The Sunshine Cruise Company (28 page)

Wesley glanced over towards the entrance of the nightclub, almost directly behind the coffee stand and hidden from the Frenchmen’s view, and saw an open-topped Bentley whispering to the kerb and a valet-parker jumping out.

Several things happened at once.

Tamalov came briskly down the steps of Le Punisher, followed by a few girls and one swarthy, heavyset man.

The radio burst into life – an excited French voice jabbering away.

A red Porsche 4x4 slunk round the corner about a hundred yards behind the Bentley.

At the wheel, driving, it was … the widow! And the wheelchair woman, Ethel Merriman, was beside her.

‘BLOODY HELL!’ Wesley yelled. ‘IT’S THEM!’

‘Eh? Eh? Eh?’ Boscombe said, blinking and jabbering and clutching around him as he jolted awake, like a mad, broken robot trying to reboot itself.

‘OVER THERE! IT’S … HERE …’ Wesley was trying to reach into the front of the motor, trying for either the horn or the radio, but it was like a bad dream: he couldn’t quite reach the radio mike and he couldn’t find the horn on this fucking French car. He couldn’t open the door either: anti-criminal child locks in the back. He started shouting at Halles and Dumas, trying to get the window down, still trying to open the door.

Boscombe – crazed, half awake – looked blearily across the road. He saw a Bentley convertible peel off from the kerb just as an attractive prostitute in a tight black dress came running down the steps of the nightclub and threw herself into the back of a huge red Porsche.

Susan Frobisher was driving the Porsche.

Boscombe lost his own mind.

‘FUCKING BOLLOCKS!’ he barked as the Porsche took off down the street after the Bentley. Boscombe
hurled
himself into the front, into the driver’s seat, while Wesley was still fumbling with the lock.

‘Sarge! No!’ Wesley shouted. ‘The Interpol guys!’

‘You snooze you lose, Wesley!’ Boscombe snapped, seemingly unaware of the irony freely capering about here as he fired the engine and crunched the car into gear, causing Dumas and Halles to drop their coffees and start running towards them as Boscombe peeled off, flooring it, screeching round in a massive U-turn to follow the Porsche. Wesley scrabbled with his seat belt and rammed it home.

Boscombe slewed the powerful car across the wide boulevard – horns screeching, traffic braking around them – and accelerated hard.

Straight into the oncoming traffic.

‘ON THE RIGHT, SARGE! ON THE RIGHT!’

In his post-sleep delirium Boscombe was convinced they were back in merry England. It was a fantasy he maintained for approximately three seconds – until Wesley started screaming as the scorching headlights of a monstrous truck bore down directly at them. Boscombe jerked the wheel hard to the right and the car hit the kerb at fifty miles an hour.

Time and space folded in on themselves. Wesley was aware that they had left the ground, that the tyres were no longer in contact with anything, and, for the second time in a week, courtesy of his boss, the detective constable entered the strange, slow-motion, underwater world of the car crash.

Boscombe was screaming too as an enormous plate-glass window loomed terrifyingly huge in his vision. He was dimly aware of the soft blue of a Mercedes sign before his hands left the wheel – useless now anyway – to cover his face.

There was the colossal smashing of glass as they went through the window, then the crump of the landing, of metal on metal, and Wesley was being thrown forward, feeling his collarbone crack against the seat belt retaining him.

Boscombe was wearing no seat belt. Had it not been for the slowing effect of first the kerb and then the glass of the window – taking them down from fifty miles an hour as they left the road to just under thirty on final impact – he would surely have died. As it was he simply smashed his face off the windscreen very, very hard, knocking himself unconscious in the process. (Eyewitnesses would later describe how surreal the whole scene had been. The police car had screeched into the road, performed an enormous U-turn, gratuitously accelerated hard into the oncoming traffic, then swerved off the road and crashed through the window of the Mercedes showroom, coming to rest upon a brand-new SLK costing eighty thousand euros. All of this had taken just over ten seconds. It was all captured on CCTV and, under the heading ‘COP FAIL’, would soon be gathering twenty thousand YouTube hits a day.)

Several hundred yards away Dumas watched in unmitigated horror.

In the back of the Porsche half a mile ahead of all this carnage Julie had heard only a faint crash in the distance behind them. Then she’d warned Susan not to get too close to the Bentley in case they were spotted.

