Cold Revenge (2015) (24 page)

Dimitri reappeared in the bar a couple of minutes later and jerked his head at Hanlon to follow him. She did so and they crossed the hall into Arkady’s office.

Tatiana had explained in detail Arkady’s sexual preferences but she had omitted to tell Hanlon what he looked like. For some reason she had imagined a man rather like Dimitri, or Campion’s Yuri, in other words, an unshaven Slavic thug.

She hadn’t expected the mound of flab that was Arkady. He looked like a giant baby, in a turquoise velour tracksuit. He had an enormous double chin, or rather a single wattle of fat, that hung from the underside of his face. He smiled beatifically at Hanlon. His lips were huge, pendulous.

‘This is Kandi,’ said Dimitri.

‘Show me what you can do, Kandi,’ Arkady commanded.

The first thing she did was put her hands in her pockets and take out a pair of black, elbow-length suede gloves and put them on. That was the fingerprint issue sorted, she thought. I certainly don’t want to leave any prints. Arkady practically purred with pleasure. He loved gloves. Particularly long ones.

In his office, as well as his desk and a workstation with a semi-circular groove cut in it to accommodate his swollen belly, was a couch such as you find in a doctor’s surgery.

Hanlon shrugged herself out of her trench coat. Arkady greedily drank in the lines of her body as revealed by the skin-tight basque.

Dimitri was standing, watching impassively, leaning against the far wall. While Arkady’s body stiffened, Hanlon could sense the bodyguard relaxing. There was nowhere she could possibly be concealing a weapon.

Hanlon patted the doctor’s couch invitingly, coaxingly, and Arkady stood up with alacrity and stripped naked. His very pallid, white flesh hung in folds from his heavy, short frame. He rubbed his large, pudgy hands over the straining flesh of his paunch and his pendulous breasts in happy anticipation. Unlike Dimitri his body was tattoo-free apart from an eight-pointed star on his shoulder. Tatiana had explained to Hanlon that this meant he was a high-ranking criminal.

He is one of the new crime bosses,
novye vory v zakone
, not tattooed so much as old ones, she had said.

Arkady hadn’t made his money the soft way. His pale skin bore many angry scars. Life had certainly left its mark on him. He climbed on to the black, padded sofa, doggy-style, and looked at Hanlon.

‘Call me
Starshi
,’ he said.

‘Yes,
Starshi
,’ she said meekly.

Starshi
meant old one. It was used to refer to the leader in a cell block. Another thing she’d learned from Tatiana.

Wordlessly, Dimitri handed her a length of rope and resumed his position, leaning against the wall.

‘Are you staying?’ asked Hanlon. She really could have done without him there, she thought. Dimitri nodded.

‘After Arkady Mikhailovich finishes with you, is my turn,’ he said, matter-of-factly. It was the prison way, where they’d both grown up. In a corrective labour institution, an ITU, in Perm region where in winter the temperature averages minus twenty degrees Celsius. In your dreams, thought Hanlon grimly.

She folded the rope in half and trussed Arkady up, more or less in the same way as a butcher would a chicken. The rope wound around his hands in front of him, running back down his body, around his ankles, back again on itself and around his armpits, secured with a tight reef knot on his broad, fleshy back. The Russian was kneeling on the couch, supported by his elbows and forehead, his huge backside, dimpled with cellulite, pointing to the ceiling. She made sure that the rope passed around the couch so Arkady was tied to it. He was going nowhere.

The rope bit cruelly into Arkady’s ample flesh until it was practically invisible in places, buried in the flab. He flexed his body against it and groaned against its constrictive pleasure. He was enormously well-endowed and the pleasure he was finding in this rope-play was extremely obvious.

While Hanlon was doing this she had been surreptitiously scanning Arkady’s office for something to use against Dimitri.

The bodyguard was probably not much bigger than opponents who she had demolished in a boxing ring, but this was no boxing ring. There were no rules and no referee. No one to say ‘Break!’ All Dimitri would need to do to defeat her, would be to fall on top of her. She’d be pinned to the ground under that bulk and he could beat her to unconsciousness or worse. Similarly, if he got those massive arms of his round her and squeezed hard, he could break her bones.

Ideally, she could have done with a baseball bat and Dimitri looking the other way. What she did see was something nearly as good.

