Tracers (16 page)

It was the same with the bed and bedside cabinet; nothing helpful, merely items for everyday living. Through to the kitchen, which showed two empty wine bottles, a mug and a glass, all wet. Maybe Joanne Archer had been a drinker, in spite of the exercise regime. He checked the cupboards, drawers and air vents. There weren’t many places to look and it was soon clear that whoever had killed her must have cleaned out anything that might have helped fill in her background.

‘Nobody’s life is this empty,’ he muttered, sensing Rik coming back to see how he was progressing. ‘Even after a few days you pick up some rubbish.’ He checked the small waste-bin in the bedroom. ‘Not even a tissue. It’s unnatural. Either the killer had help to clean up, or . . .’

‘Or what?’

‘Or Archer had already sanitized the place as a matter of routine.’

‘Makes sense. No clues, no trail. Just like her place in Finchley.’ Rik frowned. ‘Heck of a way to live, though. Who the hell is this woman?’

Harry shook his head. The choice was stark, either way. It would take a professional killer to leave the area so empty of clues, and only a person living an extremely cautious life to have so little to show for her presence.

He returned to the bedroom and studied the body. He checked the fingernails and knuckles, found them clean and unblemished.

‘I don’t get it,’ he muttered. ‘If Archer was such a hotshot in the gym, and a regimental cop, why didn’t she put up more of a fight? She should at least have got one good shot at the bastard who did this.’

‘Unless she knew him.’

‘I suppose.’

Then Rik said softly, ‘Harry.’

Harry looked up. Rik was staring past him towards the bedroom door.

When he turned his head, he found himself looking down the barrel of a semi-automatic pistol.

TWENTY-SIX

‘
W
ho the hell are you two?’ The pistol was held unwaveringly at shoulder height. Behind it stood a young woman wearing a bomber jacket and jeans, with the nylon straps of a rucksack over each shoulder. She looked fit and toned, with cropped, dyed-blonde hair and nice skin. Her mouth was tight with tension and her gaze said both men would be in trouble if they made a wrong move.

She glanced down at the dead woman, then up at the two men. There was no sign of emotion and the pistol didn’t move.

Harry broke the tension. ‘I’m Harry, he’s Rik. We didn’t do this.’ He wasn’t sure why he thought she would believe him. ‘Who are you?’

The woman ignored him and moved sideways, gesturing with her free hand. ‘The bed. Sit. Both of you. Hands away from your bodies.’ Her voice brooked no argument.

‘Hang on a sec—’ Rik began to protest, but she cut him short.

‘I said,
sit
.’

Harry sat down and motioned Rik to do the same. From the way in which the woman had positioned herself, she was just beyond their reach and it was obvious that if they made a move towards her, they wouldn’t get more than a few inches.

‘Unusual weapon,’ Harry commented, nodding at the gun, although he thought the only unusual feature about it was that she had it and they didn’t. It looked workmanlike; anonymous, small calibre, no markings and disposable. ‘You got a licence for it?’

She barely gave him a glance and looked disturbingly at ease with the gun. Distracting her evidently wasn’t on the cards.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked. She moved to the chest of drawers and rested her gun on it, the barrel still pointing between the two men. Harry kept very still. He knew that resting her arm was not a sign of weakness. Guns are heavy pieces of equipment designed to stand fierce pressures and handling. But the weight can play havoc with the wrists and arm muscles, whether held by a man or a woman.

‘We were looking for her,’ Rik explained, nodding towards the body. ‘Joanne Archer,’ Harry let him speak. Since the woman had the upper hand and neither of them was about to get within six feet of her without being popped, there was little point in using delaying tactics. ‘We thought she might be in some sort of trouble,’ Rik added. ‘Looks like we were right.’

‘How do you know Joanne Archer?’ The question came back instinctively, but with a momentary hesitation in uttering the name.

‘We don’t,’ said Harry, deliberately drawing her eyes towards him. He smiled, aiming to get her to relax. ‘We’re paid to find people. It’s what we do.’

‘Paid? By who?’

Neither of them replied. Instead, Harry said quietly, ‘That’s not her on the floor, is it?’

