by Parker Bilal
‘I’m tempted to say he’s grown up, but I’m not sure that’s true.’ Drake had a vague recollection of a spotty teenager from a few years back. ‘Now he’s partying with the big boys.’
‘That one gets around.’ Zazie leaned on the counter. ‘One night it’s the Russians, the next it’s the Albanians. He’s all over the place. I keep telling Papa he needs to get rid of these clowns and go for a better class of client. But what can you do? Money talks, right?’
‘Talking your dad out of money would be like trying to persuade a leopard to change its spots.’
That brought him a laugh. Drake had a feeling that so long as Papa was calling the shots this was about as classy as it was ever going to get. He had been hoping for a quiet drink but the noise was a distraction so he drained his glass and was getting up to leave when somebody thumped into him from behind. He swung round to see a pale man swaying on his feet. He was in his early twenties. Dark hair, cut long at the front and combed back, the sides shaved to a bristle. A poster boy for the Hitler Youth, like something from another age.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, before staggering away.
Drake didn’t react. The man was clearly drunk. He watched him cut an unsteady path back towards the group in the corner.
‘Who was that?’ he asked Zazie. She had no idea. She looked over his shoulder and he turned to see Grayson Brodie walking towards him.
Brodie was small, compact and silent. His prematurely grey hair was shaved down to the length of metal filings. He walked casually, head down, hands hanging loosely by his sides. He gave the impression he wasn’t paying attention, but Drake knew that he was registering every person in that room with every step that he took, evaluating the risk they posed.
‘Cal.’
‘How’s it hanging, Brodie?’
‘You know me, can’t complain.’ The two men shook hands. Brodie slipped onto the bar stool alongside Drake and ordered drinks for both of them.
‘Are you babysitting tonight?’
‘You could say that.’ Brodie glanced over at the party and gave a weary shake of the head. ‘Either they’re getting younger or I’m getting older.’
‘Who’s the one in the middle, big feller?’
Brodie glanced across, turning his gaze on the large man who was wearing an open-necked black shirt that was tight around massive biceps.
‘Khan.’ Brodie sucked his teeth. ‘Used to be a heavy for the Karachi mob, working for Hamid Balushi. As nasty as they come. Now I hear he’s a free agent.’
‘Is he working for Donny’s family now?’
Brodie spread his hands wide. ‘You know me, Cal. I don’t ask questions.’
Which was true. The one thing Brodie was known for was his discretion. You could tell him anything and he would take it to the grave with him, so long as you had his loyalty. That was something that counted for him. Brodie would be loyal until the moment he wasn’t; the moment he felt his trust had been betrayed.
Drake took another long look at Khan. His thick straight hair was cut into a foppish fringe that hung down over his face. The sides of his head were shaved clean. He was busy throwing money at the girl, who was bending over and shaking her hips at him. Drake knew he’d seen him before but couldn’t remember the context. On his neck there was a dark tattoo of slashes and curves that looked like Arabic calligraphy, or in this case probably Urdu. Drake studied it, filing it away in his memory.
It was certainly an odd group of misfits. Difficult to say what they were doing together.
‘So, how’s the private eye thing working out for you?’
‘Too early to say.’
Brodie was grinning. ‘I’ll give you six months, then you’ll be begging to be reinstated.’
‘You don’t think I’ll last.’
‘Once a copper, always a copper.’
You might mistake Brodie for being slight, but it was all muscle and sinew. And he was a fast mover. Drake had known him since his days in the army, but since then Brodie had carved a career for himself as a hard man, a problem solver. You wanted something done and no questions asked, Brodie was your man.
‘I guess it means I don’t have to worry about having to take you in any more.’
Brodie lifted his glass in salute. ‘Ah, you’d never have done it.’
‘Now we’ll never know.’
