Susie nodded slowly.
‘He met the Skinsman. The Skinsman took several hours making his acquaintance. Trust me, you don’t wanna know any more about that.’
She turned back, started fiddling with her phone. Texting, probably. For a moment or so silence reigned, and the streets blurred past, life viewed as if from the inside of a goldfish bowl.
Susie swallowed. ‘Did Emma meet the Skinsman?’
Karen’s fingers had been moving on the phone with all the speed of the most addicted teenager, but now they stopped. ‘Your daughter killed herself. Her killing herself is the reason for all this shit.’
‘She really did, did she? We—’
‘Hoped it was the other way?’ finished Karen with a nasty chortle.
Susie looked away. ‘No, not hoped – of course not. I couldn’t hope she was murdered. But I can’t bear thinking of her being so unhappy … so unhappy that she’d want to kill herself. I just wanted to know the truth.’
Karen sniggered. ‘Well, the truth is that she was a junkie who was in over her head. A fat cat’s daughter reduced to getting her kit off for pervy old men online. She couldn’t take it any more so she topped herself. How does that feel, Mum?’
Feels like you’re a bitch. ‘As long as it’s the truth.’
‘Oh yes, it’s the truth,’ said Karen.
But Susie noticed something. She noticed that Karen looked around the car at the faces of her men as she said it. As if saying it for their benefit, too.
Shortly after, they arrived at what Susie thought was some kind of car service centre. She was dragged inside. The injured man slumped into a seat in reception.
‘Sofia, ring the doctor,’ commanded Karen, and then Susie was taken through the office area, through the workshop and to a room at the back barred with a chain, with a sign on the door saying ‘Machine Shop’.
She was imprisoned in that room. Along one wall was a camp bed, beside it an old cabinet that had seen better days, topped with a bedside lamp. A portable DVD and TV combo had been set up on a child’s school desk and chair, and beside it a DVD: Dirty Dancing. Lastly, and most incongruously, a deckchair had been set up against the far wall.
‘What do you think?’ said one of the men who had been detailed to take her to her new quarters. ‘A home from home, yes?’
‘How long will I be here?’ she asked.
‘Who knows?’ shrugged the guy. He told her that somebody would visit her soon with something to eat and drink and in the meantime to make herself comfortable. He retired, leaving her alone.
Something caught her eye. In a corner of the room was a scrap of brown packing tape and a little strip of clear plastic, about the size of an envelope.
It was splattered with blood.
CHAPTER 45
‘KAREN?’ SAID SHELLEY, staring hard at the screen. ‘That’s her name? Karen?’
‘Yes,’ replied Claridge. ‘That’s Karen.’
And now Lucy was looking at the MI5 man with great interest. ‘Okay, so why do I get the impression that there’s something about this Karen that you’re dying to tell us?’
‘Ah, well,’ said Claridge, ‘she’s a bit of a one is our Karen …’
‘“Our Karen”,’ parroted Lucy.
‘We tend to think of her as one of ours, yes. Something of a throwback really. She’s the granddaughter of Dexter Regan. Do you know the name?’
‘It rings a bell,’ said Shelley.
‘Well, Dexter Regan was reputed to be one of the master-minds of the Great Train Robbery, died in Strangeways in 1997, where he was serving out a sentence for aggravated assault.
‘While he was inside his son Malcolm Regan had taken over running the family business. Dexter was what you might call old school, he kept his house in order. Liked to do things the Kray twins way; Malcolm, on the other hand, not so much. In the 1990s he tried his hand at property development. To all intents and purposes he aimed to take the family business and make it legitimate, so he went into business with a consortium of bankers in order to develop in Docklands. What went wrong? Who can say, but the development never happened, the business didn’t go legitimate and lots of bankers and developers turned up dead.
‘After that, Malcolm Regan pretty much abandoned any plans he had of going straight and instead concentrated on building a reputation as ruthless and sadistic. All those activities that overseas gangs were apparently monopolising – drugs, prostitution, human trafficking – that the English families had been reluctant to touch, because they were still clinging to those old-school values of family and community, Malcolm Regan embraced them fully.
