldier had no way out. He had to be in one of the garages. But a long war of attrition by thieves had left many of the garages, originally constructed with black steel doors, patched up with bits and bobs of metal. Some owners had fitted extra steel cross-beams, others wire-mesh gates. The effect was it was all the more difficult for Reikhman to see whether one of the doors wasn’t quite shut. Reikhman knew he was there somewhere, watching. In the distance, coming closer, a police siren, then another, and another. He had a corpse in the passenger footwell, another in the back seat, and there was a third in the block of flats. The situation was not impossible, but it would be better if he could deal with the police authorities at the appropriate level, not some grunt who could easily leap to the wrong conclusions.

In frustration he bit his finger, then slammed the SUV into reverse, backed out and swept out of the side streets at reckless speed, making a quick mental calculation: one dead old lady in a block of flats, two stiffs in a car-accident-to-come, to be hushed up, with the Kremlin left out of it. Here, in the sticks, thirty thousand dollars would do it, easy. He would claim for three hundred thousand.

LONDON

B
uckingham Palace lay far below, pomp left out in the rain. Raindrops pattered against the vast floor-to-ceiling window, out of which Joe surveyed the palace beyond and, closer to him, Green Park and Piccadilly. Behind lay small islands of soft seating dotted a great expanse of pale-blue carpet. The law firm where his disciplinary hearing was to take place was a shrine to uncluttered space, that most expensive commodity in London.

Cold and wet out there – trees dripping, puddles forming on pavements – but in here it was coolly warm. The kids he worked with would love this space, but sticky-fingered, messy, shouting obscenities, they would not be allowed near it. Money owns quiet; the poor go deaf thanks to their own and other people’s noise.

In the days that had passed since Reilly had been stolen, Joe had wasted his time putting up missing posters in the store warehouse and Richmond Park, all to no avail. At the memory of the missing dog, a melancholy descended on him. He still missed Reilly more than he cared to admit, almost as much as he missed Vanessa. Beautiful woman, foolish dog, stupid man.

He glanced around and found a newspaper on a table, the headline
HEADLESS VET FOUND IN BIN BAG
. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering about the depth of human depravity.

As he got into the body of the story, he realised that the dead vet was his vet.

‘Christ!’ he said out loud. But someone was calling his name.

He got up and entered a large box of frosted glass. Inside, a middle-aged woman with a permafrown introduced herself as Alison Something-Something from Human Resources and, in turn, introduced him to two men in suits: Mr Stephens, whose easy, pleasant smile Joe instinctively didn’t trust, and Mr Brooks, who looked bored.

The three of them sat on the far side of a glass table; there was an empty chair on the near side. Alison smiled a toilet-bleach kind of smile at him and then they were into it.

‘There are two issues in this disciplinary hearing. Firstly, that you provided a young person in your care with obscene material and, secondly, that you used “inappropriate force” against a young person in your care,’ said Alison – lank dark hair, piercing eyes.

The first one was easy-peasy.

‘The obscenity issue concerns a boy called Alf,’ said Joe softly. ‘He’s on the autistic spectrum and he has Tourette’s syndrome. When he first came to the home, he’d say feck, piss, wank, and so on – very loudly, all the time, in public. It was so bad that none of the carers liked to take him out in the fresh air. I gave him a joke book. He memorised every joke and would tell them, in perfect sequence, over and over again.’

‘The material was obscene,’ said Alison.

Joe countered: ‘It was
The Penguin Dictionary of Jokes
.’

‘Can you prove that?’

Joe smiled, mostly to himself. ‘I still have the receipt.’

Alison’s lips crinkled into a thin smile. She turned to her two fellow examiners; they shook their heads and she picked up a fountain pen and crossed out something. ‘The first charge against you is dropped. The second issue is far more serious.’

He denied hitting the boy, full stop. Emin, he explained, was originally from Albania, almost fully grown – more a man than a boy – and profoundly deaf and dumb. He knew no sign language, and his frustration because he couldn’t communicate with anyone led him to terrifying outbursts of anger. He had arrived on the Eurostar; there were no contact details for his family back in Albania. He was entirely alone in the world. Of all the carers at the home, only Joe was comfortable in his presence, on account of Joe of being bigger than him.

