NO KISS FOR THE DEVIL (Gavin & Palmer 5) (11 page)

It was only
when Riley was well over halfway through Varley’s notes that she found the
personal detail began to outstrip the commercial. Wading through documents
similar to the ones she had discovered, she found additional allegations which,
if true, meant Asiyah Al-Bashir wasn’t just merely extravagant, but unfaithful,
too. If the allegations were false, they were opening up the publishers of the
magazine – and by implication, anyone putting their name to them – to legal
action. And funded by Al-Bashir’s vengeful millions, that would mean personal
and professional ruin. But what if they were true?

She read through
an impressive looking report prepared by a high-level security company, looking
for weaknesses in the detail. Asiyah, it was stated, had formed a secret
liaison with a non-Egyptian national. She had been followed to several meetings
in London, Paris and Athens, where compromising photographs had been taken.
From the angle of some of the photos, Riley could only surmise that the
photographer had been standing on a balcony right outside the woman’s hotel
room, and that Asiyah was criminally careless when it came to drawing the
curtains.

It was bad
enough that Asiyah’s lover was allegedly Israeli – heinous indeed for the wife
of a staunchly proud Egyptian. But there was worse to come – at least, from
Al-Bashir’s point of view.

His wife’s
alleged lover was another woman.

********

‘You
said nobody would come… that we would remain undisturbed here. You guaranteed
it!’

Grigori’s
eyes were flat and grey like the early morning sky outside, his voice dulled
with anger. Emotion had brought an unusual level of colour to his cheeks, but
it was not a good sign. He stared for several seconds at the two men before him
with all the friendliness of a snake, waiting for an answer. ‘Well?’

‘We don’t know
why they came, boss. It was not a scheduled visit.’ His assistant, Radko, was
the spokesman, which was his job.

The man beside
him, named Pechov, squat as a dumpster and blank-eyed, seemed impervious to the
vitriolic atmosphere. He had the disinterest of a junior employee, and chewed
rhythmically on a toffee. He remained silent, which was his job.

‘How, not
scheduled? You said the supervisor, Goricz, would warn you. Yet suddenly, last
night, two people come up here and ask to look around. Did we not pay him
enough?’ He leaned forward over the desk strewn with the papers he’d been
working on. ‘Or perhaps you did not frighten him enough? What happened – is he
taking money from someone else?’

‘No, boss. I
don’t think so. It was a genuine visit. Two people – a man and a woman – came
with an agent to view the empty floor. It was short notice, Goricz said, and he
couldn’t turn them away. They were from out of town, and couldn’t see the place
any other time. They went in, looked round, then left.’ He shrugged his broad
shoulders and gave a soothing smile. ‘It was nothing, I promise.’

‘You promise?’
Grigori’s words were coated with sarcasm, wiping the smile from his assistant’s
face. ‘Like you promised the Bellamy woman would be dealt with properly? Like
you promised we would remain secure in this building? Like you guaranteed the
German woman would do what we wanted?’

‘The German was
not my fault.’ Radko’s face went pale beneath his tan, his eyes flinty with
resentment at being taken to task in front of Pechov. But he remained polite,
wary. ‘She was not my choice. As for Bellamy, she is already forgotten. The
police have found nothing and nor will they. Her place has been cleared, her
briefcase and work records destroyed.’ He paused for a moment, before adding
softly, ‘As for Goricz, I will deal with him.’

‘No. You
won’t,’ Grigori countered quickly. ‘If anything happens to Goricz, it will only
draw attention to this building – and we still need it for a while yet.’ He
looked his assistant in the eye and said deliberately, ‘But once we are
finished here, I do not expect the Serb or his family to see another day.
Understand?’

‘All of them?’
Radko exchanged an appalled look with the silent Pechov. ‘But here, in London?
It would be a huge risk-’

‘All of them!
If you cannot do it, then I will find somebody who can.’ The statement hung in
the air between them, the meaning chillingly clear.

Without another
word, Grigori flicked a dismissive hand and turned to the papers on the desk
before him as if the men did not exist.

