A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series)

by Alex Howard

  Viagra, here we come, he thought. He wasn’t troubled at all.

  ‘So, what can I do for you, Ian?’ Lizzy purred, stroking Joad’s thigh and placing one of his hands on her large right breast. He absent-mindedly stroked it like the old friend it was and took a drink of his vodka. The cold, raw spirit burned his throat in a pleasing way and he took Lizzy’s Marlboro from her other hand and inhaled a deep lungful of smoke. His GP had told him to stop smoking, but so far he’d stopped buying cigarettes and just smoked other people’s. He was amazed at the money he was saving.

  He took his phone out of his pocket. Back in Slough, he and Dimitri had loaded the unconscious, bound Enver into the boot of the Mercedes. Joad had spread a tarp across the fabric of the well of the space to stop any blood seeping into the pile of the fabric. He wasn’t concerned with the possibility of forensic evidence, but he didn’t want the carpeted interior getting dirty. He fretted about the car. He tore some holes in a plastic bag and fitted it over Enver’s motionless, swollen head.

  ‘He will doushit,’ protested Dimitri. Plans had most definitely changed. He really didn’t want Enver dead now.

  Joad looked at him blankly. ‘Do what?’

  Dimitri said, ‘Doushit, I do not know word, die when is no air.’

  ‘Oh, suffocate. No, he won’t,’ said Joad. Most of Enver’s blood was coming from his head and hands. He wrapped some plastic sheeting over the raw wounds on Enver’s fingers where Dimitri had obviously been busy. He didn’t want trace blood in his car. No mess in his nice car.

  ‘He’s got plenty of air through those holes. He’ll be fine.’

  He tucked the policeman up in the tarp and closed the boot. He got behind the wheel; Dimitri and Belanov were in the back. Myasnikov had been picked up by someone on the corner, out of Joad’s sight. He heard Dimitri make reference to the Kitayets. The Chinaman. They’d really got some respect for this Chinaman despite the botched assassination attempt on Anderson. He added this fact to his mental file on the Russians that he carried within his excellent, police-trained memory. A lifetime of orderly and methodical information storage stood him in good stead. Like most policemen he had very good recall.

  While he’d been arranging Enver in the boot, he’d switched the recorder of his phone on. The Russians obligingly started talking the minute he switched the engine on.

  Joad’s inbuilt alarm system, even more sensitive than the Mercedes, had told him that crunch time was coming. He still knew very little about what had happened in the brothel in London or the incidents in Slough, not in detail anyway, but he was aware of the disappearance of Curtis and obviously the far from rosy fate of Chantal. The half-dead policeman in the boot of the car was a clear sign that things were ramping up in a highly ominous way.

  Myasnikov and the other two could always hightail it back to Russia. It was all right for them. There were almost certainly people there who would swear blind they’d never left the motherland, while the British police gnashed their teeth impotently. Litvinenko all over again. They’d never be extradited. This luxury wouldn’t be available to Joad. Joad wouldn’t be able to flee; he’d be stuck between a hard place and a rock.

  No sunny retirement in Spain. Carrying the can for a dead cop. Carrying the can for God knows what. I should cocoa, thought Joad. Fuck that.

  He handed his phone to Lizzie, explaining what he wanted her to do. Lizzie, he knew, spoke good Russian; she used to work in St Petersburg. She went next door to her kitchen to transcribe Joad’s recording and he put on one of her porn DVDs that she kept for her customers. He refreshed his drink and watched while two girls pleasured an athletic-looking black guy. He yawned and closed his eyes.

  ‘Oh yes, baby, oh yes, that feels so good,’ one of the girls was saying. ‘Ooh, it’s so big.’

  Joad nodded off; it had been a long day.

  Lizzie rubbed her eyes in the kitchen and put her pen down. Her Russian had been good but it was rusty now. She hadn’t bothered to write down the conversation verbatim, but it was fairly straightforward. The Russians had a man – she gathered, although it wasn’t made explicit, that he was a policeman – as a zalozhnik. She puzzled over the word, then it came to her: hostage. They were going to use that man as a hostage to lure some woman, a bliyad, a bitch, presumably another cop, to where he was being kept. How they would do this, they didn’t seem to know themselves. But they did want the woman.

