The Murder Exchange

by Simon Kernick

‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah, my sentiments exactly. He was supposed to be looking after two of their grandkids today, only he hadn’t turned up. So she phones, asking me if we’ve seen him. Luckily she didn’t know he was working for us Thursday. I said we hadn’t clapped eyes on him since last week.’

  ‘How did she sound?’

  ‘Worried. She said it was totally out of character for him not to turn up, especially for his grandkids.’

  ‘It would have been. He was always our most reliable bloke. I can’t remember him ever missing a day. Did she sound like she was going to call in the law?’

  ‘Not yet, but she will do eventually, no question. And that’s going to pose a problem because it’ll give them a chance to make a link with you. We’ve just got to hope they don’t take it too seriously. I mean, it’s not like a kid going missing. This is a sixteen-stone ex-soldier in his fifties. They may just conclude he’s fucked off on some military adventure, but the problem is, it’s all a little bit coincidental.’

  I had to agree with him on that one.

  ‘Anyway, the best thing we can do is forget about everything that’s happened and put it down to experience.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right, letting them get away with it.’

  ‘This was a professional operation, Max. Three people dead, but no peep from the press, no sign of any bodies. No nothing. It’s like it never happened. Which is exactly the Holtzes’ style. Do you remember that jeweller out of Hatton Garden, Jon Kalinski, the one who did a runner with about a quarter of a million in diamonds? About three years ago?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember reading something about it.’

  ‘Well, I heard he didn’t do a runner at all. I heard it was the Holtzes who had a role in that particular disappearance. Apparently he owed Krys Holtz, Stefan’s boy, a lot of money, which was part of some scam they were both involved in, and Krys was worried they weren’t going to get much of it back. So he paid one of Kalinski’s girlfriends to phone him up and invite him round to her pad in Hampstead. When he turned up, Krys and a few of his associates were waiting for him. They took the keys to his safe, found out where every penny he’d stashed was, then killed him. And the girlfriend. Dismembered them both in the bath tub, cleaned everything up so there was no trace they’d even been there, then took the bits out in suitcases in the middle of the night. Then they went down to Kalinski’s place of business and cleaned him out of everything he owned, and everything he didn’t. Do you know how they got rid of the bits of the corpses?’

  ‘I’m surprised you do.’

  ‘Well, it might be bullshit, I don’t know, but it’s got a ring of truth to it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You ever wonder where all those thousands of maggots you get in fishbait come from?’

  ‘No. I can safely say it’s never crossed my mind once.’

  ‘Well, they come from maggot farms, places where they breed millions of the bastards in these big stinking rooms. One of the Holtz businesses is a maggot farm out in Essex. They chucked the body parts in there and then let the maggots eat them down to the bones. Then they ground down what was left into dust, and scattered it to the four winds. And that was that. No trace. Gone.’

  ‘If they’re so secretive, how come you heard about it?’

  ‘I heard it from a bloke who used to know people attached to them. A while back. I never thought about it too much at the time, not until now.’

  ‘And this bloke, isn’t it possible to ask him what all this stuff with Fowler’s about?’

  Joe managed a humourless smile. ‘Not really. The bloke was Tony.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘The point is, let’s just leave it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I think you’ve convinced me.’

  ‘You’re going to need to get out of town for a bit,Max. Probably a couple of months at least. Until everything dies down.’ He reached into the pocket of his jeans and produced two thick rolls of notes, which he put down on the table. ‘There’s six grand there. The money from the job the other night. Use it to rent a place down by the coast or something.’

  ‘I can’t take it all, Joe. Three grand of it’s yours.’

  ‘And half of Tiger Solutions is yours. Forget it. It’s the least I can do. Let’s see how things go and then, if you need any more, I’ll try and pull some out of the business somehow.’

  ‘Shit, Joe, I don’t know what to say.’ I leant forward and picked up the money. ‘Thanks, mate. Thanks a lot.’

  ‘That’s what friends are for, Max. Remember it.’

