by James Arklie
One of the mobiles rang, snapping into her thoughts. It was Danny.
‘All set, Ollie. He’s staying at the Lanesborough. So much for communism, huh? You have to be there at six tonight because they leave for the airport at ten for the flight back to China. He’s keen to meet his black pearl one more time.’
Ollie was silent. Part of her insides were starting to melt. Right now, she really wanted to be the killer who killed and couldn’t remember.
Danny carried on, jovial, hardened. ‘Better get a new frock so they let you in the door. They’re on the top floor and security will be told to expect you.’
Ollie was listening, but part of her was watching from the ceiling. She was casually planning an assassination.
Danny changed the subject. ‘On that other matter, I’ve found someone for you to meet on the estate. Mother of an old girlfriend. Eighty now, but she remembers it.’
Ollie was on her feet and pulling on her jacket while Danny told her where to meet him.
On her way in the taxi she called George and told him her meeting was at the Lanesborough at six pm. He sounded distant and rushed and told her to stay put in the hotel.
Next, she called Jo who sounded triumphant. Ollie wondered if killing Jo would stop this thing dead. Was that a better option? The woman was crazy. She sent Ollie a ‘reward’. It was a ten second video of Lily and her mother. As Ollie watched she saw something in the background. It was like a tent but was a clear bubble. She sent it straight on to George. She’d seen them before. Isolation units for biohazards.
Twenty minutes later Ollie was back on the estate of her birth, where her life was forged, first on one side of the estate, then after the age of ten, on the other side.
Nothing had changed. Some of the cars could have been there for fifteen years, some of the graffiti definitely had. The play area of swings and a roundabout was intact and populated with a crowd of youngsters. A group of boys and one girl kicked a ball around on a scrubby patch of grass.
Danny waved her into one of the blocks of flats, took her to the first floor and sat her in front of Janine, eighty, grey, permed hair, glasses and an over-sized brown hearing aid. The flat smelled of fried chicken. Janine had the shakes and was cradling a covered mug with a spout.
‘So, you’re Billy’s girl?’
Ollie nodded, thinking of her Mum who would be scared and confused and probably shaking as much as Janine. ‘Oleander.’ She smiled. ‘Do you know what happened to Billy back then?’
‘I know he disappeared. And I saw them take you and your Mum away in an ambulance. There was a lot of blood on you. Poor thing.’
Ollie didn’t remember an ambulance. She leaned forward, elbows on knees.
‘They never found Billy. When they took me away he’d already gone.’
Shaking hands raised the spout to her mouth and she tipped gently. ‘I remember. Strange that.’
‘Was anyone else around before the ambulance came?’
‘She was there. A woman. She was busy with something. To and fro. I watched from my balcony across the way. Never knew her name. Had a little girl, bit like you, but she was a bad one.’
Ollie leaned closer. ‘Did you know her daughter’s name?’
‘If I did, it’s gone, love. But she stayed bad. She had a little boy when she was barely old enough.’
Ollie looked at Danny. ‘She still on the estate?’
‘No. Long gone. Just after that actually.’
‘And the man who was the father?’
Shaking hands raised the cup to her lips again. This time there was spillage and she dabbed at her chin with a napkin. ‘No name. But your Mum knew him. Saw them together a lot.’
Ollie sat back, trying not to show her frustration. Then she laughed at herself and took out her mobile and showed her a picture of Emmanuel and her mother.
‘Was it this man?’
Janine leaned closer, prodding her glasses up her nose. ‘Yes. That looks like him. Nice man.’
* * *
Danny let her walk with her own thoughts as he hand-slapped and high-fived with some of the kids. The bad guy hero; guy who made good doing bad.
Ollie’s stepfather, Emmanuel, had known the woman’s daughter. Possibly well enough to have got her pregnant. But Emmanuel must have been forty or older. Ollie’s mind was drifting towards a conclusion she didn’t want to face.
