‘We’re trying to build up a picture, sir, that’s all.’ I fished in my jacket pocket for the photo of Merriweather and the soldier. When I’d got it out, I unfolded it, stood up, and showed it to Leppel. ‘Do you recognize the man on the left?’ I asked.
He nodded slowly without looking at me. ‘Yes, I recognize him. His name’s Tony Franks.’
The name, like the face, had an immediate ring of familiarity, but still I was unable to pinpoint from where. ‘Do you recognize the man standing next to him?’
Again, he nodded. ‘His name’s Merriweather. I can’t remember the first name.’
‘Jack,’ said Berrin.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Jack.’
‘This photograph came from an article in Der Spiegel.’
‘I know.’
‘The article was in German, and we’re waiting to have it translated. Could you tell me what it was about?’
‘It was libellous. I almost sued them over it.’
‘What did it say?’
‘It suggested that Contracts International consultants, they called them mercenaries, were involved in drug smuggling through Bosnia and into western Europe. They never produced any hard evidence other than that photo yet it helped to ruin the reputation of an organization that employed a lot of people and, whatever anyone likes to think, provided a service that was needed. Ever since that article came out, I’ve had problems. Scotland Yard were round like a shot, asking all sorts of questions, and our client base simply dried up. That’s why I’m perhaps not as co-operative as I might otherwise have been.’
‘I understand that, sir, but I can assure you I’m not interested in having a go at your company or you, I’m simply interested in solving this murder.’
Leppel observed me for a few moments as if trying to gauge how genuine I was. I gave him my standard I-won’t-piss-you-about look back, thinking that I might just be winning this sanctimonious bastard over. ‘As I’ve said, they never actually named names but said that our consultants were in partnership with organized crime figures in Britain and were using UN aid convoys to transport the contraband into western Europe. But they had no proof, nothing.’
‘Do you think, Mr Leppel, in all honesty, that one or two of your employees might have had some contact with these organized crime figures?’
‘That photograph was taken close to two years after we ceased operations in Bosnia. Yes, it’s clear from the picture that Tony Franks had at least some dealings with them, and others might have done so too, but it was entirely off their own bats. Until that article was written, I knew nothing about it.’
I nodded, trying to work out whether Leppel was telling the truth or not. He was certainly exhibiting the right level of indignation, but it was difficult to say for sure. ‘And Tony Franks? Do you know where he is now?’
‘The last I heard he was doing some work for a company called Tiger Solutions run by two of Contracts’ ex-employees.’
Tiger Solutions. Things kept coming back to them. ‘Can you give me the names of these two ex-employees?’ I asked, wanting to get it confirmed.
‘Joe Riggs was one of them; the other was Max Iversson.’
‘Do you know if they had anything to do with Jack Merriweather or any of his associates?’
‘No, as far as I know, they didn’t.’
‘Have you got a list anywhere of the employees of Contracts who served in Bosnia?’
He sighed. ‘I thought you might ask that. I haven’t, no.’
‘But presumably you could dig up the information?’
He sighed again. ‘It means going back over the old accounts for the company, but yes, the information can be dug up, as you put it. Though it would probably take a bit of time.’
‘I would greatly appreciate it, sir, if you could provide us with a complete list. It may well be very useful to our inquiry.’
‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’
I stood up, and Berrin followed suit. ‘Thank you very much for that, Mr Leppel,’ I said, putting out my hand, ‘and for your time.’
Leppel stepped forward and gave it a brief shake. ‘You’re certainly a lot less difficult to deal with than the last lot who paid me a visit.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
‘If you do get to speak to Tony, send him my regards, will you?’ he said as he led us out to the lifts.
I nodded, and said that I would. ‘Did you get on well with him, then?’
‘He was good company, and very professional. I like dealing with people like him.’
When we were outside, I looked at my watch. Twenty past five. The streets of the City of London were beginning to fill with the first wave of smartly dressed workers hurrying like ants in every direction, none looking as if they had a moment to spare.
