The Murder Exchange

by Simon Kernick

  ‘Hold on, Max. I thought—’

  ‘I’m going in the back. Less attention that way.’

  I gave Johnny the address of Heavenly Girls, shut the passenger door, and got in the back with Joe and Kalinski. Joe gave a double knock on the interior panel separating the back from the front, and Johnny pulled away from the kerb.

  Ten minutes later, the van parked up and I heard Tugger getting out to feed the meter. I looked at my watch. It was five to eleven.

  An hour passed, and we sat there in relative silence, occasionally hearing Johnny’s muffled voice jabbering on about something in the front, and the odd bored-sounding reply from Tugger. Traffic on the road seemed quiet. Joe had watched the place the previous night and Krys hadn’t shown. It was anyone’s guess whether he’d come again this evening, but if he did we were prepared.

  I watched Kalinski as he sat staring up at the van’s ceiling, chainsmoking Rothmans. To be honest, I didn’t much like him. He was too flash; a typical robber really. When I’d met him the previous night, he’d been dressed in an immaculately tailored suit, with gold cufflinks on his shirtsleeves and a thick gold Rolex any self-respecting mugger would have killed him for. I don’t like people who think they’re bigshots, and Kalinski definitely rated himself as one. Joe had told me that he’d claimed to have earned more than a million quid down the years through armed robbery and the investment of the proceeds in dope deals. He might well have done, but I didn’t like the way he thought it was worth boasting about. You could tell he thought he was better than us, sort of a cut above us riffraff who had to earn their livings by actually working, though fuck knows why. A thief and a dope peddler. He was hardly royalty, was he?

  Still, as Joe had pointed out, he knew how to handle a gun, which meant he was less likely to use it. The last thing we needed was a shootout in the brothel. The whole thing had to be neat and professional. That way, as always, lay the route to success. And if he didn’t want to say much, then that was fine by me. Johnny more than made up for his brooding silence.

  I sat back in the seat and relaxed, unaffected by the boredom of the wait. I’d learnt how to be patient a long time back. It was one of the first things you got used to in the army.

  Another hour passed. Then two. Kalinski shuffled about, stretched, muttered the odd curse, and at one point told us a story about how he’d once been out with a Lady someone or other who had apparently liked nothing better than to have Kalinski dress up in a balaclava, complete with sawn-off shooter, and pound her from behind while calling her a dirty rich whore. Kalinski seemed to think this made him come across like a stud, but I thought that it would be a bit of an insult if some chick I was sleeping with asked me to put a mask over my face, although in Lady whateverhername-was’s case, I could see her point. Kalinski was not what you’d call a handsome sort. He had a face like a frog and pockmarked skin.

  Neither I nor Joe reacted much to his story and, seeing that he hadn’t impressed us with his sexual forays into the upper classes, he settled back into sullen silence, which was just the way we liked it.

  In the front, I heard Johnny say that he needed a mickey bliss, like some annoying fucking kid. Tugger, once he’d deciphered what he was trying to say, told him to piss in an empty bottle of mineral water, but Johnny said fuck that, he would wait. He didn’t sound too pleased.

  At ten to three I heard a car pull up somewhere across the street and I tensed, stretching, hoping that this was it. But Tugger made no signal. Just another punter looking for an enjoyable end to the evening.

  At three o’clock I heard the sound of Johnny finally succumbing to nature’s demand as he took a leak into the bottle, continuing for what seemed like an impressively long time.

  At five past, I turned to Joe and said that we might as well call it a night. Kalinski grunted something in agreement, and Joe, who’d been half-asleep, nodded. I banged the interior wall four times. Thirty seconds later the engine was on, and Johnny was pulling away from the kerb.

  I lit a cigarette and hoped we didn’t have to do this for too many more nights. But that, I suppose, is what warfare is all about. Hours, sometimes days, of long waiting, then a few stunning moments of adrenalin and excitement that are gone before you know it, but live on in the memory, etched with pride, for years afterwards.

  Tuesday, five days ago

  Gallan

  I hadn’t been down that road since the investigation had wound down all those months ago. It was an attractive tree-lined street of large semi-detached whitewashed villas that meandered north of the Lower Holloway Road past the greenery of Highbury Fields. An oasis of calm in the midst of the bustling city. From where I stood now, looking down the incline in the direction of Clerkenwell, I could see the imposing spire of Union Chapel on Upper Street as it towered upwards above the trees that peppered the bottom of the park in the foreground. So often London’s residents and councils liked to tag the word ‘village’ onto the end of their middle-class ghettoes in a usually futile bid to create the illusion of community and push up the area’s property prices, but the description actually seemed to fit here. You could almost be in the middle of rural Gloucestershire. Even the traffic wasn’t that bad. It was a place that reeked of money.

