Blood Red City

by Rod Reynolds

  Lydia switched over to Google and searched the clinic’s name. The results page showed its location on the map – near Finchley Central station – alongside what looked like its official website and various other local directory listings for the same place. Underneath was a selection of Google Image results, and one looked familiar. A group shot, but she couldn’t place it. Then she looked closer and recognised Paulina Dobriska’s face poking out from the back of the crowd. She clicked the link and it took her to the same clinic’s website. The photo was a cheesy corporate shot on a page titled, ‘The professionals at Premier Dental Care’. The caption underneath named each person shown. She realised then it was the photo that had come up when she’d first Googled Dobriska.

  She flexed her fingers and jumped back to Facebook, clapping her hands together when she saw the comment was only a few weeks old and that she had Paulina Dobriska’s likely place of employment.

  Her elation sagged almost immediately. Premier Dental was closed on Sundays.

  CHAPTER 9

  The video was as bad as Stringer feared. An attempt on Jamie Tan’s life, captured in digital clarity. The assailants unknown to him.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Angie said.

  He snapped his head up, bringing the phone to his chest. In his rush he hadn’t noticed her looking, hadn’t even given her a thought. He looked sidelong at her, nudging his shoulder with his chin as he tried to process it all. ‘Nothing.’ He put the phone in the console, reached for his wallet and pulled out all the notes inside, dropped them in her lap. ‘Here, you did well.’

  She stared at him. She gathered the notes in her hands, fanning them to count. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A bonus.’

  ‘There’s like … five hundred quid here.’

  He started the engine and put his hand on the wheel, glancing at his watch. ‘Where do you want dropping?’

  ‘Just get me away from here. Other side of the river.’ Her voice was washed out as she said it and she was staring a hole into the side of his head. He refused to look at her again.

  He pulled off and took back streets away from Lydia Wright’s offices. ‘The police won’t be doing anything, you don’t have to worry about them.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s the look on your face.’

  He said nothing, eyes wide and locked on the road. It was all running through his head. Who took the video? Where did the journalist get it from – and so quickly? Who’d she share it with—?

  He braked and pulled over to the kerb, a Prius behind beeping as it had to swerve around them. He got his phone out and refreshed the Examiner website, trying to remember the last time he’d checked it.

  ‘Mike?’ Angie waved her hand in his peripheral vision. ‘Mike? Hello? What the fuck’s got into you?’

  He scrolled down but there was no mention of the video. A very minor victory that might not hold. He picked up the stolen mobile again and sent the video of Jamie Tan to his throwaway via WhatsApp, deleting the sent message and the contact details as soon as it was done. ‘I’ll take you home. Where’re you staying?’

  ‘With a mate in Kilburn. You don’t need to take me all the way, just get me to somewhere on the Jubilee.’

  ‘Give me a post code.’

  ‘I don’t know the address, I’m just crashing. Go to Kilburn Tube, I can show you from there.’

  He nodded and typed it into the sat nav. He didn’t say it was less to do with chivalry than his worry that she’d find a dealer and blow the money he’d given her.

  Angie guided him to a stop outside a scrappy row of terraced houses, the other cars around them parked half on the pavement. The road was darker than most, three of the streetlights out overhead.

  She put her hand on the dash. ‘Thanks for the money. Is there more coming up?’

  ‘No. Job’s finished.’

  ‘Six hundred quid just to get a phone and a purse?’

  ‘There might be something else on the London Assembly thing. Jennifer Tully. I’ll let you know.’

  She jutted out her lip and nodded. She reached out and tapped the stolen phone in his hand. ‘There’s an email in there. I think it’s where that video you watched came from.’

  He had the inbox open before she’d finished the sentence. She’d left the one she was talking about selected, a short message from what looked like an anonymous email account, the video attached. He snapped his eyes to Angie. ‘Did you see the whole thing?’

  She blanched under his gaze. ‘I just thought you’d want to…’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘No. I just thought you’d want to know. Fuck’s sake, as if I care…’

  He took a stunted breath. ‘Seriously, tonight never happened. You forget all of it.’

  ‘What’re you worried about? Not like I’m gonna speak to the Feds, is it?’

  The police were the last people on his mind. He reached across her and popped her door handle. ‘Get some kip, I’ll find you something else soon. Do me a favour and keep your head down for a couple of days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just because.’

  She stared at him a long second and then got out.

  He watched her cross the road and jink around a skip overflowing with old furniture, waiting to make sure she went into one of the houses. Once she did, he played the video on Wright’s phone again. He let it run all the way through, but he wasn’t concentrating, his head filling with questions, doubts, self-recrimination. Trying to order the moves he’d made and the moves he’d have to make. The vanishing chances they might’ve left Jamie Tan alive. The chance he might be next.

  The video finished and he stared into the darkness outside the windshield. A ratty fox snuck between two cars and started tearing at a black bin bag left on the street.

  He picked up Lydia Wright’s purse and opened it to look for her address.

  CHAPTER 10

  Lydia split the night between working on two articles she was due to post and looking for another way to reach Paulina Dobriska. She combed the Finchley Network in forensic detail, going back through months of posts without finding another mention of her. She checked the members list, to find out who’d added Dobriska to the group and discovered it was the same user who later tagged her for a dental recommendation.

