Cold Revenge (2015) (26 page)

Joad was bloodied but unbowed.

Templeman had a new prayer he added to his daily list. ‘Dear God, in Thy infinite wisdom, may DI Joad apply for a transfer.’

Huss looked again at the papers in front of her. The first problem, or irregularity, had been the CSI team missing the killer’s escape route at the scene of crime in the college. That had been bad enough. Now there was this. Huss was looking at the Scene Attendance Log for the day of the second search of Fuller’s room at the Blenheim Hotel. She corroborated this with the crime scene log, in case there were any discrepancies. The senior officer rostered was DI Joad. DS Ed Worth was also listed as present at the scene, and a forensics man called Davies, who she didn’t know.

Huss had seen Worth not ten minutes earlier in the canteen, which is where, stony-faced, she headed now.

Worth was drinking coffee with a couple of guys from Traffic.

‘Hi, Melinda,’ said one of them. She smiled sweetly and said, ‘I need to have a word with Ed, if you don’t mind.’

‘Sure, no problems.’ The pair from Traffic got up and gathered their things. Goodbyes were said.

‘So, Melinda,’ said Ed Worth, ‘how can I help?’

Worth had one of those curiously old-fashioned faces, square-jawed with a broad, high forehead and matching haircut, that made him look as if he’d wandered out of a thirties-era film. He was a bright guy, though, and Melinda knew he detested Joad. Working for Joad meant doing two people’s jobs. Joad’s mastery of the system made getting him dismissed for incompetence very unlikely. The best they could do was cross their fingers and hope Joad committed an actual crime of a serious nature or was harvested by nature, as a result of his heavy drinking and smoking.

‘It’s the Fuller case,’ she said.

‘What about it?’ asked Worth warily. Huss’s attractive but no-nonsense face was wearing a frown. She could be quite frightening when she was angry. She was used to ordering stockmen who worked with cattle and farmworkers, tough, aggressive men, around. She was used to command.

Whatever it is, thought Worth, I bet Joad’s got something to do with it.

‘When you returned to re-examine Fuller’s room, was the search scene still intact?’

‘Well, the tape was still there and the door showed no signs of being tampered with, so yes.’

‘And Joad didn’t interfere with anything?’

‘By that,’ said Worth, ‘I assume you’re meaning plant evidence. No. He couldn’t have. It was pretty well hidden. The slit in the mattress was maybe a centimetre and the fabric is striped, so it’s not like it was some gaping slash. There was a tacking stitch holding the edges together, we bagged the complimentary sewing repair kit to check against the thread in the stitch, and the forensics guy said it looked like being a match.’

Relief ran through Huss’s body. When she’d heard that Joad had found them, she’d automatically assumed something dodgy was going on. Now it looked as if she was mistaken.

Worth continued, ‘If it wasn’t for the DCI’s suspicion that Fuller was guilty, we would never have been back a second time and he’d have got away with it.’

Huss nodded. She knew that Templeman thought the initial underwear and hair had been left by Fuller in order to confuse the investigation. The thinking was he’d come back for the real souvenir at a later date. It was unlikely that the mattress would have been changed by the time he wanted to use the room again.

‘And you checked that the room hadn’t been accessed?’

‘I already told you. It definitely hadn’t.’

‘No. No, you didn’t,’ said Huss. ‘You said the door didn’t
look
tampered with.’ She emphasized the word
look
. ‘The hotel have got records of when rooms are accessed via the swipe-card key. Did you confirm it with them?’

Worth looked uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t know that. Maybe Joad checked.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Huss. Her displeasure was plain to see. Worth winced. He liked Huss.

The Blenheim Hotel was only a short distance from the police station and Huss walked there, oblivious of the tourists and students around her. She went up the imposing steps of the battleship-grey hotel, which always seemed grim and unwelcoming, scowling across the road at the Ashmolean Museum. The doorway to the hotel was in the form of an oddly pointed arch that looked as if it had come from a church.

The duty manager who saw her was a charming, good-looking young Pole. He ushered her into his office, typed in Fuller’s room number and clicked on the access history to the room.

He said, in his faultless, slightly accented English, ‘Well, to answer your question, no guests or cleaners have been in during time you specified.’

