Isabel sensed there was something different about him and imagined that, at this dramatic point in his life, he’d decided to draw her further in. She went to him, sat on his lap and kissed him, running her fingers up the back of his neck into his hair. Within minutes she was bent over the kitchen table with her jeans around her knees, her pants stretched between her thighs while he drove into her from behind with a passion and a need that had her hanging on to the edges of the table, as their empty glasses slid around and fell over.
Once that first crazy desire was over they went upstairs, took off their clothes and made love again, slowly, until the afternoon light started fading and Isabel drifted into sleep.
Boxer lay there with his arm around her, staring out of the window for a long hour. He whispered, ‘I love you,’ to her, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him. He was trying it out, seeing if he believed it, seeing if it hurt. Then he quickly got up, took his clothes downstairs, dressed and left the house.
As he came out of the gardens in front of the development, his mobile rang. It was the Londoner.
‘Go to an Internet café and phone store on the Finchley Road called Hari’s. It’s between the Tube station and the O2 Centre. You ask for Ali. You’ll get your instructions there.’
Zorrita was sitting in the coroner’s office, watching him put the final touches to his report after his full examination of all Chantrelle Grant’s body parts.
‘The interesting thing,’ said the coroner, ‘is that I could find no evidence of violence sufficient to have caused death. The forehead bruise was consistent with bumping into a door or something like it and there was no evidence of haemorrhaging. The facial wounds were nasty but superficial, probably from a belt buckle. She hadn’t been strangled, stabbed or shot. All her arteries were intact. None of the important organs showed any sign of damage. She’d had sex so I sent a sperm sample to the lab, so we’ll get some DNA from that . . . eventually.’
‘Are you saying you don’t know?’ asked Zorrita.
‘No. It’s just surprising, that’s all,’ said the coroner. ‘Given that the body was found in this state, we had expectations.’
‘That she was murdered.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, nodding. ‘I managed to extract a blood sample large enough to reveal a high level of alcohol and cocaine, so I checked her liver and found it contained cocaethylene. That led me to look at her heart, because that combination can produce a metabolite which induces marked coronary arterial vasoconstriction, leading to myocardial ischaemia, infarction and sudden death, which is what had happened.’
‘So you’re saying that technically she wasn’t murdered?’
‘The way I see it, she was obviously out partying with someone. I think he got her back to his apartment. There was clearly some violence and some sex, but there doesn’t seem to have been any sexual violence.’
‘Could she have been dead by the time the sex took place?’
‘Quite possibly,’ said the coroner. ‘It takes between six and twelve hours for the cocaethylene to be produced.’
‘And time of death was . . . ?’
‘Around six in the morning,’ said the coroner. ‘If the man had been consuming alcohol and cocaine to the same level as the girl it’s more than likely that he would have passed out and woken up hours later to find a dead body on his hands. He probably panicked when he saw the marks on her face, thought he’d killed her and decided that the best way to get her out of his apartment was to cut her up.’
‘You’d only do that if you had good reason to believe you were guilty or you didn’t want to be investigated by the police,’ said Zorrita. ‘I mean, some student wouldn’t take a girl home, pass out and wake up in the morning thinking his only way out was to cut her up and dispose of her. The killer bled her too. He’d thought about it. Knew how he was going to control the potential mess.’
‘Pig farmer?’ said the coroner, shrugging.
‘I think we’re still talking about someone with a criminal mind,’ said Zorrita. ‘Not a total innocent.’
‘How’s it going with your list of estate agents?’ asked Mercy, on the phone to George.
‘No luck so far, and we’ve seen everybody on Olga’s list,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘Our problem now is coverage. We can’t rely on just phoning around and asking if they’ve handled an enquiry from Irina Demidova or Zlata Yankov because firstly, we don’t know what name she’s been using. If she’s got two names on the go she probably has more. And secondly, there are all sorts of people in these offices, and not everybody knows who the other agents’ clients are.’
‘So you need to visit each one and show the photo,’ said Mercy.
‘And hope that the agent who was dealing with her is in the office at the time,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘There are still agents on that list that we have to revisit because of that.’
‘What about entering the spec for the house on one of those property sites, like Primelocation, and seeing what it throws up? Maybe some of these rentals don’t get removed very quickly, and if it was for a short let they might not even bother to take it off the market.’
She hung up and went into the Netherhall Gardens house.
‘Where’s Bobkov and Kidd?’ she asked.
‘Bobkov was called to the Royal Free Hospital about forty-five minutes ago. Kidd went with him,’ said Sexton.
They heard the front door open. Someone went into the kitchen and Kidd joined them in the living room. He was sombre.
‘What happened?’ asked Mercy.
Kidd thought about it, searched for better words, gave up, shook his head.
‘Tracey died,’ he said.
‘I thought she was in ICU.’
‘They’d taken her out. She was no longer considered critical,’ said Kidd. ‘There was a major pile-up at this end of the M1 and they needed the places. She was doing fine, but had a heart attack and they couldn’t get her going again. Andrei’s doubly broken up.’
‘What else?’
