by Greg Keen
‘All the same, you should go to the police. Someone is threatening your life.’
Peter shrugged. ‘Are they? All I can say is that I saw a figure and received a call. There’s no concrete proof of anything.’
‘Go on holiday, then.’
‘That’s not an option.’
There was a hiatus in the conversation. Peter was right: the police weren’t likely to take him that seriously. Everything he could tell them would be anecdotal and unsubstantiated. And my diary wasn’t exactly bursting at the seams.
‘Okay, I’ll get on to it immediately,’ I said. ‘But I’d advise keeping your wits about you for the next few days.’
‘Of course,’ Peter said. ‘Do you want to see George’s apartment?’
‘You’ve got the key?’
He nodded. ‘Once I’ve cleared out his papers and personal effects, I’ll get the removers in.’ He fished a fob with a single Yale key attached to it from his pocket. ‘Could you leave it at the porter’s lodge when you’re finished? I’ll pick it up this evening.’ My new client stood up and checked his watch. ‘Malcolm, I’ll speak to you tomorrow. Kenny, is there anything I need to sign?’
‘I’ll email you a couple of forms,’ I said.
Peter handed me a card that looked and felt as though it had been inscribed on vellum. It read PETER TIMMS, CEO, DAIRY VALE along with a debossed logo and the usual details. Mine came courtesy of bizcards4you.co.uk. I straightened it out and handed it over.
‘What does the OC stand for?’ he asked.
‘Odeerie Charles,’ I said. ‘He’s my business partner.’
Peter nodded, shook hands and headed for the door.
‘Thanks for recommending me,’ I said to Malcolm when he was on the other side of it. ‘How long have you known Peter?’
‘About five years. He’s a friend as much as a client.’
‘Doesn’t seem like your typical CEO.’
‘Yeah, well, the days of blokes chewing cigars and pounding the boardroom table are long gone. Most chief execs are accountants, which is what Peter trained as. And Dairy Vale’s share price has been dropping like a stone all year.’
‘He’s under a lot of pressure?’ I asked. Malcolm nodded. ‘So all this Alexander Porteus stuff could just be a figment of his imagination?’
‘It could be, but I don’t think it is. Not with the phone call too.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nor do I.’
‘What’s your best guess?’
‘It’s just someone pissing around. If he gets a couple of floodlights and a camera installed, that’ll be the end of it. And he might want to change his phone number.’
‘And the George Dent stuff? It’s weird both of them got the same call.’
‘Probably one of the other boys mucking around.’
‘But you’ll check it out?’
‘Like I said: right away.’
‘Actually, there is one thing before you go, Kenny.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Can I have my pen back, please?’
I had described Odeerie to Peter Timms as my business partner, although ‘employer’ would have been the more accurate description. After his wife ran off with her Pilates teacher, the fat man had become increasingly disinclined to accept social invitations. Ten years ago he developed a mild form of agoraphobia. These days it would require a keg of dynamite to coax him out of his Meard Street flat.
Odeerie runs his business from home. Occasionally he needs someone to visit the local chippy and enquire whether an old army buddy is still living at number 45, or provide photographic evidence for an insurance company that Rommel the schnauzer hasn’t been dognapped at all. That’s where I come in.
The official term for what I do is pretexting, although the man in the street often refers to it as lying, deceiving, or a gross invasion of privacy. Sometimes the man in the street is clutching a ball-peen hammer while the pretexter is running like a bastard in the opposite direction. It’s fair to say that none of this is what I imagined I’d be doing aged fifty-eight. Thanking the Nobel Committee for its overdue award is more what I had in mind.
On the plus side, I had picked up a client when clients weren’t thick on the ground. My agreement with Odeerie is that, if anyone approaches me privately, then I put it through the company’s books. Fair enough, bearing in mind that he supplies work on a semi-regular basis and that my IT skills aren’t exactly sparkling.
