The Murder Exchange (11 page)

'Jesus/ I said, as reality sank in. 'No wonder I
almost got killed.'

'I didn't mean to make you a part of it,' she said
defensively. 'I didn't know it would be you, and I
honestly didn't think that they'd stoop to killing
him, or your friend.'

'It's the Holtzes, for Christ's sake. They're
capable of anything.'

She shook her head wearily. 'Fuck, what a mess.
What the hell am I going to do now?'

'Keep quiet about it. That's the best thing. If they
find out you knew too much about what was going
on, well...' I tailed off, knowing I'd made my
point. 'Anyway, I'm the one who's got things to
worry about. Not only am I on the run through no
fault of my own, I'm a witness, too. I saw two men
die. The law are going to be very interested in

97
getting me to talk. The Holtzes are going to be very
interested in making sure I don't.'

'But you couldn't pin anything on them, could
you? It was your friend, Tony, who did the actual
shooting, so he's the only one who could actually
get in any trouble.'

'Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, they might not
see it like that. Especially if the coppers manage to
trace the blood on the back seat of my car back
to Fowler. If that gets public then I'm going to be on
the Holtzes' hitlist, aren't I? As well as everyone
else's.'

We didn't speak for a few moments. She sat
there, watching me now, puffing on her cigarette. It
was difficult to tell what she was thinking behind
the dark eyes.

'I feel partly responsible for what happened/ she
said eventually. I didn't bother telling her that she
was partly responsible. At that moment I needed all
the friends I could get. 'You can stay here for a
couple of days if you want, until things die down/

Thanks/ I said, 'I appreciate it.'

'Do you want a drink? A proper one?'

'Yeah, I think I need one. What have you got?'

'Most things. What do you want?'

'A brandy, please. And a beer, too, if that's all
right.' I thought that I might as well take advantage
of the hospitality on offer, not sure how long it was
going to be lasting. She didn't look like she'd taken
offence and smiled as she got up and kicked off her
shoes. Her toenails were painted a bright red,
which they always say is a sign of passion. I began
to stop thinking about my current woes and instead

98
concentrated on more immediate possibilities.

She went into the kitchen to make up the drinks
and I took my shoe off and casually followed her in.
'You're looking really good, you know/ I said,
thinking that I was going to have to buy a book on
chat-up lines or at least put more thought into
them. The thing is, I've always been a man who
preferred the more direct approach. If I thought I
vets in with a chance - and to be honest with you,
I reckoned Elaine owed me one - I tended to go
straight in for the kill.

Thanks/ she said, pouring the brandies. 'You're
not looking so bad yourself. You seem to have
improved with age.' She gave me a quick onceover,
like she was checking out a dress. 'You've
uuiked out as well. It suits you. You were always a
bit too skinny in school.'

Cheeky mare.

I took the brandy with one hand and moved the
other round towards her shapely rear, thinking that
I was taking a bit of a risk here, since she didn't
seem like the sort of person who'd suffer unwanted
attentions in silence, and if she kicked me out I
really was bolloxed because I had pretty much
nowhere else to go. But as the hand made contact,
and I gave the left cheek a gentle stroke, she shot
me a look that said that after all the fucking
mishaps of the day - and by God there'd been a few
- I'd finally struck gold. Our lips met Mills and
Boon style and her fingers crept up my inner thigh.

Not everything had changed since school, then.

99
Saturday, fifteen days ago

Gallan

'Do you ever stop work, Sarge?' asked Benin,
nursing his black coffee. Turning up at the Arcadia
on your tod at half eleven at night, getting involved
in a scuffle, and then coming to work next morning.
That's the sort of thing you're meant to do when
you're like eighteen, isn't it?'

'I was trying to recapture the fading spirit of
youth. I won't be trying again for a while.'

'So, did you get anything else from Elaine Toms?'

'Nothing of any use. She said she hadn't heard a
word from Fowler, and she claimed she didn't
know who Max Iversson was.'

'Do you believe her?'

I shrugged. 'I don't know. I didn't see him with
her so she could be telling the truth. There just
seemed something a bit coincidental about it.'

