An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (25 page)

‘What you gonna do?’ Wendy said.

‘I’m getting out of here,’ he said. He put his trousers on, then his shirt and his jacket which she could see had a gun in one of its pockets. Then he began looking for something, in wardrobes and on the dressing table.

‘What you looking for?’ Wendy whispered.

But he’d found a scarf which he tied over his mouth and nose.

‘What’s gonna happen to me?’

He looked at her as she sat up in the bed, the duvet pulled up to her chest. He looked out of one of the windows and then, slowly, opened it. ‘If Sean and Marty are going down, you’ll be free,’ he said.

He flung one leg over the windowsill and lowered himself down onto the garage roof below.

*

‘Open the safe, Sean,’ Vi Collins said.

Sean Rogers smiled and then said, ‘Now if only I can remember the combination …’

‘Don’t fuck me about – sir,’ Vi said.

They were in Sean Rogers’ office, a hardwood-lined copy of what he imagined the headquarters of an international business empire would look like. Burgundy Chesterfield sofas seemed to be everywhere. It even smelt, Vi noticed, of brandy. Together with a couple of uniformed officers, she was with Sean and his brother Marty, who both looked very relaxed about the warrant she carried to search the house and its environs. In the rooms beyond the office, Tony Bracci and another team of uniforms were attempting to calm a load of screaming girls and prevent guests – known villains, high court judges, doctors, solicitors – from leaving.

Sean Rogers waggled his fingers in emulation of an old-time safe cracker limbering up to do a bank job and then he turned the dial three times to the left, twice to the right and then once to the left again. He pulled the door open and stood to one side.

‘I dunno what you’re looking for, but knock yourself out,’ he said.

Vi peered inside the safe and then removed its contents, which consisted of two cardboard folders and a jewellery box. With Sean and Marty in front of her she opened the box, which predictably contained cheap-looking expensive jewellery and then she looked inside the folders. They contained the deeds to the house, Sean’s passport and birth certificate and about two thousand pounds in cash.

‘Me float,’ Sean said by way of explanation.

Vi was furious. But she had to contain herself. No other passports. She hadn’t seen Tatiana when they’d burst into that gruesome orgy room. It was possible she was in some other part of the house they had yet to search. At that moment Vi felt that if she found her, she’d bloody kill her. If she found her. A distinct stench of ‘set-up’ was beginning to invade Vi’s nostrils, just as Venus had said it would – the fucking bastard. He’d given her her head, against what he described as his ‘better judgement’, and now here she was, in a house full of naked judges but no passports and, so far, not even one small wrap of coke.

Vi looked at the uniforms and said, ‘Search the place. All of it. ID every girl you find. Passports, work permits, you know the drill.’

The uniforms left.

Debbie Rogers came in, smoking a green cocktail cigarette. Vi hadn’t seen her for a number of years, but she hadn’t changed a
bit. She still had a face you could crack marble on. She looked tense. Vi nodded in her direction, ‘Debbie.’

‘DI Collins.’ Debbie sat down on one of the Chesterfields. ‘What you looking for?’ she asked. ‘This is a private party here, you know.’

‘A private party where half the guests are eastern European Toms. Right.’

‘Toms?’ Debbie shook her dyed head and said, ‘Oh no, DI Collins, they ain’t Toms. No money changes hands here. All these people are our friends.’

‘So your mates are having a freebie.’

Debbie moved forward. Vi was assaulted by the overwhelming stench of Debbie’s perfume. ‘This is a private party for friends,’ she said. ‘Consenting adults.’

The orgy room and the vast living room were awash with sex toys, vials of poppers and various costumes designed to enhance people’s sexual fantasies. Vi, wound up by Debbie Rogers’ smug, bright red smile, left the office and joined Tony Bracci in the living room.

‘There’s a pool house wotsit in the garden so I’ve sent a group of officers out there,’ he said. ‘Passports?’

Vi shook her head.

‘Fuck. You think we’ve been—’

‘We’ll need to have a word with Tatiana, if we can find her,’ Vi said. And then she noticed the unprepossessing figure of Dave Spall, fully clothed, sitting in a chair.

Vi walked over to him. ‘Mr Spall,’ she said. ‘Can I have a word?’

‘What about?’ He looked grey and drained.

‘About your visits to a house in Manor Park,’ Vi said.

‘What house in Manor Park?’

She told him the address.

‘So what?’ he said.

