Death is the New Black

by Dominic Piper

  ‘Well, thank you for that suggestion.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘OK. I’ll see you later. And thanks. Thanks for everything last night.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  I click my mobile off, get out of the bath and dry myself off.

  Once I’ve made a coffee, I sit at the kitchen table and look at the list of Sara’s engagements that Isolda printed off for me. She has a lunch date today, but that isn’t highlighted. That means it’s unlikely to be in the public domain and therefore technically hassle-free. But I have to remember that these things may have a tendency to leak out. The date is with a woman called Rachelle Beauchesne.

  I drag the computer towards me and Google her name. She’s the director of a Paris-based PR company called Primeaux DD. I check to see whether she’s got a Twitter account. She has. I look at her recent activity. Just a load of fashion-related retweets, then I see what I’m looking for: ‘Lunch today with lovely @saraholt in ShahAb Persian restaurant. Diet out of window!!’

  It was tweeted this morning at seven and has already been retweeted a hundred and forty-eight times. Even a private lunch date is news now. I check the location of the ShahAb and it’s in Baker Street. Been open two years. Gets lots of five star reviews. She could walk there from Maccanti and probably wouldn’t dream of taking a cab. I wonder if I can talk her out of it. Unlikely. I’ll try, anyway.

  Just as I’m going to get dressed, my mobile goes off. Isolda.

  ‘So how did it go?’

  I’m living in so many different realities that for a second I don’t know what she’s referring to. Then I remember.

  ‘It was OK in the end. She’d taken some sort of exotic psychedelic fungus. I’ve no idea what it was. We just kept her awake, made her drink lots of orange juice and made sure that she was lying down on her side when she couldn’t stand up anymore. She’s OK now, but she’s got quite a headache. I texted Ash this morning. I may have to pop around again to make sure everything’s alright.’

  That’s obviously untrue, but it gives me an excuse the next time I have to slip away.

  ‘What time did you get back?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I think it was around two.’

  ‘You must be exhausted.’

  ‘Not too bad. I’m going to the gym in half an hour, anyway.’

  ‘Didn’t you have enough of a workout yesterday? Where do you go? Gymbox?’

  Gymbox is in St Martin’s Lane. Lots of punch bags, a boxing ring, kickboxing lessons and a DJ. Went there once. Wasn’t too keen. Too much testosterone flying around, some of it coming from the men.

  ‘No. Soho Gyms in Macklin Street.’

  ‘Are we going to see each other today?’

  ‘I’m coming into the office at eleven-thirty to see Sara.’

  ‘Should we – I mean…’

  ‘Let her know about us? Not if you don’t want to. It doesn’t affect what I’m doing, so there’s no reason why she should know.’

  ‘I’d prefer it if she didn’t. I’m not being funny. It just makes me look a bit slutty.’

  ‘That’s what attracted me to you in the first place.’

  She laughs. ‘Fuck off. What about tonight?’

  ‘I’ll give you a call when I know what’s going on.’

  ‘I miss being with you, you know.’

  ‘Me, too. See you later.’

  I get my gym stuff together and head off to Macklin Street.

  *

  After an hour’s workout and a forty-minute swim, which is all I can manage, I take a quick shower, leave my kit in my locker and walk up Drury Lane towards High Holborn. I’ve got plenty of time before I have to see Sara, so I can walk to Hinde Street and stop off at the Pret A Manger on New Oxford Street for a second breakfast.

  It’s as I’m turning left into High Holborn that I get another little warning tingle; the first I’ve had since yesterday. I keep walking and keep looking straight ahead. If this is the same person that I failed to spot in Manchester Square, St Martin’s Lane and Wimpole Street, then I’m dealing with a fair level of professionalism and don’t want to let them know that I’m switched on.

  This is a major crossroads, and behind me I can hear a bunch of cars and lorries snarling angrily at a red traffic light. I can tell the lights have gone amber by the sound of the engines and run over to the other side of the road just as they turn green, glancing in the window of a Travelodge to see if anyone’s following me.

