Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (18 page)

Bimsley raised his eyebrows. ‘You want to get backup?’

May bipped the door of the BMW and slid behind the wheel. ‘What, for arrest on suspicion of murder with the world’s rarest gun? And let someone else get that glory?’

May put his foot down hard and made the tarmac shriek before Bimsley had a chance to buckle up his safety belt.

Ian McFarland was having a nightmare. He was trapped on a fairground waltzer, and every time he tried to get off the damned thing sped up again, until he finally jumped. Moments later he was awake and standing at the bedroom window with sweat on his spine, looking down at the empty wet pavements, and right ahead of him was a patrol car with its lights turned off, creeping forward in silence to block the entrance to the flats.

He was naked. Grabbing a black T-shirt, his jeans and trainers, he tried to dress while hopping across the room, something no man has ever satisfactorily managed. With the car already outside, he knew there were only seconds to spare before they arrived at the first-floor door.

Ian had one advantage over the police. He knew about the new alleyway at the rear of the building; the builders had only opened it a couple of days ago as part of the block’s renovation. He legged it out into the corridor, avoiding the main stairwell, staying back in the shadows. His clothes and trainers were still wrapped in a bundle under his arm. He needed to put some distance between them and himself, to give him time to think.

There was still rubble lying around on the darkened staircase. Darting between the scaffolding poles, he tried not to stub his toes or at least not cry out when he did, but on the way he dislodged a stack of tiles that crashed down the stairs, causing the footsteps behind him to suddenly change direction. As he fled into the narrow alleyway he found himself confronted by an elegantly suited man who looked nothing at all like an officer of the law.

‘What, you think we didn’t know about the alley?’ May said, blocking the way. ‘Do me a favour, pop your pants on before you get in my car. I don’t want the lads thinking I’ve run in a strippergram.’

After they arrived at the King’s Cross headquarters of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, John May headed down to the solitary holding cell that had been constructed in the basement and spent some more time with Ian McFarland. When he had finished, he went back upstairs and found Bimsley eating muesli from a plastic pot on the ground-floor terrace.

‘I know you’re on a diet but I can’t adjust to not seeing you with a dripping fried-egg sandwich in one hand,’ he said. ‘Put down the bird-seed for a minute; I need to talk to you.’

Bimsley obediently followed his boss inside to the bank of computer terminals they were currently being forced to share in Raymond Land’s misguided attempt to switch the staff to hot-desking. ‘We’re not going to keep him,’ May warned.

‘You’re joking.’

‘We can keep an eye on him easily enough. He’s no money, no job, where’s he going to go?’

‘It’s a murder investigation and he’s the only—’

‘He’s not the only suspect and his story is solid,’ May pointed out.

‘You don’t believe that guff about the concierge service, do you? Of all the rubbish I’ve heard from suspects that has to be the dumbest—’

‘He was naked when we picked him up, Colin. What kind of guilty party is so confident that they sleep with no clothes on right after doing something like that?’

‘Mr Bryant said he knew an axe murderer who cooked a pineapple soufflé in his victim’s house right after killing him.’

‘What you have to remember is that Mr Bryant sometimes confuses real-life investigations with what he’s read in old horror comics. I can’t believe that McFarland shot his wife in the face, went home, stripped off and went to sleep. Admittedly he might have changed if he thought there was residue on his clothes, but the clothes he had in a bundle were the ones he was wearing earlier.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘You mean apart from the fact that he told me? There were no other bloody clothes in or around the flat! And who’d make up a story as mad as his? Have you ever heard the like? A
credit card
? Why not come up with a normal alibi, or any alibi at all? At home, asleep? Really?’

‘I know, but—’

‘He says they offered to kill his wife for him, so does he tell us he said, “Are you crazy, don’t do that?” No, he asks how they know about his wife, gets no answer and then agrees with them that yes, right now he’d pretty much like to strangle her with his own bare hands. And they ring off before he can say anything else. Now, if you think he was lying in bed waiting for us to call – knowing that he’d be first in line to get picked up – and plotting out that scenario as a foolproof alibi, then you’re as daft as he is. And there’s the bullet. Keith Wallace reckons it was specifically made for the most expensive gun in the world, which sort of fits with the concierge thing, don’t you think? A high-end operation? Something a bit out of Ian McFarland’s league?’

