Capital Punishment (23 page)

‘But that means you’ve covered your tracks,’ she said, grasping at the reeds flashing past on the bank. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about. I haven’t seen your faces. I haven’t even heard your real voice. What do I know about you?’

‘The police found Jim this morning. We made it look as good as we could. Pills, alcohol, bit of auto-erotic asphyxiation.’

‘Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. Why are you telling me this? I’m not going to tell anybody.’

‘I don’t think it will wash with the crime scene guys, though. They’ll see through it in seconds. Even you’d see through it.’

‘But it will still take time. You’ve still got time,’ said Alyshia. ‘Just go back to my parents...’

‘That has not been fruitful,’ said the voice. ‘Of course, they’ve got a negotiator there, a professional telling your mother what to say and how to say it. This has complicated the issue which, as we see it, is very simple.’

‘Let me talk to them. I can persuade them.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ said the voice. ‘The police finding Jim’s dead body has put us under pressure. We’re getting out before we’re caught. The decision has been unanimous. We’ve bought you some of your own clothes. Rather special clothes. We want you to get dressed, look nice and composed and say your final words. But Alyshia, this has to be done in ten minutes. If you try to string this out, we’ll just shoot you like a dog. It makes no difference to the men holding you. As you’ve discovered, they’ve been a bit rough with you already. They’re annoyed. They know they’re not going to get their bonus.’

They pulled her up to her feet. One of the men holding her left the room. She heard a plastic dry cleaning sheath being stripped off. The other uncuffed her wrists.

‘You’re going to need a different bra for this dress,’ said the voice. ‘Take off your underwear.’

She stripped naked and covered herself, crouching. A pair of knickers was crushed into her hand. She pulled them on. A strapless bra was thrown over her shoulder. She slipped it over her breasts.

Someone knelt down in front of her.

‘Left foot up,’ said the voice. ‘Down. Right foot up. Down.’

The dress was drawn up her thighs, over her waist. She knew the feel of it. It was the black mermaid dress. The figure-hugging one that shot out at the knee in a taffeta skirt. The one she’d worn for her 21st birthday in London.

She tried to jog her brain into thinking of some words, but all that ripped through her mind was a jetstream of fear.

The zip ran up the middle of her back. The design left her shoulders perfectly naked, ideal for jewellery. There was the dull click of a box opening. Her hair was sheafed and raised above her head. A man’s arms came over her shoulders. The touch of ice on her clavicles made her throat catch and struggle as the settings were drawn up to her neck and the clasp fixed at her nape. Her hair fell back onto her shoulders. A brush was put into her hands.

‘Do the best you can,’ said the voice. ‘Keep the mask on.’

The brush snagged through her unwashed hair, tore through the tangles; she pulled until the roots hurt and the tears came.

‘Shoes,’ said the voice. ‘Bring her the shoes. Hurry it up. We’ve got seven minutes to be out of here.’

Her feet were fitted into high heels, the black strappy ones. She was elevated to a new height. The smell of alcohol came to her nostrils. Doused cotton wool dabbed at her tear-stained cheeks.

‘No make-up. You should look as natural as possible. I want them to see the pure you. Remind them of what their intransigence has cost them. Are we ready?’ said the voice. ‘Close your eyes, Alyshia. Take off the mask.’

The cotton wool swabbed around her eyes. She cherished the coolness of its touch. The final stroke of care in this world. The light hurt and she squinted against it.

‘Open your eyes,’ said the voice. ‘The camera is running. You may speak. Action.’

Her whole life tore towards the funnel of her mind. Twenty-five years cramming itself into a small sphere, like a child looking down binoculars the wrong way to see the improbable adult so far off. How to crystallise a life? Nothing had prepared her for this moment. Not even some of the most advanced presentation techniques she’d learned at the Saïd Business School were adequate to this monumental task.
Who am I?
she thought.
Who was I?
When they asked celebrities that question: ‘What do you owe your parents?’ they always replied: ‘Everything’. Did that still apply when it also included your death?

She looked in the mirror and saw a further intensity to her beauty now that she was teetering on the edge. By contrast, the men on either side of her were deeply ugly, dressed in amorphous, thigh-length biker jackets, collars zipped up to their noses, hoods over their heads, only eye-holes visible. And the one on her right with a silenced handgun hanging loosely from an ungloved hand. She trembled inside, felt her stomach muscles quivering against the fabric of the dress. Only then did she concentrate on the necklace: the diamonds given to her by her father on her 21st birthday. Three swallows to get the emotion back down.