When he had first arrived in Iraq all those years ago, a complete rookie, trying to understand what he was doing patrolling a foreign country carrying an assault rifle, it was Brodie who had helped Drake to keep it together. ‘There are moments in life, kid,’ he told him, ‘when the bigger picture can kill you. Focus on the details. The small things are what’s going to save your life. Every time. The small things. Everything else is a distraction.’
How many times had Brodie saved his life? Hard to say. Directly, indirectly. His words would come back when you were under stress and they made you think it through, one more time. Often that meant the difference between life and death. Keep your eyes wide. Trust nobody. Double check everything. Sergeant Grayson Brodie, as he was then, was easily the most experienced man in the unit. None of the officers, with their Sandhurst training and their public school education, dared to make a move without his blessing. Brodie knew the terrain, but more than that he knew people. Didn’t matter which side they were on or where they came from. It was an instinct for human nature. He knew who to trust and who to be wary of. Drake had seen him drinking with the men like there was no tomorrow, and going from that to stone cold sober in a matter of seconds when mortar shells started coming over the perimeter.
Like many others, Drake included, Brodie had lost his faith. He’d gone out there believing in the mission, in the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the moral duty to put an end to Saddam’s reign of terror. What he saw told him there was a lot more at stake, things he could barely comprehend. He came back a broken man. It was only a matter of time before he drifted out of his marriage, his home, wandering from one job to another until he wound up living in the streets. After that there was a stint abroad, working as a military contractor.
The two men had finally come face to face again, years later, staring each other down across a darkened container park in Dagenham. They were on opposite sides. Drake was undercover and Brodie had become a hired hand for Goran Malevich. If either of them had acknowledged at that moment that they knew each other, both would probably have died, so they walked away without even a flicker of recognition passing between them. If it had been anyone else, Drake would have been worried, but with Brodie, somehow he knew he was safe.
Drake had spent six months posing as a small-time drug dealer eager to move up in the world. He had used the name Nash and was at that moment looking to unload a shipment of high-grade cocaine. It bought him a way in to the organisation.
Fitting into Goran’s world wasn’t all that hard. Drake had come back from Iraq feeling rage and anger at the people who had sent him out there. Not knowing what he wanted to do except that he didn’t want to go back to his old life. He passed straight through police training without a hitch and soon gained himself something of a reputation. Running in when caution suggested otherwise. When the offer came that they were looking for someone to go undercover he was the first to volunteer. He was way more qualified than any of the other candidates. That much was plain. He had the right profile and the warnings about Goran only made him want it more. He was no longer afraid. It felt as though he’d been through fire. What could he possibly fear?
‘You hear about the head they found on the Tube?’
‘Yeah, it was on the news.’ Brodie’s eyes never left the stage, where a slim blonde was turning cartwheels in the spotlight. ‘Makes you wonder what this country is coming to.’
‘Remember Zelda?’
Brodie looked round sharply. ‘Come on, man, that’s water under the bridge.’
‘I thought so too, until I saw it.’
Brodie swore under his breath. ‘That’s pol
ice business. I thought you were out of it.’
‘You know how it is. Unfinished business. I thought I’d take a poke around.’
‘Well, mind it doesn’t turn around and poke you back.’ Brodie took a long swig from his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Are they sure it’s her?’
‘The pathologist is trying to match it to the corpse that washed up on the beach.’
‘That was four years ago.’
‘The case was unresolved, so they kept her in storage.’
Brodie swore again. ‘Look, Cal, just take my advice and leave it alone.’
‘She didn’t deserve it, not like this.’
‘Listen to me, she knew what she was doing. She had been in the game long enough. She knew what Goran was like.’
Drake slipped a sheet of paper onto the counter. It was his copy of the same newspaper clipping that had been found wrapped around the head.
‘Someone is making this personal,’ he said.
Brodie glanced at the clipping. ‘Who?’
‘Whoever is responsible for leaving her head on the train. It was wrapped in that.’
Brodie ran his eyes over the article. ‘Might be a coincidence.’
