She climbed the steps to the front entrance and saw Mr Grobowski, the ground floor tenant, watering some plants in the communal hallway. As the self-appointed neighbourhood watch officer and concierge, he rarely missed anything, especially Riley’s comings and goings. He straightened up now with a friendly smile on his craggy face.
‘Miss,’ he yelled happily. ‘How are you doings? Busy days, I bet.’ Mr Grobowski was built like a blockhouse, with a head topped by a flat mat of coarse hair which refused all attempts to tame it. With a mild-to-serious case of deafness, he presumed everyone else had the same problem and spoke at maximum volume. In addition, sixty years of living in London had not diminished his Polish accent, and he constantly mangled the language with cheerful abandon. He also insisted on calling Riley ‘Miss’ in spite of her numerous attempts to get him to use her name.
‘Fine, thanks, Mr G,’ Riley replied. She looked for signs of her cat, the only non-human tenant of the building. She hadn’t yet got round to giving him a name, in spite of inheriting him from a former neighbour in Fulham some time ago. Mr Grobowski had tried calling him Lipinski, after a famous Polish violinist, but the cat seemed supremely unimpressed by this honour, answering only to the signs and smells of food. With one of Mr Grobowski’s interests being a part-time volunteer worker, cooking for his fellow countrymen at the local Polish community centre, this was something he always had in abundance.
‘Tchah! Is no good looking for Lipinksi,’ he warned her mock-grumpily. ‘He eat like a horses and never say a thank you. He most likely visiting his womens friends in other buildings, I bet.’
‘If that’s so,’ Riley told him cheerfully, ‘he’s living on memories. He had the chop last year.’ She left the old man to his watering, and made her way up to her first floor flat. As usual, there was no sign of the old lady she referred to as the dowager, who lived on the third floor. She was almost never seen in daylight and seemed to live the life of a bat.
She checked her email. Along with the usual collection of spam messages promising a life of unrelenting fulfilment, she found the promised attachments from Donald. Her phone contained five voice messages, none of them urgent or interesting except one from John Mitcheson. He had called from his home in sunny California, with the teasing sounds of surf and music in the background to remind her of what she was missing.
While she waited for the printer to spit out Donald’s email and attachments, she dialled Mitcheson’s number. She could never quite figure out what the time difference was, but with luck, he should be lining up his second glass of OJ after completing his customary early morning run.
Thoughts of John always left her feeling unsettled. Currently hanging on by their fingertips to a tenuous and long-distance relationship, with Mitcheson living in the States where he was running a security company, it was hardly an ideal situation. After having become involved with other former soldiers in a vicious gangland feud masterminded by a murderous old woman named Lottie Grossman, John was persona non grata in the UK. Although there were no active charges against him, and the evil Lottie had since disappeared, probably killed off by her many rivals in the underworld, they had decided it was better for Mitcheson to go into self-imposed exile until further notice. Now, when they met, it was always too fleeting, usually confined to a snatched few days wherever and whenever the two of them could match timetables.
‘Swine,’ she muttered calmly, when he answered. He sounded half asleep and she wondered if he’d had a late night. After years in the army, he was, like Frank Palmer, something of a night bird and kept unusual hours.
‘What did I do?’ he protested, the pleasure of hearing from her evident in his voice.
‘More like what you haven’t done,’ she said earthily, wandering around the room, ‘And I need a holiday. I suppose there’s no chance of you coming over this way soon, is there?’
‘I’d like to,’ he replied with feeling. ‘Let me look at some dates and I’ll get back to you. How’s Frank?’ He always made a point of asking after Palmer, something for which Riley was grateful. She used to think it might have been a touch of jealousy on his part, knowing as he did that she and Frank often worked together. But she had finally come to the conclusion that it was genuine interest, coloured perhaps by the fact that Palmer had saved him from arrest after the gang business.
‘He’s okay. Actually, a bit weird.’ She briefly related the morning’s events, until a distant doorbell at Mitcheson’s end led him to cut short the conversation.
‘Sorry, kid,’ he said regretfully. ‘Gotta go. I’ll call you.’
Riley put down the phone and went to study the two briefs Donald Brask had sent her. It was work, but way better than dwelling on her various frustrations.
One assignment was a simple reporting job with minimal legwork, involving a National Health Service trust manager suspected of having financial links to a large and successful chain of funeral homes. The fact that the company’s name seemed to figure with unusual prominence on a number of hospital lists, to the exclusion of others, implied he was not suffering too much from any conflict of interest. Given the right approach and the waving of some documentary proof, Riley was sure she might be able to get him to fold. It wasn’t a headliner, as Donald would have called it, but being NHS, it was interesting enough to be picked up for the news value. The other was, as Donald had hinted, on the heavy side, and involved the hiring and importing of gangs of fruit pickers from eastern Europe. The suspicion from other pickers and gangs was that some of them were being used to bring in more than just their strong backs and their abilities with a fruit knife.
She decided the latter assignment had more immediate news potential and dialled Palmer’s number. If they were to be working together on this, they’d need to go over the details. Which meant bringing forward their dinner date.
There was no reply from Palmer’s phone. Probably already out on one of the jobs he’d mentioned. She hung up and looked at the cat, sitting pointedly in the doorway to the kitchen.
‘Looks like it’s you, me and the NHS for the rest of the day,’ said Riley, heading for the fridge. She added as a warning: ‘Although I’m not sure you’re going to like this, not after Mr Grobowski’s fancy cooking…’
‘We could have a small problem. There was a man in the lift earlier. I’ve met him before. I think he might remember me.’
The speaker was in an office on the first floor of the block in Harrow, and was staring out of the window at the advancing evening, hands thrust into his pockets. The up-glow of lights from the street was throwing an unearthly haze across the horizon, and down in the street, the throb of traffic was building to its customary frenzied pitch as commuters made their way home. As if echoing the scene outside, doors slamming in the building and the whine of the lifts heralded the same activity.
The office was large and neat, furnished comfortably with a well-stocked fridge in one corner and a scattering of soft chairs and discreet lighting. It was adequate for the man’s needs; he was too old for anything more humble, the days of roughing it for Queen and country long gone. But a more lavish base would have attracted unwanted attention, something he had always worked instinctively to avoid.
His name was Arthur Radnor, and he had just concluded a lengthy telephone conversation. He turned to look at a younger figure leaning against the wall by the door, hands clasped across his middle in a relaxed pose. His name was Michael Rubinov and, unlike Radnor, whose skin was tanned like old leather after a lifetime in foreign climes, he was ghostly pale, emphasising the dark sheen of his eyes, his black hair and habitual dark suits and highly-burnished shoes.