Huss noticed he had the Eastern European habit of dropping the word ‘the’ when he spoke English.

‘Good,’ said Huss. That cleared that up. She guessed she could now relax. The manager held his hand up, palm outwards in a warning gesture.

‘I am not finished. There is manager’s card like this one,’ he took his wallet out and showed her a credit-card-sized piece of plastic, ‘that is slightly different.’

‘How so?’ Huss asked. Irek, the manager, smiled.

‘Cleaners’ keys will allow them access to rooms and storage areas for linen, cleaning products, stuff like that, but not for restricted areas, where food or alcohol is stored, valuable things. My card gets me in anywhere I want. More importantly, it doesn’t show up on the system.’

‘So, there’d be no record,’ said Huss.

He nodded. ‘It’s a system flaw,’ said Irek. ‘One I pointed out, actually. We do have someone working on it now from head office. We’re part of chain, and I can get them to check. But it’ll take two working days.’

‘But it can be done,’ said Huss.

‘Oh yes, it can be done.’

Huss gave him her business card. ‘Please make sure it is, Irek.’

‘I absolutely will do that, DI Huss. I will call you in two days.’

She exited the Blenheim feeling slightly happier. With luck, she’d be able to prove incontrovertibly that the crime scene had been completely undisturbed. She couldn’t see any way a manager at the Blenheim could be bribed into allowing someone intent on planting evidence access to the room. Not that it was impossible to believe, but that it would be risky.

But it was all too easy to believe that one of the cleaners on a minimum wage and a short-term contract, maybe someone not even in the country now, maybe with fake ID working illegally, could be persuaded to let someone into the room.

‘Here’s a hundred quid, just open this door and go away for five minutes.’

Well, that hadn’t happened. Joad hadn’t misbehaved. It was all good.

But Huss came from generations of farmers. Caution and pessimism ran through her like a strand of DNA double helix.

Two days. She’d believe she was clear when it happened.

Arkady Belanov, as Enver had correctly predicted, was not in a forgiving mood. He was not a forgiving kind of man at the best of times. Revenge was very much on his mind, now that the immediate aftermath of Hanlon’s visit had been dealt with.

He was particularly infuriated that Hanlon was a woman.

Women had no place in Arkady’s world except for sexual pleasure, as the butt of jokes or for public beatings and humiliation. His relationships with women were those of slave and master from plantation times.

Now Hanlon had turned his world on its head. He had been the butt of a joke, he had been physically attacked, he had been humiliated. Nothing short of Hanlon’s death would satisfy him.

He wanted a
razborki
, a settlement of accounts.

Dimitri had been sent to a private treatment clinic in Wembley that Arkady used occasionally when people who worked for him needed patching up. The facilities and doctors were good, but more to the point, there were no awkward questions asked. They X-rayed him, suggested he might like to go somewhere for a proper CAT scan, gave him industrial-strength pain killers and sent him back. The fortunate thing for Dimitri was that the injury (all the pain seemed to cluster at the site of the broken bone around his eye) was easy to isolate. This was not the case for Arkady.

Arkady had been treated at the clinic, too, for the second-degree burns on his groin. The major problem for him was that whatever he did put pressure on the area. Sitting, lying, even standing, the burned flesh was chafed and pressured. The fact that it was this kind of pain he had enjoyed inflicting on his girls was an irony he failed to notice.

Dimitri was making light of his injuries. He had survived much worse in the past, as had Arkady, but the humiliation really hurt. To be beaten up by a woman, that was an unwelcome first. He ran the scene over and over in his head like a video on a loop. Hanlon headbutting him, fine, who could have anticipated that? But then his stupidity, when he had a hold of her, in not finishing the job properly! A two-handed grip and she’d have been his. Instead, that elbow strike to his gut, then the wooden end of the shotgun driving into his jaw. Well, the next time they met – and there would be a next time, they would see to that – it would be very different.

Arkady concerned himself with more practical problems. Who was she? He very quickly decided that she had to be some kind of professional. Well, that much was obvious. His first thought was probably ex-army. Not many men, let alone women, would have either the ability or, maybe more to the point, the guts to tackle Dimitri. If it had happened in Russia he would have guessed maybe the FSB, the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s replacement. Where Putin had come from. But they weren’t in Russia and he couldn’t blame Vladimir Vladimirovitch for this.

