The Murder Exchange (6 page)

But it seemed I was going to have to wait a little
longer.

'He's not there,' said Elaine Toms, coming back to
the papers on the bar. 'Either that or he's not
answering.'

'Have you got his address?' She nodded, and
wrote it down on a piece of paper. I took it, thanking
her, and put it in my pocket. It was local. 'And
what's your position here, Miss Toms?'

'I told you, I've already been interviewed about
the murder.'

'Well, we're talking to you again. I'd just like to
refresh myself of your account.'

'It was a DID talked to.'

'DI Capper. Yes, I know. Now, if you'll answer the
questions.'

'Have you got any ID?'

51
She was trying to be difficult but I wasn't going
to argue about it, so I took out my warrant card and
showed it to her, as did Benin. She inspected them
both carefully, paying particular attention to mine.
'It's not a very good photo of you,' she told me.

With me, the camera always lies,' I said. 'Now,
your position?'

'I manage the place.'

'And how long have you been here for?'

'Just over a year. I joined last July.'

'You knew Shaun Matthews pretty well, then?'

She sighed theatrically. 'Yeah, I knew Shaun
Matthews pretty well. You know, I've said all this
before.'

'Humour me. I presume you knew he dealt
drugs?'

'Are you asking me or telling me?'

I'm asking you.'

She shrugged. 'I heard that he did some dealing
here and there and that he might even have done
some in this place, but I never saw him do any and
I never saw anyone else take any stuff either.
Occasionally you get someone off their face, but if
they get like that we don't serve them and we chuck them out. They're certainly not sold the stuff
in here. I only heard Shaun was meant to be this
big-time dealer after he died.'

'You're sticking to the party line, then? That
Arcadia's pretty much drug free and that you don't
go in for that sort of thing here.'

She glared at me. We don't. Now, if you've
finished...'

'Does Stefan Holtz own this place?'

52
Who?'

'Stefan Holtz. You must have heard of him.' She
shook her head. 'He's a well-known local businessman,
to use the term very loosely.'

'Look, as far as I'm concerned, Roy Fowler owns
this place. That's who hired me and that's who pays

me.'

'Are you sure the name Stefan Holtz means
nothing to you?' asked Benin.

'Oh, it speaks,' she said with a smirk.

Benin looked slightly embarrassed. 'Just answer
the question/ he persisted, trying not to be intimidated
by her, but not making a particularly good
job of it.

She slowly turned her head, faced him down,
u,uk a breath, then spoke. Tes, I'm sure.' She
turned back to me. 'I don't know a Stefan Holtz.'

'Mr Fowler was going to get us a list of casual
door staff who've worked here over the past six
months/ I continued, 'but so far we haven't
received it.'

'Oh dear/ she said with a cheeky half-smile.

Tou're the manager/ said Benin. 'Can you provide
us with that information?'

The smile disappeared rapidly. 'I haven't got
time. You'll need to speak to Mr Fowler about it.'

'We would do if he was here/1 said, thinking that
this was one of the great problems with policework.
That most of the time you were constantly trying to
get blood out of a stone. Just tell us the name of the
company who supplies the doormen, then/ I
added, not wanting to waste any more time with
Elaine Toms, 'and we'll contact them.'

53
She paused, and the reason she paused was
simple. If there were any dodgy ownership issues,
then they would spread to the company who
supplied the doormen because with nightclubs
that's how things work. She wouldn't want to give
out the information but I knew she couldn't lie
about it either, in case Fowler had already given us
the name and I was just testing her.

'It's an outfit called Elite A,' she said eventually.
Benin wrote the name down. 'But I don't know
how much they'll be able to tell you. I don't think
they're too hot on the paperwork front.'

'What makes you say that?'

'You know what these security firms are like.
They use freelancers/

'Did Shaun Matthews come via Elite A?'

'I think so, originally, but it was before my time
so I couldn't say for sure. The papers said something
about him being poisoned/

"That's what we believe/

She shook her head as if she couldn't comprehend
such an end for him. 'What's the world
coming to, eh?'

