Femme Fatale

by Dominic Piper

  ‘You just made one hell of a big mistake, Mr Beckett.’

  ‘Oh really. Did I. I think you’re the one that made the mistake, you creepy fuck.’

  I take a step towards him and strike him in the solar plexus. He staggers backwards and almost loses his balance. His face is red. He bunches his right hand into a fist. The chauffeur gets out of the car and slams the door. He stands and waits for orders. He’s a big bastard, but he’s not Big Bastard. Stupid-looking. Bad teeth. Pained expression. No problem.

  I can tell that Friendly Face didn’t want it to come to this – an altercation in the street in broad daylight – but I’ve given him no choice and he’s losing his temper. He pulls his fist back and attempts a roundhouse swing to my face. I know his strength now and I know I’ll be in trouble if that punch makes contact.

  I block it with my right arm and sweep the palm of my left hand underneath his nose, breaking it and pushing him backwards at the same time. While he’s considering that, I hook my right arm under his elbow, jerk it upwards and then bring him down. He lands flat on his back on the pavement with a heavy thump and I can hear the air wheeze from his lungs.

  The chauffeur runs over to help, but Friendly Face, already getting up, waves him away. He’s furious. Blood spurts from his nose and covers his mouth, chin and shirt. I can tell that he’s in two minds whether to have another go at me, but good sense prevails and he returns to the Mercedes.

  ‘You have no idea of the shit you’re in, my friend,’ is the best he can do as he’s helped, sniffing, back to the car. ‘You have no fucking idea. We’ll meet again, Mr Beckett. You have my word on that.’

  ‘Nasty nose-bleed you’ve got there, granddad.’

  I smirk at him, as I know he’ll like that. I wait until the car is in the distance and hail a black cab.

  I think that went quite well.

  I tell the driver to take me to Garrick Street so I can pick up a Vietnamese takeaway for lunch. I’ll pop in on Annalise some other time.

  Friendly Face’s wallet is an expensive Mulberry billfold number. There’s two hundred and fifty pounds in cash, which I take out and transfer to my own wallet. I’ll save that for when I take Anastasija out to dinner.

  There’s a bunch of loyalty cards, several receipts for petrol and three credit cards, all in the name of Mr L. Tansil. So at least I’ve got a name. Stuffed behind the credit cards are three smart grey carbon fibre business cards for a company called Temple Security, and underneath the company name it says Larry Tansil, Director. There are three telephone numbers, an email address and a website.

  I have a dig around for anything else interesting, but there’s nothing. I put the wallet in my jacket pocket and give Paige a call. When she answers I can hear girls laughing in the background.

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ she says. ‘No more nude pics. Your subscription’s expired.’

  More background laughter.

  ‘You told me you got a major buzz out of sending them for nothing.’

  ‘True. Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Listen. Did you get on to your agent about where Declan came from afterwards?’

  ‘Oh God. Didn’t I text you? I’m sorry. She said he was from a company called Temple Security. Is that any use?’

  ‘It might be. I’ll speak to you later. Have fun.’

  ‘I will.’

  I sit back in my seat and look out of the window, watching the tourists mill about outside Buckingham Palace. Well, that’s it: Declan’s the official information centre concerning the love life of Véronique D’Erotique. So now there’re four of them directly involved in all of this: Tansil, Footitt, Declan Sharpe and Big Bastard. This is so complex and perplexing I’m almost enjoying it. Don’t worry, Rikki; I’m almost there. We’ll find out what happened to you yet.

  33

  TEMPLE SECURITY

  The cab journey took a little longer than I thought it would, so I don’t bother with the Vietnamese, instead popping into Paul’s patisserie in Bedford Street and picking up a tuna melt croque.

  Once inside, I switch on the computer and make some coffee. With the information gleaned from Tansil’s wallet I might, at last, be able to make some headway here. I search for ‘Temple Security’ and find the site straight away. I thought Doug Teng’s site was pretty slick, but this is in another league altogether. Everything you click on fires up a well-produced promotional film accompanied by dramatic orchestral music.