I pressed Odeerie’s buzzer on the panel outside Albion Mansions. A minute passed and I pressed it again. Still nothing. The occupant of flat 4 had either nodded off or was speaking to a client. After multiple rings, his mobile went to voicemail. A call to the landline met with the same outcome. I was about to nip round the corner for a sharpener in the Ship when the door opened and a woman in her late sixties emerged. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘I’m visiting a friend in flat four,’ I said. ‘He isn’t answering his buzzer.’
‘Your friend may be out.’
‘He doesn’t go out. All I want to do is go in and knock on his door.’
The woman was wearing an orange gilet and wraparound sunglasses. As it was drizzling steadily out of a pewter sky, I suspected some type of eye condition.
‘What’s his name?’ she asked.
‘Odeerie Charles.’
‘Describe him to me.’
‘He’s a black guy in his fifties. He’s about five-eleven with short, greying hair and he’s a bit of a . . . He’s got a heavy build.’
I narrowly avoided the words fat bastard. They were a sight more accurate descriptors than heavy build, but weren’t likely to advance my chances of admission. I couldn’t see the woman’s eyes through the dark lenses of her glasses, but suspected they were appraising me. I treated her to my best pretexter expression.
It worked like a charm.
Albion Mansions was built at the turn of the last century. The lift can’t have been installed long afterwards. Tiny and panelled in oak, it ascends at an arthritic rate. As usual when I visited Odeerie, his door had been left ajar. Given that he hadn’t buzzed me up, this was odd. I knocked a couple of times and received no reply. Probably the fat man had taken a delivery of something before hastening back to whatever he’d been working on. I pushed the door open and entered the flat.
To my left was the sitting room in which Odeerie met clients; opposite was the spare bedroom he used as an office. A cigarette end had been ground into the oatmeal-coloured carpet between the doors. Odeerie didn’t smoke and he kept the flat scrupulously clean. My skin prickled as though statically charged.
‘Odeerie,’ I said loudly. ‘It’s Kenny . . .’
My employer was well overdue a massive heart attack. It wouldn’t particularly have surprised me to find that he had gone to his reward. The open door and the crushed ciggie didn’t point in that direction, though.
‘Are you there?’ I tried again.
More silence.
In the sitting room a couple of sofas had been placed at right angles to each other. Books were arranged neatly on shelves either side of the fireplace, as was a rack of classical vinyl. A pair of Bose headphones lay on a Perspex turntable cover. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Perhaps I’d checked the sitting room first subconsciously fearing what I might discover in the office. If so, my subconscious was firing on all cylinders.
Lying on the floor of the office was Odeerie Charles.
THREE
The left side of Odeerie’s face was swollen, and his eye was partially closed. Over his lips and chin was a skein of blood. His nose wouldn’t require X-raying to reveal a fracture. I laid a couple of fingers on his neck and felt a pulse.
‘Odeerie, it’s Kenny. Don’t worry, mate, I’m calling an ambulance.’
His mouth parted and a groan emerged.
‘Can you hear me?’ I asked. Another groan, followed by something I couldn’t make out. ‘What was that?’
‘Have . . . they . . . gone?’
<
br /> ‘Yeah, no one’s here. You’re safe.’
One eye opened. The other couldn’t.
‘No cops . . . no ambulance,’ he said. A deep breath caused a tiny bubble of blood to inflate and burst in a nostril. ‘I’m serious, Kenny. Don’t call . . . anyone.’
‘Odeerie, you need medical help and whoever’s done this—’
A large hand clamped itself around my wrist. ‘I said no. Get me . . . water.’
Odeerie’s interpretation of the Data Protection Act is fairly liberal, meaning that he can be a little wary of giving the law any excuse to examine his hard drives.
‘Water and a bucket,’ he repeated. ‘No ambulance.’
As the fat man’s blood pressure has been fucking colossal over fucking horrendous for the last twenty years, I postponed calling the emergency services. No point in agitating him further and risk finishing off what others had started. I returned from the kitchen with a pint glass and a washing-up bowl. Odeerie took a couple of sips and concentrated on his breathing.
The office contained two aluminium desks. On each was a large screen with a set of cables feeding into a central stack. Apart from a filing cabinet, a sofa and half a dozen reference books, that was basically it. Nothing had been taken. Either Odeerie’s assailant had been disturbed or robbery wasn’t the motive.