To the same place it's always been, Miss Toms.
Full of not very nice people doing not very nice
things to each other.' I resisted adding that with
Shaun Matthews's demise there was at least one
fewer of them. 'If you hear from Mr Fowler, please
ask him to get in touch with us immediately/

She took the card I gave her with my number on
it. 'So, have you got any suspects?'

'We're working on a number of leads,' I
answered, using the stock detective's line which

54
Was basically a euphemism for 'No', and she
obviously recognized it for what it was because
she turned away with another of those half-smiles.
The discussion was over.

When we were back in the car, Benin turned to
me with an expression of concern. 'I don't think I
did too well in there,' he said. Tou handled it a lot
better than me.'

ous, he's still got a lot to learn. Unlike most of us, he
recognizes it, and it means he's not as confident as
he could be. He'd only been promoted out of
uniform three months earlier, and apart from Rudi,
the casual killer and carjacker, this was his first ii,urdcr case. It was also the first time we'd worked
together.

I shrugged. Tve been in the game a lot longer,
which makes it a lot easier to handle people like
her. Remember, you're the one who's the boss. With
the cocky ones it can be easy to forget.'

He nodded thoughtfully. At that moment, he
reminded me of a contestant from that TV
programme Faking It. One month to turn a good
looking Home Counties college boy into a Met
detective. He was working hard to master the
ropes, to make a good impression, but he didn't
look a natural.

He turned to me, the concern replaced by determined
zeal, the kind you sometimes see on the
faces of door-to-door missionaries. 'I let her get me
on the wrong foot. That was the problem. I didn't
do enough to make her show me respect. It won't
happen again.'

55
1 know it won't/ I said, patting him on the
shoulder. Tou work with me, you'll be Dirty Harry
in no time.'

He pulled out of the parking space. Teah, right.'

Roy Fowler lived in a modern, showy-looking
development complex near Finsbury Park. It's
what these days they like to call a gated community,
although there usually tends to be very
little community-wise about them. We were
stopped at the main gates by a uniformed doorman
who was well past retirement age and looked like
he'd have trouble stopping a runaway skateboard
let alone a shadowy intruder. We showed him our
credentials and were waved into the car park in
front of the five six-storey buildings that were
arranged in a semi-circle around the well-kept, if
rather dull, communal gardens. Fowler lived in
apartment number 12 which was in the second
building on the left.

But if he wasn't at work, he wasn't at home
either. We buzzed on his intercom for several
minutes but didn't get an answer. I phoned the
Arcadia and double-checked the address with
Elaine Toms. It was the right one. Fowler still
hadn't turned up at the club either, a fact that was
beginning to irritate me and her.

We sat in the car and waited for ten minutes
without result, then decided to make our way back
to the station. It had been an unproductive morning
and Benin was beginning to look depressed, as if it
had only just dawned on him that life in CID was a
lot less interesting than it looked on the telly.

56
It was as we were coming out of Fowler's
complex that I saw it. A dark blue Range Rover
driving by just in front of us. It only passed our
field of vision for a couple of seconds at most but I
noticed straight away that it had holes in the
paintwork and industrial taping over two of
the windows. It kept going and I memorized the
number plate as Berrin pulled out, heading
f]ir other way.

'Did you see that car?' I asked him.

Berrin is not the most observant man in the
world. 'What car?' was his reply.

I thought about it for a few seconds. Who'd be
daft enough to be driving around in a bullet-ridden
Range Rover in broad daylight? But those holes
cLJii'l look like they'd been made by anything else
- what else could have made them? - and, as I've
said before, you should never underestimate the
stupidity of criminals. It was probably wasting
someone's time but I took my mobile from my
pocket and phoned the station to report a
suspicious vehicle, giving its location and possible
route.

'Do you want to turn round and go after it?' said
Berrin, looking like his depression was lifting.

'It's probably nothing. Let's leave it for the
uniforms. I need to get something to eat.'

'What do you think? Do you reckon he's flown the
coop?'

