Sandman

by David Hodges

  The phone rang as she was taking another shower and she ran naked and dripping into the bedroom to pick up the call on the extension as Hayden began to stir irritably.

  ‘Hello, Sergeant Lewis,’ the quiet voice said. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you after your ordeal.’

  Kate stiffened. The voice was unmistakable; she would have recognized it anywhere. ‘You’ve got a bloody nerve,’ she exclaimed, feeling strangely vulnerable in her nakedness, despite the fact that the Serb was on the other end of a phone. ‘How did you get my number?’

  Pavlovic laughed. ‘Ah, now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Suffice it to say that the Sandman has very good intelligence on these things.’

  Kate glared at Hayden, who had gone back to sleep, willing him to wake up, but he slept on with a big fat smile on his face.

  ‘The thing is,’ Pavlovic continued, ‘I was truly mortified that we didn’t get time to say au revoir.’

  Kate strained her ears. She could hear a sound in the background; a powerful engine turning over. The Serb was either in a car or close to one – no, it wasn’t a car it was a helicopter, the distinctive thud of the rotor blades was unmistakable.

  ‘Flying out now, are you?’ she said.

  Another laugh. ‘What a clever girl you are, my dear – but no, just about to actually. Pilot is warming her up for us.’

  ‘I thought a scumbag like you would be on your way to your next rat-hole long before now?’

  Pavlovic sighed heavily, seemingly taking her insults in his stride. ‘So did I, my dear,’ he replied,’ but sadly, the weather was against us at first and then we had a spot of engine trouble – though all solved now.’

  ‘So why the telephone call?’

  Hayden suddenly sat bolt upright beside her, rubbing his eyes and looking bewildered. ‘W-what?’ he blurted, still half-asleep.

  Kate waved him to silence.

  ‘Thought I’d ring to say I’ve got a present for you,’ Pavlovic replied. ‘Going to drop it in to you on my way out of the country.’

  Kate’s eyes narrowed. ‘A present? What sort of present would that be?’

  Another laugh. ‘Oh, you know, just something to remember me by. Hope you like it. Ciao, as our Italian cousins would say.’

  Then the line went dead.

  ‘What the devil was all that about?’ Hayden demanded, now fully awake and taking in her nudity with raised eyebrows and a hopeful gleam in his eyes, which was not reciprocated.

  Instead, Kate treated him to a preoccupied frown as she replaced the phone, deeply disturbed by the call and apprehensive as to what the sadistic Serb might have in mind. ‘That was Pavlovic,’ she said. ‘He was in a chopper. Told me he had a present for me.’

  Hayden’s expression abruptly changed. ‘A present? The cheek of the scoundrel,’ he said hotly.

  Kate gave a tight humourless smile. Good old Hayden – polite to the last.

  ‘We’d better get dressed,’ she said. ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘I’ll ring the nick,’ he said, rolling across the bed to pick up the extension phone from its base. ‘Get some backup here.’

  ‘Backup for what?’ she queried, as she reached for the clothes she had left folded neatly over the back of a nearby chair. ‘We have no idea what he’s planning.’

  Hayden snorted, now also out of bed, but back on his own side, clad in his infamous boxers and a pair of grey socks. Stabbing the keys of the phone he was holding with the index finger of his other hand, he grimaced. ‘Won’t be a bottle of bubbly anyway,’ he retorted. ‘You can be sure of that—’

  She waved him to silence and, darting across the room to the window, jerked the curtains back. ‘Can you hear it?’ she said.

  He terminated the call before he had finished dialling and joined her at the window, his head cocked on one side to listen. He heard the sound of the engine immediately, accompanied by the rhythmic thud of rotor blades. ‘A chopper,’ he said as the sound increased in volume, ‘and heading this way.’

  ‘There!’ Kate exclaimed and pointed.

  The black dot grew rapidly as it sped towards them over the tops of the trees and hedgerows, taking on its distinctive shape within seconds, sunlight glittering on its bulbous windshield.

  ‘Out!’ Hayden yelled suddenly, grabbing his tartan dressing-gown from the bed and pushing her towards the door. ‘It’s coming straight for us!’

  Kate just had time to grab her own white towelling robe from the back of the door before the helicopter’s nose filled the window like the eye of some giant attacking bug, its deafening roar shaking the old cottage to its foundations.

  But then, even as Kate struggled into her robe, Hayden was propelling her down the wooden staircase and out through the front door, gravel biting into the soles of their feet as they raced down the path and out through the front gate into the road, where a small knot of startled curious people from adjacent houses was already beginning to gather.

  The anticipated explosion or rattle of a semi-automatic weapon never came, however, and, turning as the sound of the helicopter’s engine note changed, they saw it lift high above the roof of the cottage and pause in hover mode over the driveway where Hayden’s red Mk2 Jaguar was parked. Then, a side door opened and something long and black either fell or was thrown out before the machine lifted again and thudded away back across the fields towards Burnham-on-Sea and the coast.

