A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (14 page)

Across the street from Chantal’s flat was a Starbucks. Sitting in the window was Dimitri, having a double espresso before he paid a visit to Chantal. Dimitri had been in the flat before and had drawn similar conclusions to Enver as to the advisability of consuming anything while there. He liked to have a coffee in more salubrious surroundings while he thought about Chantal. He liked the way she was terrified of him. He liked it a lot. He knew that Curtis would be away for a few hours, running errands, and Chantal would be in there alone. Dimitri enjoyed Chantal’s vulnerability. He savoured her weakness and her terror. He loved frightening women; it turned him on.

He watched Enver leave the front door and step into the street. At first he thought he was one of Chantal’s clients, then he turned and Dimitri saw his face. The Russian’s eyes widened in surprise and anger. His fingers automatically touched his cheek. This was the man who had punched him through the open window of a van in East London, breaking the bone. This was the man who had dragged him out of the van, semi-conscious, and kicked him several times in the head and crotch. A professional, hard and vicious attack. He doubted he could have done much better himself.

He hadn’t been beaten up; he’d been processed.

What was he doing here? He stared intently through the glass of the coffee-shop window to make sure it was him. The bull neck, the thick dark hair, the drooping moustache, he recognized those. Then, with a professional eye, he noted the swell of the arms through the cheap thin fabric of Enver’s suit, the powerful-looking legs. Even Enver’s paunch looked hard and dangerous. He’d have a low centre of gravity and if he launched himself at you, you’d better brace yourself.

Enver turned and walked away up the street. Dimitri watched him go. He noted Enver’s confident, heavy tread, a man used to people getting out of his way.

He shook his head in wonder at Myasnikov’s foresight. The Butcher was so right to have identified Curtis as a possible weak link in a chain that could incriminate them. And this man, well, soon he would know exactly who he was and what he was after.

God was great. He had delivered his enemy to him. He had prayed for this moment every night since his encounter with the man, and now he would have his revenge.

Slava Bogu!
Thank you, God, he said to himself.

They’d meet again; this time he’d be ready. He drank his coffee and put the small cup down, like a thimble between his large fingers.

He stood up. Time to go and see Chantal. The girl had some explaining to do.

Hanlon paid off the taxi driver at the bottom end of Dean Street, near Piccadilly. The pavements of Shaftesbury Avenue were thronged with tourists, but as soon as you walked a couple of metres away from the main road the crowds magically vanished. Soho was almost peaceful.

She walked past the church at the bottom of the street, surrounded by its outwardly curved hard-mesh fence that kept rough sleepers out of its graveyard at night. She eyed it speculatively. She could climb it easily, she thought. The overhang would pose no problem. Hanlon was the kind of woman who could do a one-armed pull-up without batting an eyelid.

The pavements of the narrow street were busy with purposeful-looking young people in casual, expensive clothes. Post- and pre-production film and TV offices were the main employers here, the main visible employers. Sex and drugs had been Soho’s main trade for years and, although hit hard by rising rents, they were here to stay. They’d been here since the outset, the eternal verities. Blake had been born in Soho, thought Hanlon. It was here he’d seen angels, seen the New Jerusalem shining amongst the filth and the squalor. Nothing changed here in the magic kingdom. Soho was still the same mixture of heaven and hell. It would see off any new technological advance with ease. The eternal verities, the unchanging faces of Los and Orc.

She saw her destination, a tiny alleyway between a Thai restaurant and a property that was being redeveloped, draped in dark green plastic mesh and shrouded in heavy, waterproof canvas sheeting to keep noise and dust levels down. Two hard-hatted builders, their hi-vis jerkins smeared in grey dust and cement, crouched outside, having a cigarette break. One of them gave his opinion loudly as she squeezed by to get into the alley.

‘Nice arse.’

Hanlon stopped, turned and looked him up and down. Her gaze swept speculatively down, from his yellow safety helmet to his ripped jeans, scuffed black knee-protectors and workboots, the leather worn away at the front to reveal the metal toecaps. He was wearing a sleeveless vest showing his powerful forearms and muscular biceps, the main vein prominent under his tanned, dusty skin. He had the kind of vascularity in the muscles that bodybuilders would die for.

‘Nice arms,’ she said to him as she passed, staring straight into his eyes. ‘Shame about the face.’