  The woman’s name was Amy Parker, and Lydia sent her a friend request and a DM too, from her own account, saying that she was urgently trying to get in touch with Dobriska. It was gone three in the morning when she sent the message. It felt good to have another lead out there, but Premier Dental was the one with real promise. Thirty hours until it opened its doors again. She imagined walking into the place, a tropical fish tank in the waiting room, the smell of diluted mouthwash – the dental surgeries of her youth – and finding Paulina Dobriska waiting for her. Looking embarrassed to be asked about the video, some kind of reasonable explanation for it all.

  Something about that version of events left her deflated.

  There was a haze almost thick enough to touch when she came out of Tottenham Hale Tube on her way home, the heat from a distorted sun boxing in the fumes from the bus station outside. The roads were quiet, even for that time of the day, and the water in the canal was still and stagnant-looking as she crossed over it; all of London too lethargic to move on a Sunday morning in late summer.

  She reached into her bag for her phone without thinking. Its absence pissed her off all over again, but even that was fleeting now – tiredness smothering everything. She stopped to lean on the bridge’s railing, looking at the black water visible in the gaps between the algae, trying to remember if she’d left any wine in the bottle yesterday, and where might be open to sell her a fresh one in case not. Then she remembered she had no purse, and she nearly shouted in frustration. A swarm of bugs shimmered over the bank, making her neck itch. Behind it, the concrete skeleton of another block of flats under construction stood silent.

  Stephen crashed her thoughts, not for the first time. If he’d messaged he
r she’d have no way of knowing, let alone replying. The timing was bad – he’d think she was being moody because of the chat they’d had the morning before. Maybe even think she was sulking. They’d agreed at the start not to discuss anything personal over work emails, but a basic message telling him she’d lost her phone wouldn’t breach that. She’d hold back the details for when she saw him in person.

  She turned on to her road. The Turkish café was already doing good business, but the rest of her street was shut tight. There were three empty Corona bottles lined up along the kerb, the remnants of a Saturday night waiting to be put to bed for good. She took her keys out of her bag and slipped them into the lock, suddenly grateful for the small mercy; that whatever else that little shit had stolen from her, she hadn’t taken away access to her bed.

  Pushing the door open swept a pile of crap aside with it – takeaway menus and a minicab flyer. But there was something larger too, and it jammed against the wall. She closed the door, looked down, expecting a small parcel, and stopped dead.

  Her purse was sitting on the doormat.

  CHAPTER 11

  Stringer went to work on Wright’s second mobile just as daylight was turning the sky a murky grey. This one was black, an older model than the other iPhone and less well cared for. It was locked, but he held the home button down to activate Siri, then said, ‘Mobile data,’ into the speaker. It displayed the setting toggle for that option, and pressing it brought up the full Settings menu, bypassing the pin screen. It bemused him that people were willing to spend fortunes on a phone with a security flaw anyone with Google could discover.

  It was quickly apparent it was a company phone. The last email she’d sent from her work account was at 7.07 a.m., so unless her IT department had come up with a replacement phone in the small hours of a Sunday morning, chances were she’d been at her desk until at least then. It validated his decision not to watchdog her overnight.

  He couldn’t find any trace of the Tan video on that phone. It looked like she hadn’t sent it to anyone else within her company, and if that was the case, the story was contained. For now. That bought him time, at least – assuming Suslov didn’t already know the truth.

  There was no sign she’d forwarded it to anyone from her personal mobile, either, and he quickly deleted the original and its attachment. But there still existed the possibility that she’d downloaded the video to a desktop or laptop. Reading the email before he junked it, it became clear Wright had been unknowingly dragged into the Jamie Tan situation. He couldn’t decide if that qualified as good luck, or outright fucking terrible, but if it meant she had no understanding of the wider context, it felt more like the former.

  The sender was another question again. Their email said they’d call in a bit, and Wright’s personal mobile registered an incoming call around thirty minutes after it was sent. The number was withheld, and chances were that was the sender making good on their promise. He started to think about ways he could crack their anonymity.

  Alicia Tan hovered at the back of his mind. She was as safe as he could make her for now, but the arrangement had a short shelf life – too many questions he couldn’t answer, too many lies already told.

  At 9.00 a.m. he forced himself to shut out the other bullshit and focus on what would happen when Suslov’s man picked him up in an hour. He raced around the North Circular to where it met the A1, then headed south towards Islington. The road dropped down from Highgate to Archway, and when he passed under Suicide Bridge, the skyline rose in the distance, faded and indistinct in the yellow haze.

  The most pressing decision was whether he revealed the video or not. Either choice carried risk, but he veered towards no – at least in the initial debrief. Information was everything, and you didn’t give it up until you could put a value on it. Accepting the risk that by then it might be too late. But if Suslov already knew what’d happened to Tan – maybe even orchestrated it – then he was leaving himself open to being caught in a lie.