‘Come on, Alyshia,’ said the voice. ‘I’m going to start clearing this equipment away in two minutes. You’ve got—’

‘I’m sorry for what I’ve done and I’m sorry for what I have not done. You mustn’t blame yourselves for any of this. You gave me the perfect preparation, the best genes, the deepest affection, the greatest attention, the right instruction, and I have squandered it all. I regret my cruelty to you, Mummy. You did not deserve any of it. I know now that it came from my own sense of failure. I love you more in this moment than I have in my entire life. I am sorry I abandoned you, Daddy. You gave me opportunities. You’ve been giving but demanding, and loving without smothering. I wish I could have returned it to you, with the interest it deserved. I am going now. But I want you to know that I’m not ignorant, selfish, arrogant and indifferent anymore, but regretful, humble and wishing that I could see you both one last time.’

The last words were soundless, mouthed through saliva that had clogged her mouth. Tears streamed down her cheeks, drops hung at her jaw.

‘Very nice,’ said the voice. ‘Surprisingly restrained, I must say. Now let’s get it done and out of here.’

Hands on her shoulders, pressing her down into a position she did not want to be. She knelt on quivering thighs, facing the man with the gun. She looked up, desperate and pleading into the black, glinting pupils beyond the holes in the hood. The gun came up. The barrel came to rest on her forehead. She reached her hands up and clung to the lower edges of the man’s jacket, while behind her the other man unrolled a length of plastic sheeting, which went over her heels. The man with the gun slapped her hands away and she dropped onto the plastic sheet on all fours, like a retching dog.

Mercy Danquah had just finished a fruitless meeting with the first of her informers, Busby, and was on her way to her second meeting with Nelson. She noticed that her gear-changing had become increasingly irritable and that she was leaning forward out of her seat and gripping the steering wheel tightly. She was angry with Boxer. He’d put her in a position. She was going to have to tell DCS Makepeace what had happened, or rather, what she believed had happened between him and Isabel.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said out loud, to God, Boxer and the traffic.

The sound of her own voice broke something open in her and she began to suspect her motives, caught a glimpse of something else she didn’t like to admit. She smacked it down, thought about Nelson instead. Why he was the better bet. Yes, Nelson, he was more in the thick of it because he lived on disability benefits and spent most of his time in the pubs and clubs of Bethnal Green, Whitechapel and Stepney.

She parked up, not far from where they were meeting in a local café, E Pellicci, on Bethnal Green Road, just round the corner from the Kray twins’ old house on Voss Street. The walls were lined with light brown wooden panels in which there were marquetry designs that dated from the 1940s. The windows had stained glass. People sat on wooden chairs at formica tables with the triumverate of brown sauce, tomato ketchup and mustard in front of them. The tea came in big cups from a large chrome urn by the till. The healthiest food on the menu was baked beans on toast. Mercy ordered a plate, seeing as she hadn’t had breakfast that morning. Nelson, despite the hour, was taking advantage of her offer to pay by having the full English, whose centrepoint was a pile of inch thick chips, which he doused in salt and vinegar and dipped in ketchup before cramming them into his mouth, leaving red flecks at the corners.

Nelson was the codename Mercy used to protect his identity. He’d lost his arm in an industrial accident some time ago and only last year had compounded his codename by losing an eye to glaucoma. At least he didn’t wear a patch, but had a glass eye with a disturbing clarity, which made Mercy think that he could see more out of that one than he could through the rheuminess of the good one. He was not a small man, with a bowling ball gut and a full head of grey hair swept back. He talked in a way that made Mercy think he’d spent a lot of time in libraries while absentmindedly shovelling eight teaspoons of sugar into his tea.

‘You know, maybe it’s something to do with the economic downturn or the government austerity measures,’ he said, ‘but I’ve heard more talk about kidnapping in the last couple of years than I have since—’

‘What’s the economic downturn got to do with it?’

‘Fewer young people with jobs, no money to buy drugs, so the drug dealers have to look elsewhere to make their money.’

‘You should be in a government think tank,’ said Mercy. ‘You’re wasted here.’