  ‘What the devil was that?’ Hayden exclaimed, but Kate was already sprinting off barefoot along the pavement towards the side gate.

  Hayden was only a yard or so behind her and he cannoned into her just inside the gateway, staring at the buckled roof of his Jag and the ‘thing’ that was lying on top of it.

  That it was the body of a man was plain to see – the arms and legs splayed over the edges of the roof like those of a broken doll and the head lolling back grotesquely over the rear window, blood streaming down the glass from what had to be some kind of horrendous wound to the back of the skull.

  Even before she got to the car, Kate instinctively knew the identity of the dead man and, once there, her worst fears were confirmed. ‘I’ve got a present for you. … Something to remember me by.’ Pavlovic’s words echoed over and over again in her brain as she stared helplessly and with a sense of unutterable horror, into the vacant brown eyes and white bloodless face of the late Larry Gittings.

  ‘According to Lydia Summers, Gittings was dead before he was thrown out of the helicopter,’ Hayden said, dropping into the chair opposite Kate, who was slumped in a corner of the settee with a glass of brandy clasped in both hands.

  She made a face and took a sip of her brandy. ‘I saw the bullet hole in his forehead,’ she said.

  Hayden nodded. ‘Nine millimetre the pathologist reckons and probably a hollow point round, going by the size of the exit wound to the back of his skull.’

  Kate shuddered, not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours. ‘Poor devil,’ she muttered.

  Hayden shrugged. ‘He knew what he was getting into when he changed sides,’ he pointed out. ‘There was always the risk that he would end up on a mortuary slab.’

  She flinched slightly at his insensitivity. ‘Turncoat or not, he still didn’t deserve to die like that.’

  ‘In my book, no one deserves to die like that, old girl,’ he replied. Then he frowned. ‘Only thing I can’t understand, though, is why Pavlović indulged in such a pointless charade when he could have simply dumped Gittings in a hole somewhere and bolted, with no one being the wiser?’

  Kate set down her glass and drew her robe more tightly about her. ‘It wasn’t a pointless charade, Hayd,’ she replied. ‘Don’t you see? He wanted to let us know that he had won – after all our efforts, he still got away.’

  ‘He hardly won, Kate. As Roscoe said at the debrief, we smashed his organization and seized the biggest haul of illegal drugs the UK has ever seen. And don’t forget, he had powerful international backers who must have invested one heck of a
lot in his operation. They won’t be at all pleased about what’s happened.’

  She sighed. ‘So, what now?’ she queried, draining her glass.

  He stood up, taking it from her. ‘Well, SOCO are now doing their stuff outside,’ he replied, ‘and when they’ve finished, the coroner has given the ok for the body to be moved. Maybe then I can take a look at the dent in the roof of my Jag before we head off for the final debrief at the nick.’

  ‘And then?’

  He smiled. ‘And then, Sergeant, you and I are going away for a much needed break. I’ve already cleared it with Roscoe and, with his usual bonhomie, he said he would be glad to get rid of the pair of us for a fortnight.’

  ‘A fortnight?’ she exclaimed. ‘Where the hell are we going for a fortnight?’

  ‘I thought a nice cruise would do the trick.’

  She straightened up on the settee. ‘And what would we do stuck on a cruise for two whole weeks?’

  He looked her up and down, his eyes twinkling. ‘Oh, I reckon I could think of at least one thing to keep us occupied, can’t you?’ he said.

  She shook her head, treating him to an old-fashioned look. ‘And the Sandman? What do we do about him?’

  ‘We forget him,’ he said quietly. ‘He’s someone else’s responsibility now.’ Then, setting her glass down on the nearby coffee table, he knelt on the edge of the settee, took her in his arms and kissed her. ‘It’s over, Kate,’ he said. ‘In my capacity as your husband, I declare this case closed.’

  AFTER THE FACT

  The Bosnian war had left its mark on Belgrade and the unmistakable scars of the bloody conflict were still in evidence in parts of the ancient city, even after so many years. The derelict two-storey warehouse in the downtown backstreet bore those same scars and, though there were signs that some restoration work had been carried out, the will seemed to have evaporated over time. As a result, the derelict shell remained a gloomy forbidding place, scarcely touched by the grey daylight filtering through the broken skylights and only offering shelter for the occasional vagrant or the desperate junkie searching collapsed veins for a new spot in which to plunge his dirty syringe.

