You Will Never Find Me

by Robert Wilson

  *

  ‘The Mercedes CLS was found in Cromwell Avenue, a residential street in Highgate,’ said Mercy to the assembled Crisis Management Committee in Netherhall Gardens. ‘DS Papadopoulos has done a door-to-door on all the houses with a sightline of the car and has two witnesses who saw a large lone male getting out of the car wearing a black overcoat, black gloves, grey trousers and a grey tweed trilby pulled down low over his forehead. He locked the car and walked off in the direction of Highgate Hill. The car has now been removed and is undergoing forensic examination. We’ve taken samples of Sasha’s fingerprints from this house and we’ll see if we get a match with any in the car.’

  ‘What about Jeremy Spencer?’ asked Kidd. ‘Any news on his murder?’

  ‘They haven’t found anybody who saw or heard anything yet. All we know is that last night Spencer did erg training with a friend at the Imperial College boathouse gym on the Embankment at Putney. He left there at 10:15 P.M. and would have been home within five minutes. There’s no sign of forced entry so either he knew his assailants and let them in, or they already had keys made, possibly with the assistance of Irina Demidova. Given that he died from drowning and was probably in the bath after his workout, it would suggest the latter scenario is more likely.’

  ‘I thought you said he was a big guy?’ said Butler.

  ‘He was, but, as I understand it, being upended in a full bath is a very difficult situation to get out of even if you’re his size.’

  The phone rang, cutting Mercy dead. She stared at it. They all stared at it thinking, is this it? Chris Sexton cued Bobkov’s lawyer, Butler. Kidd leaned over and pressed the speaker button, which started the recording and also triggered the triangulation equipment in the kidnap unit’s Vauxhall HQ, which would locate the mobile being used.

  ‘Give me Bobkov,’ said a voice.

  ‘I’m his lawyer. My name is Howard Butler.’

  ‘We will only talk to Bobkov.’

  ‘He isn’t here. He’s out raising the money. We need a proof of life before we can proceed with these talks. Can you put Sasha on the line, please?’

  ‘No. You ask your question. We get an answer. We call back later.’

  ‘What is Sasha’s favourite book?’

  The phone went dead. Sexton looked at the screen of his mobile. ‘King’s Cross,’ he said. ‘Disposable phone.’

  Two minutes. No talking. Everybody waiting to see if this could possibly develop into the first negotiation of the kidnap or another long, fruitless wait.

  The phone rang again. Kidd pressed the button.

  ‘How to Play Chess Openings by Znosko-Borovsky,’ said the voice, different this time.

  Bobkov nodded. Sexton held up a finger, made the call sign.

  ‘We’re just calling Bobkov to get confirmation.’

  The phone went dead again.

  ‘That one came from Hyde Park,’ said Sexton.

  Two more minutes ticked past. Silence. They all looked at the phone, willing it to ring. Fed up with being endlessly sweated by the gang, not getting anywhere with them. Not enough contact.

  Three more minutes.

  The phone rang again. Kidd let it go for three rings. Pressed the button. Silence.

  ‘Hello,’ said Butler.

  ‘Can I speak to Tracey, please?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Ali, from Tesco.’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves,’ said Butler. ‘She’s in hospital.’

  Kidd rang off.

  ‘Bloody Tesco,’ said Bobkov.

  The phone rang again. Kidd pressed the button. Another voice. ‘You bring seven hundred and fifty thousand euros, denomination fifty or less, instructions to follow.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Butler. ‘What’s this for? We haven’t discussed anything.’

  ‘No discussion. This is about trust. First we have to see if we can trust you. Instructions to follow.’

  The phone went dead.

  ‘Canary Wharf,’ said Sexton, looking at his screen.

  ‘I’ll organise the money,’ said Bobkov. ‘We have to be prepared.’

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ said Brito, who’d been standing outside the main gates to the Unidad Científica, waiting for Carmen. ‘Which way are you going?’

