Cold Killers

by Lee Weeks

  ‘We think it was a revenge attack. The gang situation in this area is worrying. Eddie’s death has spurred a whole lot of activity that we didn’t expect.’

  ‘Did the UCs come up with anything? I haven’t seen such a gathering of old-time crooks since Reggie Kray’s funeral.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Carter smiled ruefully. ‘We’ve got plenty of undercover officers out working the pubs and clubs in the East End tonight, sir. I have a useful informant who’s right in the middle of the local scene in Bethnal Green. I’m going to catch up with him in the next twenty-four hours and I’m pretty sure he’ll have something for us.’

  Bowie nodded thoughtfully and cleared his throat. It was a nervous habit that worsened when he was under pressure, as if something were slowly choking him. His long thin neck didn’t fill out his collars or his shoulders his jackets. It seemed like only fabric kept him standing. He’d lost a lot of weight in the last year. Carter and Bowie had known one another since they had joined the force. Bowie wasn’t liked by most of the officers who served under him. He had a reputation for setting others up to take the blame for his own mistakes. Carter was the only one who ever agreed to have a social drink with Bowie.

  ‘Tonight should be a good night for picking up information in the pubs around the East End. We’re confident, sir.’

  ‘Good,’ Bowie said, looking across at the timeline on the board behind Robbo’s desk. ‘We can’t afford a blood bath on the UK streets. We don’t want a drugs war played out over here. Whatever it is that Eddie got himself mixed up in we need to know fast. Are we watching who goes to the wake this evening?’

  ‘Yes, it’s covered,’ answered Carter.

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be on holiday this week.’ Bowie frowned at Carter.

  ‘Yeah, I was.’

  Chapter 6

  Tony and Marco watched as Tony’s wife, Debbie, cleaned and tidied the trophy room around them. The house was full of tension. The maids were whispering. There had been tears. A local girl, who normally worked in the kitchen, and had been called in to lend a hand in the bedrooms, had been assaulted by Marco. Now, Debbie was trying to keep a lid on things and contain the damage. None of the servants wanted to come near either of the men.

  Marco was sitting, stripped to the waist, on the sofa. His skin glistened across his toned chest and ripped abdominals. He had black chest hair in two tufts over his pink nipples. One of his nipples was pierced with a ring. He was as nervous as a fly, he smelled of stale sweat. His over-large features were ill-matched and his eyes as close as a gorilla’s, his brows fair and Neanderthal-heavy. His teeth were large and even but yellowed at the gum. His skin had the look of cottage cheese. His back bore the scars of a flogging. The deep, open wounds had never been stitched together and remained as grooves in his pockmarked skin. The scars were old but they still caused him pain – he felt them tug and pull. As a thirteen-year-old he’d been caught with his pants down, and in the middle of raping one of the servant girls, Marco had been whipped by his father so badly that he’d lost consciousness and been woken by his father urinating on him. He had crawled away to lie on his bed and fester. He often reflected that it had made a man of him, but what kind of man?

  Debbie was watching them from the far side of the room as she picked fluff from the antelope hide over the back of one of the sofas. Tony followed Marco’s gaze, and saw that he was watching her. The room was growing dark now, the evening descending fast. Marco grinned at her. She turned and walked out, muttering as she went.

  ‘Your woman doesn’t like me.’ Marco laughed.

  Tony was chewing the inside of his cheek as he shook his head, distracted. He tapped away at the cocaine, hunched over the table.

  ‘She’ll get used to you. She’ll have to, won’t she? She thinks we’re a bad influence on one another; she doesn’t see the genius like I do. She also thinks you had something to do with Eddie’s death,’ he said, as he glanced across at Marco.

  Marco didn’t answer. He stood and went to look at the evening outside the doors. Debbie had closed them. He opened them again. The air was damp and colder than of late but the fog had cleared and the lights from ships on the horizon blinked at him.

  Tony’s eyes were bright as he watched Marco in the gloom, and he waited for a response.

  ‘I tried to prevent it. Now Eddie has left us in the shit,’ Marco finally said, as he closed the windows, but stayed where he was, looking out to sea.

