No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  Jago had known his place in life because overlooking Canning Town, and the low-quality housing erected after the Blitz bombing had flattened the old terraces, was the triumphant glory of Canary Wharf; a world apart and a mile away. Canning Town only came to Canary Wharf to clean the soaring building and deliver their necessities. There was always an exception, though. A hero of capitalism trawled local schools for talent. A name had come up; the boy had interviewed well; his future was mapped out.

  ‘And all of this happened before you saw the client?’

  ‘Yes. It was why I was slightly late. I apologised.’

  ‘When I telephoned, no mention was made of this.’

  ‘The meeting was satisfactory, Wilhelmina. There seemed no need.’

  ‘Or was she merely gracious?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The Bible they worked from, at Broadgate in the City, at Canary Wharf and at any bank in Berlin or Frankfurt that looked to attract corporate and personal business, was KYC. Know Your Client. The requirement for trust was stamped into their thinking, too. Risk was acceptable for the traders who made the big bucks and lived with the threat of burn-out and stress, not for the foot-soldiers in the sales teams, who were up close and personal with clients.

  ‘Jago, was she merely being polite?’

  ‘I don’t think I upset her.’

  ‘And afterwards you went to the police on Bismarckstrasse, and told an officer of this incident.’

  ‘I told an investigator from KrimPol what had happened to me and the young woman.

  ‘You made a statement? You listed your place of employment as this bank, named it and its address?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No statement? How is that possible?’

  He had confused her. Did she doubt his word? The frown had set on her forehead and her lips had narrowed. Her make-up had been generously applied even though her husband was abroad, and her eyes had the glint that seemed to identify a lie.

  ‘Actually, Wilhelmina, I would have made a statement but the investigator refused to take one. His advice was that I “get a life. Forget it, because no one will thank you if you do otherwise.” That’s what I was told.’

  Her features lightened and the her eyes softened. ‘Very sensible. May I explain, Jago, because you are young and enthusiastic and honourable? If the good name of the bank was in the media – papers, radio, internet – in connection with street crime, no one here would welcome it. Although you acted from instinct, and therefore cannot be blamed, it would be negative for the bank’s name to be dragged into the courts.’

  ‘I understand, Wilhelmina.’

  ‘The good name of the bank, in difficult financial times, is of paramount importance. Perhaps, Jago, you would use the rest room to tidy yourself. Thank you.’

  He pushed himself away from the desk. His own cubicle was minute but neat, with no decoration. Others had photos of loved ones or pets, or postcards fastened to the low walls beside their screens. He had nothing personal. He had already volunteered to do the Christmas Day shift – the Gulf markets would be open, as would Tel Aviv and parts of the Far East – and watch over the figures. Hannelore would have taken him to Stuttgart for Christmas with her parents. He kept a washbag in the low cupboard at his desk. He was reaching for it.

  Wilhelmina’s voice was quiet: ‘Was the client upset because I didn’t come myself?’

  ‘She understood, Wilhelmina, that a really serious situation caused you to cry off the meeting, almost life and death.’

  He went to wash. Had he spoken with irony or sarcasm? She wouldn’t have noticed either. The entertainment was over and the team were busy again at their screens. She wouldn’t have noticed his rudeness because she didn’t know him well enough. Who did know him? Fewer people than he had fingers on one hand. That suited him. It was the way of the streets of Canning Town, where he came from and where old habits clung. When he had washed he would go back to work, and tomorrow would be another day. It would start with a seminar on sales tactics: a kick in the backside against complacency. The captain of finance, at Canary Wharf, who might have boasted about giving a chance to ‘youngsters from the other side of the tracks’, had said, ‘Jago, I’d like to leave you with this. The two most important days of your life are the one on which you were born and the one when you find out why you were born. What is your destiny? Think about it.’ He still didn’t know the answer. He scrubbed his face, cleaned the cuts and looked in the mirror to gauge the success of the repairs. He did not see himself: he saw the girl, the curl of defiance on her face, and heard her scream. He had been challenged.

