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Authors: Adam Creed

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

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BOOK: Willing Flesh
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‘Thanks for the game, mate.’

‘Mate?’ shouts Staffe. ‘You’re no mates. You know he’s got a fucking problem. If you were mates you’d stay away, not come fleecing him!’ Staffe turns to Pulford, levels him with a stare, holds it, says slowly, ‘You prick.’

‘I’m sorry, Staffe.’

‘I take you in, and this is what you do?’

‘I was winning. I …’

Pulford is wide-eyed and bleary and Staffe sees the cluelessness that most of his colleagues choose to focus on in the young graduate recruit. He quickly loses the heart to tear a strip off him. ‘Did Chancellor call you?’

‘I’ve been working that trafficking case.’ Pulford takes a step back, shaking his head. ‘On surveillance for three nights straight.’

When Staffe offered Pulford a place to stay, somewhere safe to fight his gambling demons, there had been ground rules. ‘Get yourself cleaned up, and a bellyful of coffee. You’re on duty as of now.’

‘What’s happened?’

He looks his sergeant up and down, wants to feel sorry for him. Rimmer and the rest of the team should have been in touch with Pulford. The fact that they haven’t speaks volumes. Staffe stabs a finger into the chest of the young DS. ‘You are going to get some therapy.’

Pulford looks down, shamefaced. ‘What’s happened?’

Staffe looks out through the fog at the iced houses with their black railings and shuttered windows. ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls?’

‘Because you said, sir, that you were away with Sylvie and if you even tried to talk about work, I had your permission to shoot you.’

*

Josie Chancellor puts a tray of bagged evidence on her DI’s desk. ‘Janine’s just told me about the foetus.’

‘It was eight weeks.’ He rests his chin on the flat of his palm. ‘Markary? How do we play this?’

‘How old does it have to be – before you can run DNA on it – the baby I mean,’ says Josie.

‘It’s old enough. Have you got that data from the victim’s mobile phone?’

‘Aaah,’ says Josie. ‘DI Rimmer is applying for a warrant, he says …’

‘Jesus! How long will it take?’

‘The papers are with DCI Pennington,’ says Josie.

‘And where’s the phone?’

 

Josie opens her drawer, picks up a sealed plastic bag with the gold Nokia inside.

Staffe looks around the room and hisses to Josie, ‘You keep it with you. All the time. And I mean all the time. If anybody calls, you answer it, pretending to be her. You find out who’s calling and where they live.’

‘You’re sure, sir?’

‘And here.’ He tosses her a field recorder. ‘Record some interference off the radio and play it when you answer.’

‘What did she sound like?’

‘She’s foreign, is my guess. Break your English when you answer. Say as little as you can.’

Josie leaves and Staffe has the place to himself. Soon, he is lost in thoughts: this case isn’t about him or Rimmer, but the beautiful girl, lying butterflied for autopsy.

‘Staffe!’ DCI Pennington is standing in the doorway, immaculately suited, pencil thin. He says, through pursed lips, ‘Christ, man. Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘I was thinking, sir.’

‘Well think on this, Staffe. I’ve heard about you barging in on Taki Markary last night.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘You give this man absolutely no cause for complaint. You’re only just off the hook, remember.’

 

Staffe looks at the floor and swallows words. Pennington suckered him into the Jadus Golding conviction because the DCI extracted a ‘revised’ statement from a key witness, back in the summer. Staffe shouldn’t have covered up for his chief. But he did. ‘I remember
everything
about Golding.’

‘If you go after Markary, he’d better be the right man, and you’d better have the evidence. I suggest you reappraise. Think of him as living in a castle.’

‘A castle?’

‘Surrounded by a moat full of eggshells.’

‘I’ll have the evidence, sir.’ He thinks of the DNA Janine can summon from a being the size of a grape.

Pennington shoots him a warning look. ‘What
exactly
have you got on Markary?’

‘He called the victim.’

‘After she was killed.’

‘He’s withholding evidence.’

Pennington gives Staffe a withering look.

‘The victim was pregnant. There was a foetus.’

‘You’d better hear me, Staffe.’ Pennington turns on his heel, walks out, head high and back straight. ‘Loud and clear.’ He doesn’t shut the door behind him.

*

‘You sure we should be going to see Markary, sir?’ says Pulford, sitting alongside Staffe in the Peugeot, the list of names and numbers from the gold Nokia in his lap.

‘Keep reading the names, Sergeant.’

‘Mobile number. Name Crystal.’

‘No,’ says Staffe.

‘Landline, inner London. Name Bobo.’

‘Mark it.’ Staffe knows that, in time, all these numbers will be traced, but he’s picking the men who have called the dead woman in the past week, prioritising landlines – for speed. You find your killer in seventy-two hours. After that, the tide turns against.

‘Darius A’Court. Mobile number.’

‘Contract?’

‘I’ll check.’ Pulford carries on to the end of the list.

Staffe says, ‘Get Josie to come up with the addresses and full names.’

He parks up four doors down, opposite Markary’s place on Mount Street. It is midday, but the lights are on in the house. With such fog in Mayfair’s Georgian preserve, you wouldn’t blink if a horse and carriage drew up, if a gent in tails swanned out with a cane. You couldn’t call Markary a gent. Not in Staffe’s book, but he had clearly got into the right club. Somehow.