‘And he did a very good job. So good, in fact, that it brought him to the attention of the Chechen Mafia, who wanted to make inroads in this country. Regan joined forces with the Chechens in order to rid themselves of an Irish problem they had. I don’t know which union came first, but it was around then that Regan’s daughter, Karen, married the head of the Chechens’ London operation.’
‘Hold on a minute.’ Claridge tapped on the laptop and scrolled through a new selection of photos until he chose one of an older man whose face resembled the images of Karen they’d just been looking at. ‘This is Malcolm Regan,’ he said.
Claridge flicked the screen back a couple of images. ‘The guy I just showed you. Dmitry Kraviz.’
‘So Karen was pimped out?’ asked Lucy. ‘An arranged marriage of convenience?’
‘Oh no,’ said Claridge, ‘there’s a reason we call her “our Karen”. She has a lot more agency than you give her credit for.’
‘She served her apprenticeship,’ said Shelley.
Lucy and Claridge both looked at him. ‘Okay,’ said Lucy, ‘so now I feel like you’re the one with something to tell us.’ She glanced at Claridge.
Shelley nodded. ‘This is the woman.’ He turned his attention to Lucy. ‘The woman who was part of the attempt to kidnap Emma fourteen years ago.’
‘Okay,’ said Claridge, ‘I think you’re going to have to clue me in.’
Shelley told him all about the kidnapping attempt. The trip to Waitrose. The Peugeot, the VW Passat—
‘Wait a second,’ said Claridge. ‘You broke her arm? Was it a nasty break?’
‘It wasn’t under surgical conditions,’ said Shelley. ‘I snapped it across the door. It was practically hanging off. So yeah, it was a bad break.’
‘Because Karen has an injured right arm. She has the use of it, but not full functionality, as I understand.’
‘That’s definitely her then. I saw it,’ confirmed Lucy. ‘So she was into the crime racket years before she got with the Chechens.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Claridge. ‘And as far as we know she’s as active as she ever was in the organisation.’
‘And part of the organisation involves the cams,’ said Shelley.
‘Exactly.’
‘They met again,’ said Shelley. Things were making sense to him now. His voice was low. ‘Karen and Emma. Fourteen years later, they were reunited.’
CHAPTER 46
THREE NIGHTS BEFORE her death, Emma Drake had arrived for work and gone to the office to make herself known and say hello to Jason. After that, she planned to get a hit and then go live.
She liked Jason. The other guy who sat in the office, whatever his name was, Dan, was a bit of a sleazeball. The kind whose eyes were always roaming. Christ knows why; he got to sit in the office where he could look at each of the five rooms, see the girls fully naked and performing to the punters’ hearts’ desires whenever he wanted, and yet he still did that thing with his eyes.
Emma knew why. A power trip. A mind fuck. A way of saying I’m in charge, a way of being a bit of a dickhead, basically.
Jason wasn’t like that. Any sexual interest that Jason had was obscured by a cloud of pungent weed smoke. His eyes didn’t go travelling the way Dan’s did.
Funny, though, Jason had been slightly different with her that night. There had been an edge to him.
; ‘Are you all right, Faye?’ he’d asked, except it didn’t feel like a genuine enquiry after her well-being. And there was something about the way he stressed the word ‘Faye’.
Had she imagined it? After all, she’d never really relaxed about using her assumed name. She guessed that pop stars and actors and people in the witness protection programme just got on with it and their false name became their real name, but she’d never quite managed that trick herself.
‘How are things?’ he’d asked.
Things. How were things? Emma wasn’t stupid. She was mixed up, lost and lonely and a good many other undesirable characteristics besides, but she certainly wasn’t stupid, and she knew that her recent graduation from smoking to injecting was proof that things weren’t good, and were getting worse. But even so, she tried to rationalise the situation. She told herself that an addiction to heroin was not dissimilar to needing coffee, cigarettes or alcohol.