  In a building behind a security fence, set back from Felixstowe docks, a phone rang. He answered it, heard serious excitement in the voice of the young woman who had called him. She had a ‘customer’ and his Class-A consignment. Her voice on the phone was shrill in his ear. ‘You should get yourself down here, Carlo, it’s a real nice one.’

  He had been ‘Carlo’ since the overseas posting.

  ‘Just finishing a coffee, if you don’t mind.’

  He’d heard the snort down the line from Dooley Terminal, where the lorries came and went, and the ferries were roll-on and roll-off. ‘Bring me one, two sugars. I think it’s a cracker.’

  ‘I’ll be there when it’s convenient.’

  ‘Thanks, Carlo.’ She’d have known he’d be out of his office, in the main administration section of the Customs area, and heading fast for the dockside bay where the vehicles were subjected to a thorough search. Usually it was intelligence from abroad that dictated which were pulled aside and given the treatment, but it was always Christmas come early when the ‘uniforms’ were allowed to choose which to wave down and put through the wringer. She’d known he’d burn the rubber to get there fast.

  He had gone to Rome, drugs liaison officer attached to the embassy, as Charlie. He had done four years there, should have been three but the replacement had suffered a last-ditch angina attack so the man in place had been asked to ‘endure’ another twelve months in the Eternal City. No complaints, almost fulsome gratitude to Human Resources at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. In Rome, immediately after arrival, he had become Carlo. He was Carlo with the guys in the Guardia, the Polizia, the carabinieri squads, throughout the embassy, and had brought it back with him to Felixstowe. He was a bit of a legend. It was whispered among the younger uniforms that Carlo had gone almost native in Italy.

  A driver sat on a hard chair in an interview room and two guys watched him. His passport was Albanian, and the find was two kilos of smack. The current price of heroin, at this point in the chain, wavered around an estimation of its purity. What they had on the table might be worth anything between two hundred thousand and three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It would have helped with the cultivation of the legend if Carlo had told her he didn’t get out of bed in the morning for less than a million, and it took more than five kilos to stop him yawning. The uniforms had done well and wanted congratulating, so he did that, augmenting his popularity.

  The driver didn’t speak English – or German, French or Italian. It usually took four hours to get hold of an interpreter, and then the little bugger – shivering and pleading for a fag – would likely communicate in a dialect that stumped the translator. There was nothing in the cab that indicated the end destination, except a Europe-wide road map, with crosses in pencil on the page that had the M6 toll route round the east of Birmingham and might be a service station or an exit. Difficult – next to impossible – to let the Albanian head onwards and tail him to his rendezvous.

  If the driver was allowed back on the road with a surveillance team attached to him, that would mean ten guys and girls tied down, maybe a dozen. For a million, anything was possible. For five million it was probable. For a third of a million it was pretty much a charge sheet, a trip to the docks police station where the holding cells were, a beer or a shiraz in the bar, and not much more. It would not have been right to pour cold water over
them, and the girl was keen. Carlo had been keen once, a long time ago. Keenness, he reckoned, was likely to wear out, like the heel of a favourite shoe. If his keenness had slid it was because incentives were scarce. The cuts pared resources and the poaching of staff by the National Crime Agency removed the best and the hungriest.

  He congratulated the team, gave them what they wanted to hear. He didn’t tell them that there was a container port on the coast of southern Italy, where formerly only mosquitoes had flourished, at which, on average, four thousand kilos of pure cocaine was seized each year, and that was the tip of the iceberg of what was brought through Gioia Tauro, far less than a quarter. He suggested they inform the press desk that the haul had a street value of half a million. He showed interest, was polite.

  Four good years in Rome, and because he had achieved so much there it would have been thought he needed cutting down to size. The tag ‘gone native’ never helped a career. He had been posted two years before to Felixstowe, and his skills were wasted there: he was supposed to collect dross and filter it, then pass it, if relevant, to the investigation teams. No one thanked him for less than a million’s worth in smack, coke or the recreational stuff.