  ‘To the Pinar del Rey Metro, but I’m not going to tell you anything, Raul.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to be one of your sources. There’s not enough people involved in this investigation for me to get lost.’

  ‘I can guarantee anonymity.’

  ‘From your end maybe, but not from mine.’

  ‘I can guarantee it from all ends because I’m not doing this for a story.’

  Carmen stopped in the street, looked him in the eye.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Raul. When have you ever done anything that’s not for a story . . . apart from watch Real Madrid?’

  ‘O.K., there is a story involved, but it’s not this one.’

  ‘Now you’re not even making sense.’

  ‘It’s easy. If I deliver information on this story, I get a bigger story in return.’

  ‘Who are you delivering this story to?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘How did you know there were only six people in that room tonight?’ said Carmen. ‘How did you know the names of the two police officers involved? How did you know out of the four of us on the forensic team to come to me?’

  ‘You’re the only one I know.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘O.K. I read in the newspapers that your pay scale in the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía had just had the equivalent of a 40 per cent cut,’ said Brito. ‘And you told me just before Christmas that you have a little girl and you split up with your husband at the beginning of last year.’

  ‘Right, so you came to me because you know I’m desperate.’

  ‘I don’t like saying that kind of thing to people,’ said Brito. ‘It’s not your fault; it’s just the way life’s going at the moment. I’ll give you two hundred euros.’

  ‘We’ve found three bags so far,’ said Carmen. ‘The first one had a lower leg with foot attached and some clothes with a British passport belonging to a girl called Amy Boxer. We thought—’

  ‘I know what you thought—that the body was hers.’

  ‘The second had two thighs with buttocks attached.’

  ‘Gruesome.’

  ‘Yes, it was. You try not to imagine the guy who’s doing this or finding yourself anywhere near him . . . like on the Metro,’ said Carmen. ‘The worst of it is we reckon there’s expertise. We can tell from markings on the ankle and two nicks into the carotid arteries that the body was hung upside down and bled out.’

  ‘You mean he’s done this before?’ asked Brito. ‘I don’t remember anything like it, not in the last ten years.’

  ‘He could be a butcher,’ said Carmen, ‘or someone who cuts up animals, like an abattoir worker, a farmer or a hunter.’

  ‘And the third bag?’

  ‘I haven’t finished. The left buttock had a butterfly tattoo on it.’

  ‘How do you do this work, Carmen?’

  ‘It feeds me and my little girl.’

  ‘So . . . the third bag.’

  ‘The third bag had the head in it, two upper arms, a pair of shoes and a handbag with another passport in the name of Chantrelle Grant.’

  ‘Chantrelle? With an “r”?’ said Brito, making notes.

  ‘Yes, her middle name was odd, too. Taleisha or something like that. The sub-inspector was on his smartphone all the time and told us they were Jamaican names.’

  ‘Did the severed head match the passport photo?’

  ‘We think so, but the boss wasn’t prepared to commit himself.’


  ‘So what’s the story?’ said Brito. ‘I hear the first girl, Amy Boxer, is a runaway.’

  ‘The cops told us that the runaway had given her passport to Chantrelle so that it would look like she’d gone to Madrid. Her parents are cops or something like that so she knows she has to be clever, send them off on the wrong trail.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Keep up, Raul. Amy Boxer.’

  ‘So she’s still alive in London, while the double, impersonating her, was killed in Madrid by some maniac,’ said Brito. ‘Now that is a good story.’

  ‘Changing your mind now?’ said Carmen. ‘Just keep me out of it. Don’t even use the word “forensic”.’

  ‘You must have filed a report on the police computer by now. Anybody could have seen it.’

  ‘Not anybody and not yet,’ said Carmen. ‘I shouldn’t think there’s more than ten people with access to it.’

  They arrived at the entrance to the Pinar del Rey Metro. Brito took out four fifty-euro notes he’d already prepared, added another fifty.

