Bombproof (4 page)

The train moves through tunnels that pop his ears, before emerging into the light and disappearing again.

Peak-hour is over. The men in suits are in their offices. Not all wear suits these days. Some wear jeans and chinos. What do they do, wonders Ruiz? Sit in front of screens. It seems a poor substitute for hunting and gathering.

There’s no romance in office work. No thrill of the chase. Ruiz was at a rugby dinner a few weeks back, sitting at a table with fifteen men. Successful professionals. A new-comer among them was asked what he did for a living. He said he made concrete blocks.

The conversation petered out. Nobody knew what to say. Then Ruiz pointed out that this guy was the only person at the table who actually
made
something. The rest of them shuffled paper, traded futures, negotiated deals, added value and took their margins. They didn’t build anything, or save anyone, or make a mark on the world other than on a balance sheet.

Ruiz felt guilty about being too critical. There was no romance in police work either. That’s why he retired - jumped before he was pushed or became an exhibit in the Black Museum.

At Regent’s Park he emerges from below ground and walks to Harley Street. Today is his annual medical. It normally falls on either side of his birthday, but this year the dates have aligned.

He sits in the waiting room. Picks up a magazine. It’s one of those celebrity rags full of paparazzi photographs and ‘at-home-with’ specials where TV stars announce how happy they are together and you know they’ll be divorced within six months.

Ruiz is about to toss it back onto the coffee table when he notices a shot of Ray Garza, smiling at the cameras from the red carpet at Covent Garden. He is hosting a charity performance by the National Opera in aid of spina bifida. There are more shots over the page. Garza is mingling with the great and the good. The cast. The artistic director. The Arts Minister. Celebrities.

The media nicknamed him ‘the Chairman’ years ago and the name has stuck. It’s almost like Garza plays up to it, dressing in charcoal grey suits, bright ties, and never being photographed without a cigar in his fist, unlit.

Three years after Jane Lanfranchi died, Garza married a society girl with a double-barrelled surname whose father had inherited a pile in Wiltshire but had to sell it to the Government in lieu of death duties. Garza rescued the old man when the only thing he had left was a few hereditary peerages that he was trying to flog off to rich Americans. Garza took over one of the titles: the Earl of Ipswich. It must look impressive on a business card.

Garza wasn’t always a wealthy man. He started out as a soldier - an officer, who specialised in logistics and transport. As such, he understood supply and demand and the importance of being able to move quickly.

A lot of legends have grown up around the Chairman. Not all of them are true - but what’s not in dispute is how he made his first million. Garza helped liberate Kuwait in the first Gulf War and was on hand when the Iraqis were pushed back across the border.

The world saw smoking convoys of vehicles, charred wreckage of luxury cars that had been looted from Kuwait and bombed by Allied planes as they fled across the desert. But that was only some of the stuff. Hundreds of luxury cars were abandoned. Untouched. Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars and Bentleys were left sitting in the desert, the keys still in them.

There was more. Convoys of trucks full of computers, washing machines, air conditioning units and Mont Blanc pens. The Iraqis looted everything that wasn’t bolted down and the Kuwaitis didn’t want the stuff back. Oil drilling equipment, earthmovers, yachts, helicopters, private jets - Garza found a way of shipping them out of Kuwait.

He finished the job the Iraqis started. He looted Kuwait, stealing from rich oil sheiks, who were so relieved to have their country back they didn’t give a shit about a few missing cars or boats or planes.

Nobody raised an eyebrow. Nobody turned a hair. The only hint of scandal came when a UK Sunday paper did an exposé about an armour-plated Mercedes, specially built for the Kuwaiti Minister for Trade, which somehow finished up under the hammer at a car auction in Croydon.

For Ray Garza it was just the beginning. He left the army and soon he was moving massive shipments of hardware out of countries in the midst of war, famine or caught up in Africa’s perverse interpretation of ‘democracy’.

Questions were asked in Parliament. MI6 took an interest. Nothing stuck. Whenever Garza looked shaky he managed to walk away. Witnesses disappeared. Cast iron cases crumbled. One Spanish middleman jumped off Waterloo Bridge with bricks in his pockets. A junior accountant changed his testimony, spent six months inside and that same year bought a sixty foot yacht.

