by Wes Markin
‘Yes, on your part, Michael. Not on mine. If you want to stay on this case, you’ll make it work. Now go and meet Assistant Chief Constable Robinson from SEROCU. He’s sitting in your office. Then, after that, you can run the briefing. I’m not stupid enough to put Luke in charge until SEROCU have left the building.’
She turned to her keyboard and started typing an email. She didn’t bother saying goodbye.
Douglas Firth sat next to Herbert ‘The Reaper’ Wheelhouse on the bottom bunk. Firth had just run through his entire conversation with his son-in-law earlier.
‘Mentioning George was a necessity, Herb. They’re bound to look into the money now. Best to be open and up front. Like I told you years ago, George is the best. They’ll find nothing out of order, and they’ll leave us both alone.’
Wheelhouse didn’t respond. He’d been crying hard and was only now getting his breath back.
The cell door opened. Gavin Harris stood there, chewing gum.
‘We’re busy,’ Firth said. ‘Go back to reading your newspaper.’
‘Finished it. Hargreaves wants your section outside now for exercise.’
Firth stood up. ‘Then I’ll repeat what I just said. We’re busy.’
‘And I’ll repeat what I just said,’ Harris said. ‘The warden wants you outside now.’
Firth took a step towards him. ‘What do I pay you for exactly?’
‘You pay me for what I can do. Arguing with my boss is something I can’t do.’
Firth took another step forward, so he towered over the diminutive, younger man. He leaned over so he could speak into his ear. ‘No such thing as can’t. Didn’t they teach you that at school, little man? Go and learn how to argue with the warden, or I will find someone who can.’
Harris took a step back, chewing with his mouth open. ‘Ten minutes.’
He left the room.
‘The youth have no fucking respect anymore,’ Wheelhouse said.
‘Like we used to have respect for anyone?’ Firth said and smiled. ‘We just did a better job of pretending.’
Firth took a moment to look at the framed photograph of Ian on the bedside table. His five-year-old boy was clutching a football to his chest. Yes, it reminded him of that day when he chased the ball out onto the street, but his son had loved the game, adored the game. It was an appropriate photograph, and one that brought back a lot of good memories rather than just tragic ones.
He reached down and picked up a copy of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.
‘I used to be a salesman way back,’ Firth said.
‘You still bloody well are,’ Wheelhouse said, ‘you could sell ice to an Eskimo.’
Firth smiled. ‘That’s probably why Death of a Salesman is my favourite read.’
‘It’s about a self-centred man, who does not understand that he isn’t good enough at what he does.’
‘Precisely,’ Firth said. ‘The tragedy of Willy Loman. What better warning is there?’
‘Indeed. It’s a warning we should’ve heeded long before now, I guess.’
‘We always got it, Herb. We always knew we weren’t good enough, and we were never self-centred.’
‘It’s a shame our families would disagree with us on that one.’
Firth waved his hand and laughed. ‘Ah, what do they know?’
‘All I ever wanted to do was protect them, and I’ve failed … I’ve fucking failed.’ He started to cry again.
Not again, Firth thought. We will be outside in five minutes. Weakness is not something you want to parade around anywhere, especially in prison.
Wheelhouse looked up at him. His face was red. ‘I need your help.’
Firth shook his head. ‘No … you just need time—’
‘No! I need help. If roles were reversed, you’d be asking for the same thing.’
‘Which is what exactly?’
‘You know what Doug.’
‘It’s not a good idea. Everything has a cost. You know that as much as anyone.’
‘I’ll pay you whatever you want.’
Firth sat down beside him and put his arm around his old colleague’s shoulders. ‘It’s not about the money. It’s never about the money. Most’d disagree but remember we’re better than Willy Loman.’
Wheelhouse looked him in the eyes. ‘If not money, then what’ll it cost me?’
Firth raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, what did revenge cost me … eventually? Everything. My freedom, my family …’
‘But I’ve lost all of that already.’
Firth shook his head. ‘You’ve never truly lost everything.’
