A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series)

by Alex Howard

  But his work colleagues thought he was in France. The only person who would miss him would be Melinda Huss.

  ‘Have you still got your watch?’ he asked Chantal.

  She shook her head. ‘They took it.’

  What would Huss do? thought Enver. He pictured her getting off the train at Paddington, failing to find him. The unanswered calls to his mobile, her rising anger, her returning on the train to Oxford. He clamped down on the thought as best he could.

  Enver was one of those people who would fret about trivial things – what will happen if . . . ? – and construct elaborate, doom-laden scenarios based on nothing but pessimism. Faced with real and terrifying danger, such as the inevitability of much physical pain when boxing and the possibility of severe injury, even worse, he was cheerily fatalistic.

  He had confronted the certainty (at the time) of death and he had been pleased by the stoicism he had shown. He had survived that. It was a good precedent. Perhaps he would survive this. Well, he wasn’t going to worry about it any more than he had to.

  ‘Well, Chantal,’ he said, ‘since we’re here and there’s nothing else to do, why don’t you tell me everything you know about Dimitri and Arkady Belanov?’

  Chantal thought about it. She had little to lose. She looked at Enver, shackled to the other end of the radiator. He had lost his shoes somewhere along the way; she assumed Dimitri had removed them for some reason. After he’d been injected with the ketamine, two men – they had to be twins, they were so alike – had turned up at her flat carrying the empty box with its reinforced base, like a pallet, so a forklift could slide its prongs underneath. She guessed it had been used once to carry something like a washing machine. The unconscious Enver had been jackknifed into it, the box sealed and slid down the stairs, then put into the van waiting outside on the pavement. Then she’d climbed in after him.

  It was all very well planned. Of course it would be, she thought unhappily. Her thoughts were drawn to the oil drums, their squat, sinister shapes unpleasantly suggestive of menace. It was the way they had been placed in the centre of the big, empty echoing space of the warehouse that drew the eye to them.

  Dimitri had left her a bottle of water and she took a mouthful. Only one of her wrists was attached to the radiator; her other arm was free. Enver watched enviously as she drank. He was desperately thirsty.

  ‘I’ve been with Sam, Sam Curtis, for eight months,’ she began. She was determined to begin at the beginning. No one had ever expressed any interest in her life story before and she had a horrible feeling that Enver would soon be in no position to repeat anything.

  The sky as revealed by the row of small windows changed to a deeper and deeper blue and the light gradually faded in the warehouse. There were obviously streetlights because a dim orange glow from outside cast enough of a diffuse illumination to make out close-at-hand objects.

  They could see each other and the suggestive oil drums revealed themselves only as deeper cylinders of darkness in the gloom of the warehouse.

  Chantal had finished speaking and the two of them were silent, Chantal too miserable to think, Enver only too glad to consider a subject other than his own fate.

  There was a lot to think about. The murders of at least four people and the Russians’ criminal connections. The Russians had someone on Oxford Council, they had minimally one tame policeman, they had maybe another high-ranking police official or civil servant or NGO on board. They had the brothel on the Woodstock Road. They had this place. They had a great deal of money and probably half a dozen men working for them plus subcontracted local criminals such as Sam Curtis. And they had a keen brain running them in the form of this vor, Myasnikov.

  Well, I’ve done what Corrigan wanted, thought Enver bitterly. I’ve shaken the tree. I’ve found that Belanov is the watcher and I know the name of the vor. All I have to do now is unshackle myself from this radiator and get out of this building and I can go and present my report in person. He will be delighted. I now know more about this than I ever would have thought possible.

  His reflections were broken by the noise of an engine outside the warehouse. It was a vehicle pulling up and parking.

  ‘Chantal,’ said Enver quietly, ‘if we’re lucky that could be a security patrol. The estate probably has one. I’m going to count to three and I want you to shout Help with me, OK?’

  Chantal nodded.

  ‘One, two, three,’ said Enver, ‘and HELP!’

