Cleanskin (3 page)

O
F COURSE
, M
AX
C
ARTER
kicked us out of the office ahead of Farrell. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d had a discreet tail on us to make sure we left the building. Ben and I crossed the street and bought a couple of overpriced coffees that had longer names than most of the people I knew. Ben checked that all the stake-out teams were in place. We put our earpieces in so we could hear the radio traffic, then we stared glumly at each other.

‘Why do I feel like we’re on the road to nowhere?’ I said.

‘Because that’s what Farrell wants you to feel?’

I took a sip. My coffee tasted burnt. It made me wonder how those expensive coffee shops ever caught on in the first place. ‘Maybe. Or maybe not. I got the initial forensics report this morning. They’ve got nothing to go on. The petrol could have come from any one of three
thousand odd petrol stations. They got in through the garden door at the far end of the hall, bypassed the alarm sensor on the door. Not exactly easy, but not rocket science either. They left no prints, and the wire they used to bypass the alarm could have been bought anywhere. Any other trace of evidence was destroyed by the fire.’

‘It’s a right bastard, fire,’ Ben said.

Before I could agree, voices crackled in my ear. ‘He’s on the move,’ I said, listening hard.

‘He’s in lift number six,’ I heard. ‘Kirsty’s in with him. Going down.’

A pause, then, ‘He hasn’t got out on the ground floor. I couldn’t see if he’s still in the lift.’

DC Kirsty Blythe’s voice cut in next. ‘We’re on the lower car park level. Subject headed left.’ Static crackled in my ear. I was on my feet now, swigging back the coffee and heading for the door. We had two unmarked cars in the car park, one on each level. ‘Oh shit,’ I heard Kirsty say. ‘There’s three identical white vans parked side by side. Target’s walked in behind them. I can’t see which van he’s got into.’

Now we were running, Ben and me. No clear
plan of action, except that we couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. A black cab came towards us and I hailed him, dragging my warrant card out of my pocket and waving it at him as we piled in. ‘Swing round so we can see the exit of the car park for that building there,’ I shouted.

Muttering something rude, he did as I asked. We had just got into position when the first of three white vans emerged at the top of the ramp. The first one went left, the second and third right. Our unmarked cars were hot on their tails, one swinging in either direction. I told the cabbie to tuck in on the right.

Ben got on his mobile to the tail car we were behind and told him to stay with the lead van and to leave the second one to us. But I knew we were completely screwed. It’s not like on the telly where they make it look like a piece of piss to follow a car without being spotted. You can’t tail a vehicle without them realizing it unless you’ve got two or more cars on the job. It’s fine on main routes in the city or out on the motorway. But as soon as you start moving through side streets or country roads, it’s all over. Your target knows you’re there, so they
either lead you in the wrong direction or they lose you.

Our van led us north, sticking with main roads all the way. We ended up horsing it up the M11 towards Cambridge. After about an hour of stupidity, the van turned off and drove down country lanes, bringing us at last to the car park of a village pub. The van pulled in while we hung back, trying to pretend there was nothing unusual about a London taxi idling in some Essex hamlet.

The van driver knew, of course. He got out and walked round to the back of the van. He opened the doors then turned and waved to us. ‘Smartarse,’ Ben growled.

‘Go and check, all the same,’ I said.

Ben gave me a dirty look but did as he was told. He walked down the lane and into the car park, casting an idle glance at the open van as he strolled towards the pub. He walked inside. A moment later my phone rang. ‘Clean as a whistle,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll be back out as soon as I’ve finished my pint.’

Neither of the other tail cars had done any better. The van that had turned left had headed into Central London then doubled back. They’d
lost him when he shot through a set of traffic lights on the Farringdon Road just as they turned to red. He’d nearly been sideswiped by a bus, but he’d made it.

Our boys hadn’t.

The third van had ended up going through the Dartford Tunnel and heading round the M25. They’d lost him in the approach to some roadworks, when a lorry had cut in front of our car at the last minute as the lanes merged. By the time our guy could get clear, there was no chance of reconnecting with the right white van.

At the end of the meeting in Max Carter’s office, I’d almost been convinced that Farrell’s grief was real. But the stunt with the vans was so like the old Jack Farrell that I didn’t know what to think.