  Lizzie found it hard to listen to what they planned to do to her. It was a question of revenge, that was for sure – mest, Russian for revenge – but they went into stomach-churning details, golaya, involving naked, graphic descriptions that she found nauseating. She wouldn’t want to be in that woman’s shoes, that was for sure.

  She knew of Belanov and Dimitri by reputation. One of the girls from the Woodstock Road brothel had worked with her and some other girls at a party organized for some high-ranking VIPs, diplomats and senior legal advisers to the British government, who had been at a Commonwealth civil rights conference held at a large, exclusive hotel not far from Oxford. Anastasia (her working name) had told her of the dreadful lives they were leading. A few months later she had seen an e-fit of Anastasia’s face – Do you know this woman? – in a local paper. Dead of a drugs overdose, found in the River Evenlode near Oxford. Foul play wasn’t suspected, but Lizzie knew that the girl from Donetsk had escaped from Belanov and his cruelty the only way she had felt certain would work.

  She wondered what this Hanlon had done to them to make them both hate her so much. The two Russians were keen to keep all of this from another Russian, sometimes they called him Konstantin Alexandrovich, sometimes Miasnik, the Butcher. She gathered that this campaign against Hanlon was of their own devising, that she had humiliated them in some way that they didn’t want to tell their boss about. Miasnik wasn’t to know.

  Then they started talking about yborka doma, house-cleaning, and Lizzie really started to pay attention.

  Lizzie woke Joad up from his sleep in the armchair in a state of agitation. She switched the TV off.

  ‘Calm down,’ said Joad, yawning. ‘What’s the matter?’

  She started talking. Myasnikov had decided on a compulsory redundancy scheme of his own devising of his UK staff. Vse izmenniki umrout. Death to all traitors. Curtis was dead and Joad was next on the list. Joad nodded, entirely unfazed by this development. And what about the man from the council, he asked, Steve Berlington? Him too, said Lizzy, and do you know someone who is Chinese?

  ‘The Chinaman?’ said Joad.

  Lizzie nodded. ‘He’s the one who’s going to do it.’ Joad asked when and where and Lizzie said, ‘In the next two weeks. This Myasnikov flies home soon. He wants to make sure everything is arranged and in place before then.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Joad.

  Lizzie nodded. ‘This man Enver. They want to keep him alive to use as bait to catch some woman called Hanlon. They don’t know how, but that’s their plan.’

  ‘Any idea where they’re keeping him?’ asked Joad.

  ‘Either a farm or a cottage, does that mean anything?’ Annoyingly, it didn’t. Lizzie carried on. ‘Their boss doesn’t know about any of this plan concerning the woman. It seems to be their own pet project.’

  ‘Is there more?’ asked Joad.

  Lizzie nodded. ‘Myasnikov wants them to up the pressure on someone called Anderson. Myasnikov wants Anderson to sell him a place in London in the next two weeks. He’s very clear that he doesn’t want Anderson dead until he’s signed off on this place in Marylebone.’

  Joad nodded, satisfied.

  He did a swift mental recap of his own position: the Russians wanted him dead; the police (as epitomized by Huss) wanted him out or in prison; he had no friends; he had no allies.

  Business as usual then. Ian Joad versus the world. So far, Joad was winning.

  On the other side of things: he wanted the Russians incapacitated; the police off his back; Belanov’s Mercedes and a suitable amount of money to enlarge
the Joad pension pot. He’d also like sex with Huss, despite the potential erectile problems, but he figured you had to be realistic.

  He’d settle for shafting the Russians.

  Lizzie looked at Joad with concern. She didn’t exactly like him, but she felt some concern for anyone she knew who was going to cross swords with Belanov. There was an odd look on Joad’s face.

  Even Huss wouldn’t have been able to fault Joad’s ability to rise to a challenge. It had also rekindled his appetite for sex in a way that the hard-core porn had failed to do. Action made Joad horny.

  Lizzie placed her hand firmly between his legs. ‘My, my,’ she said automatically, with practised skill. God knows how often she’d said it. ‘Is that all for me?’