‘What, are you going to tell me there’s some kind of new company offering this as a regular service?’ Bimsley asked. ‘I must have missed that episode of
Dragon’s Den
.’

‘I’m saying it’s a set-up. You’re not very thorough. Did you not read his charge sheet properly? Mr McFarland’s first conviction was for fraud. He was caught selling fake antiques in Portobello Market, said he was trying to raise money for the kids of wounded soldiers.’

‘That just proves he’s an accomplished liar, doesn’t it?’

‘No, because he really
was
trying to raise money for them. What he didn’t do was bother to check where the antiques were coming from. I think somebody sent him the card because they heard he was a bit of a mug. And where could they have found that out?’

‘From the people he fenced the antiques for?’

‘From his
wife
,’ said May wearily. ‘He was out of the country for two tours of duty, and she hooked up with this fellow Finnegan.’

‘Then he had all the more reason to want her dead.’

‘Let me guess, when you were at school you were the one at the back of the class mucking around with his mates instead of paying attention, weren’t you?’

Bimsley picked a lump of muesli off his shirt. ‘It’s funny you should say that because—’

‘It was a rhetorical question.’ May sighed. ‘McFarland has a gullible nature. He didn’t realize he was being used to fence smuggled goods, he didn’t notice that his wife was having an affair, and when he
did
find out, he was daft enough to walk into a pub and take a slice out of her lover’s arm.’

‘And that’s why you think it was a set-up?’ asked Colin, frowning again.

May rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘What more do you need?’

‘The credit card,’ Bimsley said.

‘He says it freaked him out and he threw it away.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘I can see I’m going to have to play my ace,’ said May. ‘I’ve got the phone call. It’s true it might sound to an untutored ear – yours, for example – like an agreement to let someone kill his wife, but it proves he was talking to a third party.’

‘They traced it?’

‘To a chuckaway.’

‘So what do we do now?’

May peered out of the dirty window and checked the sky. ‘We pay a visit to the boyfriend, Jake Finnegan. A Jake, in the common underworld parlance of Glasgow, whence our Mr Finnegan hails, is a person addicted to class A substances who has a poor quality of life as a consequence. Mr Finnegan has a spectacular history of prosecution for drugs offences, yet he managed to raise the capital for one of London’s most expensive restaurants, presumably by teaming up with Ribisi. Besides, when you’ve interviewed the cuckold, you owe it to them to do the same with the cuckolder.’

‘I’m not sure I understand—’ Colin began.

‘I think the Water House started out as a money laundry. And now its owners are expanding, offering hitmen for hire. It’s Ribisi. He’s bringing the Mafia to London.’ May pointed at the nearest keyboard. ‘See if you can get your fat little fingers working on that and tell me how many unsolved gun crimes we’ve had this year. It’d be interesting if it turned out that Mr McFarland wasn’t the only one enjoying the privileges of club membership.’

‘Don’t leave the city without telling us or I’ll be chasing you naked down the street again,’ John May had told him, but Ian knew they would be back as soon as their other leads failed. He had been conned again, and the possibility of going back to jail, this time for a much longer stretch, was starting to look like a probability. Unless he could find the card.

The whole thing was a mess. As he trudged miserably through the sodden
Metro
newspapers discarded on the Euston Road, he tried to recall the exact words of the phone call.

‘We could kill your wife.’

An incredulous pause. And then him joking: ‘I think I’ll take you up on that, mate. I feel like strangling her myself.’ And the line going dead.

The call had unsettled him. He’d have written it off as a prank set up by his army mates if it hadn’t been for the fact that the service being offered chimed uncomfortably with his darkest thoughts. Mandy had ruined his life. He had trusted her implicitly, and she had taken advantage of him. And now she was dead.

He’d been set up. But unexpectedly, the set-up had failed. He’d been taken to some weird dump of a place that looked nothing like a regular police station, and they had decided, against all odds, to let him go. He knew he should have kept the credit card instead of chucking it into the river, but the damned thing had messed with his head. Now it was all that could prove his innocence.