The loud, confident voice belonged to DCI Knox,
the big boss. No question of him ever losing control
of an interview. Berrin and I were sat in his office,

57
on the other side of his imposing desk, explaining
the position regarding the lack of intelligence as to
Roy Fowler's whereabouts.

We don't know/ said Benin. 'He was certainly
aware that we were meant to interview him this
morning.'

It seems odd, though,' I said, liim disappearing off
so soon. If s like an admission of guilt, but, if we're
honest, we haven't really got anything on him.'

Knox nodded in his sage-like way. True. But then
where is he?'

It was a good question. Tvlaybe he had more
pressing engagements and thought we could wait/
I said eventually.

Knox snorted. Well, he's wrong if he thinks that.
We'll put out an alert. Any patrol that sees him,
they can pick him up and bring him in for
questioning. I don't like the way these smalltime
villains think they're royalty these days.'

We both nodded in general agreement. It was
always good to agree with Knox, always fatal to
pick holes in his pronouncements. Unlike Benin, he
was not one of life's listeners, whatever he liked to
claim. 'My door's always open' was one of his
favourite mantras, which might have been true
literally, but that was about it.

'What about the list of bouncers? I don't suppose
we've got that then, have we?'

I shook my head. 'No. We spoke to the manager,
a Miss Toms, and she told us that a company called
Elite A supplied all the casual door staff they used.'

'I wonder if she's involved in the drugs scene at
the Arcadia/ mused Knox.

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'Has she got a record?'

He shook his head. 'I don't think so, but that
doesn't mean anything, does it? There was
definitely dealing going on down there and it's
almost certain that it originated on the door. So the
manager's probably in on it. You'll need to check
up on this Elite A. I don't suppose whoever runs
them's whiter than white.' Out of the corner of my
eye, I saw Benin nodding in agreement. Cheeky
sod. A politician already. 'Now,' continued Knox,
'we've talked to three of the other doormen at
Arcadia who all worked there on a permanent
basis, so we only really need to catch up with the
temporaries who've been there the last six months,
dluiough that could be quite a few. They're a busy
club. I'll leave you two to do that. Try to get to talk
to them all by Monday p.m. at the latest. We
need to tie up all the loose ends on this.'

'And these other doormen haven't told us anything
useful?'

'No. They all knew Shaun Matthews to varying
degrees but none said they'd ever seen him selling
drugs of any description and, of course, they all
denied selling any themselves. When confronted by
witness statements testifying to his extracurricular
activities, they all expressed varying degrees of
surprise/

'Perhaps we should offer some sort of reward,' I
suggested. That might persuade them to give us
some information we could use.'

'It's a possibility if we still don't get anywhere,
but budgets are tight and I'm not sure I'd feel right
doling out much-needed money to solve the

59
murder of a violent drug dealer.' Once again, I caught Benin nodding.

'It might get us a result.'

'We'll have to see. We've got pretty much our
whole allocation resting on the Robert Jones case. If
we have to pay out on that then we're not going to
be able to offer a reward on anything until 2010.'

I baulked at the mention of Robert Jones. Always
did. It was one of the few cases that had truly disturbed
me in all my time in the Met. Robert was a
thirteen-year-old schoolboy who'd disappeared
while doing his morning paper round six months
earlier. His body had been found a few days afterwards
buried in a shallow grave in woodland out in
Essex. He'd been stabbed three times in the chest
and his clothing had been tampered with, indicating
some sort of sexual assault. I'd had to break the
news of the discovery to the parents, along with the
WPC who'd been their liaison officer. They'd been
a pleasant, ordinary middle-class couple who'd
only let Robert do the round because he'd been
keen to save up enough money to buy a new bike.
I'd watched, unable to do anything to help, as
they'd crumbled in front of me, while the WPC had
comforted his little sister when she'd appeared in
the doorway, too young to understand what was
going on. Robert had been their only son, his
family's pride and joy. What had got me the most
was the total and utter injustice of it all. A young
boy from a good home, never been in trouble unlike
so many of the little bastards we had to deal
with - seeking to better himself, only to be struck
down in the space of a few moments by someone