NO KISS FOR THE DEVIL (Gavin & Palmer 5) (4 page)

‘You’ve got a
double pick-up,’ his control had told him over the phone two hours earlier.
‘Outside Terminal Four, not inside, right? Don’t be late.’ The man’s Nigerian
accent had rumbled over the airwaves like crushed concrete falling down a
wooden chute, making it hard for Szulu to pick out every word. God knows, he
thought sourly, what anyone else made of it. He’d just about caught the description
and names of the two passengers, and the central London hotel they had to be
taken to, before the call had ended. There was also no explanation as to why he
had to wait outside, but he wasn’t about to waste time arguing. He suspected
they had probably travelled here by car from somewhere else. If so, it was
their business.

Szulu worked
mostly as a part-time driver for a couple of west London cab firms. He drove
limousines when he could get the work, mini-cabs when nothing else offered. And
in between, he tried to stay out of trouble.

Right now,
though, he was being stared at as if he was about to do something illegal. He
knew the cops were only doing their job and protecting the masses, but why were
they giving him the snake’s eyes? He wasn’t carrying anything suspicious, and
he was dressed in a smart suit with a peaked cap, even if the dreadlocks
hanging round his collar didn’t quite fit the image of a regular driver.

He sighed and
took another turn along the pavement, skirting a bunch of inbound tourists
waiting for their lift, and a straggly line of luggage trolleys abandoned by
previous arrivals.

He passed the
security guard, who was trying to look tough and failing, and caught sight of
his own reflection in the glass doors behind him.

Szulu was tall,
slim and walked with an athletic spring in his step and a roll to his
shoulders. It was a gait he’d developed twenty years ago in his early teens,
when strutting your stuff was more than just for show; it was survival. Back
then, he’d been tall for his age, but skinny, and therefore still liable to be
a target for the wrong sort of attention. So he’d done what all his
contemporaries had done, and taken to looking tough. Most of the time it had
worked, helped by having big, useful-looking hands and a hollow stare. Since
then, he’d put on a few pounds and learned a few moves to back up the image.

He shook his
head, setting the dreadlocks swinging. The beads clicked quietly, but he didn’t
notice them anymore. What he did notice, though, was the nagging ache in his
left arm. It had healed over long ago, but every now and then, warm or cold, it
seemed determined to serve him up with a nagging reminder.

He wondered
what the security drone and the two armed cops would say if they knew he
carried the scar from a genuine bullet wound. The idea made him smile. They
might have their suspicions of him because of the way he looked, but it would
prove that they didn’t know anything about him.

When he turned,
he was relieved to see a couple of men standing outside the doors, looking
around. Slim briefcases, suits, no coats. He held up his cardboard sign and
received a nod in acknowledgement.

Thank Christ,
he thought, and smirked at the two cops on his way to the car. ‘Hang loose,
guys,’ he told them cheerfully. ‘You doin’ a good job.’

*********

Frank Palmer
switched off his phone and stared blankly through the windscreen of his Saab
into the thin morning light. He was parked in a south London trading estate,
adjacent to a chain-link security fence bordering a series of warehouses and
storage facilities.

Until the call
from Riley two minutes ago, his focus had been on a distribution depot a
hundred yards away, where three shift workers were unloading an Italian haulage
truck prior to filling up a fleet of delivery vans. He knew that at least one
of the men was conspiring on a regular basis to load more than the job sheets
called for, and with the co-operation of one of the drivers, was steadily
plundering the company of a fortune in electronics goods. Palmer had been hired
to find out who was doing the plundering and how.

He’d just
returned to England after following the haulage truck all the way from a
wholesale warehouse in Italy. The trip had been free of incident; no unusual
contacts, no unscheduled stops in lay-bys, and no night-time handovers to other
drivers. But at least he now knew where the company’s problem lay.