  As they stumbled up the stairs together towards her bedroom, locked in a firm embrace, Joad’s lips against hers, she realized that the strange expression on Joad’s face was one of happy anticipation.

  He’s madder than I realized, she thought.

  26

  Serg Surikov stretched his long, muscular body luxuriously in the goosedown comfort of Francine Edwards’s large double bed and looked at her shapely nakedness as she checked her emails on her laptop.

  She was sitting cross-legged with her back to him. He gently ran his index finger down the ridges of her vertebrae at the nape of her hairline downwards. She tilted her head left then right, freeing the tension in the muscles at the base of her neck. She grinned at him over her shoulder; she had a goofy, infectious grin that was incredibly attractive.

  Her fingers clicked away at the keyboard.

  Golaya, obnazhenniy. Those were the Russian adjectives. In English naked, thought Serg, nude, in the nuddy. Unclothed, unclad. Other synonyms floated through his mind – bare, stripped. And not just single words but collocations, birthday suit, and slang, stark bollock naked. What a rich language English was. He loved words. I’m a vocabulary junky, he thought. Of course, appropriateness of language was always tricky, a thorny question, he thought, pleased with himself. Could he say that Ms Edwards was stark bollock naked, given that she was female, or would that only refer to men like him? He didn’t like to ask. He’d had ample experience of adverse reactions to questions relating to non-erotic matters while making love. His attention would wander from his partner and he’d follow a train of thought unrelated to sex. It was unpopular, that much was undeniable.

  ‘How long have you worked for Thanatos?’ asked Edwards. She scratched her thick dark hair and the heavy silver bracelets that she wore jangled as they slid down her forearm.

  ‘A year or so,’ said Serg. It wasn’t true; it was a lie, an evasion, a falsehood, a porky. That was so beautiful, he thought, porky, a porky pie equals lie. Rhyming slang, fantastic, although now, sadly, beginning to die out.

  ‘And they brought you over as Charlie Taverner’s replacement?’

  Serg nodded. ‘I did a lot of work for him, information gathering, in Moscow. And, of course, I know Edward Li quite well. He was a good friend of my father’s.’

  Edwards looked round. ‘Was?’

  Serg shrugged. ‘He died. Well, he was killed, in the first Chechen war.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Edwards.

  Serg shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. Another porky, he thought. His hand moved further down her body, gently massaging the muscles that ran down by her spine, and he noted Edwards’s breathing deepen. She logged off and clicked the laptop shut, then turned round.

  Serg’s eyes, she decided, were kind of feline; they even gleamed like a cat’s. He had the sensitive face of a poet with a hint of Cossack warrior, she thought. Was that fanciful? She didn’t care. He was beautiful and she wanted him. She ran her eyes over his long, lean body, his elegant muscular thighs. She traced his ribs with one blood-red fingernail. She pushed her hair away from her face with both hands. Serg’s eyes widened appreciatively as she knew they would. She had great breasts. She leaned her body over his. ‘Darling,’ she breathed.

  Betrayal, thought Serg, as her dark hair brushed his face and her tongue sought his. Stabbing in the back, duplicity, treachery, deception.

  Later, afterwards, Edwards was in the shower.

  He opened her laptop and typed in her password, which, glimpsed over her shoulder, he’d memorized earlier. A nice, strong password. He had a couple of decryption programs on a memory stick but now he wouldn’t need to use it. Just as well, he thought, it’d take too long. Quickly, his fingers an efficient blur, he found an address book and Hanlon’s work address and mobile number. He had what he’d come here for. Bingo!

  He closed down where he’d been and entered the details into his phone.

  Edwards reappeared in the bedroom and started opening drawers and pulling on underwear. Serg watched her, half lasciviously, half running through his underwear vocabulary database in his head. A German word for vocabulary, and Serg’s German was good, was wortschatz, word treasure. And this was, in a way, how Serg felt about lexis – a treasure chest of shiny adverbial rubies and ingots of noun gold and filigreed strings of verbal pearls that he could dive his hands into, like a miser with a hoard of Krugerrands or Maria Theresa thalers.

