The Mourner

by Susan Wilkins

  Blake opened his palms in a placatory gesture. ‘At least think about it.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Could hold the key to this investigation.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Nicci grabbed the plate-glass door and hauled it open. Blake watched her go with a wry expression on his face; he was glad to see her showing some spirit. Six months ago he hadn’t even been sure she’d survive. She’d been a broken reed but he’d offered her a job anyway. It wasn’t altruism, it was self-interest. At least that’s what he told himself. In a competitive market, he needed to build a reputation on results and he wasn’t likely to find many ex-coppers out there of the calibre of Nicci Armstrong.

  As usual, her instincts were spot on and she was right about the case. A sensible man would say no. In terms of time and aggravation, there’d be little profit in it. But profits weren’t everything. Blake still needed a reason to get up in the morning. Going up against those smug bastards sitting it out for their pensions – that appealed to him.

  A private smile flitted across his face as he pressed the intercom on his desk. ‘Alicia, is Eddie about? Can you track him down for me?’

  6

  Kaz sat at the kitchen table, hands cupped round a mug of tea. The kitchen was long and narrow, at the back of the house with a side door onto the garden. She watched as Yasmin, standing in the open doorway, had a quiet word with one of her girls. The girl wore an ivory, antique lace negligee over a tightly laced bustier, forcing her small breasts into tiny mounds and reducing her waist to hardly more than a hand-span. The girl listened attentively to Yasmin’s instructions. Her pale face was surrounded by a frizzy halo of auburn hair. She had an air of childish innocence. Kaz judged her to be fifteen at most.

  Yasmin patted the girl’s arm. She shot a nervous glance in Kaz’s direction then disappeared down the garden. Out of the back window Kaz could see a low, prefabricated structure with a half-glazed door and a couple of obscured windows. It looked like some kind of site office. The girl opened the door and stepped inside.

  Yasmin joined Kaz at the kitchen table. ‘All fixed. The girls can bunk up, so you’ll have your own little room. It ain’t big, but it’s clean.’

  Kaz shifted in her chair, she wasn’t sure how she felt about all this.

  She’d come expecting a sofa to kip on, not a knocking shop full of underage prozzies. ‘Look, I don’t wanna put you out, Yas.’

  Yasmin smiled. She reached over for the clutch bag propped up on the windowsill and brought out a pack of Menthol Superkings. ‘N’t a problem, babes. Rooms in the house are strictly for business. But we cosy enough down there. Got a shower, three bedrooms, Sky and Wi-Fi. Trust me, them whores are spoilt rotten.’

  She offered the cigarettes to Kaz, who shook her head. ‘Still off the ciggies? Good for you.’

  Kaz wasn’t feeling particularly good. She was batting away memories of her own teenage years servicing the sexual needs of a drunken father. ‘So how the fuck d’you get into all this?’

  Yasmin pulled a brushed chrome Zippo from her bag, lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘You was my inspiration, girl. Don’t take no shit from no one, that’s what you was always saying. I got out, I thought, Fuck this! I ain’t going back to him. I don’t need no scumbag pimp.’

  ‘Yeah, but this must’ve cost a packet. Where’d you get the money?’

  Yasmin tapped the side of her nose, looking smug. ‘You ain’t the only one learnt stuff inside. I done courses too.’

  Kaz sipped her tea. ‘I don’t recall a course on how to run a whorehouse.’

  ‘I done computer skills, found stuff on the Net – how to write a business plan. And that’s what I done when I got out. Made a plan and went to see the man.’

  ‘The man?’

  ‘Mr Kemal – old john of mine. Got loads of interests round here: taxis, property, chain of kebab shops. Now I’m a businesswoman and he’s my investor.’

  ‘And he leaves you alone?’

  ‘He likes the money I bring in. He got clients he wants to impress, then I hire a hotel suite, arrange a private party for them. Classy stuff. You in need of cash, babes? I can set up a few sessions for you.’

  Kaz gave her old mate a sidelong look. Yasmin held up her palms. ‘Strictly hostess work, you don’t even need to fuck ’em if you don’t want. Some of them are big tippers.’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

  Yasmin shrugged. ‘Only trying to help.’

  ‘I’m a student. Being poor is part of the deal. I don’t mind it.’