Wesley cried out in pain as he wriggled free of his seat belt in the smoking ruin of the car, deafening alarms all around him. He leaned forward and started slapping Boscombe, who lolled unconscious in the driver’s seat. ‘
Sarge! Sarge!
’

‘Mmff, rrnnghh,’ Boscombe said.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Groo. Mmrghh.’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘Arrnnn, shrrppp. Unnfff …’

Wesley lifted his head up by the hair and saw that Boscombe had lost pretty much all of his front teeth. His nose looked like it had simply been reversed into his skull. All of this was immediately apparent; it would only be later, in the hospital, that they would discover Boscombe had also bitten off a quarter of his tongue and fractured two vertebrae.

It would be later too, at around 6 a.m. BST, that Sergeant Tarrant, just finishing up on the night shift, would make what would prove to be one of the defining mistakes of his career when he picked up a ringing phone on his way out of the station. He’d listened with growing disbelief. Then he’d gone to the cupboard in the kitchen and taken out the bottle of Famous Grouse the duty officers kept there for emergencies. He’d poured himself a treble and then made the call.

Drowsily, his wife fast asleep beside him, Chief Inspector Wilson had picked up. He’d listened. Tarrant’s explanation seemed to take a very long time and during it Wilson uttered not a single word until the very end when he simply said, ‘I see. Thank you, Tarrant.’ Then he’d hung up.

Wilson placed the cordless phone back on its stand and sat on the edge of the bed. It was then that he felt the strange, not entirely unpleasant, tingling. Something not unlike a mild electrical current running through his left arm.

MUSIC OOZED SOFTLY
from the wall-mounted speakers out by the pool, some ambient Ibiza crap Tamalov had got one of the DJs at the club to put together for him. Tamalov liked heavy rock – Iron Maiden, now that was a fucking band – but when you had the ladies back it had to be either ambient or disco.

Tamalov took a long draught of champagne and inhaled the night air, the smell of pine from the forest and the sea far below. (Well, he would have smelt all this had his nostrils not been chock-full of very fine cocaine, more lines of which Benny was now shaping on the glass dining table beneath the covered patio that ran along the rear wall of the 7,000-square-foot house. He was talking to two of the girls they’d brought back from Le Punisher. Skanks of course. Benny always got the skanks. Although, it had to be said, at Tamalov’s house, even the skanks were well worth having …) He’d bought the place from an arms-dealer friend back in the nineties, when he’d first started making some real money. The arms dealer had bought it from a drug dealer in the eighties, who had bought it from a pornographer in the seventies who had owned the house since the death of the original owner in the sixties – an American bootlegger who’d built the place back in the thirties.

All of these men had made various improvements in terms of facilities, security and so on, and Tamalov had added a few of his own. It was, he liked to think, a pleasure compound.

Two more girls sat on the loungers by the pool talking. They were laughing, high as kites. The real prize, the real peach, sat talking to Franco. Or rather, Franco was talking to Vanessa, or, even more accurately, talking
at
Vanessa, for the Italian’s conversation was now just a mad free-flowing jabber of cocaine-addled rubbish. By God she was young! That skin! Maybe seventeen at the most …

Mmm. Tamalov faced a difficult moral question here. He’d already kind of promised Vanessa to Franco, as a favour for services rendered. Now that Tamalov looked at this girl, in her red dress, with her long legs and bobbed brown hair, he found that he wanted her very badly indeed. What to do? Assert authority, move in on her, and just cope with Franco’s upset as part of the deal? Or hang back, content himself with one of the skanks and let Franco have his fun? No, that was it. There was a way to solve all of this and avoid any unpleasantness.

He’d have Benny slip some sleepers into Franco’s drink: drug him unconscious then he’d fuck the girl. Happy solution found, Tamalov walked around the pool to rejoin the party, raising his glass to everyone.

‘Look at that fucking idiot,’ Julie hissed.

They were in the woods bordering the property, the three of them dressed in black, with their balaclavas worn on top of their heads, like little hats. ‘Ohh, God,’ Ethel moaned. ‘Just … just give me a minute.’ She slumped down onto the pine needles, her back against a tree, sweat pouring down her face and caught her breath. It was the furthest Julie had ever seen Ethel walk – a good five hundred yards from where Jill sat waiting in the car, through thick woodland. They’d followed the Bentley for forty minutes, up into the hills winding along the coast, high above Marseilles, taking care to stay at a good distance. There was some rusty barbed wire just ahead of them – which Julie had already snipped with the pliers – and then it was a straight downhill run of about a hundred yards to the brightly lit poolside, where, even now, Julie could see Vanessa shaking her head as the swarthy bouncer offered her a plate of something and a rolled note
. Good girl.