After all, people often talked of ‘high-functioning alcoholics’, those people who, despite their addiction, managed to lead fulfilling home and work lives. Their addiction didn’t hold them back. It didn’t result in them engaging in criminal behaviour. No doubt it was occasionally problematic in the way that consumption of any mind-altering substance can be, but generally, on the whole, not a big problem.
So it was with her own addiction. Yes, the huge difference was that alcohol was legal and heroin was not. But so long as you had dealers, which she did, and a job, which she did, there was no reason not to maintain that habit. No reason she couldn’t be a ‘high-functioning heroin addict’.
That was what she thought if she was feeling upbeat and positive. A lot of the time, though, she wasn’t feeling at all upbeat or positive. She saw in stark detail and in colour – that colour being grey – the reality of the life she had chosen for herself.
And in those dark moments she would remember exactly what her ‘job’ entailed, and why she was forced to do it; she would remember that she experienced periods of crippling sickness unknown to all but the most chronic alcoholics, and that she regularly indulged periods of bingeing, rather than just maintaining. And it was because of those binges that she’d built up debt with her dealers which they forced her to pay off by working at the cam house.
She knew that while all this hung over her head, she could never go home. Despite the fact that every day she longed to be back there. She could never face her mum and dad.
And so when Jason asked, ‘How are things?’ she’d known better than to try and pull the wool over his eyes. ‘Oh, you know, Jason, could be better I suppose.’
‘Well, you never know, you might be about to go up in the world. Our lord and master has been showing quite an interest in you.’
She looked sharply at him, liking absolutely nothing about that sentence. ‘“Lord and master”?’
As far as she knew – and this was according to Jason – Foxy Kittenz was owned by some Russian types. He called them the Russian Mafia and of course she’d always assumed that it was just him being flippant. But whatever they were, Mafia or not, she certainly wasn’t keen on anybody showing her undue interest.
She tried not to let her unease show. ‘What do you mean – the Russians?’
‘No, the Russians never come round here. It’s one of the wives who occasionally shows her face, a woman called Karen. You’ll see her eventually, no doubt. Always dressed up to the nines. Bit of a clothes horse if you ask me. Can’t for a second think why she’s interested in you.’
It was a joke, a bit of banter, and yet Emma detected the hint of a question to it as well. Jason was digging. And Emma wondered whether she was right to suspect that he knew a little more about Karen’s interest than he was letting on. Jason, for all that he was a nice guy, also knew on which side his bread was buttered. ‘I love my job, me’ was one of his favourite sayings, and she had no doubt that for a guy like him, being paid to sit around watching women undress while he smoked weed all day had to be high up the list of dream occupations.
And then, later that day, she saw the mythical Karen for the first time. She had been making one of her apparently rare visits and Emma caught sight of her in the corridor.
‘You’re Faye,’ she had said, smiling.
Emma had just taken a little hit in the toilet so her mind was a bit floaty and scrambled. The woman’s voice was different, her hair was much longer, but Emma recognised her. And it was all she could do to keep the recognition from being obvious. ‘Yes, hello,’ she’d said.
‘Jason says you’re settling in well.’
The woman had looked hard at her, Emma thinking it must be written all over her face: that mixture of shock and surprise, hatred, and rank, outright fear. Like seeing a ghost.
Afterwards, she had tried to tell herself that she might simply have been wrong. Maybe she was projecting. After all, it was so many years ago. They were both different then, the context so different.
Yet she found herself worrying, wanting to know, and her thoughts went to Shelley, her special forces. She wondered about getting a picture of the woman and texting it to him, realising that she could still recall his number. (Would he have the same number?) She could remember him making her recite it every morning. He’d made it into a game.
