A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series)

by Alex Howard

  Seconds later, Arkady Belanov’s Mercedes swept into the yard, an expressionless Joad at the wheel. It pulled up outside the house and the passenger door opened. Myasnikov had arrived.

  37

  Hanlon had slipped inside the dark kitchen through the unlocked door. She had a small flashlight the size of a pen, but there was enough light from the moon to see. There was an open door into the hall of the house opposite the one that led into the yard. From the inside of the house she could see bare wooden stairs leading up to the top floor and a door off on either side.

  She risked a quick glance. One door was in darkness. Through the bottom of the other one she could see a strip of flickering light and hear muffled shouts and explosions. She guessed that someone would be watching an action movie. Hanlon’s sensitive nose caught the sickly smell of weed and the more acrid tang of cigarette smoke in the hall. The house itself smelled musty, of age and disuse, of damp and coal and a hint of blocked drain. She remembered what Huss had said about the house belonging to an old farmer; it certainly had that look and feel about it.

  The kitchen was dominated by an ancient, soot-encrusted range that had stood there for probably eighty years. It was coal-fired and the flue obviously leaked. The scent of coal dust was overpowering.

  She wished she had some idea of how many people there were in the house. Joad had texted Huss earlier to say that neither Dimitri nor Belanov were at the house on the Woodstock Road. She shone the torch quickly round the table. There on a chopping board was a large ham, half of it hacked away, and the remains of a supermarket Black Forest gateau. Another gateau with a breadknife sticking out of it, like Excalibur in the stone, stood next to it.

  Protein for the muscle-building Dimitri, and no prizes for guessing who had wolfed down a cake and a half with what looked like 500 ml of extra-thick double cream. Belanov’s distinctive spoor.

  So, at least two of them; almost certainly more.

  Encouragingly, there were two empty bottles of vodka on the table too. The more drunk the Russians were, the better.

  Hanlon moved to where the pantry should be, through a low opening to the side of the kitchen. She shone her torch at a door that barred her way.

  This looked promising. Nothing high-tech like the door of the warehouse in Slough. Nothing formidable like Albert Slater’s metal-plated, hinge-bolted portal that it would take a battering ram to knock down. Just two big bolts, brand new by the look of things, top and bottom, and the old-fashioned keyhole by the handle. Enough to keep a man locked in, but not enough to keep a woman like her out. No sign of a key, though. She quickly ran the torchlight over the walls just in case there was a key hanging on a hook. Nothing. She did notice, though, that the walls of the farmhouse were heavy stone. In here there was no sound whatsoever from the deafening TV.

  Quickly she drew the bolts back, top and bottom. She tried the door. It was locked and there was no give on it. Sod it, she thought. She put the muzzle of the rifle against the keyhole, angling the gun so the bullet would strike where the metal of the lock connected with the frame. She slid the safety off. Before she pulled the trigger, she thought with grim amusement of the time she had spent with Mawson practising shooting at tiny targets half a kilometre away. No need to be gentle with the pressure on the trigger now. No need to check her stance or regulate her breathing. Missing was not a possibility. Being blinded by shards of wood or splinters was, though. She screwed her eyes shut and turned her head away as she pulled the trigger.

  The bang was like a clap of thunder to her ears. Thank God for the shooting on the TV down the hall. She broke open the rifle and put another round in. This was going to be a serious problem. How quickly could she reload a rifle? Ten seconds? Five? But she wouldn’t be facing a stationary target, and Dimitri, Belanov and anyone they had with them would be armed. She was guessing handguns, automatics. She was pinning her faith on their drunken marksmanship and her ability to hit what she was shooting at. Plus she had Huss, and while she didn’t like her, she trusted Huss’s ability with a gun. Huss was capable of bringing down fifty to a hundred odd clays fired at different speeds and heights, Huss had shot rabbits, pigeons and foxes. She’d certainly be capable of hitting two lumbering Russians at spitting distance. Danny she discounted. She had seen his heart wasn’t in it and anyone who felt like that was not going to arrive early at the party.

  She wished she’d taken his gun.

  She pushed the door. The old keyhole had looked worryingly intact but the bullet had wrecked the lock, shattering the century-old mechanism. The door swung open easily enough and she shone the torch in.