  He backed off. The driver eyed him. Where he used to work, the driver would have been labelled a picciotto, a foot-soldier, at the bottom of the food chain, expendable, replaceable, little more than a mule with a condom up the back passage full of resin. He had seen big players taken down in Italy, those with the rank of padrino or the title of vangelista or santista, and had played a part in their downfall. He had seen the faces of men numbed at the shock of arrest, with the cuffs tight on their wrists, and had felt the glow of achievement. Before that he’d done well on Green Lanes in north London, targeting the Turkish Mafia importers, and up in Liverpool where the heavy action was . . . but Rome had been the love affair.

  But he was not in Rome now, at the embassy on Via Venti Settembre. Carlo was at Dooley Terminal in Felixstowe. He was short and squat, with a barrel chest, now aged fifty-three. His hair was thinning and silver, but his moustache was red – he coloured it.

  ‘It’s a good one. Thanks, guys. Appreciate you calling me.’

  He went back to his office to push paper round his desk and on his screen, and killing time until he could go home.

  Hi, Wilhelmina. Sorry, but feeling the after-effects, a bit sick. Seeing a doctor tomorrow morning. Apologies about your seminar. Best, Jago.

  He sent the text.

  Jago had waited until nearly midnight. He reckoned the FrauBoss would be asleep and wouldn’t see it until morning, but he’d keep his mobile switched off anyway. He doubted he would be missed. He sat in the comfortable chair in his room, in the living area beyond the partition that shielded the bed, and sipped coffee. The room, under the sloping ceiling, was tidy. In ten minutes, Jago could have packed a bag, run the vacuum over the rugs, wiped a cloth across the draining-board, cleared the fridge and left traces that only a forensic search would have found. He was the star of the street where Carmel Browne lived, with his brother and sister, the one who had worked at Broadgate in the City and was now on an exchange with a renowned bank in the German capital. His progress had seemed effortless. Neighbours would have congratulated his mother on what he had achieved. She didn’t love him, maybe no one did, but he slept well without love.

  There was distant traffic and rain pattered on the skylight, but the quiet gathered mournfully around him. It was more than two years since he had been back to Canning Town. His mother, last he’d heard, cleaned service apartments for people patronising the ExCeL conference centre. Billy was a probationer – at Canary they’d call it an ‘intern’ – hardly paid on a market stall. Georgina worked at an Oxford Street shop, flogging shoes at discount prices. His success had cut the links and the contact. Last Christmas he’d sent a hamper to the maisonette by the Beckton Arms and taken himself to a guesthouse on the Devon coast. There, he had walked the cliffs and eaten solitary meals surrounded by lonely pensioners . . . He didn’t know where he fitted in. He lit another cigarette. He didn’t fit, and it was years since he had.

  A dark February afternoon, in his school uniform, homework piled on the kitchen table. Jago was fourteen. There was no milk and Carmel was home from work, flustered and tired. Would he go down to Freemasons Road and get some? A suppressed protest, and Billy, aged nine, had piped up that he’d go. Georgina was too young for errands. Jago had gone, with bad grace, the money jangling in his pocket and Billy had skipped along beside him. He’d worn his school blazer and tie. They’d bought the milk. The kids had come out of the shadows. Some might have known him before he’d become ‘a high achiever’ and been moved on, but his smart blazer would have egged them on. The milk had been snatched. He’d been pushed and shoved, then punched. He’d gone down. The blazer had been a major investment for his mother, with the white shirts, the school tie and the pullover. The milk was over the pavement. Kicks were aimed at him and he was cursed in the gang patois. Blood was streaming off his face, and his phone had gone. He might have been about to take a bad kick, one that would do damage. But Billy, four years younger, had thrown himself across him and saved him from that kick. A car’s headlights had lit the scene and the kids had drifted away. Half of the milk was still in the plastic bottle. They’d gone home. Billy had told Carmel. Jago supposed he had been challenged and had failed, but he was now a banker. Billy had been challenged, had passed the test and worked for a pittance on a market stall on the Barking road in all weathers.

