Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  ‘Don’t you want to have a look at this photo?’ I asked, taking it out of my pocket and sliding it along the table towards Merriweather. ‘It’s the last one ever taken of Robert. Christmas Day lunch last year, six weeks before he died. It’s a good one, isn’t it?’

  Merriweather continued to look away, but I could see that his jaw was quivering.

  ‘I really must protest about these methods. My client has already said he doesn’t want to answer any more questions on this matter. I am therefore requesting, in the strongest possible terms, that you terminate this interview.’

  ‘Were you aware, Jack, that a company called Dagmar Holdings paid the rent on Tony Franks’s house?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of Dagmar Holdings.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, and Merriweather immediately knew he’d made a mistake. You could see it in his eyes. ‘Two cheques from Dagmar Holdings totalling a grand total of nine thousand three hundred and twenty pounds were paid into a bank account belonging to your wife, one in February, another in June. You were also at the home of the company secretary of Dagmar Holdings when we arrested you.’

  ‘With an unlicensed firearm,’ added Knox for good measure.

  ‘As your representative, Jack, I advise you to make no further comment at this time.’

  ‘No comment,’ said Merriweather.

  ‘One way or another someone’s going down for this child murder, Jack,’ said Knox. ‘We’re not going to rest until we find the person responsible.’

  ‘And for some reason, you seem to be lying a lot during the course of this interview.’

  ‘And you’re connected very strongly to the house where we believe he died.’

  ‘Where’s Tony Franks, Jack?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did he kill Robert Jones, or did you?’

  ‘What did you kill him for, Jack? Did he see something he shouldn’t have done?’

  ‘No comment. I told you! No fucking comment!’ He turned to the brief. ‘Come on, Melvyn, tell ’em I’m not answering any more fucking questions about stuff I don’t know nothing about.’

  ‘You heard my client,’ said Carroll. ‘He’s saying nothing further at this time.’

  Knox and I looked at each other and nodded. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll return you to your cells while we continue our enquiries. Before we finish, though, there’s one thing I’d also like to show you.’ I picked up another evidence bag, again seemingly empty. ‘It’s one of Robert Jones’s hairs, also found at Runmayne Avenue. Amazing what you can discover when you look hard enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not a very good clean-up job, was it?’ said Knox with a sympathetic smile.

  Merriweather tried to stare us both down, tried to appear calm and aloof in the face of our threats, but it wasn’t working. A single bead of sweat ran down the middle of his forehead and onto the bridge of his broken nose. He was immediately aware of it, and knew we could see it. Knew we knew.

  ‘Interview terminated at twelve forty-five p.m.,’ I said, and switched off the tape. I stood up and smiled at Merriweather. ‘We’ll talk again soon,’ I told him.

  When the two of us were safely ensconced in Knox’s office, along with Berrin, we discussed what we’d gathered from the interview.

  ‘It’s still tenuous, John. If he holds out, we’re in trouble. He’s consistently denying his involvement with the case, and the witness statements and that little bit of forensics are hardly enough to pin him for the murder. At the moment, all he’s down for is possession of an illegal firearm, which he’s denying. He says it belonged to Iversson. If it carries on like this, he could easily get bail. Is there no way we can get Iversson to talk and let us know what was happening there?’

  Iversson had been captured after a short but dramatic chase through the streets of Clerkenwell, but he wasn’t co-operating either.

  I sighed. ‘He’s even more of a no-comment merchant than Merriweather. Iversson’s linked with the massacre at the farm and the kidnapping of Krys Holtz, so I think he figures he’s got nothing to gain by talking, and nothing to lose by staying silent.’

  ‘What about Toms? Can’t we prise anything out of her?’

  I shook my head. ‘She knows a lot more than she’s letting on but she’s not stupid. Her story’s that she was with Merriweather, whom she knows vaguely, when Iversson turned up and tried to rape her. He beat up Merriweather but somehow she managed to get his gun off him and shoot him in the shoulder. She claims it was self-defence and it’s a story she’s sticking by. Therefore, in the absence of Franks, who we can’t find anywhere, our best bet’s got to be Merriweather. He knows what’s going on, I’m sure of it, and he’s got the most to lose by not co-operating.’