‘Why do you go there?’ Vi asked. ‘It’s full of girls, from Eastern Europe.’

‘What if it is?’

‘Well, we think that they might be on the game,’ Vi said. Around them officers took names, addresses and contact numbers. They looked at passports, turned out drawers, boxes and DVD cabinets.

Dave shrugged. ‘They ain’t Toms, they’ve all got proper jobs,’ he said.

‘How do you know? Got a girlfriend there, have you?’

He looked up at her with pale blue, pig-small eyes. ‘Yeah.’

‘What’s her name, Dave?’ Vi asked.

‘Magda,’ he said.

‘She here tonight with you, is she?’ Vi asked.

‘As a matter of fact she is,’ he said. He pointed to a red-head wearing a basque.

‘You mind your girlfriend servicing a load of wrinkly old judges, do you?’ Vi asked.

‘It’s just a bit of fun.’ He smiled, but it was forced. There was a pain somewhere in Dave, but was it because of Magda?

‘You know the names of the other girls who live with Magda?’ Vi said.

‘Olga,’ he said. Vi waited for more but none came.

‘Just Olga?’

‘Yeah.’ But he looked away and so Vi knew that he knew. He had to.

‘I thought there were three girls in that house,’ she said.

‘No, only two.’

‘I’d’ve hardly described the house as being full if there were only two girls in it, now would I?’ Vi said.

‘I dunno.’ He shrugged again.

Vi smiled at him but then she was distracted by a shout from outside. It came from one of her officers.

It had all come down, finally, to Wendy Dixon. The plods from Essex who were supposed to have been securing the house and the garden had managed to let someone get past them. But then he, or she, had shot at them. They’d managed to retrieve a bullet from the side of Sean Rogers’s house. But the rest of the operation had been a disaster. All the girls had their own passports with them, they all apparently worked, and the house had been so drug free that DI Vi Collins wondered if she’d inadvertently wandered into a convent. ‘Just a group of consenting adults indulging their sexual fantasies’, as Sean Rogers had told her. Nobody knew any shooter, and Sean’s house had been as clean of firearms as it was of drugs. He’d known they were coming.

Vi had asked Magda about the girls she shared her house with but she hadn’t mentioned Tatiana’s name. Now a team was searching the Manor Park house for her. At one point in the early hours of the morning Vi actually wondered whether she’d dreamed the girl up. But now here was Wendy, who was crying. She alone had been found in possession of what remained of a joint which, she said, she’d brought to the party with her.

Vi looked across the table at Wendy and said, ‘You weren’t downstairs with the rest of the party guests, were you?’

They’d found her, naked, in a bedroom over the top of Sean’s double garage.

‘Who were you with?’ Vi asked.

She shrugged.

‘Anyone?’

Wendy said nothing.

Vi leaned back in the hard wooden chair and wished she could have a fag. ‘I know what you are, Wendy,’ Vi said. ‘I’ve watched you being passed around. What is it Sean calls girls like you?’

Wendy looked up sharply through her tears.

‘I know you owe him money,’ Vi continued. ‘But you’ll never work your debt off, you know, not until you’re too old and too knackered to be useful.’ She leaned forward. She’d seen the Sean Rogers type many times over the years. ‘But even then it won’t end. When your body’s like a sack and your face looks like mine on a bad day, he’ll have you dealing blow or stashing hooky fags and booze. Your debt will never be paid. Who were you with in that room over the garage, Wendy?’

‘No-one.’

‘So you were just stark naked on your own?’

Wendy looked down again.

‘Wendy, the Essex coppers who provided backup tonight saw a figure jump down off the garage roof and make a break for the woods behind Sean’s house. It was that person who fired on those officers with a gun. That’s a very serious offence, and if you are protecting that person you could be in a lot of trouble.’

Wendy said nothing and so Vi changed tack. ‘If you won’t think of yourself then think about your kids,’ she said. ‘If anything happened to you, what would happen to them? Eh? If you went inside or died, they’d go into care.’

‘I’ve got a sister,’ she mumbled.

‘Oh, and you think your sister’d automatically get your kids?’ Vi leaned across the table. ‘Don’t be stupid, Wendy. You know what the score is. They’d go into care. Deal with Sean and his organisation now and you can be free.’

There was a pause before Wendy Dixon laughed. ‘You know that’s bollocks,’ she said.

‘We’ll protect you.’

