The Informant (11 page)

Joey stopped in his tracks. He stared right at her, the intense, hypnotic gaze. His voice was cold and detached. ‘That what you really think?’

Kaz stared right back at him but she didn’t reply. She was miles away, years away, before, if there ever was a before, searching her mind in vain for a time of childhood and innocence.

Joey pushed past her, practically yanked the sliding kitchenette door off its runners. He stormed into the sitting room, seized Jez by the throat and lifted him bodily off the sofa. Jez’s
glasses tumbled to the floor, he looked like a startled fawn; Joey had one arm round his neck, trapping it in a vice-like grip, the other under his flailing legs. He strode across the room to the
open balcony door and holding Jez’s gangling body horizontally he stepped through it, hoisted him up to shoulder height and threw him off the balcony.

Kaz returned to the room in time to see Jez disappearing. He made no sound, he was simply gone.

Joey stepped back into the room with a satisfied smirk on his face. He met Kaz’s astonished look. ‘You wanted it sorted, it’s sorted. Okay?’

He scooped the car keys from Ashley’s hand, marched down the hallway straight out of the flat, slamming the door behind him. Kaz rushed out on to the balcony and looked down. Thirteen
floors below, Jez’s broken body was splayed face up across one of the council wheelie bins, neck and shoulders dangling limply over the edge, one leg twitching. Kaz stared in disbelief.
Inside the flat Natalie started to scream.

Kaz had to admit she was impressed by the way Ashley simply took charge of the situation. He whacked Natalie round the chops just hard enough to stun her into silence. Then he
rooted round the debris of the sitting room and found a pair of flip-flops for her to put on.

‘Right, we need to get out of here.’

Kaz was still so flabbergasted by Joey’s actions she didn’t reply. Grabbing Natalie’s hand, she allowed Ashley to shepherd them both towards the front door. They reached the
lift and he pressed the call button. Kaz glanced at him anxiously.

‘Wouldn’t the stairs be better . . . less obvious?’

Ashley dismissed this with a shake of his head. ‘We’re already on the CCTV, if it’s working. Stay cool, act normal, pretend like nothing’s happened.’

The lift arrived and they stepped inside. Natalie was snivelling then a low keening started to rumble through her emaciated frame. Kaz put a comforting arm round her shoulders. ‘It’s
okay babes, it’ll be okay.’ She didn’t believe this herself, her brain was reeling, but the immediate priority was to deal with Natalie.

Ashley reached in his pocket and pulled out a plastic grip-seal pouch of about half a dozen pills. He held it up.

‘Could try giving her a couple of these?’

‘What are they?’

‘Benzos. They’re ace for chilling you out. I give them to Joey when he has a freak out.’

Kaz stared at him, she was beginning to see Ashley in a whole new light. He tipped a couple of pills into his palm, offered them to Natalie.

‘There you go Nat. Make you feel better.’

Natalie didn’t hesitate for a second; pills, powders, this was what she knew. She hoovered them up like Smarties, even managed to give Ashley the ghost of a smile.
‘Cheers.’

Ashley tipped out a third pill and handed it to her. ‘One more for luck, eh?’

Natalie gobbled it down.

The lift doors opened at the ground floor, Ashley stepped out into the lobby and did a quick recce. A crowd of people was gathering outside round the wheelie bins, someone was on a mobile,
several kids were using their phones to take pictures of the corpse. People were milling about in an atmosphere of excitement and prurience. But that made things easier.

A battered-looking CCTV camera was mounted on the wall facing the entrance, Ashley considered it. Then a gang of lads on bikes rode up, eager to see what was going on. This gave Ashley the
chance he was looking for. He grabbed Natalie’s arm and, using the lads as cover, slipped through the outer door and along the wall until they were out of the camera’s range.

No one gave them a second glance as they skirted round and back to the car park, but the Range Rover was long gone.

Kaz stared at the empty parking space and huffed. ‘Oh that’s just great.’

Ashley was on alert, his eyes scanning in all directions. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine.’

Kaz snorted. ‘He’ll be fine?
He’ll
be fuckin’ fine! What about us?’

Natalie was standing, face upturned, blinking at the sky. It occurred to Kaz that she might not have been outside in full daylight for a while. Suddenly a shaft of sunlight burst from behind the
scudding clouds and drenched them and the scrubby tarmac in blinding sunshine. Natalie pulled up her hood to shield her eyes and started to squirm. ‘Need a pee.’