The boy, almost sixteen now, had a history of physical violence – punching, headbutting, spitting – and was clearly very troubled. In the previous fortnight he had attacked two other carers at the children’s home who were still on sick leave, and on the night in question it had been necessary for Joe to restrain him, for the safety of the other staff but especially a young Moroccan boy of twelve years of age, who had just got off the Eurostar unaccompanied. The police had brought him to the home only a few hours before. Emin had picked a fight with the Moroccan boy, Joe explained. To stop Emin from bullying the smaller boy, he had had to restrain him.

‘I had to hold Emin. He was . . .’ Joe stopped as Alison picked up a phone on the glass table.

‘Just a moment, Mr Tiplady . . . Hello, I specifically asked for sparkling water . . . Yes, please, straight away . . . Carry on, Mr Tiplady.’

‘. . . trouble.’

‘You say that, Mr Tiplady, but what about the video?’ said Alison.

‘What video?’ asked Joe.

‘Two of your colleagues have tendered written submissions to this tribunal that the video clearly showed you using inappropriate force against Emin.’

‘What video?’ repeated Joe.

‘It appears that the video has been mislaid,’ said Mr Stephens, smiling all the while. ‘Nevertheless, two of your colleagues were able to view it, and we are minded to accept their statements as admissible for the purposes of this fact-finding hearing.’

‘Isn’t this the preliminary?’

‘No. It’s the fact-finder,’ said Alison.

‘Who watched the video?’ asked Joe.

‘Your colleagues have exercised the right to anonymity.’

‘There was no video,’ said Joe.

Alison gestured for him to pause. She picked up the phone again and repeated her request for sparkling water, then nodded for Joe to continue.

‘The logbook will prove the video wasn’t working.’

‘Have you got a copy of the logbook?’ asked Alison.

‘No, but the day manager has one.’

‘No record of an active logbook, Mr Tiplady,’ said Mr Stephens. ‘No record whatsoever.’

The phrase hit him like a sandbag.
No record
. No record of an active detonator.

His mind went back to the cemetery in West Belfast, the sky grey and overcast, clouds scudding towards the Isle of Man. Declan Donnelly walked up the steep incline towards him through a corridor of Republican graves, his tweed overcoat flapping in the breeze, his hands deep in his pockets.

As he neared Joe, Donnelly’s right hand moved out of his pocket an inch or so, and Joe could clearly see his fingers gripping the stock of a Taurus pistol. The outline of the muzzle waved at Joe through the lining of Donnelly’s coat, suggesting that he take a seat on the metal bench with a view of the city and the lough beyond. Joe sat down and the muzzle shape stayed trained on him. Donnelly, never a fit man, was out of breath.

‘So,’ wheezed Donnelly.

‘You asked to see me, Declan, and here I am,’ said Joe.

‘We’ve got a tout in the London Special Branch.’

Joe knew where this might be going, and knew it would not be good for him.

‘He’s human scum, our tout. A bent copper, the most bent in all of Scotland Yard. One of our people clocked him running errands for a London gangster. We did the gangster a favour and now we own the copper. He got sight of the intelligence report on the failed bomb attack at the Tower of London. The bomb you made and planted would have killed the head of MI5, the head of the Met, the head of the RUC and a British prince. But the detonator didn’t work, so you said.’

‘The detonator was a dud.’

‘The intel report says “no record of an active detonator”. The bomb didn’t go off because there was no detonator. Point being, Joe’ – and here the muzzle shape waved at him again, pointedly, through the cloth of Donnelly’s coat – ‘it was always a dud. You built the bomb. You supplied the dud. That makes you a British spy.’

It was cold on the hill, but Joe licked his lips as if they had been dried out by great heat.

‘The evidence in our hands makes you a British spy.’

‘Then your evidence is wrong. I’m no British spy.’

‘Then who the fuck are you working for?’

‘No one.’

‘You’re a bomb-maker. But you deliberately make a bomb that doesn’t go off. Why?’

‘North Korea.’ Joe paused and looked out over the gravestones marching up and down the hill. ‘Here in West Belfast, you learn to hate the British,’ he continued. ‘Our time in North Korea made me realise that however bad the British are, however heavy the RUC, however much our people are discriminated against, it’s nothing like as bad as how the regime there treats ordinary people. Killing Chong was the moment I woke up, Declan. The killing, the hating, you’ve got to be brainwashed to do that. And my brainwashing has worn off.’