He didn’t respond for ten seconds, breathing erratically and nodding. The silence was beginning to weigh on my patience. I was tired of waiting for him. I also didn’t want to be around him any longer than I had to be. He needed focusing and I knew how to do it.
I leant over, grabbed his shirt with my left hand and jerked him to his feet sharply.
“Hey, what the fuck you doing?” He sounded aggrieved. Like I cared. I heard Marie take in a sharp breath. He was so short I had to look down to see his face.
“Ray, the next time I ask when you last saw or spoke to Michael, I’ll be doing it inside an interview room at Maidstone police station. After which I’ll have you charged with obstructing a murder inquiry, plus what happened last week, and, given your circumstances, you know what this’ll mean, don’t you?”
I’d discovered on Fiddley’s file he had a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, hanging over him for receiving and handling stolen goods which he’d been caught trying to sell at a boot fair. He had six weeks until the threat of having to serve the sentence was rescinded. I spelled it out to him just in case he’d missed my hint, emphasising the dim view courts take of people with suspended sentences obstructing murder inquiries.
“It’s called recidivism, Ray. You really wanna go back to prison?” I asked quietly. “This is a murder inquiry. Do yourself a favour, huh?”
He sighed loudly. I released my grip and he dropped back into his chair. Marie was staring at Ray with a very concerned expression.
He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, taking a long drag. It seemed to relax him. He looked at Marie and then poured it all out.
Mendoccini had phoned him about two weeks ago, saying he was coming back to England for a week or so as he had a couple of things to take care of, though he hadn’t said what they were. They’d chatted for a while and, when they’d met briefly at the beginning of last week, Mendoccini had asked if he’d seen me recently. Fiddley’d said no, I’d not been down lately, but his mother had said she’d heard I’d married a journalist on the Evening Standard and had moved to Battersea.
So I was right. This was how he’d known so much about me.
“Did he say how he came to England?” I asked.
“No, but he was really surprised to hear you’d got married.” Fiddley’s morose expression suddenly changed and he laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “You wanna know what he said, his exact response? You’re fucking kidding me, Rob’s got married? I just told him what my mum’d told me.He didn’t believe me, but I showed him the picture my mum’d given me. Honestly, the look on his face.”
So that was how he’d recognised Taylor to give her the card. “So you did see him.”
“Yeah, but just for a few hours or so.” He sounded contrite.
“Did he say why he’s in the country?”
“I asked him what’s in London, and he said he had to talk to someone about a bad debt and he was gonna kill this person if he didn’t pay up.” He looked desperate to convince me. “I mean, I thought he was just kidding, you know, a figure of speech and all that, I didn’t think he was actually gonna do it, but when you said he’s wanted in connection with a murder . . .” He stopped talking, looking very worried.
“Was he with Angie?” I knew she’d been in the country and I was wondering whether she’d accompanied Michael or whether they’d travelled separately.
“No, he was with someone else, some American bloke.”
“American?”
“Yeah, sounded like an American accent, and he also had a Special Forces tat” – he touched his left forearm – “right here.”
“How d’you know what a Special Forces tattoo looks like?” I was sceptical.
“You seen the film Lethal Weapon?”
I shook my head.
“You’re missing a good buddy cop film.” He grinned. “Anyway, in the film, Mel Gibson plays some crazy ex-Special Forces guy. He has this tat on his arm and says it’s a Special Forces tattoo, the one what’s got the knife with a large black snake wrapped around it, and the bloke who was with Mike last week had one exactly like it right here.” He touched his forearm again. “Quite a big one as well.”
I took a deep breath. American? Special Forces tat? I had a bad feeling I knew who he was referring to. I narrowed it down to one of two persons.
“Describe this guy. What was he like?”
“Big guy, mean-looking, built like a brick shithouse, muscly arms. Looks like the kind of bloke who’d kick the shit out of you ’cause he felt like doing it. He scared me just looking at him.” Fiddley looked nervous.