  And I did remember it. Would always remember it. Me and Joe went back a long, long way. We were like that, you know. We’d been in the paras together and, even though Joe had been an officer while I’d never risen above the level of colour sergeant, we’d always been mates in a way that rarely travels across the ranks of the British army. I owed him now – but then, to be honest with you, I’d always owed him. You see, a long time back I’d done something to him that to this day he didn’t even know about, but which meant that one way or another I was always in his debt.

  Joe was two years older than me, and towards the end of his military career he got married to a German girl he’d met while we were stationed out there. Elsa, her name was; twenty-one, far too good-looking, and with an attitude to sex that you’d have to say was slap bang on the liberal end of liberal. Why she got married, I’ll never know. She just wasn’t cut out for making do with a one-dick-and-two-ball escort. But the problem with Joe was the same problem you get with a lot of blokes: he was just too smitten to notice. I’d heard stories about her knocking around with other squaddies all through the engagement, but decided it was best to keep quiet about it. In the end, it was none of my business. Joe had made his choice and that was that. I know that might sound a bit harsh, but in my experience no one ever thanks the bearer of bad news, especially when the bad news is about his missus and her shenanigans.

  Then, a few weeks after the wedding, I ran into her in a local bar. She was on her own as well, which was unusual for her. She was quite a looker, was Elsa. We got talking and she told me that she and Joe had had an argument. I didn’t mean for anything to happen, you know, but I offered to walk her home and one thing just led to another. We did it in a field full of bored-looking sheep (twice as well) and I knew I should have just left it at that and hoped nothing was ever said, but the thing was, Elsa had a way about her that could really reel a man in. She was addictive, that was the best way to describe her. We started to see each other regularly behind Joe’s back, doing it whenever and wherever, including in their marital bed, which I know was a terrible liberty. I felt guilty about it, I really did, and jealous, too, because I knew I wasn’t the only one of her lovers. But I just couldn’t stop myself. That’s my only defence, if you can call it that. I just couldn’t help myself.

  Then one day, no more than a couple of months after that fateful night in the sheep field, Elsa’s partly clothed body was discovered in the grounds of a local high school. Her head had been smashed to a pulp with a blunt instrument. There was a police investigation that initially focused on the army base and its occupants, particularly the husband, but quickly spread into the local community as other lovers came out of the woodwork. After only three days, an arrest was made. A nineteen-year-old local bloke, Dietrich Fenzer, had been seen arguing with her on the night she’d died, not far from where the body was found, and it was known that he was one of her lovers. He also had two prior convictions for crimes of violence. A search of his home revealed the murder weapon, a small lead-filled cosh, and he was promptly charged. Six months later he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison, which I’d always thought was a bit lenient, especially as he’d probably be out in ten.

  The whole thing was extremely hard on Joe, as you can imagine, but he held up well considering the humiliation of having your new wife’s numerous affairs aired in public. Thankfully for me, the police never did dig deep enough to find out about o
ur little fling, so my friendship with him remained intact. But the reality was that it was the end of Joe’s army career. He felt that he couldn’t continue to command the respect of his men after what had happened, and he was probably right, especially since half of them had shagged her. Within a few months he’d left the military for good to begin a new career as a security consultant, or, more accurately in those early days, a gun for hire. For me, though, the guilt never completely disappeared, and from then on I always felt that I had a lot to do to make it up to Joe for betraying him in such an underhand way. And here he was doing all this for me. It fair choked me up, to tell you the truth.

  ‘Are you all right, Max?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah. Just dreaming, that’s all. All this humidity’s sending me into a trance.’ I pulled from my pocket a pack of cigarettes Elaine had bought me that morning.

  Joe gave me a dirty look. He was like that, always wanting to make sure I stayed on the straight and narrow. ‘When did you get back on them?’ he asked, not worrying, however, about taking one off me.

  ‘Well, getting shot at by one of my best employees started to break my resolve, but then, after spending most of yesterday running away from various members of the local law enforcement, I thought, fuck it, lung cancer’s the least of my worries.’

