A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (28 page)

Betrayal, thought Serg, as her dark hair brushed his face and her tongue sought his.
Stabbing in the back, duplicity, treachery, deception
.

Later, afterwards, Edwards was in the shower.

He opened her laptop and typed in her password, which, glimpsed over her shoulder, he’d memorized earlier. A nice, strong password. He had a couple of decryption programs on a memory stick but now he wouldn’t need to use it. Just as well, he thought, it’d take too long. Quickly, his fingers an efficient blur, he found an address book and Hanlon’s work address and mobile number. He had what he’d come here for. Bingo!

He closed down where he’d been and entered the details into his phone.

Edwards reappeared in the bedroom and started opening drawers and pulling on underwear. Serg watched her, half lasciviously, half running through his underwear vocabulary database in his head. A German word for vocabulary, and Serg’s German was good, was
wortschatz
, word treasure. And this was, in a way, how Serg felt about lexis – a treasure chest of shiny adverbial rubies and ingots of noun gold and filigreed strings of verbal pearls that he could dive his hands into, like a miser with a hoard of Krugerrands or Maria Theresa thalers.

Pants, panties, knickers
, he thought. But she’s not wearing a thong or bloomers; they’re different. Opposite ends of the underwear spectrum.

Francine Edwards looked at him sternly. ‘You’re a foreign national,’ she said with mock severity. ‘You shouldn’t be looking at Foreign Office briefs.’

Serg pointed at the triangle of black fabric she was wearing. ‘They are briefs?’

‘They are indeed,’ said Edwards.

‘It is a pun?’ She nodded. Fantastic, thought Serg.

‘So what is the other meaning of
brief
? Not, I would estimate,
short
as in
Brief History of Time
.’

Wearily, Francine Edwards started to explain.

The Huss family farm lay at the end of a private road. Thick hawthorn hedgerow bushes grew alongside the main road and bordered the fields that lay on either side of the lane.

Huss glanced in her mirror, indicated left and turned into the narrow track, wide enough for only one car at a time. The car jolted over the cattle grid near the road with a rumbling, crashing sound and then she stamped on the brake as a Volvo estate pulled out of a passing place and drove straight towards her. She braked savagely, suddenly furious at this interloper on Huss property.

Huss’s Golf and the Volvo were practically bonnet to bonnet like two snarling dogs, each unwilling to back down. Huss unbuckled her belt and angrily got out of the car, as did the other driver.

‘Hello, Melinda,’ said Joad with an unpleasant smile. His hands were hidden behind his back.

‘What the fuck do you want, Joad?’ spat Melinda Huss. It was a sign of how preoccupied she was that she hadn’t noticed who was driving the other car. Unconsciously her fists had balled as she took a step towards him.

‘Just this,’ said Joad, bringing his hand forward and showing her what he had in his grasp.

Huss recoiled in horrified disbelief.

‘That’s right,’ said Joad. ‘Take a good look at it.’ He gave what he was holding to Huss. Joad nodded grimly. ‘I think you’d better come with me, don’t you?’

Huss nodded unhappily.

‘Now,’ said Joad, ‘reverse back, let me out and follow my car, have you got that?’

Huss complied. She followed Joad’s car in her own, her thoughts dulled both by misery and confusion.

She followed him up to the main highway, her mind full of unanswered questions. They drove down some minor B roads until they came to a car park in the middle of nowhere surrounded by Oxfordshire woodland. There were several vehicles there, all estates, all with either mesh screens in the back or cages to restrain dogs.

Joad got out of his car and into the passenger seat of Huss’s Golf. She held Enver’s bloodstained warrant card in one hand. She had been crying as she drove. Now her eyes were dry and hard. She wasn’t going to weep in front of Joad.

‘You want to explain this?’ she demanded.

Joad said, ‘You don’t much like me, do you, Huss?’ He could see the rage in her eyes. Even Huss’s blonde hair seemed to bristle with anger and distaste. Her blouse was unbuttoned a couple of notches and Joad stared with frank admiration at the top of her breasts. She was a very attractive woman in her own large way. He pulled his wandering attention back to the business in hand.

‘If you’d like to listen, Huss, I might be able to help you save Enver Demirel.’