  It’s clear, so I continue down the north side of the road and turn into Grape Street, a small thoroughfare that doesn’t have much going on in it apart from a few office buildings, some vacant, some not, and the stage door for the Shaftesbury Theatre.

  I have no idea who this might be, but I now have to assume it’s connected to the case. Even if it isn’t, I’ll still have to neutralise it as it’s getting on my nerves.

  I risk a quick look over my shoulder. Still no one obvious. On a whim, I turn into one of the office buildings, pushing the double swing doors open and walk into the reception area like I know why I’m there and what I’m doing.

  I have to take in my surroundings in a millisecond. Expensive décor. Air-conditioning. Clean smell. Pretty, well-dressed young girl behind a high reception desk. Lovely brown eyes, dyed blonde hair, gorgeous cleavage, late teens/early twenties. Bronze-tinted mirrors everywhere. There’s a sign on the wall: Coggan Media Solutions. I catch the receptionist’s eye and smile. She smiles back.

  ‘Hi, there. I’ve come to pick up the proofs to be delivered to Mr Allen.’

  I think that sounded credible enough. I lean against the reception desk with an air of very slight impatience, then turn and give her a brief but hopefully engaging smile. She looks unsettled.

  ‘Sorry, the – for who?’

  ‘Mr Allen? Vector Studios?’

  ‘I’m sorry; I don’t know anything about this. Would you like to take a seat and I’ll ask someone?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I sit down and position myself so that I can see the street outside reflected in one of the bronze wall mirrors. As she makes the call, I see my mark walking past at some speed. Late forties, running to fat, short blond hair, clean-shaven, expensive pale grey suit, black briefcase. I get up, wave at the baffled receptionist and go outside.

  I can just see Blond Hair as he reaches the end of the street. He’s assuming that I ran down this road as soon as I was out of sight. He stops and looks left and right. We’re at the top end of Shaftesbury Avenue. Now he has to make a decision based on not much. There are about thirty places I could have gone before he caught up. I could even have got a cab or got on a bus.

  After a few seconds of indecision, he opts to turn left. I wait for a while then follow, keeping on the right side of Grape Street. I don’t want to turn around the corner at the end and get punched in the face.

  When I think it’s safe, I turn left and see him about ten yards away. He’s crossed Shaftesbury Avenue as it gives him a better view of the road as it curves southwards. He’s not rushing, he’s not in a panic, he just moves along with a slow, purposeful walk, casually but thoroughly scanning the whole area without it being obvious what he’s doing. Blond Hair is almost certainly police, or, more likely, ex-police.

  I take my jacket off and sling it over my shoulder. It isn’t a perfect disguise, but it might gain me a couple of seconds if he spots me. I allow him to get a little over a hundred yards ahead of me and keep on the other side of the road from him.

  He strolls along at the same pace as a first-time tourist, then stops to look in the window of a shop selling expensive kitchen items, while using the reflection of the glass to look behind him, just in case. He gets his mobile out and makes a call, probably telling whoever it was who set him on me that I’d managed to escape his clutches and that he was very sorry and it wouldn’t happen again. I wonder if he’s talking to Scary Boss.

  He takes off in the direction of New Oxford Street, stopping by a small coffe
e bar and going inside. After less than a minute, he comes out and sits on one of the metal chairs, still breezily scanning his surroundings, just in case.

  When the waiter comes out with his coffee and distracts him for a second, I sit down at another table a couple of feet away. When he glances to the side and sees me, the reflex jerk it creates causes some of his coffee to spill into the saucer. He places his coffee on the table and nods his head resignedly at the predictability of being caught out like this. He turns and looks at me.

  ‘You’re looking a bit tired, my friend.’

  God, he even sounds like a policeman; that offhand, blasé, mildly aggressive, condescending tone that I was frequently on the receiving end of as a teenager. I reply, but I don’t turn to look at him or make eye contact.

  ‘So what happened?’ I say. ‘Were you slung out of the force for taking bribes? Beating a suspect to death? Falsifying evidence? Covering up child abuse by politicians? Go on – you can tell me. I’m very broad-minded.’