Propped against Arkady’s desk was a double-barrelled shotgun. On top of the desk, next to the monitor, was a box of cartridges.

Hanlon had no intention of shooting anyone. She didn’t even know if the gun was loaded, but she did know that a shotgun usually weighs four to five kilos and she knew what it felt like when someone hit you with one like a club. She unconsciously rubbed her left arm; it’s how that had been broken, by a rifle butt.

She walked up to Dimitri. His hair was closely cropped and stood up like coarse bristles.

‘Can I have some more rope, please?’ she asked, with a salacious smile.

He nodded, went over to the desk, opened a drawer and handed her another couple of metres of rope. It looked like the kind you could get in specialist sports shops for climbing. Hanlon took it with a murmured thanks and turned away, breaking eye contact with Dimitri in case he got an inkling of what was coming.

There are two types of headbutt. Using your forehead, as she had on Fuller, and the side-head strike. She had moved her head to one side, so Dimitri was looking at the dark, tight, curly hair on the side of her head. That is the beauty of a side headbutt; there’s no eye contact, so the recipient has no idea it’s coming. Now she whipped her head round with a mighty flick of her neck, so the top of her forehead smashed into his face.

Hanlon was lucky with the blow. Her tough skull made contact with Dimitri’s eye socket, fracturing the bone beneath the skin. It hurt the Russian like hell.

‘
Suka
’, bitch, he hissed.

Hanlon had hoped that Dimitri would instinctively put his hands up to his face, allowing her a split second in which to grab the shotgun by the end of its metal barrel and swing it into his head. No point even trying it against his body.

This didn’t happen. The big man gasped with pain, but he’d been hurt too many times before, in fights, to allow his opponent to dictate terms. Unlike Fuller, he was no pushover.

He swore viciously in Russian and lashed out at Hanlon with his left arm. She ducked and his meaty fist swung over her head, grazing her hair. Then it was her turn to gasp with pain, as his strong fingers closed over her bandaged right wrist.

He yanked her hard towards him. She knew that in a nano-second, his left hand would clamp on to her, probably in her hair, and she’d be his, unable to escape.

The power in the Russian’s huge arms was immense.

Hanlon threw herself forward to break free. Dimitri grinned, as he tugged her backwards as hard as he could. He was expecting her to resist, but Hanlon half-spun herself back into his body, using the power in her legs. They were now both facing the same way, like in some extreme tango dance, and she slammed her left elbow as hard as she could into his solar plexus.

It drove the wind out of the Russian and he gasped for breath. He literally couldn’t breathe. He tried to suck in a lungful of air, but nothing happened. He was on the edge of blacking out. Now Dimitri let go of Hanlon’s wrist, as he attempted to steady himself with his hand on the edge of the desk. He was momentarily bent double, trying desperately to get some oxygen into his body and also trying to disregard the terrible pain.

Hanlon snatched up the shotgun and brought the butt smashing down and round in an arc on the side of Dimitri’s jawline just where it met his chin. It drove the Russian’s head sideways with massive force. The impact to his brain, as it was driven against the wall of his skull, must have been terrific.

Dimitri collapsed on to the floor, temporarily unconscious. He was still stirring, though, and Hanlon straddled him and tied him up with the climbing rope. She did this with extreme speed. Even now his eyes were fluttering and any second consciousness might return.

This time there was no finesse, no artistry. She lashed his wrists together and brought the rope down to secure his ankles. He was now completely immobilized. In one of the desk drawers she found a reel of Sellotape and this she used to wind round and round Dimitri’s mouth so the bottom half of his head looked like a badly wrapped parcel.

Only then did Hanlon allow herself a thirty-second rest, while she assessed the situation.

Arkady was immobile. Lashed as he was to the couch with Hanlon’s beautifully executed rope-work, this was hardly surprising. She crouched over Dimitri to take a better look. He was very pale but she pressed her index and middle finger down by the hugely defined muscle in his neck and windpipe, and felt a good strong pulse from the carotid artery. In all honesty, Hanlon didn’t particularly care one way or another about Dimitri’s fate. Arkady was not the kind of man who would dream of involving the police. Neither would he have any particularly strong feelings regarding Dimitri. Still, on balance, Hanlon was pleased the man was still alive.

The door to the study had been bolted shut earlier by Dimitri and there was a large sash window which overlooked a well-tended lawn. That’s my exit, she thought.