  ‘It didn’t need to happen like that,’ Tony said, lowering his voice.

  ‘I agree. Absolutely. But it was an accident, an unavoidable catastrophe. And . . . every tragedy has a silver lining. One man’s misfortune is another’s . . . opportunity,’ Marco said, still staring out at the ships, before turning round and grinning at Tony. He began chopping furiously, animated, jiggling. Coke was flying off the glass top, into the air, covering the floor in a fine white powder. ‘Eddie’s going to make it up to us, from the grave. We take everything he owns and we build on it. We build ourselves a future.’

  ‘Yes yes . . . yes. But I wish he had just done that small thing for us.’

  ‘No good wishing your life away, wishing it down the pan, we need to gather all the funds we have together now. My family is not waiting around, the shipment is ready to be dispatched,’ Marco said. ‘We need to get the rest of the money now. We lose face on this? We lose our balls.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know. When Harold gets here I’m going to put this on him to find it. Harold will know who to squeeze.’

  Marco turned away. His contempt for Harold was clear.

  ‘What about our friends in the basement?’ he asked. ‘And, what about the legal stuff? How do we know it’s going to be okay? The Mendez cartel must be fooled into thinking it’s not our fault their money is missing, at least until we have the rest of the funds in place. It’s got to be believable. We need to buy time.’

  ‘Of course it is going to look believable. It’s going to be signed by their lawyer, for Christ’s sake. He will sign it and then he will take a long holiday.’

  Marco came away from the window. ‘When we finish with the bookkeeper and his daughter, where did you have in mind to take them? It’s too risky to hire a boat.’

  ‘Eddie’s property. There’s an olive grove and wasteland at the back. We can get there without going by road.’

  ‘We should do it now. I need to go back to the UK with something in writing. It has to be convincing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tony sprang to his feet and led the way through the office and down to the garage. Marching ahead of Marco, his cheesecloth shirt flapped in the breeze that always rose from the lower floors, up like a wind tunnel through the corridor.

  They crossed over the forecourt and Tony stopped by the door to the control room and grinned at Marco. He opened the door and leaned his weight on it as he peered inside.

  The bookkeeper, Señor Francisco, was naked and bound, feet and hands behind his back. But he had still managed to work his way across to his daughter, his head next to hers. The daughter was still tied by a rope around her neck. She looked to be unconscious.

  Tony went inside. He squatted down froglike next to the young girl. He stroked her face. She didn’t react. Marco spoke from his place at the door.

  ‘She looks a funny colour. There’s no air in here.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Tony beckoned him forward. Marco stepped inside, closed and locked the door behind him.

  Tony looked the girl over and touched her hair as he smiled at Francisco.

  Marco was already sweating in the windowless, airless room, with its breezeblock walls and concrete floor. On the walls were the control panels for the garage and the climate control needed to keep the cars in tip-top condition. It pumped out heat from its blinking switchboard.

  ‘Any water in here?’ asked Marco.

  Tony shook his head.

  ‘But, there can be, when Señor Francisco here agrees to my terms.’

&nb
sp; Marco hadn’t meant for them, he was thirsty, but he nodded anyway.

  Tony went across to the top of the control box and took down the documents he had put there.

  ‘Sign these papers.’

  Francisco looked at Marco, as if he might be the only hope of reason in the room. Marco stared, unblinking, back. Francisco hung his head. He looked like a man who was anticipating the fall from the cliff and the double devastation of seeing his daughter flung before him. He nodded. Tony removed his gag.

  Francisco croaked, ‘Free my daughter and I will sign it.’

  Tony laughed. ‘It doesn’t work like that. You have nothing to bargain with, whereas I’ – he reached out to stroke the little girl’s leg – ‘I will get someone else to do it and I will strangle you with your own daughter’s intestines. You sign it, I give you my word, I will let her go.’

  ‘Please,’ Francisco begged Marco. Marco stared coldly back. Francisco nodded. ‘I’ll sign it. Please untie her. Get her some water. She is not well. Let her go.’