He was holding the photo frame and looking down at the faces, his finger on one of the women. Although the cap and brown hair was enough to fudge the picture slightly and throw them off, it was now obvious that the woman he was looking at wasn’t the one lying here.

She was actually standing right in front of them.

‘She was staying with me overnight.’ The comment was matter-of-fact. ‘Her name was Cath Barbour; we were in the same unit. She just got out.’

‘What kind of trouble are you in, Miss Archer?’ queried Harry.

She blinked rapidly, then surprised both men by kneeling down by the body. If she saw either of them as a threat, she no longer seemed to care.

‘It would help if you put the gun away,’ Harry suggested. He was careful not to move, however; this woman was too full of surprises and might have a miniature Uzi tucked inside her bra.

‘I heard you talking,’ she said vaguely. She touched her fingers to the dead woman’s face, then sat back on her heels. ‘What are you – army?’ Her voice was dull, lifeless.

‘Used to be,’ said Harry. He left it at that. She wouldn’t be impressed by their background in the security services.

‘Recently?’

‘No. Not recently.’

‘Then you won’t be able to help.’ Her voice was soft, almost regretful, as if they were not what she had been hoping for. ‘You won’t be used to this.’

‘Death, you mean?’ Harry gave a shrug when she looked up at him. ‘Actually, we’re more accustomed to it than you might think.’

‘How?’

He told her briefly about the past couple of days, how death seemed to be following them around; about Silverman and the events at South Acres, and the trail they had followed to this flat. Something told him she wasn’t about to go screaming to the police about Param and Matuq, and she clearly had a connection of sorts to Silverman, which made her a person of interest.

She took it in without comment, then stood up. She studied the gun as if making a decision and clicked on the safety, switching her gaze squarely back to the two men. ‘I don’t see how any of this concerns me. I don’t know anyone called Silverman and I’ve no idea how he came to have my number or –’ she looked down at the body of her friend – ‘why anyone would kill Cath. She was just passing through . . . she didn’t have anything to steal, either. It’s . . . crazy.’

Harry studied her face. There was a flat quality to her voice which made her sound robotic. Yet she seemed almost too controlled, given the circumstances. Unless she had an unusually low panic threshold. Whoever or whatever she was, unusual seemed a fair description.

‘So why are you here?’ he asked, changing the direction of the conversation. ‘You’ve got a flat in north London, you train there, you have friends . . . you’ve got a routine. When you’re not travelling, that is.’ He gestured around them. ‘Why this place?’

Archer didn’t reply. Her attention seemed to have drifted off somewhere far away.

‘We might be able to help,’ Rik offered gently. But there was still no reaction.

‘I’m going to reach into my pocket,’ Harry told her. ‘There’s something I want you to look at. You OK with that?’ She didn’t respond. ‘Joanne?’

The sound of her name seemed to bring her back. She nodded assent, watching warily as Harry reached inside his jacket and pulled out the shot of Samuel Silverman from the airport camera. He flipped it the right way up and handed it to her. ‘This is the man we’re following. The one who had your phone number.’

Neither of them knew quite what to expect. Logic suggested that there was little likelihood that Joanne Archer had ever set eyes on Silverman before. The fact that he had been in possession of her phone number and initials might have been one of those inexplicable convergences of detail that sometimes pops up, in the same way that siblings who have never met occasionally discover a brother or sister living in the next street, unknown and unknowing neighbours for decades.

But Archer’s reaction on seeing the face in the photograph took them both by surprise. First came a look of intense shock, then her knees buckled and almost gave way, her face draining of colour. She stared at each man in turn, her lips working soundlessly.

‘This can’t be,’ she whispered finally, shaking her head. ‘He’s dead. He was blown to pieces three weeks ago!’

TWENTY-SEVEN

A
car started with a tinny rattle, and a woman’s laughter floated up from the street, a rising trill ending on a high note. It was followed by a volley of goodbyes and the slamming of car doors. From further away came a brief squeal of car tyres and a man shouting an obscenity. A car horn, voices, a burst of music growing louder, then fading as it went by, a roller shutter slamming down. Normal street sounds.

