Cold Courage (18 page)

In Leyton, Mari walks towards the Eastern Buffet. The name makes her smile. That’s good. Smiling is a good thing. She knows she’s too serious these days, too caught up with trying to control what might happen. She has been wondering for a long time whether she could come here.

The summer has gone swimmingly, especially because of Lia. She has made Mari smile every day. But during this autumn, Mari has had a hard time keeping her head clear.

She owes Lia this visit. And the Latvian woman, killed and mangled by someone so brutal. Unforgivable.

Mari has feared coming to this shop. If that barbaric, evil person is there, the visit will be hard. Sometimes she reacts so strongly to what she sees that she can’t conceal the surge of emotion. That has happened before when she’s dealt with criminals.

Mari has only told a few people about her ability. Even them she hasn’t told how the gift has changed over the years and how it has changed her.

She can’t always decide whom she reads. Sometimes it just
happens
. Sometimes she feels like an antenna obliged to receive and feel every signal from every person that comes her way.

There are days when Mari has complete control over her thoughts. But in recent years she has felt more and more often that the gift controls her. Limiting it takes all her willpower – or a few drinks. That is another reason why she has enjoyed her evenings with Lia. And their little
juominki
.

Juominki
. She must remember to say that to Lia. An old, rakish word. The moment when a person feels truly alive.

Mari stops at the threshold of the Eastern Buffet and breathes in. Strange smells, an entire foreign world. She steps inside. The place is exactly as Lia described.

Mari sees the customers, four women, and sees immediately that they are not simply buying food, aromas and tastes. They are seeking something to fill an empty space. The void formed by the gradually fading memories and feeling of home, of belonging somewhere.
Of a world they have lost.

Mari’s eyes fill with tears, the feeling is so strong.

She has not missed her own homeland, but now, in the middle of this shop, whose shelves are filled with real and artificial mementos of these people’s origins, she is ready to burst into tears.

She tries to calm herself. She looks at the calendars and
magazines
on a rack against the wall. They are written in languages she doesn’t know, which keeps them closed to her. Having something that does not cause an avalanche of thoughts and stays unknown feels good.

Mari sees the pearled combs and mirrors. The sight startles her. Here, in the middle of so many useful and so many other useless things, their significance is suddenly perfectly clear.

They are part of a tradition: small girls sitting still in the evening while their mothers comb or brush their hair. One hundred strokes. Mothers sitting next to their daughters at night, every night, even if the day has been busy, the daughters learning the peaceful rhythm of the comb and carrying it with them always. The daughters feeling something which perhaps never takes shape as a conscious thought: if they ever have daughters of their own, they will pass these
moments
on to them.

On the combs and brushes are white daisies made with cheap imitation mother-of-pearl. Whenever a woman buys them, the memories of her childhood make her smile as she completes her purchase.

That was what the Latvian woman did.

At the back of the shop a curtain moves, the shopkeeper stepping out into view. The motion makes Mari reflexively look at him.

A second passes, perhaps two, and then the man looks back.

Mari just has time to stop her reaction. She holds back her cry but not the pain, which slams into her.

The man looks at her, and Mari knows that he is thinking of the full shelves in the back room, of all the goods he has ordered from thousands of kilometres away, and then of how many women are in his shop who will not buy anything, who are just looking. And Mari knows that the man has a dark side, a side as black as pitch. So cold and brutal. Panic grips her.

This man has killed many times. He has killed men and women, with steady hands and the efficiency of a postman delivering letters. If he did not kill the Latvian woman whose body ended up in the white Volvo, it is only a matter of chance.

The man looks at a woman moving down an aisle, and Mari sees him think how much he would like to strike her down – and the thoughts that follow become too excruciating for Mari to bear.

Mari rushes out onto the street, the door to the shop banging closed behind her as everything floods out of her in a panicked deluge.

She waves down a taxi, looking at the driver only for a fleeting second, but that is enough. Collapsing into the back seat, she asks him to drive to Hoxton.

Mari gets out of the cab before reaching home. Always at least three streets early.

All her strength has cascaded away, but she must walk the last few blocks to make sure that no one is following.