  Pants, panties, knickers, he thought. But she’s not wearing a thong or bloomers; they’re different. Opposite ends of the underwear spectrum.

  Francine Edwards looked at him sternly. ‘You’re a foreign national,’ she said with mock severity. ‘You shouldn’t be looking at Foreign Office briefs.’

  Serg pointed at the triangle of black fabric she was wearing. ‘They are briefs?’

  ‘They are indeed,’ said Edwards.

  ‘It is a pun?’ She nodded. Fantastic, thought Serg.

  ‘So what is the other meaning of brief? Not, I would estimate, short as in Brief History of Time.’

  Wearily, Francine Edwards started to explain.

  27

  The Huss family farm lay at the end of a private road. Thick hawthorn hedgerow bushes grew alongside the main road and bordered the fields that lay on either side of the lane.

  Huss glanced in her mirror, indicated left and turned into the narrow track, wide enough for only one car at a time. The car jolted over the cattle grid near the road with a rumbling, crashing sound and then she stamped on the brake as a Volvo estate pulled out of a passing place and drove straight towards her. She braked savagely, suddenly furious at this interloper on Huss property.

  Huss’s Golf and the Volvo were practically bonnet to bonnet like two snarling dogs, each unwilling to back down. Huss unbuckled her belt and angrily got out of the car, as did the other driver.

  ‘Hello, Melinda,’ said Joad with an unpleasant smile. His hands were hidden behind his back.

  ‘What the fuck do you want, Joad?’ spat Melinda Huss. It was a sign of how preoccupied she was that she hadn’t noticed who was driving the other car. Unconsciously her fists had balled as she took a step towards him.

  ‘Just this,’ said Joad, bringing his hand forward and showing her what he had in his grasp.

  Huss recoiled in horrified disbelief.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Joad. ‘Take a good look at it.’ He gave what he was holding to Huss. Joad nodded grimly. ‘I think you’d better come with me, don’t you?’

  Huss nodded unhappily.

  ‘Now,’ said Joad, ‘reverse back, let me out and follow my car, have you got that?’

  Huss complied. She followed Joad’s car in her own, her thoughts dulled both by misery and confusion.

  She followed him up to the main highway, her mind full of unanswered questions. They drove down some minor B roads until they came to a car park in the middle of nowhere surrounded by Oxfordshire woodland. There were several vehicles there, all estates, all with either mesh screens in the back or cages to restrain dogs.

  Joad got out of his car and into the passenger seat of Huss’s Golf. She held Enver’s bloodstained warrant card in one hand. She had been crying as she drove. Now her eyes were dry and hard. She wasn’t going to we
ep in front of Joad.

  ‘You want to explain this?’ she demanded.

  Joad said, ‘You don’t much like me, do you, Huss?’ He could see the rage in her eyes. Even Huss’s blonde hair seemed to bristle with anger and distaste. Her blouse was unbuttoned a couple of notches and Joad stared with frank admiration at the top of her breasts. She was a very attractive woman in her own large way. He pulled his wandering attention back to the business in hand.

  ‘If you’d like to listen, Huss, I might be able to help you save Enver Demirel.’

  ‘Go ahead, Joad,’ she said, a threateningly angry undertone in her voice. ‘You go ahead and do that. And, Joad, it had better be good or I’ll rip your balls off.’

  Joad smiled at her. ‘It’s the real deal, Huss. We both happen to want the same things. Now, if you’ll allow me to begin?’

  And he started to talk.

  28

  Enver Demirel came to lying next to a wall in a small, windowless room lit by a single bulb. His hands and his feet were manacled together.

  Another day, another radiator, he thought, staring at the only thing in the room beside himself. He was vaguely surprised to find he was still alive. Memories flickered and coalesced in his mind as his brain started to function again. Memories of Dimitri; memories of Slough and Chantal.

  He sat upright with a great deal of effort and explored his aching body. In fairness, he had sometimes, once or twice, felt worse after a twelve-round fight. That had meant thirty-six minutes of being punched repeatedly. How long had Dimitri worked on him? He couldn’t say.