  The dead air and acoustics of the warehouse made a mockery of their calls for assistance, but they tried again. Then Enver’s straining ears heard something, the sound of a key turning in a lock, and briefly there was a flash of light as the outside door to the loading bay opened. Then it disappeared as the external door closed, and then the electric light in the entrance lobby came on. There was an opaque glass panel in the double doors that led to the lobby and the light, diffuse as it was, seemed very bright after their virtual darkness.

  The doors opened and the giant form of Dimitri stood there, looking at them. In his left hand he held a sports bag. He walked towards them. Enver heard Chantal gasp in fear. He could certainly sympathize.

  The huge Russian walked up to them with a slow measured tread. He stopped a couple of metres away from Enver and stared at him. Their eyes locked. It was like when two boxers met before the fight, that first moment that could sometimes decide the outcome.

  His brutal face, which seemed composed of flat planes, with little that was rounded in it, looked down at Enver in sadistic satisfaction. Enver’s eyes conveyed angry, defiant contempt.

  Dimitri said nothing but slowly unzipped the sports bag and took out a variety of objects. A plumber’s blowtorch. A chisel. A hammer. Pliers. Duct tape. A screwdriver. A lighter. A Stanley knife.

  He carefully lined these up in a row.

  ‘All for you,’ he said to Enver. Enver was silent; what use were words? He wouldn’t give Dimitri the satisfaction of pleading. Chantal was silent too, but she was crying. Tears ran down her cheeks, glistening in the light from the door.

  ‘Who sent you to her and why?’ asked Dimitri, addressing Enver.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Enver, almost conversationally.

  Dimitri smiled. ‘You don’t know how happy I am to hear you say that,’ he said.

  He picked up the duct tape and neatly severed a length, which he attached over Enver’s mouth.

  ‘Where to begin?’ he asked no one in particular. He looked at his array of tools and picked up the claw hammer. He walked over to Enver.

  ‘We start with this.’

  Chantal closed her eyes as Dimitri bent over Enver. Enver couldn’t make any noise but she heard the hammer and she heard Dimitri.

  That was maybe even worse.

  21

  Anderson was waiting patiently for Hanlon near the office building where she worked. He had used his lawyer, Cunningham, with his extensive list of police contacts, to track down her whereabouts.

  The first time they’d met, he’d been in prison on remand for cocaine possession. A lot of cocaine. Hanlon had freed him in return for his help to find a child kidnapper. He had provided the information, and she had tampered with evidence so that it would be declared inadmissible. It was with grim amusement that he learned from Cunningham the blame for this had fallen on several other Metropolitan Police who had also coincidentally been tampering with evidence in exchange for money. Their vehement denials of their involvement in Crown v. Anderson had fallen on sceptical ears. He’d heard that one of them had, in fact, confessed to it as part of a kind of plea bargain.

  The last time he’d had dealings with her had been to give the nod to Iris Campion to let Hanlon know the address of the Russian brothel in Oxford. Now the Russians were back to haunt him. Anderson didn’t care that much. He had a messianic belief in his own destiny. He felt, he knew, that he had been put on earth for a special purpose. Like Aguirre, he felt he was the Wrath of God. To him events were preordained, predetermined by some div
inity or fate, and occasionally the veil parted and God, or fate, allowed him if not a glimpse into the future then a sense of the way the wind was blowing.

  He’d known he was going to see Hanlon again soon before any of this kicked off. He had, by chance, seen her overweight, boxer sidekick in Tottenham a fortnight before, a mere glimpse out of a car window but a sure sign to his mind. She was associated with certain numbers too in his personal numerology. Fifty-one meant Hanlon. It had been part of the number plate on her last car, and he’d seen it outside a restaurant he’d eaten in and on a bus that had passed by in Woolwich, where he’d gone to pick up half a kilo of coke. Finally, there had been the kestrel he’d seen when he’d been hunting down Jackson. The bird, motionless, graceful, deadly, hanging effortlessly in the Essex sky; obviously it was her.

  The boxer. The numbers. The bird. Signs and wonders. Some things were meant to be.

  When Hanlon had appeared at the funeral he hadn’t been remotely surprised. It had been foretold.

