The Payback (10 page)

A black Mercedes SUV rumbled slowly past and she looked as casually as possible inside, but the windows were blacked out and she couldn’t see the driver. She cursed herself. The last thing she needed was to bring the demons from her own life into those of her parents.

But then the SUV turned into a driveway a few doors further up, and an attractive woman in her late thirties jumped out and flicked back her long, curly hair ostentatiously, before striding up to the front door of the house and letting herself in.

Tina sighed and told herself to stop being so paranoid. She’d taken every precaution possible, and there was no way her assailants would be able to track her down to here. There was nothing in her own home with her parents’ address on it, and Boyd was too common a name to be of any use to anyone intent on finding her. Even so, she still looked round several times, checking those few cars parked on the street for occupants, before opening the gate to her family home.

Her mother was at the door in seconds. An older, slightly darker version of Tina, courtesy of some Spanish blood a couple of generations back, she looked fantastically fit and well for sixty-one, and Tina often hoped she’d look half as good as her mum at her age. She couldn’t see it happening, though. Not the way her life was going. Making thirty-four was going to be challenge enough.

‘Tina, how lovely to see you, darling,’ said her mother with a huge smile, giving her a hug that was surprisingly painful after
what had happened earlier. She took a step back and suddenly frowned. ‘My God, what’s happened to your hair?’

‘I had it cut, Mum. People sometimes do that.’

‘And that colour. You look …’ She pulled a face. ‘Well, you look like a man, Tina. You’ve got lovely hair. Why did you have to do that to it?’

‘I fancied a change,’ said Tina, thinking she should have expected this kind of reaction. She’d decided on a whim a few weeks earlier to have her hair cut ultra-short and bleached blonde, and whatever her mum might have thought, she liked her new look. It went with the new, leaner body she’d been working on with her new four-times-a-week gym regime – something that had stood her in good stead earlier that evening.

‘And what’s happened to your face?’ continued her mother, noticing the cut and swelling on Tina’s cheekbone where she’d been hit with the butt of the gun.

‘It’s nothing. I had a bit of an argument with a suspect, that’s all.’

‘It doesn’t look like nothing,’ she said, ushering Tina inside and closing the door. ‘You know, I don’t know why you do that job, darling, I really don’t. You’ve had so many bad things happen to you. Why don’t you think about doing something else? You’ve got a degree, a good one too. You could do anything.’

Tina smiled and said she’d think about it. Her mother’s concern was hardly surprising, given all she’d been through in the past few years. As well as enduring the deaths of a number of people close to her, she’d also been shot twice in the line of duty; shot at by suspects a few more times than that; even kidnapped. She was therefore a source of constant worry to her staunchly middle-class suburban family, utterly unused to the violence that lurked on the streets of the capital. Her father was the retired finance director of an insurance company; her mother had been a midwife, then a housewife; her
older brother, Phil, was a married quantity surveyor with his own business and two small children. All lived the kind of pleasant, uneventful lives that would have driven Tina insane with boredom, but she’d given up trying to tell any of them that.

And she was secretly pleased that she had people who cared for her so much.

‘Look who’s here, Frank,’ said her mother as they walked into the lounge.

Her father got up from the sofa where he’d been watching golf on his new plasma TV. He and her mother tended to spend the evenings apart watching TV in separate rooms, which seemed somewhat bizarre to Tina but appeared to suit them just fine.

He gave her a smile that couldn’t quite hide the concern, and took her in his arms, holding her there for a few seconds longer than usual. Although not as overtly emotional as her mother, Tina knew he worried about her just as much. They’d always been close, and it felt good to have him hold her now.

‘Good to see you, love,’ he said. Tina sensed that he’d seen the state of her face but had decided to make no comment, though he nodded approvingly at her hair. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

‘Just thought I’d pay a visit,’ she answered, taking a seat in one of the armchairs and trying to look as natural as possible. It was hard being back in the comfort of the family home, with the same old photos on the walls of happier childhood times, knowing that only three or so hours earlier a man she’d never seen before had tried to drown her in her own bath, and come very close to being successful.

She had a sudden, intense urge for a real drink. To grab hold of a huge glass of silky Rioja – the sort she used to buy when she was feeling flush – and gulp it down in one fell swoop, allowing that sweet, drifting feeling of lightheadedness to wash away all her troubles. She hadn’t been to an AA meeting for more than a week
now, and felt her mouth watering at the prospect of booze. But her parents knew about the problem she’d carried around for much of the last six years – it had been well enough documented – so she felt safer knowing she wouldn’t be able to relent here.

Instead, her mum offered her a cup of tea and Tina spent the next fifteen minutes chatting to them – not about the job, a subject her parents both tended to avoid, but about neutral subjects: the neighbours; her brother’s family; her dad’s golf handicap. Such conversation should have been comforting, but she found it difficult to concentrate. There was too much else to think about – most importantly: what was it that Nick Penny had discovered before he died? And why did his killers want her dead as well when she had nothing that could incriminate Paul Wise? These were questions that were going to need answering.

When a welcome pause broke in her mother’s talking, Tina grabbed her laptop and asked her father if she could use his printer. Five minutes later she was sitting at the desk in his study, poring over hard copies of Nick Penny’s phone records on the dedicated number he’d used for their investigation.

In the earlier bills, there were plenty of calls, including many to overseas numbers, where Wise’s various holding companies held countless secret bank accounts. Wise had long been suspected of laundering money from the illicit businesses he was involved in – most notably drug smuggling, people trafficking and prostitution. She knew Nick had drawn a blank at every turn and, as she sat there, remembering his initial gritty determination to bring Wise to justice (a determination she’d found so attractive at the time), it struck her how naive they’d both been, thinking that they could ever find evidence where everyone else had failed.

