‘Frank Palmer. A man for all seasons. I have the talent if you have the money. How may I help you?’
*********
5
‘You’re late.’ Alex Koutsatos, the proprietor of MailBox Services, a mail forwarding business, waited impatiently on the doorstep of his shop as a delivery driver heaved a large cardboard box out of his van and dumped it on the pavement. The van usually arrived at six am, before most of the surrounding businesses were open and Koutsatos still had the street more or less to himself. Now it was nearly nine and he was already anxious. Too many around here were interested in other people’s business. Deliveries often attracted attention, and attention was something he and his customers preferred to avoid.
‘Mains burst in Aldgate,’ the driver muttered shortly, and held out an electronic pad and stylus for a signature.
Koutsatos scribbled as directed and waved the driver away. He would have to leave the main splitting up of the parcel until this evening now, when it was quiet. Maybe even tomorrow. This was a bigger consignment than usual, and couldn’t be rushed.
Of mixed Armenian and Ukrainian parentage, Koutsatos had done many things in his life, most of them confined to the darker recesses of his memory. Born in a charity hospital in the northern Black Sea port of Odessa, his life had been at an all-time low and his prospects zero, when he had been shown how to gain entry to the UK. The papers, he had been assured, would pass the closest inspection – for a while. As he had discovered later, this was because the original owner, a predatory homosexual on holiday from Glasgow, was now buried in an unmarked grave in Tangiers.
In return for the freedom, independence and a home in London, Koutsatos had agreed to eventually assume a Greek name and to set up a mail forwarding shop in the capital. There was one major condition involved: he would be called on from time to time to assist in the movement of papers, parcels and, just occasionally, people.
Koutsatos dragged the box inside the shop. It was heavy and he was soon out of breath. Fortunately, there were no customers around. He had just enough time to check the contents and make sure the labels were included. He worked in silence, using a lethal-looking fisherman’s knife to slice through the heavy-duty tape and bindings. He found the packing list and made up five of the largest bundles, putting them to one side. These would be collected by a motorcycle courier for onward delivery to Heathrow. He never studied the contents of the packages, and had never queried – out loud, at least – why they were so important. But once, a careless slash of his knife had ripped into one of them, and he had disposed of the damaged item carefully in the yard behind the shop, in a small brazier.
Somehow, the idea that a few magazines could be so important had never ceased to amaze him.
Ray Szulu stood outside the Arrivals exit at Heathrow’s Terminal Four, holding a cardboard sign. He was engaged in a silent battle of wits with a security guard in a suit and a couple of armed policemen. He’d been hanging about for nearly an hour now, waiting on a delayed flight, and was getting annoyed. Being stared at by a couple of uniforms with guns wasn’t so much of a problem – he’d been there before many times - but the pushy suit’s attitude was getting him down.
‘You’ve got a double pick-up,’ his control had told him over the phone two hours earlier. ‘Outside Terminal Four, not inside, right? Don’t be late.’ The man’s Nigerian accent had rumbled over the airwaves like crushed concrete falling down a wooden chute, making it hard for Szulu to pick out every word. God knows, he thought sourly, what anyone else made of it. He’d just about caught the description and names of the two passengers, and the central London hotel they had to be taken to, before the call had ended. There was also no explanation as to why he had to wait outside, but he wasn’t about to waste time arguing. He suspected they had probably travelled here by car from somewhere else. If so, it was their business.
Szulu worked mostly as a part-time driver for a couple of west London cab firms. He drove limousines when he could get the work, mini-cabs when nothing else offered. And in between, he tried to stay out of trouble.
Right now, though, he was being stared at as if he was about to do something illegal. He knew the cops were only doing their job and protecting the masses, but why were they giving him the snake’s eyes? He wasn’t carrying anything suspicious, and he was dressed in a smart suit with a peaked cap, even if the dreadlocks hanging round his collar didn’t quite fit the image of a regular driver.