‘Do you think this Tony Franks character could have something to do with Matthews’s death, then, Sarge?’ asked Berrin as we started walking towards Moorgate Tube.
‘He’s linked to the Holtzes, albeit fairly indirectly, and he’s linked, again indirectly, to the snake poison. It’s not a lot to go on, but it’s something. Did the name mean anything to you?’
Berrin shook his head. ‘No, never heard of him. Does it to you?’
‘It does, but I can’t think from where.’
‘Something’s going on at that Tiger Solutions, though, isn’t it?’
‘The name keeps coming up, that’s for sure, and it’s not a name you’re going to forget. We’re going to have to pay another visit to Joe Riggs, but I think maybe we should leave it for a day or two. I’d like to have something to pressure him with, and at the moment we haven’t got much.’
‘At least now we’re beginning to get somewhere, though.’ For the first time in a while, he sounded enthused.
When we got to Moorgate Tube it was shut by a security alert, and the traffic had near enough ground to a halt. I called Malik on my mobile but he wasn’t answering, so I left a message, asking him to call back urgently. I’d intended to go back to the station, but by the time the two of us had walked up to Old Street it was twenty to six and hardly worth it, so we went our separate ways.
But on the Underground, heading back home, sweating with the commuters, I couldn’t get the name Tony Franks out of my mind. It bugged me, so much so that I got off at Highbury and Islington and returned to work, thinking that I’d never be able to relax until I’d satisfied my curiosity.
As usual, the incident room was empty, which suited me just fine. I switched on my PC, got a coffee while it booted up, and logged on to our criminal database. I then typed in: Franks, Anthony.
One match.
I opened the file and a photograph of a good-looking, youngish man with short dark hair and a calm, almost mocking expression appeared. It was the same man in the photograph with Jackie Slap. According to the computer, he’d been arrested in December 1997 on suspicion of the importation of Class A drugs, but released without charge. He had no convictions, and did not appear to have been arrested on any further charges.
I looked at the mugshot for a long time, racking my brains, trying to remember where the hell I knew him from. I’d questioned him about something. Something not that recent, but also not that long ago. It had been a serious crime but Franks had not been a suspect. He’d answered the questions put to him helpfully and with the right level of concern. I remembered I’d found him a likeable character. He’d said he worked in security. He’d once been a bodyguard for Geri Halliwell.
And then it came to me, and I was puzzled because I wasn’t sure what the information meant. I’d questioned him at his home, and the reason was that Tony Franks had lived on the very same street on which thirteen-year-old paperboy Robert Jones had last been seen alive on a cold, dark February morning all those months ago.
Iversson
‘So you can’t tell me nothing about it?’ said Johnny, looking at me like he honestly thought I might suddenly change my mind.
‘Not at the moment.’ I pulled
the cap low over my face, then climbed into the passenger side of the red Mercedes van that would be used to transport Krys Holtz the two miles from Heavenly Girls to the lock-up in Finchley Joe had rented the previous day where we’d be changing vehicles. Johnny got in the driver’s side and took the car out onto City Road.
‘I hope it’s nothing that’s going to get me in trouble, Max. I like a quiet life, you know.’
‘As do I, Johnny, which is something you should have thought about when your recommendation almost got me blown away.’
‘Give us a Scooby.’
‘A what?’
‘A Scooby Doo, clue. Just so I’ve got some idea. Is it something illegal?’
‘I’ve asked you to steal two vehicles, both of which are going to end up burnt out. What do you think?’
‘I think I’m fucking nervous.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘Where are we heading, then?’
‘A pick-up in Muswell Hill.’ I gave him the address and the main road it was off. ‘You know how to get there?’
He nodded. ‘Sure.’ It was half ten and long dark. The streets were fairly quiet, it being a Monday night, and a light rain was falling. ‘So, I might not be needed after tonight, then?’
