The Missing Husband

by Alex Coombs

  The last time he’d had dealings with her had been to give

  the nod to Iris Campion to let Hanlon know the address of the Russian brothel in Oxford. Now the Russians were back to haunt him. Anderson didn’t care that much. He had a messianic belief in his own destiny. He felt, he knew, that he had been put on earth for a special purpose. Like Aguirre, he felt he was the Wrath of God. To him events were preordained, predetermined

  * * *

  by some divinity or fate, and occasionally the veil parted and God, or fate, allowed him if not a glimpse into the future then a sense of the way the wind was blowing.

  He’d known he was going to see Hanlon again soon before any of this kicked off. He had, by chance, seen her overweight, boxer sidekick in Tottenham a fortnight before, a mere glimpse out of a car window but a sure sign to his mind. She was associated with certain numbers too in his personal numerology. Fifty-one meant Hanlon. It had been part of the number plate on her last car, and he’d seen it outside a restaurant he’d eaten in and on a bus that had passed by in Woolwich, where he’d gone to pick up half a kilo of coke. Finally, there had been the kestrel he’d seen when he’d been hunting down Jackson. The bird, motionless, graceful, deadly, hanging effortlessly in the Essex sky; obviously it was her.

  The boxer. The numbers. The bird. Signs and wonders. Some

  things were meant to be.

  When Hanlon had appeared at the funeral he hadn’t been remotely surprised. It had been foretold.

  Hanlon slowed her car down as she approached the side road that would turn in to the car park for the office block where the MPU was situated and there, leaning against the sign advertising the names of the businesses in the industrial park, was the unmistakable figure of Anderson.

  His tall, wiry figure, wearing a dark blue Adidas tracksuit and trainers, conveyed sinister malice. Like Death getting in shape for a track-and-field event. She stopped and opened the driver’s window. Anderson put his hands on the top of the car door and bent his head down to look in.

  She saw his unshaven face, the high cheekbones and hot, restless eyes. His unkempt stringy hair framed his bony features. She was conscious of his magnetic presence filling the small car.

  * * *

  She was very aware of his large, powerful hands, the fingers splayed above the groove where the glass of the window had disappeared.

  His gaze took in her face, her hair, her upper body. It was incurious, almost robotic. As always with Anderson, there was a sense that he wasn’t entirely present, as though he were listening to some other voice, like a TV presenter with an earpiece. Now he cocked his head slightly as he looked at her.

  ‘Nice car,’ he said. London accent, proper London, she thought, almost snobbishly; echt-London, not Slough wannabe London.

  She nodded. She had no wish to discuss the finer points of an Audi TT. She waited, then raised an interrogative eyebrow. Anderson smiled, genuinely amused. Most people who knew his reputation needed a change of underpants when he spoke to them. Oh, Hanlon, he thought, you’re so cool.

  ‘Like Slough, do you?’ he enquired.

  She looked him in the eyes. ‘Love it,’ she said with crisp certainty. Anderson wondered what she was doing here. Cunningham’s mate in the CPS had guessed she was being punished, but you never knew with the woman he was looking at.

  ‘I’d like a word,’ he said.

  Hanlon nodded again. Not the Three Compasses. She’d had enough of Edmonton for a while. She thought back to the incident with the painter and decorator; there’d been a pub on the corner. ‘There’s a pub down the road, the Three Barrels. I’ll meet you there, four-thirty.’

  ‘Is it nice?’ asked Anderson. He was immediately struck by the recurrence of the numeral, three. Three Barrels, Three Compasses. God is in the detail.

  It was foretold. How could it be otherwise?

  * * *

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ said Hanlon. She smiled icily at Anderson and put the car in gear.

  He stood and watched as the car drove off.