‘Go ahead, Joad,’ she said, a threateningly angry undertone in her voice. ‘You go ahead and do that. And, Joad, it had better be good or I’ll rip your balls off.’

Joad smiled at her. ‘It’s the real deal, Huss. We both happen to want the same things. Now, if you’ll allow me to begin?’

And he started to talk.

Enver Demirel came to lying next to a wall in a small, windowless room lit by a single bulb. His hands and his feet were manacled together.

Another day, another radiator, he thought, staring at the only thing in the room beside himself. He was vaguely surprised to find he was still alive. Memories flickered and coalesced in his mind as his brain started to function again. Memories of Dimitri; memories of Slough and Chantal.

He sat upright with a great deal of effort and explored his aching body. In fairness, he had sometimes, once or twice, felt worse after a twelve-round fight. That had meant thirty-six minutes of being punched repeatedly. How long had Dimitri worked on him? He couldn’t say.

He remembered the hammer; he remembered the chisel; he remembered the blowtorch. His body remembered the pain.

He explored his mouth with his tongue. His teeth were miraculously intact, but his eyes didn’t open properly. He guessed his face and head were pretty badly swollen as he gingerly felt them. His hands were nightmarish. Agonizingly sore, they looked like fleshy oven gloves. Two or three fingers on each hand were probably broken; he was missing fingernails. He turned his gaze away. Just looking at them was making him feel sick, and every time his heart beat the puffy, tight, hot flesh on each hand throbbed as the blood tried to force its way through the constricted vessels. He wondered what he was doing here and where he was. He guessed he would find out eventually.

Dimitri and Arkady Belanov were not happy men. Normally, neither of them had to think long term. Arkady was a problem-solver. As a teenage hood, he’d beaten people up to order. As a conscript soldier, first in the regular army then Spetsnatz, he’d fought or killed to order. In prison, he’d provided the muscle for the
vor
and, of course, now Myasnikov gave the orders and he followed them.

But Hanlon, like all women in his view, had confused things. She had got in the way of his relationship with the Butcher. He’d been too proud to tell Myasnikov of his and Dimitri’s humiliation at her hands. He could barely admit it to himself. Now Joad had informed him that Hanlon was determined to save Demirel, that they could use him as bait. It was his plan, but taken over and refined by Joad.

‘It’s what you said you wanted, Hanlon. I can find her now.’ Joad’s voice on the phone was clear and confident.

‘How?’ Arkady had asked. Suspicion and hope both waged a battle in his heart.

‘I work with Demirel’s girlfriend. She knows Hanlon. I can tip her off; she’ll tell Hanlon. Hanlon will come.’

Joad’s voice on the phone was calm and relaxed. It was an unusual experience to be more or less telling the truth to disseminate a lie. It made life a lot easier. Arkady looked at Dimitri, who shrugged.

‘How do we know the police won’t turn up?’ asked Arkady suspiciously.

Joad sighed. ‘Because both Hanlon and Huss know you have someone who works for you in a high place in the force. You can’t mobilize an armed response unit discreetly. I’d know and so would that other copper you’ve got working for you. You’d know immediately if either of them made it official.’

Arkady nodded. It made sense. From what he knew of Hanlon she would prefer acting alone. It had happened in the past; it would happen again.

‘What will you tell Huss to make her believe you?’

Joad grinned broadly as he held the mobile phone to his mouth. He was glad Dimitri couldn’t see his face. ‘DI Huss thinks I’m a bent copper, so I’m going to tell her a little bird told me that you were thinking of retiring me. Permanently. You follow me so far?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Arkady. It was his turn to grin broadly now; so did Dimitri. ‘It makes sense.’ Of course it does, he thought, since that is what we were planning to do to you anyway.

‘So,’ continued Joad, ‘I get her to fetch Hanlon to take you out. Now, you’ve met Hanlon. She’s not one for sitting around, twiddling her thumbs. One of her ex-sergeants is in a coma, thanks to her. She’ll do anything to avoid losing another one. I think we can safely say she’ll be down at your gaff like a rat up a drainpipe. Oh, and, Arkady, Huss will almost certainly want to hear Demirel’s voice or she won’t believe me. Don’t do anything stupid like kill him. Not for the moment.’

Silence on the phone. For an agonizing second, Joad thought, Christ, I hope they haven’t killed him. Then relief washed over him.

