‘No. You won’t,’ Grigori countered quickly. ‘If anything happens to Goricz, it will only draw attention to this building — and we still need it for a while yet.’ He looked his assistant in the eye and said deliberately, ‘But once we are finished here, I do not expect the Serb or his family to see another day. Understand?’
‘All of them?’ Radko exchanged an appalled look with the silent Pechov. ‘But here, in London? It would be a huge risk-’
‘All of them! If you cannot do it, then I will find somebody who can.’ The statement hung in the air between them, the meaning chillingly clear.
Without another word, Grigori flicked a dismissive hand and turned to the papers on the desk before him as if the men did not exist.
He forced himself to remain calm. He was disturbed by what had just happened. Was Radko beginning to show signs of weakness? He hoped not, for that was something he could not allow. A weak link threatened them all, and would be seen by others as a challenge to his authority.
Several miles away, across London, Ray Szulu drummed his fingers on his mobile and waited. It was gone nine am. He was usually up and out earlier than this, but there had been no call yet, and he was still in his skivvies. He was waiting for Ayso, the controller and manager of the mini-cab firm, to give him some work. The limousine company had nothing, he’d already checked that, so here he was again, worrying about earning some money from short drives and wondering if his moans about Ayso’s pig-ugly accent had somehow got back to the man. It would be just like him to make Szulu squirm and wait for a job out of spite.
‘Hey, Raymond. You comin’ back to bed? I’m getting cold!’ The girl’s voice cut through from the bedroom of Szulu’s one-bed flat in what she probably thought was a sexy, seductive tone. All it did was set Szulu’s teeth on edge.
When he’d first started talking to her yesterday evening in a club in Hammersmith, her voice had sounded husky and alluring, muffled slightly by the driving bass line of the music and the constant hubbub of talk and laughter. And when she’d run her fingertips across his bullet scar, mention of which he’d dropped casually into the conversation the way he always did, because the ladies just ached to know they were talking to a real, live, wounded man who’d seen some action, she’d sounded positively honey-toned and had fluttered her eyelashes as if they were powered by Duracell.
But once outside and on the way back to his place, with her hanging on his arm — his wounded left arm — her voice had turned out to be sharp enough to stop the traffic.
He fingered the slight indentation in his upper arm. It wasn’t hurting this morning. Not that he’d admit that to her, of course. As far as the ladies were concerned, the pain was always there, a reminder of how close he’d come to leaving this life and moving onto the next. As usual, he always skirted round what had happened to the man who’d shot him and dwelt on himself. After all, he was still here, wasn’t he?
‘Raymond — you comin’ or what?’
Szulu dropped the mobile and made his way back to bed. Work or not, screechy voice or not, he had a reputation to uphold. Another job would come along sooner or later. Until then, there were other comforts.
Small blessings, as his ma used to say about all of life’s ups and downs. Small blessings.
17
‘Mr Palmer? DI Craig Pell.’ The detective walked into Palmer’s Uxbridge office, leaving a uniformed officer hovering at the top of the stairs. It was just after eleven and the morning street noise had died to a rumble.
Palmer swung his feet down from his open desk drawer and stood up. He’d left a message for Pell earlier, and the man had called back to say he would drop by for a ‘chat’. The speed with which he had done so and the presence of uniformed back-up weren’t necessarily significant, but neither was it a good sign.
He offered Pell coffee, but the policeman declined and sat down heavily on one of the hard chairs, thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets. The man’s face was all planes and angles, and Palmer guessed he would be the same mentally. A tough cop, he judged, and young for his rank. It meant he was good at his job.
‘You say you knew Helen Bellamy,’ Pell began without preamble. ‘Would you care to describe how and when?’
Palmer sat down and related how he had met Helen when he was hired by a businessman she happened to be profiling at the time for a trade journal. Palmer was doing a security assessment on the man’s factory, and had bumped into her in the company car park. They had exchanged telephone numbers, and from there it had progressed through dinner to more dates, and into what had been a very pleasant relationship, even it hadn’t been long-lasting.
‘Really? Why’s that?’
Palmer shrugged, aware that Pell was looking for clues as to how well he and Helen had known each other. ‘Work, mostly. Helen was trying to make a name for herself; I was away a lot. At the time, it didn’t suit either of us to try for anything more than that.’ He heard the words and thought how bland and casual it must sound, as if their relationship hadn’t been worth more effort.
‘At the time?’
‘Looking back is easy. We did what we did.’
‘So it was just fun?’
Palmer felt his face harden. ‘Come again?’ His words fell softly into the room, and Pell shifted uncomfortably and looked away. For a moment, the creak of the chair and the shuffling feet of the officer on the landing were the only sounds.
‘Sorry — that didn’t come out the way I meant it.’ Pell admitted. He seemed genuinely embarrassed. ‘Do you regret the relationship not being more than it was?’
Palmer breathed easily and tried to ignore the not-so-subtle meaning behind the question. ‘I regret lots of thing,’ he said evenly. ‘I regret not having been able to help her, if that’s what you’re asking. But I can’t change the circumstances.’
‘So you last saw her… when?’
‘Several months ago. I’d have to check, if you want me to be more specific. But I don’t see how it would help with your investigation.’
Pell nodded slowly. ‘So you wouldn’t know what she might have been working on recently?’
‘No. She specialised in commercial and business matters, that’s all I can tell you.’
‘Fair enough. You were in the Military Police, is that right?’
‘Yes.’ Palmer guessed that the moment he had rung and left a message, Pell would have had someone trawling through the records. It would have been negligent not to. And Pell was coming across as anything but slow to join all the primary dots.
‘So you know a bit about procedure.’
‘I know you have to eliminate everybody, yes.’
‘What made you come forward?’
Palmer shrugged. ‘You’d have come across my name eventually.’
Pell raised a cynical eyebrow. ‘Miss Gavin didn’t suggest it, then?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
Pell eased back in the chair and stretched out his legs. ‘I was up at Paddington Green station when I got your message, sitting in on a National Crime Squad taskforce meeting. Bloody boring, most of it, talking about budgets and targets. Christ, it’s like being in a call centre. Anyway, I was relieved to get a message that someone had called about Miss Bellamy. It gave me an excuse to get out for some fresh air.’
‘Glad to have been of help.’
‘While I was taking the message, a senior suit ambushed me; he’d heard your name mentioned and dragged me to one side. He told me a few things about you — and your friend, Miss Gavin.’ He stared hard at Palmer. ‘You know Chief Superintendent Weller?’
‘Yes, I know him.’ Palmer wondered at the small community that was the police service. He had encountered Chief Superintendent Weller on a previous job with Riley. The officer was a member of the Serious Organised Crimes Agency, and was fond of using people involved in cases to get results; of allowing them a certain degree of slack to see what might be stirred up, like sludge on a river bed. It was a risky strategy, but it had worked before and the man had the confidence and clout to use it. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything Weller tells you. He mixes with people who tell lies for a living. It rubs off.’