Capital Punishment (33 page)

7.05 A.M., TUESDAY 13TH MARCH 2012

Branch Place, Hackney, London N1

‘And where the fuck have you been?’ asked Dan, looking up from the files he’d been reading, pulling out his earbuds and turning off the voice recorder. ‘It’s past six o’clock.’

‘Growing my hair,’ said Skin. ‘My new disguise.’

He grinned, running his hand over his still shorn pate.

‘Where d’you put the van, Skin?’

‘Yeah, no, that’s why I’ve been so long. I had an idea.’

‘I don’t like you out there thinking all on your own.’

‘While you sit here swotting up for
The Weakest Link?’

‘
Mastermind,
Skin,’ said Dan flatly. ‘Specialist subject: Alyshia D’Cruz. Where’s the van?’

‘I took it to my mate.’

‘What’s he going to do? Paint it pink and put in some curtains?’

‘No. I watched him stick it in the crusher. It’d fit under that table now.’

‘You took it to a breakers yard?’

‘That way they’ll never find it.’

‘What about the plates?’

‘They’re in the canal.’

‘And where’s your mate’s breakers yard?’

‘Three Colts Lane.’

‘That’s Bethnal Green,’ said Dan. ‘Nice and local for Pike to walk into. Does he know how to keep his mouth shut?’

‘Course he does, and he’s got some heavy help in the yard ’n’ all.’

‘It’s a bit bloody close for comfort.’

‘If I’d known a breakers yard in Watford, I’d have gone there, but I don’t,’ said Skin, annoyed. ‘And even if I did, how do you think they’d react to someone like me asking them to crush a car like, fucking, now! I know this guy and he’s reliable.’

‘As long as he’s more scared of you than he is of someone else.’

‘Pike?’ said Skin, derisively. ‘Pike doesn’t know where he is on this side of the river. His SatNav stops at the Thames.’

‘So you keep telling me,’ said Dan. ‘At least you remembered the newspaper.’

‘How’s the patient?’ asked Skin, chucking him a copy of today’s
Sun
.

‘I don’t know, I sent her out to get some bacon sarnies half an hour ago and she hasn’t come back.’

‘Wasp got up your arse or what?’ said Skin, opening the bedroom door a crack, enough to see a lump in the bed.

‘She’s sleeping,’ he said. ‘Blood pressure, temperature and pulse are all normal. She’s in perfect condition. I handcuffed her to the bed. Is the
Sun
the best you could come up with? We don’t want them thinking we’re cretins.’

‘They’d run out of the
Daily Star
,’ said Skin, still looking into the bedroom.

‘Why don’t you make us a cup of tea?’

‘All right,’ he said, closing the door softly. ‘And you can tell me what you’ve found out about our specialist subject.’

‘Read it yourself.’

‘It sticks better when I’m told,’ said Skin. ‘I only ever look at the pictures in the Sun.’

‘You can’t play the thicko with me,’ said Dan. ‘You’re just being a lazy sod.’

‘So what were you listening to?’

‘The tapes of Jordan talking to Alyshia,’ said Dan. ‘That guy, I tell you, he was very highly trained.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I’ve worked in mental hospitals. I’ve seen psychologists and psychiatrists in action. He was more aggressive in his style, which makes me think he was maybe military, like PsyOps or something. But I’m looking at his research and listening to him and he’s got all the interrogation techniques and a shedload of psychological profiling and analysis,’ said Dan. ‘And the notes he’s taken: there’s order to them. He scribbles shit down and then reorganises it into bullet points and then drafts questions to suit. Fucking brilliant.’

‘So you reckon they were all military? Except for the Irish bastard; he was just criminal,’ said Skin.

‘Looks like we’re going to have a bunch of mercenaries after us,’ said Dan, trying not to sound too depressed. ‘That’s two East End outfits, the police and—’

‘You’d better get on the phone pretty fucking sharpish and ask for the ransom,’ said Skin, cutting in on him.

‘Me?’

‘Yeah, you. You’re the negotiator. You’re doing the reading and the thinking, so you’re going to do the talking ’n’ all.’

‘And you? Where do you fit in?’

‘I’m the enforcer.’

‘You got that from
Goodfellas,
didn’t you?’

‘I’m just saying, I do all the physical stuff. I’ll take all the risks.’

‘So from now on you’re doing fuck all.’