  He steered around Archway roundabout, the ugly tower rising above the station covered in scaffolding and sheeting. Information flowed both ways: how much did he really know about Andriy Suslov? Despite being based in New York, the man eschewed publicity and hadn’t given a press interview since the nineties. He’d never met him in person and they’d spoken only once, a phone call right back at the start of the job. Everything else had been conducted through Suslov’s frontman, a shiny-faced suit who introduced himself as Dalton. Whether that was his Christian name or surname was never made clear.

  Background details on Suslov were beyond troubling. He’d made his money in the Wild East era after the Soviet collapse, consolidating mining assets before establishing his own investment companies. He moved Stateside in the early 2000s and built up the private hedge funds that he still ran to this day. Best estimates put his personal wealth north of a billion dollars – the kind of client Stringer usually drooled over. But the rumours about him weren’t hard to come by. A business rival who’d drowned in a boating ‘accident’ off the coast of Maine in 2003, and a murdered journalist who’d been investigating that death were the two most dramatic hints as to what he was capable of. The latter was gunned down on the streets of Moscow in 2006, amid speculation she was about to publish allegations of Suslov’s involvement in the 2003 death. In the context of what happened to Jamie Tan, they weren’t easily dismissed as smears anymore. And if these rumours were widely known, in his experience it meant there was always more under the surface.

  But most worrying of all were Suslov’s reputed ties to the Kremlin, via his friendship with Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president that Time magazine called ‘Russia’s man in Ukraine’. Suslov had served as an informal adviser throughout Yanukovych’s political career, and it was well known that the two remained close, even with Yanukovych exiled in Russia. US diplomatic reports branded Yanukovych’s party a haven for mobsters and oligarchs; Suslov fit the bill on at least one of those counts.

  Stringer swung the car into the underground garage. He’d always kept his home address closely guarded, but after their first contact, Suslov had sent a car to pick him up outside, unannounced – a show of power that had more of an effect than he would admit.

  He took the lift to his flat on the seventh floor. It was quarter to ten, enough time to change out of a shirt clocking up its fiftieth hour, splash some water on his face. A shower was a distant dream. He stripped off his clothes and caught his reflection through the open door of the en suite across the room. The light from outside was coming at an angle that shadowed every ripple of the mangled flesh that ran from his wrist to the top of his back.

  The Accident. Never spoken about, almost never broached in the years since. An instant that defined a lifetime. Aged twelve, his mother at the cooker, frying chips for dinner, Stringer buzzing around her. Whatever they were arguing about long forgotten, obliterated by what came next. The old man sweeping in from the pub, the same as always – Carling on his breath, fag smoke on his M&S suit. The ‘quick drink after work’ that always turned into half a dozen. A toss-up which mood he’d arrive home in – tipsy and cheeky, or drunk and angry. That day, the latter. Abi smart enough to vanish to her room when she read the signs, Stringer too full of early-teenage fire to do likewise. The escalation was fast – from ‘Shut up, Michael’ to the threat of ‘a proper slap’ in thirty seconds flat. Stringer feeding off it, pubescent anger that the world was against him. Telling his father to fuck off.

  Knowing it was a mistake the second the words left his lips. The old man flying at him, his mother trying to get between them, always the peacemaker, Stringer half fury and half terror. And then—

  And then scolding white pain. On the floor, in agony, his arm like it was on fire. Shouts of ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Oh fuck’. His parents squabbling between themselves about whether to throw water on the burns, his mother shouting not to because it was oil and it would just spread it. His skin red, melting, burning – reaching for it but too
afraid to touch it, his arm alien. Abi appearing in the doorway, her face … her face in utter shock, a look he’d never seen before, making him panic even more. His mother wrapping wet tea towels around his arm, his shoulder, trying desperately to strip his T-shirt off but stopping when she realised it had been melted into his flesh. Chips scattered all over the lino, one next to his head still sizzling.

  Abi on the phone dialling 999.

  Afterwards the old man would say it was an accident. That he was protecting his wife from their rampaging son. That in the struggle they’d caught the pan’s handle, tipping its contents over the boy. The old man stopped short of blaming him outright, but the insinuation was there – you started it. His mother telling social services the same – ‘a terrible accident’ – the social all too happy to buy that in light of Stringer’s school record as a troublemaker. Bad shit happened to bad kids, close the file.

  Stringer living with the truth all these years. He saw the old bastard reach for the pan. Thankful, eventually, that it wasn’t worse; that it wasn’t his face, or his mother or sister. But for years, through the surgeries and skin grafts, the painstaking rehab and beyond, feeling nothing but rage. His mother playing peacemaker for all time – saying she’d been facing the wrong way to see, but she knew her husband and there was no way he would’ve done that on purpose. In her mind, protecting her family.

  Afterwards, the old man was different; less boozing, more withdrawn. No sense of what he was feeling – maybe shame, maybe just shocked at himself. Stringer resolved he’d kill him anyway, as soon as Abi was grown up. Years of silent fury. Then Mum got sick, and the old man got a reprieve through necessity. Stalemate; the rage never dissipating.

  Stringer stepped out of view of the mirror. He pulled a fresh suit out of the dry cleaners’ polythene and threw it on, grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter and went to the street.