He sighed and took another turn along the pavement, skirting a bunch of inbound tourists waiting for their lift, and a straggly line of luggage trolleys abandoned by previous arrivals.
He passed the security guard, who was trying to look tough and failing, and caught sight of his own reflection in the glass doors behind him.
Szulu was tall, slim and walked with an athletic spring in his step and a roll to his shoulders. It was a gait he’d developed twenty years ago in his early teens, when strutting your stuff was more than just for show; it was survival. Back then, he’d been tall for his age, but skinny, and therefore still liable to be a target for the wrong sort of attention. So he’d done what all his contemporaries had done, and taken to looking tough. Most of the time it had worked, helped by having big, useful-looking hands and a hollow stare. Since then, he’d put on a few pounds and learned a few moves to back up the image.
He shook his head, setting the dreadlocks swinging. The beads clicked quietly, but he didn’t notice them anymore. What he did notice, though, was the nagging ache in his left arm. It had healed over long ago, but every now and then, warm or cold, it seemed determined to serve him up with a nagging reminder.
He wondered what the security drone and the two armed cops would say if they knew he carried the scar from a genuine bullet wound. The idea made him smile. They might have their suspicions of him because of the way he looked, but it would prove that they didn’t know anything about him.
When he turned, he was relieved to see a couple of men standing outside the doors, looking around. Slim briefcases, suits, no coats. He held up his cardboard sign and received a nod in acknowledgement.
Thank Christ, he thought, and smirked at the two cops on his way to the car. ‘Hang loose, guys,’ he told them cheerfully. ‘You doin’ a good job.’
*********
6
Frank Palmer switched off his phone and stared blankly through the windscreen of his Saab into the thin morning light. He was parked in a south London trading estate, adjacent to a chain-link security fence bordering a series of warehouses and storage facilities.
Until the call from Riley two minutes ago, his focus had been on a distribution depot a hundred yards away, where three shift workers were unloading an Italian haulage truck prior to filling up a fleet of delivery vans. He knew that at least one of the men was conspiring on a regular basis to load more than the job sheets called for, and with the co-operation of one of the drivers, was steadily plundering the company of a fortune in electronics goods. Palmer had been hired to find out who was doing the plundering and how.
He’d just returned to England after following the haulage truck all the way from a wholesale warehouse in Italy. The trip had been free of incident; no unusual contacts, no unscheduled stops in lay-bys, and no night-time handovers to other drivers. But at least he now knew where the company’s problem lay.
He glanced up at the mirror and wondered if the face staring back at him really looked that cold or whether it was simply the effects of days and nights of surveillance and a lack of sleep. He ran a hand through his scalp, barely disturbing his scrub of fair hair, and felt the nerves tremor all the way down his neck. Just before his phone rang, he’d been fantasising about coffee, breakfast and his bed – in that order.
Now all that was forgotten.
Instead, he had a cold feeling lodged deep in his chest, as if shards of iced water had been pumped into him under pressure. His brain felt oddly scrambled, and he was having difficulty concentrating on the fact that someone once close to him was
dead. And not simply through natural causes.
Murdered.
He watched the men in the loading bay for a few more moments. Mentally, at least, he’d already tuned them off his radar. They would keep. Too greedy to stop their little operation now it was working so well, they would continue for as long as they were allowed to get away with it. If he had to, he already had someone in mind who could wrap this up for him.
He turned the ignition key and pulled quietly away from the kerb. He followed the road through twin lines of commercial units with their shuttered warehouses and darkened office fronts out of the estate to the main road, allowing the speed to build smoothly. Speed, now, that was something else. Speed could help you survive, get you out of a tight spot. Speed could provide a sort of solace, when other things couldn’t.
