Vendetta

by Dreda Say Mitchell

Mac checked him over for any signs that he was surprised that Mac was still among the living. A slight opening of the eyes? A red stain appearing beneath the skin of the face? A hand moving for a gun to put Mac down permanently this time?

  Reuben’s hand shot out. Instinctively, Mac reached for his gun, before remembering it was no longer there.

  Reuben’s hand clamped down on the edge of Mac’s shoulder as he greeted him with a half-smile. ‘So glad you could come.’

  So glad he could come? He would indeed be glad if he wanted Mac dead. In that case his victim had made it too easy for him. Mac searched the big man’s frozen eyes for an answer. But there wasn’t one.

  He felt the grip tighten on his shoulder as Reuben whispered. ‘Have you got a problem . . . ?’

  The way the question was posed didn’t invite an answer. Did he mean – have you got a problem? Or – you’ve got a big problem.

  Mac whispered. ‘A problem?’

  Reuben was looking him up and down. ‘Yes. You seem to have a few bumps and bruises. And you seem a little stressed. Not your usual self . . .’ Once again, Mac looked into the empty eyes. A concerned gangster? Or Reuben’s little joke? But he got no answer.

  ‘Daddy,’ a high voice shrieked.

  A small boy barrelled his way towards Reuben and wrapped his arms lovingly round his leg. Reuben looked down at the boy clinging to him and smiled. Mac realised that he’d never really seen the other man’s features transformed by a loving smile.

  ‘This is my son, Milos.’

  The boy turned his face towards him. Mac felt his belly rolling and his power of speech go. The boy’s face was almost a replica of Stevie’s. The same gleam of curiosity in his blue eyes; the tiny dimple in his right cheek; the two missing front teeth. Abruptly the picture of that other birthday party flashed through Mac’s mind. Desperately he tried to push it back, shove it away. But the image got brighter and clearer. Came into full focus. Took over Mac’s conscious mind . . .

  twenty-eight

  Stevie’s eyes shone happy-blue as he stared at his banana-shaped birthday cake. He had been banana-mad since hearing the ditty ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’ on a kids’ TV show six months back. The flames on the six candles matched the glow on his cheeks.

  ‘Don’t forget to make a wish,’ Mac whispered, hunched down on the other side of the table, camera in hand, ready to snap that magic moment. ‘And remember to close your eyes.’

  The party was in full swing in the sitting room of the house he shared with his son and Donna. The place was decked out in streamers, balloons, party food and kids. And more kids. He didn’t even know that Stevie had so many friends. A hush fell as everyone waited for the birthday boy to blow out the candles.

  But instead of doing it, he looked up at his father, the happiness slipping slightly from his face. ‘But what if it doesn’t come true, Dad?’

  The adults in the room, including Mac, chuckled. ‘Believe me, son, it will.’ He winked as he dropped his voice low. ‘But only if you don’t tell anyone.’

  Stevie turned back to the cake. His eyes lit up. His little mouth moved as he gathered a deep breath. Then he leaned forward and blew. Click. Mac took the picture. All of the candle flames were gone except one. Stevie blew again. It wouldn’t go out.

  Blew.

  It fluttered but bloomed back to full brightness.

  Blew.

  ‘Bananas,’ Stevie let out crossly as the flame burned bright.

  Mac pulled himself up and scooted to hunch down by his son. Put his arm round his shoulder.

  ‘Let’s make a wish together.’

  Stevie grinned back at him and nodded. They both closed their eyes.

  ‘Ready,’ Mac said, a few seconds later.

  Again Stevie nodded.

  ‘After three,’ Mac said, then chanted. ‘One . . . two . . . three.’

  They let out twin breaths of air across the cake.

  The flame died.

  twenty-nine

  ‘Milos, say hello to my good friend Mac.’

  Reuben’s words slammed Mac back to the present. The air in his chest blew out of his nostrils. A film of sweat formed above his top lip. Blood pumped with such intensity around his head wound that he had a desperate need to hold his head in his hands. But he didn’t. Instead he nervously looked at the kid and his father to see if they’d noticed his mood swing. But all he saw was the shy smile of a boy who held out his hand to him.