  * * *

  Hanlon spent the rest of the afternoon occupied on her official business. She checked through the details of those reported missing over the previous twenty-four hours, prioritizing and making sure that protocol had been followed for the several teenagers who had disappeared in the past seventy-two hours. DS Mawson was busy working on budget updates for an internal audit. He won’t have me to worry about. I’m not costing him any money, thought Hanlon. I’m still on the payroll of the Met, as far as I know. At least that’s what her last payslip

  had said.

  Missing persons was not occupying much of her mind at the moment. Foremost in her thoughts was the link between the dead Taverner and Arkady Belanov via Dimitri.

  She called up Companies House on her screen and did a quick check of Woodstock Wellness Clinic, the name she’d made a mental note of when she’d been demonstrating. A call to Oxford Council had established that was the name under which, unbeknown to them, Arkady Belanov’s brothel operated.

  Hanlon’s dark eyebrows lifted in increasing interest as she read under Overseas Company Information that it was now a subsidiary of Godunov Holdings. Its penultimate filing history was the appointment of a Mr Arkady Belanov as managing director.

  Godunov Holdings wasn’t listed as a UK company, but further digging and a one-pound fee elicited the information that it also had a mortgage on a property in Slough. A warehouse. She noted down the address.

  * * *

  So how did this tie in, if it did, to the disappearance of Charlie Taverner? According to Oksana, Taverner, researching Russian growth in the prostitution market, had come across Belanov – a man known to Hanlon as being involved in the trade. Belanov worked for a senior crime figure, the vor. Probably the man that she had seen at the airport. The Butcher of Moscow.

  Then there was the other piece of the puzzle. Anderson. If Iris Campion were to be believed, there was some sort of ongoing feud between Anderson and the Russians, again centred around prostitution, in this case Anderson’s Beath Street brothel. A turf war?

  She tapped her even white teeth with the end of a pen.

  Then the attempt on Anderson’s life. The dead man on the roof, a Slav.

  Finally, what was she going to do? In her mind the agenda was simple: find Taverner, or at least his body, for Oksana’s sake. The chances were that Anderson would know where it was. It was he who had disposed of the corpses from Beath Street. If it was unofficial, he might even tell her where Taverner could be found.

  The unusual thing was that so far she hadn’t done anything too outrageous. The deaths at Beath Street were, after all, technically only rumour. Others could open or not open that can of worms. So she could, with a fairly clean conscience, do what she was supposed to do.

  I don’t know, she thought. There doesn’t seem to be any real rush. The dead are dead anyway and there appears to be no threat to anybody living. I’ve usually acted too quickly in the past, was her conclusion. I’ll see what Anderson wants and then sleep on it. Tomorrow is another day.

  Hanlon put her head down and ploughed on with her officially sanctioned work. Mawson walked past her desk a

  * * *

  couple of times on his way back and forth to the coffee machine in the corner of the office. He was quietly pleased to see Hanlon settling down. Proof to him that good police work stemmed from the top. In the past Hanlon had either had demonstrably disastrous managers – here he thought of Peter Bench, currently doing fifteen years – or Corrigan himself, too lax with Hanlon. Obviously, what she needed was some useful, undramatic work in a carefully supervised environment.

  He watched with a sense of pride as she left the building and crossed to her car down below in the car park. She’d politely said goodbye and that she’d be in bright and early the following day. There’s progress for you, he thought proudly. Bright and early.

  Hanlon started her car and drove out of the car park.

  Anderson,
here I come, she thought, bright and early.

  The pub lived up to her unenthusiastic billing. The Three Barrels wasn’t a bad place but it lacked charisma. She walked in and immediately checked the layout, an automatic habit. It was L-shaped with the bar at the top of the letter, entrance at the bottom and a room just off on the right that she guessed in the old days would have been a separate bar, now knocked into one.

  It was a working-man’s pub with no concessions to family or women. Four-thirty p.m. was builders’ drinking time, most construction workers following an eight-until-four day. She’d guessed this would be the clientele from the pickup trucks which were parked outside. There were also a couple of small Nissan flatbeds with scaffolding and the scaffolders’ names emblazoned on the sides, which were crammed into the small car park behind the pub. She had glanced down at the pavement and seen there were still splashes of paint on the grey stone from her altercation with the painter and decorator.