‘Ah come on, Doug, cut out the philosophy. I’m in my twilight years, and I’m in jail. If I walk out of here, which I probably won’t, it’ll be using a fucking Zimmer frame.’
Firth reached around to the back of Wheelhouse’s head and pulled him close to him. Their foreheads touched. ‘Whatever you want then, Herb. Whatever you want.’
‘Make it happen, Doug. George can sort out the money.’
With their foreheads touching, Firth was forced to lift his eyes to meet Wheelhouse’s again. ‘Please don’t say I didn’t warn you. I don’t know the true cost of your revenge yet, but I do know this … if it’s against Buddy Young, the cost will be high …’
Despite Assistant Chief Constable Riley Robinson’s slight build, his handshake was one of the firmest Yorke had ever experienced. ‘Thank you for having me, Detective Chief Inspector.’
‘Thank you for your support, sir, please make yourself comfortable.’
Robinson undid a button on his suit and sat down on a sofa chair at the side of Yorke’s office. Yorke wheeled over his office chair and sat opposite him.
‘Support is something we all need to be calling on in these trying times, DCI.’
‘Please call me, Mike, and yes, I really hope we can support you in turn.’
‘I was bringing someone with me today. Louise … a capable Inspector. Unfortunately, the ash cloud is causing her problems.’ He touched his chest. ‘Asthma.’
Wendy, the Management Support Assistant, interrupted them with coffee. It was a welcome refreshment for Yorke after a long night prowling the garden, and it was a welcome duty for Wendy due to the high praise she received. ‘Coffee doesn’t taste this good where I’m coming from, I can tell you,’ Robinson said.
Wendy smiled. ‘It’s all in the quantity of ground coffee, and the timing. And never from a machine. Always a cafetière.’
‘If you ever fancy a change of scenery …’
Wendy laughed and nodded at Yorke. ‘And leave this one? Whatever would he do?’
‘I wouldn’t last a week,’ Yorke said and smiled.
After Wendy had left, Robinson continued. ‘I spoke to your Superintendent at length this morning, and she wanted me to take you through everything again. That’s quite a compliment – she thinks very highly of you.’
Yorke smiled. Life was certainly full of surprises.
Robinson swallowed a mouthful of coffee, and then said, ‘Have you heard of Article SE?’
Yorke nodded. ‘It’s the name given by your department to an organised crime syndicate based in the South East.’
‘Organised crime has been evolving for years, but in my career, I have never seen anything quite like this. Article SE have a hand in everything. And I mean everything. Not just the obvious stuff either like human trafficking, drugs and prostitution. We’ve found an arm of the organisation illegally importing foods such as pufferfish, and shark fins. Last year, we closed a record number of sweatshops full of illegal immigrants. And last month, we moved on a racket that were using prostitutes to breed children for sale. Identifying the top of this organisation has been impossible. We know the epicentre is in the South-East, but it is growing at a remarkable rate.’
‘Could Young Properties be the top of the organisation?’
Robinson shook his head. ‘You have it the wrong way around. Article SE have absorbed Young Properties. This
is down to the last CEO, Simon Young. A ruthless, ambitious individual. After growing their dirty company to remarkable heights, Young was happy to let it metamorphose into one of the cancerous lumps growing from the malignant mass which is Article SE.’
‘If you can’t beat them, join them?’ Yorke said.
Robinson nodded. ‘And make more money in the process. Since Simon’s death, his father Buddy Young, a very old-school racketeer, has come out of retirement, and from what we can find out, which is very little, it seems he isn’t best pleased with the more modern approach in which all these facets of corruption work in synergy and he’s not the leading figure.’
‘You say you can’t get to the top, but surely, with all the current surveillance technology at your disposal, you should be all over them …’
‘That’s what you’d think,’ Robinson said. ‘But, alas, this technology you speak of is a better weapon for them than it is for us. Genuinely, I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, and I’ve never known criminals to be so evasive. You move in and sever an arm off this outfit, and another arm grows somewhere else. It doesn’t matter who you catch red-handed, and burn in an interrogation room, they take you nowhere. They always know so little, if anything at all. There are layers and layers of ignorance and diversions. Last month, we followed one trail which had us all excited, and it led us right to a priest …’
Yorke shrugged. ‘Priests aren’t always innocent.’