  With a shaky smile in return, Mac shook his hand. The boy beamed with complete pleasure, as if shaking hands was the newest game he’d learnt. Reuben said something to Milos in Russian that had him skipping away. To Mac’s shock and surprise, Reuben put his arm round his shoulder and led him into the party. Grim-faced members of the gang made jokes and horse-played with children, but Mac could see it was all faked. When the kids turned and ran, the same men who gave the youngsters rides on their backs were whispering to each other and scowling in turn.

  Reuben was still playing the genial host. ‘Today my son is six years old. Family is so important, don’t you think? Do you have any children, my friend?’

  Mac couldn’t shake off Stevie’s ghost; without realising what he was saying, the words formed like ash in his mouth. ‘There was a boy. He died.’

  Reuben said nothing but tightened his grip on Mac’s shoulder. ‘There will be other sons, my friend. Please treat my home as your own.’ Reuben’s hand fell away and the spark of emotion set off by his son left his face. ‘Please understand I have things to do . . .’

  Mac knew that Reuben hadn’t been play-acting the doting daddy – but in reality he was a cold-blooded man dealing in death. Mac’s brain shifted into gear and he began to plan. Priority number one was he needed a weapon. But what? As his gaze darted around, a woman approached him with a small plate of party cake. Impatiently he waved her away. He wasn’t here to celebrate. Wasn’t here to eat. Wasn’t here . . . Sharply he looked across at the woman dishing out cake. Cake. Cake meant . . . Mac’s gaze flew to the buffet table manned by two people from a catering company. With long strides he moved over to the table.

  ‘What can I get you, sir?’ one of the caterers asked with a professional smile.

  ‘Just fill up a plate,’ Mac answered, his gaze doing the rounds of the table. That’s when he spotted the car-shaped cake with a serrated knife beside it.

  ‘Will this do, sir?’

  Mac jerked his eyes up at the plate being offered to him. ‘Sure,’ he let out. ‘I think I’ll just help myself to some of that yummy-looking cake.’

  He took the plate and headed up to the end of the table. Picked up the black handle of the knife. Looked around. Shoved it into his inside pocket. The blade rested high against his chest. There were so many ways to kill a man with a knife. Slit his throat. Stab him deep in the eye. Plunge it into the heart, then, with the flick of a wrist . . . twist.

  Mac dumped the food. The sound of male voices drew him out onto the patio. Reuben was standing a few yards away with his back turned, deep in conversation with his mad dog of a brother, Sergei. Sergei was the younger of the two – how much younger, Mac didn’t know, but he guessed it was a big gap; one was maybe coming up to forty, the other in his mid-twenties. He wore a white vest, showing off his taut muscles, tats, and baggy, low-riding jeans. Sergei had a reckless streak that was reflected in the hard grooves around his mouth and eyes and in his feral, hand-raked bleached hair. Both men were dangerous, but Sergei was the one who’d never mastered the art of control.

  ‘Uncle Mac . . .’

  Mac felt a tug on the bottom end of his jacket and looked down to see the little figure of Milos below him.

  Mac whispered, ‘Careful,’ afraid the knife might fall out.

  Milos let go and sent him a brilliant smile of innocence. ‘Do you want to see my new car? It’s just like the real thing . . .’

  Mac said nothing. He looked away from the boy, towards his father’s back, and then out into the garden where a toy car was sitting. H
e also noticed that the members of the gang seemed to have thinned out. Mac looked at his target again while Milos tugged his trouser leg this time. ‘Uncle Mac – are you all right? Your leg is shaking.’

  Mac looked down at the kid’s face and swallowed hard. What came first? The right of this boy not to see his father stabbed to death in front of him? Or the promise he’d made to Elena?

  ‘Milos,’ Sergei yelled. He gestured with his thumb. ‘Hop it and play in the garden with the others.’

  All the animation drained from the boy as his eyes grew wide with fear. He didn’t leave with a happy skip this time, but ran as fast as his little legs could carry him. So the kid’s piss- scared of his uncle, Mac observed. When Mac looked back across at the men, Reuben was gone. Bollocks, he couldn’t find him. Sergei sauntered over to him, closely followed by his enforcer, Vladimir.