‘Until you’ve negotiated the ransom. Then I’ll be the bastard who goes and collects it. The one who sticks his head up over the parapet.’

‘So having found this place, I’m now doing hostage care, research
and
negotiation,’ said Dan. ‘While you do fuck all, plus occasional violence.’

‘I took out the two in the warehouse. You looked after the girl. You don’t get killed, doing what you do,’ said Skin. ‘And anyway, I once heard Jordan tell Reecey he would only talk to the mother.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I reckon you’d be good at talking to women.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You do housework.’

‘Fuck off, Skin.’

‘You listened to all the recordings yet?’

‘No. There’s a hell of a lot of material here.’

‘Maybe Jordan recorded his phone calls, too.’

‘Why do you think he’d be doing that, I mean, recording anything?’ asked Dan.

‘I asked Jordan that before I shot him and he said the only one we had to fear was the Irish bastard, who’s called McManus, by the way,’ said Skin. ‘He said he’d be after us for killing Reecey. Maybe not tomorrow but, you know, in the end.’

‘That’s left me brimming with confidence and so totally relaxed I—’

‘And I didn’t tell you what Alyshia said to me when I shot Jordan, did I? She said: “I think you’ve just done something very stupid”.’

‘She was only recognising an evident characteristic.’

‘Talk English, Nurse, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Time is running out for Amir Jat,’ said the Director General of the ISI. ‘The Americans have a dossier as thick as your arm, of which the last inch is dedicated to Amir Jat’s involvement in the hiding of Osama bin Laden in the Abbotabad compound a hundred kilometres from my office.’

These were words the DG had directed at Lt General Abdel Iqbal in a secret meeting in Islamabad three months ago. Iqbal had left that meeting in no doubt as to what was required of him. He had to solve the Amir Jat problem. The Americans mustn’t take him; it would be far too embarrassing for the government and the ISI.

How he was supposed to achieve this without having him assassinated on home soil was beyond him. Because that, in veiled language, was what the DG had implied to him had to be done. The only problem being that Amir Jat rarely left Pakistan and if he did, it was always in secret.

Then last month Iqbal had been approached by Mahmood Aziz, who he’d met through Amir Jat. Aziz had made a proposal that, if you didn’t know the tortuous machinations that were possible within the ISI, would have seemed incredible. Mahmood Aziz knew what the DG had asked of him. How the content of such a secret meeting could have been leaked to a radical such as Aziz might only be comprehensible in retrospect. Aziz had offered not only to help but also to reward, which had left Iqbal with the flame of his ambition roaring from all cyclinders and yet torn by a range of complex loyalties to the service and his old friend, Amir Jat.

Now Frank D’Cruz had been fed into the mix and there was another complicated loyalty: D’Cruz had funded the life-saving surgery on Iqbal’s son’s brain tumour. That must have been repaid by now, surely. But then again, can the life of your eldest son ever be repaid?

Iqbal paced the room, waiting for the phone to ring, his posture erect, shoulders back, stomach flat, hands behind his back, glancing out into his garden. Nervous. His eyes darted in his large square head, oiled hair swept back off his furrowed forehead but beginning to come unstuck. The call he’d been waiting for finally came through from a secure phone in another ISI officer’s home in Lahore.

It was from Mahmood Aziz, who’d only just recovered his composure after that short conversation with Amir Jat in which he’d seen eighteen months of operational planning potentially go up in smoke because of some unforeseen kidnapping stunt.

Aziz calmly outlined the conversation he’d just had with Amir Jat.

‘He’s coming to see me later this morning,’ said Iqbal.

‘On his way to London,’ said Aziz.

‘He didn’t say.’

‘But that’s where he’s going.’

‘He’s crazy.’

‘Definitely unbalanced,’ said Aziz. ‘But this will give us the perfect opportunity to bring about the change that we talked about last month.’

Silence. Aziz could feel Iqbal’s tension coming down the line.

‘You told me that the Americans were closing in on our friend,’ said Aziz. ‘I am telling you that I have now arrived at a solution. All you have to do is not deter our friend in any way from doing what he wants to do. I will be in constant touch with him throughout. Later, I will tell you when to release the information that he is due to arrive in the UK to Frank D’Cruz. At that point you will also persuade him that our friend is responsible for kidnapping his daughter.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Iqbal. ‘You can’t give our friend over to MI5. That would be no different to the CIA taking him. And they’ll be watching D’Cruz’s every move. I already have MI6 sniffing around here. They follow Anwar Masood to my door every time he comes to see me.’