The man who has killed goes with her, inside her, in the terrible certainty growing within her.

Now there are two. Arthur Fried and this man. She must stop them both.

Before her building stands an older gentleman, slow movements, walking cane, decades-old cap upon his head. Looking at him, Mari sees something that takes a moment to recognise – what it is, what remains, when a person begins to slip away. Forgetfulness.

She is filled with compassion and envy for the old man. She does not have forgetfulness as her aid.

Two men who require action.

At home in her top-floor flat, she looks out the window. She sits there for a long time, minutes stretching into hours. Fear burns in her. Anger hardens her. She sits there until she can control her thoughts.

That night she doesn’t sleep. She thinks.

‘We have to start following him,’ Mari said.

Lia knew immediately that something had frightened her.

Nothing concrete had come out at the shop, Mari assured her. She had just looked at the man behind the counter and known that he was dangerous. That was all.

‘Do you think he killed the Latvian woman?’ Lia asked.

Mari had nothing to go on but her own impressions. So there was no use going to the police. A comb with flowers on it was not sufficient evidence.

Still, Lia knew that something had happened.

Mari had resolved the main issue: now they had something specific to investigate.

Now this is a job for Patrick Moore, Mari said.

‘A stake-out. If you want, you can join him. If he’s willing to take you along.’

Lia thought.

‘Yes, I want to.’

Mari’s second suggestion felt more difficult. She asked Lia to go back to the Fair Rule office.

‘If you stop going all of a sudden, they’ll wonder where you disappeared to. Better for them not to suspect anything. Maybe tell them that you aren’t going to have so much time any more. Besides, something new could always turn up.’

‘They could always catch on that I don’t share their Nazi ideology,’ Lia responded.

After another few moments of hesitation, she agreed. She did not have any logical grounds for refusing, just an unpleasant feeling.

The following day after work, she went to the party office in Epping. Stephen was happy to see her, but disappointed when she said she would not be able to come for the next couple of months.

‘My fiancé and I have started looking for a new flat, and it’s taking an unimaginable amount of energy,’ Lia explained.

‘You’re easily the best graphic designer we’ve ever had. And you’ll miss all the best times as the elections get closer,’ Stephen said, trying to coax her into reconsidering.

‘Thank you, but I’m going to have to be content to watch the elections from the sidelines.’ Lia designed an information flyer, but when there was no sign of Arthur Fried and nothing else in particular happened, she said her goodbyes.

‘For now,’ she said. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’ll be back sooner than I think.’

‘I hope so,’ Stephen said.

‘Stephen, I’ve always wanted to ask you: what do you think of these slogans? Do you agree with all of them?’

Stephen looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course. I wouldn’t devote all my time to this if I didn’t.’

Lia nodded and quickly left.

A few days later, Patrick Moore rang Lia and suggested a meeting over lunch.

‘Mari said that you’d like to learn certain skills from me.’

‘Oh she did, did she?’

They met at The Real Greek in Bankside, around the corner from the Studio. The restaurant was full, but Paddy landed them a table in short order. Something about his burly physique and
commanding
presence made people unwilling to argue with him, Lia noticed.

Paddy got straight to the point.

‘I’ve been following the target for two days now. This is going to be interesting.’

The target. Lia understood that it was time learn the lingo.

Paddy told her the background information he had gathered up to that point. His name was Kazimirs Vanags. People called him Kazis. Age forty-six, birthplace Latvia, moved to Britain in 1997.

‘Latvia!’ Lia said.

‘I know,’ Paddy said. ‘And there’s more.’

Vanags was registered as the owner of the Eastern Buffet, and other firms also appeared under his name in the Companies House register. One of them, Salmina, imported products from the Baltic
and Russia and had a turnover of nearly half a million pounds per annum.

‘We’ll have to look into that more closely. Taxes, employees, import licences. Everything he brings in and from where.’

Paddy worked quickly and rigorously. He also wanted to agree on some ground rules before Lia started shadowing the shopkeeper.

‘I say what we do. You’re Mari’s friend, but here you’re a
spectator
. I’ll call off the whole operation instantly if you start getting your own ideas. Two reasons: first is security – yours, mine and everyone else’s. The second is the success of the mission.’