‘This one was, he’d been dead for 60 years.’
‘Ah,’ Yorke said. ‘Slippery bastards.’
‘They’d actually have to be there to be slippery. It’s more like mist. You can see the arseholes moving, but that’s all you’re allowed. And if you walk into the mist, you just get lost.’
‘Or possibly worse?’ Yorke said.
‘Yes … unfortunately, there have been some incidents like that.’ Robinson looked away and sighed. ‘The worst thing is the Russian involvement. There’re a lot of Russians, who know very little English. They’re also quite mercenary. They work for money with no real knowledge of what they’re doing. Great soldiers, poor informants. Which leads me to why I’m here.’
Robinson lifted a briefcase up onto his knee and reached in for a brown folder and handed it to Yorke. He withdrew a handful of photographs.
On the first photograph, a man lay sprawled on the floor. The entire bottom half of his face was red with blood, and he had a bullet hole in the centre of his head. Yorke shuffled to the next photograph. Snap. A man with a bloody face executed with a headshot. Yorke only had to see two more murders to get the Modus Operandi.
‘Carry on,’ Robinson said. ‘To the close-ups.’
Yorke did so. When he reached the first of them, he flinched.
Someone had sliced and diced one of the victim’s mouths. His lips were in tatters; some pieces hung loose while other pieces were completely missing. Yorke could see the victim’s bloody teeth through the gaps. The killer had also sliced from the corners of his mouth to the top of his cheeks, spreading the bloody mutilation further up his face.
Yorke looked up at Robinson. ‘You’re going to tell me these monstrosities are linked to our case, aren’t you?’
‘I hope we’re wrong, but yes, I think they are,’ Robinson said, reaching into his briefcase for another brown envelope. This time Robinson took the photograph out himself and handed it over to Yorke.
Yorke looked down at a mugshot of a tall well-built man with a shaved head and a long aquiline face. The wall he stood in front of, and the jail jumpsuit, were white. The only colours on the photograph were his eyes and his red mouth. The rest of his skin was pale and barren and smouldered with the surrounding whiteness.
‘The cutter, I assume?’ Yorke said.
‘A more appropriate name for this beast, I agree, but no, he’s the The Dancer.’
Yorke creased his brow. ‘The Dancer?’
‘That’s what they call him. The Dancer. Back when he was in Russia, before he worked for Article SE, he was a Russian ballet dancer. His real name is Borya Turgenev. It may interest you to know that his name translates to Energetic Fighter.’
‘It doesn’t interest me,’ Yorke said. ‘It just worries me.’
‘You need to be worried, I’m afraid. Borya is Article SE’s most prolific hitman.’
‘So, if you know who he is, why don’t you have him yet?’
‘The man is a shadow, Mike. He’s been caught on camera once. Two years ago, leaving a vic’s residence, he passed a local park. A fourteen-year-old boy, truanting from school, was taking selfies of him and his girlfriend. Borya showed up on one of these photographs. The boy’s mother, who had sneaked a peek at her brat’s phone after confiscating it, alerted us to the photograph when we put the feelers out for information regarding suspicious behaviour in the area. Borya was behind the young couple, staring at them with those same dead eyes you just saw on the mugshot. I haven’t got the photograph to hand, but he did look truly sinister. What compelled him to stop and look I have no idea, but we had our first image of him. Then, we found a match to a passport he used to enter the country five years ago. We’ve got some history of the man from the Russians but not as much as we’d like or need. That mugshot is of him serving a short spell inside. Apparently, he had a disagreement with someone he was dancing and performing with. We’ve struggled to get a reason why. Who knows, maybe he trod on his toes during the dance routine? Anyway, the disagreement led to a near-death experience for the victim, and Borya did a spell inside for GBH. This is a real monster here, Mike. There have been a lot of hits in the South East in the last five years. Every single one of them has been male, and every single one of them has had his face mutilated. We suspect he’s ruining their mouths to send out a message from his employees. Something along the lines of: if you talk, we will take your mouth to pieces too.’
