Stealing People (7 page)

‘What’s the damage?’ asked Boxer, looking over her shoulder at the tossed living room strewn with cushions and clothes, a couple of emptied suitcases. ‘You don’t sound as shaky. How bad is Siobhan?’

‘She’s been beaten up,’ said Amy. ‘They must have waterboarded her or something like it. She had a sodden towel over her face when I first went in. The worst was the rape. She’s got blood coming from down there.’

‘Did they touch you?’ he asked, holding her away, looking her over. ‘What’s that mark on your neck?’

‘They just grabbed me by the throat, said it wasn’t about me and to keep out of it. They tied me up in the duvet.’

‘Will Siobhan talk to the police?’

‘Nope.’

‘How long were they here?’

‘Three quarters of an hour.’

‘So it was an interrogation, not just a beating?’

‘More like torture.’

‘But the idea was to get information,’ said Boxer. ‘Did you hear any of it?’

Amy shook her head.

‘Did you check whether she was staying at the Savoy with her father?’

‘There was a room booked in the name of Conrad Jensen from the twelfth until this morning.’

‘Ask her if she’ll talk to me,’ said Boxer, releasing Amy, looking in on the state of the bedroom. Amy had a word with Siobhan, nodded him into the bathroom.

‘Just me and Siobhan for the moment,’ he said.

He sat on the toilet. Siobhan eyed him over the rim of the bath with a puffy lid.

‘Don’t start talking to me about police,’ she said.

‘You should get some ice on that eye,’ said Boxer.

‘Thanks, Doc.’

‘I can get you one of those if you want … and she won’t ask questions.’

Siobhan shook her head.

‘Amy said they raped you and that you’re bleeding,’ said Boxer. ‘That’s not something you should ignore.’

‘Like I said …’

‘Are you going to let me help you, or what?’

‘Are you going to accept the job, or what?’

‘Did this attack have anything to do with that?’

Siobhan looked at her nail-varnished fingers. Boxer wondered if she’d manipulated this situation: not the savage assault, but drawing Amy into her world in order to put pressure on him. If she had, it had worked.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the job … on one condition.’

‘What?’

‘Amy stays out of it.’

‘Some things are not in my hands,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Consenting adults and all that crap.’

‘That’s my only condition,’ said Boxer. ‘Do we have a deal or am I out of here?’

‘What’s your daily rate?’

‘I don’t have one for finding missing persons. All I ask is that you make a contribution to the
LOST
Foundation.’

‘Like what? I don’t do charity. Don’t get it.’

‘It depends on your level of gratitude when the job’s done.’

‘And what if I’m not here by the time the job’s done?’

‘I normally like my clients to be more positive at the outset,’ said Boxer.

‘We don’t know who we’re dealing with yet. We just know the world my father works in.’

‘OK, if you’re dead, you won’t be in any shape to feel satisfied, so … no charge,’ said Boxer. ‘If on the other hand this turns out to be a kidnap situation, then that will change things. I can’t operate under those circumstances because the Metropolitan Police will have to be informed and they have their own kidnap unit.’

‘Would somebody kidnap a person and make no demand for three days?’

‘In this case it would have been more likely that
you
would have been kidnapped in order to exert pressure on your father to release funds that he has control over,’ said Boxer. ‘So for your father to be kidnapped is unusual but not totally out of the question. What access do you have to any significant funds of your father’s? How easily could they be released?’

‘I have access to data on some but not all, and no right to release on any.’

‘I presume he keeps funds offshore.’

‘Like … who doesn’t?’

‘The other ninety-nine per cent of people in the same world,’ said Boxer. ‘Has there been any unusual movement in the accounts to which you have access?’

‘No.’

‘So you’ve been checking?’

‘I’ve been waiting in a hotel room for three days and Mark Rowlands told me to keep an eye on them and to tell him if anything happened.’

Silence.

‘Don’t think for a moment that I’ve forgotten: you still haven’t given me your word,’ said Boxer.

‘All right, for fuck’s sake, I promise to leave Amy alone,’ she said, trotting it out. ‘We didn’t do anything except snog … that’s all.’

‘She’s only just got her life back together,’ said Boxer, logging the revelation of a kiss.

‘After what?’

‘Too complicated.’