‘What happened?’ I asked after he’d taken more fluid on board.
‘There were three of them.’
‘How did they get in?’
‘They said there’d been reports of a gas leak. By the time I worked out who they really were, it was too late to get the chain on. One of them was Billy Dylan.’
Odeerie turned his head and yakked up something deeply unpleasant into the washing-up bowl. I very nearly followed suit.
Four months earlier, a woman in her late twenties had contacted Odeerie via the website. She suspected her husband of having an affair and wanted to hire OC Trace and Find to confirm her suspicions. The woman – her name was Sandra Smith – was prepared to offer full rate plus expenses and a ten per cent bonus for the money shot.
It was the kind of work for which Odeerie usually recommended a more appropriate firm. But the fee was good and we weren’t drowning in clients. Against Odeerie’s better judgment, he took an advance of a thousand quid in fifties. Three days later his number-one associate was sitting in a Fiat Uno outside a large semi in Chingford with a Pentax and an A4 photo of the husband resting on his lap.
Shortly after noon, a black BMW pulled up. A beefy bald guy in a fleece exited the driver’s side and opened the rear door to allow his passenger out. No mistaking the bloke in the photograph Odeerie had been supplied with. Sandra’s husband was in his late twenties and had dark curly hair that fell to the collar of a distressed biker jacket. His pale features had an almost feminine delicacy about them. He swaggered to the front door and was admitted without having to ring the bell.
The guy was in the house for an hour, during which time his chauffeur leant against the hood of the car, smoked his guts out and read a copy of Heat. When the front door opened, I pointed the camera and let the motor drive do the work.
The couple gave each other a long snog goodbye that I captured for posterity, or more probably a divorce lawyer. She went back into the house and he said something to the driver, who laughed and slapped him on the back. Thirty seconds later the Beemer rolled off the driveway and that was the end of that.
Except that it wasn’t.
Odeerie contacted the client to say he would email the photographs over. She insisted on collecting them in person and paid the balance on the account in cash. Odeerie had been unable to connect Sandra Smith’s name with the address she supplied on her new client form. As all he was obliged to do legally was ask for details, not confirm their accuracy, this wasn’t a problem. All the same, perhaps alarm bells should have begun to ring before the piece in the Standard appeared.
Cheryl Dylan had separated from her husband, Billy, and was bringing divorce proceedings against him. Why was this of interest to the reading public? Mainly because Billy was the only son of Marty Dylan, head of a notorious North London criminal gang. Marty’s daughter-in-law was thought to be staying at a safe address with her three-year-old daughter, Caitlin, according to the paper.
Pictures of Cheryl – aka Sandra – and her husband supplemented the piece. As did one of those I had taken in Chingford. Odeerie and I reassured each other that there was no way Billy Dylan could find out who had taken it. Judging by my friend’s battered face, we’d been wrong about that.
Odeerie was unsteady on his feet but he made it to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth, swallowed three paracetamol and changed into a clean tracksuit. His left eye had closed entirely and the lump on his head was the size of a golf ball. In the sitting room, he lowered himself gingerly on to one sofa while I occupied the other.
‘Take me through what happened,’ I said.
‘I told you how they got in?’ I nodded. ‘When the door was closed, one of them coshed me. Then they bundled me into the office and Billy Dylan asked if I knew who he was and why he was there.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘That we had no idea the client was his wife.’
‘We?’
‘He had a Stanley knife, Kenny. He threatened to slice off my . . .’
Odeerie wrapped his arms around his chest and began to sob. I switched sofas and put an arm across his shoulders. His body quaked while he tried to regain control.
‘He’s gone, Odeerie,’ I said. ‘And there’s no way he’d have used the blade. Wankers like Billy Dylan chuck out all kinds of bullshit threats.’
‘You weren’t there, Kenny. He reckoned I was to blame for his little girl being taken away from him.’ Odeerie looked at me, tear tracks on his cheeks. ‘If I hadn’t said what I did, he’d definitely have . . .’