‘I like this idea,’ said Arkady with approval. ‘And this woman, Huss, afterwards?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Joad tetchily. ‘You could shut her up, permanently, but Huss lives with her parents. I’m sure that you can explain to her what the consequences of her talking would be, not just to her, but to them. But she’s not my problem, mate.’

‘Yes, that would work,’ said Arkady. ‘You have their address and details?’

‘Yes,’ said Joad. ‘Thing is, Arkady, I’m going to find it hard working with Huss after this. I’ll have to go for early retirement, until the pension kicks in. I don’t want to lose money, even for a friend like you.’

‘How much?’

‘Hundred and the Merc. I’ve got attached to it.’

‘One hundred, no Merc. I am attached to it.’

‘Jesus Christ, Arkady,’ protested Joad. ‘Even Judas got thirty pieces of silver.’

‘That was for son of God,’ said Arkady curtly. ‘You’re just giving me one woman and one fat Turk. Come to Woodstock Road, one hour, we work out details.’

‘I’ll be there,’ said Joad.

He turned his phone off and looked at the woman beside him in the passenger seat.

‘This had better work, Joad,’ said DI Huss. Until now she had been primarily concerned with Enver’s safety. With a horrible chill of certainty she realized that what Joad had said was true. Belanov would not hesitate to have her silenced, or her family. It’s what men like him did. He tortured women for fun with a blowtorch. Belanov had machine-gunned families in the Caucasus: men, women and children. He had strapped suspects to artillery shells in Chechnya and blown them to pieces so no shred, no trace would remain. It was called ‘pulverization’. He would do the same again in Oxfordshire. He wouldn’t care. And if he was arrested, a proxy would do it for him. The terrifying thing about Belanov and Dimitri was that there were a lot of them around. They weren’t just isolated monsters.

Joad was genuinely aggrieved that she sounded so aggressive. Hadn’t he just saved her boyfriend?

‘Don’t say thank you, then, fatso,’ he said angrily. ‘Let’s just hope Hanlon doesn’t let you down.’

Huss stared at him grimly. ‘She won’t, Joad. She won’t.’

‘No, your posture’s still all wrong,’ said Mawson to Hanlon. The two of them were at a range that the DS used near Slough. Range was a possibly over-descriptive word. It was a field screened by scrubby trees. At one end of the field there was an embankment where spoil had been dumped years ago, forming a natural earthwork to act as a barrier to the bullets.

Hanlon had been driving around with her .22 rifle in its gun bag in the boot of her car ever since Mawson had promised her a shooting lesson. Being taught to improve by a Bisley champion, one of the best shots in the country, was not an opportunity to be missed. Hanlon was always keen to learn from an expert. She loved learning new things and building on existing knowledge.

Mawson had examined her rifle, an old Ruger that she’d bought second hand from Tremayne, her former boss, way back when. Hanlon was a good shot. She belonged to a range in West London, and occasionally spent time in the summer with a box of cartridges, unhurriedly shooting at targets. It was quiet – her gun had a suppressor, although a .22 didn’t make much noise anyway – and relaxing. She enjoyed the camaraderie of her fellow marksmen, generally placid, friendly, middle-aged men from a variety of backgrounds. Target shooting was very democratic, very egalitarian, unlike thousand-pound-a-day game shoots where the emphasis was as much on who had the most expensive shotgun as it was on marksmanship.

Mawson examined the gun, snapped it shut, squinted down the sights, put a shell in it and fired a shot at a target halfway down the field. The business of checking the accuracy of her sights had begun.

When that was done, when he’d made minor adjustments to the positioning of her scope, zeroed the sights to a hundred metres accuracy, he said to her, ‘You see that “shoot n-c” target to the left.’ Obediently, she looked down the sight at the piece of paper with the concentric rings of the target, a drawing pinned to a post. ‘Six shots on that, please, in your own time. There’s no rush.’

Mawson watched as Hanlon lay prone on the ground, her rifle resting on his tightly folded jacket, the slight breeze playing with the curls of her dark hair, her face concentrated as she worked the bolt.

He put the field glasses to his eyes and looked at the rings of the target she was shooting at. It wasn’t perfect, but for an amateur it was extremely impressive. He studied the groupings of the shots and made a mental note of areas that needed to be covered.