The description tallied with the person I was thinking of. “You get the name of this guy?”
“Not a full name, no, but I heard Mike call him Post.”
I’d guessed right. Michael Mendoccini had been with Bartlett ‘Post’ Poe. He was a former US military man who killed people as easily as he drank beer. I knew him to be responsible for at least four deaths, two on the orders of Mendoccini. But why was he with Michael Mendoccini? Was he part of whatever Michael was in the UK for or just along for the ride?
I was nodding knowingly. Fiddley looked bemused by my response.
“You know who this bloke is, then?” he nervously asked.
“Oh yeah, I know exactly who this character is, and you’re right; he’s not a nice guy,” I said with grievous understatement, looking directly at Fiddley. “You wanna know how he got the name Post?”
Fiddley nodded.
“During the second Iraq war, he tied an Iraqi prisoner to a metal post and whipped him with a big heavy chain. Split the guy’s liver and broke a lot of ribs. That’s where he got the name. He was dishonourably discharged from the US army and he’s now a mercenary.”
“Fuck,” Fiddley gasped in surprise, mouth open wide, as though Poe were now standing in front of him.
“You know where Michael’s staying in London?” I asked.
“No,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “He never said.”
I nodded. I believed him. “He contacts you again, Ray, I wanna know about it, okay? What you’re not going to do, though, is tell him you’ve seen me or talked to me. We clear?”
“He said he was gonna contact you in London,” he said hurriedly. “He also said, if I saw you, I’m not to tell you he’d been in touch.” He said this a little mournfully, like he felt guilty for betraying his confidence. “He was quite insistent about that.”
“Not very good at keeping your word, then, are you, Ray?” I grinned at him and turned towards the door. Marie stood up; we walked out into the short corridor and I gave her a hug.
“Can you tell Sally I love the dress she wore at your wedding?” she said quietly. “It’s beautiful. I’d love to have worn something like that. She’s very pretty, your wife, isn’t she?”
“I think so.” I grinned at her.
“I saw you looking at my wedding picture, if you can call it that,” she said flatly. “You asked me once why I was with Ray. Do you know why I am?”
I did. I nodded. There was nothing to say about it. She looked at me with a sad expression.
“So what about that thing last week, then?” Fiddley interrupted us, coming out of the doorway.
“What thing? I don’t know anything about last week.” I grinned evilly at him, to his horror. “I work in London.”
He face dropped and he looked dismayed as I said goodbye to Marie and left.
Five minutes later, I came off J5 onto the M20 and headed west towards London, feeling intensely sorry for Marie. She deserved so much better than a life with Fiddley. Traffic was quiet and, driving fast, I made it to Battersea in less than forty minutes.
“You get what you wanted?” Taylor asked.
She was curled up on the couch, rereading one of her favourite books by Maya Angelou and wearing her erotic night attire: an off-white T-shirt two sizes too big, a pair of old tracksuit bottoms and pink woolly socks. She still looked better than most women when the
y’re dressed to kill.
“Oh yeah.” I smiled and knelt down beside her. I didn’t tell her I’d heard something which’d made me quite uncomfortable at the same time.
She put her book down and wrapped her arms around me. I reciprocated. She kissed me gently, then lightly bit the tip of my nose. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back.”
T E N
Tuesday
Bartlett ‘Post’ Poe with Michael Mendoccini, and both probably here in London. Poe was a known killer and I speculated on why he was with Mendoccini and whether he was somehow part of the whole equation. I wasn’t sure whether Mendoccini had developed the stones to kill anyone, but Poe could kill a woman in the middle of having sex with her and not even miss his stride. Human life, to Poe, was just something he took if he thought it expedient, or if he’d been paid to. He didn’t kill for political or ideological reasons. Politics and idealism to him were simply abstractions. Whereas Mendoccini clung to some kind of vague ideological motives for what he did inside Red Heaven, however ill-defined they might be, Poe had no such premise for his actions. Pay him enough, point him in the right direction and watch the body count increase.