As she knocked hard on the big red door in front of her she heard the other say, ‘Look, Dave, you’re blushing.’

The door opened and Hanlon stepped across its threshold into the dark portal of the Krafft Club. Iris Campion’s house. A place of pain and correction.

Tea, dear?’ asked Iris Campion solicitously.

Hanlon nodded. ‘Yes please.’ She watched as Iris Campion, her bulk shrouded in a floral kaftan, poured from a Clarice Cliff floral-decorated teapot into a matching art deco porcelain cup. Hanlon looked round Campion’s windowless sitting room. It was as chintzy as she remembered, every square centimetre of available surface covered in knick-knacks with no unifying theme. There were china shepherdesses, toby jugs, glass swans, Wedgwood vases, art deco figurines, art nouveau flowery ceramics. On the walls were sentimental, kitsch paintings.

Hanlon’s cold eyes studied Campion. The twin scars, like tribal markings incised deeply into the flesh of each cheek, were deliberately uncovered by the thick foundation that Campion used. They had been done by a pimp as a punishment decades ago when she’d been a teenage whore. The pimp was long dead; his handiwork lived on in her cicatriced face.

She could have had corrective plastic surgery but she elected to leave her face as it was. Her two fingers up at the world. Soho Iris, she was called around here, her world bounded by a kilometre square. Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road, the four borders of her kingdom. She never left the place.

‘Who’s the
polone
?’ the man in the guest armchair asked, in an unfriendly voice. He was, Hanlon guessed, in his seventies, red trousers, pink, tiger-print brothel-creeper shoes and a lilac shirt. Despite his age and his camp mannerisms, his eyes were hard and contemptuous. Mind you, thought Hanlon, she was in the reception room of London’s leading S&M brothel, not a drop-in centre for the over-sixties. You weren’t going to meet upstanding members of the community here. Well, you might, but only as paying customers.

His white hair had a faint pink hue to it. Like candyfloss. One hand held an ebony walking stick with an ornate silver head. It caught her attention.

‘Looking at my knob are you, dearie?’ he said, angling the polished metal head in Hanlon’s direction. She ignored the suggestive double-entendre. Hanlon had been wondering if it was actually a swordstick, a Victorian relic still deadly after all these years. Maybe a little like this pensioner. He looked the kind of man who would be perfectly willing to use such a thing.

‘Milk?’ asked Campion.

‘No, thank you,’ said Hanlon. Campion shrugged and sat down on the high sofa, which sagged noticeably under her weight. Hanlon noticed her ankles were badly swollen. She put her tea down on a small table and topped it up with an aged single-malt Macallan. I wonder what on earth that tastes like, thought Hanlon with a repressed shudder.

Campion looked at her two guests with amusement. ‘Albert Slater,’ she indicated the older man with a slight hand movement ‘. . . meet DCI Hanlon.’

The old man looked at her with unalloyed displeasure. ‘I thought you was Lilly Law, when I
vardad
you.’ He looked at Campion. He had the old queen’s dated habit of using he for she and vice versa. ‘Didn’t think he was one of your
polones
. He’s a bit
naff
, inne?’

He looked witheringly at Hanlon.

‘Cat got your tongue, dearie?’ he asked.

‘I hope you mean
naff
in the original sense?’ said Hanlon coolly. ‘If you mean “not available for fucking”, then yes.’

The old man smiled despite himself. ‘Ooh, sharp, aren’t we. Mind you don’t cut yourself. So you know Polari?’

‘Yes,’ said Hanlon. She could have added, I learned it from my colleague and friend, Mark Whiteside. But, of course, she didn’t.

She thought of him lying in his bed in hospital. Asleep in hospital. She never thought of him as in a coma or on life support, or in a persistent vegetative state. Just asleep, and one day he would wake up. She would make sure of that.

Mark was an
omi-palone
, as the old man would have called him, gay as it was now known. She smiled inwardly, her face externally as hard as ever. He had loved the old camp language of Polari. She remembered when she used to stay sometimes at his flat, Mark naked except for a pair of Calvin Kleins, the corrugated ridges of his abdominal muscles. ‘How about that for a basket, ma’am?’ he’d asked, indicating his well-packed underwear. ‘Fantabulosa, Mark,’ she’d replied.

Alone now in his hospital bed, the only physical contact when the team of gentle, patient nurses turned him periodically, like a piece of meat, to prevent pressure sores from developing.