‘Look, it was only sex, we weren’t about to elope or anything,’ said Siobhan. ‘I can’t help it if people get a thing about me, can I?’

‘People do, do they?’

‘Well
you
haven’t,’ she said. ‘Which is probably just as well.’

‘You’re trouble and you and I know it. You’ve taken this beating as if it’s happened to you before.’

‘People don’t like confusion when it comes to sex.’

‘That was a heavy beating. Forty-five minutes according to Amy,’ said Boxer. ‘What did they want?’

‘To know where my dad was … what do you think?’

‘How did they know where to find you?’

‘Followed me, probably.’

‘You’ve had some training on that front,’ said Boxer. ‘If you know how to follow you must know when you’re
being
followed.’

‘Not when my mind’s on other things,’ she said, trying a grin but wincing away from it.’

‘Be serious, it’s important,’ said Boxer. ‘Do you think they already knew you were living here?’

‘They didn’t follow us from the gallery. So they definitely knew I was here.’

‘How did you book this place?’

‘Online. A holiday rentals site.’

‘How did you get the key?’

‘The owner of the flat met me here, told me the other two flats were empty but tenants were arriving tomorrow.’

‘And you took a cab from the Savoy with your luggage.’

‘This morning around eleven o’clock.’

‘Any tail?’

‘Not that I could see.’

‘What did you bring with you?’ asked Boxer. ‘Your own things and presumably whatever your father left behind?’

‘Yes,’ said Siobhan, thinking.

‘Was there any of his business paraphernalia in his stuff, like a laptop, papers …?’ asked Boxer. ‘I mean, they’ve tossed the place completely. Were they looking for something specific? What questions did they ask you in their interrogation? And Amy says the one that spoke to her was a Londoner. Is that significant?’

‘You’re asking too many questions for somebody who’s had the shit beaten out of them,’ said Siobhan.

‘Sorry, take your time.’

‘First of all my father does everything on his phone. He doesn’t like information being left around in computers or filing cabinets. He likes it all next to his chest. All his deals – the legal ones at least – are done on his phone.’

‘And the illegal ones?’

‘In person.’

‘You could expand on that if you wanted to.’

‘There’s not much to expand. I was never invited … as you can imagine.’

‘Who was he doing illegal deals for?’

‘Not illegal exactly … just stuff below the radar, as he called it.’

‘OK, but for who?’

‘The Americans were the only people he worked for. If he was doing stuff for anybody else I didn’t know about it.’

‘Did you ever see any of these Americans?’

‘People would come to the flat in Dubai. Some of them were American.’

‘Anybody recently?’

‘A guy came to see him twice before we left. That’s the tenth and the eleventh of January.’

‘Name?’

‘Mike with a weird surname like Klink or Klonk … something onomatopoeic.’

‘Do you know what they discussed?’

‘
Nada
.’

‘You talked about seeing data from these offshore accounts. What about payments made into or out of them?’

‘There wasn’t anything from the US Department of Defense if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘Just answer the question, Siobhan.’

‘Of the offshore companies whose accounts I’ve seen, there were three: Xiphos Technologies Inc., Hoplon International Ltd and Kaluptein Trading Inc.’

‘And where were these companies based?’

‘Christ,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘Xiphos was in Belize, Hoplon in Bermuda and Kaluptein in the British Virgin Islands.’

‘And these companies paid into which of your father’s accounts?’

‘He didn’t
receive
anything. My father paid
into
these companies from accounts he had in the same territories. So his Belize company, called Interceptor Trading Ltd, paid Xiphos; the Bermudan company, called Ferguson Consulting Ltd, paid Hoplon; and the
BVI
company, called Sunbeam International Ltd, paid Kaluptein.’

‘Why did your father name his companies after Jensen cars.’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘The Jensen brothers made sports cars after the war until the seventies.’

‘My father doesn’t give a shit about cars,’ said Siobhan. ‘I would say he’s only interested in people. Yeah, money and people and how they work together … and how the one fucks up the other. And power, too, or is that the same thing?’

‘So you told these two guys that your father had walked off into the night three days ago and you hadn’t seen him since,’ said Boxer, ‘and they didn’t believe you?’