The speedometer surged upwards, charging past 50 and above with no more effort than the desire it took to go there. The tyres hissed on the wet road surface, smacking through puddles and fissures in the worn tarmac, and the engine noise diminished to a steady hum, as if it were being gradually drained away and left behind by the increased speed. Street lights became a washed-out blur and other vehicles mere furniture, there momentarily, then lost in the slipstream.
Palmer steered smoothly round a battered mini emerging from a side street, catching a momentary glimpse of a pale, shocked face from the corner of his eye. A truck was slow in accelerating from changing lights, and he stabbed the brakes, skimming past a traffic island and a barely-visible cyclist wobbling along in the opposite direction.
He breathed out, his heart drumming, and allowed his speed to drop. His eyes went to the mirror. Not clever, he told himself, his hands tight on the steering wheel. Not cool.
He turned north and found himself thinking about Helen, and what she would have thought of his reaction. He hadn’t got to know her that well, in spite of the fact that their relationship had, for a while, been intense in more than a merely physical way. They had discovered in each other a shared preference for risk-taking, with Helen admitting to eschewing the safety of a salaried job with a national daily and all the perks on offer, in favour of freelance work. Flying solo. Never knowing where the next job was coming from, and never having a guarantee other than a certainty in one’s own ability. Even if the story you were going after might take you out over a gaping chasm with no safety net.
He’d once asked her about it, knowing the offers had been there. She had laughed and said nothing, and he’d instinctively known the answer: the lure of danger and the unknown had been too much of a pull. Like another reporter he knew. Like himself. Kindred spirits.
In the end, however, it had not been enough to sustain what lay between them. With too much time spent apart on their various assignments, it had been Helen who had gradually begun to pull away. She had still been passionate, still the same person, yet with an increasing reserve as time went by, as though she were gently easing herself out from anything too committed.
Finally, she had told Frank that she wanted to remain friends. It had been like a knife piercing his soul, and probably the moment he had realised just how much she had meant to him.
He surged between speed cameras, opening up the car in brief bursts, wary of cruising patrol cars. All the while, a map was constantly rolling through his mind in case he needed to cut off and lose himself amid huddled rows of houses or the mish-mash of small suburban trading estates.
He reached Uxbridge and parked outside his office. It was on the first floor above a row of small businesses. A dry-cleaners stood on one side, and a large, glass-fronted shop on the other. The latter was currently a photocopier display room, but had already changed business use three times in as many months. Palmer lived in hope of it becoming something useful, such as a coffee shop with comfortable chairs and crisply-ironed newspapers for patrons to use all day. It would make the times between jobs so much easier to bear.
A plain wooden door with a scarred front led to a moribund pot plant and a narrow flight of stairs. A scattering of mail lay on the bottom step, and he scooped it up. At the top of the stairs stood a glass-panelled door. Behind it lay a single office with a desk, chairs and a filing cabinet, and a kettle in lieu of a coffee shop. A computer fan purred beneath the desk, and the air was stodgy with the smell of warm plastic. He had gone out several days ago and left it on by mistake. Riley would have a fit. She might be another risk-taker, but he was certain she was developing a thing about carbon footprints.
The room’s appearance was what Palmer liked to think of as lived-in and comfortable, like the jackets he wore. His clothes provided anonymity, a necessity for the kind of work he did. But they also reflected the deliberate distancing of his years spent in uniform - an existence according to Queen’s Rules and Regulations. What he had now, he freely acknowledged, was another kind of uniform, but at least it was his by choice. And that choice spilled over into his workplace, where comfort was key and dust was allowed to settle and accumulate over long periods until he felt concerned enough to move it around a little.
He switched on the kettle and made coffee. A large spoonful and three sugars. The milk had solidified so he did without. He slopped some cold water into a pot plant that was showing signs of becoming a twig. It had been a present from Riley, who seemed eager to prove that even Palmer could make things grow, given time and regular care.