  ‘When I say so.’

  Tony turned the pages to the appropriate signatures needed. He motioned for Marco to come forward and free Francisco so that he could sign the forms.

  ‘Here, here.’ He gave him a pen and piece of card to lean on.

  Francisco signed the papers and handed them back. ‘You will need me if this goes to court. I can help you, Señor Butcher. I know all the right people for this.’

  Tony looked at him incredulously.

  ‘Of course you do.’ He handed Francisco another set of papers. Francisco paused as he read them.

  ‘They will not believe you gave me the money to deposit. They will not believe it. It is not as simple as this. I can help you move money to cover the shortfall. I can help you with this. I can move funds around to cover for the loss.’

  ‘Sign.’

  Tony checked the papers before putting them back above the control box.

  Francisco looked from one man to another and tried to come between them and his daughter. Tony stepped forward and took a small, short-bladed knife from his pocket. As Francisco brought his arm up to try to protect himself, he stabbed Francisco repeatedly in his chest. The puncture wounds opened one by one.

  ‘What the fuck? Why did you do that? We needed him. Shit, look at the floor, you should have protected the floor: the concrete is like a sponge,’ said Marco as he edged across to look at the papers. ‘He could have been more use to us. Maybe he was right. He could have helped us.’

  ‘I didn’t like him. Lawyers, judges, policemen, they’re all ten a penny. You get a lot of corruption for your euro here. You go and get something to clean this up. Ask Sheena for everything you need. Package him up, we’ll get rid of him later.’

  ‘And her?’

  ‘Leave the child for me to play with.’

  ‘We could take her and dump her somewhere. She’s sick, anyway. She won’t last the night. We can make it look like she wandered off.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ Tony was waving Marco away as he went across to the child. His mind focused on one thing. There was an odd whining noise in the room, coming from the control box, and it kept stopping, whining, restarting, repeating just like the sparrows: What you going to do, Tony? What you going to do?

  Chapter 7

  Fletcher House was cold; the heating had broken down. A memo came round:

  Now winter has hit hard and Christmas is coming. Will everyone please support the Christmas Giveaway in support of the refugees and give generously.

  ‘Winter has hit pretty hard here too.’ Carter stood. ‘I’m starting my own collection for a heater for my office.’

  Willis looked up from her screen at the shivering figure next to her.

  ‘Your nose is like Rudolph’s,’ she said with a smile. ‘Maybe you’re getting a cold.’

  Willis was sitting at her desk in the inquiry team office; it was the biggest office. Thirty-eight officers made up MIT 17, and it was one of twenty-four major investigation teams in London. The inquiry team office was where all the detectives who did the main bulk of work were. Visiting sergeants, DCs, they also were given a workspace at one of the six long desks that housed three workstations on each side. Carter shared an office with two other inspectors but he was rarely in it. He preferred to work surrounded by the team.

  Carter groaned. ‘That’s all I bloody need.’

  ‘If you had a fever you’d be too hot,’ said Willis, ‘not cold.’

  ‘Something to look forward to then,’ said Carter. ‘I’m off, Eb.’

  ‘Home?’ She turned in her chair. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really, home. I feel rough. I’m going to try and nip this in the bud.’

  She looked at him incredulously. ‘Are you okay? Has Cabrina been in touch?’

  ‘No, she hasn’t. I think she’s still a bit sore with me for not going on holiday.’

  ‘Really? Just a bit, you think?’ Willis said, turning back to her monitor.

  ‘She’ll be okay in a few days,’ he said as he walked out of the office, pulling his scarf up over his nose.

  Willis spent the next two hours looking at the history of some of the faces who’d attended the funeral and then she went to see Robbo in his office. It was nearly eleven.

  ‘Pam gone home?’ Willis asked, glancing at the clock on the wall.

  ‘Yes. Some people have got one, you know.’ Robbo rolled his eyes and smiled wearily. He had intended to go home an hour ago but he had passed the point where his wife would be pleased to see him. Now she would be in bed and he told himself it didn’t matter what time he crawled in beside her. It didn’t matter that they had no contact with one another any more. He told himself many couples that stopped having sex still had great marriages.

