Down into Darkness (32 page)

Silano asked, ‘How is it now?'

Maxine smiled. She said, ‘Think of it this way – I used to be hated for it. Now there's a law against hating someone for it. And I'm a law officer.'

Forester put them in chairs that faced his desk. The chairs were small with tweedy seats and had narrow wooden arms. His chair was large and leather and swivelled authoritatively. He said, ‘I can't believe it. I can't believe it's happened. I mean, I knew him.'

‘The reason we're here,' Maxine explained, ‘is to ask you whether you can think of any reason why George Nelms might have been killed. Any connection that occurs to you, any odd occurrence, anything from the past.'

‘Nothing,' Forester said. ‘There's nothing. I can't think of anything. I don't suppose anyone could. George Nelms… it's so improbable.'

His desk carried a calendar, a digital clock, an appointments book, a telephone, a pen rack. They were all aligned perfectly, positioned for size and bulk and confined to the top left-hand corner.

He smiled. ‘There are some people you might think of as having a secret life, but George wasn't one of them.'

Both Maxine and Silano had read the report containing Stella's notes on Monica Hartley.

‘The problem is… our problem…' Silano told him, ‘it seems clear that Mr Nelms knew his killer – or was known to him; it's not quite the same thing.'

‘I can't imagine he did.' Forester shook his head.

‘We're not saying they were close friends. Just that Mr Nelms had some connection with the man who murdered him. And we wonder what that connection might have been.'

‘You're not suggesting it was through the school, surely?'

‘We'll need to talk to members of staff,' Maxine said.

Forester looked startled. ‘Yes. Yes, all right.'

‘Enemies,' Silano said. ‘Did he have any enemies that you know of?'

‘Here at school? No, certainly not. He was very popular.'

They talked more but learned nothing. The recently retired George Nelms, it seemed, was spotless of character and had only friends and admirers. As they were leaving, Maxine asked, ‘What was his subject?'

‘He was our sports teacher,' Forester said. ‘Sometimes he might fill in if a teacher was unavailable but just in a supervisory role.'

‘Just sports?' Silano asked.

‘Yes.' Forester added, ‘And the cadet corps. He was very generous with his time.'

The Beamer Boys were cruising. They had topped up with a few pills and a can or two, and they were feeling fine. Toni had gone with them, and the car was a little crowded, but they could handle it. The sound-system made their nerve-ends rattle. Toni was lying full length across the boys in the back seat, her head in her boyfriend's lap. The boy was thinking, idly, that in a while he might put that head to work.

The Toyota came up out of nowhere on a cut-through road between the Strip and Notting Hill Gate. The boy driving the BMW caught it in his wing mirror and had just enough time to yell and slap the accelerator, but the other car was alongside already and there was no time to find a
turn-off. He drove a mazy line, weaving back and forth on the crown of the road, but it was too little, too late.

The gunshot was loud and authentic. Beamer Boy swung the wheel instinctively, hitting the kerb, bouncing, clipping a roadside tree, then finding the road again and changing down a gear to get traction. His passengers were yelling and swearing and falling about all over the car. In the middle of it all there was a scream. When the boy looked again, the Toyota was nowhere.

Toni was face down on the floor. She was sobbing. She said, ‘They shot me, they shot me, they fucking shot me, Jesus Christ, they shot me.'

The seat of her jeans was red and wet.

The money has to move.

Ricardo knew his business. Even though his deals were small time, they linked with bigger deals; the money amalgamated, it coalesced, you could think of it as tributaries flowing into a river; a river of money, and no saying where it had come from or where it was going.

The best way to launder money is to own a bank, or have a friend who owns a bank, or have some kind of hold over someone who owns a bank. Whichever it is, there's a fair chance that the bank, or the banker, will be Russian.

You start with ‘placement': the cash is paid into your bank, or your friend's bank. Then comes the ‘layering' stage: when the money takes flight and winds up in other banks. You'd want to make this stage as complicated as possible – multi-layering – with a complex network of transfers in your home country and worldwide but, eventually, it will all wind up overseas. Finally, ‘integration': the money is defrayed, it buys houses, it buys businesses, it buys prime-location holiday homes with golfing facilities. The income feeds back to the depositors, or else the homes and businesses are sold after a while.