  Temple Security plc was founded in 2003, though it doesn’t say who by. From the look of its scope and range of services, plus the length of its existence, I’d guess that it’s basically a conglomerate of maybe half a dozen smaller security companies that were melded together by some bright spark in the City with a view to making it a public limited company.

  It employs three thousand and ninety-four people, has a turnover of approximately £44 million and has accreditations, awards and quality approvals coming out of its ass. It’s also SIA licensed, which would be extremely important for a big concern like this.

  The SIA (Security Industry Authority) regulates the private security industry in the UK. It hasn’t been in existence for long, but it’s an essential licence to have whether you’re a huge company like Temple or a lowly private investigator like me. I don’t have an SIA licence.

  Virtually anywhere you go and see security cameras, security guards, mobile patrols, dog patrols and all the rest, a company like Temple Security is behind it. Just scrolling down their client list is a mind-boggling experience in itself and you can hear the cash registers ringing: shopping malls, university campuses, rail networks, construction sites, supermarkets, office properties, fast food outlets, car parks, hotels, heavy industry, the National Health Service, theme parks – you name it. This is big, big business.

  I take a look at the senior management page. The top guy is a wizened old geek called Nathaniel Fernsby. Used to work for a big chemical concern. Keen on country walks. One down from him is Judith Skelton, who’s the Senior Commercial Manager. She has a string of academic abbreviations after her name and breeds Devon Rex cats. All these people are suits of one sort or another and flicking through their brief CVs tells me nothing. Then I find Larry Tansil. He’s the Managing Director of City of London Operations when he’s not busy ruining Paige McBride’s personal life or being smacked in the mouth by me.

  His brief résumé goes on about his long-term experience as a police officer, but it doesn’t say what he did, where he served or why he left. But then why would it? For comparison, I take a look at one of the security managers, an aggressive-looking grey-haired gorilla named Robert Parry. He’s also an ex-cop, but it says he was Assistant Chief Constable in the Avon and Somerset Constabulary. Before that, he was a Detective Superintendent in charge of CID.

  Just from a random search, I find two more ex-police and two ex-army. In each case it tells you what their rank was, where they served and what they did. But not Tansil. This may mean nothing, but I’ll keep it in mind.

  I flick through more staff until I finally find Big Bastard. He’s Deputy Corporate Security Manager and his name is Mark Gable. He doesn’t look like the sort of psychopath that Jamie Baldwin described to me and at least he was fully dressed and oil-free when this photograph was taken.

  He seems like quite a cheery person, in fact, with a big, broad smile. But once again, all I can glean from his little paragraph is that he was ex-police with extensive experience of personnel management. Like Tansil, there are no further details. Well, at least Jamie’s intuition about both of them being cops or ex-cops was on the beam.

  I don’t imagine that I’ll find Declan Sharpe on here: with a couple of thousand employees, they’re hardly going to put everyone’s name and photograph up, but I have a look anyway. It’s while I’m navigating around the site that my mobile goes off. It’s Jamie Baldwin.

  ‘Hi, Jamie. What can I do for you?’

  He sounds edgy, as if he doesn’t quite know why he called me.

&nb
sp; ‘Oh, hi. Er – I was just – I thought I’d give you a call to see how things were going. With your investigation, I mean.’

  ‘They’re OK. I’m gradually getting there, I think.’

  ‘Did you find out who Friendly Face and Big Bastard were afterwards?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m still looking into that.’

  ‘But you’ll let me know if you find out, yeah?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you seen Paige since you saw me? Or spoken to her?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. There was nothing more I needed to ask her.’

  ‘Oh. OK. Listen…’

  ‘What is it, Jamie?’ I say. I can afford to sound a little terse and impatient when I’m several miles away from that seventy-four-inch reach. I take a sip of my coffee. It’s cold.