Danny interrupted her thoughts by tugging her sideways and into the walled off area where the metal refuse bins used to be stored. Now they were tall blue recycling bins.
He pointed at some graffiti on the wall. Black spray paint. ‘Danny and Oleander. Soulmates’.
‘I wrote that fifteen odd years ago.’
Ollie smiled. She remembered standing here while he did it.
‘Marvin Gaye, that was you.’
‘To your Diana Ross.’
Ollie looked at the rest of the graffiti. The modern stuff was disgusting, some aggressive and targeting individuals, but the older poets had a bit more class. A few blow jobs had been given in here and first shags had, while friends kept watch outside.
One of the walls had a small message on each red brick. Her eyes scanned them, then stopped. ‘S4E4VR’. She blinked, where had she seen that before? When? School notebook, schoolbag? Ollie took a picture.
They started walking back across the estate. Ollie asked, ‘Did you know Saran Sherry.’
‘Of course. Sherry Baby, used to tease her with that song all the time.’
‘Wrong spelling.’
‘Seriously? See, no GCSE’s for a gangster like me.’
A thought stopped Ollie and turned her round. ‘I need to show Janine another picture.’
Five minutes later a shaking hand offered the mobile back to Ollie. ‘Could be her. Very like her. Possibly.’
They walked out of the flat. Ollie leant on the railing of the walkway and looked across the estate while Danny took a call. She’d shown Janine a picture of Jo. If she let her mind believe that Jo had come to their flat when Billy was killed, then where did that take her?
It took her to the café site, now owned by Jo where the body was found. Had it been open then, or did Jo just know it was a good hiding place? Something else was building in her head and pressing on one side like a blood vessel about to explode.
She encouraged it, but suddenly Danny had taken her by the arm and was moving her towards the stairs. He hung up.
‘Your meeting with Cheong has just been brought forward to five pm. Something about the plane leaving earlier.’
Ollie checked her watch. It was three pm. She felt the nausea creep into her gut.
Less than five hours to go until she had to kill a man.
* * *
Andy answered a call from Jules. ‘I’m on my way back, can it wait?
‘I thought you may want to know this straightaway. I looked up Joanna Johnson, like you asked.’
Andy could hear the excitement in her voice that comes when you find just that little something that may break open a case.
‘And?’
‘I’ve got a new name for you.’ Jules gave him the name.
Andy heard himself gasp. ‘You have got to be kidding?’
Jules laughed at her success. ‘She’s all yours, tiger.’
* * *
12.30 – on the Estate
Ollie tried to call George to let him know but got no answer. Instead, she called Small.
‘He’s fighting your corner, though I don’t know why. There’s no way they’ll let a killer like you have the opportunity to get near to such an important man.’
Ollie was confused. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on, Soul. The double-bluff theory gets more credible the more I listen to you.’
Ollie was getting scared. ‘What double-bluff theory?’
‘The one that says this is a clever plan constructed by you. One that has the British authorities themselves allowing you close. You’re working for the terrorists. They’ve
put you undercover with the instruction to gain the trust of our defence agencies.’
Ollie’s brain was starting to freeze with fear. That was a twist on the facts she hadn’t seen coming. ‘That’s rubbish. They have Lily and my mother hostage. You’ve seen the pictures.’
Small’s laugh spat on Ollie’s concern. ‘Really? Or all part of the plan to convince us? They could have been filmed in a plush hotel room for all we know.’
Ollie’s brain whirled with disbelief. ‘So now no one believes me? Does that mean they’re not really looking for Lily and Mum?’
‘One person believes you, Soul. And like I said. He’s trying to fight your corner.’ She paused. ‘But if you want my opinion, you’re screwed.’
Ollie hung up, tears flowed down her cheeks. Danny grabbed her by the shoulders, staring into her face. ‘What’s happening, Ollie? Where are Lily and your Mum?’
Ollie shook her head. This world. This fucking world. This bloody, sodding life. Every which way she turned it smacked her in the face.