‘Erm . . . what did you say?’ I asked.
‘I told him that, when I found out who the client really was, I insisted on stopping. You carried on behind my back because you needed the money.’
‘Did he believe you?’
‘I’d be in a lot worse shape if he didn’t.’
‘So that means you’re off the hook because Billy Dylan thinks I’m solely responsible for his wife doing a bunk?’
‘At least you know he’s looking for you, Kenny – that’s something.’
‘What did he do after you told him?’
‘Kicked me in the head. That’s the last thing I can remember.’
‘Thanks, Odeerie,’ I said. ‘Thanks a million.’
‘Chances are he’ll think we’ve gone to the police and that’ll jeopardise his chances of getting his kid back. He’s almost certainly not going to try anything again.’
‘Yeah, but if he does . . .’
Odeerie gently massaged the lump on the side of his skull. ‘What you need is a minder,’ he said. ‘Someone to keep an eye on you for the next few days.’
‘How am I going to afford that?’
The fat man’s expression indicated an internal struggle. Usually it was wind. Thankfully, on this occasion, it represented a financial dilemma.
‘Get someone on the business,’ he muttered eventually.
‘I can hire a bodyguard on expenses?’
‘Not a fucking bodyguard, Kenny. Just someone who can handle himself in a ruck, and only for a few days. We’re going through a tough patch, remember.’
‘Actually, I’ve got some good news on that front.’
As usual when money was mentioned, I had Odeerie’s full attention. It took ten minutes to replay my conversation with Peter Timms.
‘Did you give him a new client form?’ was his first question.
‘I’ve got his email address. We can DocuSign it.’
‘He knows the costs?’
‘Timms is minted.’
‘Does he really think this Porteus bloke is stalking him?’
‘He kind of does and he kind of doesn’t. T
he thing is that it has to be sorted in the next two days.’ I told Odeerie about the ‘Ten days’ phone call and that I had suggested Peter contact the police.
‘He shouldn’t go anywhere near the bloody police!’ he spluttered. ‘And I hope you told him about the twenty per cent priority supplement.’
‘I wasn’t aware we had one,’ I said. ‘But you can always add it to the quote when you send the contract over.’ This suggestion appeared to mollify him.
‘How are you going to get to talk to Blimp Baxter?’ he asked.
‘I’ll work something out.’
‘It’ll take some doing.’
‘You think we should turn the job down?’
‘Course not. This is a business, Kenny.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t want us milking it. Peter Timms is my brother’s mate.’
Odeerie held his hands up as though he found the idea morally repugnant. ‘We’ll treat him like every other client,’ he said. ‘If this Paxton guy has a number, then I’ll be able to find it pretty quickly. Did he have any info about the other two boys?’
‘Just names. He googled them but nothing came up.’
‘Write ’em down and I’ll get on to it.’
‘You should get checked out by a doctor first, Odeerie,’ I said. ‘You were spark-out when I found you. At least have an X-ray.’
‘I’m fine, Kenny. Go see Dent’s apartment.’
Odeerie rose from the sofa with the grace of a sedated rhino and headed straight for the door. ‘Gimme a call later,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably have something for you on Clarke and Creighton-Smith and I’ll text you Paxton’s number if he has one. Actually, I could probably sort out your minder too.’
‘You mean someone who’s competitive on rate?’
The fat man gave me a wounded look. ‘I mean someone decent, Kenny,’ he said.
‘Yeah, well don’t bother about that,’ I replied.
‘Why not?
‘I’ve already got someone in mind.’
FOUR
Mermaid Court was a complex of red-brick buildings put up in the thirties. According to Wikipedia, its name derived from the fountain in the central gardens, and it was less than a mile from the Palace of Westminster. For this reason it was home to quite a few MPs and senior civil servants. The official entrance was through a six-columned portico on Millbank, although I opted to use the access road instead. Each apartment block was named for a British county. George Dent had fallen from the seventh floor of Surrey House. The east corner of the gardens had more trees and bushes outside it than most – ideal cover for the ghost of a dead magician.