  ‘But will he crack?’

  ‘No-one wants to be labelled a child killer,’ I said, ‘especially a macho gangster type like him, and I don’t think he’s as much of a hardman as he likes to make out. Yes, in my opinion, he’ll crack.’

  Ten minutes later, while we were still talking, the phone on Knox’s desk rang. He picked it up, listened for twenty seconds, smiled, and told the caller we’d be right down. He looked at me with the sort of expression my wife’s lover would pull if he’d just stumbled on a story that would put the prime minister out of a job. ‘It looks like you’re right, John,’ he said, and I think there might even have been some admiration in his voice. ‘He wants to talk to us.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Better than good. He wants to do it without his brief present.’

  * * *

  ‘First things first. I want immunity.’

  ‘You haven’t told us anything yet, Jack,’ said Knox, lighting his cigarette for him.

  ‘I’ve got stuff, all right?’ he said, looking at us both in turn. ‘Stuff that’ll put people away, but if I help, I don’t want to fucking go down. I’m going to need the works. Immunity, new identity. All that shit. Understand?’

  ‘If what you tell us is the truth,’ said Knox, ‘and it’s a big if, and if you’re prepared to testify, then obviously special arrangements will be put in place for you. But no decision’s going to be made on that until we hear what you have to say.’

  There was a long silence while Merriweather thought about what had just been said. ‘You know, I’ve never done nothing like this before,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m no grass, I’ll tell you that now. If it hadn’t been for that fucking kid – that’s when it all went wrong.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, unsure whether I felt excited or depressed that we were so close to the truth.

  ‘I wasn’t even there at the time, and that’s a fucking promise. I had nothing to do with it. I’d never kill a kid. I mean, I’ve got three of my own, haven’t I? I’m no fucking nonce.’

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning, Jack,’ said Knox. ‘What was the house being used for?’

  He took a drag on his cigarette, then answered without looking at us. ‘Smuggling. A lot of the smack from eastern Europe went through that gaff. It used to get dropped by the couriers at sites in Kent and then Franks and whoever else he was using would go and pick it up and bring it back to the place for storage. We always reckoned it was the perfect cover because it wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect to find gear. You know, it was a nice posh area.’

  ‘And the gear was paid for by Stefan Holtz, right?’ I said. ‘It was his stuff?’

  ‘It belonged to the organization, yeah.’

  ‘So what’s this got to do with Robert Jones?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t just smack that was being smuggled. You see, Tony Franks, me and him both report to Neil Vamen, and there was other sidelines Neil had going that the boss, Stefan, didn’t know about, because he wouldn’t have approved.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Guns, that was the main one. And not just any guns either. All sorts. Grenade launchers, AK-47s, even anti-fucking-tank missiles. You see, Tony had been a mercenary or something over there, and he got us involved with th
e drug-smuggling routes through Bosnia. It was his idea to do guns because we had the route set up and the place was chock-a-block with firearms. Well, Stefan never liked that idea, he didn’t think we should be putting weapons in the hands of people who could use them against us, but Neil had contacts. Not just here but in Ireland, and he reckoned he could make a serious packet out of it, and there was no need to let the boss know, so that’s what we did.

  ‘It worked pretty well, too – so well that Neil began to get this idea that maybe things would be better if he ran the organization rather than Stefan. He used to say that Stefan was too traditional in the way he did business, that he didn’t think big enough. A couple of years back he even got us to plant a load of rifles on Tommy Holtz to get him put away. I think Neil’s idea was to start taking out the Holtzes one by one. Anyway, things were going nice, Tony’s doing most of the work, I’m just checking up on him now and again, and then suddenly I get a call one morning last February from Tony saying he’s got a problem. A big problem. I get round there and I can’t fucking believe what I see. I still can’t fucking believe it. There’s this kid, this Robert Jones, and he’s laid out on the floor with his paper bag, and he’s dead, and Tony’s standing over him with this geezer, Shaun Matthews, who used to help him out sometimes, and they’re saying what the fuck are we going to do?’