‘Get away from me, Danny. Keep your distance. I’m seriously damaged goods. My brain is screwed and my life is a fuck up.’ She shrugged his hands free.
‘Ollie, tell me what you need.’
‘I need you to get away from me now so you’re not in any deeper.’ She paused, her instinct for survival taking over. ‘And I need your car.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
13.00. Canal side
Ollie called Jo and told her the meeting had been brought forward. Jo was angry at the lack of contact.
‘We give you a mobile so we can call you. Not so you can hide it under a bridge.’
Ollie ignored her. ‘Do you want to meet or not?’
Jo gave her the name of a street in a non-descript housing estate off the North Circular where most of the houses had boards for windows and squatters for residents. ‘Four pm. Alone.’
Ollie allowed herself a laugh at that. She was definitely alone. She drove back to a side-street near the canal and settled herself under the bridge. The mobile had gone. A man emerged from the shadows at the side of the bridge and handed it to her.
‘Keep with you. Always.’
Heavy accent. Like a caricature of a Russian. ‘Piss off.’
He grinned and prodded her in the chest. ‘Big day. Don’t fuck up.’
She watched him amble away carelessly and moved further back, sitting and drawing her knees to her chest, staring at the band of sunlight trying to penetrate the murky waters of the canal.
Ollie tried Saran, desperate for someone to talk to, but again there was no answer. It left her feeling isolated and alone. Then she started thinking about Jo, about the woman Janine had seen going ‘to and fro’.
Come on, Ollie, let your mind go, pretend you’re on drugs, let it drift and dream, let the patterns swim and swirl. Drop that tangled, twisted ball of threads into a pool of clear water. See the threads wave like tentacles and the current unravel them. Watch the ripples ride across the molecule thin skin of the water’s surface.
Start somewhere. Start with Jo. She is the extremist. A terrorist. There are violent men and women gathered around her from somewhere in Europe. They have already killed. They will kill again. This time, Ollie, you are their weapon. Carefully chosen to match the target.
But why don’t they kill him? Is it because only you can get close? Or because only you can deliver the specific death they want him to have. Poison in a glass of wine. Something from Shakespeare. Out of date, surely.
Jo, her rant about global warming. ‘We must use nature’s way of correcting the balance, of saving our planet.’ Ollie took that to mean plant more trees, stop them being cut down, stop air pollution by industry and cars. Arrest the pace of global warming.
Then another sentence chilled her. ‘We have to cut to the cause of the problem. And the cause of the problem is satisfying the needs of the people on this planet’.
A ripple washed over a thread and dragged it free. Jo was saying that the cause of the problem wasn’t the pollution itself, it was the number of people on the planet.
‘We must attack the cause.’
The horror was building in Ollie’s mind. Fewer people means less pollution. X minus Y equals Z. Simple solution to the problem. China was densely populated and a polluter. But so is India, the USA, hell, every country takes some blame.
Ollie realised she wasn’t going to be killing one man. This wasn’t poison, it was something much worse. She was going to start an epidemic, a plague of death. And it could kill millions.
And Jo had chosen China.
Because a trade delegation was coming to Britain.
Because she had the person to deliver a virus to a delegate.
And he would carry it home in his body, unknowing and unseen.
* * *
Small was stuck in a shitty little waiting area of a Sixties-something building in the City. It had four grey, plastic chairs and a low wooden table stained with white rings from hot mugs. In the corner was a coffee machine.
Apparently, it was home to MI5, MI6, the NCA or whoever it was that George Sapphire worked for. She didn’t care. She was impatient to rewind to yesterday when Soul was a killer and Small could arrest and charge her.
She put her feet up on the table and called Andy. ‘This plan is going nowhere. Keep gathering the evidence and building the case against Soul.’
‘I thought you had doubts, Boss.’
‘We have to get something out of this, Andy, for our sakes.’ If she had to throw Soul to the wolves to save her career, so be it.