He glanced up at
the mirror and wondered if the face staring back at him really looked that cold
or whether it was simply the effects of days and nights of surveillance and a
lack of sleep. He ran a hand through his scalp, barely disturbing his scrub of
fair hair, and felt the nerves tremor all the way down his neck. Just before
his phone rang, he’d been fantasising about coffee, breakfast and his bed – in
that order.

Now all that
was forgotten.

Instead, he had
a cold feeling lodged deep in his chest, as if shards of iced water had been
pumped into him under pressure. His brain felt oddly scrambled, and he was
having difficulty concentrating on the fact that someone once close to him was
dead. And not simply through natural causes.

Murdered.

He watched the
men in the loading bay for a few more moments. Mentally, at least, he’d already
tuned them off his radar. They would keep. Too greedy to stop their little
operation now it was working so well, they would continue for as long as they
were allowed to get away with it. If he had to, he already had someone in mind
who could wrap this up for him.

He turned the
ignition key and pulled quietly away from the kerb. He followed the road
through twin lines of commercial units with their shuttered warehouses and
darkened office fronts out of the estate to the main road, allowing the speed
to build smoothly. Speed, now, that was something else. Speed could help you
survive, get you out of a tight spot. Speed could provide a sort of solace,
when other things couldn’t.

The speedometer
surged upwards, charging past 50 and above with no more effort than the desire
it took to go there. The tyres hissed on the wet road surface, smacking through
puddles and fissures in the worn tarmac, and the engine noise diminished to a
steady hum, as if it were being gradually drained away and left behind by the
increased speed. Street lights became a washed-out blur and other vehicles mere
furniture, there momentarily, then lost in the slipstream.

Palmer steered
smoothly round a battered mini emerging from a side street, catching a
momentary glimpse of a pale, shocked face from the corner of his eye. A truck
was slow in accelerating from changing lights, and he stabbed the brakes,
skimming past a traffic island and a barely-visible cyclist wobbling along in
the opposite direction.

He breathed
out, his heart drumming, and allowed his speed to drop. His eyes went to the
mirror. Not clever, he told himself, his hands tight on the steering wheel. Not
cool.

He turned north
and found himself thinking about Helen, and what she would have thought of his
reaction. He hadn’t got to know her that well, in spite of the fact that their
relationship had, for a while, been intense in more than a merely physical way.
They had discovered in each other a shared preference for risk-taking, with
Helen admitting to eschewing the safety of a salaried job with a national daily
and all the perks on offer, in favour of freelance work. Flying solo. Never
knowing where the next job was coming from, and never having a guarantee other
than a certainty in one’s own ability. Even if the story you were going after
might take you out over a gaping chasm with no safety net.

He’d once asked
her about it, knowing the offers had been there. She had laughed and said
nothing, and he’d instinctively known the answer: the lure of danger and the
unknown had been too much of a pull. Like another reporter he knew. Like himself.
Kindred spirits.

In the end,
however, it had not been enough to sustain what lay between them. With too much
time spent apart on their various assignments, it had been Helen who had
gradually begun to pull away. She had still been passionate, still the same
person, yet with an increasing reserve as time went by, as though she were
gently easing herself out from anything too committed.

Finally, she
had told Frank that she wanted to remain friends. It had been like a knife
piercing his soul, and probably the moment he had realised just how much she
had meant to him.

He surged
between speed cameras, opening up the car in brief bursts, wary of cruising
patrol cars. All the while, a map was constantly rolling through his mind in
case he needed to cut off and lose himself amid huddled rows of houses or the
mish-mash of small suburban trading estates.

He reached
Uxbridge and parked outside his office. It was on the first floor above a row
of small businesses. A dry-cleaners stood on one side, and a large, glass-fronted
shop on the other. The latter was currently a photocopier display room, but had
already changed business use three times in as many months. Palmer lived in
hope of it becoming something useful, such as a coffee shop with comfortable
chairs and crisply-ironed newspapers for patrons to use all day. It would make
the times between jobs so much easier to bear.