O
VER THE NEXT FEW
days, I got more and more wound up about Jack Farrell. It was as if he had gone up in a puff of smoke. We had sources inside his posse, but they swore that they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the top man. Riley and Chu had never been more visible nor more busy, but as far as Farrell was concerned, he might as well have been the invisible man.

Martina had finally surfaced enough to tell us she didn’t know where her husband was. She didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about her husband going off the map in the wake of her only child’s murder. Which just goes to show how true it is that the very rich are very different from the rest of us. All she seemed to care about was when she could hold the funeral.

Of course, we were also nosing around, trying to put a face to the mystery man who had had the balls to take such a terrible step against
Farrell. But we were getting nowhere on that either. Nobody, it seemed, was prepared to admit they were bold or stupid enough to have taken Katie Farrell’s life. It was a genuine mystery.

I missed Stella too. OK, sometimes I didn’t see her outside work from one week’s end to the next. But that was different from knowing she wasn’t around at all. Every night when I got home, pissed off and pent up, I poured myself a large brandy and wished she was there to share it. Then I fell into bed and slept like the dead. Given that, maybe it was just as well she was away.

Five days after the murder of Katie Farrell, something shifted. One of my snouts called me. ‘I got something for you,’ he began. No names, no pack drill, that’s how these exchanges go. ‘We need a face to face.’

Two hours later, I was sitting in the back row of a cinema out in the sticks watching a very strange Danish/Scottish film about a homeless transvestite. Sometimes this job is just plain madness. Half an hour into the film, a figure slipped into the seat next to mine.

‘All right, Mr Martin?’

‘I’d be happier if you had better taste in films, Shanky,’ I grunted.

‘I thought we’d be safe here from any of Jack Farrell’s mob,’ Shanky said.

All at once I regained the will to live. ‘You got something on Farrell?’ I said.

‘Not
on
Farrell, as such. More
about
Farrell, you might say.’

‘Can we get to the point, Shanky? I haven’t got time for one of your round-the-houses tales.’

‘This is worth something, Mr Martin,’ he said. ‘More than the usual.’

‘Shanky, I’ll take care of you. Just give me what you’ve got.’ It’s always a bloody to-and-fro with snouts. All they care about is how much kudos or cash they can squeeze out of you. I hate having to deal with them, but it’s part and parcel of how the game works.

‘He’s shedding,’ Shanky said.

‘What?’ For a moment, I had a bizarre image of Jack Farrell as a shaggy dog, leaving his hairs on the chairs.

‘He’s off-loading. He’s selling off the business in chunks. All for cash. The girls have already gone to some Lithuanian godfather. Danny
Chu’s selling his soul to raise enough cash to take over the drugs, and Fancy Riley’s got his name down for the loan-sharking. All the other stuff – it’s up for grabs. He’s talking to people he’s been at daggers drawn with for years. People who’ve tried to take it off him and failed. He’s sitting down with slags he wouldn’t normally be seen dead with.’

I could hardly believe it. ‘What’s his game?’

Shanky cleared his throat, a wet, sloppy sound. ‘They’re saying it’s his kid. That he’s lost it.’

‘And has he?’

Shanky shifted in his seat. ‘Jack Farrell? I don’t think so. He’s still not taking any crap from anybody. He might be selling up, but he’s not giving it away. I think he’s just had enough. He wants to cash in his chips and fuck off to the sun.’

‘Where’s he living?’ I asked.

‘No fucking idea,’ Shanky said. ‘He’s got a boat down Southampton, that’s where he’s doing the meetings. But he’s not living there. What I hear, Fancy takes him off at the end of the day in a big fuck-off speedboat and they’re off down the estuary.’

I asked some more, but Shanky had given me all he knew. I handed over an envelope of cash, promising him another wedge if he could come up with any more info.

Back at the office, Ben and I chewed over Shanky’s info. It didn’t make sense to me. If he was so upset by Katie’s death, how could he be arsed to jump through all the hoops involved in taking apart something on this scale? But if he wasn’t upset by Katie’s death, why bother doing it at all?

‘Maybe he needs the money,’ Ben said.

‘You don’t think he’s got enough salted away in his various accounts?’

‘Can you ever have enough?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what I do wish I knew. I wish I knew what the hell he’s planning on doing with all that money.’

I
F
I’
D MADE A LIST
of possible reasons why Jack Farrell was turning his business empire into cash, I would never have come up with the truth. But a couple of days later, it seemed as if my question had been answered in a very strange way.