  He ignores this, picks up his briefcase and takes out a brown Jiffy Bag. He tosses it so it lands on the table in front of me. The waiter comes out to see if I want anything. I say no thanks.

  ‘As I was saying, you’re looking a bit tired. I think you need a holiday.’

  ‘Where would you suggest?’

  ‘Somewhere hot, if it was me. Perhaps Malaysia. Somewhere like that. Far away.’

  ‘How much is in the envelope?’

  ‘Five thousand.’

  ‘D’you think that’ll be enough, officer?’ I say the ‘o’ word to annoy him. He’s absolutely not in the force anymore if he’s doing stuff like this.

  ‘More than enough, I would say. I think you’ve got a cracking deal there. Most private dicks would jump at the chance.’

  ‘You were very good in Manchester Square, St Martin’s Lane and Wimpole Street. I didn’t see you at all.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He looks truly baffled. Am I wrong about this? Interesting if I am.

  ‘Forget it. So you want me to stop my current investigation with immediate effect, would that be correct?’

  ‘That’s about it, matey.’

  ‘How do you even know I’m on a case? How do you even know I’m a private investigator? How did you even know where I’d be so you could trail me?’

  I look at him for first time. I want to see his face when he replies. He avoids my gaze by looking up at the sky.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell someone like you that there are ways of getting information like that. Technology is so vulnerable if you know what you’re doing, don’t you find that, matey?’ He smiles smugly to himself and sips his coffee. A couple of drips fall from the bottom of the cup onto his trousers. I watch as the stain spreads.

  His reply brings a whole number of new factors into play. Unless I’m mistaken, he’s talking about phone hacking and listening devices. If that’s what’s been going on, then I’m going to have to take some major steps before I go any further with this case.

  First of all, there’s Sara’s flat. Whoever got in there could well have planted a few bugs when they were busy moving coffee mugs around. Perhaps that was the main intention and all the rest was a smokescreen. That hadn’t occurred to me. My focus and that of the police was on the breaking and entering aspect. It’s equally possible that they may have tampered with her mobile while they were there or are intercepting the telephone signals in some other way.

  Also, they know where she works. The scratching of her car right outside the building proves that. I didn’t take any note of the security at the Maccanti building. If my bugging theory is correct, she may have the same problem in her office. Shit.

  And if they’re picking up intelligence from mobile phones, then it’s a probability that they would target her MTA1 and MTA2. Maybe even other colleagues like Gaige. It’s possible that someone was listening in on the conversation I had with Isolda this morning. I tell her where I was going to the gym and Blond Hair is on my back five minutes after I leave with a packet of bribe money. It can’t be a coincidence. It occurs to me that he may have a car parked nearby.

  If any of these guesses are true, then it’s almost risible. What the hell is going on? What sort of ex-cop could manage this sort of stuff? I turn to Blond Hair once more.

  ‘Were you in Special Branch, by any chance?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  So that’s a ‘yes’, then. I look around to see if there’s any conceivable way I could lift this guy, here, right now, in broad daylight, but it’s impossible. Footballer Dad was a lot easier because of the time, location and crowds. Besides, he was busy, dim, and didn’t see me coming. If I tried something like that here, it would be too conspicuous and I don’t want the sort of trouble it would bring.

  I really must have a think about all of this when I have a moment. As for now, I pick up the Jiffy Bag and throw it at Blond Hair’s head. It bounces off and lands at his feet. He sighs, bends down, picks it up and puts it back in his briefcase.

  He looks pissed, but like me, he can’t really do anything here. He does, however, put on his best hard-man expression. You know the sort of thing: friendly tone, smiling mouth, threatening eyes. Never fails to give me a chill.

  ‘I’ve tried to be nice and reasonable, my friend. If I see you again, I won’t be so nice. You dump this right now. Right fucking now. My advice to you is fuck off and hide yourself somewhere. Now. This morning. You really don’t want to get involved. You really don’t.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – I don’t know what I’m up against.’