‘Just as I am about to entrust you with the considerable financial power from our Afghan “agricultural” operations, a power held onto with such a tight grip by our former friend, you must have complete faith in my actions,’ said Aziz. ‘It is for our mutual benefit.’

‘And what about Alyshia D’Cruz?’

‘What is your concern exactly?’

Iqbal was going to say ‘for her safety’ but veered away from such sentimentality.

‘Frank D’Cruz could be very useful to us.’

‘I am afraid that has not been borne out by past events,’ said Aziz. ‘You will have to accept that his daughter is expendable.’

Jack Auber’s wife, Ruby, was up early. She did not look good. Even before Jack got himself killed, she did not look that good. Now she looked terrible. Ill. Her hair, which had been blonde, hung down to her shoulder blades, but with no structure it looked like an ash pile hit by a north wind. She decided to wear it up on her head with a big toothy clasp at the back. Her face was wrecked from an early life of heavy drinking and smoking. Her cheeks had caved in and her dentures were loose in her mouth, but her eyes were still steely blue and could rivet a man to the spot from twenty paces. Nobody crossed Ruby Auber. She might weigh a little under seven stone but she was five foot nine and had nails that could claw a ploughed field down your cheek.

Nothing was going to help her look any better this morning, so when her daughter Cheryl shouted up the stairs that the taxi had arrived, she just stuck on a slash of lippy and left.

Fifteen minutes later, the cab had dropped them off outside Joe Shearing’s house in Voss Street and Cheryl was ringing on the doorbell. There was an exchange through the frosted panes of glass and the door opened a crack. Cheryl beckoned to Ruby, who came in off the pavement, and they went into the front room.

Joe Shearing had been a boxer at the famous Repton Boys Club in Bethnal Green. The living room was a shrine to his achievements in the ring. He’d had a shot at the British middleweight title in 1976 and had been knocked out in the fifth by Alan Minter at Wembley. He was still involved with the Boys Club and went to watch training and give talks to the groups of disadvantaged kids, who were brought there from all around the world.

Ruby stood by the fireplace. Cheryl thumped herself down in an armchair.

‘You don’t know whose seat that is,’ said Ruby.

‘Whatever,’ said Cheryl.

Ruby froze her with a gimlet stare and Cheryl slowly eased her enormous buttocks out of the chair, just as Joe Shearing came into the room. He wasn’t a middleweight any more. If he’d had to get in the ring now, he’d have found himself up against David Haye. The lightness had gone out of his feet decades ago, but it had not left his touch. He took Ruby’s slim hand in his hard slabs of stone as if he were showing a butterfly to a child.

‘I’m sorry for your loss, Ruby,’ he said. ‘Jack did not deserve to go like that. He was a good man. I’ll miss him. If there’s anything I can do, you be sure to let me know.’

He did the same for Cheryl, finding something to say about Vic Scully, who he knew from the Repton Boys Club. He showed them the armchairs and Cheryl plonked herself down with a huff, while Shearing, whose hips were a menace to him, eased himself down onto a cushioned upright chair.

‘How are you for money, Ruby?’ asked Shearing. ‘You need any help with expenses, it goes without saying...’

‘That’s very good of you, Joe,’ said Ruby, ‘but that’s not why we’re here.’

Shearing nodded, breathed in through his broken nose, loudly.

‘I want you to find out who killed Jack and Vic,’ said Ruby.

‘You know it was nothing to do with me,’ said Shearing. ‘He wasn’t on one of my jobs.’

‘You haven’t given Jack anything for years, Joe,’ said Ruby, not meaning it to come out quite so bitterly.

‘Young man’s game,’ said Shearing, not taking offence. ‘I thought he was doing fine with the sheep trade I gave him and the office furniture.’

‘He was too generous,’ said Ruby, through the slash of her mouth. ‘Gave too much away. Felt sorry for them. Wanted them to be able to send some back home.’

‘That was Jack, though, wasn’t it, Ruby?’ said Shearing. ‘I heard he was badly broken up by those two lads getting it.’

‘That’s why he took Vic along with him on Sunday night for the pay-off,’ said Cheryl. ‘He hadn’t done that, Vic would still be here.’

‘So what do you want me to do when I’ve found out who’s responsible?’

‘Tell us.’

‘I can do that now,’ said Shearing, ‘but I don’t know who pulled the trigger.’