Kaz glared at her; the determination to rescue her baby sister had worn decidedly thin in the last half-hour. ‘You’ll have to wait.’

Natalie pressed her knees together, she was bent almost double, her face contorted. ‘Need a pee.’

A wailing siren announced the imminent arrival of a police car. Ashley put a guiding hand on Natalie’s elbow. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Need a pee.’

Kaz and Ashley propelled Natalie down the road between them. Once they were out of sight of the flats, they allowed her to squat behind a parked car and take a piss. As she
relieved herself Ashley got out his phone and made a call. Kaz paced the pavement and tried to get her jumbled thoughts in some kind of order. Two weeks out of prison, how the hell did she land
herself in this unholy mess? She cursed her own stupidity. She should be sitting calmly and safely in her life drawing class, not running from a murder scene. Getting hooked up with her family was
always going to be a mistake. How many times had she told herself that? She’d sworn never to go down this road again, but here she was, up to her neck in shite, courtesy of Joey.

Natalie was fumbling to refasten her jeans, she couldn’t seem to coordinate her fingers. Kaz grabbed her by the waistband and hoicked up the zip none too gently.

Natalie gazed up at her, her watery blue eyes met Kaz’s angry gaze. ‘Got a fag?’

Kaz considered clumping her, but she held back. What had she expected anyway, when she came looking for her baby sister? Natalie was no baby any more, she was an eighteen-year-old drug addict
whose life had gradually and inexorably spiralled out of control over the last six years. She needed help and she needed treatment. She needed someone who cared about her enough and was prepared to
persist for long enough to see that she got those things. Their mother clearly couldn’t give a toss, Joey had issues of his own. That left her, Karen, playing the big sister once again, a
role she’d vowed would have no part in her new life.

Ashley clicked his mobile off and smiled. ‘Right, got things sorted. We need to head down to the front, wait for a pick-up.’

A stiff breeze was blowing up the estuary, they walked away from the primped and paved esplanade until they found a shelter facing the beach. It was wrought-iron, much painted,
a random piece of Victoriana left over from Southend’s glory days. Kaz swept abandoned chip papers from the seat and sat down. There were few people about aside from a Muslim family, the
women wearing hijab, laughing and teasing each other as they attempted to keep the ends of their scarves from blowing in their ice creams. They seemed happy in each other’s company, the
children buzzing one another on their scooters, one of the men swinging a toddler up on to his shoulders. An ordinary family on a day out at the seaside, Kaz felt envious.

Natalie curled up in the corner of the shelter and stared into space. She seemed a whole lot calmer now. The benzodiazepine had kicked in. Ashley positioned himself with a view both up and down
the promenade. The funfair was one way, the Sea Life Centre the other. Kaz watched him.

‘You knew what he’d do, didn’t you?’

Ashley gave her a shifty glance. ‘Nah not really. Joey’s always full of surprises.’

Kaz returned his look with her own searching gaze. ‘Thirteen? Unlucky for some? Ain’t that what your joke was about?’

‘I was being a prat.’

‘Strikes me Ash, you pretend to be a prat. That’s your cover. But you’re a lot more canny than you let on.’

Ashley’s grin was lopsided but he seemed to appreciate the compliment. ‘Well, y’know what Joey’s like.’

‘I used to. But I reckon you got the drop on me now.’

Ashley smiled. ‘Nah, ain’t no one matters to him as much as his sister.’

Kaz snorted. ‘Yeah? Which one?’

Ashley didn’t reply. They both knew the answer and it wasn’t Natalie. He spent the next quarter of an hour fidgeting, continually glancing up the road. Kaz left him to it. She needed
time to gather herself and figure out a viable strategy to keep her from going straight back to jail. And Fat Pat would be waiting.

Kaz felt her gut contract. She was imagining the screw’s gleeful greeting, when she noticed Ashley raise his arm at a big black BMW X5, which promptly drew up kerbside. A bloke, well over
six foot, got out of the passenger door and strode towards them.

Ashley smiled at him. ‘All right mate?’ The man nodded. Ashley glanced at Kaz. ‘Don’t know if you two have met?’

Kaz looked him up and down. He was solid muscle with sleeve tattoos up both arms, head shaved to a dark stubble.

‘Kaz. Yev.’

Yevgeny gave her a curt but respectful nod.

