Willing Flesh (6 page)

‘Who’s dead, Bobo?’ You don’t often get moments like this, when the bad guys are on the back foot, when the strong are weak, so Staffe walks up to the brute, crossing the threshold to the flat and saying, in his softest voice, raising it a pitch – as close as he can to Bobo’s falsetto, ‘Tell me about Tchancov, Bobo. I can help.’ Staffe reaches up with his hands and puts them on Bobo’s shoulders, like laying hands on weathered gritstone.

Bobo has scars all over his head: some deep and long, some fine. It is like the surface of an old and neglected windscreen. ‘My Lena,’ he mumbles.

‘Lena who, Bobo?’

‘My Elena,’ he says, the words petering to nothing and Staffe sees Bobo’s head come towards him. Staffe closes his eyes, raises his fists, readies himself to fracture his knuckles on this man of rock.

But Pulford shouts out, ‘No! Sir, no!’

Staffe feels a great weight on him and, opening his eyes, has Bobo’s face in his, the great weight of the man pushing him down.

‘He’s passed out, sir,’ says Pulford, on his haunches, trying to hold Bobo up. ‘Get hold of him, sir,’ he wheezes. ‘He’s crushing me.’

Staffe puts his arms as far around Bobo as he can, gripping him under one arm and pulling him off Pulford. He tries to lower him gently to the ground, but Bobo crumples to the concrete, makes a sound like a side of beef slapped onto a butcher’s block.

Staffe and Pulford look down at him, then at each other.

‘What the hell do we do now?’ says Pulford.

Staffe peers into the flat. ‘You watch him.’

‘You sure, sir?’

‘Sometimes you’ve got to take sweets from the baby.’

‘Some bastard baby, sir.’

The Atlee is rough, but Bobo’s living-diner is painted a rich, high-glaze plum, with a long, glass dining table and high-backed chairs with pale pink silk skirted covers. The kitchen is simply one wall of black units and steel appliances. It is sleek and Bobo, for sure, keeps it spick and span. Above the stereo is a large black-and-white photograph of the beautiful woman. Elena. She is laughing and her fair hair is blowing back. She crinkles her eyes against the sun and looks beyond the photographer, as if seeing something unintended. Behind her, white horses in a high, breaking sea. At the corners of her mouth, the smile fragments.

There is a notepad on the marble counter. The top sheet says ‘
BCTPEчA
V.
B
’ Staffe lifts it daintily with the very tips of his thumb and forefinger, as if the sound of the paper might wake the dead. The next sheet is blank.

‘V,’ he whispers, to himself. As in Vassily. Vassily, as in Tchancov. ‘VB?’

He glances back down the hallway where Pulford looks anxiously up from Bobo, gesturing insistently for Staffe to come, be done with his trespassing, but Staffe sees there are two more rooms to inspect.

The first is the bathroom, boasting nothing untoward in its mirrored cabinet, save two gramme bags of what he assumes to be coke. There are two bottles of prescription drugs: one an antihistamine, the other an antidepressant, Molaxin.

‘V,’ says Staffe, making his way into Bobo’s bedroom. He closes the door and drops to his knees, lifting up the valance. Under the bed is a folded-down rowing machine and some weights. Staffe looks in the drawers by the bedside and smiles to himself. Wrapped in black silk ribbon – a stack of letters written on thick, pale lilac paper – almost parchment. Luckily for them, Bobo is a romantic. And his girlfriend, according to the second sheet, is a girl called Elena. Was a girl called Elena. Staffe sits on the edge of the bed and begins to read, but the script is foreign, written in a long and beautiful hand.

He knows that if he comes back for the letters, armed with a warrant and a translator, Bobo may well have disposed of them. So he looks at the dates and selects two, puts them in his pocket and begins to tie, but he hears a creak. The vast bulk of Bobo fills the bedroom doorway.

‘What the fuck,’ says Bobo, reaching towards Staffe who shuffles back on the bed, working out whether, if he can roll away from the first punch, he can get away. But Bobo, quicker than thought, flicks his fingers into Staffe’s throat.

Staffe can’t breathe. He clutches at his neck, dropping the stack of letters.

Bobo picks up the letters and kicks the door shut in the face of the advancing Pulford. ‘You read these letters?’ he sobs.

Staffe can smell Bobo’s breath as he speaks. Fish and pickles and woe. ‘Elena had her own place. Where is it, Bobo? I have to know. If you save me time, it will help.’

Bobo raises his hands to his head. He moans, ‘Livery, she calls it.’

‘Livery Buildings? On Cloth Fair?’ says Staffe.

‘Now you leave me.’

‘Do you work for Vassily Tchancov?’

Bobo drops his hands. Despite his bulk, and the scars, Bobo’s face is washed over with fear. The blood drains from his face and he looks to the floor. He mumbles, ‘You go.’

‘Did Elena know any bankers?’

‘Go!’

‘She called the Colonial Bankers’ Club, the day … the day it happened.’

‘Leave me.’ His voice breaks down. Bobo looks up, as if it takes his last drop of strength, and he reaches for the bed. He sits, lets all his weight go, and curls up like a foetus.

*

‘Just because Bobo called Elena and let us keep a couple of letters doesn’t mean he’s not a suspect, sir,’ says Pulford, sifting through the Companies House secure-access files on Vassily Tchancov’s declared businesses.

‘VB.’ Staffe’s finger rests in the margin of the page, next to
VodBlu
. The registered address is in Jersey. ‘You saw how much he loves her. He’s not our killer,’ he says, typing in
VodBlu.com
.