Lia nodded.

Paddy encouraged her also to prepare for it being boring. Usually the work was just sitting for hours on end. Then when something happened, you had to spring into action immediately to follow and try to predict what would happen next.

Lia listened seriously. She had a lot more to learn than how to talk the talk.

After work, Lia hurried to their meeting place on the High Road in Leyton.

She had imagined Paddy watching the shopkeeper directly outside the grocery, but instead, he took her to his car parked one street away. In the car, he showed her the screen of his laptop, which featured a high resolution shot of the shop entrance.

Nowadays trailing was more remote surveillance than anything else, Paddy explained. But you still had to be close enough to the target to follow him if the need arose.

On the building across the road from the food shop, Paddy had installed a miniaturised WiFi camera, one of Rico’s gadgets. It was unbelievably small, perhaps the size of a screw, and you could stick it to any metal surface with a magnet or use a special adhesive strip. Paddy had installed it at night with a telescoping pole, high on a wall so passers-by wouldn’t notice it.

The camera could even see into the shop when someone opened the door. At times Lia made out the shape of the shopkeeper behind the checkout counter.

‘Unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Such a sharp picture from so far away.’

Buying something comparable would cost in the range of £5,000, Paddy said. But the basic components were common enough in mobile phones, so Rico had built a dozen of them. The most
expensive
part was the miniaturised high-capacity battery, which still cost less than a portion of fish and chips.

Normally the camera would operate for about a day. However, they could turn it off remotely when they weren’t watching, allowing it to transmit for longer. When the time came to change the battery, Paddy would dress up as a worker pasting up advertising hoardings so he could move around without arousing any suspicion.

Paddy described how Kazis Vanags had been in the shop each day from morning until closing time but had immediately left in his car at six o’clock and driven around for the rest of the evening, making the same circuit for the past two days. First he drove to Oval and visited a flat on the top floor of a three-storey building on Vassall Road.

‘It’s a brothel,’ Paddy said. ‘There are always men coming in and out, and they’re always acting in a certain way. Glancing from side to side.’

Paddy had seen two women in a window smoking. They looked Eastern European. There were probably more. They didn’t go
outside
much, since presumably their movements were restricted. They were not prisoners though: one of the women had gone shopping down the road.

After visiting Vassall Road, Vanags drove to a supermarket and purchased a whole bag of food. Then he drove to Catford, to Sangley Road, and entered a terraced house using his own key. Vanags stayed in the house only about ten minutes. The grocery bag he left inside. Paddy could not see into the house, but the previous night he had caught a glimpse of Vanags switching on the light in the hall and a figure flashing by before the door closed shut.

‘The size of the shopping bag says that there are probably at least two people living there,’ Paddy added.

From Sangley Road, Vanags drove to the Assets strip club in Hackney. They had had problems with their business licences for years, and it was known for being the kind of place you could get your wallet nicked. There had been beatings.

‘A regular dive,’ Paddy said.

Vanags seemed to be in the habit of spending an hour there before going home. Paddy had seen him going into the back room and
chatting
familiarly with the proprietor.

‘The same route each night,’ Paddy repeated. ‘What do you make of it?’

‘Is he picking up money? He might be running the brothel and be a partner in the bar too,’ Lia suggested.

‘Highly probable,’ Paddy said, casting Lia an approving glance. ‘And I also doubt that’s his ageing mother living in the terraced house in Catford, unable get out to shop for her own groceries.’

The time was just past six when Lia and Paddy saw Vanags closing up. After retrieving the poster stand from the pavement, he carefully turned the key in both locks.

Paddy waited until Vanags had disappeared from the reach of the surveillance camera and then started the car.

‘We’ll give him space to get moving. I’m guessing he’ll make the same rounds again.’

Paddy guessed right. When he turned his dark blue BMW onto the Leyton High Road, they saw Vanags stuck in traffic.

‘Will he recognise your car?’ Lia asked.

‘I’ve used a different one every night. Mari never complains about expenses like that.’

They stayed a good hundred metres back.