He thought about Mandy. She had behaved appallingly, but he would never hurt a woman. What had she done to get herself killed? She’d always had a mouth on her. He’d heard rumours about the boyfriend’s business partner, but he couldn’t afford to get involved. Actually, right now he couldn’t afford anything. He had no job and no savings, he owed back-rent and didn’t have a penny left over for the utilities. He headed back to the Over Easy Diner to pick up his last day’s wages.

Golden wasn’t her real name, but nobody could pronounce that because she came from Vietnam and, in a moment of spectacular misjudgement, had married the café’s owner after meeting him on his holiday in Hanoi. When she wasn’t working as a manicurist she waitressed at the Over Easy, and made good tips from men who felt guilty about making a play for her.

‘Ian, what are you doing back here?’ she hissed as he walked in, looking alarmed.

‘Came to collect my pay is all,’ he said, taking a stack of dirty plates and setting them down behind the counter from force of habit.

‘Someone’s been looking for you. A man in expensive clothes. Kind of creepy-looking.’ For Golden to think a man was creepy in this neighbourhood, he had to be very unpleasant indeed. ‘You’re not in any trouble, are you?’

Ian looked at her. She was as beautiful as her name, and the less she got involved, the better. She seemed so innocent that he couldn’t help but worry. ‘Why, did he say something?’

‘He left a card. Hold on.’ Wiping her hands on her apron, she ducked into the kitchen and came back with it.

‘Alessandro Ribisi – LondonLink Direct Holdings’.

The card was black and silver, and exactly matched the credit card he had been sent. He knew at once it was Ribisi who had set him up, making him trot out a tall tale to incriminate himself. He knew a couple of other things about Ribisi, things his wife had told him: one, that he was a barely functioning crazy on anti-psychotic medication, two, that he was Mafia, over from Naples.

With nothing to lose now, he headed to the address on the card.

LondonLink Direct was up by Drayton Park and the new Arsenal football ground, in an anonymous two-floor 1970s office building that looked like the kind of place contractors pulled down after finding asbestos in the ceilings. He didn’t call first; on this occasion, he decided that the element of surprise would work in his favour.

Except that it was lunchtime, and Ribisi was out. He wasn’t expected back today.

Brilliant
, Ian thought.
You should get a job as a private detective.

There was one other place to try.

‘Four unsolved deaths in the Dalston area this year,’ said John May, tapping at the map on his screen with the end of a breadstick. Colin’s diet required him to get through boxes of the things. ‘Five if you count McFarland. Makes for quite interesting reading, this. Don’t show it around; they’ll all want to jump aboard.’

‘Not if it turns out to be a complete waste of time,’ said Bimsley gloomily.

‘It won’t. He’s offering a proper bespoke service. There’s been talk around town for a while now about something being set up called the Elimination Bureau. The Met treated it as a joke.’ May scratched the back of his hand thoughtfully. ‘What do you do when you want to set up a new business? Try to kill the competition. You can see the possibilities.’

‘Finnegan’s running a gold mine in that restaurant. What would he want to jeopardize something like that for?’

‘Who said anything about Finnegan?’ he countered. ‘I’m talking about Ribisi. Finnegan’s no Stephen Hawking. He’ll be doing the heavy lifting. Ribisi’s the ideas man. Let’s find out where they are. It’s time we paid them a visit.’

Although the police had finished with the Water House, it was still shut for business. The gate was locked and a police sign read: ‘Closed until further notice’. Already, a pile of flyers and newspapers had blown behind the grille across the entrance, giving the darkened building a derelict air.

Inside, the reservations hotline had been overloaded with unanswered complaints all morning, so Jake Finnegan had summoned his partner to discuss what to do. He was always wary of meeting up with Alessandro because you could never tell what might happen, but right now he needed the Italian. As he entered the cocktail-bar section of the ground floor, he flicked on the battery of lights behind the onyx-tiled serving counter and poured himself a rich Islay malt, leaving the bottle out.