She’d killed the man who’d put him where he was now. Fat lot of good it had done.

‘So, Detective Chief Inspector,’ said Iris Campion, bored by this lengthy pause, ‘other than a linguistic trip down memory lane, how can I help? Or is this a social call?’

Hanlon looked enquiringly at Albert Slater.

‘Bert’s practically family,’ said Iris Campion. ‘You can say anything you want in front of him.’

Hanlon shrugged. ‘Who owns 50 Beath Street?’

Campion had a comprehensive knowledge of the who’s who of the London brothel world. She took a hefty sip of her whisky-enhanced tea. ‘Dave Anderson. He’s a mate of yours, isn’t he? I’d have thought you’d have known that.’

So I was right, thought Hanlon.

‘Tell her what’s been going on.’ It was Albert Slater who spoke. Hanlon noted the change of pronoun. Now he’d given her back her feminine identity, a form of politeness, she guessed.

Iris Campion frowned; she didn’t like anyone telling her what to do. Then she relented.

‘Someone’s been killing Anderson’s toms,’ she said. ‘And the clientele.’ With that, she filled Hanlon in, more or less accurately, on what had happened at Beath Street.

‘So far it doesn’t seem like the Old Bill know,’ said Campion. ‘Anderson’s boys don’t shoot their mouths off, but I know because one of them talked to someone one of my girls knows and working girls share stuff like that, and these days news gets about faster than a dose of the clap.’

Hanlon sat in her chair, expressionless. It was a gangland killing designed to intimidate, designed to send a message.

Anderson would try to keep it private, and he might just succeed. The dead prostitute, well, working girls tended sadly to be friendless. That left Charlie Taverner and no one was busting a gut over him.

Only Oksana and her.

She knew now that Taverner was dead; she knew it for sure. She was police. There was no doubt as to what she should do, but she felt strangely reluctant to act. It was as if Oksana Taverner’s scorn of officialdom had been contagious. The Metropolitan Police had let her down, packed her off to Slough, had made no secret of the fact that they considered her a liability rather than an asset, and she felt disinclined to share her knowledge.

Knowledge was power and what Hanlon needed above all was the power to get Sergeant Mark Whiteside transferred to somewhere private where he could be operated on. Whiteside was too high risk and the cost of the op too exorbitant for it to happen on the NHS. So she stored this nugget of golden information away while she thought of how she might use it.

Hanlon knew that Whiteside’s days were numbered. His next of kin wanted the machines that kept him alive withdrawn or, the equivalent nutrition denied him, so he would pass on.

Over my dead body, thought Hanlon. I’ve lost faith in the system, she thought.

‘Who did it?’ she asked Campion.

‘The Russians, I believe, dearie. Anyway, you remember Yuri.’

Hanlon nodded. He’d been Campion’s manager. ‘He fucked off once he heard, scarpered he did, couldn’t see his heels for dust. Something about the Butcher of Moscow.’ As Oksana thought, noted Hanlon.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Hard to get good staff, I guess.’ Yuri will be no loss, she thought. ‘What was it all about?’

‘I dunno,’ said Campion. ‘Turf war maybe, revenge. Who knows. To be honest, I don’t give a flying fuck.’ She yawned ostentatiously. ‘Dave Anderson’s your boyfriend, not mine. He’s a nutcase.’

‘He’s not that,’ said Hanlon. ‘I’ve seen his psychiatric notes. Dr Stein assessed him, the last time he was banged up. He’s a prominent forensic psychiatrist. He knows them all, Iris. All our prominent killers. Dave Anderson is officially evil, not a nutcase at all. He’s saner than you or me.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Iris Campion. She looked at her shrewdly. ‘You don’t seem overly excited by any of this, do you, DCI Hanlon.’ She added some more expensive malt to her tea. ‘You going to old man Anderson’s funeral?’

‘I wasn’t invited.’ The last time she had seen Dave Anderson’s father, Malcolm Anderson, he had been dying of lung cancer. Hanlon had liked him, he’d retained a mordant sense of humour as the shadows had lengthened around him and the pain ratcheted ever upwards. Not only had he been stoic in the face of death; he’d managed to joke about it. Hanlon had found that very impressive. And now the old man was gone, leaving Dave Anderson to run things.