Without taking her eyes off him Kelly said over her shoulder, “Tyrone take the sharps’ bin of contaminated needles back upstairs and empty it out will you?”
“No problem Kel,” Tyrone said cheerfully. “I’ll spread ’em around the place just like we found ’em. You want me to dump the lot?”
“That depends on how much discount we’re being asked to give,” she said.
The letting agent stared in horror as Tyrone stepped down out of the van carrying the container plastered with large yellow warning labels for blood-borne infection.
“Now wait a minute—”
Kelly held up a finger cutting him dead. “A hundred percent of the price you agreed to gets you a hundred percent of the job,” she said firmly. “Any less and you’ll need to get your rubber gloves out and hope your shots are up to date. Your choice.”
The man was small and thin, narrow-featured except for his ears which stuck out far enough to glow pinkly when he stood with his back to the light. He scowled furiously but couldn’t take his eyes off the additional stickers on the bin that warned of serious health risks from the contents. He scrabbled for his wallet and waited impatiently while Kelly ran his credit card details.
As soon as she was done he snatched back the card and hurried away to lock up, looking over his shoulder furtively as he did so.
Tyrone heaved the sharps’ bin back into the van and grinned at her. “Don’t think we’ll get much word of mouth from this one, yeah?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said sitting on the edge of the load bay to strip her own suit over the booties, making sure it stayed inside out as it came off. Ray was fanatical about ensuring not just his licences stayed unblemished but that his staff protected themselves from infection as well. “You’d be amazed who he might come into contact with.”
Tyrone’s own gear went into the bin for biohazard waste disposal too. “Might have been talking already,” he said then quietly leaning towards her. “There’s a guy sitting in an old Merc across the road—been watching this place all day.”
Kelly followed his casual nod and noticed a pimped-up black Mercedes coupé on wheels so large they barely fitted under the chrome spats on the arches. The limo-black tint on the glass made it impossible to see the driver but as she turned to follow Tyrone’s gaze the engine fired and the car pulled out sharply into traffic.
She stared after the disappearing taillights, frowning. The car was distinctive and she could have sworn she’d seen it earlier in the day as they headed out towards Dartford but hadn’t caught the reg number.
Coincidence?
She felt cold fingers walk slowly and deliberately down her spine.
What else could it be?
“That us done for this afternoon, is it?” Tyrone asked then, trying and failing to keep the hopeful note out of his voice. “Only, I’m playing in a pub league five-a-side this Sunday. I said I’d try and get to practice early tonight.”
Kelly checked her watch. “You can scoot off as soon as we get back to the office if you like,” she offered. “I’ll put the report in and restock the van.”
He grinned. “You’re a real star Kel, y’know that?”
She cocked her head on one side. “What—very dim and far away?”
Traffic was bad on the way home and driving the large van took up most of Kelly’s concentration. She kept a watchful eye out for the black Mercedes but decided that either it was indeed a coincidence or the driver had been more interested in the property they’d just cleaned.
Either way, she didn’t see it again.
21
Dmitry had no need to observe the two cleaners more than he had done. He’d seen enough to know they turned up together and worked without outside supervision.
What more did he need to know?
So he waited until it was dark before heading out to the East End listening to hip-hop on the Merc’s expensive stereo. He kept the volume at a level where it would not intrude outside the car. It irritated him to sit next to some vibrating boom-box at traffic lights, the occupants’ baseball-capped heads bobbing in time with the distorted music.
Back home he’d have killed them for such an intrusion.
But he liked driving at night through the darkened streets of the city. It made him feel like some kind of avenging angel searching out the weak and the damaged.
In this case the weak and damaged were to be found on waste ground near the river on the Isle of Dogs, huddled round perforated oil drums filled with scavenged timber lit for warmth. The homeless, the hopeless, the repossessed and the dispossessed. They shuffled together after dark like the walking dead to remember old stories and forget new ones with any kind of brew that would fire them from the inside out.
As he approached on foot across the rough ground the smell of the derelicts was acrid in Dmitry’s nostrils even from a distance but he had smelled worse. He waited a long time in the shadows for suitable prey to make itself apparent. To split from the herd.
He wanted an older man so he’d be easy to overpower, and skinny enough that he’d be easy to carry. And already drunk so it wouldn’t take long.
In his jacket pocket Dmitry had a half bottle of Bacardi 151 overproof rum which at more than seventy-five percent ABV was enough to have an effect even on the most hardened of drinkers.
Just in case, folded up inside his jacket was a plastic body bag.
Over by one of the oil-drum braziers an argument of sorts broke out. Raised voices and shoving until one old guy with straggly grey hair and a long matted beard found himself scuffled out and away from the fire. He made a couple of half-hearted attempts to regain his place but soon gave up the fight. As he shambled away into the shadows he continued to curse and gesticulate wildly.
Watching from the darkness, Dmitry smiled.
22
The fire was called in anonymously from a public call box—one of the few still functioning in that area of Millwall—and logged at 2:26 AM. The caller was male with what the operator judged to be a slight eastern European accent. Maybe an asylum seeker? It was no surprise that he rang off without leaving a name.
A single appliance was dispatched to the address given which turned out to be a partially completed warehouse conversion near the River Park Trading Estate. There firefighters discovered the burning body of an elderly male sitting propped against a steel pillar in an unfinished office on an upper floor of the building.
He was firmly ablaze but the lack of combustible materials nearby prevented the spread of the fire which was quickly extinguished. Broken glass alongside the charred corpse was identified as a container for a particularly potent brand of rum so highly flammable it came with a flame-arrester on the bottle.