Harry pulled his attention away from Joanne Archer and what she had just said. He cocked his head and eyed Rik, then stood up and left the room, ignoring the gun. He went through to the front window and checked the outside. Half the pavement was visible beyond the overhanging roof above the shops, the kerb lined with cars. Vehicle and shop lights splashed the faces of the few pedestrians still going about their business. He walked down the hallway and peered through the back door at the metal stairs and the yard below. All clear. Yet he felt a prickle of anxiety. Staying here made them vulnerable. Exposed.

He returned to the bedroom, where Archer and Rik were waiting in silence.

‘We have to go,’ he announced. ‘Now.’

They both looked round at the urgency in his voice.

‘Trouble?’ Rik asked.

‘Not sure. But staying here can’t be good.’ Harry looked at Joanne, who was still holding the gun. ‘Did you say your friend was just passing through?’

‘Yes. She rang my mobile yesterday. She needed a place to crash for a night. She was on her way up north to see her family. I couldn’t exactly turn her away, so I said she could stay. I gave her directions and she arrived yesterday evening.’ She gave a bitter smile. ‘She brought some wine and we gave it a hammering, talking over old times. We hadn’t seen each other for over a year.’

‘And you were the first to leave this morning?’

‘She said she wanted to be on her way by ten, but she was feeling hungover, so I went out; I had things to do which took me longer than I expected. She must have decided to wait for me to come back and . . .’ Her voice trailed off as she thought about what had happened.

‘She was unlucky,’ said Harry. ‘Wrong place, wrong time.’

Joanne flinched at the harshness in his voice. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Whoever killed her got the wrong person. The killer came in, saw her and did what he was hired to do. You and she were about the same height, weight and colouring. If she was in the bathroom when he kicked the door in, and holding the towel to her face, he wouldn’t have noticed the difference until it was too late. He probably didn’t expect to find anyone else here but you. Then he sanitized the place to delay identification of the body.’

She stared at him as the implication sank in. ‘He’s been watching me.’ For some reason, she didn’t sound surprised.

‘Bet on it. And he’ll probably be back when he finds out he got the wrong woman.’ Harry pointed at the gun. ‘Put that thing out of sight but keep it handy. We have to go.’

‘What about my things?’ she protested. ‘And the photo – I’m not leaving it.’

He pushed it at her. ‘Take this, leave the rest. You can always buy more clothes.’

He made for the back door, leaving the other two to follow. They passed a pink gym bag in the hallway.

‘Leave it,’ said Harry, as she bent to pick it up. ‘A colour like that is a beacon. It got you noticed once already.’ He softened his tone. ‘Your gym buddy, Hughie, spotted you with it the other day.’

As she stepped outside, Rik hung back and asked quietly, ‘What’s the rush?’

‘Jennings is sending another team. After Matuq and Param, do you want to be here when they arrive?’

Rik pulled a face and followed Joanne outside without another word.

They walked back to the car with Joanne sandwiched between them, each checking vehicles parked at the kerb and eyeing pedestrians nearby. The clatter of a motorbike made Harry jumpy, the familiar sound too fresh from the night before. They climbed in and Rik headed north, while Harry kept an eye on the surrounding traffic.

He felt pretty sure they weren’t being followed, but his instincts had been wrong before and he didn’t want to take chances. Ever since the prickly feeling he’d had on the way to South Acres, he’d been fighting a rising sense of paranoia, and now found himself constantly checking their tail.

It took them an hour to reach Rik’s flat. Harry got Rik to change direction twice and double back on their route to throw off any possible pursuers. Joanne said little, even when addressed directly, but stared listlessly out at the traffic. Whatever vitality she had possessed on first entering her flat had drained away, and Harry guessed she was settling into a state of shock.

‘Shouldn’t we tell the police?’ she muttered at one point, as a patrol car sped by in the opposite direction. But the question lacked conviction. When nobody replied, she shrugged and huddled deeper into the corner. The gun, they noticed, never strayed from her hand.

Back at the flat, Rik made coffee and poured three brandies, while Joanne excused herself and went to the bathroom. She walked as if she was at the very limit of her resources, shoulders slumped in an attitude of defeat.