‘What now?’ Susan whispered.

‘We’ve got to get down there …’ Julie replied.

Julie and Susan were clutching two pistols from Nails’s collection, the Browning automatic and the huge Webley revolver respectively. Behind them Ethel was holding the sawn-off shotgun. All three weapons were, for the first time in many years, loaded with live ammunition, the actual loading done – with what appeared to Susan to be terrifying deftness – by Ethel in the car on the way up.

‘We can’t just run down there,’ Julie said. ‘We need a diversion or something …’

‘A diversion?’ Susan said. Her heart was thumping. Her mouth bone dry.

‘She’s right,’ Ethel said from behind them. ‘Our front’s too exposed. Hundred-yard dash with no defilade. Suicide. Somme. Ypres.’ She was rummaging in Nails’s bag while she talked.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Susan asked.

‘I wonder if this is the seven or the four?’ Ethel said.

‘Eh?’ Julie said, not taking her eyes off Vanessa down by the pool.

‘
Only one way to find out …’

‘What are you talking about, Ethel?’

‘
Fire in the hole!’
Ethel hissed. Julie and Susan both turned in time to see Ethel launching something over their heads – her right arm extended full back, like a shot-putter – and then throwing herself on top of them, pressing them down into the warm earth.

‘OK,’ Tamalov said, standing with his back to the pool and letting his robe fall to the ground, ‘let’s get this party started, ladies …’

There was a distinct ‘PLOP’ behind him as something splashed into the water. He turned round and peered down into it, as did Benny and the two girls with him, both of them already down to their underwear. There was a grey shape, about the size of two tennis balls, sinking to the bottom.

Neither Susan nor Julie had understood Ethel’s question about four and seven seconds.

It referred to the fuse length in the Mk II Mills bomb, the hand grenade that was standard issue to the British Army from 1915 until the early 1980s. The reason the weapon enjoyed such a long service span was its durability and reliability: it was a simple design that had rarely been bettered. Indeed one of the few improvements that had been made to the device occurred in 1940, when it was finally decided that the seven-second fuse that had been fitted up until then was, in fact, too long. It gave the enemy a chance to evade the grenade’s blast or, even worse, throw the bugger back. So, in 1940, the fuse was shortened to four seconds. As the date stamp on the bottom of this particular Mills bomb had long worn off Ethel had no way of knowing the fuse length. Nails had bought three of them off a villain called Ian McKay in the snug of the Crazy Rat in Bethnal Green on August bank holiday weekend 1964. A fiver each they’d been. (A
lot
of money back then.) One had been used (unsuccessfully) to try and blow the door off a safe later that very year, one had been lost sometime in the 1970s and the sole survivor of the trio now sat at the bottom of Alexei Tamalov’s pool.

Ian McKay had bought a box of twelve from an old soldier who’d snatched them from the armoury at Aldershot just prior to being demobbed in 1945. The grenades were part of a consignment that had left the Mills Munition Factory in Birmingham just before the outbreak of World War II, in the summer of 1939.

So the answer to Ethel’s question was seven.

Seven seconds.

A second and a half between Ethel pulling the pin and throwing, two seconds in the air, another two and a half seconds for it to sink the three metres to the bottom of the deep end of the pool and one second for Tamalov to frown into the water and say, ‘What was tha—’ before –

KAA-BOOOOMMMMMMMM!

Of course, due to the increased density of the conducting agent, the force of an explosion is greatly magnified underwater – the grenade erupted, sending a plume of water and shrapnel over a hundred feet into the air. Tamalov was knocked flat on his back, his ears ringing like cathedral bells. Benny and the two girls, the closest ones to the explosion, were all sent flying thirty feet across the patio – all knocked unconscious.

Vanessa was screaming. Franco was stumbling around, his ears ringing, soaked head to foot, a mirror-full of drenched cocaine in his hands. He dropped the mirror and was reaching inside his jacket for his gun when he heard the sound of a pump-action shotgun being viciously racked and felt something very hard being pressed into the small of his back and the words ‘Drop that fucking thing or I’ll turn your fucking kidneys into pâté’. Franco understood the tone, if not the exact sentiment. He dropped his Beretta onto the deck and turned to see a very out of breath old lady, her face obscured by a balaclava with the word ‘FUCK’ scrawled across the forehead staring him down. He started to laugh at the demented sight but Ethel drove the butt of the gun straight into his face, breaking his nose, and Franco went down, hot tears spurting from his eyes.