  ‘Hello, ma’am,’ said Enver. He was sitting on the floor, propped against the far wall. Relief flooded through her. Not dead. She shone the torch on him. Christ, he looked terrible.

  ‘Can you get up, Enver?’

  He was sitting down, propped against the wall. She leaned over and took his arm. He gasped with pain. His hands were handcuffed together.

  ‘Pull me up,’ he said with gritted teeth. He hissed with the effort as he straightened up, and then he was on his feet. She looked down at the shackles binding his ankles.

  ‘Can you move?’ she whispered.

  He nodded. ‘Yeah.’ He shuffled forward slowly. That would have to do for now. He was in no fit state to move faster anyway.

  ‘Come on, we have to get out of here. For God’s sake be quiet.’

  She turned and moved to go into the kitchen. As she did so, the headlights of a car illuminated the outbuildings as the Mercedes turned into the farmyard.

  Hanlon froze. The car stopped and its horn sounded. She and Enver crouched out of sight below the top of the massive kitchen table as hoarse shouts came from the front room, followed a couple of seconds later by three men running through the kitchen into the yard. None of them had looked left in her direction, though they’d passed a scant metre away from where she and Enver were hiding.

  Hanlon rose from her crouch and stood up in the kitchen, just as a fourth man switched on the light.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Arkady Belanov, a huge grin spreading on his face. ‘Look who it is.’ He raised the CZ 85 automatic in his hand, her face clearly triangulated by the sights on the gun, and pulled the trigger.

  38

  Francine Edwards was not a woman you said no to. She had been invited that morning by Serg to meet him at his hotel at nine o’clock to have dinner that evening. It was nine thirty and there’d been no sign of him at the bar. He wasn’t answering his mobile either. Now she wanted to check his room to make sure he was all right.

  She was currently speaking to the manager, equally determined to prevent her.

  ‘I know you’ve called his room, that’s not the issue here. I want to check his room personally.’ Edwards was used to getting her own way and she could feel her temper beginning to rise.

  The manager, Irek Czerwinski, was sensing jealousy issues. He’d had problems like this before. Automatically his eyes dropped to her left hand. No wedding band, probably irate girlfriend then. Twice, when he’d been at the Blenheim Hotel in Oxford, he’d had to deal with this kind of thing, guests subsequently found in flagrante in rooms by partners. He had been left with the noisy, disruptive fallout.

  ‘I’m sorry, madam, but—’

  Francine Edwards produced her trump card. She took her Home Office ID out of her bag. She let Irek study it in detail, let the implications sink in of who he was talking to.

  ‘You let me in there right now or tomorrow I’m going to make sure that an immigration audit team is in here checking every member of staff who works here, right down to cleaners and the guy who sweeps the car park, and if any non-EU employee here does not have a valid work permit I’m going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.’ She looked closely at his badge. ‘Fines, deportations, financial audits, employee audits, the works, and I’ll also make sure, Mr Czerwinski, your boss and his boss know whose obstructive attitude sparked the whole sorry mess. Have I made myself clea
r?’

  Irek knew when he was beaten. Five minutes later he was opening Serg’s bedroom door. As Francine Edwards switched the light on and her eyes widened with shock, the manager thought to himself, Happy now?

  Five minutes after that, a now fully dressed Serg was heading down the M25 London ring road towards the M40 motorway and Oxford.

  39

  Arkady Belanov had sprung to his feet with the others, or tried to. He wasn’t built to spring. He, Dimitri and Georgiy and Grigory, the Yusopov twins, had been watching an old Rambo movie when they’d been startled from their evening’s relaxation by the sound of the car horn blaring outside.

  There was a coffee table in the living room. On it were three old copies of Hustler, the current edition of Muscle and Fitness, a virtually empty bottle of Grey Goose vodka, a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, a bag of grass, some coke, two Makarovs, a CZ 85 automatic and a Ruger shotgun.