  We both laughed and drained our beers. ‘Are you in a hurry,’ I asked him, ‘or have you got time for another one?’ It was rare these days that we sat and socialized, and now I had the feeling that we might not get the chance for a long time to come. It seemed important to make the best of things.

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, course I’ve got time.’

  So I poured the other two beers and we sat back and smoked and talked about the old days: people we’d known, experiences we’d shared, places we’d served. Only once did things go quiet, when Joe mentioned Elsa and his eyes clouded over as he thought back to what could have been. And I felt guilty again and hurried on to the next subject, maybe just a little bit too quickly.

  It was early evening and Elaine had yet to reappear by the time Joe said he had to go, and there was something a bit gloomy about the formal handshake we shared. As if we both knew that for some reason nothing between us was ever going to be the same again.

  Sunday, fourteen days ago

  Gallan

  The station was quiet that morning. The busiest night of the week had come and gone and the cells were slowly being emptied of the drunks, the brawlers, the low-level dealers and anyone else unlucky enough to have had their collar felt. It was another glorious day. The weather woman on the radio had announced chirpily that it was the seventh in a row with more than ten hours of sunshine. Temperatures expected to touch twenty-nine degrees Celsius, eighty-four by the old measurement. No one would be working who didn’t have to, even though crime often went up in heatwaves. Tempers got more frayed, particularly in an overcrowded city; domestic burglary increased as people left their windows open at night. So, too, did rapes, for exactly the same reason. But who wanted to catch criminals on a hot August Sunday?

  And that was the thing. I did. I wanted to find out who thought they were clever enough to kill Shaun Matthews and get away with it. I wanted to prove them wrong.

  It didn’t seem as though too many of the squad shared my wish, or were at least prepared to break their backs over it, and the incident room for the Matthews murder was empty for the second morning in a row when I walked into it at just after half past eight. Berrin was expected in, as was DI Capper, my immediate boss. It didn’t surprise me that neither had arrived. Berrin had been particularly reluctant to work that day because he’d had to break a date, and had only had one day off in the previous fourteen, so it was unlikely he was going to make it in before nine. As for Capper, he was never on time if his superiors weren’t working. Which was the bloke all over. It was a testimony to his arse-licking skills, and the talent he had for creating a wholly false image of commitment and hard work, that he had reached the level of detective inspector on the back of having absolutely none of the skills required. He was a detective who couldn’t detect, a civil servant who didn’t like to serve, and a man manager who truly couldn’t manage. Every word he ever uttered reeked of insincerity, and his habit of backstabbing colleagues was legendary. He had the luck of the devil, too. His predecessor in the DI’s post had been a guy called Karl Welland, by all accounts a good no-nonsense copper who’d been forced to retire after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, paving the way for Capper to slip into his shoes in the absence of any other suitable candidates. Welland had been dead close to a year now, and Capper continued to thrive in a role he genuinely didn’t deserve. Who said life was fair?

  There was a message from Knox on my desk, giving me the telephone number of one of the station’s former CID men, Asif Malik, now of SO7, Scotland Yard’s organized crime unit. Malik had left months before I’d joined, but I knew of him. Everyone knew of him. He’d been the guy who’d worked most closely with Dennis Milne, the part-time hitman. From what I heard, Malik had had nothing to do with any of his former boss’s many crimes and was supposedly as straight as a die, but after what had happened he’d found it difficult to remain at the station, and had transferred to SO7 a few months later. Knox hadn’t been keen initially to get SO7 involved in the Matthews murder investigation because he didn’t want control of the case taken away from him and CID. But when I’d spoken to him the previous afternoon, he’d been interested in the Jean Tanner/Neil Vamen lead and had agreed that someone at SO7, one of whose jobs it was to keep tabs on organized crime figures in London, might at least be able to offer some insights. He’d added on the message (Knox liked his messages) that we were to continue to try to locate Fowler and if necessary widen the search for him, particularly in the light of his continued absence.