‘There’s less money around at street level, that’s all I’m saying.’ ‘I thought that’s why they were bringing in plant food from China for the kids to snort.’

‘Plant food?’

‘Mephedrone,’ said Mercy. ‘Don’t worry about it, admiral. Tell me why kidnapping’s back in fashion.’

‘It’s mainly the quick twenty-four hour stuff. Nothing complicated. Track your mark. Stick them in the back of a van. Smack them about a bit. Put them under. Make your phone calls. Take your money. Tip them out and run.’

‘What about longer term stuff, for big money?’

‘You mean the new tax on the rich?’ said Nelson, stabbing his fried egg viciously, as if it were the eye of a banker. ‘Make them pay for all the shit they’re putting us through. Steal their kids and give them an alternative education.’

‘On what? Dog racing?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the dogs, Mercy.’

‘Let me know when these gangs start their Samuel Beckett workshops and I might turn up myself,’ said Mercy. ‘So have you heard of anybody getting involved in longer term stuff?’

‘What? Like that Indian businessman they nabbed in East Ham a while back? Asked for a Fergie. Kept him on an industrial estate in Essex.’

‘A Fergie?’

‘That’s half a mil.’

‘You never forget, do you, admiral?’ said Mercy. ‘Yeah, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. Long term. Safe house. Big ransom demand.’

Mercy recognised Nelson’s methodology. He’d given some intelligence on the Indian’s kidnap, which had been very useful in getting the hostage back. She felt the excitement kick in at the thought that he might actually have something.

‘It’s not that easy in this part of London anymore.’

‘You mean with friends like you littering the place and listening in on the chit-chat?’

‘Let me know how you get on when you lose your right arm, Mercy.’

‘Only teasing.’

‘Yeah,’ said Nelson, disbelieving.

‘What about somebody doing something to order?’ said Mercy, trying to jog Nelson along. ‘Like a businessman with money and resources but no expertise or manpower, who hires a gang to carry out a kidnap on his behalf?’

Nelson nodded, concentrated on his food, put together a forkful of bacon, egg, sausage, tomato and a chip.

‘You’ve gone all quiet on me, admiral,’ said Mercy, nervous that she might have pissed him off by reminding him of his snout status.

‘I’m eating,’ said Nelson, swilling down the last mouthful with the dark, brown, sweet tea that he sloshed around his dentures. ‘You know why I like to come here?’

Mercy sank a little inside. More stroking was going to be required. ‘Think of it as foreplay,’ they’d said on the Met’s informer course, but that, in Nelson’s case, was just too disgusting.

‘It’s a nice place,’ said Mercy, looking around. ‘I go to the Winning Post down in Streatham every now and again. I’ll take you there one day.’

‘The thing about this place, Mercy, is that Nev, the owner, doesn’t change anything.’

‘Even the Ladies?’

‘And out there,’ said Nelson, ignoring her, pointing over her shoulder at the traffic pounding through the grey on Bethnal Green Road, ‘it’s changing all the time.’

‘How’s that?’

‘We’re getting squeezed by the Bees out there.’

‘The bees?’

‘The Bankers, the Brokers and the Bengalis,’ said Nelson. ‘There’s not many of us left.’

‘Which tribe are you?’

‘The white working class,’ said Nelson, brushing his front. ‘Nowadays you go out there and there’re Poles and Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Bulgarians, Chinese and Jamaicans, Punjabis and Pashtuns. We don’t know who
we
are any more. But, at least, in here, I know: I’m English and I belong.’

‘Even though Nev’s Italian,’ said Mercy. ‘And by the way, you left out Ghanaians. I’m hurt.’

‘You’re not Ghanaian, Mercy. You’re bleeding English,’ said Nelson, pointing his fork at her across the table. ‘You know what? Nev doesn’t even know what a latte is.’

Mercy thought that unlikely, but let it go.

‘It’s Grade Two listed in here,’ said Nelson, looking around at the marquetry and the stained glass windows. ‘That’s how English it is. It’s become part of our heritage, an institution.’

‘And you’re all in it,’ said Mercy. ‘What’s your point, Nelson?’

‘Kidnapping is not an English crime,’ he said.

‘I think you might be forgetting that the bloke who kidnapped that Indian in East Ham was called Danny Gibney.’