  Dimitri and the Yusopovs were up and out of the door in a couple of seconds. Belanov was much slower. With his weight he found getting to his feet a struggle. He was in a lounger chair, which helped, but he’d been lying in it, the chair in its recline mode, his feet in the air, when Myasnikov arrived. His powerful fat arms pushed on the side rests of the chair until it resumed an upright position, and only then could he get up.

  His back had been hurting badly, a permanent problem, and Dimitri had lashed him into what he called his zhenskiy korset, his lady’s corset. He had owned it for a few years now but he was bigger these days than he’d been when he’d originally acquired it, and folds of fat extruded from the sides where the straps were, in strange fist-size bulges. But it meant he couldn’t slouch. He had to hold himself erect, which helped his overworked spine, and its lightweight panel gave him a feeling of pleasurable control over the heavy flab of his gut.

  Underneath he was wearing a pair of tartan boxer shorts and knee-length support socks for his white, varicose-veined legs.

  The last owner of the house, the farmer, hadn’t redecorated the room since he’d inherited Tragoes Farm from his parents, and the wallpaper was ninety years old. It had come adrift from the walls but was still attached at the top. It hung like wafer-thin tapestry and moved slightly in the draught from the door.

  He caught a glimpse of himself in the old, fly-blown mirror that hung on the wall. Even he thought he looked a bit weird dressed like that. The carapace of the corset and his pudgy hairless limbs made him look like a huge beetle standing upright on its back legs, and the shifting backdrop of the walls gave an even more hallucinatory tinge to the image.

  Belanov suspected that it was Myasnikov performing one of the late-night snap inspections he liked to carry out. He pulled on a kimono, rather like Chantal’s, red polyester with a gold dragon motif, and hid the drugs. Myasnikov was quite puritanical. There’d be hell to pay if he saw them. The booze he’d tolerate, grudgingly.

  He picked up the Czech nine mm and stumbled slightly. He paused to steady himself against the sofa. He was drunker than he’d thought. He looked again at his reflection. His face was flushed and his eyes were bulging from the effects of the coke. Bloody Myasnikov. He was in no fit state to be talking to his boss.

  He went through the open door and could see down the short hall, through the open door of the kitchen, the backs of the Yusopovs and the much larger one of Dimitri. They were now outside. The courtyard was illuminated by the powerful headlights of the Mercedes that Joad had left on full beam.

  He strode into the kitchen, where his hand closed round the antiquated raised brown Bakelite knob of the light fitting and he switched it on. It was then that he saw Hanlon.

  Her dark hair was tied back and she was wearing a navy-coloured T-shirt, her muscular arms bare. Her left hand was on the table, palm down; in her right a rifle that she was lifting upwards.

  Arkady was slow and ponderous most of the time, but now he moved with graceful speed. His combat reactions were excellent. Most people had a natural tendency to freeze in situations of extreme stress or danger. Belanov had been tried and tested in bar-room brawls, vicious streetfights, the Chechen conflict and some of Russia’s worst prisons. He didn’t have Hanlon’s fitness levels and lightning reactions, but he had a lot more experience of life-and-death fighting. He and Hanlon were well matched. He had the advantage, though, that he was used to killing and she was not. She had taken two lives, it was true, but only in self-defence. He had lost count long ago. For Belanov, killing someone required as much thought as swatting a fly.

  He pulled the trigger on the nine mm, his arm braced for the recoil from the handgun. The trigger didn’t move. The bottle of Bailey’s, shots of vodka and several joints had affected his judgement. He’d left the safety on.

  Belanov swore at his stupidity and reached for the safety slide with his free hand. Hanlon didn’t hesitate. She raised the rifle and pulled the trigger. The rifle cracked in her hand and the .22 bullet caught Belanov in the chest, knocking him off balance. He fell backwards, his head slammed against the wall and his eyes closed.

  Outside the three Russians spun round at the sound of the shot. Hanlon was briefly illuminated like a fish in a tank by the bright single bulb hanging from the ceiling. She desperately swung her rifle at it, the barrel smashing it, and flung herself down as the Yusopovs opened fire at the window and door. The glass in the window exploded, but Hanlon had hit the floor unharmed and hurriedly reloaded. She crouched under the window sill, rose up, put the barrel out and fired a shot with no particular target, just to make them keep their heads down.

