“Thanks, anyway.” He left the room and started up the corridor to where Beattie still awaited her taxi.
She was chuntering on about the outrage of the dawn raid. “They won’t let me lock my door,” she told him. “They said they have a search warrant for the whole basement. I don’t want strange men going in my room when I’m not here and opening my underwear drawer. I’m a law-abiding woman. How can I be a suspicious person when I’m stuck in this chair all day?”
“I’ll make sure they respect your belongings,” he said.
“If I find anything gone, I’ll sue you.”
There’s gratitude, he thought. “Did Tony visit your room before he went out to run in the Other Half?”
“What are you suggesting now?” Beattie said. “You lot with your dirty minds take my breath away.”
“That’s not what I meant, Beattie. He could have left some of his valuables in your care, or even his phone. I’m sure he trusted you.”
“Are you calling me a thief now? I’ve got nothing of Tony’s. God knows I’d tell you if I had.”
“But did he visit your room just to let you know what was happening?”
“Will you listen?” she said. “The only time Tony Pinto has ever been across my threshold is when I had an unwelcome visitor.”
“Oh? Who was that?”
“A spider, silly.”
“Ah.” But the “ah” in this case wasn’t downbeat. It was the “ah” of enlightenment, a Eureka moment. That elusive conversation at the back of his brain had come back to him and of course it was the spider invasion. They came from the vaults under the street, she had said. Duke Street was built on a raised platform over vaults that elevated it by five metres above marshy ground once thought to have been uninhabitable.
Thanks to Beattie’s eight-legged visitors he believed he knew why Pinto had written the five-digit number on his wall.
“I’m coming by.” He edged around the back of the wheelchair and left Beattie muttering to herself. Without another word, he passed the armed officer on duty at the basement’s main door and stepped into the walk-out area nobody had bothered to clear of leaves and rubbish. Being so far below pavement level, this shaft was shadowy as well as smelly. Before anything was built, this would have been ground level, the swamp Beattie had spoken about. The grey stone walls were part of the foundations supporting the street above.
The space below the street had to be searched. Years ago, the residents would have stored their coal there and may have stowed a few unwanted pieces of furniture as well.
The stout wooden door was half hidden by the wheelie bins. He dragged them aside and found what he was expecting: the entrance to the vault secured by a strong hasp and staple and a heavy-duty shiny brass padlock.
A five-digit combination padlock.
He rotated the disks to get 50598 and the shackle sprang up. One mystery solved. The door groaned on its hinges.
The vault’s interior was cold, pitch black and smelt rank. He took out his phone and found the torch function. The beam picked out a massive limestone arch over a flagged floor. Beattie had been right about the spiders. Generations of webs like filthy net curtains hung from either side. But the centre looked clear to walk through, suggesting somebody had come this way not long before.
He turned the beam of light in all directions before taking a few shuffling steps, prodding the flagstones with his stick. Ahead, the archway opened up to a stone passage that crossed laterally. He didn’t need to go far. Just behind the base of the first archway his light picked out a plastic storage box and through the transparent lid he could see a laptop, an iPhone and a stack of bank cards held together with a rubber band. Enough data to employ the computer forensics geeks for months.
And two knives.
The vault was Pinto’s office storeroom.
He shone the light across the rest of the space to check for more and was startled by a movement on the far side. A large rat had emerged from under what looked like a folded tarpaulin, its eyes caught in the beam for a second before it raced away and out of sight.
This wasn’t a nice place to be. Diamond had found what he came for and wouldn’t be staying much longer, but out of a sense of duty he crossed the floor for a closer look and uttered an untypically genteel “oh, no” at the feel of a cobweb draping itself around his face. In the act of brushing himself down, he made things worse by dropping the phone. Fortunately, the light stayed on. He had to go on one knee to pick it up.
Then he went rigid.
Ahead, caught in the beam a little more than a yard away, a hand was poking out from under the tarpaulin, the fleshy underside chewed to the bone.
32
“I won’t ask how you came to be in the wrong place at the right time.”
Puffed up by the overnight success of Operation Duke Street, Jones from ROCU was seated in the comfortable armchair in Diamond’s office for what he called a debriefing.
Diamond had no intention of being debriefed, a term he’d always thought unfortunate, so he didn’t comment. If Jones wished to expose himself, so to speak, that was his choice.
“But it’s a good thing you were,” Jones added after one of his long pauses. “My lads would certainly have found that box with the laptop and the phone when we made a wider search, not to mention the body, but you saved us valuable time and I’m grateful for that.”
“Do we know who it is?” Diamond asked.
“The corpse? One of the slaves. His name was Vasil, according to the others, and he attempted to escape months ago. He’s listed on the wall with the rest in Pinto’s room. They all knew he’d been killed. Pinto kept reminding them, to discourage anyone else from escaping. It was a rule of fear. He called himself the Finisher because he’d finish anyone who stepped out of line.”
“So they’re talking to you?”
Jones gave the smile of a seasoned interrogator. “You need to know how to get people like that onside. You tell them their cooperation will be taken into account when their applications for asylum are heard.”
“Where are they from?”
“Albania. We had to ring round to find anyone able to act as interpreter. Got there in the end.”
“What’s wrong with Albania that made them want to leave?”
“Where shall I start? Horrendous unemployment. Poverty. It was a Stalinist country until 1992 and vast numbers left when they got the first chance. About three million stayed on and ten million are living abroad. The economy has never really caught up.”
“I’m not even sure where Albania is.”
“Think north of Greece and south of Serbia and you won’t be far wrong. It’s a Mediterranean country with a good long coastline they try to promote for tourism. Ever heard of the Albanian Riviera?”
“I’m not much of a traveller.”
“Stunning beaches, I’m told.”
“Not much of a beach boy either.”
“You’re a miserable bugger, Diamond. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
“All the time. What happens next?”
“Most of the victims need medical treatment and counselling. Some of them were living rough in Tirana before they got here. Others were on the run from the police. They’re desperate men. They’ll be housed while their claims are processed.”
“And Tony Pinto was the gangmaster?”
“The cog in the machine that failed to function, which is why he ended up dead.”
“Was he Albanian himself?”
“Some of his childhood was spent there, but he’d lived most of his life here.”
“Where did he go wrong?”
“Two more of the group escaped, or tried to, only a few days ago. One, a man called Spiro, was picked up later by the police in Reading. We don’t know the fate of Murat, the second one. After it happened and the news of the escape got back to the mafia who ran this racket, Pinto’s fate was sealed. He was being monitored pretty closely and was caught out, so he had to go.”