‘Doesn’t feel like a coincidence.’
‘Makes no sense. I mean, why hold on to her for all this time?’
‘Maybe this is the first chance they’ve had.’
‘Doesn’t sound right. I mean, at the time, you went over all of this, right?’
‘Right.’
‘This isn’t how Donny or any of the others would play it. You’d be hanging upside down in a warehouse somewhere with a welding torch to your head.’
‘So how do you explain this?’ Drake tapped the paper.
‘How? It’s a fucking psycho, is how.’ Brodie threw up a hand and called for another round of drinks. ‘Take my word for it.’
‘I still keep coming back to the question of who killed her.’
‘Well, obviously the wacko has been running around with her head for four years. What did he do with it, keep it in the freezer alongside the fish fingers?’
‘It might not have been the same person.’
‘So what?’ Brodie frowned. ‘Somebody came along and just cut her head off?’
‘I don’t know how it went down. I’m just asking questions.’
‘Right. You keep doing that and it’ll get you into trouble.’
‘That’s the point.’ Drake indicated the clipping. ‘I’m already in this. Someone clearly holds me responsible for her death.’
‘You mean, they’re coming after you? But why?’ Brodie scratched the tip of his nose. ‘Unless they think you killed her.’
Loud whooping brought their attention back to the party across the room. In the middle of the fray Zephyr, Donny’s nephew, was surrounded by women. The kind that seemed to have been constructed out of male sexual fantasies. They all had straight, shiny hair and skimpy dresses. Over-inflated breasts, long legs and short attention spans. They had practised laughs that displayed a lot of even teeth and their English was barely good enough to order a drink. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Zephyr was like a pig in muck. He was sitting back, arms around a pair of them, ordering more champagne. He didn’t even seem to mind the disturbance.
‘What happened to the rest of Goran’s men after he died?’
‘It’s water under the bridge, Cal, let it go.’
‘He left a lot of action behind and Donny scooped up a fair portion of it.’
‘You know Donny, he hates to see opportunity go to waste.’ Brodie licked his lips. He wasn’t the kind of man you wanted to play poker with. He gave little away. But he did have a conscience. A rarity in his line of work.
‘You were one of the few people who was there back then. You were on the inside.’
‘It wasn’t a good time. I was in a bad way. My head was messed up.’
‘Brodie, help me out here. You’re the only one from that time I can go to.’
‘Look, we’re mates, right? We’ve been through shit. We got through it because we had each other’s backs. That counts for something, right?’
‘Sure. I’m not trying to put this on you.’
‘Goran’s men were like a tribe. They stuck to themselves and didn’t let us mere mortals close to the inside track.’
‘If it wasn’t Goran or Donny, then who?’
‘It’s over, Cal. Move on.’
There was a crash as one of the girls toppled off the table into the lap of the big man, Khan. She spilled something onto his jeans. Angrily he tossed her onto the floor. Then all of a sudden it was turning nasty.
‘Shit!’ muttered Brodie. ‘I’d better sort this out.’ He rested a hand on Drake’s shoulder. ‘If I think of anything I’ll give you a call.’
Drake watched him go, slipping back through the crowd. He wondered in passing how many men Brodie had killed. Under the quiet stillness of him there was the smell of death. He’d seen and done things that would give most people a breakdown. There was no doubt he’d been through some hard places. In Iraq, but also after he left the service. As a contractor, Brodie had seen action all over. Afghanistan, Syria, Mali. Drake only knew a few of the stories.
As he got up to leave, something made him turn around. Across the room, in the shadows, behind the melee, he caught a glimpse of the young man with the Hitler Youth haircut who had bumped into him earlier. He was staring right at Drake.
13
The shoe box full of old photographs was tucked into the back of a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. Crane sat down cross-legged on the floor and lifted the lid. She wasn’t by nature a sentimental person. Her patience for that kind of poring over past events was limited, to say the least. She had always been so. There was nothing but the present. So perhaps she was changing as she was getting older. She would soon pass the forty mark and maybe that was significant. Birthdays were not something that she celebrated. They were as meaningless to her as Christmas.
