Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  ‘Forget it. It wasn’t your fault. But I’ve got to be honest with you, there’s a serious ring of bullshit about what he was telling you.’

  ‘Look, I—’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know. You’re telling me the truth.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I’m sure you are, but there’s got to be a lot more to it than that. If Fowler was carrying the deeds to the club in the case he took to that meeting, then why kill him before he’s signed them over? And, in fact, why kill him at all? Particularly when he’s got people with him. There’s a lot of unanswered questions.’ I was silent for a moment. ‘But at least there’s one you can answer.’

  ‘I’ve told you, Max. Don’t get involved. It’s not worth it.’ She stared me down as she spoke, in the way my mum used to do. The expression said: Don’t argue. I thought she’d have probably made a good Miss Whiplash, and a lot of judges and politicians would have paid good money to be dominated by someone as good-looking as her, but I really wasn’t in the mood to be told what to do.

  ‘I want to know who killed my friend, Elaine. And who tried to kill me.’

  ‘Why? It won’t help you. I promise you, there’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  She stared straight at me. ‘The Holtzes.’

  That stopped me dead.

  ‘You know who they are, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I know the Holtzes.’

  Everyone who was anyone in that part of town knew the Holtzes, or who they were anyway. Led by their reclusive founder, Stefan, who was now on the wrong end of middle age, they were one of north London’s premier crime families, rulers of a criminal empire that was worth tens of millions. And evil bastards, too. Word had it that they’d been involved in dozens of murders as they’d fought to stay at the top, but even after years of police attention, they remained intact. If anyone could have staged what had happened the previous night, it was the Holtzes.

  Elaine sighed. ‘So, now you see why I said don’t get involved.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, as reality sank in. ‘No wonder I almost got killed.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to make you a part of it,’ she said defensively. ‘I didn’t know it would be you, and I honestly didn’t think that they’d stoop to killing him, or your friend.’

  ‘It’s the Holtzes, for Christ’s sake. They’re capable of anything.’

  She shook her head wearily. ‘Fuck, what a mess. What the hell am I going to do now?’

  ‘Keep quiet about it. That’s the best thing. If they find out you knew too much about what was going on, well…’ I tailed off, knowing I’d made my point. ‘Anyway, I’m the one who’s got things to worry about. Not only am I on the run through no fault of my own, I’m a witness, too. I saw two men die. The law are going to be very interested in getting me to talk. The Holtzes are going to be very interested in making sure I don’t.’

  ‘But you couldn’t pin anything on them, could you? It was your friend, Tony, who did the actual shooting, so he’s the only one who could actually get in any trouble.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, they might not see it like that. Especially if the coppers manage to trace the blood on the back seat of my car back to Fowler. If that gets public then I’m going to be on the Holtzes’ hitlist, aren’t I? As well as everyone else’s.’

  We didn’t speak for a few moments. She sat there, watching me now, puffing on her cigarette. It was difficult to tell what she was thinking behind the dark eyes.

  ‘I feel partly responsible for what happened,’ she said eventually. I didn’t bother telling her that she was partly responsible. At that moment I needed all the friends I could get. ‘You can stay here for a couple of days if you want, until things die down.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Do you want a drink? A proper one?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I need one. What have you got?’

  ‘Most things. What do you want?’

  ‘A brandy, please. And a beer, too, if that’s all right.’ I thought that I might as well take advantage of the hospitality on offer, not sure how long it was going to be lasting. She didn’t look like she’d taken offence and smiled as she got up and kicked off her shoes. Her toenails were painted a bright red, which they always say is a sign of passion. I began to stop thinking about my current woes and instead concentrated on more immediate possibilities.

  She went into the kitchen to make up the drinks and I took my shoe off and casually followed her in. ‘You’re looking really good, you know,’ I said, thinking that I was going to have to buy a book on chat-up lines or at least put more thought into them. The thing is, I’ve always been a man who preferred the more direct approach. If I thought I was in with a chance – and to be honest with you, I reckoned Elaine owed me one – I tended to go straight in for the kill.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, pouring the brandies. ‘You’re not looking so bad yourself. You seem to have improved with age.’ She gave me a quick once-over, like she was checking out a dress. ‘You’ve bulked out as well. It suits you. You were always a bit too skinny in school.’

  Cheeky mare.

  I took the brandy with one hand and moved the other round towards her shapely rear, thinking that I was taking a bit of a risk here, since she didn’t seem like the sort of person who’d suffer unwanted attentions in silence, and if she kicked me out I really was bolloxed because I had pretty much nowhere else to go. But as the hand made contact, and I gave the left cheek a gentle stroke, she shot me a look that said that after all the fucking mishaps of the day – and by God there’d been a few – I’d finally struck gold. Our lips met Mills and Boon style and her fingers crept up my inner thigh.

  Not everything had changed since school, then.

  Saturday, fifteen days ago

  Gallan

  ‘Do you ever stop work, Sarge?’ asked Berrin, nursing his black coffee. ‘Turning up at the Arcadia on your tod at half eleven at night, getting involved in a scuffle, and then coming to work next morning. That’s the sort of thing you’re meant to do when you’re like eighteen, isn’t it?’