Meanwhile, Garza launched himself on society. He transformed himself into a patron of the arts, a media darling, the orchestrator of a thousand publicity stunts involving pretty girls in short skirts.

Garza suddenly had a finger in every pie. They were La Maison pies. River Café Pies. Savoy Grill pies. They were the dog’s bollocks and the bee’s knees of pies. He was dining at the head table, supping with the great and the good and the morally bankrupt.

His chequered past, the question marks over his business dealings, nothing seemed to matter. Not even the distant scandal of a rape allegation and a troubled teenager who threw herself off a tower block in Hackney.

A receptionist interrupts. Ruiz looks up from the magazine. Dr Reines will see him now. He tosses the rag aside and stares at the newsprint on his fingers, wanting to wash it off.

The doctor asks him to sit on the examination table. Takes him through the normal checks. Blood pressure, cholesterol, finger up the bum … Having his prostate checked always reminds Ruiz of a joke about knowing you’re in trouble if your doctor checks your prostate and has both his hands on your shoulders.

Doctor Reines is telling him horror stories about fat-choked arteries and how people his age are dropping like flies. Then comes the lecture about him exercising more: walking or swimming - six laps of a pool or two miles on foot.

He listens to Ruiz’s heart. It’s strong. A champion’s heart. A thoroughbred. Everything else about his body is turning to shit, but his heart is going strong.

Dr Reines asks after Ruiz’s mother.

‘How is her Alzheimer’s?’

‘She has good days and bad.’

‘Does she still think I’m Josef Mengele?’

‘She thinks all doctors are Josef Mengele.’

Ruiz’s mother, Daj, doesn’t live in the present any more. Most of the time she’s reliving the war, escaping from the Gestapo and SS, surviving the concentration camps.

Daj met Mengele once. He was standing on a ramp in dress uniform and polished black boots. He wore white cotton gloves and held a cane, directing a sea of exhausted and starving women and children either left or right.

A handsome man, Daj said. Cold. He looked like a gypsy with dark hair, dark eyes and tawny skin. ‘Perhaps that’s why he hated us so much,’ she said. ‘He was purging the world of the things he hated about himself.’

Ruiz leaves the doctor’s surgery and takes a bus to Victoria, before walking along Vauxhall Bridge Road. He has another appointment, another annual check-up.

Every year on his birthday, he has a beer with an old mate from the Met, his former second-in-command at the Serious Crime Group, Colin ‘Bones’ McGee.

McGee was a rising star when Ruiz first met him - one of the university graduates they fast-tracked through training and nudged upstairs after the Flying Squad got disbanded. He topped his class at Hendon, made Detective Sergeant at thirty and Detective Inspector at thirty-five. Then his wings fell off.

It was 2002 - a sting operation involving twelve million quids worth of cocaine found in a shipping container in Rotterdam. McGee took the decision to leave the container on board and let the ship sail for Felixstowe. He ran the surveillance operation.

Can you see what’s coming? The drugs vanished. Not a trace. Maybe the haul got tossed into the North Sea. Maybe it was never on board. It was all supposition and it didn’t wash with McGee’s bosses. That’s when he got the nickname Bones because his career was dead and buried.

Since then Bones has been treading water with the Specialist Crime Directorate, tracking assets and chasing paper trails. It’s a dead end job because no serious player will ever hold assets in their own names. They hide behind shelf companies and dodgy corporations based in the Bahamas and the Caymans.

Ruiz doesn’t particularly like Bones. Never has. He was always a little too ambitious. Too grasping. But when he left the job, Ruiz handed over his old files - including the Lanfranchi case. He asked Bones to keep an eye on it … just in case.

They meet at a pub on Vauxhall Bridge Road. Union Jacks hang from the rafters.

Bones is at a table drinking single malt. He’s lost his boyish innocence, thinks Ruiz - a receding hairline will do it every time - but he still dresses sharply in grey trousers, Italian loafers and a jacket. His copper-coloured hair - dyed most likely - is combed straight back on his scalp.

‘How’s it hanging, Vincent?’

‘I’m good, Colin.’

They swap small talk. Retirements. Promotions. Prostate cancer. There’s twenty years between them - almost a generation - but the job doesn’t change, only the rules.