  * * *

  Hanlon had turned the corner and entered the doorway of the pub. As she walked in she could see the backs of half a dozen plaid shirts lined up at the bar, and an old TV tuned to a sports channel.

  Curious heads turned to examine her. The pub obviously didn’t attract a female clientele. One of the faces was familiar, all too familiar despite not being covered with white paint. Decorator Man.

  Hanlon didn’t pause or flinch. Retreat was not an option in her mind. The sensible thing to do would have been to just turn and leave, but she wasn’t made that way. Sensible wasn’t part of her character. When she went to bed that night she couldn’t have faced closing her eyes, knowing that she’d backed down. She’d have despised herself.

  She walked up to the bar and ordered a Coke. There was a strange, almost eerie silence as the builders stared at her, not impolitely but obviously all wondering what she was doing in here, an attractive woman in a skirt and jacket. She guessed it was the office clothes more than anything that puzzled them. A man in a suit would have been baffling, although a woman in here of any description would have been a rare enough sight.

  Decorator Man said nothing, but stared at her menacingly while he rolled a cigarette. The barman said something to him, he was obviously a regular, and he nodded without listening. All his attention was fixed on Hanlon. He was as unattractive as she remembered, his face sneering and piggy-eyed. She suddenly thought, I bet he hasn’t told any of his drinking buddies what happened, why he was coated in paint the other day. He wouldn’t dare say he’d been beaten up by a woman. He wouldn’t be man enough to bear the teasing. He wasn’t the kind of guy to go in for humorous self-deprecation.

  * * *

  In fact, she thought, he probably hasn’t admitted it happened even to himself.

  She paid for her drink and nodded civilly to the sweat-stained scaffolders, then went to sit down in the bottom part of the pub, out of sight of the bar round the corner. She sat with her back to the wall, awaiting the inevitable.

  Her keen senses heard the conversation by the bar start up again and then the squat figure of the decorator appeared from round the corner. He was carrying a pint of Guinness, which he put on the table that she was sitting behind. He sat down opposite and stared at her. The unlit cigarette that he had rolled hung from his lip.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’ he said. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, as unappealing as the rest of him. She had obviously been preying on his mind, beaten by a woman, and here she was, an answer to a prayer.

  He leaned forward menacingly across the table, bringing something out of the pocket of his paint-stained dungarees. He held his right hand around something fist-sized, there was a click and a slim blade appeared.

  ‘Cat got your tongue, bitch?’ he said, in his hoarse, squeaky voice. He was looking intently into her face, obviously hoping to see fear, something he could taste. Something he could feel. He wanted to see her suffer. Hanlon sat immobile, her cold grey eyes staring him out, relying on her peripheral vision so that if he did slice at her face with the knife she would have a chance to react.

  She felt a rising rage at her own stupidity. She should have known that for Decorator Man his humiliation would have been festering like a boil, and now here was the chance to lance it. She had thought that what he wanted to do was frighten her. It was only now that she realized she had seriously

  * * *

  underestimated him. The knife was wholly unexpected. He had gone nuclear.

  He hadn’t produced a knife just to scare her. Now she suspected it was to mark her forever, so that whenever she saw herself in a mirror from now to the end of her time she’d think of him.

  He would go for her face any second now. That was for sure. That was a given. She rehearsed what she could do. She couldn’t jerk her head back, away from the knife, there was a wall there. She’d have to go sideways. His arms were short; he’d have to stand to make sure of reaching her face. So, as he rose, she’d flip the table towards him, using the momentum to propel herself away and then throw herself forward at him. He wouldn’t be expecting that. He wouldn’t be expecting her to attack; he would be expecting tearful pleading.

  ‘Bitch,’ he repeated, provoked by her lack of reaction. Ever since he’d been humiliated by her he’d been fantasizing about what he’d do to her and now the moment had come. Now she was going to pay.