‘When you told us that Irina Demidova/Zlata Yankov had infiltrated DLT Consultants we sent a coded message to Igor Tipalov, telling him to stop all extra-curricular research and to get out of Russia as fast as possible,’ said Kidd.
‘He was acting for me,’ said Bobkov, pushing past Kidd into the room, ‘on the basis of information we’d been given by the nuclear scientist Professor Mikhail Statnik about the polonium 210 production of certain RBMK reactors. The first bad news we received this morning was that Professor Statnik was found dead in his apartment in Moscow. An hour later we heard that Tipalov had been found shot in his car on the road between Roslavi and the RBMK reactor just outside Desnogorsk, near Smolensk.’
‘And what is the feeling about the impact of those deaths on our situation here?’ asked Mercy.
‘We’ve faced up to the worst possible scenario,’ said Kidd.
‘Which is what?’
‘You have to remember that we are not dealing with a state here,’ said Bobkov, the desperation now visible in his face. ‘We are dealing with a man. There’s an important distinction. If you cross a state, the impact is minimal. It whisks you away like a fly. However, once the state has become synonymous with a man and you cross a man of such power then that slight becomes personal. Criticise me and I will have you shot. Hold me to ransom and I will sacrifice the hostages. Oppose me when I’ve bestowed great wealth on you and I will impoverish and imprison you. Marshal foreign opposition against me and I will have you poisoned in a way that the world will never forget. Try to humiliate me by proving my involvement in such an act and I will kidnap your son, strip you of your wealth, murder your supporters, bring you to your knees to beg me for mercy and . . . and I will show you none.’
‘Look, Andrei, we’re not going to give up on Sasha,’ said Mercy firmly. ‘We’re going to find out where they’re holding him and—’
Mercy delivered her findings from the estate agents but stopped when the phone rang. Bobkov limped across the room, pressed the button.
‘This is Bobkov,’ he said.
‘Have you prepared the next instalment?’
‘Yes,’ said Bobkov. ‘What is to be my reward this time?’
‘You will be reunited with your son.’
‘I have a question for Sasha. A proof-of-life question,’ said Bobkov. ‘I want you to ask him, “When is a man truly free?”’
‘What?’
‘Only he will know the answer, out of all of you.’
Bobkov cut the line, limped back to his chair, slumped into it and sat there with his hands steepled, gnawing at the tips of his forefingers to stop the tears from coming.
On the way to Notting Hill Gate Tube station Boxer listened to his phone messages. There was a long one from Mercy detailing what she’d found in Alice Grant’s flat. Nothing she said made him think he should change his course of action. The least dangerous path for rescuing Amy was to keep the Met out of it. He deleted the message.
He came out of Finchley Road Tube station and headed north to the O2 Centre with four lanes of traffic crashing beside him. He was oblivious to the noise. He went into Hari’s phone store and asked for Ali. A young Asian guy beckoned him into the back room. He opened a Jiffy bag and asked Boxer for his phone. He gave Boxer a new phone, switched it on for him. He took him further out the back, through a storeroom to an outside metal staircase. They went down into a yard at the bottom. He pointed him towards a red car waiting in the road, told him the driver knew where to take him.
29
5:00 P.M., FRIDAY 23RD MARCH 2012
Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, London
I’ll give it to you in order of appearance,’ said DI Max Hope, the officer who was investigating Alice Grant’s death, calling Mercy. ‘The first thing back from the lab was the composition of the drinks on the table. Both glasses contained a combination of Coca-Cola, vodka and GHB. If full, the GHB element of the half-full glass would have been just over a gram, which, combined with alcohol, would have been enough to knock anyone flat. The GHB content was lower in the almost-empty glass and we’re assuming it was refilled after a much higher dose had been consumed because, in the absence of an autopsy report, that’s the only explanation we’ve got for Alice Grant’s seizure.’
‘What about fingerprints?’ said Mercy, anxious.
‘The ones you gave me on the card matched those on the half-full glass. Alice Grant’s were on the almost-empty glass.’
‘Were there any others?’
‘We got an almost full set from the underside of the music centre remote and they matched some partials we found on both the drinking glasses but they didn’t belong to Alice Grant. We’ve found a match on our database to one Miles Lomax.’
‘How did he end up on your database?’
‘In 2003 he was caught in possession of just under one gram of cocaine. He was lucky. No record. No track as a dealer. He got off with two hundred hours of community service,’ said Hope. ‘I’ve since spoken to a project team within the Serious and Organised Crime Command who tell me they’ve had their eye on him for a while. They’re sure he’s dealing and using an elaborate system of runners to deliver his gear, but they don’t want to arrest him until they’ve found his supplier.’
’Have you got an address?’
‘The project team have him at a flat in 5 Elm Park Gardens in Chelsea, but we’re not getting any answer from it,’ said Hope. ‘There’s one other player involved. One set of prints we found on the inside of the front door of Alice Grant’s flat belonged to Terence Mumby. He has a record as long as your arm, the most serious of which is GBH. He’s done jail time and we’ve got a current address for him in Tufnell Park.’