She hadn’t always felt that way. She still had fond memories of Ramadan in Tehran with her grandparents. The whole house would be full of relatives. So many aunts and uncles whose names she could barely remember. But they all knew who she was; the little girl who lived in England and whose Farsi was a clunky hash of misunderstandings topped with a bad accent. But she was one of them. They made that clear. She belonged. After the breaking of the fast the long nights were spent wandering the lighted avenues. She recalled squares full of people enjoying the cool night air, the endless rounds of greetings, the pastry shops and ice-cream parlours that buzzed with cheerful energy. It was like a month-long party and everyone was in on it.
The box contained a jumble of pictures, snapshots saved from her childhood along with prints from before the digital era struck. The earliest ones were colour faded, tinged now with a reddish orange hue. One showed her as a little girl with long black hair, standing next to the penguin enclosure in Regent’s Park. That was always her favourite spot. She had even gone there a few times as an adult. The picture would have been taken by her father. She held it up, closer to the light to see better. Her mother looked younger than she remembered. How old would she have been then? Probably not much older than Ray was now.
The last time Crane saw her mother was in Tehran in 1995 when she was taken away by the Republican Guard. She was a few months shy of sixteen at the time. Her father was teaching at the university. Both of them were. What she didn’t know then was that Edmund Crane was also an agent for British Intelligence.
Twelve years later found Crane in Iraq in 2007, working for the SIS herself, assisting Stewart Mason. She was assigned to a special investigations unit: Directorate for Operational Research and Intelligence Strategy (DORIS), which was a long-winded title for a unit that nobody really knew the purpose of. She found herself working alongside an international team from a range of different backgrounds. The idea being to bring their varied experience to bear on the way the war was going, t
o pinpoint weaknesses and, above all, to make predictions about what was to come. The war in Iraq was into its fourth year. The insurgency was changing up its tactics, metamorphosing into something that would eventually become Islamic State. Their job was to look under every rock, to talk to prisoners, soldiers, civilians, ex-Baath officials. All with the idea of building up a composite of the mental state of this nation which was unravelling under the pressure of the occupation. People no longer had jobs, they were frightened for their future, their children.
Another picture from around the same time showed all three of them. This was when they were visiting Tehran, staying in borrowed accommodation or with friends. These were her father’s rebellious days, when he had turned his back on his family and refused to take their money. Her mother found work teaching at Tehran university and father was writing a novel instead of finishing his doctorate on Macaulay. He still dressed like a hippy in those days, his long blond hair already thinning to reveal the bald patch that would eventually take over the top of his head. Looking at the picture now, she imagined it was easy to see what her mother saw in him. You could see in his smile that he was still open, easy-going. All of that was to change. It must have been around then that he was recruited.
They were afraid of bombs, of kidnapping. These kinds of things could lead people into dangerous areas. DORIS’s job was to identify what those areas were and who was being drawn to them.
The picture she held in her hand now showed a group of them. It was taken on one of their regular Friday barbecues. Their forward operating base was a handful of shipping containers set in the corner of a US military base outside Fallujah. They were close to the east-west highway that ran from Baghdad to Amman. The photograph was a print one of the others had made and sent to her. She was the only woman in the picture. They were all holding up bottles of beer and smiling. Her eye was drawn to the bearded man standing next to her. Orlando Araya. A Mexican American who had worked for the DEA before transferring to counter-terrorism. He was brought in as a specialist in urban warfare and indoctrination. For a time they had been close, although she had never really been sure whether he was completely honest with her about who he was working for. Orlando was smart. He played his cards close to his chest. They had a thing that, like everything out there, was built on the fact that all was temporary. He was transferred to Afghanistan and then disappeared below the surface. She had no idea where he was now.