  Sergei leaned close to Mac and whispered, in that fake American-ghetto accent he loved to use. ‘My bro wants you. Now.’

  Why would Reuben want him? Unless he wanted Mac in a place he could do what he liked to him without many witnesses.

  The muscles in Sergei’s neck visibly tightened and he hissed, ‘That’s not a request, that’s an order.’

  The enforcer took Mac’s arm. Sergei was close by him on the other side. There was no way Mac was going to be able to grab the knife, with both men stuck to him like blowflies on a rotting corpse.

  thirty

  ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news and more bad news?’ Detective Jamie Martin asked his superior as she walked into the office.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any good news when you’re dealing with murder,’ Rio answered as she pulled off her jacket.

  They were in the squad office at their HQ, nicknamed The Fort by those who worked inside it, because it was believed to be the site of a former Ancient Roman stronghold and had been used as a high-profile government building during the Cold War. The Fort was really three buildings: a middle section that was modern and transparent, reflecting what The Met proclaimed its relationship with the public was, and one block on either side, made of tough, acid-stained grey, 1950s brick. Rio’s squad was stationed on the third floor of the new section. The place was brisk and busy.

  DC Martin blushed at her remark and Rio reminded herself she was meant to be his personal supervisor. ‘OK, let’s do a sandwich approach – bad news, good news, bad news.’

  She threw her jacket on the back of her chair at her desk and sat down.

  Eagerly Martin got up and went over to her. He knew better than to perch on the edge, casualness just wasn’t the DI’s style, so he pulled up a chair instead. ‘There’s no match to the hotel victim’s DNA in our system or dental records, which suggests she got into the country illegally and kept herself off the radar. So I’ve put in a call to Europol and Interpol to do a search.’

  ‘Good news?’

  ‘We’ve got a record of the DNA of the blood found on the bed in the hotel.’

  Rio pulled herself straight. ‘Good work, Martin. So what’s the bad news?’

  ‘When I tried to match the DNA to a face, the computer didn’t want to cough up the info.’

  ‘What do you mean it didn’t want to play ball?’

  He shrugged. ‘Kept coming up as blocked with a code. I chatted to one of the lab guys who said it could be happening for lots of reasons, including the original information being put into the new system incorrectly.’

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. Rio hated, totally hated, having to rely on machines. What she wouldn’t admit to herself was that she didn’t like not being in absolute control.

  ‘We need that match . . .’ she ground out.

  ‘Yeah, I know boss, I’ll keep on at the lab guys.’

  ‘What about the image on the security camera from the hotel? Have we got a clearer image . . . ?’

  Her words faded when she saw Martin look down, avoiding her gaze.

  ‘Am I going to have to squeeze your balls to get the info out of you?’

  That made the young man blush darker than before. She knew she could be blunt and vulgar, but that’s just how she was. If Martin didn’t like it, he could fast-track off out of her squad.

  So Martin told her straight. ‘The weather Up North has been shite, which means our expert has been delayed—’

  ‘Get someone who works this side of the Watford Gap, for crying out loud.’

  ‘Cutbacks. Apparently that department was slashed in the latest financial cull.’ Rio threw out a noise of utter disgust. ‘There isn’t anyone else. He says he’ll be here in a few hours. And there aren’t any Russian translators working today, so we can’t decipher the words on the tattoo.’

  ‘Good job they’re not invading then . . .’ Rio blasted.

  ‘They’re on a three-day week—’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Rio jumped in, her sarcasm hitting the ten button. ‘Cutbacks.’

  She almost turned the air blue. What the hell was The Met coming to when it was at the beck and call of bureaucrats who just didn’t get the basics of police work? Might as well distribute leaflets in prisons saying there was going to be a crime festival in town every day and dick was going to be done about it.

  ‘I could ask a friend of mine who works at the Russian embassy to translate the writing,’ Martin tentatively threw out.

  Rio shook her head. ‘No can do. We’re only permitted to use official personnel – using anyone else could contaminate our investigation. When we bring someone to trial for this murder, we don’t need to give the prosecution any grounds to trip up our case.’