  ‘Stay down, Enver,’ she hissed as she reloaded. She didn’t need to tell him to do that. The injuries he had received were too much for his system to cope with and he had lost consciousness again. He was slumped against the wall, unmoving apart from his laboured breathing.

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Hanlon.

  The Mercedes’ engine roared as Joad put the car into reverse and slammed his foot hard down on the floor. The car shot backwards at speed. Myasnikov, unarmed, threw himself down on the ground, out of the line of fire.

  From her hiding place in the outhouse, Huss could now see the three men and Myasnikov lying on the ground. Dimitri had taken up a position sheltering behind the bonnet of the white van. She couldn’t see him directly but he was resting the barrel of the shotgun on it, pointing it at the kitchen. The rear doors of the van faced her. In front of the van was Dimitri’s motorcycle. One of the Yusopovs was now crouched underneath the window of the farmhouse kitchen, just the other side of the wall to Hanlon, the other twin was about two metres away from Hanlon, sheltering behind the giant rear wheel of the Massey Ferguson tractor.

  Hanlon’s only advantage was that none of the men knew for sure how many they were facing. Dimitri suspected it was Hanlon in there, which was just as well for her. The glimpse he’d caught of an armed figure before she’d smashed the light hadn’t been enough for him to be absolutely sure, but who else could it be? He had a high respect for her abilities, even more so now she’d taken out Arkady.

  The Russians hadn’t been expecting trouble and were low on ammumition. Makarovs only took eight bullets in their small magazines. The Yusopovs had six shots left each in their guns, Dimitri just the two. He didn’t want to waste them and face Hanlon unarmed. One of the shells too was problematic. It was a solid round, rather than one loaded with shot. This was used by Spetsnatz, the Russian equivalent of the SAS or US Navy Seals, although the design was fairly universal and most countries used them, as did armed police. It was designed to punch through solid metal. It was still utterly lethal, but given the chance he’d rather have had the shot. He would have to hit Hanlon direct if he used that. If it made any contact with her, it would be game over, but he’d rather have something that required less accuracy.

  Huss, concealed in her hiding place, had her shotgun, but she would have to break cover to use it and she suspected she would have no time to reload.

  She hardly dared breathe in case the twin, whose back she
could clearly see, heard her. Georgiy was wearing a white T-shirt and the night breeze ruffled his short sandy hair. Hanlon’s finger on the trigger was slippery with sweat. The gun in his hand was black in the moonlight. The lights from the Mercedes lit up the yard as brightly as a stage. Joad had backed it up some twenty-five metres, turned the engine off, jumped out of the car and concealed himself in a ditch out of harm’s way. He watched the proceedings with interest. Hopefully, they’d all kill each other, although he’d settle for the Russians dead. One thing was for sure: he wasn’t going to take any part in the proceedings.

  All was eerily quiet, then Joad heard Dimitri’s voice shouting something in Russian. Joad watched as Grigory flattened himself against the wall of the kitchen and edged slowly along to the opening by the door. Joad could see what his problem was. He had no angle of fire to shoot inside, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be dumb enough to put his head and shoulders through the window. He gathered himself into a crouch and ran across the empty doorway to the other side, where he drew himself up to full height. He held his breath and the pistol in both hands. He started counting to himself.

  One, two, three, four . . . On five, he started to move.

  Inside the kitchen Hanlon had seen the blur of movement as Grigory dashed across the doorway. She guessed immediately what he was up to and what would come. She glanced back at Enver, who had weakly opened his eyes. He nodded that he was OK. He’ll never get out of here without being carried, thought Hanlon.

  Beyond the kitchen table, somewhere on the floor, lay Arkady Belanov’s handgun. She would dearly love to get to it, but felt that she would be too much of a target through the open door. She was also impatient for Huss to act. Please God, let her not lose her nerve, she thought.

  As Grigory reached five, he leaned round the door of the kitchen and fired two shots in Hanlon’s direction. He couldn’t really see where he was shooting; he was just praying for luck. The bullets didn’t hit Hanlon or Enver. One embedded itself in the two-inch-thick old oak table, the other into the wall. Hanlon returned fire, her bullet striking the wall.