‘Not if all goes according to plan, but don’t bet on it. It might take a while.’
We didn’t speak for the rest of the journey. Johnny continued to look nervous and uncomfortable but he drove without losing concentration and within fifteen minutes we’d pulled up outside Joe’s place, a flat in a slightly worn-out-looking redbrick townhouse. I rang up to him on the mobile and a couple of minutes later Joe, Tugger Lewis and Mike Kalinski came out of the door. Tugger was dressed in a suit while Joe and Kalinski wore similar boiler suits to the ones Johnny and I were wearing, and both were carrying holdalls. Tugger came round to my door while the other two went straight to the back of the van and climbed inside. I stepped out and let him in. ‘Johnny, Tugger. Tugger, Johnny. You two are going to be spending some time together. Johnny, do whatever Tugger says.’
‘Hold on, Max. I thought—’
‘I’m going in the back. Less attention that way.’
I gave Johnny the address of Heavenly Girls, shut the passenger door, and got in the back with Joe and Kalinski. Joe gave a double knock on the interior panel separating the back from the front, and Johnny pulled away from the kerb.
Ten minutes later, the van parked up and I heard Tugger getting out to feed the meter. I looked at my watch. It was five to eleven.
An hour passed, and we sat there in relative silence, occasionally hearing Johnny’s muffled voice jabbering on about something in the front, and the odd bored-sounding reply from Tugger. Traffic on the road seemed quiet. Joe had watched the place the previous night and Krys hadn’t shown. It was anyone’s guess whether he’d come again this evening, but if he did we were prepared.
I watched Kalinski as he sat staring up at the van’s ceiling, chainsmoking Rothmans. To be honest, I didn’t much like him. He was too flash; a typical robber really. When I’d met him the previous night, he’d been dressed in an immaculately tailored suit, with gold cufflinks on his shirtsleeves and a thick gold Rolex any self-respecting mugger would have killed him for. I don’t like people who think they’re bigshots, and Kalinski definitely rated himself as one. Joe had told me that he’d claimed to have earned more than a million quid down the years through armed robbery and the investment of the proceeds in dope deals. He might well have done, but I didn’t like the way he thought it was worth boasting about. You could tell he thought he was better than us, sort of a cut above us riffraff who had to earn their livings by actually working, though fuck knows why. A thief and a dope peddler. He was hardly royalty, was he?
Still, as Joe had pointed out, he knew how to handle a gun, which meant he was less likely to use it. The last thing we needed was a shootout in the brothel. The whole thing had to be neat and professional. That way, as always, lay the route to success. And if he didn’t want to say much, then that was fine by me. Johnny more than made up for his brooding silence.
I sat back in the seat and relaxed, unaffected by the boredom of the wait. I’d learnt how to be patient a long time back. It was one of the first things you got used to in the army.
Another hour passed. Then two. Kalinski shuffled about, stretched, muttered the odd curse, and at one point told us a story about how he’d once been out with a Lady someone or other who had apparently liked nothing better than to have Kalinski dress up in a balaclava, complete with sawn-off shooter, and pound her from behind while calling her a dirty rich whore. Kalinski seemed to think this made him come across like a stud, but I thought that it would be a bit of an insult if some chick I was sleeping with asked me to put a mask over my face, although in Lady whateverhernamewas’s case, I could see her point. Kalinski was not what you’d call a handsome sort. He had a face like a frog and pockmarked skin.
Neither I nor Joe reacted much to his story and, seeing that he hadn’t impressed us with his sexual forays into the upper classes, he settled back into sullen silence, which was just the way we liked it.
In the front, I heard Johnny say that he needed a mickey bliss, like some annoying fucking kid. Tugger, once he’d deciphered what he was trying to say, told him to piss in an empty bottle of mineral water, but Johnny said fuck that, he would wait. He didn’t sound too pleased.