Eventually the talk gets around to Ray Garza. It’s been years since there was any news on the Lanfranchi case. At past meetings, Bones has made shit up to keep Ruiz happy and Ruiz knew it, but this year he has something fresh, something new, something hot off the press.

‘Ray Garza’s boy got busted two nights ago after a high speed pursuit. They found eight kilos of cocaine in the boot of his Porsche and a semi-automatic, which he waved around at the coppers. Took a shot.’

Ruiz ponders the information. Garza’s son - Ray Jnr - how old is he now? Out of school. Nineteen. Twenty tops.

‘It’s a commercial quantity,’ says Bones. ‘The kid’s going down.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Spent last night in the Scrubs. He’s in court today.’

Bones continues talking, spinning a story about the Specialist Crime Directorate offering Ray Jnr a deal if he turns on the old man. It’s not going to happen, thinks Ruiz. Junior won’t bite the hand that feeds him - not unless he has bigger ambitions. But it still warms his heart to think of Ray Garza losing sleep over his precious boy.

Ray Jnr wasn’t even born when his father raped Jane Lanfranchi and chewed open her cheek. Ruiz always thought Garza should have had a daughter. That way he could have worried when she turned sixteen and went out at night. Wondered about where she was and whom she was with. Hopefully, he’s worried sick now.

‘What about the Lanfranchi case?’ he asks.

Bones shrugs.

‘Any similar rapes?’

‘Nope.’

‘Any missing women with links to Garza?’

‘Can’t you forget the fucking Lanfranchi case for once?’ says Bones. ‘It’s old news. Ancient bloody history.’

Ruiz ignores him. ‘Garza likes the wholesome girl-next-door types. Suburban princesses. He thinks they’re hiding their true natures.’

Bones shakes his head. ‘You’re fucking obsessed. I’d get more sense talking to the wall.’

‘And less whisky,’ says Ruiz swallowing the last of his Guinness.

There’s a moment of friction. Bones wants to tell him to fuck off, but something about Ruiz’s silences has always unnerved him.

‘I’m just giving my opinion, Vince. You don’t have to take it,’ he mutters, speaking slowly like he’s talking to a child. ‘There’s a bail hearing today. Police are going to oppose because Ray Jnr took a shot at a copper.’

‘He’ll walk.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. But it’s going cost Daddy big time.’

‘Where’s Garza now?’

‘He flew in from Geneva this morning. Smart money says he’s going to be in court. Media haven’t got wind of this yet, but the storm’s coming.’

Ruiz takes another sip of beer. Maybe today won’t be such an anticlimax after all.

5

Sami has called Nadia’s friends, her workmates, and talked to her old neighbours. Nobody has seen her. She hasn’t been at work for three days. Didn’t call in sick. Didn’t hand in notice.

Next Sami calls the local hospitals and drops in to Brixton police station to lodge a missing persons report.

The desk sergeant is a doughnut short of being fat and has a torn piece of tissue paper, encrusted with blood, stuck to his neck.

‘How long has she been missing?’ he asks.

‘Since the weekend.’

‘Did you fight with her?’

‘No.’

‘Who was the last person to see her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you have realistic fears for her safety?’

‘I don’t know. Yeah. Maybe.’

The sergeant presses his right hand into his lower back and grimaces as if relieving himself of lower back pain. ‘Are you sure you even have a sister?’

Sami has to fill in a form. Tick boxes. Old Bill isn’t going to raise a sweat looking for Nadia. He needs another plan.

Uncle Harry will know where she is. He promised to keep an eye on Nadia when Sami got put away. He’s not really Sami’s uncle: more of a family friend from the days when Sami’s old man was still alive and running a bookmaking operation out of an upstairs room in Harry’s boozer.

Going even further back, Harry used to be a professional boxer, whose fighting nickname was ‘Homicide’ on account of him killing a guy in one of his early fights. Sami has never met anyone who’d seen one of Harry’s fights, but in his heyday he fought at Crystal Palace on the same card as Henry Cooper.

The White Swan is tucked behind Waterloo Station not far from the Old Vic Theatre. Sami pushes open the pub door and peers into the gloom. There are punters inside who act as though someone has opened the lid of their coffin.

Same faces. Same smells.

‘You been away?’ one of them asks.

‘Something like that,’ says Sami.

‘It’s your shout.’

‘I’ll buy you a pint if you can remember my name.’