  Hanlon slowed her car down as she approached the side road that would turn in to the car park for the office block where the MPU was situated and there, leaning against the sign advertising the names of the businesses in the industrial park, was the unmistakeable figure of Anderson.

  His tall, wiry figure, wearing a dark blue Adidas tracksuit and trainers, conveyed sinister malice. Like Death getting in shape for a track-and-field event. She stopped and opened the driver’s window. Anderson put his hands on the top of the car door and bent his head down to look in.

  She saw his unshaven face, the high cheekbones and hot, restless eyes. His unkempt stringy hair framed his bony features. She was conscious of his magnetic presence filling the small car. She was very aware of his large, powerful hands, the fingers splayed above the groove where the glass of the window had disappeared.

  His gaze took in her face, her hair, her upper body. It was incurious, almost robotic. As always with Anderson, there was a sense that he wasn’t entirely present, as though he were listening to some other voice, like a TV presenter with an earpiece. Now he cocked his head slightly as he looked at her.

  ‘Nice car,’ he said. London accent, proper London, she thought, almost snobbishly; echt-London, not Slough wannabe London.

  She nodded. She had no wish to discuss the finer points of an Audi TT. She waited, then raised an interrogative eyebrow. Anderson smiled, genuinely amused. Most people who knew his reputation needed a change of underpants when he spoke to them. Oh, Hanlon, he thought, you’re so cool.

  ‘Like Slough, do you?’ he enquired.

  She looked him in the eyes. ‘Love it,’ she said with crisp certainty. Anderson wondered what she was doing here. Cunningham’s mate in the CPS had guessed she was being punished, but you never knew with the woman he was looking at.

  ‘I’d like a word,’ he said.

  Hanlon nodded again. Not the Three Compasses. She’d had enough of Edmonton for a while. She thought back to the incident with the painter and decorator; there’d been a pub on the corner. ‘There’s a pub down the road, the Three Barrels. I’ll meet you there, four thirty.’

  ‘Is it nice?’ asked Anderson. He was immediately struck by the recurrence of the numeral, three. Three Barrels, Three Compasses. God is in the detail.

  It was foretold. How could it be otherwise?

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ said Hanlon. She smiled icily at Anderson and put the car in gear.

  He stood and watched as the car drove off.

  Hanlon spent the rest of the afternoon occupied on her official business. She checked through the details of those reported missing over the previous twenty-four hours, prioritizing and making sure that protocol had been followed for the several teenagers who had disappeared in the past seventy-two hours.

  DS Mawson was busy working on budget updates for an internal audit. He won’t have me to worry about. I’m not costing him any money, thought Hanlon. I’m still on the payroll of the Met, as far as I know. At least that’s what her last payslip had said.

  Missing persons was not occupying much of her mind at the moment. Foremost in her thoughts was the link between the dead Taverner and Arkady Belanov via Dimitri.

  She called up Companies House on her screen and did a quick check of Woodstock Wellness Clinic, the name she’d made a mental note of when she’d been demonstrating. A call to Oxford Council had established that was the name under which, unbeknown to them, Arkady Belanov’s brothel operated.

  Hanlon’s dark eyebrows lifted in increasing interest as she read under Overseas Company Information that it was now a subsidiary of Godunov Holdings. Its penultimate filing history was the appointment of a Mr Arkady Belanov as managing director.

  Godunov Holdings wasn’t listed as a UK company, but further digging and a one-pound fee elicited the information that it also had a mortgage on a property in Slough. A warehouse. She noted down the address.

  So how did this tie in, if it did, to the disappearance of Charlie Taverner? According to Oksana, Taverner, researching Russian growth in the prostitution market, had come across Belanov – a man known to Hanlon as being involved in the trade. Belanov worked for a senior crime figure, the vor. Probably the man that she had seen at the airport. The Butcher of Moscow.

  Then there was the other piece of the puzzle. Anderson. If Iris Campion were to be believed, there was some sort of ongoing feud between Anderson and the Russians, again centred around prostitution, in this case Anderson’s Beath Street brothel. A turf war?