  I got myself a coffee and tried Malik’s mobile. It went straight to message so I left one, explaining who I was and why I was calling, and asking if we could meet up.

  After I’d hung up, I reluctantly phoned my ex-wife. The live-in lover, Mr Crusader, answered, sounding like he’d just woken up. ‘It’s the man whose career you fucked,’ I told him evenly. ‘I’d like to speak to Cathy, please.’ He told me angrily to try phoning later next time as Sunday was their day for lying in. ‘Just put her on,’ I said. ‘It’s about Rachel.’

  Cathy came on the line sounding equally knackered and I heard Carrier telling her in the background that I’d sworn at him. You had to hand it to the bloke, he was a born whistleblower. There wasn’t a tale he wouldn’t tell. Cathy told me that she thought we’d got over all the childish name-calling and I apologized, thinking that that would be the easiest tactic, and asked whether I was still having Rachel the following weekend.

  ‘Well, can you fit it in round your work?’ she asked, with a hint of sarcasm in her voice. ‘The last time you were meant to have her—’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ll make sure I’ve got the time off. I haven’t seen her in close to a month. I won’t let her down.’

  ‘You promise? I’m not having her looking forward to seeing you and then you dashing her hopes.’

  ‘He can’t be allowed to do that again,’ said Carrier in the background. ‘Just because he’s unreliable.’

  Not for the first time, I tried to understand what Cathy saw in the bastard. I’d always thought of her as a pretty decent judge of character, someone who knew a creep when she saw one, so it was doubly disheartening to have my view proved so emphatically wrong.

  ‘I promise,’ I said wearily. ‘I mean it. I’ll come and get her Friday evening and bring her back Sunday.’

  ‘Thanks, that’d be nice. Come about six, can you?’

  ‘Sure, six is fine.’ I started to say something else but she cut me short, saying she wanted to get back to sleep.

  ‘See you on Friday,’ she said, trying to sound pleasant, and hung up, leaving me staring at the phone and thinking that she never used to lie in that late on a Sunday.

  ‘Morning
, John. Nice to see you in bright and early.’

  I looked up to see Capper come walking in, his suit jacket slung jauntily over one arm, a cheesy smile on his face. There were already sweat stains appearing on the underarms of his faded yellow shirt. It was, I thought, strange how unpleasant people often had unpleasant side-effects to their normal bodily functions. Perhaps it was some sort of divine justice, a punishment from God. I liked to think so.

  ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ He motioned towards the phone and I wondered if the bastard had been listening in. Probably.

  ‘Fine. And you?’

  ‘Very well. Had a quiet evening in and an early night for once. Done me the world of good.’ He dropped the jacket at his desk, and walked over to the kettle. ‘Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ve just this minute finished one.’

  Capper made general small talk as he prepared his coffee and waited for the kettle to boil, and I played the game, sounding interested and occasionally making comments of my own. The thing about Capper was that he was nice to you if he thought you were going to be useful to him and he clearly thought I had potential, that maybe I wasn’t going to be stuck under him for ever, which I suppose was one good thing. I think he also thought we got on well and, although I couldn’t stand him, it suited me to remain cordial. One thing I’d learnt in the Force was that you never make enemies unless you have to. Pragmatism. That was what it was all about.

  Capper grabbed a chair and sat down on the other side of my desk with his coffee. ‘How did it go with the doormen yesterday?’ he asked, after explaining that his absence from duty the previous day had been down to a ‘family matter’, whatever that was meant to mean. Capper was a bachelor who looked like the sort of person any right-minded sibling or parent would avoid like greasy dogshit on the pavement. He sat there now with a think-of-me-as-one-of-the-guys smile, showing yellowing teeth, etched firmly on his face.

  I gave him a brief rundown, explaining that we hadn’t got much that we didn’t know already, but mentioning the possible girlfriend lead, as well as John Harris, the doorman who’d fallen out with Matthews.