A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (31 page)

She uncoiled her legs, stood up and stretched. ‘I know you don’t work for Thanatos. I know you’re FSB. I take it you’re not going to deny that.’

Serg shook his head. God, she’s good, he thought admiringly. ‘No. How did you know?’

Hanlon smiled tightly. She thought of McClennan, the text he’d sent her with the photo of Serg attached. She had messaged him to check on Serge en route to the Ibis. By the time they’d arrived and bought drinks at the bar he’d got back to her. The mighty FSB, outflanked by an elderly, retired copper. Then again, he always had been a cunning old bastard, not unlike Tremayne. She thought again of Mawson, of his yin/yang image, the fact that white always contained some black and vice versa. That was McClennan, eighty-five per cent good, fifteen per cent corrupt, if her judgement was accurate. She wondered if Mawson had any guilty secrets. She shrugged and looked at Serg, seemingly unfazed by his situation.

McClennan had even asked her out for a drink in a later text, the one she’d switched off when she’d propositioned Serg. It had taken him less time to track Serg down electronically than to find a series of lewd emoticons to show how much he was attracted by her.

Well, she thought to herself, I am undeniably popular these days. Particularly with Arkady and Dimitri – they’re just dying to see me again.

‘I know a lot of things,’ she said.

Serg watched as she picked her phone up and her fingers moved over the screen. She put the phone down and went to the window of the hotel room overlooking the car park. Through the glass he could see the planes taking off and landing with astonishing frequency. There was no noise; the soundproofing must have been excellent.

There was a tap on the door and Hanlon opened it. A man entered the room, tall, slim, thin-faced, about fifty years old. There was a lot of grey in his side-parted hair. The lining of his suit jacket as he sat down on the bed was an exquisite robin’s egg blue. Raw silk. The suit was beautifully cut and his black leather loafers gleamed. He wore a blue-and-white striped Turnbull and Asser shirt and a carefully knotted matching tie. He ran his eyes incuriously over Serg.

He was carrying a tan Dunhill manbag, like a satchel. He carefully undid the strap and took out a folded canvas package, the kind of thing a chef used to carry knives. Serg could guess what it contained. Jones put it next to him on the bed. Within easy reach, just in case it was needed.

Serg had never met him before, but he had worked with people in Russia who had the same hard, dead eyes.

‘This is Mr Jones,’ said Hanlon. ‘He’ll be joining us for our discussion. How much you want Mr Jones to contribute to our little chat is very much up to you, Serg.’

Morris Jones steepled his fingers and looked at Serg with interest. The kind of evaluating stare a cat gave to a cornered field mouse.

‘I want to speak to you alone,’ Serg said.

Jones stood up. ‘I’ll wait in the bathroom,’ he said.

The door closed and Serg said, ‘What do you want?’

Hanlon looked at him levelly. ‘I am curious as to why an officer of State Security is over here pretending to work for a government-employed think tank, but what I really want to know is if you have any information as to where Myasnikov and Belanov have a colleague of mine that they have taken.’

‘It’s that simple?’ asked Serg.

‘It’s that simple,’ confirmed Hanlon. ‘I just need an address.’

‘And Mr Jones is here to make sure I comply.’

‘He is indeed. I think Morris Jones would make your life unbearable if you didn’t, and he has a colleague downstairs to help carry you out of the building after he’s finished.’

Serg smiled and shook his head ruefully. ‘I had heard a lot about you, DCI Hanlon, and I am delighted to tell you, you are even more intriguing than I had dared hope.’

Hanlon drummed her fingers on the fake wooden table in the bedroom. It was an ominous sound.

‘I have two addresses for Belanov,’ she said. ‘A central Oxford brothel and a warehouse in Slough. I need a third address. I’m looking for a farm not far from Oxford.’

Serg looked at her face. Composed, perfectly prepared to do whatever it took to get him to talk to save her colleague. He knew that she would have no compunction in killing him, if that was what it would take. He also knew she would take no pleasure in it either, unlike several of his colleagues.

‘I’m waiting,’ she said ominously. Whoever Belanov had taken must be quite a guy if a woman like Hanlon was prepared to go to these lengths for him. He felt a momentary stab of jealousy towards the unknown policeman. He reached a decision.

‘Well,’ said Serg, ‘I can help you there. Tragoe Farm, East Nethercote, near Chipping Norton.’