  ‘It’s just that there’s something I didn’t tell you. I didn’t think it was that important at the time. It was just weird. Creepy, really. And I just thought you might think I was weird if I told you about it. It’s – it’s just not the sort of thing you tell someone about, know what I mean? And it’s probably – it’s probably totally unimportant.’

  ‘What was it, Jamie?’

  ‘It was when, er, Friendly Face and Big Bastard came round to my flat. When they did my arm, yeah?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Well, you know I told you that Big Bastard stripped down to that thong thing he had on and he was covered in oil?’

  ‘That image hasn’t left my mind for a second.’

  ‘Well it was when he was grabbing me round the chest. When he had me in that really strong grip and held my arm out so Friendly Face could use the iron bar on me. I could feel him against me, d’you know what I’m sayin’?’

  I think I do, but my brain refuses to contemplate it.

  ‘What do you mean, Jamie? What…’

  I hear him take a deep breath and sigh. ‘He was havin’ a stiffy, man. He was having an erection.’

  For a moment, I can’t think of anything to say. The strangeness of this, added to everything else, has given me temporary brain-freeze. I stare straight ahead of me, I look around the room, I glance at the computer screen, I push around some unopened junk mail on the desk.

  ‘What are you saying? Was this caused by his proximity to you? Or was it to do with the violence that was about to happen?’

  ‘God knows. Either would be pretty disturbing, eh?’

  ‘Was this reacted to or commented on by him or Friendly Face?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t in a good state at the time, but as far as I can remember they didn’t seem to notice.’

  ‘So Friendly Face wasn’t fazed by Big Bastard’s, er, condition?’

  ‘If he was aware of it, he didn’t seem bothered.’

  I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone this question before, but here goes.

  ‘Was he rubbing himself against you rhythmically?’

  ‘You mean like dry humping? Like a dog or something? No, man. It was just there, you know? Like it was just a thing that happened that he took for granted or something. But I think he wanted me to know, you get me?’

  Jesus Christ.

  ‘You didn’t imagine this at all, did you? From what I remember, Big Bastard gave you an uppercut that knocked you off your feet and Friendly Face kicked you in the head. I mean…’

  ‘I didn’t imagine this. I was fully conscious. Conscious enough to be frightened about what he was going to do with the iron bar.’

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll certainly take all of that on board. Thanks for calling.’

  ‘And you’ll let me know if you find out who they were, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will. Speak to you later.’

  I click him off, place my mobile on the desk surface and press the balls of my hands into my eyes. Well, that’s another slice of bewitching weirdness stirred into the mix. I can’t imagine it has much bearing on anything, though. Once you’ve got a guy who gets out of his clothes and oils himself up when he’s colluding in a spot of grievous bodily harm, then any additional quirks aren’t really that shocking. Maybe the shocking thing was that Tansil was cool about it.

  I return to the Temple site and take a closer look at their immense and impressive client list. I’m looking for Asset Properties, the insurance company who own Frampton House, where Rikki is or was domiciled, but they’re not there. It would have been useful if they had been. That might have explained how that girl was smuggled into Rikki’s flat and murdered.

  I’ve no evidence that Day Manager Oliver Gallagher or Reception Supervisor Thomas Wade had anything to do with all of this, but I still get a strong feeling that someone working in Frampton House is connected to Tansil and Gable in some way and that the Terrible Two were probably responsible for killing that girl, aided and abetted by Footitt.

  That whole thing with the girl is still nagging at me. I can’t work out precisely how she fits in to all of this. It’s as if her death was part of some plan, but I can’t for the life of me work out what that plan would be. The overriding feeling I get is that she didn’t have to die at all. It’s rather as if someone thought it would be a good idea to take her into Rikki’s place and kill her. It’s almost as if it was done on a whim; just for fun. A bit of a jolly jape. She was one of those people who just didn’t matter. And to have the boldness to do something like that would indicate that you had no concerns about being caught, and even if you were caught, no concerns about any real consequences. Once again, I decide I’m going to have to be careful.