  Perhaps that was why I felt I should have looked into the background of Tony Franks more. A man who worked in security wasn’t the sort who could afford to live on a street like this. As I recalled, a lot of the neighbours had been bankers and lawyers, the sort of people with serious cash. I thought he might have said something about being part-owner of the firm he was employed by but I couldn’t remember for sure, and there was nothing in the notes to confirm it. At that time, I hadn’t been unduly interested in Tony Franks. He had no criminal record as such, didn’t come across like he had anything to hide, and, rightly or wrongly, simply wasn’t a suspect. We’d always assumed that Robert had been snatched by a predatory paedophile who’d taken advantage of the dark morning and the quieter residential area to abduct his prey from the street. Robert had been a small boy, four feet eleven, and wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a resistance if his attacker was of a reasonable size, and determined.

  The weather was fine and sunny that morning, very different from the bitterly cold February mornings when we’d been doing the house-to-house enquiries on this, probably the grimmest case I’d ever worked on. I stood on the spot where Robert had last been seen alive by an accountant for Citibank who was leaving for work. The time then had been five to seven and Robert had been walking past the man’s driveway as he’d pulled out in his car. The man had recognized him instantly because Robert wore a distinctive woolly hat with a green fluorescent strip running round it. He’d been doing the round for more than six months, and they often saw each other in the morning. Robert had given him a brief wave and the accountant had waved back. He’d started crying when he’d related this story to the detectives because he had a son of his own the same age. I knew how he felt. There was nothing worse than the taking of a child’s life, particularly for a parent. I remembered how grimly determined I’d been to solve the case and bring the perpetrator to justice, and how impotent I’d felt when we’d finally had to scale everything down because the leads had simply not materialized.

  It was difficult to believe that a crime so heinous had taken place on what was such a quiet and peaceful street, and for me that’s the worst thing about policework, the knowledge that effectively nowhere’s safe. In a free country, those with evil in their hearts can roam wherever they want.

  I’d wanted to come here alone. I’d told Berrin that this was because it would waste less time. I’d got him hunting down any further information he could find on Contracts International, and chasing Leppel for the list of Bosnian operatives. The real reason, however, was to give me an opportunity to revisit the scene of what I considered one of my most important pieces of unfinished business, and perhaps take a bit more time to reflect on what had happened that cold, dark morning.

  T
he newsagent for whom Robert did his round was situated on Highbury Grove, approximately half a mile north-east of where I now stood. This street, Runmayne Avenue, was about halfway along his route. He would make his way down Runmayne, which was just under a quarter of a mile long, then come back the other way on Fairfield Avenue, the next street down, before returning along the main road back to the newsagent’s. I was sure it was on this street that Robert had been snatched. Even at that time in the morning, there were cars and people about. Not that many, but enough to expect that if he’d continued the whole length of it he’d have been seen by someone else. After all, he would hardly have been inconspicuous.

  Franks’s house was about a hundred yards further along from the spot where Robert had last been seen and wasn’t one to which he delivered. Slowly, I started towards it, trying to remember the exact route he would have taken and which houses he delivered to, but without much success. It was too long ago. Too much time and too many cases had come to pass since then, and already the life of Robert Jones was passing into ancient history. He would always be remembered, of course, by his parents and his sister, but even they would think about him less and less as time wore on, and to everyone else he would simply become a vague memory, a smiling, permanently young face in a photograph that would occasionally inspire a sad and wistful conversation. It was more than a tragedy, it was an injustice. Someone, some day, would have to pay.

  Franks’s place was the end extension of a huge villa, set back a few yards from the road, that probably housed at least half a dozen professionally spacious flats and which had two grand entrance porticoes along its length. The extension had been built much later than the villa, probably in the sixties, and looked as if it had been attached at a slightly crooked angle. The paintwork was a fading sky blue rather than the white of the rest of the building, making it stand out for the wrong reasons. Apart from that, though, it looked OK. Small, but reasonably well kept. Newish windows had been installed on both floors, and there was a tiny, recently cobbled driveway in front of it with room for two cars at a squeeze. A high stone wall separated it from the main parking area in front of the rest of the villa, as if its occupants didn’t want anything to do with their tattier neighbour.

  Today, Franks’s driveway was empty as I walked up it to the front door. Through the net curtains, I could make out a clean, well-furnished interior but no obvious signs of life. I rang the doorbell but no one answered, then looked through the letterbox. There was a pile of tacky-looking brochures and various other bits of junk mail on the carpet – at least a week’s worth, probably a lot more. It looked like he might have moved out.

  I went round to the nearest entrance portico and saw that there were buzzers for three flats on the wall outside. Beneath the buzzers was a sticker saying that the building was protected by CCTV cameras – not that I could see any in evidence. I rang the first two but got no answer, so I tried the third. I needed to ring several times but eventually a moderately annoyed female voice came on the line. ‘Yes?’ she said in an accusatory voice. I identified myself, and explained that I was here as part of an inquiry. Her voice immediately lost its initial hostility, and she buzzed me in. Hers was the ground-floor flat, and she came out of the door to greet me, clad only in a dressing gown and slippers. She was about thirty with short blonde hair, and nice-looking in a Sloaney sort of way. In a dressing gown as well. Perhaps I was going to have to watch out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize you were the police. I thought you were here to sell me something.’

  ‘I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not,’ I told her.