I brought up his file. Most of it I was depressingly familiar with, but I was more interested in his recent known movements. When I’d been looking for Mendoccini a while back, I’d encountered Poe; he’d come up behind me as I was interviewing someone and had laid me out with a well-placed karate chop. He’d then skipped the country before he could be questioned.
I asked my contact in MI6 what they knew about Bartlett Poe’s recent movements, and learnt he was known to be living near Amsterdam, but they’d had no recent update on anything he was known or suspected to have done. My contact also mentioned Poe had been tagged as leaving the country a few hours after the radical Islamist Khaled al-Ebouli and one of his bodyguards had been shot, the bodyguard dying instantly and al-Ebouli next day, but his involvement couldn’t be proven. A further call to someone working in border control established nobody with the name Bartlett Poe had entered the country in the last few months. If he was in the country, he was operating under an alias or had been smuggled in.
*
Three days on and there were still no developments concerning the death of Charles Garlinge. Police inquiries in Hertfordshire had uncovered no viable suspects; nobody in the area had seen anything and the driver who’d driven Garlinge home from the ExCeL centre had been cleared of any involvement, as had Garlinge’s wife.
There’d also been no sign of Michael Mendoccini. His picture had been circulated but there’d been no sightings of him anywhere. He could have already left the country, but I very much doubted that; more likely he was moving around but well disguised, or he was being kept out of sight by someone who was allowing him to stay with them. Either way he was proving to be elusive. Was Poe with him? Several persons known to have an association with Red Heaven, however tenuous, had been questioned, and several premises had been raided, but nobody had any information about Mendoccini or his whereabouts.
I thought about what Victoria Sacchialli had said yesterday concerning how Garlinge had been killed. Could Michael Mendoccini really have killed him? Had Michael moved from financier to killer? My thinking was, if Poe was around, he was the killer.
I’d seen evidence of Angie Delucca being in London, and I knew the car she’d hired had been spotted parked not too far away from Charles Garlinge’s house, which I didn’t believe was a coincidence. Had she been the chauffeur for whoever had killed Garlinge?
I was confused, which wasn’t unusual, but there was still work to be done.
On the phone to Bartolome’s London office, I asked to speak to Ian Harper. I was going to make an appointment to continue our conversation from last Saturday, and to try to confirm Thornwyn’s suspicion Harper was honest enough to offer some useful information, but I was told he was still unwell. I asked if he’d called in sick again, and the receptionist replied he hadn’t, but, as he hadn’t come into the office, the assumption had been that he hadn’t yet recovered. I asked for his address.
Harper lived in a flat in Warwick Square, Pimlico. I parked a few houses along the road from his building and, as I did, I realised this was the same address on Charles Garlinge’s file; this building was where he shared a large flat with two other Tory MPs, though I’d discovered two days earlier he now also shared a flat in Septimus House with Paula Jeffries.
I rang the bell marked Harper. There was no answer, so I rang the adjoining bell, and the security latch inside the front door unlocked. Whoever had buzzed me in hadn’t even asked on the speakerphone who I was. And they wonder why burglaries occur, I thought.
Harper lived in flat four on the first floor. At his door I listened but couldn’t hear any sounds coming from inside. No radio, no movement. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. No answer. I tried the door handle, having first put on plastic surgical gloves so as not to smudge any prints, and found it unlocked.
I entered into a short corridor and I could see the light on in the room ahead. The door was half-open, so I looked in as I called Harper’s name. No answer.
I gently pushed the door open and saw Ian Harper slumped in an armchair in the corner, opposite the window, staring at a blank television screen. His head was hanging left at an obtuse angle and his eyes were wide open. He looked calm, at peace with the world. I knew he was dead even before I checked for a non-existent pulse. There was an empty bottle of pills lying by his feet, plus an almost-empty wine bottle on the coffee table next to him. Suicide?