‘I didn’t end up like this because they were happy,’ said Siobhan. ‘They wanted to make sure I didn’t go to the police. They showed me what to expect if I did and threatened me with worse.’

‘Any indication what they wanted from your father? Money … expertise? Had your father stolen something?’

‘They just wanted to know where he was.’

‘It could, of course, have nothing to do with his business and be something … personal.’

‘It felt like it.’

‘I mean you don’t beat and rape a man’s child unless you want to make a very personal point.’

7

20.15, 15 January 2014

DI Mercy Danquah’s house, Streatham, London

T
he call came through at 20.16. Mercy remembered the time, a professional tic, as she clicked the receive button to what she thought was going to be a call from Marcus Alleyne.

Until that moment she’d been sitting at the kitchen table in her dark blue jeans, a black roll-neck cashmere sweater (a present from Amy), navy blue high heels and full make-up, waiting for him to show. Normally this would not have been an unusual situation. Alleyne, the laid back Trinidadian, felt that punctuality was uncool, while it was Mercy’s duty, as the cop, to always be on time. But given the circumstances of the phone call earlier today, and the fact that they hadn’t seen each other for four days, she thought he might, for once, have been on time.

Mercy decided not to let it bother her. It was his nature. She slipped back into a reflective mood. January did this to her. The cold and wet, which she loathed, and the possibility of losing her job made her retreat into a dazed state of comfort rumination. She’d been seeing Marcus for nearly two years now. The only man she’d seen for longer was Charles Boxer, and it had just started occurring to her, with some surprise, that she was now over Boxer. She didn’t think about him any more. He naturally cropped up in her mind because he was Amy’s father, but she no longer thought about him in the addictive way of the unrequited lover of the last twenty-odd years.

Her mind was full of Marcus. He occupied her, but not in the all-encompassing, oppressive way that Boxer had. With Marcus, she was so confident of his love, there was no room for anything else. They talked every day about everything. Well, almost. He loosened her up, made her laugh and they still had great sex.

So what was the problem?

That word: ‘almost’. They talked about lots of hard things: Mercy’s relationships with her family, her difficult daughter, Boxer, Isabel, even Isabel’s daughter and ex-husband. Marcus Alleyne had an incredible appetite for people and their difficulties. It was as if he had an empathy muscle that needed a daily workout.

The one thing they couldn’t talk about was Alleyne’s … occupation.

He was a fence: receiving stolen goods and selling them on. It was how they’d met. In Amy’s horror phase she’d brought a suitcase of cigarettes over from the Canary Islands with a group of girls and Alleyne had met her at Gatwick airport. One of the rooms in Alleyne’s Railton Road flat was given over to flat-screen
TV
s, tablet computers, coffee machines, high-end trainers, cigarettes and other contraband. Even Boxer’s mother was wearing a pair of trainers from ‘Santa’s Den’, as Alleyne referred to the room.

This was more than awkward for a detective inspector with the Kidnap and Special Investigation Unit. It meant that they lived their relationship in a bubble. Mercy couldn’t afford to introduce Alleyne to her family and friends and especially not to any of her colleagues, and she certainly didn’t want to meet any of Alleyne’s acquaintances, who ranged from small-time crooks, rap artists and twerk specialists to debt collectors, gun dealers and well-known gangsters.

How much longer could they live in this bubble before it burst? She’d already asked Alleyne if he could go straight, but had no idea how he would be able to make £50,000 a year (after tax) going legit. Especially as £20,000 of that money made its way back to Trinidad as his contribution to the family’s investment in a tourist development.

Mercy had asked Boxer’s advice and he’d been bleak about her options. If Alleyne couldn’t quit being a fence, she would have to quit the kidnap unit, quit the relationship or, as she had done over the last two years, ignore it and hope for the best. She took the third option every time.

And now it occurred to her for the first time that maybe they’d found out about her relationship with Alleyne and this was why
DCS
Oscar Hines was demanding her presence in his office tomorrow morning. Her eyes widened at the possibility. How could she have been so slow?

And where
was
Marcus anyway?

That was when her phone rang. ‘Marcus’ came up on the screen, but not his voice into her ear.

‘Mercy Danquah?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Just answer the question,’ said the voice, London accent.

‘Yes, this is Mercy Danquah,’ she said, keeping it bored and predictable.