What was she? Mixed martial artist? Cage fighter? Surely not.

The only time he had seen commitment like that, bravery like that, and that fanatical look in the eye of someone perfectly prepared to die for their cause, was when he’d served with the army in Chechnya.

Svoboda ili Smert!

Freedom or death. That was a Chechen war cry he had heard many times. He could easily imagine it on her lips too.

While promoting brand Belanov, Arkady had always heavily emphasized the terrible things that would happen to those who crossed him. He had learned long ago that fear paralyses people as effectively as a choke-hold. He liked people to be afraid of him and you would have to be crazy not to be. Whoever the woman was, she hadn’t been deterred by his reputation.

Then there was the question of who had sent her. His first thought, when Dimitri went down, was, I’m a dead man. She had to be an assassin, a hit-woman. He had never heard of such a thing, but why not? To see was to believe and from his position he felt sure he was looking death in the face. What else could this be? When you live a gangster’s life, you will probably die a gangster’s death, either behind bars or violently. There was no doubt in his mind as to his fate.

He knew what violent death looked like. He had meted it out often enough.

His most coherent thought had been a desire to die well, to show her that a Russian wasn’t scared of death. Dimitri had a tattoo of the Virgin and Child on his chest ready for this eventuality. It meant that his conscience was clean before his friends. Arkady’s only hope had been that it would be quick. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing or seeing, when she stuck that picture of the nonentity Fuller under his nose. This peculiar request for information on probably the least important of his clients, was what he found hard to grasp. That anyone should risk their lives to find out what that ineffectual pervert was up to was bewildering.

Arkady’s brain was an incredible storage system. In prison he’d occasionally do memory shows for his fellow inmates, memorizing packs of cards, that kind of thing. He had been able to provide all the details she had wanted in a nano-second, time, date, length of stay, choice of girl, but who cared about some two-bit teacher?

That made him rethink the soldier part of his theory. Police? It was such a cop kind of question, establishing an alibi, but such an unorthodox way of going about things. Still, it was something worth checking out. Indeed, realistically, it was one of the few things he could check out.

To think was to act. Arkady picked up his new mobile phone and called his contact at Oxford CID.

DS Joad looked around the bar with approval. It was only the second time that he’d been here, although he had been on Arkady’s books for two years. He had been given disappointingly little to do. Since he was paid a retainer, plus extra for services rendered, he’d earned a lot less than he was hoping for. Plus, he’d expected to be given the run of the house, where the girls were concerned. Joad had been extorting sex from prostitutes all his life and now he had hit the mother lode, he wasn’t allowed so much as a blow-job. Perhaps today his luck would change. He looked at the menu of girls. Nadezhda from the Caucasus looked very promising.

He ordered a Beluga Goldline vodka on the rocks. It was eye-wateringly expensive and he liked the stylish bottle it came in. He also liked the way that he didn’t have to pay for it. He knocked it back quickly and banged the glass down on the bar so he could get another one in while the going was good.

‘Make it a large one, Ivan,’ he said to the barman.

He caught his reflection in the mirror and straightened his tie. He was looking good. He was glad he’d worn his best suit. He fitted in perfectly. He’d had a bit of banter with the barman about it. He was popular with barmen; he had the common touch. He sipped his drink and looked around the bar. He smiled benignly at the other customers with their girls of choice. The barman slipped away and crossed the corridor to Arkady’s office. He knocked on the door and Dimitri opened it.

‘Get that fuck-wit out of my bar, please, Dimitri Nikolyavitch,’ begged Sergei. ‘He’s beginning to freak the other customers out.’

Dimitri looked across the office at Arkady, who nodded. Dimitri then accompanied the distraught barman and returned thirty seconds later with Joad, still clutching his drink.

Arkady began to reconsider his hiring policy. Surely anyone was better than this. He ran his eyes coldly over Joad, who was grinning at him, anxious to please. The policeman was wearing a terrible three-piece suit, made of some dark, artificial fabric. Even in Arkady’s hometown of Tulskaya in south Moscow, notorious for being an industrial slum, a real dump, it would look like shit.