‘And how you gonna do that?’ Wendy said. ‘Lock us all in a bulletproof car? Sean and Marty kill people. I know it and so do you, even though you’ve never managed to catch them. You never will! They know everybody, they’ve got everybody …’

‘They haven’t got me,’ Vi said. ‘Wendy …’

‘No! No,’ she said. ‘I … Look, just do me for the blow and let me go. I’ve nothing more to say.’

Vi shook her head. ‘I think you’re making a really big mistake, Wendy.’

‘I don’t.’

‘If you’ll just give us the name of the shooter.’

‘What shooter?’ Wendy said. ‘There was no shooter. There was just men and me in that bed and—’

‘Oh, fucking hell!’ Vi put her forehead in her hands. ‘No shooter, no Tatiana, no—’

‘Tatiana. There was a girl called Tatiana, I met her once or twice,’ Wendy said.

Vi sat up straight again. ‘Blonde, Russian, tall girl.’

‘Yes, lovely,’ Wendy said. ‘But I never saw her at Sean’s last night.’ And then she frowned.

Vi saw it and said, ‘Bad memory, Wendy? Of Tatiana?’

‘Oh? Oh, no.’ And then she smiled. But Vi knew that it was false.

*

For the second night running Nasreen had been tied to the bed. In too much pain to sleep she’d peered into the darkness around her and wondered what was going to happen once the baby was born. Would he kill her? How could he get away with doing that? And yet he clearly hated her and so how could it end other than badly?

She heard him come in through the front door at some time she couldn’t begin to guess at. He hadn’t asked her to cook an
iftar
meal to break the Ramadan fast and so she was wildly hungry and thirsty. It was dark. In the silence she heard him talk to someone, or into his phone.

‘It’s sorted,’ he said. Then, ‘I’m cool, I’m cool.’ Then there was a long gap before she heard him say, ‘Look, I promised and I never go back on my word … What police station? Where?’ Finally she heard him say, ‘You own the house at the end of the day. Just give me another week.’

Nasreen felt her heart begin to race. What house had her husband been talking about? Their house? But that wasn’t possible because they owned their house – didn’t they?

*

Morning came, bringing with it a double dose of horror. Not only had Abduljabbar Mitra, the man who had murdered Bully Murray, finally managed to hang himself in his cell but Vi had also been obliged to give an account of her actions in Ongar to Superintendent Venus. He had not been impressed.

‘So you’re telling me,’ he said as Vi stood in front of his desk, ‘that ourselves and Essex committed valuable resources to an operation that only resulted in one caution for possession of a half-smoked joint?’

‘Essex police officers were shot at …’

‘They recovered the bullet, sir.’

‘From a handgun, a pistol.’

‘Yes. My informant is missing, sir,’ Vi said. ‘Tatiana.’

He looked up at her quickly and then looked down at the paperwork on his desk again. ‘She played you,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ Vi replied. ‘We searched the house where she lived in Manor Park and there was no sign of her at all. Everyone I asked about a third girl in that house denied flat that one had ever lived there.’

‘Maybe they were right.’

‘No, sir, I followed Tatiana, she lived there,’ Vi said. ‘And Wendy Dixon, the Class B, confirmed that she’d known Tatiana too. She existed.’

‘Maybe she did, but you were played anyway, DI Collins,’ he said.

‘The Rogers knew we were coming, yes,’ Vi said, ‘that was evident from the moment I saw inside Sean’s safe. But either Tatiana tipped them off or they got the information out of her somehow. I think that Marty Rogers’ henchman Dave Spall was having a fling with her. I can’t prove it, it’s just a hunch …’

‘Yes, well I think we’ve had quite enough of your hunches, don’t you, DI—’

‘Tatiana was no hunch, sir!’ Vi said. She was angry now. Even if Venus didn’t accept anything else, he had to accept that Tatiana was real and she was missing. She could very well be dead. ‘The Rogers had a man with a gun in their house last night—’

‘Which they deny and we cannot prove. I think you’ll find that he or she cannot definitively be connected to the Rogers brothers.’

Vi ignored him. Of course the shooter had been connected. ‘They’ve either killed Tatiana or shuffled her back to Eastern Europe,’ she said.

‘Yes, well …’ He moved one piece of paper off his desk and replaced it with another. ‘All that is by the by. I’ve had word from the assistant commissioner’s officer today and we’re definitely on for the Olympics. Because that security firm cocked up so royally all leave is cancelled and that is now our priority.’

Vi had known it had been coming. ‘Yes, sir.’