Another one of her presents was a Rolodex file sitting on one corner of his desk. She had insisted that every PI worth his salt had to have a Rolodex. He hadn’t felt inclined to argue - mainly because he’d been quietly pleased at the idea. While he waited for the kettle to boil, he fanned the cards, enjoying the clatter as the cylinder spun, the gentle, dry sound echoing almost comfortingly in the room.
He flicked through the mail. Most of it was junk. He dropped it in the bin. There were two obvious bills and one large, official-looking brown A4 envelope with spidery writing across the front and an older address scratched out in the same ink. Whatever it was could wait. The red message light on his answering machine was blinking accusingly, but when the first one turned out to be a call-centre, he switched it off. They could wait, too. He was too tired, too strung out to deal with trivia.
The coffee was bitter, in spite of the sugar, but Palmer barely noticed. He stared out of the window across the rooftops and breathed deeply, until his mind began to settle, to wash off the night-time torpor.
Down in the street, traffic was building, lifting the day into a semblance of activity. With it, Palmer was beginning to acknowledge that something had happened in the past few hours that had affected him more than anything in a long time. It involved someone he had known and, albeit briefly, cared deeply about.
And now he had arrived at a simple decision.
He was going to do something about it.
********
7
The power base for Copnor Business Publications was a small, first-floor office in Covent Garden, sandwiched between an outdoor activities shop and a theatrical agency. A plate on the wall in the foyer listed a variety of specialist business and trade periodicals. Riley had never heard of most of them. But the list was headed in bold print by a couple of business journals she knew by reputation, and which she suspected kept all the others afloat. The name of the man she had come to see was at the bottom in small type: David Johnson – Editor.
She debated turning round and going to Palmer’s office in Uxbridge. It was the natural place for him to go, and she knew he’d be there, if not now, then soon. It was where he rested, recuperated and sometimes allowed time to drift by when he had nothing more pressing to do.
She shook off the thought. Palmer was a big boy. Anyway, he needed the space, just as she would in similar circumstances. She had told him everything she knew; now it was best to leave him alone to absorb the news and come to terms with it in his own way.
She walked up the stairs and through an open door. A young woman with a shock of red hair and green-framed glasses was just taki
ng off her coat, head craned to one side to study a pile of printed sheets spilling out of a fax machine. She managed to hang up her coat and scoop up the fax pages at the same time, while adroitly switching on her PC and simultaneously dropping a wad of mail on her desk from under one arm. A white plastic prism with the name Emerald in green print sat on the front of the desk, facing the door.
She glanced up as Riley entered, and pointed a lime-coloured fingernail towards a doorway to an adjacent room. ‘Miss Gavin? David said you were coming. He’s in there. Tea or coffee?’ Her tone and smile were relaxed and unfazed, and Riley had the impression that even if this young woman’s day got any harder, she would probably look no different to the way she did right now.
‘I’d love a coffee,’ she said gratefully. Donald’s idea of coffee was weak and warm, and she needed a stiff belt of caffeine to get her brain in gear. ‘Sweet and strong, please.’ Her head was already tight with tension, and she’d most likely have the mother and father of all headaches by mid-morning. But getting through the next few hours wasn’t going to be accomplished on wishful thinking and a couple of cold Smoothies.
‘No probs,’ said Emerald lightly.
Riley stepped through the open doorway into David Johnson’s office. The carpet was worn to a thread and stained, but the computers and monitors in the office were state-of-the-art and humming with activity.
Elsewhere, the place had the appearance of a glory hole, with shelves weighed down by papers, box files and reference books, and the untidy disorder of a serial slob oblivious to the apparent chaos around him. Riley was willing to bet the man could lay a finger on whatever he needed at the drop of a hat.
Johnson was a thin, balding man with a harried air and frameless spectacles cantered to one side as if they’d been put on in a hurry and never adjusted. His tie looked new but was already showing signs of strain, and his dark shirt had the rumpled bachelor’s look of just-in-time ironing.
NO KISS FOR THE DEVIL (Gavin & Palmer 5) Page 3