‘We’re holding your friend Marcus …’

‘Above your head?’ she said, not taking it seriously. ‘I’m not impressed.’

‘He said you’d be a cool customer.’

‘Let me speak to him,’ she said, instantly annoyed, not liking the idea of Marcus taking the piss out of her profession with his dubious mates.

‘He’s indisposed,’ said the voice. ‘I think that’s how you’d put it.’

‘Don’t give me that crap,’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to be in the restaurant in less than half an hour.’

‘I’d change your reservation to a table for one if I was you.’

‘Not funny. You hear that?’ said Mercy, giving him a beat of silence. ‘I’m not laughing. Put Marcus on the line … now!’

‘I’m sorry, but he won’t be able to make it to the phone,’ said the voice, very polite. ‘We’ve had to soften him up a little.’

Silence. Things sinking in. Her professional mode smacked down the fluttering fear in her stomach.

‘So far all I know is that you’ve got his mobile phone,’ said Mercy.

‘In that case you don’t know him very well,’ said the voice.

Silence. She’d told Marcus not to carry her number in any of his phones.

‘Right. Now you’re thinking, aren’t you, Mercy?’

‘There’ll be no progress without proof of life.’

‘That’s more like it. Very professional. Glad to hear you’re taking this seriously now.’

‘Let’s have it then. No more bullshit.’

‘We’ll just have to wait for him to come round,’ said the voice. ‘Maybe you could give us a question we could ask him?’

‘What’s the name of my father’s village?’

The line went dead.

She dropped her phone on the table. Her cool deserted her. She was up and pacing the kitchen floor. Her hands gripped the close-cropped hair on her head as she came to a halt at the sink and looked at her reflection in the window to the big, dark outside. Her fingers trickled down her cheeks as she realised that this was the ultimate disaster.

There was only one person she could call.

As soon as she opened the door to her mock Georgian house on a luxury estate in the middle of Kensington, he knew something had changed. She’d put on weight for a start, which was an achievement after six weeks in Mumbai.

‘Did you get my text?’ asked Boxer, hanging up his coat.

‘Yes,’ said Isabel, standing behind him, waiting.

‘I’m sorry. I had to go. Amy had a tricky scenario with a client,’ he said, turning to her.

‘She’s all right, though?’

‘She’s fine. And you?’

‘Just tired,’ she said. ‘Jet lag always gets me coming back from Mumbai.’

He hugged her to him, felt the warmth of her contours pressing into him, a difference in shape, and with a trembling vulnerability underneath. He kissed her neck. He’d missed her. Six weeks she’d been away. Something she’d planned over a year ago, wanting to spend quality time with her daughter and her boyfriend, Deepak Mistry. She and Boxer had talked every day, but a physical craving for her had started up within a week, something that had never happened before with any other woman.

‘So how was Mumbai?’ he whispered into her hair. ‘Did you get into the street food?’

‘Oh, you know, Frank was exhaustive and exhausting, as you can imagine,’ said Isabel, pulling away from him. ‘Alyshia and Deepak were lovely. I didn’t travel as much as I wanted to. We did that Kerala trip and the week in Goa was great, but I was taking it easy.’

‘Is something the matter?’ asked Boxer. ‘You … feel different.’

‘Alyshia’s come back with me.’

‘Was that the idea?’ asked Boxer, convinced that it wasn’t. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she?’

‘She’s fine,’ said Isabel. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen.’

They sat on either side of the table. She poured Boxer a beer, and herbal tea for herself, which he glanced at. She stretched her hands across the table and took hold of his. She looked straight into his eyes so that he felt compelled to stare back.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

The surprise and elation spread through him.

‘Well at least that’s settled,’ she said and squeezed his hands, released him.

‘What is?’

‘You’re happy. I had to see that to make up my mind.’

‘About what?’

‘Whether to keep it or not.’

‘But …’

‘At my age it’s not a light decision.’

‘Then let’s talk about it.’

‘I could see you were pleased.’

‘I am. I can’t deny it. It’s … it’s great.’

‘Then I will have the baby,’ said Isabel. ‘If you’d been a bit iffy … well, I’d have … That’s why I had to look you in the eyes.’

‘You’d have what?’

‘I’d have terminated it.’

‘Does that mean you don’t really want to have it?’