He forced
himself to remain calm. He was disturbed by what had just happened. Was Radko
beginning to show signs of weakness? He hoped not, for that was something he
could not allow. A weak link threatened them all, and would be seen by others
as a challenge to his authority.

Several miles away,
across London, Ray Szulu drummed his fingers on his mobile and waited. It was
gone nine am. He was usually up and out earlier than this, but there had been
no call yet, and he was still in his skivvies. He was waiting for Ayso, the
controller and manager of the mini-cab firm, to give him some work. The
limousine company had nothing, he’d already checked that, so here he was again,
worrying about earning some money from short drives and wondering if his moans
about Ayso’s pig-ugly accent had somehow got back to the man. It would be just
like him to make Szulu squirm and wait for a job out of spite.

‘Hey, Raymond.
You comin’ back to bed? I’m getting cold!’ The girl’s voice cut through from
the bedroom of Szulu’s one-bed flat in what she probably thought was a sexy,
seductive tone. All it did was set Szulu’s teeth on edge.

When he’d first
started talking to her yesterday evening in a club in Hammersmith, her voice
had sounded husky and alluring, muffled slightly by the driving bass line of
the music and the constant hubbub of talk and laughter. And when she’d run her
fingertips across his bullet scar, mention of which he’d dropped casually into
the conversation the way he always did, because the ladies just ached to know
they were talking to a real, live, wounded man who’d seen some action, she’d
sounded positively honey-toned and had fluttered her eyelashes as if they were
powered by Duracell.

But once
outside and on the way back to his place, with her hanging on his arm – his
wounded left arm – her voice had turned out to be sharp enough to stop the
traffic.

He fingered the
slight indentation in his upper arm. It wasn’t hurting this morning. Not that
he’d admit that to her, of course. As far as the ladies were concerned, the
pain was always there, a reminder of how close he’d come to leaving this life
and moving onto the next. As usual, he always skirted round what had happened
to the man who’d shot him and dwelt on himself. After all, he was still here,
wasn’t he?

‘Raymond – you
comin’ or what?’

Szulu dropped
the mobile and made his way back to bed. Work or not, screechy voice or not, he
had a reputation to uphold. Another job would come along sooner or later. Until
then, there were other comforts.

Small
blessings, as his ma used to say about all of life’s ups and downs. Small
blessings.

********

‘Mr
Palmer? DI Craig Pell.’ The detective walked into Palmer’s Uxbridge office,
leaving a uniformed officer hovering at the top of the stairs. It was just
after eleven and the morning street noise had died to a rumble.

Palmer swung
his feet down from his open desk drawer and stood up. He’d left a message for
Pell earlier, and the man had called back to say he would drop by for a ‘chat’.
The speed with which he had done so and the presence of uniformed back-up
weren’t necessarily significant, but neither was it a good sign.

He offered Pell
coffee, but the policeman declined and sat down heavily on one of the hard
chairs, thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets. The man’s face was all
planes and angles, and Palmer guessed he would be the same mentally. A tough
cop, he judged, and young for his rank. It meant he was good at his job.

‘You say you
knew Helen Bellamy,’ Pell began without preamble. ‘Would you care to describe
how and when?’

Palmer sat down
and related how he had met Helen when he was hired by a businessman she
happened to be profiling at the time for a trade journal. Palmer was doing a
security assessment on the man’s factory, and had bumped into her in the
company car park. They had exchanged telephone numbers, and from there it had
progressed through dinner to more dates, and into what had been a very pleasant
relationship, even it hadn’t been long-lasting.

‘Really? Why’s
that?’

Palmer
shrugged, aware that Pell was looking for clues as to how well he and Helen had
known each other. ‘Work, mostly. Helen was trying to make a name for herself; I
was away a lot. At the time, it didn’t suit either of us to try for anything
more than that.’ He heard the words and thought how bland and casual it must
sound, as if their relationship hadn’t been worth more effort.

‘At the time?’

‘Looking back
is easy. We did what we did.’

‘So it was just
fun?’

Palmer felt his
face harden. ‘Come again?’ His words fell softly into the room, and Pell
shifted uncomfortably and looked away. For a moment, the creak of the chair and
the shuffling feet of the officer on the landing were the only sounds.