  I make myself another coffee and start work on Tansil. I Google ‘Larry Tansil police’ and look at what turns up. Top of the list is, of course, the Temple Security website. There’re a few junk sites that deal with security companies and he appears there, too, but only as one of Temple’s senior staff. Come on: Tansil is an unusual surname. I rip through twenty-seven pages, but still there’s nothing.

  Eventually, I come across a sloppily-designed website called Conspiracy Concepts. The name Tansil is highlighted amongst a small block of maybe a dozen other surnames. I click on it. Nothing happens. The site seems to be defunct; the last post was made over four years ago. There’s a small section that looks like it’s a link to somewhere else, but, once again, it doesn’t work. It says ‘Tansil and Ricketts – those in the know spill the beans!!!’

  Is this something, I wonder? I Google ‘Tansil Ricketts’ and see what comes up. Page after page of useless and irrelevant stuff is the answer to that. Then I find what seems to be the website of a Hertfordshire-based newspaper I’ve never heard of, The Elstree Enquirer. And there it is:

  Chief Superintendent of Metropolitan Police Resigns after Corruption Charges Dropped.

  It’s him. Ch/Supt Laurence Tansil. And there’s even a photograph of his friendly face, scowling at some hapless press photographer. I have to say, he looks very smart in his full dress uniform.

  This all happened seven years ago. The article in The Elstree Enquirer reads like it was a cut and paste job from several different articles and is quite difficult to follow. The upshot seems to be this: Tansil took payment on two occasions from a known criminal called Martyn Ricketts. In return for these payments (they fail to give an amount), Tansil arranged to delay police response time to two armed robberies in the City of London. How he did this is not mentioned here.

  He also took steps to impede the investigation. Once again, we’re not told how he did this (are they keeping all the interesting stuff for a book or something?). The ordinary, non-corrupt police finally tracked down members of Ricketts’s gang and a couple of them grassed Ricketts.

  Ricketts didn’t grass Tansil, but some smart detectives finally put two and two together (after nineteen months!) and Tansil was arrested. I’m guessing that this wasn’t the first time he’d been involved in shady dealing, but I suspect it was the first time he’d been caught. I wonder why it took them nineteen months? Was their investigation being impeded in some way?

  Even without the full details, t
his is very, very serious stuff, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that Tansil was allowed to walk free. He must either have had one hell of a lawyer or been related to the judge.

  It says that despite the charges being dropped, he resigned so as not to cause embarrassment to the police force and to take attention away from all the difficult work they had to do. He sounds like a real politician. And so, with that dark cloud hanging over his head, he’s given a well-paid job in a private security company. Some guys have all the luck.

  Mark Gable is not so easy to track down and it takes me fifteen minutes before I come across a small news item about him in the online version of The Manchester Evening News. Gable was a detective inspector in the Serious Crime Division of The Greater Manchester Police. This time, there was no dignified resignation. Gable was ignominiously booted out and was given a four-year suspended prison sentence. He was found guilty of a serious assault against a member of the public and that member of the public’s girlfriend. This all happened three years ago to the day.

  The incident had happened outside a nightclub in Manchester’s town centre. Twenty-eight-year-old Matthew Bell and his girlfriend Julita Jaworska, twenty-two, were leaving Champagne Supernova at one-twenty a.m., when Gable, seemingly the worse for drink, approached Miss Jaworska, started calling her a slut and then tried to feel her breasts through her dress. He’s quite the silver-tongued ladies’ man.

  Mr Bell attempted to intervene. Mr Gable punched him in the face, knocking him to the floor, then proceeded to repeatedly kick him in the chest, arm, neck and head. Miss Jaworska tried to stop Mr Gable. Gable punched her as well, breaking her jaw in three places and knocking her unconscious.

  Mr Bell suffered multiple injuries plus a blood clot on the brain and it was touch and go whether he would survive. Miss Jaworska was in a coma for two weeks, but was expected to make a full recovery.

  What the hell did Gable think he was doing? No sane serving police officer, particularly a DI in Serious Crimes, would do something like that unless they were completely crazy. It would be suicidal on a number of levels.