There are other ways and many of them. You can use cyber-payments and trade in digital money. You can use no-limit value cards like Mondex and make telephone transfers to a trickle-down system. Money markets are open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, so the money never stops moving. You can use trust systems like Chop or Hawallah, when your receipt will be
a torn playing card or a laundry ticket, and money never crosses a border or registers on an electronic system. You can use the futures market, buying and selling the same commodity under a broker's anonymity, paying the commission, maybe even taking a small loss. You can buy antiques or jewellery. You can team up with someone who owns a casino, buy chips, play the tables, win a little, lose a little, then cash in.

You can bring your money back through any one of a hundred offshore facilities whose owners are a mystery. There are Caribbean islands with a population of a few thousand and better than five hundred banks that are owned by the Nothing Corporation whose board members are John Doe, Mickey Blank and Jack Noname.

Drugs aside, money laundering is the biggest illegal international business. The sums are astronomical: hundreds of billions of dollars, for sure. Ricardo just wanted a fraction of this. A fraction of a fraction. He'd worked hard to secure his minuscule corner of the market, and he was seriously unhappy about being muscled out, though he remembered Jonah nailed to his chair and accepted that London was a bust.

He'd gone out to buy a newspaper, cigarettes, a lottery ticket. He took his usual read from the rack, then stopped short. There were a dozen or so different papers on display, and one of them carried a picture above the title advertising a feature article in that day's issue: Delaney's article on Stanley Bowman. It wasn't a name Ricardo recognized, but he'd seen the face before. He'd seen it in a rear-view mirror.

He opened the paper and started to read. As he read, he smiled.

Toni was tired of hearing how lucky she'd been. She didn't feel lucky; she felt unhappy and angry and sore. The boys
had dropped her a block from the hospital and she had limped down to A & E, shouting with pain, her hand clutching her ass. By the time she got there, the left leg of her jeans was sopping.

The boys had explained that it wouldn't be wise for them to go with her (though of course they wanted to). There would be too many questions to answer (and they really didn't have the answers). The police would be called, for sure (which might well prove embarrassing).

So maybe she could say she was out for a walk when… Or was lying on the grass in the park when… Or she couldn't remember quite what… Toni asked them exactly what it was that someone shot in the ass wouldn't quite remember, but by this time they were dumping her on the pavement. On her ass on the pavement.

It must have been because she'd been lying full length in the car that the bullet had gone through the fat of her backside, clipped the passenger seat and deflected into the dashboard. The boys looked at the hole in the dash and cursed. The boy in the passenger seat had wanted everyone to know that he'd come that close.

That motherfucking close, dude
.

Toni had wailed, trying to look round at the damage, and her more-or-less boyfriend had told her, yeah, they'd get her somewhere first, go looking for the Toyota Team later. He'd made it sound like a concession.

Now she was on her hands and knees, ass up, while a doctor stitched the exit wound, then applied a dressing as a cop, with a poor sense of timing, asked her questions. The cop was a woman who liked a joke, but she wasn't ready to allow that Toni had been walking when she was shot, because the angle of the wound was wrong, or lying in the park, because the same applied, or that she was confused about the incident, because somehow that didn't strike true.

Toni decided to hold to the amnesia story. She'd heard about injury trauma, and it sounded like a good idea. She could shrug and shake her head and speak about walking and lying in the park as false memories.

The cop was sceptical. Toni told the cop to kiss her ass.

Gideon Woolf was dressing to go out, this time, in black. Silent Wolf wore black at night and became a shadow… no, less than a shadow. The long coat wasn't right for climbing. Instead, he put on a roll-neck, a hooded top with zipper pockets, 501s, sneakers. The knife went into his waistband under the hoodie; the gun into one zipper pocket; into the other, a home-made grappler – a thin rope the end of which had been unravelled and self-lashed to a heavy glass paperweight.