‘You do some serious time for a woman.’ His accent was thick as treacle, to Kaz’s untrained ear it could’ve placed him anywhere east of Krakow.

She smiled. ‘Yeah. Reckon I did.’

He nodded again, pondering this. Then he glanced at Natalie in the shelter. ‘Want me to carry her to the car?’

Kaz looked at her sister. ‘She’ll be all right.’ She held out her hand. ‘Come on Nat, time to go.’

Natalie got up and meekly took Kaz’s hand. She allowed herself to be led to the four-by-four. Ashley held the door open and she climbed in the back. He buckled her in as you would a
child.

Kaz glanced at the driver, he was a younger version of Yevgeny. He wore tight leather gloves, with the backs cut out. Yevgeny himself was still sizing her up. He smiled.

‘My brother. Tolya.’

Tolya gave Kaz a friendly salute.

‘His English ain’t so good.’

Kaz returned Tolya’s smile, then glanced at Yevgeny. ‘Little brothers eh? They can give you a lot of grief.’

Yevgeny pursed his lips and gave a curt nod. A man of few words, Kaz reflected, though it was hard to say if this was because of his language skills or his temperament. Kaz looked at him, then
at Ashley. She resented the fact that she was being rescued and protected by Joey’s minders. Yevgeny was holding the rear door of the Beamer open for her. She was a female relative of the
boss; organizing her, controlling her, that was his prerogative, he was simply doing his job. Fuck this, thought Kaz. She folded her arms and stood her ground.

‘Right, well one of you two lads had better get that miserable little fucker on the phone, ’cause I want a word with him.’

Ashley met her look nervously. Her gaze bored into him.

‘You heard me Ash. Now.’

Then she opened the front passenger door of the car and climbed in beside Tolya.

Mal Bradley placed himself strategically at the very back of the room in the hope that Turnbull wouldn’t notice him. He’d spent the last three days attending a life
drawing class at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of a summer school course that Karen Phelps had signed up for. She’d signed up but so far she hadn’t shown up and Bradley’s
pathetic attempts to put charcoal to paper had earned him some sympathy and a slew of patronizing advice from his fellow students. Initially he’d assumed that sitting in on the class would be
a doddle, staring at naked young women all day, he could manage that. But the model turned out to be male, muscular with a periodically tumescent penis, which embarrassed Bradley, although no one
else in the class seemed to notice.

Bradley spent the rest of his time hanging round the hostel in his assumed role of support worker. Only the SPO knew his true identity, everyone else simply accepted him. Karen’s stuff was
still in her room, he knew that because he’d used the pass key to take a snoop. But Karen herself was proving evasive. She’d checked in with the SPO, the story was she was visiting her
sick father.

If Bradley was honest he didn’t know how to move forward or who to ask. When the boss had summoned him he’d been on the team barely a week. He’d had only nine months out of
uniform, done a couple of courses, but mostly he’d been sitting on his backside all day listening to phone taps. The new skipper was DS Nicci Armstrong and he’d made the mistake of
calling her ‘Skip’. She’d given him a disbelieving glare.

‘I’m not your bloody dog Bradley.’

‘Sorry Skip.’

It was nervousness pure and simple, but she hadn’t seen it that way. She thought he was trying to be smart. Some of the other lads had laughed and that made it worse. Armstrong was one of
these don’t-fuck-with-me women, she’d have your nuts in the wringer as soon as she looked at you. She was early thirties and had a kid, he only knew this because he’d overheard
her bitching to one of the others about the cost of childcare.

Turnbull had called everyone in for an emergency briefing, but all Bradley could glean from the rumour mill was there’d been ‘developments’. The boss walked into the room
flanked by the DCI; Bill Mayhew was maybe ten years older than Turnbull and perpetually harassed.

Turnbull surveyed the room with a thin smile. He was seriously hacked off, but not about to reveal that to his assembled officers until he was good and ready. Sharply suited, the tip of a white
handkerchief peeping out of his top pocket, Bradley admired his style. Beside him the pot-bellied, scurrying Mayhew looked like a down-and-out. Turnbull continued his leisurely scan as Mayhew and
another minion prepared the PowerPoint presentation. His eyes came to rest on Bradley for a second, then they moved on. A mugshot of a young man in round glasses with a mass of unruly dreadlocks
came up on the projection screen. Turnbull glanced up at it then he turned to address the room.