  ‘I worked with a girl once, she was a student. We done a lesbo double-act. She turned tricks her whole way through college. Now she’s a doctor, an ortha-whad’you-call-it, ortha-something surgeon.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Kaz chuckled.

  Yasmin put on a show of wide-eyed innocence. ‘I ain’t lying, babes. Her name’s Shilpa. Still sends me a Christmas card every year. Reckon if I ever need a new hip, she’ll fix me up.’

  Yasmin cackled with laughter and Kaz joined in. In spite of the venue, it felt such a relief being in Yasmin’s company and not having to pretend.

  ‘So what’s going on with you, girl?’ Yasmin reached across the table and put her hand over Kaz’s. ‘’Cause I gotta say, without meaning to cause offence, you look like shit.’

  Realizing that the laughter had somehow turned to tears, Kaz swiped beneath her eyes with both index fingers. Yasmin blew a long plume of smoke up at the ceiling and waited. Then she got up, tore a piece of kitchen paper from a roll on the counter and handed it to Kaz.

  Kaz wiped her nose and sighed deeply. ‘Remember my lawyer?’

  Yasmin sucked her teeth. ‘Well that bitch was always gonna cause you grief. So what happened? Once you was on the outside she didn’t want to play no more?’

  ‘She had a partner.’

  ‘Really? Wow, that’s a surprise.’

  ‘She did me a lot of good, Yas.’

  Yasmin slapped her hand on the table. ‘She was playing with you, girl. Bitches like that, it turns them on, hanging with the bad girls. She made you her pet, but you still a jailbird. What you think was gonna happen? She takes you home to meet Mummy and Daddy and all her posh friends?’

  The tears were coursing down Kaz’s cheeks and they didn’t seem to want to stop. Seeing this, Yasmin huffed, put a hand on her hip and straightened the bodice of her jacket. ‘Now you making me feel bad.’ Kaz’s tears dripped onto the tabletop and started to form a small puddle. Yasmin tore off two fresh sheets of kitchen roll. ‘You give me the address, I’ll go round there and slap her myself!’

  Kaz took the kitchen paper. She mopped her face, but still the tears kept coming. Swallowing hard, she managed to meet Yasmin’s eye. ‘She’s dead, Yas. A month ago. I only just found out. Says on the Net she committed suicide.’

  Yasmin’s eyes widened. ‘Fuck me!’

  ‘She didn’t commit suicide. No fucking way.’

  ‘Then why they saying that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t fucking know!’

  Yasmin put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Oh, babes, maybe you just didn’t know her as well as you think. We all got stuff inside we don’t show. Maybe she had troubles you didn’t know about . . .’

  Kaz blew her nose hard. ‘She was really clever, y’know. Got elected to Parliament. Back in January. She was always full of big ideas, stuff she wanted to do. She wasn’t afraid to upset people.’

  Realization spread over Yasmin’s face, she gawped at Kaz in disbelief. ‘What? You mean the MP that jumped in the river? That was her? I saw it on the telly. Ages ago. How come you only just found out?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Kaz balled up the kitchen paper in her hand. ‘I don’t watch much telly.’

  ‘It’s been everywhere. There were even pictures of her with some bint in Hello! magazine.’ Yasmin sounded impressed. ‘I never realized that was her.’

  ‘You probably never saw her.’

  ‘One time I did. In the visitors’ pen
.’ Yasmin gave a rueful smile. ‘Really had a thing for her, din’t you?’

  Kaz became absorbed with unravelling and refolding the soggy kitchen paper. ‘Yeah. I did.’

  A mobile phone on the kitchen counter trilled with an incoming text. Yasmin picked it up, opened the text, scanned it and huffed. ‘Aww, that’s all I fucking need!’

  Kaz began to get up. ‘Listen, babes, I don’t want to put you out. I can find somewhere else to crash . . .’

  Yasmin clicked the phone off, tossed it on the counter. ‘The fuck you will. It’s nothing. Just a bit of business, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t want to be in the way—’

  Yasmin put a hand on her hip, thrust her shoulder forward and glared at Kaz. ‘You got a problem staying in a whorehouse?’

  Kaz pulled a serious face. ‘No. But I ain’t doing no lesbo double-act to pay the rent, okay.’