As if to prove her point, the calls had gradually thinned out as the months passed, and the overseas ones had disappeared altogether.
Nick had never let on to Tina that his determination was flagging, but it must have been hard to keep up his motivation as the doors to success had closed one after another.

In the week before she’d last spoken to him, he’d only made four calls on the phone, and had received none. Three were to UK-based mobiles, all of which he’d called before. The other was to a central London landline number, again one he’d called a number of times before. Nothing stood out.

She took a deep breath as she came to the calls for the last seven days, the crucial ones during which he must have made the discovery that had led to his death. He’d made eight calls and received two.

The last call he’d made had been to Tina’s own mobile number the previous day at 4.45 p.m. Only hours, possibly even minutes, before he’d died. She frowned. She didn’t remember getting a missed call from him, although she’d been in a meeting for much of the previous afternoon and had had the phone off for its duration. Had he intended to tell her something? She pulled out her phone now, went back through the missed calls page, and sure enough, there it was.

‘Jesus,’ she whispered, surprised she’d missed it. But then she’d had half a dozen missed calls during that meeting, including three from her reluctant, now former, witness Gemma Hanson.

She shook her head sadly, wondering what it was he’d wanted to say, and knowing that she’d probably never know now, then pushed her emotions to one side and looked at his other calls. Three of the ones he’d made had been to the same number. It was a foreign mobile with the prefix +855, which was one she didn’t recognize. Straight away, she noticed that two of the calls had lasted over ten minutes, and she felt that familiar excitement that came from stumbling on something interesting.

She Googled the +855 prefix, seeing immediately that it was from
Cambodia. She tried to remember if Paul Wise had any connections there, but nothing came to mind.

According to the world clock on her phone, Cambodia was seven hours ahead, which made it five in the morning. Pretty damn early for a Saturday, but worth a try.

Her call was answered on about the tenth ring by a man talking in the local language. His tone was brusque and he sounded as if he was some kind of official.

Tina asked him if he spoke English.

‘Yes,’ he answered stiffly. ‘You are through to the Phnom Penh Police, Detective Bureau. Who is speaking please?’

‘My name’s Detective Inspector Tina Boyd from London’s Metropolitan Police.’ She waited while he wrote this information down before continuing. ‘I am following up on a number of calls made by a UK-based journalist to this number on Monday and Tuesday of this week. His name was Nicholas, or Nick, Penny.’

‘This is the main switchboard number for the Detective Bureau. Do you know what it was he wanted?’

Tina chose her words carefully, wanting to make clear the importance of the call. ‘I’m afraid not. But I’m sorry to have to tell you that he was murdered here in the UK yesterday, and we’re extremely interested in finding out whether it had anything to do with the calls he made to you.’

If this information fazed the officer, he didn’t show it. ‘I will see what I can find out, but we are a big department, and it is very early in the morning here.’

‘I understand that. Anything you can do would be hugely appreciated by the British police.’

Tina was put on hold. But when the man finally came back on the line five minutes later, it was obvious he hadn’t found anything out. ‘I will circulate a memo and see if anyone remembers speaking to
him, but that is all I can do. Do you have a number that you can be reached on?’

Tina gave him her mobile number, then took his name and thanked him for his time before hanging up. She wondered what Nick could possibly have wanted to talk to the Cambodian police about, and whether he’d actually got through to anybody who’d helped him.

He’d also made two calls to different numbers with the prefix +63 – another country code she didn’t recognize. One had been to a landline, the other a mobile number. He’d also received a call from the mobile lasting more than twenty minutes. All three had been made at various points on Tuesday morning, just a couple of days before he’d died.

A quick search revealed that +63 belonged to the Philippines. Once again, off the top of her head Tina couldn’t recall Wise having any business links there either, and for the first time it struck her that this might not have anything to do with him.

But if it hadn’t been to do with Wise, then why had she too been targeted? It didn’t make sense. He had to be behind this somehow.

Before she called the Philippines, she studied the only other number that Penny had called that week, which was also a number that had been used to call him. It was a UK-based mobile, which looked vaguely familiar, so she reckoned its owner was someone he’d been in contact with before. Whoever it was had also been the last person to call Penny before his number went out of service, at 11.30 on the morning he’d died.

Taking a deep breath, she punched in the number now.

‘Satnam Singh,’ said a well-educated voice at the other end after barely a ring.

Recognizing the name as someone Nick had mentioned before,
Tina introduced herself, apologized for the time, and asked if he’d heard about what had happened.

‘Yes,’ Singh replied. ‘I heard this morning. We worked together at the
New Statesman
a few years back. It’s terrible news. I understand you were working with him on the Paul Wise case.’

‘I was,’ she answered, hoping that Nick hadn’t mentioned anything to him about their affair. ‘Although he was the one doing most of the work.’

‘And do you think it was suicide?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Interesting. Why not?’

Tina had no desire to get into a lengthy conversation with a journalist she’d never met, so she said that right now it was nothing more than a hunch.

‘I don’t think it was suicide, either,’ said Singh. ‘I spoke to Nick twice this week and both times he sounded fine. No sign at all that he was about to take his own life.’

‘Can I ask what it was you spoke about?’

‘Is this an official interview?’ he asked guardedly.

‘No. Nothing I’ve been doing on the Paul Wise case has been official, so this is just between us.’

‘And is this line secure?’

‘It is, I promise.’

‘OK. Nick rang me on Monday night and asked me if I could find out if Paul Wise had travelled to certain countries on certain dates in the past.’