I was sitting in my office, working through what little material we’d gathered on Farrell’s bargain basement sale. I was glad to be back in my own office, glad to shake the country bumpkin dust of Hampshire off my shoes. Then Ben walked in, a sheet of paper in his hand.

‘What do you know about John Stonehouse?’ he said.

‘Labour Cabinet minister in the Sixties, fiddled a load of money he couldn’t pay back,’ I said, dredging my memory. ‘Faked a suicide by leaving his clothes on a beach in America with a suicide note. Turned up with his mistress in Australia, where the cops picked him up
because they thought he was Lord Lucan. Got extradited, did time. What is this? You doing the
Daily Mail
quick quiz again?’

‘Ha ha,’ Ben said, dropping the paper on my desk in front of me. ‘Just in from our friends in Hampshire.’

I read the memo and whistled. ‘And they believe this?’

‘His tailor says it’s his suit, his cobbler says he made the shoes for him, and Max Carter says he did indeed witness the signature, though he didn’t know what the note said.’

‘Do you believe it?’ I asked.

Ben threw himself into the chair opposite mine. ‘No. You don’t raise a king’s ransom in cash then top yourself. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘It does if you want to provide for your widow. Martina couldn’t run Farrell’s business. Even if he was shagging the Spanish nanny, there was still something there with the wife. They still shared a bed, Ben. The only way to make sure she was all right was to make a dash for cash and then stash it somewhere we wouldn’t find it.’

Ben looked at me, his mouth open and his eyes wide. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You think
Jack Farrell topped himself? You really think the king of smoke and mirrors did himself in?’

I shook my head. ‘Not for a minute. But I can see how you could make an argument for it. The guy was destroyed by his kid’s death. He couldn’t go on. But he cared enough for the mother of his child to make sure she would be OK. It’s a strong case and if we’re going to knock it down, we need facts. And we haven’t got anything on our side of the argument except the fact that we don’t appear to have a body. What do we know about the tides and currents where he went in?’

Ben rolled his eyes and got to his feet. ‘I’m on it.’

Within the hour, we knew three things about the part of the English Channel where Jack Farrell’s clothes had been found. One was that quite a few people choose that part of the coast as their jumping-off point for suicide. Two was that bodies usually took a week to ten days to make their way to shore about fifteen miles west of where they’d gone in. And three was that the combination of marine life and shipping meant the bodies tended to be pretty well mashed up.

While the official line might be that Jack Farrell had topped himself, in private we knew we had to wait and see.

As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait very long. Eight days later, we got the call from Dorset police. A body had washed up on a beach near Poole and they had reason to believe (as some cops still feel the need to say) that we might be interested in taking a look at it. Why might that be, we asked. On account of the tattoos, they said, a bit stiff.

Ben didn’t hang about. It was pedal to the metal with our blue light flashing all the way down there. I missed Stella every mile of the way. Sure, she wasn’t the only competent pathologist in the world. But we made a good team. She understood what we needed, she was fast and she was damn good in the witness box.

Usually a body that’s been in the sea a couple of weeks is hard to identify. The face and head get bashed about against rocks. Fingerprints get nibbled by crabs. Bodies change shape in the water. They get bloated and stop looking like themselves. That’s when you need a pathologist to read the body and tell you what you’re
looking at. And to take the samples so you can check DNA.

We knew from the Dorset cops that this corpse’s head and hands were in bad shape. But as soon as we walked into the mortuary, I knew we weren’t going to need Stella to identify this particular corpse. The colours were faded, the shapes contorted because the skin was stretched and torn. But the tattoos were unmistakable.

The dragon I’d seen on the night of the fire still covered his torso, its tail snaking down his naked groin to taper to an end on his left thigh. The flame of its breath was dulled now, but we could still see it clearly crossing the right side of his chest, climbing up to his shoulder. One arm was torn off halfway down, but the top half of the samurai remained. On the other arm, the woman looked like she’d gained weight and needed an appointment with the hairdresser.

I reckoned we didn’t need to bother Martina. I could ID Jack Farrell on the spot. It looked like I’d been wrong again.

All the same, I did ask the pathologist to take samples for DNA testing. I wanted to compare it with Katie’s DNA and with the DNA we’d got
from the clothes and the note left on the beach.

Like they say, it’s best to use a long spoon when you sup with the devil.