‘If you’re going to pick up Mumby you don’t want to spook Miles Lomax, who sounds like the major player in this,’ said Mercy. ‘How’s it gone with the door-to-door?’
‘We’ve had one sighting of Terence Mumby in the stairwell of Alice Grant’s block just before midnight,’ said Hope. ‘And we’ve had a sighting of a strange threesome just after midnight: two men with someone smaller in between them who looked as if he/she was being carried. They went to a car parked in the Andover Estate, which was thought to be a silver Golf or an Audi, but no registration number was seen. The smaller person was put in the back with one of the men, the other got into the driver’s side with someone else in the passenger seat.’
‘When do you expect to get the autopsy results on Alice Grant?’
‘Tuesday,’ said Hope. ‘The interesting thing is Lomax and Mumby. There’s no discernible link. Lomax is university educated, living in Chelsea; Mumby left school at sixteen with no qualifications and lives in north London. The one thing missing from his record is drug offences.’
‘Somebody put them together to do this job?’
‘But what’s the job?’
‘I’d be interested to listen in when you question Miles Lomax.’
The red car was a minicab driven by a Bangladeshi. He took Boxer through Belsize Park, past the Royal Free Hospital and dropped him at Hampstead Heath Overground station.
‘Ten pound, please,’ said the driver.
‘What?’ asked Boxer, incredulous.
‘Ten pound.’
‘They said six on the phone.’
‘All right, six,’ said the driver, depressed.
Boxer only had a ten-pound note.
‘No change,’ said the driver, pleased.
‘Where now?’ asked Boxer.
The Bangladeshi gave him a strange look and pulled away.
Boxer waited, looked at the cheap mobile phone he’d been given. It rang. Private number.
‘Get on the Overground in the direction of Stratford. Come off at Caledonian Road and Barnsbury. Cross over the tracks and take the Offord Road exit. We’ll be in touch.’
He sat among Polish workmen in paint-spattered overalls who muttered into their mobile phones. He left the train following two Somali girls, their oval faces encased in colourful hijabs and wearing long brightly coloured skirts, each with a black biker jacket on top.
Another call came through while he hung about on the Offord Road. The voice took him through empty residential streets full of silent Georgian houses, past Barnsbury Square and the Albion pub, where smokers sat out in the cold. He turned left at the Crown, past the Celestial Church of Christ on Cloudesley Square and into Liverpool Road. A single person followed him on the other side of the road and only left him when he walked into the Angel Tube station.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ said Lomax.
‘What do you mean?’ said Amy, her legs starting as if ready to run.
‘No, no, don’t worry. Stay calm,’ he said and added in a low voice, ‘I didn’t tell them anything. You’re going to be O.K. You’re going to get out of this.’
‘But what’s it all about?’ said Amy. ‘Why did you kidnap me?’
‘I still don’t know. All I do know is that you’re going to be released. There’ve been some negotiations and you’re going to be exchanged for somebody else. All you’ve got to do is stay calm and everything will . . . unfold. O.K.?’
She nodded.
‘Two guys are taking over from me. One of them is going to come and sit with you now. They’re good guys and they won’t hurt you.’
Lomax leaned over and took her hand, whispered in her ear, ‘Promise me one thing: that you’ll forget I ever existed.’
‘I
promise.’
‘See you in Cardiff,’ he said and kissed her on the cheek.
It made her emotional. She’d never cried over anybody leaving her before, but when Lomax went it was like losing a lover. The tears welled.
Lomax went back outside.
‘She’s all yours,’ he said.
Dennis and Darren nodded, looked at him in unison as if measuring him so that he knew if he hadn’t been the subject of their talk for the last five minutes, he would be for the next.
‘Good job,’ said Dennis.
‘Let’s talk tomorrow,’ said Darren. ‘Dad and I’ll have a chat about the money you owe. We’ll sort something out, right?’
Lomax nodded, walked down the alleyway, feeling their eyes on his back.
Dennis waited until he heard the door to the warehouse shut.
‘What do you think?’ said Darren.
‘I get the feeling he didn’t tell us everything,’ said Dennis. ‘He told us about the girl, but there’s something even bigger he’s left out.’
‘He’s a risk, you ask me,’ said Darren. ‘If he’s picked up we’re done for, and what with El Osito here, it could blow the whole operation.’
‘It’ll send a message too. Everybody knows he’s into us for twenty-eight K,’ said Dennis. ‘We have him done and it’ll make everybody sit up. They’ll know we haven’t gone soft.’
‘You want me to call the Wolf?’
Dennis nodded, put his hands in his trouser pockets and trotted down the basement steps and into the room where Amy was tied to the bed.
‘Hello, love,’ he said.
She knew immediately from his voice that he was older, probably older than her dad, maybe fifty or more.
‘We’re going to get you some food,’ said Dennis. ‘What would you like? Just don’t make it complicated. We’re talking sandwiches here, not coq au vin.’
‘Moroccan falafel salad on granary,’ said Amy.
You Will Never Find Me Page 35
