Cold Kill (38 page)

After a moment, Stella said, ‘You can do this – you can
put the gun down and then I'll arrest you and certain things will happen. We can talk deals. You can listen to what I've got to say and you'll find out what I want. Or you can shoot me. In which case you'll have to shoot him. And then your life changes completely.' She said all this with her head tilted slightly backwards under pressure from the gun.

Wilkie didn't speak because he didn't know what to say. And when Stella lifted her hand very slowly and moved the gun from her head, but kept hold of it, tugging slightly, he didn't know what to do. Until he let go of the gun and he knew he'd done the wrong thing.

They walked out to the landing, Wilkie wearing plastic cuffs and a sorry expression. The lift was on their floor. Harriman thumbed the button and the doors shook, then opened with a clatter. Stella said, ‘I don't think so,' and they took the stairs.

Wilkie said, ‘I could have killed you.'

‘That's right,' Stella said, ‘you could have.'

‘You talked about a deal.'

‘We'll talk about it more later.'

As they crossed the lobby towards the bull ring, a great crash came from the lift shaft and the floor-indicator light went out. Wilkie laughed out loud. He said, ‘How did you know?'

‘I used to live here,' Stella told him. ‘I used to breathe the same air as pissrags like you.'

‘And the deal is what?'

In the interview room Wilkie looked oddly put together, with his jeans-but-no-underwear, his shoes-but-no-socks and his coat-but-no-shirt. The blond-streaked hair was perfectly in place and had the shellac glint of lacquer. Harriman had organized a little whip-round in the squad room and raised ten cigarettes. Wilkie was smoking them one after the other and the room carried scrolls and scarves of blue.

Stella indicated the tape. She said, ‘Of course, anything you might do or say to help us in the course of our inquiries will be reported to the court and might possibly assist them in their consideration of any sentence.'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘A Glock forty-five calibre handgun was recently used in the commission of a murder. We want to know whether you supplied the weapon and who to.'

‘You think I sell guns?'

‘I know you sell guns. There's a search team in your apartment as we speak. They've found sixty weapons ranging from handguns to machine pistols and a large quantity of ammunition. You sell guns. Did you supply the Glock?'

‘The flat isn't mine. I'm renting it.'

Stella said, ‘DC Harriman is leaving the room. Interview temporarily halted at eighteen twenty-seven.'

She switched off the tape. Harriman hadn't moved. Wilkie said, ‘What?'

‘Let's not start off on some long and tedious journey,
because we're just going to end up back at the start. You sold a Glock recently. Who bought it?'

‘I'm not the only armourer in London.' As he used the word ‘armourer', Wilkie glanced at the tape.

‘You're the only one sitting in a police interview room talking about a deal.'

‘What's the time-scale?'

‘Three days. Maybe four. Less than a week.'

Wilkie fell silent. He could have been deciding whether to come clean, or simply enjoying a little after-rush from the spliff. Stella was trying not to look as if his answer mattered much, but she knew it was crucial. Wilkie was right. Mister Mystery could have got the gun from a number of sources, though geographically Wilkie was most likely. But if Wilkie had sold a Glock forty-five within the last week, then the chances were strong that it was the murder weapon. There had been only two other shootings on Stella's patch in the last five days and they were black-on-black drug disputes, one involving a Mach 10, the other an Uzi machine pistol.

‘Will I walk?' Wilkie wanted to know.

‘You heard what I said for the tape.'

‘Yeah, I heard. Will I walk?'

He was talking about police bail, about being back on the streets in time for a drink at the local. Stella said, ‘It's not up to me.'

‘So what kind of a fucking deal is it if nothing's up to you?'

‘Give me ten minutes.'

‘Okay,' Wilkie nodded and lit another cigarette. To Harriman, he said, ‘I'm going to need some more of these.'

‘I'm clearing this with you,' Stella told Sorley. ‘The tape will be off, obviously, but it's possible that questions will be asked afterwards.'

Sorley spread his hands. ‘So there might. Don't worry about it. Set the bail figure high.'

‘It won't make any difference to him.'

‘No, but it'll look good.' Sorley was drinking from a plastic cup. It could have been coffee, it could have been Scotch or medication. Maybe it was coffee with a slug of Scotch and a dash of medication. ‘You went down there without any back-up and without asking me.'