‘What if the foetus wasn’t his?’ says Pulford. ‘Perhaps you have to love somebody enough, to be able to kill them.’

‘Does this look like a crime of passion?’ says Staffe, looking at the ice bar’s homepage. He goes to the window and looks up towards Cloth Fair, trying to pick out Livery Buildings and Elena’s flat. ‘It seems that VodBlu is owned by a company registered in Jersey, run by somebody called Desai. It turns over nine million a year.’

‘We should go to Elena’s place,’ says Pulford.

‘Tchancov will soon get wind of our visit to Bobo. If we move quick, he might not know Elena’s dead.’

‘He’d know if he killed her.’

‘Why would he kill her?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘So let’s go talk to him.’ Staffe tosses his car keys to Pulford and makes his way down through the building, scrolling through his phone menus to find the number of his old mucker, Smethurst – over at the Met. ‘We’ll keep Livery Buildings under our hat. I don’t want Rimmer rummaging through Elena’s life before we can.’

Making his way down Leadengate’s dark corridors and winding stairwells, Staffe thinks of older times, when he was the young pup to Jessop and Smet. Pulford rushes ahead, takes the stairs two at a time and Staffe wonders whether his sergeant will ever be an old dog.

Leadengate is unsuitable for modern policing, was never intended to uphold the law; in fact, quite the reverse. It was previously the Saracen’s Head, an old inn of bad repute.

They spill out into the dungeon-like reception and Jombaugh gives Staffe a sarcastic, am-dram salute, calls out, ‘Take it easy, Staffe,’ his head sticking up above the high counter. He is leafing through
The News
by lamplight.

‘Easy?’

‘I don’t see Rimmer running at all that fine china.’

‘You calling me a bull, Jom?’

Jombaugh smiles over his glasses. He is a tall, broad man piling on the half-stones since he became desk sergeant. At least he’s still married, though. ‘You just take it easy.’

Outside, the snow reflects a pale orange hue. Smet answers and Pulford starts up the Peugeot. You can see the shapes of its splutter in the chill.

‘Staffe, you old bastard! What kind of trouble are you in now?’ says DI Smethurst.

‘It’s the season of goodwill, Smet, don’t you know?’ Staffe presses 0 on his phone and pulses it three times. ‘I’ve got to go, there’s another call coming in.’

‘What was it you wanted?’

‘Vassily Tchancov.’

‘Tchancov? He’s keeping his nose clean as far as I know.’

‘He just cropped up on something to do with one of Taki Markary’s girls.’

‘There was a coming together, a couple or three years ago.’

‘Over what?’

‘A gambling licence.’

‘Who got it?’

‘Neither. Two rabid old dogs in the manger.’

Staffe presses o again, gives it a long beep and says, ‘Cheers, Smet,’ clicking off.

*

They park up on Wardour Street, three doors down from VodBlu, which loses
£
600,000 a year on a turnover of
£
9 million. That’s a lot of vodka amounting to nought, but Staffe’s gut tells him that VB was never conceived for profit, but to spit out clean cash and tax credits. VB, says the sign, sculpted from ice, dyed blue. It is so cold out, today, that the sign doesn’t melt at all. In summer – according to the website – they sculpt it fresh every day.

Four doors down from VodBlu, two lean, chiselled and suited men are smoking next to a blacked-out Bentley. Staffe raises a hand to them, is amused when they seem puzzled.

As they go in Pulford’s words plume up from his mouth. ‘Christ, sir! Is this …’ He looks around, open-mouthed, ‘… is this all ice? Even the bar is ice.’

The girl behind the bar has black hair and powder-blue eyes. She wears a polar-white fur hat, a cropped, quilted gilet that shows her tummy, and knitted hot pants. Staffe wonders how long her shifts are. She looks happy enough and holds up a cone of black ice with a bottle embedded within. She wears white leather gloves, jiggles the bottle. ‘Absolut, gents? Today’s special.’

‘Water,’ says Staffe. ‘Two, please.’

The bar is full of small groups of media types in thick vintage coats and porkpie hats or berets. One of the barmaids jokes as she goes out, cigarette at the ready, ‘to get warm’.

Pulford brings the drinks and Staffe keeps an eye on a door between the end of the bar and the toilets. It is the only place that might accommodate an office, and, soon enough, a small, wiry man in a suit emerges. He has dyed-black hair with a widow’s peak and electric blue eyes, like beads pressed into deep scars. He comes across to Staffe and says, ‘You gentlemen have everything you need?’

‘Elena sent us,’ says Staffe, scrutinising the reaction.

‘Elena?’ says the man, convincingly deadpan.

‘A friend of Vassily’s?’

‘Maybe you should go.’ The man takes a hold of Staffe’s elbow. The grip is tight as a nut and Staffe shakes his arm, can’t shift it.

Pulford takes a step towards the man but Staffe says, ‘This place does all right, I suppose. But you’re not turning over nine million a year. No way. Maybe we’ll have the DTI look at things.’

‘You have a strange attitude, coming into my bar with such menaces,’ says the man, in a clipped Eastern brogue. He turns to the hot-panted girl. ‘Bring the gold Bison.’

‘Mr Tchancov?’ says Pulford.

‘Vassily. Now,’ he places a hand on the small of Staffe’s back, ‘Elena, you say?’

‘She is with one of yours. Bobo Bogdanovich,’ says Staffe.

The girl brings the vodka and three glasses. Tchancov tips her
£
10 and she strokes his arm, whispers something in his ear that makes him smile.

‘Bobo does a little work for me.’

‘And Elena?’

Tchancov shrugs.