  A slight frown passes across his face when I say that. He gets up, gives me the mother of all hard looks and walks away in the direction of New Oxford Street.

  I order a coffee and a croissant and sit and watch the world go by while I’m waiting. It’s interesting that he didn’t mention Footballer Dad. I’m assuming that he works for Scary Boss, so that was a little surprising. It could be that he’s unaware of the activities of his colleagues. I think if he’d known about Footballer Dad’s disappearance, he might have said something, maybe even questioned me about it, but it didn’t come up at all.

  But that’s not necessarily unusual. If I was organising something like this, I’d run it all on a need-to-know basis, just in case one of my little helpers got caught. I doubt whether Footballer Dad could have told me anything about Blond Hair. He may not even have known of his existence.

  Was it Blond Hair who broke into Sara’s flat? Unlikely. He’s almost three stone heavier than me and that extra weight would have brought down those cable coverings and believe me, it was a close thing when I was doing it.

  ‘Sorry, sir. We haven’t got any croissants left. Would you like anything else? We have carrot cake and lavender and coconut cake. Oh, and salted caramel and chocolate cookies.’

  ‘It’s OK. I’ll just have the coffee.’

  He places the coffee in front of me. I take a sip. It’s almost cold and tastes of burnt milk. I leave the rest and decide to get a cab to Hinde Street.

  It’s just as I’m walking in the direction of Tottenham Court Road tube station, looking over my shoulder for a car, that I feel I’m being observed yet again. Well that’s it. It can’t be Blond Hair unless he’s totally crazy. Would he have an assistant? Unlikely. I’m annoyed now; I haven’t even started work and I’m working already. This time I’m going to catch this fucker, whoever it is.

  16

  RED HAIR

  I walk down New Oxford Street using every reflective surface that I can, looking for suspicious activity to my rear. I use telephone kiosks, billboards on bus stops and shop windows. I try as hard as I can not to look too self-consciously switched on. I stop, bend down, and tie an imaginary shoelace while quickly looking behind me. Whoever it is that’s tailing me is doing it, I suspect, from quite a distance.

  This is a wide, three-lane road, with a lot of traffic, particularly buses, and a lot of pedestrian ac
tivity, not to mention the comings and goings from all the snack bars and cafés. It’s also long and straight. If it was me doing this, I’d feel fairly confident that I could stay about two hundred yards behind my mark. I’d probably tail them from the opposite side of the road and keep one hundred per cent focus on them, so even if I lost visibility for a few seconds, I’d still know where they were from their probable trajectory and walking speed.

  The advantage of tailing on the opposite side of the road is that it makes it more difficult for the person being followed to use reflective surfaces. I can see directly behind me and I can see directly across the road, but wider angles are virtually impossible, especially when the other person might be a few hundred yards to your rear.

  Luckily, I’m getting help from the newer double decker buses. Every time they pull out, stop, start or change lanes, they’re giving me a comprehensive view of the road behind me, the big curved glass on the front and back acting as constantly changing reflective surfaces. They’re little distorted, shaky, unreliable and confusing from time to time, but they’re all I’ve got at the moment.

  Just as the wide windscreen of a Number 38 gives me a clear view of the other side of the road, I spot two contenders walking about a hundred and fifty yards back. Just a brief glimpse, but neither of them looks right.

  One of them is a woman in her fifties in a red knee-length coat pushing a shopping trolley. She keep stopping and looking in windows, but the windows she’s looking in are those of sandwich shops and snack bars. She could be genuine, but I have to be suspicious. Maybe she’s just hungry and fussy. New Oxford Street has a lot of stuff in it, but it’s not the sort of place you’d go for your daily or weekly shop, so it’s the shopping trolley that arouses my suspicion.

  The other contender is a guy in his mid-thirties. Stocky, shortish red hair, over six foot and with a measured, ambling walk. He’s wearing a grey waterproof more suited to a walk in the Peak District and a pair of pale khaki cargo pants. He, too, has an interest in the snack bars, but that casual, nothing-special-to-do walk is out of place here.