  Yasmin tilted her head coyly. ‘Nah? Don’t you fancy me no more? You used to. I know I ain’t her, but we had some sweet times, din’t we?’ Her wistful smile turned into a smirk. ‘Remember when we charged that screw to watch?’

  Kaz grimaced. ‘Oh no, he was gross! I don’t wanna think about him.’

  Overcome by giggles, Yasmin wrapped her fingers around an imaginary cock and jerked her hand up and down. ‘He was staring and pumping away at his limp little dick! Took him ages to get off. Remember?’

  They both started to crack up.

  Yasmin grabbed Kaz’s arm, pulled her to her feet and enveloped her in a hug. ‘You stay here long as you like, ’til you get your head straight. ’Cause I know you, Kaz Phelps, you’re gonna go digging into this mess, n’t you? And all you’ll find, girl, is grief.’

  ‘I just want to know what happened to Helen.’

  ‘You won’t never know that. Not for sure.’

  ‘We’ll see.’ Kaz managed a thin smile. ‘You’re a good mate, Yas.’

  ‘Too fucking right, I am. And you still fancy me a bit – admit it.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Kaz grinned. ‘It’s ’cause you’re so fucking vain.’

  7

  The Investigations Department at SBA Security was stuck in a corner and occupied the smallest amount of floor space. Blake oversaw its caseload himself. But as his de facto number two in the unit, Nicci had the pick of workstations. None of this desk-sharing crap, which was the latest cost-cutting wheeze in the Met. Accordingly she’d secured herself a snug spot, back to the wall, panoramic view out of the window.

  She dumped her mug, flopped down in the high-backed leather chair, scooted it away from the desk, put her feet up and took out her phone. She scrolled through the contacts list; Blake was of course right, she still had Fiona Calder’s number. She stared at it. The other thing he was probably right about too was Fiona Calder’s intervention; whatever she was up to would certainly throw light on the conundrum of Helen Warner’s death.

  Seated at the adjacent workstation, Pascale threw a questioning glance her way. Nicci was not known for her regular office hours.

  ‘He must’ve got you out of bed.’

  Nicci huffed, took a slug of coffee. ‘Not quite.’

  Grinning, Pascale returned to her keyboard. She hailed from the Ivory Coast by way of Paris, spoke five languages fluently and was the best researcher Nicci had ever worked with. She and Liam were the permanent back office presence in Investigations. Beyond that, Blake tended to rely on a freelance pool of former police officers, either retired or semi-retired. Liam, who was in his twenties, dubbed them the old codgers. But with the workflow changing from week to week Blake needed flexibility as well as reliability. He wasn’t about to pay anyone to sit around twiddling their thumbs.

  The core business was security. For that he had Rory and Hugo, a former army major and a captain, both of whom had seen active service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Large, square-jawed, posh public schoolboys, they were frighteningly fit and, although unrelated, could be mistaken for twins. A regular flow of beefy ex-squaddies in dark off-the-peg suits passed through the office en route to jobs as bodyguards and bouncers. At the end of a dire office party Nicci had got pretty bladdered and ended up snogging either Hugo or Rory; she was never quite sure which and so had subsequently taken to ignoring both of them.

  The other side of the room and spiritually on a different planet were the techies. These were all IT professionals specializing in the burgeoning arena of cybercrime. No one else in the firm really understood what they did, Blake included, but he had persuaded his financial backers to invest in a shedload of state-of-the-art computer kit on the basis that this was where the future lay. The techies moved around in their own little bubble, huddling together occasionally for bursts of excitement as if part of a game to which no one else was privy. Nicci watched them from time to time, always busy like worker bees.

  The section head was Bharat, a timid and painfully polite young man. Nicci had made a point of making friends with him. He loved to explain; given encouragement, his confidence soared. She was canny enough to play the girly listener. In return, she got the lowdown on the latest gadgets, the best new apps and all the technical help she needed.

  Nicci put the phone on the desktop and swivelled it round in a circle with her index finger. Telling Blake to fuck off had certainly afforded her a degree of satisfaction, but the detective in her was as keen as he was to find out why Fiona Calder had stuck her neck out.