‘Who sent you?’ Arkady had up till now been completely silent. Now, naked and bound, utterly helpless, he exuded a kind of impressive aura of calm. He had spent a lot of time in prison and in the army. He’d endured a lot of pain. He had been officially classed as an
Osobo opasnyi retsidivist
. Nobody had ever broken his spirit. Hanlon looked at him.

‘It wasn’t Paul Molloy,’ he said speculatively. ‘None of his people are your quality.’

Hanlon ignored him. She continued her investigation of the office. She picked up the shotgun and broke it open. The circular brass ends of two cartridges stared back at her. The blow to Dimitri could well have caused the hammer to fall, even though, as she noticed, the safety catch was on.

She took the two cartridges out and examined them. SG shot. A typical twelve-bore cartridge, say a Number 4, 3.1 mm, will have about thirty to forty tiny spherical metal balls inside. That’s the kind of shot you’d use for a bird. SG shot is much larger. You’d get eight or nine pieces of lead in there. You could kill a deer with SG shot.

Hanlon automatically looked up at the ceiling. If the gun had gone off, there would be a huge great hole up into the bedroom above.

She opened the drawer where she had found the tape she’d used on Dimitri, and took out a Swiss army penknife she’d seen in there. She also took out a cigarette lighter that caught her attention.

She opened the main blade of the penknife and ran it down the outer layer of adhesive bandage strapping her right wrist. She peeled this back and took out the carefully folded piece of paper that had been hidden underneath. She unfolded it and held it in front of Arkady.

‘This is Dr Gideon Fuller,’ she said.

‘I do not know this man.’ Arkady’s voice was perfectly level.

Hanlon sighed. ‘This is Dr Gideon Fuller,’ she repeated. ‘I just need to know if he was here last week.’

There was silence from the Russian. Hanlon sat down in the chair by the desk. Arkady’s eyes stared at her balefully. He watched as, with the penknife blade, she carefully cut open the crimped end of the shotgun cartridge and shook the shot out on to the polished wooden surface of the desk.

‘What on earth could you be wanting to shoot with this, Mr Belanov?’ she asked, holding up a piece of shot. ‘Planning a trip to Magdalen College deer park, are you? Or had you planned on something more two-footed?’

She did the same with the other cartridge.

She now had eighteen pieces of shot in front of her.

Next, she removed the wadding out of the cartridges and dropped it neatly in the bin.

She surveyed her handiwork critically. ‘If anyone else had said that they couldn’t remember a customer, well, I’d probably believe them. But you’re famous for three things, aren’t you. Your retentive memory, Mr Belanov, the fact that you like to hurt women, and your enormous penis. The last one’s true, obviously. I can well believe the second, and that gives me hope for the first.’

Hanlon took Arkady’s iPhone from its docking station and prised it apart with the blade of her knife. She dropped the back cover in the bin and placed the other half in front of her. She now had what was in effect a shallow plastic tray filled with circuitry.

‘I have nothing to say. I do not know this doctor,’ spat Arkady. Fuller was nothing to him, but his pride was a different matter. Arkady didn’t talk. It was hardwired into him.

‘Oh well,’ said Hanlon indifferently. ‘If you say so.’

She tipped the contents of the cartridge into the shallow tray of the half iPhone and then added the back cover.

‘Hope you’ve got all your information backed up, Belanov,’ she said solicitously. The nitro gunpowder was made up of lots of tiny blue rectangles like confetti. They reminded Hanlon of microtabs of acid that she’d seen once in a drugs bust.

Arkady was starting to look nervous. ‘There’s no point trying to hurt me,’ he said. ‘I like pain. It’s my friend.’

Hanlon shrugged. She looked down at the pile of nitroglycerin gunpowder, then she picked up the lighter and struck it, staring momentarily at the flame. Its burning light reflected in her eyes as she looked at Arkady. They reminded him of the eyes of a wolf. She smiled horribly at him.

She placed the explosive-filled half-phone, now a shallow tray full of gunpowder, carefully underneath his groin.

‘I’m not going to hurt you, Arkady. I’m going to blow your balls off,’ she said conversationally.

From the floor Dimitri moaned faintly. Hanlon took a tissue from a box on the desk and rolled it into a spill to light the gunpowder.