Chapter 60
Soho in the late evening is always a busy place.
Plenty of the pubs remained open and the many restaurants were still alive with chatter and laughter.
I walked along Shaftesbury Avenue, turning left into Dean Street. I had left Barbara some forty minutes ago after giving her as much reassurance as I could. But I was no medical man. Someone was going to pay for it, though, I had told her. Making it a mantra for myself. As if saying it a lot of times would make it so. Coming good on the promise might be a different matter, but I meant every word I said.
Jack Morgan was going to hold me to it, too. This was every bit as personal to him and it was killing him not to be over here working the case with me. But it wouldn’t help me, Hannah or Jack himself if he were arrested. A Supreme Court judge gets sent down for a crime she didn’t commit because Jack Morgan skips a subpoena and the consequences for Private in the States didn’t bear thinking about. So Jack was stuck between a rock and a hard place, so were we.
And time was running out.
I had assumed earlier that there was no connection to the States with Hannah’s kidnapping. That it was a local operation. Lightning striking twice and her captors lucking onto a jackpot.
But now I wasn’t so sure.
Brendan Ferres going into Chancellors. It was conceivable enough that he did have business there. His lot dealt in drugs. Students used drugs. This wasn’t news. But the black-suited man sitting at the table with Ferres and Allen was old school Mafia, I’d put money on it. The first time that Hannah Shapiro had been kidnapped it was by a couple of hoods recently fired from an East Coast outfit. Like I said, I don’t like coincidences. If this was all leading back to the States it put a whole new complexion on things. And it was a complexion I didn’t much care for.
I strolled past the French House and then the Pitcher and Piano and up to the front door leading into the building where my flat was.
I looked across at the Crown and Two Chairmen. A group of young men and women stumbled out. Drunk, happy, not a care in the world. I toyed with the idea of going in for a bottle of beer but shrugged the notion away. I had to be up early tomorrow, I had an exchange to make and I needed to have my wits about me. Too much was at stake.
I walked up the three flights of stairs and jiggled the keys into the lock of my front door.
As soon as I walked into the small hallway inside I knew that something was wrong.
Chapter 61
I was pretty sure I hadn’t left my lounge light on.
But there was light coming through the gap at the bottom of the closed door. I picked up an old left-handed five-iron that I kept in a walking-stick holder in the hallway and kicked the door open.
I wasn’t expecting laughter.
‘You got any idea how ridiculous you look, Dan?’
My ex-wife. Sitting on the sofa, sipping on a generous glass of my Remy Martin Louis XIII Grande Champagne cognac. Retailing at about twelve hundred pounds, depending where you bought it. I didn’t much care: I hadn’t bought it, and I didn’t drink brandy very often. It was a gift from a grateful client.
I turned around, put the golf club away and crossed to my small kitchen. I opened the fridge, took out a bottle of Corona and popped the cap with a bottle opener I had mounted on the small work surface. With a metallic tingle, the cap tumbled into the litter basket I kept underneath. There were plenty more in there and when the basket was full I’d take it to the recycling centre. I’m almost a model citizen. I took a long pull on the cold beer, sighed, then went back into my lounge.
‘How did you get in here, Kirsty?’ I asked.
‘I’m police,’ she replied. ‘We have ways and means.’
‘Yeah, you also have a mobile phone – maybe you could have called me.’
‘Maybe I did. Maybe you had your phone switched off!’
I took out my phone and looked at it. She was right. I had turned it off at the hospital at the request of the ward sister. A two-hundred-and-something-pound African-Caribbean woman with whom I wasn’t about to argue. I switched it back on. Sure enough, there was a message from my ex-wife flashing.
I put the phone back in my pocket. Kirsty took another sip of the brandy.
‘Nice drop,’ she said.
‘You can take it with you when you leave.’
‘You asking me to go?’
‘No, I’m just going to stand here looking all masculine until you tell me what you want.’
She smiled again. Damn, it was a sexy smile.
And damn again if everything about her wasn’t sexy. She had changed out of her businesslike two-piece suit, and was wearing a flouncy white skirt, too short, some kind of peasant blouse laced open at the front and a denim jacket. She was also wearing black Doc Marten boots with blue boot socks and her hair was tied back. The whole outfit should have looked ridiculous.
It didn’t.
‘I want your help, Dan,’ she said simply.
It surprised me more than finding her in my flat in the first place.
‘That so?’ I replied, master of ready wit that I was, and took another pull on the Corona. Registering that it was nearly empty, I tilted the bottle and finished the job. ‘I get the feeling I’m going to need another one of these.’
I headed back into the kitchen, pulled another bottle from the fridge shelf and held the cold bottle against my forehead for a moment before popping the cap. I went back to the lounge.
‘Okay, doll face,’ I said recovering some of my legendary savoir faire. ‘Spit it out.’
Chapter 62
Kirsty put the brandy snifter down on a small table that she had placed next to my couch.
The sofa itself was positioned under the window that looked down on Dean Street below, and across to Meard Street – which had once been a favoured haunt of drug addicts and prostitutes but had gone downmarket now and was favoured by media types.
The lounge was small and contained a three-seater sofa that converted into a double-sprung bed, a thirty-two-inch Sony Bravia HD television which I very rarely watched, and an original Victorian fireplace which, though unused, was stacked with wooden logs. An art deco drinks cabinet which Kirsty had raided. A Moroccan rug on the floor and a bookcase by the television housing most of the books I was supposed to have read when I’d been studying English at Reading University – Dickens, Hardy, Shakespeare, lots of poetry – and which had hardly been glanced at since. When I did read anything nowadays it was most likely in paperback form, and the kind of book that once read you gave away to a friend or dropped off in a charity shop.
So that’s my lounge, bijou but comfortable and with everything just as I liked it – apart from the dark-haired woman with dangerously come-to-bed eyes that was sitting on the sofa.
‘I’ve applied for a job in Manchester,’ she said.
I nodded, although I had absolutely no idea where she was going with this.
‘I figured, get out of town,’ she continued. ‘You and me won’t keep bumping into each other. Take a spade and bury the past where it belongs.’
‘You always were the romantic one.’
‘Yeah – it wasn’t me taking text messages from your girlfriend when you were supposed to be marrying me.’
I took another slug of beer. Kept me from talking, at least, and this was one argument I was never going to win. I swallowed and said, ‘So you’re going to move to Manchester. What do you want me to do, help you pack?’ I was being a regular Jack Benny that night.
‘It’s a new position. They’re setting up a serial-killers unit. Worldwide coordination. Profiling. The whole shebang. Bit like the FBI have out at Quantico.’
I gestured with the beer bottle for her to continue.
‘I’m in with a chance, but there’s a lot of competition.’
‘So why do you need my help, Kirsty?’