  From what they’d been told, it sounded as if the Met had conducted an over-hasty investigation into the MP’s death, batting it firmly back to the Coroner. Yet Julia Hadley was adamant that it wasn’t suicide. Although it was quite possible, even likely that Julia was blinded by grief, Nicci’s intuition backed her judgement. That left two possibilities: accident or murder. Occasionally people drowned in the Thames, usually as a result of boating accidents. There was the odd swimmer who underestimated the strength of the current, the occasional drunk who misjudged their footing, but Helen Warner clearly didn’t fit into these categories. Post-mortem and toxicology reports would be presented at the Coroner’s inquest, and Nicci was pondering what these might contain when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Eddie Lunt barrelling across the room towards her.

  Eddie was barely medium height but carried plenty of extra inches round his girth. His ginger hair was neatly buzz-cut and he wore a carefully sculpted beard and moustache. Always smiling, his features were cherubic. Yet Nicci thought of him more as a malevolent pixie.

  He’d started his career going through celebrities’ dustbins and built up a nice little trade selling celebrity gossip to the tabloids. Then ambition and technology got the better of him when an old lag of his acquaintance showed him how to hack voicemail. Eddie found himself in on the ground floor of this particular racket. Soon he had wires on over a hundred people ranging from D-list reality TV stars to the great and the good. As scoop followed scoop, the gossip mags, celebrity columnists and newspaper editors were queuing up to use his services.

  When the shit hit the fan and the scam was busted, Eddie was one of the first to be hung out to dry. He pleaded guilty to illegally intercepting phone messages and served six months in jail. However, Eddie Lunt was never a bloke to waste an experience. He spent his time inside building up a raft of underworld contacts and mastering a few new tricks, and emerged from prison with his legendary optimism intact.

  Hoisting his jeans from under his paunch, Eddie rested one expensively leather-jacketed elbow on the side of Nicci’s workstation. ‘All right, Nicola?’

  This earned him a baleful look. Only her mother called her that and even then she didn’t like it.

  ‘Just been in with the guvnor. The Warner case! That’s a turn-up, innit. Simon says I’m on the team. Says you asked for me specially.’

  ‘He’s winding you up, Eddie.’ She gave him a regal smile. ‘I hate you as much as I ever did.’

  Eddie shrugged, a man totally beyond offence. ‘No worries. Rumour has it the honourable member was a bit of a party girl.
Probably liked a toot. So is that an angle you wanna play?’

  Nicci folded her arms and turned her chair to face him. ‘Eddie, let me explain something to you. A woman has died. Possibly in suspicious circumstances. Our job is to find out what happened to her. What we’re looking for here is the truth. Not an angle. Not a story. We want to establish who was involved and the actual events that took place. Does that make any sense to you?’

  Eddie nodded, grin still in place, like a schoolboy faced with a grumpy teacher who for some strange reason wouldn’t accede to his charms. ‘I know a few dealers on the Westminster beat. Posh boys, very discreet. Supply you anything. Topnotch gear. You want me to find out if Helen Warner was on anyone’s radar?’

  ‘Excellent idea.’ Anything to get rid of him.

  Eddie beamed. ‘No worries. I’ll keep you posted.’

  The phone on Nicci’s desk vibrated with an incoming text, drawing a speculative glance from Eddie. ‘Boyfriend on your case, is he?’

  Nicci picked up the phone and fixed him with her iciest stare. ‘You ever, ever touch my phone or any of my stuff, I will hack off your balls with the bluntest instrument I can find. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He shrugged and lumbered off towards his own desk, where he unwrapped a sub the size of a baguette and started to devour it in canine gulps.

  Exchanging a disdainful glance with Pascale, Nicci clicked on to the newly arrived text. It was from Blake and read please, followed by a smiley face with heart-shaped eyes.

  Nicci ran her hand through her hair and sighed. She knew she was snookered. She could continue to kick off, go home, open a bottle of vodka. But where would that get her?

  Fiona Calder had been a more than decent boss. When the investigation into career criminal and psychopath Joey Phelps looked set to go pear-shaped, Calder had personally stepped in and overseen his arrest. Instead of claiming all the credit, she’d happily acknowledged Nicci’s contribution, letting her know she could expect to make DI when the next vacancy came up. But Sophie’s death had put paid to all that. In the mayhem that ensued Calder had tried to support her, but the Met had policies and policies ruled. The second time she was found to be drunk and incapable on duty the Met’s disciplinary system kicked in. She was processed, counselled, and still the result was a foregone conclusion – retirement on medical grounds.