  ‘I need more background on the Butchers and their associates,’ she said, picking up the empty cafetière and examining it. ‘There were several people, identified in the crowds at the funeral that had made the trip over from abroad. Quite a few that had bought villas from Eddie in the last fifteen years since Eddie started his company in 2000. There were eighteen of them, at the last count. Of those, five were here at the time Eddie was killed.’

  ‘We can’t discount anyone. The job done on Eddie was bespoke. Someone paid someone else to do that.’

  ‘Some of those who came were old criminal connections to the family who hadn’t been seen in the UK for ten or more years.’

  ‘I know, I was looking at that myself. The Butchers still command that much respect, I suppose,’ said Robbo. ‘Okay, go and rinse that out,’ he said, pointing to the cafetière, ‘and I’ll make some fresh.’

  When she returned Robbo made a pot of coffee as Willis drew up a chair.

  ‘Here’s the list.’ Willis placed it on the desk before them.

  He took it and scanned it with his eyes.

  ‘I can see what you mean. There’s a lot of criminal history here.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve cross-referenced as many as I can, but I need to know which to concentrate on,’ said Willis.

  ‘We are concentrating on those with the most recent direct contact with Eddie,’ replied Robbo, ‘starting present day and working backwards.’

  ‘That’s a lot of people. Eddie seems to maintain a service with his villas. He takes care of them afterwards. He lives near to a lot of them. I suppose it’s easy for him to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Pam’s getting in touch with any villa owners of interest. Where’s Carter? Has he any thoughts on who to concentrate on from this list?’

  ‘He’s gone off sick tonight.’

  ‘Really? He seemed to be pulling out all the stops for this case, now he’s ill?’

  ‘Yes, he does look rough. This case seems to be personal to him,’ said Willis. ‘He’s even cancelled his annual leave. He’s supposed to be on holiday right now.’

  Robbo nodded. ‘I know.’ He stood. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  Robbo came back over with the pot and ti
pped out the rest of the packet of Haribo onto his desk. Willis didn’t wait to be asked. Robbo always left her the ones he knew she liked, even though he pretended he didn’t do it on purpose.

  ‘I feel like I’m missing something I should know,’ said Willis as she ate the sweets, ‘about this Eddie Butcher case. If we conclude that Eddie had got involved with some Colombian drug connections, which would explain the way he was killed, then we should hand this over to the NCA, Organised Crime Command, shouldn’t we? They cover all areas of organised crime. They have more resources than us. Do we really care who killed Eddie?’

  Robbo didn’t answer straight away but then he nodded. ‘We should stick with it. He died on our patch, but you’re right: this is likely to have more to do with Tony than anyone else.’

  ‘How come Tony is still free?’ asked Willis.

  ‘We’ve tried to get him many times. The Spanish police would love to close him down too but he’s always clever enough to evade it, or at least his lawyers are. But you’re right about this being personal to Carter, and not just him, for a few of us. We had a big operation in 2003 to try and get him.’

  ‘Operation Argos?’

  ‘Yes. Some of us were involved in that.’

  ‘I started looking into it, but it doesn’t really say a lot in the report. I can’t get access to all of it. Can you get me in to study it? Can you fill in some gaps for me?’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Wait here. I’ll go to the box-file storeroom and see what I can find in there for you.’

  Robbo returned with two files and handed them to her.

  ‘Look after these. They aren’t generally available. You can email me or text any questions you have. I’ll be staying here this evening. Bring those back to me tomorrow, without fail.’

  ‘I will.’

  Willis left Robbo’s office and checked her watch as she walked back down the corridor. It was twelve thirty. She tried Carter’s phone. It went straight to answerphone. She turned round, picked up her coat from her desk and took the stairs down to the first floor, where there was a connecting door to Archway Police Station. She was going to check whether her friend from the canteen was still working or whether she needed a lift home as Willis had decided to head that way. She intended to grab a few hours’ kip and have a shower, change her clothes.