Hanlon blinked in surprise. It had been that simple. She looked narrowly at Serg. It seemed too easy. He returned her stare, his feline eyes quietly amused. She shrugged on her jacket and banged on the door of the bathroom. Morris Jones emerged. Serg looked closely at him. The hitman’s eyes were narrow, his movements slightly somnolent. His head gave an involuntary nod. Heroin, Serg thought. Hanlon paid him no attention. She looked at her watch.

‘I’ll be back before six a.m tomorrow to untie you.’

‘That’ll be nice,’ said Serg. ‘We can breakfast together and I’ll tell you what I’m doing over here.’

‘Serg,’ said Hanlon, sighing deeply, ‘I don’t care what you’re doing over here. I don’t give a rat’s arse if you’re here to kill the prime minister. But if you’ve fucked me over on this address. . .’ she leaned forward, her eyes startlingly clear and diamond hard ‘. . . Morris and his merry men will make sure you never see Mother Russia again.’

Hanlon turned and left the room. The door closed on her back with a solid click. Morris Jones’s head dropped again suddenly and he scratched himself absent-mindedly. His glazed pupils never left Serg. In the Russian’s professional opinion, Jones was a highly dangerous man. He would kill you like squashing a bug.

‘So, just you and me, then, Mr Jones,’ said Serg pleasantly.

Morris Jones sighed and took some duct tape out of his bag. He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘That’s enough rabbit from you, sunny Jim.’

He had carefully folded a bit of the tape back on itself so he could find the edge easily. He took a scalpel from his bag. Its tip gleamed ominously in the light, but he only used it to neatly cut a piece of the tape off. Even a job as simple as that called for perfection in Jones’s eyes.

Rabbit
, thought Serg, more rhyming slang,
rabbit and pork
. Mr Jones must be a Londoner.

Morris Jones sealed Serg’s mouth with the tape and put the scalpel away, then the canvas roll back in his manbag. Then he polished his shoes with a special impregnated paper cloth provided by the room. They gleamed a fraction more.

‘My employer needs me to go and watch his back.’ Jones patted Serg on his head. His pupils were pinpricks, but Serg knew that the strung-out Jones would be just as deadly as he was straight. Maybe more so.

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ said Morris Jones. He left the room, turning out the light behind him.

Serg was alone in the darkness.

‘So where exactly are we going?’ Danny asked Hanlon. They were heading west, down the M40 towards Oxford.

‘We’re going to a farm owned by Arkady Belanov, the fat Russian,’ said Hanlon. ‘We’re going to rescue a friend of mine who he’s holding there. He’s called Enver. Enver Demirel. But first we’re stopping off to see a woman called Melinda Huss.’

‘We?’ said Danny.

‘You and me, Danny, you and me,’ said Hanlon. Her voice was clipped and irritable, her driving fast and aggressive.

Danny fell silent. It was plain that she wasn’t in the mood for talking. That was fine by him; he wasn’t in a communicative mood either. He had come, he realized, to a crossroads in his life and he’d had enough. He was tired of being ordered around by Anderson, he’d had more than enough of Morris Jones and he was also frightened. He realized that now. He usually defined himself by his fearlessness. He had welcomed danger because it gave him a chance to prove himself. He had always felt before that he was immortal, that death was an abstraction or something that only happened to others. Well, that had changed.

He had seen too much death recently. It wasn’t glamorous and it was happening uncomfortably close. He was twenty-six and he didn’t want to die. Until now he had never thought it could happen to him. Now he did.

He looked at the woman next to him, at her hard, confident face. The only person he had ever seen his boss actually like. He envied her ability to feel so confident, so sure of herself. He wondered what she’d had to say to Anderson earlier that afternoon.

Hanlon glanced at the blond, crop-haired man beside her. She was glad he’d shut up. Tonight she was crossing a line she had never thought she would. She was about to take money from organized crime. She was about to become what she’d always despised, a bent cop.

Yin and yang, she thought. And now that nice, pristine clean circle that represents my life is about to have an unequivocal dirty stain in it.

She overtook a car that was dawdling along in the middle lane. Hanlon loved driving. There were so few external variables, just the car, the driver’s ability and whatever was happening on the road. It was a level playing field. It was simple and straightforward. Not like the rest of her life.