  He dragged hard on the cigarette, shaking his head, reliving the scene. ‘First things first, I ask them what the fuck’s happened, and Tony says that they was unloading some boxes in the front room full of rifles they’d taken delivery of when they heard a noise round the back. Tony goes out to take a look what it is and catches this kid, who’s been looking in the window at what they’ve been doing. Fuck knows what he was up to. Maybe he saw them taking stuff out of the van and got suspicious, and just decided to have a butcher’s. It was a stupid thing to do, whatever it was.

  ‘So Tony nabs him and drags him inside, but now they don’t know what to do with him. They know they can’t let him go because he’s bound to tell someone, and then that someone’ll tell you lot, and you’ll come sniffing round asking questions, and even if they get rid of the stuff and it’s their word against the kid, Stefan’ll probably find out, and it’ll look bad on them. As it happens, I think they just panicked a bit as well, and Matthews, he admitted it was him, took a knife to the kid and killed him. Then they’re wondering what to do with the body so they call me. Can I have another fag, please?’

  Knox pushed the pack over to him and we watched as he pulled one out with shaking hands, put it to his lips, and lit it. Jackie Slap Merriweather, for all his initial bravado, was carrying a lot of guilt about with him, and had been for six months.

  He exhaled loudly. ‘So I tells them to get some gloves, not to touch the body unless they’re wearing them, and to make it look like a nonce has done it, then get rid of the thing.’

  ‘Did you help in that process?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. That kid was only a couple of years older than my oldest. I wasn’t going to do nothing. It was their problem, not mine. So I left them to it, but not before I’d told them to keep their gobs shut. I didn’t want Neil finding out about it.’

  ‘So where’s Tony Franks now?’ asked Knox.

  ‘Dead,’ answered Merriweather.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s a long story and, I have to tell you, it’s one I can’t hardly believe myself.’

  ‘We’re in no hurry, Jack. I think you may as well start talking.’

  He exhaled loudly again, then began. ‘Well, nothing happened for months. Obviously you lot were looking for the boy’s killers but I was pretty sure we – I mean they – were in the clear because it looked like you was searching for a nonce, and I think they’d covered their tracks well enough. Then, a couple of weeks back, it all went wrong. Someone offed Shaun Matthews.’

  Knox looked surprised. ‘What? You don’t know who?’

  Merriweather shook his head. ‘No. It was no-one from the organization.’

  Knox and I looked at each other quizzically. This was an interesting development, and something we’d have to pick up on later.

  ‘Anyway, as well as doing a bit of work with Tony, Matthews also ran the door at this club called Arcadia, as you probably know. Now, Neil owns Arcadia even though his name’s not on the deeds, but a bloke called Roy Fowler’s the one who’s actually been managing it for him. But Fowler was skimming the club, taking money that was meant for Neil, and Matthews was involved as well. So, when Matthews gets topped, Fowler panics, thinks we’re on to him, which we were, and thinks we’re going to kill him, which we weren’t. Not as far as I knew anyway. ‘The problem is, though, Fowler’s convinced he’s a dead man, so he takes evasive measures.’

  ‘What sort of evasive measures?’ I asked.

  ‘Blackmail. You see, he’s got something up his sleeve he’s been keeping as a bargaining chip for just this sort of eventuality. In fact, he’s got two things. He’s got a tape recording he made of a conversation he had with Matthews, and in this conversation Matthews, who as it happens was pissed, is talking about the weapons scam and how it’s run by Vamen, and also what happened with the kid. Just the sort of tape you don’t want falling into the hands of Stefan Holtz. But he’s got something worse as well. He’s got the knife that killed the kid.’

  ‘How the hell did he get hold of that?’ demanded Knox.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Maybe Matthews panicked when they got rid of the body, kept it for a while, then gave it to Fowler to get rid of.’ He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t tell you. But, either way, Fowler decided to hang on to it, just in case it ever proved useful, and so, when Matthews died and he suddenly thought he was next, he sent a message to Neil saying that he had this incriminating stuff and that if we tried to do anything to him he’d make sure Stefan and the Old Bill got to hear about it. He also said he wanted a hundred grand so that he could get out of the country, and if Neil gave him that, then he’d hand over the knife and the tape.