They were the good times, she had thought wistfully. Happy times. But then there had been the kidnap attempt, and Shelley had left, and the man who replaced him was never the same. Oh, he’d tried, bless him. He’d done his best to be jolly, friendly and warm, but he was like an embarrassing uncle, and Emma had seen right through him. She had wanted Shelley back. She had pined for him like other girls pined for boyfriends.
Well, anyway.
Emma spent twenty-four hours too scared to get in touch with Shelley. And of course if she had managed to screw up the courage and call then it might have saved her life, because she was in work one night and about to go to her room when she saw the door at the end open and in came a Russian-looking man.
Behind him, Karen.
They had both seen her, and Karen smiled. ‘Hello, love,’ she’d said, and right then Emma knew that she knew. And she knew that Karen knew that she knew.
She let herself into her room, heart hammering. She took out her phone and tried him at last, but there was no answer. It went to answerphone. Not even his voice.
She had opened her mouth, about to leave him a message, when there came a knock at the door.
CHAPTER 47
SUSIE SAT ON the deckchair in her new prison cell, also known as the machine shop, wondering what happened now and knowing that in reality the answer was nothing – nothing happened now apart from waiting.
All those years ago, David had sat her and Emma down and told them that if the unthinkable happened and they were taken and found themselves captive then they should do their best to be as amenable and open as possible with their captors.
The idea was that their captors should see them as human beings rather than just negotiating tools. Doing that would make them more difficult to hurt and ultimately more difficult to kill.
At the same time Susie tried to recall films she’d seen involving kidnap situations. Then again, maybe not; they never seemed to end well. So in the meantime she just took a seat and let her mind wander, waiting but not really waiting.
The door rattled. She sat up straight as it began to open, had second thoughts and stood up to greet her visitor instead.
It was Karen. She wore the same clothes she had earlier, and Susie guessed it was her usual attire: black boots that stopped just below the knee, expensive and showy, black jeans and a knitted polo neck in the same colour. The only thing missing from the ensemble was the belted woollen overcoat she’d had on, and Susie, dressed in her gym outfit of leggings, tight white base layer and zip-up hooded top, was in the rare position of feeling underdressed in the other woman’s presence.
Karen stood by the door, motioning for Susie to step back against the far wall. When Susie was in place, Karen turned and was
handed a small tray.
She caught Susie looking at her arm. ‘It’s never repaired. Permanent nerve damage. I have restricted movement, limited mobility, no grip, numbness and tingling. Most days I wish that they could have just taken the whole fucking thing off.’
She placed the tray down on the school desk. Next she winced as though something was bothering her, and then reached to her waist and took out a gun that she placed on the tabletop, doing the whole thing quite casually, almost absent-mindedly.
Karen indicated for Susie to take a seat.
‘Some food for you,’ she said, and Susie nodded in thanks, looking across. Close to the food was the gun, placed about halfway between the two women.
Karen pulled the school chair across, its legs scraping on the concrete floor of the cell with a sound like dinosaurs yawning. She sat and crossed her legs, staring at Susie with a strange, unreadable expression. ‘“It is you” – that’s what you said in the car.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it is me, yeah.’
But you didn’t want to reveal that in front of your men, thought Susie, but decided it was wiser to keep that observation to herself. ‘And your arm?’ she said instead. ‘The injury to your arm, I mean. That happened on the day of …’ She tailed off, not sure how Karen would have chosen to describe her attempted kidnapping.
But Karen grinned, her snaggletooth making an appearance. ‘Oh yes. I get to think about that moment a lot. Like, every five minutes or so. On cold days, when the arm really plays up, maybe even more often than that.’
Good. You deserve it. ‘I’m sorry.’
Karen sneered.
‘No, I am,’ insisted Susie. ‘You probably think that I’m just saying that—’
‘Oh, you reckon?’
‘But I’m not. You were just doing your job.’
Karen was rolling her eyes and Susie knew the tactic was a bust. ‘You’re not sorry,’ she said, ‘and if you really are then you’re a bigger pussy than I take you for, and believe me, I take you for a pretty big pussy as it is.’
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