  Zoran Pavlovic was very tense, though he tried not to show it in the presence of the minder who had driven him in a hired car from the airport to this pre-arranged rendezvous. He had good reason to be tense too. His beloved Serbia – and Belgrade in particular – was a major player in the trafficking of illegal drugs between Asia and Western Europe and the city of Belgrade had spawned any number of rival Mafia clans involved in the criminal trade. His UK operation had been part of one in particular, one that was fast emerging as the most powerful clan in the country, and the ‘godfather’ he was here to meet controlled an extensive network that had worldwide connections. If anyone could help him get back on his feet, it was Goran Jovanovic, known as ‘Snake Eye’, but the wizened old man with the gaze of a cobra, who insisted on being called Father, would need convincing that Pavlovic was worth a second chance – and that was what worried the albino, for he knew that Jovanovic was not known for his forgiving nature and the old man had already invested a fortune in the now-aborted UK operation.

  ‘Boss?’ the thug in the driving seat said suddenly. ‘We got company.’

  Pavlovic felt his stomach muscles tighten. The cavalcade consisted of four cars – all black Mercedes, all with headlights blazing, as they swept in through the gaping hole that had once accommodated big steel doors, swinging round in an untidy formation to face towards the exit again and skidding to a stop a few yards in front of Pavlovic’s car, transfixing it with their headlights.

  For a moment there was no movement and then the front passenger door of one of the cars was thrown open in obvious invitation.

  Pavlovic touched his minder on the shoulder. ‘Be ready, Kenny,’ he said, ‘just in case I need to get out of here in a hurry.’

  The other grinned and tapped the Uzi on his lap. ‘You bet,’ he said.

  Snake Eye was sitting in the back right-hand corner of the end Mercedes, slumped there, motionless, the single watery eye which had given him his nickname studying Pavlovic through a film of mucus as he climbed into the front seat. The bald-headed Albanian who accompanied the Mafia godfather everywhere occupied the other rear seat beside his boss, but stared ahead without even acknowledging Pavlovic’s presence.

  The albino forced a smile and turned in his seat to speak to the old man, but before he could say anything, Snake Eye spoke to him in a crackling voice like dry twigs rustling in a breeze. ‘Face the front, Zoran,’ he said in their mother tongue. ‘We don’t need to look at each other to talk.’

  Pavlovic glanced sideways at the driver but, like the Albanian, he remained impassive. ‘There has been a problem with the UK operation, Father,’ he said.

  There was a heavy sigh. ‘That has already come to my notice, my son,’ Snake Eye said, ‘and I am very disappointed by the loss of such a profitable enterprise, but such things happen and we must put it behind us.’

  Pavlovic breathed a sigh of relief; things were going better than he had expected. ‘Thank you, Father,’ he said, ‘I am only sorry I let you down and I will make it up to you in the future. I just need to lie low for a while, until—’

  Then he broke off, stiffening in his seat. A dark figure in some sort of long coat had emerged suddenly from the shadows at the rear of the car he had hired from the airport and was approaching the driver’s door. The next instant the figure appeared to raise an arm towards the window. There was a bright flash, but no sound and, even as it dawned on Pavlovic that his minder had just been shot with a silenced pistol, the continuous blast of the car’s horn as the dead man fell against the steering wheel was the last thing he heard.

  The garrotte was applied with expert proficiency by the Albanian sitting behind him in the back seat, cutting off his air supply before he realized what was happening, and a bloody froth began to trickle from the corners of his gaping mouth as he writhed in the seat, clawing futilely at the thin cord biting into his neck.

  Death came slowly, but surely and only when he ceased struggling altogether, his throat producing a long expiring rattle and his body relaxing and hanging limply in the improvised noose, did the Albanian slacken his grip and release the garrotte. Then, climbing out of the car, the killer calmly opened the front passenger door and hauled Pavlovic’s body out before carting it over one shoulder to the hire car and dumping it in the back seat behind the dead man slumped over the wheel.

  The oily rag thrust into the petrol filler pipe was a simple expedient and the brief flash of a match preceded an even brighter flame. The four car cavalcade was already pulling away when the Albanian jumped into the second Mercedes beside Jovanovic and, as they raced out of the warehouse on to the road, the violent explosion in the gloom behind them lit up the interior of their vehicle almost with the brilliance of an exploding star.

  ‘Your father forgives you, Zoran,’ Snake Eye murmured in his crackly voice, as he studied the leaping flames in the driver’s rear view mirror, ‘but, sadly, forgiveness is never enough.’

  By the same author

  Slice

  Firetrap

  Requiem

  Strawfoot

  © David Hodges

  First published in 2015 by

  Robert Hale an imprint of

  The Crowood Press Ltd,

  Ramsbury, Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.crowood.com

  www.halebooks.com

  ISBN 978 0 7198 2018 2 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 2019 9 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 2020 5 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1835 6 (print)

  The right of David Hodges to be identified as

  author of this work has been asserted by him

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

  Patents Act 1988.

 
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