*
Two uniforms and a DI plus an ambulance arrived soon after I’d called it in. I identified myself to the DI and explained how I’d come to be in the flat. Before anyone had arrived, I’d looked around the flat, careful not to touch anything, because I knew from personal experience police are not the most pleasant of people to be around when a potential crime scene’s been unnecessarily compromised, but had found nothing useful, nothing to suggest anything untoward had occurred. Everything seemed to be exactly as it appeared on the surface.
Harper’s body was taken away by the medics for a post-mortem examination to be carried out. I’d suggested to one of them I wasn’t convinced this was a suicide, though whether a post-mortem could prove otherwise I had no idea. The two uniforms began canvassing the building, and then knocking on doors in the immediate vicinity, checking if anyone had seen Ian Harper or anyone with him in the past few days. Harper had called in sick yesterday morning, so the assumption was that he had still been alive twenty- four hours ago.
I decided to check the flat Garlinge supposedly lived in. I showed ID to the woman who answered the door and identified myself as a Special Branch detective. She was maybe late thirties and dressed in what looked to be a very expensive power business suit. She looked impatient at being disturbed. I asked if she was a tenant in the flat.
“Yes, my name’s Janine Channon. Can I ask what this is about?”
I explained that Ian Harper had been found dead but didn’t give any cause of death.
“Oh, poor Ian,” she sighed.
I asked if she knew him, but she said, apart from brief chats in the hallway when collecting post, she didn’t really know him at all.
Had she noticed any non-residents in this building lately? She thought for a moment. “Only one I’ve seen was yesterday morning. Didn’t really get too close a look at him, but he was quite a big man. He was coming in as I was leaving for the House, but we didn’t speak.”
“He was entering?”
“Yes, as I came downstairs.”
Had Harper buzzed this person in? “Is there CCTV inside this building?”
“No.”
“You mentioned the House. You’re an MP?”
“Yes.” She smiled the politician’s smile, as though I was a potential voter.
“This is where Charles Garlinge lives, isn’t it?”
“Used to. I took over his room when he moved out. Poor Charles. He h
ad a heart attack early last Sunday morning. So much bad news around lately.” She sighed. “But, no, he’d not lived here for a few months. I do believe he’d moved into one of those new flats in Covent Garden, Septimus House.”
*
The reaction at Bartolome to Harper being found dead was one of profound and muted shock. I’d talked to a few people in senior management about Harper. Nobody claimed to know him well, but equally no one had him pegged as likely to take his own life. Ian was always, well, just Ian, just got on with things; that was the consensus.
Sir Paul Peterson was on the premises, so I asked to speak to him again. He recognised me from Sunday morning as I entered his office. Given his seniority, the room didn’t befit his status, with minimal furnishing, a desk, a laptop and not too much else. He was sitting up straight in his chair, the palms of his hands flat on his desk, and looking puzzled.
“Why is it, every time you come see me, someone’s just died?”
I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, so I didn’t respond to it.
I commiserated with him about Harper’s demise and then asked him about Harper’s role at Bartolome, but learnt little beyond the fact he was good at his job, a dedicated company man and a hard worker. As far as anyone knew he lived an austere life, had no major debts, had never married, had a sister living somewhere and had never been in any kind of trouble. I already knew all this from his file.
I thought of what Thornwyn had told me last Friday. I apologised to Sir Paul for having to ask questions at this time, but he nodded his assent. I began by asking if Harper knew Charles Garlinge.
“They were work colleagues,” Sir Paul said, “and they had flats in the same house in Pimlico, so, of course, they’d know each other, but I don’t know how well. I don’t suppose they socialised with each other, if that’s what you mean.”
I was wondering how much Sir Paul knew about Armswatch’s claims. It was time he learned the facts of life.
The Real World- the Point of Death Page 22