‘I do, but if you hadn’t been keen, that would have decided me. It’s not the right age to be having a child. Alyshia should be having one, not me.’

Boxer leaned back, gripped the edge of the table.

‘I’m sorry, it was stupid,’ she said. ‘Not to think about it. I just assumed I wasn’t fertile any more. My periods have been erratic for the last five years and I thought I was weighing into the menopause. I mean, we’ve been sleeping together for two years without contraception …’

‘So how pregnant are you?’ asked Boxer. ‘I mean, you didn’t look pregnant before you left.’

‘Over five months … twenty-four weeks, they reckon.’

‘And you didn’t know?’

‘I thought something was going on, but that it was me being menopausal,’ said Isabel. ‘I’d missed two periods, but that’s not so unusual.’

‘And how did you find out?’

‘I wasn’t feeling great so I went to Alyshia’s doctor in Mumbai. I thought it was a stomach bug. I was feeling sick. First thing they found was that my blood pressure was raised. Then they did a blood test and it came back positive.’

‘Have you spoken to your GP here?’

‘Not yet. I had an amniocentesis test while I was in India and it was clear. Did you ever …’

‘What?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Come on, Isabel, let’s get it all out.’

‘The question mark over Amy … who her father was. Did you ever get that checked out?’

‘No. It didn’t matter to me. We’re closer now than we’ve ever been.’

The discovery of the tape left by his father flashed through his mind and he decided that he wouldn’t bring that up now. He’d wanted to ask her advice. She had such sound judgement. But now, he realised, was not the time.

‘What’s going on in there?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘That’s why I didn’t want to tell you over the phone from India. I wanted to be looking into your eyes when I told you,’ she said. ‘You have two modes: professional and personal, and they’re instantly interchangeable. Your job demands that you hide your emotions, which you do … very well.’

‘If I’m honest, for the first time in my working life, the job has faded away in importance. I used to love it because it put me in a place where I believed things really mattered.’

‘And now?’

‘You matter to me now. And Amy, Mercy, even Esme has started to matter.’

And as he spoke, the emotion came up in his throat and he thought his voice might crack and betray the intensity of what he was feeling for Isabel and his new life in which she’d been so instrumental. She reached a hand across. He took it and kissed the soft skin over the small knuckles.

‘Say it,’ she said. ‘Nobody ever says anything these days.’

Her face leaned over the table: the straight dark eyebrows above the velvet brown eyes that always completely undid him, the high cheekbones with the faintest declivity beneath where his lips had found their most preferred resting place. Then there was the full mouth with the pronounced Cupid’s bow, which had whispered close to his ear so many words that hadn’t just disentangled the unanswerable knots of a lifetime of confusion, but repaired him too, rendered him whole.

‘I love you,’ he said, and something quickened in her. Her neck flushed, the cords tightened and her blood ticked into his fingers. ‘Nobody has ever paid me a greater compliment than wanting to bear my child. You’ve rescued me …’

She knew it was true. She’d noticed changes in herself, realised now that the shadowy allure of her unknowable first husband no longer intrigued her. All it had done was hide a terrible emptiness, in fact worse, his ruthlessness. She’d been excited but frightened when she’d sensed the same draw in Boxer, and had found the courage to reach in, but this time had discovered something different. He seemed determined to escape from his inner darkness and was willing to strive for any possible light.

Boxer’s phone vibrated against his chest. After the night he’d had with Amy and Siobhan, it was not a call he could ignore. Isabel told him to take it.

‘Mercy,’ he said, wondering why she was using her landline.

‘Are you alone?’ she asked.

‘I’m with Isabel.’

‘This might be a conversation for us to have alone.’

He looked up at Isabel, who was sipping her tea. She pointed
him into the living room. Mercy filled him in on what Alleyne’s kidnappers had told her.

‘Have they given you a proof of life?’

‘I’ve asked a question and I’m waiting for the reply.’

‘How long ago?’

‘A few minutes.’

‘And I’m the first person you’ve called?’

‘There’s no one else who knows about my involvement with Marcus.’

‘In your office, you mean, but not in the outside world,’ said Boxer. ‘Any indication what this could be about? I mean, it’s not going to be money, unless …’

‘No, they’ve said nothing.’