  ‘So Neil, who’s none too pleased to find out about the dead kid, arranges to meet up with Fowler to do the exchange. At the same time, he finds out from Elaine Toms, who’s like his eyes and ears in Arcadia, that Fowler’s going to be getting his security from Tiger Solutions. Well, Tiger’s run by a bloke called Joe Riggs, who’s a bit of an associate of Neil’s, nothing major, but he’s had some involvement in the weapons side through Tony. So we set it up that Tony would be on the team taking Fowler to the meet. He’d deal with Fowler, and anyone else who got in the way, and take back the evidence. End of story, end of problem.

  ‘Except it didn’t work out like that. Joe’s been rumbling on about his partner, Iversson – the naked bloke you nicked – for a long time, and even thinks that Iversson might have offed his missus – that’s Joe’s missus – years back. So, when it’s all set up, Joe makes sure that Iversson’s one of the ones escorting Fowler, because he wants Tony to take him out as well. Only problem is, Iversson was a bit tastier than Tony was prepared for, and Tony was the one who got shot.’

  ‘So Iversson didn’t have anything to do with the murder of Fowler?’

  He looked at me. ‘No. He didn’t have a clue what was going on. The thing was, though, he was now a fucking complication. He knew what had happened, plus you lot were after him, so things could have got very dodgy if he’d been picked up.

  ‘We were still thinking what to do about him when he turns up at the Arcadia and ends up in the sack with Elaine Toms, who, as it happens, is one of Neil’s exes and a girl he’s got a real soft spot for. They were going to have Iversson killed round her flat, which was where he was staying after you lot started looking for him, but then Neil has a bit of an idea. A better way of dealing with him. Like I said earlier, Neil’s been looking to move in on Stefan for a while, but it was never going to be easy because Stefan didn’t move from that fucking house of his, and he’s guarded to the hilt. Plus, Neil doesn’t want to be seen to do anything that’ll
make him look disloyal. Far better to get someone else to do it. So he gets Elaine to push Iversson into kidnapping Krys because he knows that’s the only way he’s going to get Stefan out into the open. Joe helps her set everything up, Krys gets lifted, and when Stefan turns up at the rendezvous with the ransom money, he gets popped by our people. And the beauty of it is that no-one suspects Neil at all.’

  ‘What happened at the farmhouse?’ asked Knox. ‘We found Riggs’s body there, as well as a number of others, including Krys Holtz’s.’

  Merriweather sighed. ‘That was Riggs’s fault. He was meant to sort out Krys and Iversson and leave their bodies there so that Iversson would get the blame for everything, but that fucker’s got a real knack for staying alive, and it was Riggs who got killed. When Riggs didn’t show up to say that it had all been sorted, we had to take our own evasive action. We thought Iversson would head for Elaine’s so I went round there, just in case she couldn’t handle things, and that’s where you found me. She tried to kill him, he attacked her, and I just got in the way.’

  ‘What about Shaun Matthews?’ I asked. ‘Who killed him if it was no-one from your own organization?’

  ‘Christ knows,’ said Merriweather. ‘Who the fuck poisons anyone anyway? It’s a recipe for getting caught these days, what with all them technological advantages you lot have got.’

  ‘Our information strongly suggests that Matthews’s girlfriend of a number of months was also a mistress of Neil Vamen.’

  ‘Who’s that, then?’

  ‘Her name’s Jean Tanner.’

  For the first time in the interview, Merriweather laughed, although there wasn’t much humour in it. ‘Oh yeah, you were on about her in the Seven Bells the other week, weren’t you? Nah, I wouldn’t put it quite like that. They went out for a little while – old Neil likes to have a few girlfriends – but it was all over way back.’

  ‘When?’

  He shrugged. ‘I dunno, four, five months ago? But she was a right weirdo. Used to work in Heavenly Girls, but even the punters stayed a bit clear of her. She was nice looking, and all right when you first met her, but, I dunno, it’s difficult to put your finger on, but something about her wasn’t quite right, know what I mean? I know old Neil was glad to get rid of her. As it happens, I think she was the first girl he’d ever been with who actually scared him – not that he’d ever admit it, of course.’