  ‘Don’t make me look like a whore,’ said Carmen.

  ‘There’s fifty extra. Get something nice for your little girl,’ said Brito, slipping the rolled notes into her hand.

  ‘A couple of other things,’ said Carmen. ‘The police are working an angle. All the bags were weighed down so they wouldn’t float to the surface. The killer used five-kilo weights in each bag. You know, the circular ones you see in gyms.’

  ‘I’m not a gym kind of person, Carmen—as you can see.’

  ‘Weightlifters use them: discs of metal with a hole in the middle. These were painted blue with 5kg written in white,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe some of the knowledge blanks you have.’

  ‘You get to my age and there’s only a certain amount of RAM available,’ said Brito. ‘And the other thing?’

  ‘Her mother’s name and address were in the back of her passport,’ said Carmen.

  ‘You didn’t happen to remember what they were?’

  She wrote them down for him.

  ‘Were you going to tell me those last two things?’

  ‘Only if you were a nice guy,’ she said and disappeared into the Metro station.

  The bell rang at the front door. Bobkov, who was still arguing with Sexton about strategy, veered off to open it. Kidd intercepted him.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, and checked the peephole.

  A man in a black hat and mac was holding up a card: bobkov chemitrade ltd. Kidd opened the door. The man raised his hat.

  ‘Only Mr. Bobkov can receive this,’ he said.

  He had a small case chained to his wrist.

  Bobkov stepped forward with a key to the handcuff, which he unlocked. He signed for the case, which had barrel combination locks. The man raised his hat again and withdrew to his car. They took the case inside and Bobkov opened the combination locks. They checked the money.

  ‘It’s all here.’

  ‘There’s no guarantee this money is going to bring you any return,’ said Sexton. ‘There’ve been no negotiations to establish what you’re going to get. Normally, in a kidnap situation, we demand a demonstration of trust from them, not the other way round.’

  ‘Look, Chris. You said in your introduction to this process that the idea was to get them talking, to involve them, embroil them, but they haven’t given us a chance,’ said Bobkov. ‘Contact has been minimal. They’ve made a serious threat to Sasha. I don’t want them sending me bits of my son because I wouldn’t come up with some stupid money. I don’t care who they are. If they’re mafia or FSB they’re capable of extreme violence, even to a small, defenceless boy.’

  ‘We’ve got to secure some sort of return or this could happen again and again.’

  ‘But if they won’t talk,’ said Kidd, ‘what can you do?’

  ‘If they call again with the instructions I’ll speak to them,’ said Bobkov. ‘I understand your strategy of putting someone between me and them, but in this case it hasn’t worked. They want to talk to me direct. So I will speak to them.’

  Another knock on the front door. Kidd left the room, looked through the peephole.

  ‘Tesco,’ he said.

  He opened the door to a young Asian guy in a Tesco coat.

  ‘Delivery, sir.’

  At his feet on a trolley were two boxes of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

  ‘We didn’t order this,’ said Kidd. ‘Somebody called and we told them that Tracey Dunsdon was in hospital.’

  ‘We have a record of that, but the order was later reinstated by Mr. Alexander Bobkov.’

  ‘Bring it in,’ said Bobkov, appearing at the door.

  The young guy wheeled the boxes in, unloaded them. Bobkov signed the order.

  Sexton slit open one of the boxes. There was what looked like an order stuffed into one of the bottle compartments. He pulled it out.

  ‘Instructions,’ he said.

  21

  10:30 P.M., THURSDAY 22ND MARCH 2012

  Bar El Rocio, Puerta del Sol, Madrid

  This story’s a lot more interesting than I first thought,’ said Brito, sitting at a small table in a cramped bar with Jaime and Jesús on either side of him. He ran them through the conversation he’d just had with Carmen, leaving her out of it as she’d asked and making it sound like his own brilliant research.