  Rio slipped her thoughts back to the investigation. In all her years in the Force, she’d only known a few occasions where a DNA sample in the system hadn’t come through with a name. Mind you, those IT idiots had changed the network last year, which had thrown a few spanners into the works, but that should all have settled down. She needed to get that DNA match.

  Rio left Martin and moved out of The Fort towards the older building on the left side that housed the forensic team. This was one of the only police complexes that had an on-site forensic team. It was more an experiment, really, to see if, in the words of official policy, it would assist more ‘joined-up thinking’. Joined-up thinking, my sweet black arse, Rio thought as she took the stairs to the third floor.

  She saw Charlie as soon as she entered the front office of the lab.

  ‘DI Wray,’ the forensic specialist said as soon as she saw her. ‘I’m glad you’ve come over. I’ve got two pieces of information that I think will help the investigation.’ The other woman took Rio to her workspace and opened a file.

  ‘I found something interesting from the scene. Blood on the wardrobe in the main room. It wasn’t much, just a fine spray. From the direction of the blood, someone was hit by something violent as he or she stood near the doorway.’

  ‘Like a blunt instrument?’

  ‘No, from the blood pattern, I think the person was shot.’

  ‘Could the blood have belonged to the victim in the bath?’

  ‘No. The blood matches the person who was lying on the bed. Maybe the victim shot him . . .’

  ‘No.’ Rio’s spine stiffened. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. If the victim shot him, surely she would have managed to get away . . .’ Her shoulders went back as another idea hit her. ‘What if there was a third person there? Someone who shoots our dead woman, then shoots someone else as they come into the room. Leaves them on the bed to die. Except they don’t die, they escape.’

  Two victims, one murderer?

  One victim, one murderer?

  One victim, two murderers?

  Rio’s mind buzzed with possible scenarios.

  ‘And the other piece of information,’ Charlie shot over Rio’s thoughts. ‘You were right: the towel from the doctor’s clinic matches the torn towel in the hotel room.’

  At last, confirmation that the two murder scenes were connected. Now all she had to do was figure out what that connection was. How t
he fuck was Doctor Mohammed Masri linked with the faceless woman in the bath? Had he treated the person who left the pool of blood on the bed? The murderer? She wasn’t going to get any more answers until she found out whose medical record was missing from the doctor’s.

  Charlie carried on, ‘And the blood on the towel at the doctor’s matches the blood found on the bed in the hotel room.’

  Two murders. Two different crime scenes. One killer connected to both crimes? And the only way of finding out was getting a DNA match on the blood. A match the computer system wasn’t giving up. Dead end. Or was it?

  ‘Detective Martin says that we can’t get access to that information because of some code. Can you show me the information you found out about the blood?’

  Charlie took a sip from her drink and grimaced at the heat it pushed into her mouth. ‘I haven’t been working on that aspect of the case, but sure it shouldn’t be a problem.’ She leaned over her desk and tapped away at her keyboard. The information for the DNA came up.

  Match.

  ‘This new system is bloody frustrating,’ the forensic expert muttered under her breath as she pressed enter but nothing changed on the screen.

  She looked up at Rio. ‘You might have to find out who the match is by manually going through the files, which will probably take you ages . . .’

  Her words dribbled away when she realised that Rio wasn’t listening to her. Instead the younger woman’s dark gaze was fixed firmly to the screen.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

  For a few seconds Rio didn’t respond. Then she pushed herself straight. ‘Nothing. Thanks Charlie.’

  Rio strode away. Couldn’t believe what she’d seen on the computer screen. A code in the top right-hand corner.

  1402C.

  The coding system she knew was used for undercover cops. But this one was different because it ended with the letter C.

  thirty-one

  Sergei led Mac towards the villa’s garage like a condemned man. Most of the gang waited inside. The garage was a good size, free of clutter except for a monster 4x4 and bathtub that looked like it had seen some pretty damn good days inside a Victorian whorehouse. Reuben sat on the edge of the tub, one of his hands massaging the ornate tap mixer.