‘Very commendable,’ he said, one liver-spotted hand reaching inside his jacket and emerging with a cigar that could have done service as a pit prop, always supposing there were any pits left.
‘I need your help to make it work,’ I continued as he chopped the end off his cigar and sucked indecently on it. ‘I need Tony Tambo’s cooperation, and I don’t have sufficient powers of persuasion to secure it.’
‘And you hope’—puff—‘that in exchange’—puff—‘for you getting Joey off the hook’—puff—‘I will persuade Tony to help?’
‘That’s exactly right, Mr di Salvo.’
‘Why you want Tambo?’
‘DI Lovell has been keeping a low profile. Not a lot of people know he’s behind these attempts to take over the turf. But Tony’s already had a face-to-face with him, so the man’s got nothing to lose by coming in to a meeting. All Tony has to do is set it up. I’ll do the rest. It’s my head on the block, nobody else’s.’
Collar nodded. He closed his eyes momentarily. That didn’t stop him abusing my air space with his cigar. His eyes opened and he stared into mine. Any more ham and he could have opened a deli counter. ‘You got it,’ he said. ‘Unless you hear otherwise, the meet will be at Tambo’s club, half past eight, tonight. OK?’
‘OK.’ I didn’t want to ask how he was going to get it sorted that fast. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. I stood up and was about to thank him when he said menacingly, ‘You don’t like your coffee?’
I’d had enough of playing games. ‘It looks like sump oil and tastes worse,’ I said.
I thought he was going to bite the end off his cigar. Then he smiled, like a python who finds a dancing mouse too entertaining to eat. I paid for both coffees on the way out, though. I’m not that daft.
Eight o’clock and Della Prentice had her hand down the front of my most audacious underwired bra. We were in an interview room at Bootle Street nick, and Della was making sure the radio mike was firmly anchored to the infrastructure of my cleavage. If Lovell paid the kind of attention to breasts that most Vice cops are prone to, I didn’t want anything showing that shouldn’t be. Nipples were one thing, radio mikes another altogether.
‘Right,’ said Della. ‘He’s not going to spot that unless things get rather more out of hand than we’re anticipating.’ She stepped back and gave me the once-over. I’d gone for a shiny gun-metal lycra leotard over black leggings and the black hockey boots I normally reserved for a bit of cat burglary. Draped over the leotard was an old denim jacket with slashed sleeves that revealed the temporary tattoos I’d got stencilled on both biceps. The makeup aimed for the recovering-junkie look; the hair was gelled into a glossy helmet. ‘Very tasteful,’ she commented.
‘You can talk,’ I muttered. Della wore a white shirt with the collar turned up and the buttons undone almost as far as her navel. The shirt tucked into a black lycra skirt a little wider than the average weightlifter’s belt. Her legs were bare, her feet sensibly shod in flat-soled pumps. From her vantage point washing glasses behind the bar, no one would see more than the tarty top half and immediately dismiss her. With her hair loose and enough make-up to change the shape of eyes and mouth, Lovell was never going to recognize a woman DCI who might have been pointed out to him a couple of times across a crowded canteen. ‘Did you manage to pick up anything on the grapevine about Lovell?’ I asked.
She pulled a face. ‘Not a lot. I didn’t want word getting back to him that I was interested. I heard his wife divorced him because he was too handy with his fists, but that’s hardly exceptional in the Job. What I did find out, though, was that he claims to have a couple of weeks’ time-share in a villa in Lanzarote. Very tasteful property up in the hills, swimming pool, terraced garden, half a dozen en suite bedrooms. A little bit of poking around and the calling in of a couple of favours reveals that the holding company that owns the villa is in turn wholly owned by Peter Lovell. Since the property’s worth the thick end of quarter of a million, it does raise one or two questions about DI Lovell’s finances.’
‘Nice one, Della,’ I said.
‘That’s not quite the end of it,’ she said as we walked up to the waiting car. ‘An old school friend of mine is married to a chap who manages one of the vineyards there, so I gave her a call. Her husband knows Lovell. Clothes by Versace, car by Ferrari, part owner of a restaurant, a bar and two discos in Puerto del Carmen,’ she said, her voice tight with anger.
‘Obviously not the kind of life style one could sustain on a police pension.’
‘Quite. And about bloody time his gravy train hit the buffers. Let’s go and make it happen.’
The plan was simple enough. Della would be inside the club watching what was going down. Three of her most trusted lieutenants would be hidden within yards of the main bar where the meeting was scheduled for — two in the ladies’ loo, one behind the DJ’s setup. Another four hand-picked officers would be stationed outside the club, listening to the transmission from my radio mike. When they had enough on tape to hang Lovell out to dry, they would move in and relieve him of his liberty. A classic sting.
Considering Tony had only had eight hours to sort everything out, he’d come up with a credible cover story for me. I was the keyboard player in a new all-female band. We’d allegedly got together in Germany and we’d been touring in Europe, so successfully that we already had a recording contract with a small indie label in Hamburg. But we wanted more, so we’d come back to Britain to make a full-frontal assault on the music scene in a bid to get a major label contract. Because we were already fairly established, we didn’t want to piss around. We wanted promotion, we wanted exposure. We wanted it fast and we wanted it top quality. And we’d told Tony Tambo we wanted to talk to the top man because we weren’t going to waste time or money. Now I just had to pray that Lovell would give us enough to pull him on, or I was going to owe so many favours the only solution would be to leave town.
Thinking of favours reminded me of my grave robbers. ‘Did you turn over Sell Phones?’ I asked.
Della nodded. ‘We sent a team in this morning. The shop was clean, but one of my bright boys noticed there was a trap door for a cellar. And lo and behold, there was a phone room down below.’
‘A phone room?’
Della raised her eyebrows. ‘You mean I’ve finally found a scam you haven’t heard about?’
‘Try me.’
‘OK. There’s a little electronic box you can buy that allows you to eavesdrop on mobile phone calls. What it also tells you is the phone number of the mobile phone that’s being used, and its electronic code number. With that information, you can reprogram the silicon chip in a stolen phone and turn it into a clone of a legitimate phone. You can then use that phone to call all over the world until the cellphone company cottons on and cuts you off. Normally, you can get a few hours’ worth of calls, but if you’re making international calls, sometimes they cut you off within the hour. So if you’re cloning phones, you set aside a room with a dozen or so cloned phones in it, and hire the room out for, say, £20 per person per hour, and as soon as one phone gets cut off, the hirer just moves on to the next phone on the table. The hirer gets their calls dirt cheap and untraceable. And the crook’s got virtually no outlay once they’ve got the original scanner and stolen phones.’
‘And you found one of these at Sell Phones?’
‘We did.’
‘So I’m flavour of the month?’
‘Let’s see how tonight goes down.’
At ten past eight, Della and I descended into the club via the fire escape, as I’d prearranged with Tony. He was waiting for us, nervously toking on his Camel. ‘Your friends got here,’ he said, his unease and resentment obvious.