Andy let the cover your arse message sink in, then said, ‘Got a couple of quirky things here, Boss. I asked Jules to do an in-depth check on Joanna Johnson. It seems she took that surname from a partner who is long gone. Her real surname is Sherry.’
Donna Small took her feet off the table and sat up straight. There was more coming, she knew it from his voice.
‘The Cayman company that owns the apartment Soul is living in? Well the initial paperwork that came from Cayman said the owner was Joanna Sherry.’
Small made a fist with her free hand. ‘Used her proper name and that fits the double-bluff theory nicely. Soul is working for them.’
‘Agreed, except there was a transfer of ownership three weeks ago. They’ve just sent those papers through. The shares were transferred to a Saran Sherry.’
‘Who is?’
‘Her daughter. And, Boss, remember the woman at the hospital, Saran James? Looks like the same person to me.’
Small sat forward. ‘Address?’
‘Done it, Boss. Southwark. Sent uniform, but no one at home.’
‘Guys Hospital?’
‘Not in this week because she’s on leave.’
‘We need to find her.’ A lightning bolt hit Small. ‘Whoa, Andy. Marston worked at Guy’s Hospital as well. Research.’ Yes, she thought. Finally, it’s cracking open.
Andy carried on. ‘There’s more. Jules scanned her picture and set some searches running across all the CCTV we’ve collected.’ He paused. ‘Saran James was at the demo, Boss. Not right at the front, near the back. But she is watching the killing and when that group leave, they walk straight past her.’
Shit, thought Small. A crowd of people is faceless until you spot the one you want. ‘That’s good, Andy. Run it against the street tapes from all the other murders.’
‘It’s happening now. But there’s a couple more things. There were some more property transactions in that company. I’m getting clarification on what else it owns and where.’
Small sensed something big was coming. ‘And.’
‘The apartment Saran James lives in is rented from an agency. But not by her. The named tenant was Mark Anderson. They may have been a couple, Boss.’
This was good work. ‘The missing partner was in plain sight the whole time.’
‘We’ve been blind, Boss.’
‘No, Andy, they have been very clever.’
Small
was silent, the air around her still. Soul fitted the bill for a serial killer. They had all the evidence they needed to charge her. She fitted the bill for a terrorist playing a game of double-bluff to get close to and kill a VIP.
But still she rankled, and she wriggled, and she niggled at Small’s brain.
Andy said it for her. ‘Have we been looking in the wrong place, Boss?’
They’ve been manipulating us, thought Small. The whole sodding time.
Chapter Fifty
15.45 – Street off the North Circular
Ollie deliberately arrived early and parked at the end of the street. It was one-way, the far end being blocked by the nightmare that was the North Circular. The rhythm of the traffic hummed and roared and buzzed through her open window.
She pushed back the seat and rested her head. The sun poured through the windscreen, warming her body through the new cotton dress. It was yellow, the same buttercup yellow of her favourite dress from the day of death all those years ago. It was another idea to try to burst the dam in her brain that was holding back what she needed to know.
A car went past, turned at the far end and parked outside a boarded-up house. Jo, another female and man waited for five minutes, stepped out, looked around, then let themselves into the house.
Ollie left her car, walked the length of the road and followed them in. The woman was keeping watch and nodded her passed.
Jo was in a flippant mood, buzzing on adrenalin and the mayhem she was about to unleash. ‘Oleander. Good of you to come. Nice dress.’
She removed a polystyrene package from a rucksack. It had ‘Property of Guy’s Hospital’ stenciled across the side.
Ollie walked around the table and confronted her. ‘Did you kill my father, Billy?’ The male stirred, moving closer.
Jo paused with the box halfway to the table. She let it down slowly.
‘No. You did.’
Ollie shook her head. ‘I was there, but I’m not the killer.’
Jo’s face became a slow smile that danced evilly across her eyes. She started to hum and then sing the chorus of ‘Baby Love’ by The Supremes.