At ten to three I heard a car pull up somewhere across the street and I tensed, stretching, hoping that this was it. But Tugger made no signal. Just another punter looking for an enjoyable end to the evening.
At three o’clock I heard the sound of Johnny finally succumbing to nature’s demand as he took a leak into the bottle, continuing for what seemed like an impressively long time.
At five past, I turned to Joe and said that we might as well call it a night. Kalinski grunted something in agreement, and Joe, who’d been half-asleep, nodded. I banged the interior wall four times. Thirty seconds later the engine was on, and Johnny was pulling away from the kerb.
I lit a cigarette and hoped we didn’t have to do this for too many more nights. But that, I suppose, is what warfare is all about. Hours, sometimes days, of long waiting, then a few stunning moments of adrenalin and excitement that are gone before you know it, but live on in the memory, etched with pride, for years afterwards.
Tuesday, five days ago
Gallan
I hadn’t been down that road since the investigation had wound down all those months ago. It was an attractive tree-lined street of large semi-detached whitewashed villas that meandered north of the Lower Holloway Road past the greenery of Highbury Fields. An oasis of calm in the midst of the bustling city. From where I stood now, looking down the incline in the direction of Clerkenwell, I could see the imposing spire of Union Chapel on Upper Street as it towered upwards above the trees that peppered the bottom of the park in the foreground. So often London’s residents and councils liked to tag the word ‘village’ onto the end of their middle-class ghettoes in a usually futile bid to create the illusion of community and push up the area’s property prices, but the description actually seemed to fit here. You could almost be in the middle of rural Gloucestershire. Even the traffic wasn’t that bad. It was a place that reeked of money.
Perhaps that was why I felt I should have looked into the background of Tony Franks more. A man who worked in security wasn’t the sort who could afford to live on a street like this. As I recalled, a lot of the neighbours had been bankers and lawyers, the sort of people with serious cash. I thought he might have said something about being part-owner of the firm he was employed by but I couldn’t remember for sure, and there was nothing in the notes to confirm it. At that time, I hadn’t been unduly interested in Tony Franks. He had no criminal record as such, didn’t come across like he had anything to hide, and, rightly or wrongly, simply wasn’t a suspect. We’d always assumed that Robert had been snatched by a predatory paedophile who’d taken advantage of the dar
k morning and the quieter residential area to abduct his prey from the street. Robert had been a small boy, four feet eleven, and wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a resistance if his attacker was of a reasonable size, and determined.
The weather was fine and sunny that morning, very different from the bitterly cold February mornings when we’d been doing the house-to-house enquiries on this, probably the grimmest case I’d ever worked on. I stood on the spot where Robert had last been seen alive by an accountant for Citibank who was leaving for work. The time then had been five to seven and Robert had been walking past the man’s driveway as he’d pulled out in his car. The man had recognized him instantly because Robert wore a distinctive woolly hat with a green fluorescent strip running round it. He’d been doing the round for more than six months, and they often saw each other in the morning. Robert had given him a brief wave and the accountant had waved back. He’d started crying when he’d related this story to the detectives because he had a son of his own the same age. I knew how he felt. There was nothing worse than the taking of a child’s life, particularly for a parent. I remembered how grimly determined I’d been to solve the case and bring the perpetrator to justice, and how impotent I’d felt when we’d finally had to scale everything down because the leads had simply not materialized.
It was difficult to believe that a crime so heinous had taken place on what was such a quiet and peaceful street, and for me that’s the worst thing about policework, the knowledge that effectively nowhere’s safe. In a free country, those with evil in their hearts can roam wherever they want.
I’d wanted to come here alone. I’d told Berrin that this was because it would waste less time. I’d got him hunting down any further information he could find on Contracts International, and chasing Leppel for the list of Bosnian operatives. The real reason, however, was to give me an opportunity to revisit the scene of what I considered one of my most important pieces of unfinished business, and perhaps take a bit more time to reflect on what had happened that cold, dark morning.
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