  She smiled. ‘I don’t know either. Anyway, please, come in. You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve got a terrible cold. That’s why I’m not working.’ She sniffed loudly to prove it, then stepped aside to let me in. ‘I hope it’s nothing about David,’ she added, leading me into a spacious, well-furnished lounge.

  ‘David?’

  ‘My husband.’

  I took a seat and she sat down on the sofa opposite, her legs tightly pressed together. Somehow, I got the feeling I was safe from any predatory advances. ‘No, it’s nothing to do with him. It’s about your neighbour to the left, a Tony Franks?’

  ‘Oh yes, Tony. Nice-looking guy. Dark hair.’ Her tones were clipped and upper-class. This girl had definitely not been educated at the local comprehensive. Mind you, who had round here?

  I nodded. ‘That sounds like him. This is a photo.’ I removed the mugshot from my jacket pocket and briefly showed it to her.

  ‘Oh yes, that’s him.’ She excused herself while she sneezed into a tissue she’d removed from the pocket of the dressing gown. ‘Why? Has he done something wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know is the short answer. Possibly.’

  ‘I thought it was funny.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, the way he moved out. It was all quite sudden.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘I don’t know for certain. I didn’t actually see him go. All I know is about a week ago a man turned up in a van and took some stuff away.’

  ‘This man, had you ever seen him there before?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I hadn’t. On the day he came I was outside putting the rubbish out for the dustmen when I saw him loading it up. I don’t normally take too much notice of what the neighbours are up to – I mean, you don’t in London, do you?’ I nodded, thinking that that was probably the root cause of so much that was wrong with it, and waited while she continued. ‘But there are quite a few burglaries around here, as you probably know, so I asked him what he was up to, and he told me he was Tony’s brother.’

  ‘Those were his exact words: “I’m Tony’s brother”?’

  She nodded. ‘That’s right, so I thought he must have something to do with him. He was friendly enough, too, not at all furtive, as you’d expect a burglar to be.’ She paused to blow her nose, once again apologizing. ‘He said that Tony was moving out, and he was helping with the removals. There wasn’t a lot I could say to that. I asked him if Tony would be coming along later and he said he would. But he never did.’

  ‘You never saw Mr Franks again?’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen him for two or three weeks at least.’

  I made some calculations. It was sixteen days since Shaun Matthews’s murder. The timing sounded very convenient. Now for the big question. ‘Did you take down the registration of the vehicle this gentleman was driving?’ I mentally crossed my fingers.

  ‘Yes, I did. I don’t like to be a busybody and I know it’s none of my business, but I memorized it while I was speaking to him, just in case, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper as soon as I got back in.’ She stood up, sniffing loudly. ‘Now, what have I done with it? Excuse me for a minute, will you?’

  She wandered out of the room and I hoped I was going to get a break. Even if it proved difficult to locate Franks, whoever was moving his stuff had to have some information as to his whereabouts. Somehow I knew I was on the right track. Call it instinct, if you like. It was just a matter of continuing to pursue the scent while at the same time persuading my superiors that it was a worthwhile investment of my time. This would be the hardest part, particularly now that it looked like the area’s criminals were beginning to wake up from the previous week’s inactivity. An aggravated burglary the previous night in which a pregnant woman had been threatened with a knife by two intruders, who’d threatened to cut her open if she didn’t reveal the whereabouts of her valuables, had already caused the chief super yet another serious resources headache. What with the continued clamour over the assault on the young girl, things were getting extremely stretched. Already Knox had hinted that the murder squad was likely to be reduced still further in the next twenty-four hours, so time was of the essence.

  ‘Here it is,’ she said, coming back in the room with a piece of paper. ‘I wasn’t sure whether I’d thrown it away or not, but it was in the drawer.’ She handed it to me, and I p
ut it in my top pocket, thanking her.

  ‘Can you describe the man for me, Miss … ?’

  ‘Deerborne. Mrs Judy Deerborne. I’m not too good at this, but I’ll give it a go. He was quite well built. Sort of tough-looking, which was why I wasn’t entirely sure about him. About fortyish, maybe a couple of years older, five nine or ten, and I think he was bald, although it wasn’t easy to tell, because he was wearing a cap. He also had quite a big head.’

  ‘I disagree with you,’ I said, ‘I think you are good at it.’ I was glad I’d worn the suit I’d been wearing yesterday because it still contained the photograph I’d shown to Martin Leppel. I fished it out now, and handed it to her. ‘It wasn’t the man on the right, was it? The one in the suit?’

  She looked at it closely for a few seconds. In the photo, the Slap had a cap with him but was holding it in his hand rather than wearing it. His bald dome seemed to stand out a mile.

  Finally, she looked up. ‘You know, I think it is. I can’t be a hundred per cent sure – it’s not a brilliant photo, is it? But, yes, it looks a great deal like him.’

  Interesting. ‘You’ve been here for how long, Mrs Deerborne?’

  ‘My husband and I bought this place ten years ago. I think it cost us about a third of what it would go for now.’

  ‘That seems to be the case for most of London. And how long has Mr Franks been your next-door neighbour?’