‘Officer acting on information.'

‘Officer acting like a fucking idiot.'

‘It wasn't a problem.' Sorley looked at her, cocking his head, and laughed. She said, ‘If Wilkie comes good for me, we'll have a name and a face. In which case, I'll need more manpower.'

‘It's okay.'

‘And more money.'

‘That's okay too. It's all okay.'

Stella looked at him, the cherry nose, the sunken eyes. She said, ‘Are
you
okay?'

‘Terrific. Benylin, ibuprofen, Strepsils, Scotch.'

‘Cigarettes.'

‘Cigarettes,' Sorley agreed. He smiled benignly. ‘How many guns did they find in this bastard's flat?'

‘Upwards of sixty.'

‘Down on Harefield.'

‘That's right.'

‘It's a war zone. The United Nations should move in.'

Stella named a sum for police bail and Wilkie pretended to be outraged. He made a show of including the bail price in their deal and Stella just said, ‘No,' and shrugged a lot until he'd finished busking.

The tape wasn't running, but he asked for it to be removed
from the cassette, then he said, ‘A guy called Leon Bloss.'

Stella asked him to spell the name and, when he had, Harriman left the room. Stella asked for more and got the details of the meeting at the Wheatsheaf and details of the drop.

‘Out of the way of CCTV,' Wilkie said. ‘Holland Park.'

Stella felt a chill. ‘Where in the park?'

‘He waited on a bench up by the trees.'

I'll bet you did
, Stella thought.
Happy memories. Valerie Blake jogging by, you moving out of cover… I'm getting close to you now. You don't know how close I am
.

‘How do you know this guy?'

Wilkie shook his head. ‘You meet people.'

‘What does he do?'

‘No idea.'

‘You're lying, Wilkie.'

‘Why should I know that stuff? He's around. I've met him. Do I want his life story?'

They'd done their deal, she had nothing left to offer and nothing with which to threaten, so she let it slide.

Harriman came back after twenty minutes and said, ‘Nothing,' which meant that Leon Bloss hadn't shown in any computer trace.

Stella turned to Wilkie. ‘Slipper, we're going to do some computer-imaging with your help. It had better look a lot like the man in question.'

‘What's it to me?' Wilkie said. ‘He's yours now.'

They took a break. Only Maxine Hewitt and Marilyn Hayes were in the squad room. Stella sat with Maxine while Marilyn called round to find someone to make the computer-image.

Maxine said, ‘Do you think it's him?'

‘He picked up the gun in Holland Park.'

‘Open space, no –'

‘CCTV, I know. It's the only sale Wilkie made last week. The only Glock.'

‘It's not a cert.'

‘It's a very good bet. We'll have him in.'

‘Oh, sure.' A pause, then, ‘Are you okay?'

‘Fine. Why not?'

Maxine's laugh was an echo of Sorley's and she cocked her head in just the same way. Stella said, ‘What?' Maxine reached into her bag and took out a make-up mirror. She held it up to Stella's face. The blood from her scalp had dried and begun to flake, three little rivulets gathering at the point of her jaw. She picked some off with her fingernail.

‘I thought he was going to kill us,' she said, ‘both of us. Just for a minute, I really thought that.'

It was Bloss. Stella couldn't have known, but it was him for sure, the strange, Oriental features, the thin line of the lips, dark hair balding from the forehead. She thought the eyes must be wrong, such a high, thin blue, but Wilkie shook his head. The eyes were what he remembered best. Stella recalled a saying about blue eyes, something straight from the old wives' handbook – you were looking at the sky through the skull.

The graphics artist printed off fifty copies and Stella posted several round the squad room on windows and doors. She left a copy on every desk. She asked Marilyn to liaise with DI Sorley about new personnel and to arrange for Bloss's likeness to be transmitted to police stations nationwide but with special emphasis on west London. Finally, she pinned the portrait up on the whiteboard, right in the centre, so that he was surrounded by the scene of crime
photos of his victims, the bloody wreckage, the blank stares, the heavy-limbed dead.

So there you are. Mister Mystery. Whose blue-eyed boy were you?