She had bent more than a few rules in her time and she had broken a few too. But they had always been in the pursuit of justice. She had never had any doubt before that a hypothetical jury, whilst maybe rejecting her actual deeds, would applaud her motives. Maybe she had been totally misguided – she didn’t think so but she was prepared to accept the possibility – but now it was down to money. Pure and simple. Selling herself for cash. Not too different from Chantal, or even Joad, come to that.

Her conversation with Anderson had been short and to the point. ‘I can get the Russian, Myasnikov, off your back, Anderson, if you make it worth my while.’ They were standing in the Ibis Hotel’s car park, the jets deafeningly loud overhead, forcing an unnatural rhythm to the conversation as they could only really speak in short bursts between the roar of the planes’ engines.

‘Off my back, Hanlon?’ he’d asked.

‘I mean dead,’ she said. ‘I will kill him for you.’

He had looked puzzled. ‘What, and make it look like a botched police operation?’

Hanlon shook her head. She had smiled mirthlessly. ‘No, it’ll look like an efficient contract killing. It’ll look like murder because that’s what it will be.’

‘Fine by me,’ he said, shrugging. ‘What about Belanov and Dimitri?’

Hanlon said, ‘No promises, but if they get in the way, then, sure.’

‘And what’s the price, Hanlon, how much is this going to cost?’ he had asked, reasonably enough.

‘Two things,’ she said. ‘The dead people at Beath Street. I asked you before, I’m asking again. Charlie Taverner. I’d like what’s left of him back.’

‘Too late,’ said Anderson, shaking his head. ‘Second?’

‘You remember my colleague, Mark Whiteside?’

‘Coma Cop?’ he asked, surprised.

‘Yes, him,’ biting her tongue to stop an outburst,
How dare you call him that
. ‘The cost of his operation and subsequent treatment.’

‘OK,’ he said.

‘It’ll be at least five hundred K,’ said Hanlon.

‘That’s very expensive,’ said Anderson.

Hanlon shrugged. ‘Of course, but who else would do it, who else could do it, and I can do it tonight.’ Anderson looked at her hard, attractive face. The gritty breeze in the car park ruffled her dark corkscrew hair. He was running out of time and resources. He had nothing to lose. If she failed, on her head be it. The monetary cost was liveable with. Myasnikov wasn’t.

Anderson had looked up at the skies, at the wheeling air traffic. ‘I’ll guarantee his treatment up to seven fifty K,’ he said. ‘Things always cost more than you expect. For that, I would like Belanov or Dimitri too, and that hitman of theirs, the Chinaman. I don’t want to be walking around knowing Charlie Chan’s going to blow my head off at any minute.’ He looked at her; his eyes pierced her. ‘But you know about cost, don’t you, Hanlon? Anything else, that’s your problem. I’ll send Cunningham over; he’ll sort out the legal bit. You’ll need some kind of independent escrow account to pay the bills. Something not associated with me. Even the dickheads the Met employ might notice if I start writing cheques for them.’

Hanlon nodded. Anderson was wearing a long, black leather coat with jeans and a T-shirt. The wind whipped at his stringy hair. He looked as sinister as he was. It’s funny, though, thought Hanlon, I know I can trust him implicitly. If he says he’ll do something, he will.

Then Anderson said an odd thing. He looked at Hanlon. ‘You should stop torturing yourself about Coma Cop,’ he said mildly.

‘His name is Mark Whiteside. He’s a friend of mine,’ she said angrily.

‘Whatever.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘You didn’t shoot him in the head. Stop feeling guilty.’

‘How do you know what I’m feeling?’

Anderson had laughed. ‘I never feel guilty, Hanlon. I’m not wired that way. But, Hanlon, when I see you asking me to help you out with money, money not for you but for your injured colleague, I can recognize guilt.’

Hanlon said nothing. There was nothing to say.

‘You can use Danny if you want him,’ said Anderson offhandedly. He opened the door of his Range Rover. ‘Not Morris Jones, he’s too useful to me. Good luck with the Russian hunt. I’ll be lying low until the dust settles. Cunningham can always find me.’

The door of the Range Rover slammed shut and Anderson drove away.

She turned her attention back to the driving. She glanced at the man beside her. You can use Danny, not Morris Jones. Danny was disposable, then. That was Anderson’s subtext.

They drove through the dramatic gap in the hills that marked the descent from Buckinghamshire into Oxfordshire. Not far now, thought Hanlon.

And now I’ve become Anderson’s woman. She had a horrible feeling that the high price he was prepared to pay her would end up leading to more favours done. I’ve sold my soul, she thought bitterly.