  Hanlon smiled contemptuously and rested the palms of her hands on the underside of the table. When she reached three she would act, explode into action. She started counting in her head.

  One, two—

  The door of the pub opened and Anderson walked in, flanked by Morris Jones and Danny.

  Decorator Man wouldn’t have noticed if a brass band had walked in. All his attention was on Hanlon. Absolutely nothing was going to distract him. Even if he had been aware of the door opening he wouldn’t have cared. From a casual entrant’s perspective there was nothing strange or potentially violent going on. What would anyone coming in see? The back of

  * * *

  a man’s head as he sat opposite a woman. Nothing unusual. Nothing to worry Decorator Man about anyone walking in. He was just annoyed by the absence of fear on the bitch’s face. Hanlon watched impassively, her eyes not moving from Decorator Man’s face. The stocky figure of Danny in jeans and an expensive-looking bomber jacket moving out of sight to the bar, Morris Jones in chinos and a red-and-white striped shirt, what looked like diamonds in his cufflinks sparkling, advancing purposefully towards Decorator Man’s left and Anderson to the right. Dave Anderson’s face was hard, menacing. His eyes

  glittered in their deep sockets.

  Decorator Man became aware of Anderson only as Anderson leaned over him, his rat’s tails of long hair brushing his bald patch. Decorator Man twitched, but was so intent on Hanlon he didn’t look round.

  ‘Boo!’ said Anderson, softly in Decorator Man’s ear.

  That got his attention all right. Decorator Man jumped and twisted his neck, looking up in surprise at Anderson. It was maybe that action, presenting his nose as a target, that determined what happened next. Anderson drove his forehead with practised skill hard into the man’s nose, just at the bridge where it met his forehead. There was a crunching noise, as if someone had stepped on a pair of glasses. Simultaneously, his large, powerful hand descended onto the man’s wrist as fast as if he was swatting a fly, to trap the blade, and Morris Jones’s knuckles thudded in, hard and vicious, to the back of Decorator Man’s skull.

  Head, hand, fist. Bang. Bang. Bang. The whole process was unbelievably quick and efficient. It must have taken less than two seconds.

  Decorator Man’s head had been driven into the table from the force of Jones’s short punch. The table was heavy and sturdy. It

  * * *

  barely moved as his forehead made contact with its surface. He was still conscious but in no shape to do a great deal. The three short, sharp blows to his head – nose, back of head, forehead

  had taken their toll. Blood start
ed to trickle from his nose as Jones hauled him upright, the legs of his chair screeching on the cheap lino of the floor, and bundled him out of the pub door.

  He went in an unprotesting sort of way. Probably he was barely conscious or, if he was conscious, not wanting to provoke his attackers any more.

  Anderson took the vacated chair. He picked up the flick knife from the table and inspected it. He raised his eyebrows, retracted the blade and put it in the pocket of his tracksuit jacket. He said to Hanlon, ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘We’d met before,’ said Hanlon.

  Anderson smiled at her. ‘I guessed so,’ he said quietly.

  They looked at each other, both conscious that Anderson had evened things up after the cemetery incident.

  ‘Not Russian, is he?’ asked Anderson.

  Hanlon shook her head. ‘A domestic incident,’ she said.

  Jones reappeared and Danny joined them with a tray of drinks. Anderson nodded at Decorator Man’s half-drunk Guinness. He looked at it with disfavour. The froth from the head had congealed, like a slug trail, up the side of the straight glass.

  ‘Take that back to the bar, Danny. Buy his friends a drink. Make sure the natives aren’t restless.’ He turned to Jones. ‘What did you do with chummy, Morris?’

  ‘I left him with Robby. Robby’s taken him round the back.’ Anderson nodded, satisfied. Jones turned and positioned himself near the entrance to the alcove-like part of the bar where they were, to prevent any newcomer, if there were any,