It was nine o'clock on Saturday morning and
Benin and I were the only people in the Matthews
incident room. I hadn't left the club until quarter to
one and I was tired. However, I didn't look as bad

100
as Benin, who was carrying a mean hangover, and
vvhose breath smelled of long-dead fish. About the
only thing he'd got remotely enthusiastic about in
the ten minutes since we'd got in was the altercation
I'd had with Iversson. He'd found it
particularly amusing that the ex-para had chucked
someone at me while they'd still been taking a leak.
'Simple but very effective, I should think,' was how
Ivj'd summed it up. Fair enough, I suppose. He was
right.

It was day six of the heatwave and day seven of
the Matthews murder inquiry, and we had plenty
to keep us busy. Knox, who wasn't coming in until
later, had dropped on my desk a note with a photograph
of a hard-looking blonde with Myra
i iiiidley's haircut and the same sort of amiable,
light-up-the-world expression. The note identified
her as Jean Tanner, a former call-girl, two of whose
partial prints had been recovered from Matthews's
flat, one of them on a coffee mug, suggesting she'd
been more than simply a passing punter after some
gear. Knox had supplied us with the address,
somewhere up in Finchley, and had instructed us to
go round, take a statement from her and find out
what she'd been up to there. Like a lot of the work
on a murder investigation it was routine stuff, but
something that had to be done. He signed off by
telling us to continue trying to track down Fowler,
whose prints had also been found on a number of
items in Matthews's flat, even though he'd claimed
the two had never socialized.

Before we collared Ms Tanner, we drove over
to the Priory Green estate to show her photo to

101
Matthews's neighbours and see if she was the
blonde woman identified by two of them as having
gone to his flat more than once in the past few
weeks. This, at least, would give us something to
throw at her if, for some reason, she proved
uncooperative.

The estate itself, a medium-rise collection of red
and greybrick buildings just north of the NatWest
building on Pentonville Road, was leafy, quiet and
relatively well kept. A few years earlier it had
received a large cheque from the National Lottery's
Heritage Fund to spruce things up, and there was
still a lot of building work going on. So far the
money looked to have been pretty well spent,
which isn't always the case with construction
projects. Priory Green had none of the menace of so
many of London's sixties- and seventies-designed
council estates, those graffiti-stained fortresses with
their mazes of darkened walkways so beloved of
muggers everywhere, that for a copper always feel
like enemy territory. Bad things might have gone
on here, but they were done in quite a pleasant
setting.

Things got off to a good start as well. Both the
witnesses - a young black woman with a very fat
baby and several other yowling kids in the background,
and an elderly man who insisted on
haranguing us about the estate's supposed litter
problem - were in residence and able to confirm
that they'd seen the woman in the photo going
either in or out of the flat on several occasions,
though not in the past couple of weeks. The elderly
man thought he might have seen her three times,

102
but he couldn't be sure. While we were there we
knocked on a few other doors to see if we could jog
some memories but, where anyone bothered to
answer, we were given the kind of welcome usually
reserved for Jehovah's Witnesses, and no-one could
provide any help.

I wasn't sure how much use it was finding out
that Jean Tanner, ex or current prostitute, had
vi'itcd the flat of a known drug dealer on more than one occasion, even if he had supplied her with
coffee, but at least it was something. However, our
good fortune, if good fortune it could be called,
didn't last very long. On the way to Jean's place
there was an accident on the Caledonian Road that
held us up for getting close to half an hour in
^..aJily increasing heat. Then Berrin, who was
in charge of navigation on the basis that I didn't
trust him behind the wheel in the state he was in,
got us lost in the backstreets of East Finchley. By the
time we finally tracked down the address - a flat in
an ultra-modern, heavily alarmed four-storey block
that sat like an eyesore between the Georgian townhouses
on either side of it - it was almost half
eleven. And, after all that, she wasn't in.

We had six more addresses to visit that day, all of
them doormen who had worked at one time or
another in the past six months at Arcadia. The list
had been supplied by the proprietor of Elite A, a Mr
Warren Case, himself a one-time doorman. We'd
interviewed Case, who could fairly be described as
a man of many sovereign rings, the previous afternoon
at his home, an untidy third-floor flat in
Barnsbury which also doubled as Elite A's offices.