‘Nice,’ Yorke said.
‘Just a theory,’ Robinson said. ‘He could just be doing it because he enjoys it.’
‘Don’t,’ Yorke said. ‘I’ve met some people like that before. Not pretty.’
‘And now you’re wondering how we know that all the murders were committed by Borya? After all, anyone can cut a face to ribbons.’
‘Not sure I could,’ Yorke said with a grimace. ‘But go on.’
‘The hitman uses a pistol called a Para Ordnance P-18 with a suppressor. An interesting weapon based on a vintage pistol from 1911. Ballistics have matched all of the bullets from the thirty-eight hits.’
‘Bloody hell … thirty-eight.’ Yorke said. ‘His press nickname, The Reaper, just got a lot more fitting.’
‘Actually, Mike, it’s now thirty-nine hits.’
Yorke signed. He knew what was coming.
‘I hope you don’t mind, but we fast-tracked ballistics on your behalf.’
‘He killed Janice Edwards, didn’t he?’
Robinson nodded. ‘She’s the first woman he’s killed.’
Yorke sighed.
‘Small mercies that he didn’t ruin her face, and just shot her from behind.’
Yorke sighed. ‘I guess The Reaper is a gentleman.’
The bright red bill flashed, and the bread disappeared.
With a gloved hand, Borya threw a handful of breadcrumbs to the other swan; a black-feathered female with a much shorter bill. It crooned, appreciating the gesture. Borya glanced back at the male, who now held its neck erect with its feathers raised in an aggressive display.
Borya showed the empty bag to the male and smiled.
‘Please Mummy, look, he’s feeding the swans!’
Borya turned to his right to look at a young boy pointing at him. He was holding his mother’s hand.
The mother frowned at Borya and then nodded over at the Don’t feed the Swans sign.
Borya stared at the mother. Not with any intent, or anger. Just with curiosity. He wasn’t too sure what the correct response to her challenge was.
Like he’d done with the swan, he showed
her the empty bag. She shrugged. She was unrelenting. He felt her challenge but did not understand it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She shrugged again. ‘It’s not good for them.’
She would not be pacified. She would not be controlled.
She would not be beaten.
He took a deep breath and felt the moment.
Everything was quiet. Still.
Peace.
He spat on the floor at her feet and walked away.
Borya watched the man sit down. He moved with no grace. No elegance. He could never be a dancer.
He was also timid and shaky. His glasses didn’t fit him properly and continually slid down his nose.
‘Are you ordering a coffee?’ he said.
Borya shook his head. He unwrapped another Chewit, slipped it into his mouth, and rolled the wrapper into a tight little ball. He laid the wrapper beside another one on the table.
‘They’re calling you The Reaper.’
Borya looked at the tiny, squirming man and chewed.
‘Maybe you should try to be more … more inconspicuous.’
Borya swallowed. ‘I do not know that word.’
The man coughed and his glasses slid right to the tip of his nose. He pushed them back. ‘More subtle.’
‘Again, I do not know your vocabulary. I deliver messages. I delivered. Next?’ He held out his gloved hand.
‘Yes …’ The man rustled in his backpack and handed over a file.
Borya looked through the file. He noticed the mother and child from the river earlier come into the café. She glared at him.
He respected her for her fight but ignored her. He looked at the picture of the man again; then, he put the file down.
‘A policeman?’
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Like you, I just deliver.’
‘Hmm,’ Borya said and started to unwrap another Chewit. ‘Not inconspicuous or subtle, is it?’
The man’s eyes widened.
‘When?’ Borya put the Chewit in his mouth.
‘Tonight.’
‘That soon?’
‘Yes.’