Slipper Wilkie was getting restless. He'd been bitching at Harriman for half an hour. When Stella walked into the interview room, he looked relieved. ‘I just need to make a couple of calls, raise the bail money, get out of here, okay?'

‘Not really,' Stella said. ‘No.'

Wilkie looked at her, slightly puzzled, a half-smile on his face, as if he hadn't quite understood. ‘You said you'd talk to someone. Fix things...'

‘I did – my boss. DI Sorley.'

‘Good. So we're set.'

‘DI Sorley wasn't able to agree to police bail, in part because you were found with sixty-three illegal firearms in your possession, and also because there's a strong reason to believe that a weapon sold on by you was used to murder a man named Oscar Gribbin, but mostly, DI Sorley tells me, because he expects that there would be a high risk of your absconding.'

There was a silence. Wilkie lowered his head. He was shaking like a man with a fever, and the muscles in his forearms were jumping. When he looked up, his eyes were showing the whites. He said, ‘You're dead.'

‘I found it hard to disagree with DI Sorley, but my reasons for refusing police bail are slightly different. They have more to do with being pistol-whipped and having a gun jammed against my head.'

Harriman was standing very close to Wilkie now. The man looked like someone on the verge of a seizure, breathing hard, the veins in his neck cording and pulsing.

‘You're dead, bitch.'

‘Also, you're an arsewipe, Wilkie – and there's the most convincing reason of all.'

‘You are dead. You're a walking dead person. I guarantee it. You've got my promise. However long it takes, you cunt, you're mine, you're
meat
.'

‘I've heard it before,' Stella said. ‘I'm still here.'

She walked out of the interview room and along the corridor to the squad room and sat down at her desk and put her head in her hands.

She hadn't heard it before – not quite like that.

People went back to source. Officers went back to the pubs and the clubs, the minicab caves and the strip-o-ramas. Maxine Hewitt went back to Jumping Jacks. Louise said, ‘I break at ten.'

They met at the bar, where CCTV picked up their images but not what they said. Louise sighed. ‘The whole place is on-screen, didn't you know that?'

‘So tell them I looked at your statement; there was something I needed to clear up.'

‘I'm a good dealer. I've got good hands. I've been clean for a year and I don't give head in alleys any more. Don't fuck it up for me.'

‘When does your shift end?'

‘Tonight? One o'clock.'

‘And you get home –'

‘Twenty past. Half past, maybe.'

‘Give me an address.'

‘Jesus Christ, Mrs Hewitt.'

‘But we could talk here if you prefer.'

Louise had given an address in north Fulham: a custom-built low-rise in a back street surrounded by offices and small workshops. Maxine was parked at the door when she arrived. They walked in together, but Louise disappeared without speaking. Maxine helped herself to a drink and waited for Louise to come back. When she did, she'd showered and changed out of her dealer's uniform. She topped up Maxine's
glass and gave herself a drink and smiled. That was new. Maybe it meant, I'm on your side now. The smile faded fast when Maxine showed her the computer-image.

‘You know him.'

‘Yeah.' She sighed. ‘Leon Bloss. This isn't going to be good.'

‘Why not?'

‘He used to work for Billy Souza.'

‘Used to?'

‘He was security. Like JD.'

‘Have you seen him recently?'

‘A couple of days ago.'

‘A couple?'

‘Four, five, a week, I'm not sure.'

‘Can you peg it by what was happening that day?'

‘All days are the same. I deal blackjack.'

‘You saw him at the casino?'

‘That's right.'

‘Why was he there?'

‘Christ, I don't know. Must've been to see Billy. He won some money, quite a lot of money, then JD picked him up at my table and took him upstairs.'

‘You say he used to work for Billy. Why did he stop?'

‘Well, first Billy took him off house security and upped him to minder.'

‘His own minder – Billy's?'

‘One of three. I don't know exactly what happened. I think some punter came up to Billy in the car park. You'd be surprised how many think the wheel's fixed or the cards are stacked. No need, of course. The only sure thing about gambling is that you can't win, not in the long run.' Louise shrugged. ‘Things got difficult and Leon took the guy apart. Really hurt him. They put him in a car and dumped him
outside A & E somewhere the other side of London. The next day, Leon didn't turn up for work. Billy had fired him.'