  She tapped her even white teeth with the end of a pen.

  Then the attempt on Anderson’s life. The dead man on the roof, a Slav.

  Finally, what was she going to do? In her mind the agenda was simple: find Taverner, or at least his body, for Oksana’s sake. The chances were that Anderson would know where it was. It was he who had disposed of the corpses from Beath Street. If it was unofficial, he might even tell her where Taverner could be found.

  The unusual thing was that so far she hadn’t done anything too outrageous. The deaths at Beath Street were, after all, technically only rumour. Others could open or not open that can of worms. So she could, with a fairly clean conscience, do what she was supposed to do.

  I don’t know, she thought. There doesn’t seem to be any real rush. The dead are dead anyway and there appears to be no threat to anybody living. I’ve usually acted too quickly in the past, was her conclusion. I’ll see what Anderson wants and then sleep on it. Tomorrow is another day.

  Hanlon put her head down and ploughed on with her officially sanctioned work. Mawson walked past her desk a couple of times on his way back and forth to the coffee machine in the corner of the office. He was quietly pleased to see Hanlon settling down. Proof to him that good police work stemmed from the top. In the past Hanlon had either had demonstrably disastrous managers – here he thought of Peter Bench, currently doing fifteen years – or Corrigan himself, too lax with Hanlon. Obviously, what she needed was some useful, undramatic work in a carefully supervised environment.

  He watched with a sense of pride as she left the building and crossed to her car down below in the car park. She’d politely said goodbye and that she’d be in bright and early the following day. There’s progress for you, he thought proudly. Bright and early.

  Hanlon started her car and drove out of the car park. Anderson, here I come, she thought, bright and early.

  The pub lived up to her unenthusiastic billing. The Three Barrels wasn’t a bad place but it lacked charisma. She walked in and immediately checked the layout, an automatic habit. It was L-shaped with the bar at the top of the letter, entrance at the bottom and a room just off on the right that she guessed in the old days would have been a separate bar, now knocked into one.

  It was a working-man’s pub with no concessions to family or women. Four thirty p.m. was builders’ drinking time, most construction workers following an eight-until-four day. She’d guessed this would be the clientele from the pickup trucks which were parked out
side. There were also a couple of small Nissan flatbeds with scaffolding and the scaffolders’ names emblazoned on the sides, which were crammed into the small car park behind the pub. She had glanced down at the pavement and seen there were still splashes of paint on the grey stone from her altercation with the painter and decorator.

  Hanlon had turned the corner and entered the doorway of the pub. As she walked in she could see the backs of half a dozen plaid shirts lined up at the bar, and an old TV tuned to a sports channel.

  Curious heads turned to examine her. The pub obviously didn’t attract a female clientele. One of the faces was familiar, all too familiar despite not being covered with white paint. Decorator Man.

  Hanlon didn’t pause or flinch. Retreat was not an option in her mind. The sensible thing to do would have been to just turn and leave, but she wasn’t made that way. Sensible wasn’t part of her character. When she went to bed that night she couldn’t have faced closing her eyes, knowing that she’d backed down. She’d have despised herself.

  She walked up to the bar and ordered a Coke. There was a strange, almost eerie silence as the builders stared at her, not impolitely but obviously all wondering what she was doing in here, an attractive woman in a skirt and jacket. She guessed it was the office clothes more than anything that puzzled them. A man in a suit would have been baffling, although a woman in here of any description would have been a rare enough sight.

  Decorator Man said nothing, but stared at her menacingly while he rolled a cigarette. The barman said something to him, he was obviously a regular, and he nodded without listening. All his attention was fixed on Hanlon. He was as unattractive as she remembered, his face sneering and piggy-eyed. She suddenly thought, I bet he hasn’t told any of his drinking buddies what happened, why he was coated in paint the other day. He wouldn’t dare say he’d been beaten up by a woman. He wouldn’t be man enough to bear the teasing. He wasn’t the kind of guy to go in for humorous self-deprecation. In fact, she thought, he probably hasn’t admitted it happened even to himself.