  ‘I was trying to recapture the fading spirit of youth. I won’t be trying again for a while.’

  ‘So, did you get anything else from Elaine Toms?’

  ‘Nothing of any use. She said she hadn’t heard a word from Fowler, and she claimed she didn’t know who Max Iversson was.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him with her so she could be telling the truth. There just seemed something a bit coincidental about it.’

  It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning and Berrin and I were the only people in the Matthews incident room. I hadn’t left the club until quarter to one and I was tired. However, I didn’t look as bad as Berrin, who was carrying a mean hangover, and whose breath smelled of long-dead fish. About the only thing he’d got remotely enthusiastic about in the ten minutes since we’d got in was the altercation I’d had with Iversson. He’d found it particularly amusing that the ex-para had chucked someone at me while they’d still been taking a leak. ‘Simple but very effective, I should think,’ was how he’d summed it up. Fair enough, I suppose. He was right.

  It was day six of the heatwave and day seven of the Matthews murder inquiry, and we had plenty to keep us busy. Knox, who wasn’t coming in until later, had dropped on my desk a note with a photograph of a hard-looking blonde with Myra Hindley’s haircut and the same sort of amiable, light-up-the-world expression. The note identified her as Jean Tanner, a former call-girl, two of whose partial prints had been recovered from Matthews’s flat, one of them on a coffee mug, suggesting she’d been more than simply a passing punter after some gear. Knox had supplied us with the address, somewhere up in Finchley, and had instructed us to go round, take a statement from her and find out what she’d been up to there. Like a lot of the work on a murder investigation it was routine stuff, but something that had to be done. He signe
d off by telling us to continue trying to track down Fowler, whose prints had also been found on a number of items in Matthews’s flat, even though he’d claimed the two had never socialized.

  Before we collared Ms Tanner, we drove over to the Priory Green estate to show her photo to Matthews’s neighbours and see if she was the blonde woman identified by two of them as having gone to his flat more than once in the past few weeks. This, at least, would give us something to throw at her if, for some reason, she proved uncooperative.

  The estate itself, a medium-rise collection of red- and greybrick buildings just north of the NatWest building on Pentonville Road, was leafy, quiet and relatively well kept. A few years earlier it had received a large cheque from the National Lottery’s Heritage Fund to spruce things up, and there was still a lot of building work going on. So far the money looked to have been pretty well spent, which isn’t always the case with construction projects. Priory Green had none of the menace of so many of London’s sixties- and seventies-designed council estates, those graffiti-stained fortresses with their mazes of darkened walkways so beloved of muggers everywhere, that for a copper always feel like enemy territory. Bad things might have gone on here, but they were done in quite a pleasant setting.

  Things got off to a good start as well. Both the witnesses – a young black woman with a very fat baby and several other yowling kids in the background, and an elderly man who insisted on haranguing us about the estate’s supposed litter problem – were in residence and able to confirm that they’d seen the woman in the photo going either in or out of the flat on several occasions, though not in the past couple of weeks. The elderly man thought he might have seen her three times, but he couldn’t be sure. While we were there we knocked on a few other doors to see if we could jog some memories but, where anyone bothered to answer, we were given the kind of welcome usually reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and no-one could provide any help.

  I wasn’t sure how much use it was finding out that Jean Tanner, ex or current prostitute, had visited the flat of a known drug dealer on more than one occasion, even if he had supplied her with coffee, but at least it was something. However, our good fortune, if good fortune it could be called, didn’t last very long. On the way to Jean’s place there was an accident on the Caledonian Road that held us up for getting close to half an hour in steadily increasing heat. Then Berrin, who was in charge of navigation on the basis that I didn’t trust him behind the wheel in the state he was in, got us lost in the backstreets of East Finchley. By the time we finally tracked down the address – a flat in an ultra-modern, heavily alarmed four-storey block that sat like an eyesore between the Georgian townhouses on either side of it – it was almost half eleven. And, after all that, she wasn’t in.

  We had six more addresses to visit that day, all of them doormen who had worked at one time or another in the past six months at Arcadia. The list had been supplied by the proprietor of Elite A, a Mr Warren Case, himself a one-time doorman. We’d interviewed Case, who could fairly be described as a man of many sovereign rings, the previous afternoon at his home, an untidy third-floor flat in Barnsbury which also doubled as Elite A’s offices. Case had shown us Elite A’s certificate of incorporation and VAT registration, both with his name on it, and had provided us with a list containing nine names. Two of them had already been interviewed during the course of the investigation, and another had left the country for Australia more than a month before the murder and was, as far as Case knew, still there. He’d given us the addresses of everyone else and then we’d been on our way. As we’d left, I’d asked him how well he’d known Roy Fowler. ‘Well enough to know that he was a slimy cunt,’ he’d replied evenly. Which was probably a fair enough description, but made me think that if you’ve got a man like Case saying that about you, then you’ve really got problems. Although, of course, at that time I didn’t know the half of it.