‘Sorry – that
didn’t come out the way I meant it.’ Pell admitted. He seemed genuinely
embarrassed. ‘Do you regret the relationship not being more than it was?’

Palmer breathed
easily and tried to ignore the not-so-subtle meaning behind the question. ‘I
regret lots of thing,’ he said evenly. ‘I regret not having been able to help
her, if that’s what you’re asking. But I can’t change the circumstances.’

‘So you last saw
her… when?’

‘Several months
ago. I’d have to check, if you want me to be more specific. But I don’t see how
it would help with your investigation.’

Pell nodded
slowly. ‘So you wouldn’t know what she might have been working on recently?’

‘No. She specialised
in commercial and business matters, that’s all I can tell you.’

‘Fair enough.
You were in the Military Police, is that right?’

‘Yes.’ Palmer
guessed that the moment he had rung and left a message, Pell would have had
someone trawling through the records. It would have been negligent not to. And
Pell was coming across as anything but slow to join all the primary dots.

‘So you know a
bit about procedure.’

‘I know you
have to eliminate everybody, yes.’

‘What made you
come forward?’

Palmer
shrugged. ‘You’d have come across my name eventually.’

Pell raised a
cynical eyebrow. ‘Miss Gavin didn’t suggest it, then?’

‘I’m not sure
what you mean.’

Pell eased back
in the chair and stretched out his legs. ‘I was up at Paddington Green station
when I got your message, sitting in on a National Crime Squad taskforce
meeting. Bloody boring, most of it, talking about budgets and targets. Christ,
it’s like being in a call centre. Anyway, I was relieved to get a message that
someone had called about Miss Bellamy. It gave me an excuse to get out for some
fresh air.’

‘Glad to have
been of help.’

‘While I was
taking the message, a senior suit ambushed me; he’d heard your name mentioned
and dragged me to one side. He told me a few things about you – and your
friend, Miss Gavin.’ He stared hard at Palmer. ‘You know Chief Superintendent
Weller?’

‘Yes, I know
him.’ Palmer wondered at the small community that was the police service. He
had encountered Chief Superintendent Weller on a previous job with Riley. The
officer was a member of the Serious Organised Crimes Agency, and was fond of
using people involved in cases to get results; of allowing them a certain
degree of slack to see what might be stirred up, like sludge on a river bed. It
was a risky strategy, but it had worked before and the man had the confidence
and clout to use it. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything Weller tells you. He
mixes with people who tell lies for a living. It rubs off.’

‘He says you’re
quite a team, the two of you.’ Pell waited, but Palmer refused to be drawn.
‘For him, that’s praise indeed. Although,’ his mouth slipped into a humourless
smile, ‘I got the impression he might have a couple of question marks posted
against your name. What’s that about, then – past misdeeds?’

‘You should
have asked him.’

‘I did. He went
all secret-squirrel on me and said it was nothing worth worrying about.’ He
waved a vague hand, drawing a line beneath the topic. ‘If he can live with it,
so can I. Back to the matter in hand. Were you ever in Miss Bellamy’s flat?’

‘Yes. Several
times.’

‘You know where
it is, then?’

‘Beaufort
Street, Chelsea. Why?’

‘Elimination
purposes. When were you there last?’

Palmer made a
show of remembering. But he was thinking instead of how close he had come to
going to Helen’s place yesterday, but how other things, like seeing the inside
of Pantile House, had intervened. He’d been lucky, by the sound of it. Being
found in the wrong place at the wrong time had dropped many people in the dock
when they didn’t need to be. And the home of a newly-discovered murder victim
was about as wrong as it could get.

‘Again, several
months ago,’ he replied eventually. ‘My prints might still be there, I
suppose.’

‘Do you know
who she might have started seeing, after you?’

‘No. We stopped
going out; that was the end of it.’

‘Did the
relationship end on a good note?’

‘Yes. Friendly,
in fact. It had run its course, that’s all. We didn’t fall out, if that’s what
you’re asking.’

‘I wasn’t, but
thanks for saying so.’ He studied Palmer carefully, then said casually, ‘Had
Miss Bellamy been in touch recently?’