  ‘So how do you know the parents of this runaway girl, Amy Boxer, are in the police?’ asked Jaime.

  ‘I don’t. I said “something like the police”. I heard the homicide cops talking about them. So, I’ve been checking it out. I went to the missing persons websites and I found posts about the girl with photos, but they keep it anonymous. You can’t contact the family direct. You have to go through the website’s helpline.’

  ‘And the father?’ said Jaime anxiously, wanting all the information now, immediately. ‘You said you had a name for the father.’

  ‘I got that from the Hotel Moderno. He stayed there in the same room as his daughter, or the girl he thought was his daughter. I looked him up on LinkedIn. He used to be in the army, then he was a homicide cop in London before he became a kidnap consultant.’

  ‘What’s one of those?’ asked Jesús.

  They ignored him.

  ‘He’s white,’ said Jaime, ‘so it’s the mother who’s black, and she must be the cop. Why isn’t she using the surname Boxer as well? Didn’t they get married?’

  ‘I’ll work on it,’ said Brito. ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll get there.’

  ‘The girl that was killed and hacked up . . . ’

  ‘Chantrelle Taleisha Grant,’ said Brito. ‘I’ve got the name and address in London of her mother too.’

  ‘Have they got any suspects for the killing?’

  ‘No, but they’ve got a lead,’ said Brito and told them about the weights in the bags.

  Jaime and Jesús just about managed not to look at each other, but Brito picked up on the tension bristling between them as they stared back at him without moving a facial muscle. The two had bought the weightlifting equipment for El Osito before he arrived, using cash in a sports store called Decathlon. Jaime couldn’t remember if he’d ever talked about the Colombian’s obsession in front of Raul Brito.

  ‘We’re going to need all the documents,’ said Jaime.

  ‘I’m going to need some money,’ said Brito. ‘The expenses have been heavy and . . . ’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘I’m a newspaper man,’ said Brito. ‘This is a good story. Runaway girl sends double to Madrid to fool cop parents and the unfortunate double gets killed and cut up. I’d like to run it.’

  ‘We told you,’ said Jaime a little too quickly. ‘We don’t know who we’re dealing with yet. It could be dangerous for you—you could get killed.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,�
�� said Brito.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Jesús.

  Jaime shut him up with a look that took half his face away.

  ‘How much are we talking about?’

  ‘Thirty-five thousand euros.’

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding,’ said Jesús.

  Another look that locked the words up in Jesús’s throat as if he’d been stabbed.

  Jaime sat back, looking at Brito carefully. How much did he know?

  ‘That Russian story. What did they pay you for that?’ said Jaime. ‘And don’t tell me it was anything like thirty-five thousand.’

  ‘This isn’t the Russian story. That was a long-term investigation. You wanted instant information. I don’t know why, but you did. I got it for you. Along the way I found the real story hidden inside. This one’s got legs: intrigue, emotion, tragedy and . . . evil. And it’s not over yet.’

  ‘Seven thousand,’ said Jaime.

  ‘Thirty . . . two,’ said Brito.

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Thirty.’

  Jesús watched them like it was a tennis game.

  ‘Meet you in the middle,’ said Jaime. ‘No more.’

  ‘Twenty it is,’ said Brito. ‘When and where shall we meet?’

  ‘Here in fifteen.’

  The brothers left, headed up the street to Sol.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ said Jesús in a savage whisper over his brother’s shoulder. ‘Twenty grand for that? El Osito will kill us.’

  ‘So you know how much Brito knows, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, shut the fuck up then. You think El Osito wants any attention from the cops with this deal he’s trying to do with the English coming up? You think Vicente wants this new market to be destroyed even before it’s got started? You think Vicente wants the cops anywhere near the guy who’s supposed to be running his European operation?’

  ‘No, no, you’re right.’

  ‘El Osito won’t know anything about the money.’

  ‘You mean we pay for the story?’ said Jesús. ‘El Osito told us if it cost money . . . ’