A plain wooden
door with a scarred front led to a moribund pot plant and a narrow flight of
stairs. A scattering of mail lay on the bottom step, and he scooped it up. At
the top of the stairs stood a glass-panelled door. Behind it lay a single
office with a desk, chairs and a filing cabinet, and a kettle in lieu of a
coffee shop. A computer fan purred beneath the desk, and the air was stodgy with
the smell of warm plastic. He had gone out several days ago and left it on by
mistake. Riley would have a fit. She might be another risk-taker, but he was
certain she was developing a thing about carbon footprints.

The room’s
appearance was what Palmer liked to think of as lived-in and comfortable, like
the jackets he wore. His clothes provided anonymity, a necessity for the kind
of work he did. But they also reflected the deliberate distancing of his years
spent in uniform - an existence according to Queen’s Rules and Regulations.
What he had now, he freely acknowledged, was another kind of uniform, but at
least it was his by choice. And that choice spilled over into his workplace,
where comfort was key and dust was allowed to settle and accumulate over long
periods until he felt concerned enough to move it around a little.

He switched on
the kettle and made coffee. A large spoonful and three sugars. The milk had
solidified so he did without. He slopped some cold water into a pot plant that
was showing signs of becoming a twig. It had been a present from Riley, who
seemed eager to prove that even Palmer could make things grow, given time and
regular care.

Another one of
her presents was a Rolodex file sitting on one corner of his desk. She had
insisted that every PI worth his salt had to have a Rolodex. He hadn’t felt
inclined to argue - mainly because he’d been quietly pleased at the idea. While
he waited for the kettle to boil, he fanned the cards, enjoying the clatter as
the cylinder spun, the gentle, dry sound echoing almost comfortingly in the
room.

He flicked
through the mail. Most of it was junk. He dropped it in the bin. There were two
obvious bills and one large, official-looking brown A4 envelope with spidery
writing across the front and an older address scratched out in the same ink.
Whatever it was could wait. The red message light on his answering machine was
blinking accusingly, but when the first one turned out to be a call-centre, he
switched it off. They could wait, too. He was too tired, too strung out to deal
with trivia.

The coffee was
bitter, in spite of the sugar, but Palmer barely noticed. He stared out of the
window across the rooftops and breathed deeply, until his mind began to settle,
to wash off the night-time torpor.

Down in the street,
traffic was building, lifting the day into a semblance of activity. With it,
Palmer was beginning to acknowledge that something had happened in the past few
hours that had affected him more than anything in a long time. It involved
someone he had known and, albeit briefly, cared deeply about.

And now he had
arrived at a simple decision.

He was going to
do something about it.

********

The power base for
Copnor Business Publications was a small, first-floor office in Covent Garden,
sandwiched between an outdoor activities shop and a theatrical agency. A plate
on the wall in the foyer listed a variety of specialist business and trade
periodicals. Riley had never heard of most of them. But the list was headed in
bold print by a couple of business journals she knew by reputation, and which
she suspected kept all the others afloat. The name of the man she had come to
see was at the bottom in small type: David Johnson – Editor.

She debated
turning round and going to Palmer’s office in Uxbridge. It was the natural
place for him to go, and she knew he’d be there, if not now, then soon. It was
where he rested, recuperated and sometimes allowed time to drift by when he had
nothing more pressing to do.

She shook off
the thought. Palmer was a big boy. Anyway, he needed the space, just as she
would in similar circumstances. She had told him everything she knew; now it
was best to leave him alone to absorb the news and come to terms with it in his
own way.

She walked up the
stairs and through an open door. A young woman with a shock of red hair and
green-framed glasses was just taking off her coat, head craned to one side to
study a pile of printed sheets spilling out of a fax machine. She managed to
hang up her coat and scoop up the fax pages at the same time, while adroitly
switching on her PC and simultaneously dropping a wad of mail on her desk from
under one arm. A white plastic prism with the name Emerald in green print sat
on the front of the desk, facing the door.