The sky was darkening by the minute, a heavy blue dusk. He felt good. He felt that necessary buzz along with a tightness in the throat, a tightness in the gut. His fingertips tingled. On TV there were scenes of conflict, then a politician invoking God, then men spilling from the back of a truck in windblown rain.

A voice said,
The infantry, going forward as one
.

Woolf experienced a sudden flashback to his waking dream.

Men walking in single file, the road white, no sound… A flicker of light at the corner of his vision… Then a shot, a cry
…

Coward. You filthy fucking coward.

It seems they are making love… pretty soon, he'll forget about the conflict and chaos and fear. They lie together and talk. He answers all her questions
.

Dirty girl. Oh, you dirty bitch.

The images staggered him, and he put out a hand, steadying himself against the door-jamb. He squeezed his eyes tight
shut. Aimée's face swam up behind his closed eyelids, her smile, her lips moving:
I love you
.

What can I do? Aimée… what can I do now but kill you?

He sat in his operator's chair for a moment or two, breathing deeply, channelling his thoughts to the task in hand. Silent Wolf stalking the alleyways, moving unseen over rooftops. A street-glow from the Strip played on the ceiling, pink-and-green neon; car horns sounded; engines revved; voices shouted threats or invitations. He was ready. He left the scorched room, his step light as he went downstairs.

On TV, the politician was still talking about God.

Stanley Bowman thought he had better things to do. There was money to be moved, some clean, some slightly soiled, some distinctly grimy. There was a deal to be closed, perfectly legit, and another where the names had been changed to protect the limitlessly guilty. There were several above-board companies to be looked after, some of which carried government contracts and could name Members of Parliament among their directors.

A long time ago Bowman had learned that high-profile respectable businesses with high-profile respectable connections were great camouflage for certain less public activities. Working both sides of that divide took time, but it also brought rewards: the dirty work trebled your profits, the open-book businesses brought status and position – people wanted to write feature articles about you.

He wasn't happy about playing go-between, but the Americans had both influence and amazing connections. Their business was worldwide, highly profitable and wholly legitimate: a growth industry that showed no sign of falling off. It depended on war, and there were wars round the globe, wars 24/7, wars that had been going on for decades, wars that had only just begun, territorial wars, religious wars, racial wars, drug wars, doctrinal wars, wars that depended on old grudges, on new antagonisms, wars for political gain, wars for democracy, wars for domination, wars that were being fought out of habit, out of hatred, out of ignorance.

Wars require weapons, and Bowman was very anxious for a piece of that particular action. It was in his interests to help
crack a market where he could be broker. Like Bowman, Morgan had taken American money; he couldn't expect simply to shrug and say, ‘I tried.'

Bowman parked and walked past the Honda without really noticing it. When Morgan let him in, he noticed the glance that went over his shoulder and laughed.

‘Are they out there – your minders?'

‘I told you.'

Bowman could hear yells and explosions from a farther room. Morgan had been watching TV. They went down a long hallway to the back of the house, and Morgan poured drinks before bothering to switch off the movie.

‘Now,' Bowman said, ‘we need some sort of a game plan. These people with influence… Who's got secrets? Who's in debt? Who's ambitious?' He smiled. ‘Who's got something to lose?'

Woolf looked ahead; he looked back down the street. People searching for a restaurant, people strolling. He walked past the house, to the end of the street, then started back. The restaurant door opened and closed; the strollers turned the corner. Woolf dropped down into the basement area of the house with scaffolding.

There was an alarm warning clamped to one of the scaffolding poles. From his vantage point below, Woolf looked up and saw the passive infra-red detectors on the first level of the scaffolding. He went back to the street. A car went by, then a pizza-delivery bike, its wasp-whine fading. Woolf threw the grappler, lobbing it under-arm. The weight rose and arced perfectly, dropping over a pole on the third level. He fed the rope out until the weighted end came to hand, then tied a running knot and pulled on the rope again, sending it back.