103
Case had shown us Elite A's certificate of incorporation
and VAT registration both with his name on
it, and had provided us with a list containing nine
names. Two of them had already been interviewed
during the course of the investigation, and another
had left the country for Australia more than a
month before the murder and was, as far as Case
knew, still there. He'd given us the addresses of
everyone else and then we'd been on our way. As
we'd left, I'd asked him how well he'd known Roy
Fowler. 'Well enough to know that he was a slimy
cunt,' he'd replied evenly. Which was probably a
fair enough description, but made me think that if
you've got a man like Case saying that about you,
then you've really got problems. Although, of
course, at that time I didn't know the half of it.

We hadn't phoned ahead to warn any of the
interviewees we were coming, which was not
untypical practice in a murder inquiry. It was
unlikely that any of them would know anything of
real help, but if they did and they didn't want to
talk, a surprise visit would help to prevent them
making up a convenient story. However, it also
meant that, like Jean Tanner, they might not be
there when we called, particularly on a hot
summer's day like this one, and not surprisingly
the first two on the list weren't, while the third was
just going out as we arrived. He'd only worked
with Matthews on a handful of occasions, and
claimed he couldn't really recall too much about
him. 'He was a bit of a wanker, I remember that
much,' he told us, which wasn't exactly news. Him
and Fowler must have been a right pair of cards.

104
By the time we left him it was gone one o'clock
and food called. We stopped at a Greek-owned
sandwich place off the Finchley Road, and ate in
relative silence, both feeling worn down by the
drudgery of detective work.

'You know, don't get me wrong, Sarge,' said
Berrin between mouthfuls of turkey, salad and mayo
baguette, 'but I thought that there'd be more excite
Uitiu to murder investigations. I don't mean that it
should be fun or anything, but it just seems to be the
same sort of monotony that you always get.'

I chewed thoughtfully on my ham and pickle
sandwich. It was quite tasty except for the fact there
was too much fat on the ham. 'Dave, if it was really
like it was on The Sweeney, no-one would ever
leave, would they?'

'I know. I just wish it felt like we were getting
somewhere, that's all.'

He had a point, and at that moment I felt the
same way. It would have been a good day to sit out
in the garden with a decent book, catching a bit of
sun and letting the world drift idly by. Or maybe
even to take my daughter out somewhere, making
the most of the fact that she was still young enough
not to look at me with a teenager's wincing embarrassment.
But I'd learnt long ago that you don't
do policework for the laughs or the job satisfaction.
You do it for the desire to put away criminals,
which basically is an end in itself. I could see,
though, that Benin, who was still new enough to
think there was a lot more to it than that, was
flagging and needed a bit of an interest injection.

'This Jean Tanner's got herself a nice pad,' I said,

105
taking a sip from my mineral water and wishing it
was beer. 'How much do you reckon it's worth?'

'Just the location's got to be worth a fair bit. The
thing is, we don't know what her actual place is
like.' *

'Well, say it's a one-bedroom flat. It's a nice area
of Finchley, it's still got to be worth - shit, I'm no
estate agent, help me out here.'

Two hundred grand. Maybe more.'

'And it's probably bigger than one bedroom. I
don't reckon we'd be looking much short of two
fifty. That's a lot of money for a prostitute, the type
who hangs about with a lowlife like Shaun
Matthews. Particularly if she's got a drugs habit.'

'So what are you saying?'

And this was where the interest went out of the
injection. 'I don't know/ I said. 'It just seems odd.'

The fourth address was on a residential road of rundown
whitebrick terraces, less than half a mile
away from Highbury stadium. The traffic was
appalling on the way there, mainly due to the fact
that Arsenal were playing at home, and it was half
two and about ninety degrees when we finally
parked up almost directly outside the lower
ground-floor flat of Craig McBride. According to
Case, McBride had worked for Elite A for the best
part of a year in a freelance capacity and was still
used by them at fairly regular intervals. He was
twenty-seven years old and had prior convictions
for ABH, threatening behaviour, theft, and
possession of Class A and B drugs, a fact that had
been discovered when we'd run his name through