‘Here we are, sir,’ says Pulford, reading from his Blackberry.

 

Staffe is sad at the thought of bookies getting rich on Pulford’s misery and wonders what is so lacking in the young man’s life as to send him down that road. ‘Go on. Let’s have it.’

‘Bobo is a Boris Bogdanovich, lives in the Atlee, Bethnal Green.’

‘Russian? Find out how long he has been in the country.’

‘Darius A’Court is pay as you go, but one of the landlines is the Colonial Bankers’ Club.’

‘Is that it?’

‘The gold Nokia was bought in Dubai. It’s pay as you go and chipped. And there’s no correlation of the corpse with missing persons.’

‘Colonial Bankers. How pukka can you get?’ Staffe looks up at Markary’s apartment. He has had it five years, since he came over from Istanbul. He paid
£
1.5 million for it but that’s nothing compared to his house on the Bosporus and the nightclubs his wife still owns over there. She makes the Mayfair gang look nouveau riche. Some might think Markary a spiv, but his wife’s family has been lording it since the Ottoman empire came home to roost.

Staffe starts the engine – the wise thing. The next time he fronts up to Markary, he’ll have evidence. ‘Let’s visit this Bobo.’

Pulford’s Blackberry beeps with another message. ‘It’s Janine.’ He ruffles his hair and says, ‘The forensic archaeologist says your woman was East European – the cranium, the eyes. And the contents of her upper intestine.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Beetroot and herring bones. She had one of her teeth capped. A classy piece of dentistry, apparently. But no match so far.’

‘Tell Josie the victim was East European.’ He sees a woman at a window on the first floor. She has full lips and olive skin, the darkest eyes which appear to have smudged their mascara.

*

Josie hears the vibration before the ringtone. She looks at the gold Nokia. ‘The Carnival Is Over’ chimes up and she wishes Staffe was here.

Bobo calling
.

Trying to calm herself, Josie turns on the interference track on the field recorder and places a tissue over the mouthpiece, clicks green.

‘Lena,’ says a man’s voice. He is foreign.

Josie says nothing.

‘Lena, are you there? Hello!’ The man is agitated and sounds young. He says something Josie cannot decipher, presumably Russian or Polish.

‘It’s me,’ says Josie, softly, ironing out her vowels.

He continues in a foreign tongue.

Josie says, ‘In English, Bobo. You need to practice.’

‘Where are you?’ says Bobo.

 

Rimmer comes into the room and she waves him away but he paces around her. ‘What are you doing?’ says Rimmer. ‘Is it for her?’

‘You come over, Lena. You come to me. I am worried. He knows,’ says Bobo.

Josie checks the prompts Staffe gave her, says, ‘Who knows?’

‘Tchancov. You know.’

She scribbles the name, her heart thudding. Rimmer puts the palm of a hand to his forehead.

The phone has gone quiet and Bobo says, quieter, more circumspect. ‘Lena? … Lena, is this you?’

Staffe said to trust her instincts, and she removes the tissue, turns off the interference, says, ‘Bobo? I’m sorry. This is not Lena.’

‘What happens?’ He immediately sounds more afraid.

‘Was Lena in danger, Bobo?’

He cries out, like a baby. His breathing is heavy, irregular.

‘We are police. We can help you.’

‘They kill her?’

‘Who is
they
?’

He begins to wail.

‘Where does she live?’ says Josie, but all she can hear down the phone is a low sobbing. ‘Bobo? Bobo! What is her name? Her surname!’ But the phone clicks dead.

 

Rimmer peers at her notes and sits down, says, ‘Tchancov?’

Josie phones Staffe, says, ‘Bobo Bogdanovich just called her phone, sir.’

‘What did he say?’

‘She’s called Lena. He knew she was in some kind of danger. He mentioned someone called Tchancov. He said this Tchancov knew something.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He broke down, sir. Cried like a baby.’

‘Did you tell him she was dead?’

‘He guessed it.’

‘He didn’t know already?’

‘I’d say not. Would he have called her if he knew that?’

Staffe says, ‘A good ruse if he realised he had left her phone at the scene – with him trapped inside it.’

 

Six

Snow falls steadily on the city. Staffe knocks on the door of Bobo’s peeling, deck-access council flat on the Atlee and stamps his feet, to keep warm, as he waits for a fragile-looking fellow, probably from Poland or Russia. Josie had said he had a ‘tiny voice, like a girl’s’.

The locks clatter back and the handle turns; the door swings violently open and Staffe finds himself looking into the broad-vested chest of a brute. The vest sports a gold skull on a Chelsea blue background with HEADHUNTERS writ large. Staffe casts his eyes slowly up, taking a step away as he does. The man has a neck like a 30 K dumb-bell weight; a face like a 20 K. His scalp is shiny, the nose broken and the eyes red, raw, glistening with grief.

‘You police?’ he says.

‘Are you … Bobo?’ says Staffe, off guard.

‘She’s dead? Tell me no. Tell me this not so.’ He talks in fits, starts again with the sobbing, gasping his words out like a child who has fallen badly, is still in shock. ‘I kill the fuck. I kill the fuck.’

BOOK: Willing Flesh
7.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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