‘At this distance, he would have a hard time recognising anyone,’ Paddy explained. ‘When people are far away, we recognise them by their body shape, clothing and hair colour, which is why I’ve been wearing different clothes every night and a hat yesterday. If we follow him tomorrow, you should change your clothes too.’

When they arrived on Vassall Road, Paddy stopped his car a long way from the building Vanags drove up to. They watched while he exited the car, locked the door and entered the block of flats.

‘Now we just wait.’

Lia wondered what Vanags could be doing.

Is he collecting last night’s takings? Is he talking with the manager about the market situation? Is he screwing prostitutes?

The evening was already dark, and Lia noticed that Paddy was watching the whole area using the car mirrors. Whenever someone walked by on the street, Paddy turned his face away.

‘Thinking that sitting here this long wouldn’t attract anyone’s attention would be silly. But we also shouldn’t try to look too
inconspicuous
. That would just arouse more curiosity,’ Paddy explained. ‘Usually it’s a good idea to get out and walk around for a minute. But I think tonight we can just wait.’

To pass the time, Paddy explained surveillance techniques.

‘It isn’t enough to know where the target is going and what he’s doing when you can see him. That’s just the beginning.’

What was important was figuring out what kind of person your target was. How did he think and make decisions? Did he panic easily? If Lia had to capture him, what would she do? When you learned to recognise things like this, you knew a lot about your target instantly. Surveillance was not just about following people but about being able to predict what they would do.

This all sounded sensible to Lia, but difficult.

I don’t have a clue how a person like Kazis Vanags thinks.

The little tricks Paddy shared impressed Lia, such as avoiding eye contact. People remembered best those with whom they made direct eye contact. Keeping your own expression blank was also
surprisingly
difficult when you met the eyes of the person you were
following
. You learned how to avoid eye contact by watching the rhythm of your target’s motion and how often he glanced around.

Paddy laughed when Lia practised avoiding his own eyes. The laughter helped her relax.

They also had time to chat about other things. Lia would not have brought up Paddy’s past crimes and prison sentence, but when he mentioned them himself, she said aloud what had been
bothering
her.

‘I don’t understand why a man like you would turn to robbery.’

‘I understand it a little too well,’ Paddy replied.

The thought of robbing an armoured car had come from one of his old workmates. Neither of them had ever committed a serious crime before. But the third man who joined them had been to prison already, serving long stretches for robbery and forced entry.

‘We were too close to big money. Sometimes bankers cheat and investment company managers stick their hands in the till. And when you work with big companies and rich people, you get to see what a good life you can have if you have the cash. We didn’t do it to be clever; we wanted the good life.’

As their target they had chosen Thomas Cook, a large
multinational
corporation, so no little people would suffer unduly from their theft.

‘We did it as cleanly as a robbery can be done. We didn’t run in waving guns. We knocked out the guards with diluted chloroform onto mattresses. That’s why we got caught: we were too careful.’

The handcuffs they used to bind the guards were padded to prevent bruised wrists. Because of the padding, one of the guards squeezed free from the handcuffs much more quickly than they had planned.

The alarm sounded within six minutes. The police surrounded them.

‘I thought I was a real player. Taking risks is the only way win big. But it doesn’t really work that way. Life is too short for shortcuts.’

Paddy’s tone changed.

‘Stay cool. Don’t stare at the building. A woman just walked out.’

Lia slowly moved her eyes to the building and saw a woman
approaching
along the pavement.

‘Take this,’ Paddy said and pulled a large, folded map out of a door pocket.

Lia opened the map. Paddy grabbed his mobile and held it to his ear so that his hand covered his face when viewed from the street.

The woman passed by without stopping. Lia glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. Bleach-blonde hair, shapely body, long coat, clicking heels.

‘One of them?’ Lia asked Paddy.

‘I saw her yesterday too. I’d say it’s ninety-nine per cent sure she’s an Eastern European prostitute.’

‘How can you tell?

The whole package, Paddy said. Over the years he had hired dozens of prostitutes for his customers when he was working as a bodyguard.

‘Some customers think that a bodyguard’s job is getting them whatever they want at any hour of the night or day, not just
monitoring
their security. Drugs, prostitutes, whatever.’