  We hadn’t phoned ahead to warn any of the interviewees we were coming, which was not untypical practice in a murder inquiry. It was unlikely that any of them would know anything of real help, but if they did and they didn’t want to talk, a surprise visit would help to prevent them making up a convenient story. However, it also meant that, like Jean Tanner, they might not be there when we called, particularly on a hot summer’s day like this one, and not surprisingly the first two on the list weren’t, while the third was just going out as we arrived. He’d only worked with Matthews on a handful of occasions, and claimed he couldn’t really recall too much about him. ‘He was a bit of a wanker, I remember that much,’ he told us, which wasn’t exactly news. Him and Fowler must have been a right pair of cards.

  By the time we left him it was gone one o’clock and food called. We stopped at a Greek-owned sandwich place off the Finchley Road, and ate in relative silence, both feeling worn down by the drudgery of detective work.

  ‘You know, don’t get me wrong, Sarge,’ said Berrin between mouthfuls of turkey, salad and mayo baguette, ‘but I thought that there’d be more excitement to murder investigations. I don’t mean that it should be fun or anything, but it just seems to be the same sort of monotony that you always get.’

  I chewed thoughtfully on my ham and pickle sandwich. It was quite tasty except for the fact there was too much fat on the ham. ‘Dave, if it was really like it was on The Sweeney, no-one would ever leave, would they?’

  ‘I know. I just wish it felt like we were getting somewhere, that’s all.’

  He had a point, and at that moment I felt the same way. It would have been a good day to sit out in the garden with a decent book, catching a bit of sun and letting the world drift idly by. Or maybe even to take my daughter out somewhere, making the most of the fact that she was still young enough not to look at me with a teenager’s wincing embarrassment. But I’d learnt long ago that you don’t do policework for the laughs or the job satisfaction. You do it for the desire to put away criminals, which basically is an end in itself. I could see, though, that Berrin, who was still new enough to think there was a lot more to it than that, was flagging and needed a bit of an interest injection.

  ‘This Jean Tanner’s got herself a nice pad,’ I said, taking a sip from my mineral water and wishing it was beer. ‘How much do you reckon it’s worth?’

  ‘Just the location’s got to be worth a fair bit. The thing is, we don’t know what her actual place is like.’

  ‘Well, say it’s a one-bedroom flat. It’s a nice area of Finchley, it’s still got to be worth – shit, I’m no estate agent, help me out here.’

  ‘Two hundred grand. Maybe more.’

  ‘And it’s probably bigger than one bedroom. I don’t reckon we’d be looking much short of two fifty. That’s a lot of money for a prostitute, the type who hangs about with a lowlife like Shaun Matthews. Particularly if she’s got a drugs habit.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  And this was where the interest went out of the injection. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It just seems odd.’

  * * *

  The fourth address was on a residential road of run-down whitebrick terraces, less than half a mile away from Highbury stadium. The traffic was appalling on the way there, mainly due to the fact that Arsenal were playing at home, and it was half two and about ninety degrees when we finally parked up almost directly outside the lower ground-floor flat of Craig McBride. According to Case, McBride had worked for Elite A for the best part of a year in a freelance capacity and was still used by them at fairly regular intervals. He was twenty-seven years old and had prior convictions for ABH, threatening behaviour, theft, and possession of Class A and B drugs, a fact that had been discovered when we’d run his name through the computer. It wasn’t strictly legal any more for someone with his record to be employed as a doorman, unless he’d somehow convinced the council that he was a reformed character, which I doubted. But I knew it happened, and for the moment it wasn’t worth taking the matter up with Warren Case.

  A set of greasy steps led down to McBride’s
abode. The front door was shabby, the once-white paint peeling off in strips to reveal dull-coloured wood beneath, while an ancient-looking hanging basket containing nothing but dry earth and a cluster of weeds hung limply from one of the outside walls. There was a small dirty window to the right of the door. I wondered briefly whether it had ever been cleaned. It didn’t look like it. Straightening my tie, I peered through it and immediately my spirits lifted. Eureka. Just what we needed.

  Within a Western country’s somewhat limited means of coercion, there’s no surer way of getting someone to talk than to give them the alternative of criminal charges, and it looked like Craig McBride was indulging in an activity that left him very much exposed to the latter. Even through the stains on the window, I could clearly make him out sitting on a sofa in his front room behind a coffee table on which a plate piled with white powder was sat. Next to the plate was a large tub of baking soda, and next to that were small transparent plastic wraps, each containing more of the powder. Sherlock that I was, I hazarded a guess that the contents of each one weighed pretty much exactly a gram. McBride himself, dressed only in a pair of shorts, was leaning forward, head down, fiddling with what looked like a small electronic weighing machine. As if confirmation of what he was doing was needed. Criminal mastermind young Craig was not. He might as well have put up a sign on the road saying ‘Drugs this way’, such was his total and utter recklessness. Never underestimate the stupidity of criminals. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps a lot of us going.

  I turned to Berrin, put a finger to my lips, and motioned for him to have a look. Berrin peered in, then stepped back, smiling. ‘It seems a shame to disturb him,’ he whispered. ‘He looks so busy. Do you think it’s worth knocking on the window?’