  He ground out the cigarette. It was a first: Jago Browne had never before taken a day off work sick, genuine or bogus. Nor, when at Lancaster, had he missed tutorials or lectures. The girl that morning had been pretty, but there had been beauty in her anger as she had spat at her attacker. Magnificent. All those years before, he had seen the same pride on Billy’s face and the same anger on his mother’s. It was about cliffs, the emptiness under them, the waves beating on sharp rocks far below, and how men and women were drawn to the edge, couldn’t help themselves, and didn’t know why they had been born.

  Jago could have spent that evening with Hannelore or Magda. He might have been with either of them in one of the Turkish cafés in Kreuzberg, or with Renate. There was another girl further down the office, between the flags that hung from the ceiling, denoting the languages spoken, and the clocks that showed the time in San Francisco, Riyadh and Hong Kong. She sometimes eyed him over the low walls that divided them from each other and seemed to approve. He just hadn’t seemed to have time. It might have been better to be with one of them, not crying off sick and not being pulled towards a cliff edge.

  3

  The web was tickled by a breeze and moved. What had been the body of the fly swayed gracefully, as if death had brought it some dignity. The manufacturer of the trap, the killer, was not to be seen.

  He sat on the bench, waited and watched.

  It was a morning almost like any other in the recent times of Jago Browne. From force of habit, although he was off sick, he wore his office suit, the one that went, dirty or spotless, to the dry cleaner round a corner from his attic apartment every Friday evening and was collected on Saturday. His shoes were polished and he wore a clean shirt with a nondescript tie. He had not brought his briefcase or laptop. The weather had closed in a little and cloud built to the east, over Spandau and Tegel. He had a formal raincoat – nothing as casual as an anorak – folded over his knees. Jago had no weapon. He didn’t own one.

  The lady was opposite him. She had been there when he had arrived, then had gone to the same bench and taken the same place on it as the previous day. She might have noticed that the young man facing her was dressed similarly to when she had first seen him and looked as if he was killing time before a business meeting. She might have caught little nuances of change. No checking of his watch and his eyes hovered mostly to his right. Perhaps she understood. That day she had brought her own cigarettes and a lighter with mother-of-pearl sides. She had already sm
oked two, but had not offered him one. She might have thought he was too preoccupied to engage in the chatter that would accompany the gift of a cigarette. She was well dressed again, and her shoes, almost new, still didn’t match. Jago thought that each pair would have set her back a hundred and fifty euros.

  He had a clear view of the pavement in front of the pizzeria. He could see the doors, and shadows moving inside. He hadn’t yet seen the girl. Why was he there?

  Difficult to summon up an answer. He didn’t know yet the extent of his involvement. His mother had known where she was going and why on a darkening February evening eleven years before. Jago had been left in the kitchen. His mother’s orders had been staccato, sharp, and he would have been an idiot to challenge them. He was to start his maths homework. He was to make Billy’s tea. He was to help Georgina with her reading and get her something to eat. He had told his mother what the kids had been wearing, in which direction they had sauntered off. She already knew, of course, the make and style of his phone: she had saved hard to get him a decent model. The door had slammed after her. His mother was five foot two. She weighed under eight stone. She had no flesh on her, neither muscle nor fat – but she could summon up the temper of her Irish ancestry.

  Among the few who knew and the fewer who cared in Canning Town, a little of a legend had been born. Various stories were peddled. One had it that Carmel had fastened the group’s leader with her gaze, requested the return of the phone and been given it. Unlikely. Other versions roved over her finding the leader, slapping him a bit, standing on tiptoe, then kneeing him in the groin, head-butting him and taking the phone from his pocket. The most popular had her marching into the kid’s home, pushing aside a shaken mother, going upstairs and bearding the bastard in his room, not needing to touch him because he cringed from her, then taking the phone from the bedside table and leaving. She had come home. She had checked that the phone worked, then put it down beside his maths book.