Cold Killers (2 page)

The Marbella sun was strong, even in winter, but it was interrupted by the occasional storm, which brought clarity to the air. It was hot enough for an Englishman abroad. Tony
Butcher had lived on the Golden Mile for over twenty years. And, over those years, he had grown to hate the sun. Where it used to warm his bones, now it scorched them. It shrivelled his skin and,
when he looked into the mirror, he saw a parody of his former self. He saw the shape of his skeleton. He saw his skull pushing through his face.

He had been a smart man once, a ‘man about town’. His wardrobe was still stocked with brightly coloured silk ruffled shirts and brocade waistcoats. He had a large collection of hats
neatly stacked in a temperature-controlled closet. Nowadays, though, he preferred his uniform of baggy, washed-out combat shorts with a canvas belt and a vest from Ibiza.

Tony looked at his bare feet as he walked through the long cool room, which had a veranda on three of its sides. He watched each foot spread across the cold marble as his weight shifted from one
to the other. This was his trophy room. He would recount how he shot most of the animals on the walls, but, at best, he told half-truths. The killer lion, whose head had pride of place between the
two sets of French windows leading to the veranda facing the sea, was a man-eater, so he claimed, but he had not shot it. He’d bought it from a restaurant in Namibia, where it had been hung
on the wall. He had shot a giraffe. There was one jutting out from the corner of the room. With its long thick neck and small head, it had taken Tony twelve attempts to shoot the giraffe that day.
In the end, a real hunter had stepped in to end the animal’s suffering. The giraffe was in such a mess that the giraffe on the wall wasn’t even the one that Tony had tried to kill. This
was one that had been bred in captivity, and was killed by an Italian tourist who couldn’t be bothered to have it mounted and flown home and hadn’t even bothered to get out of his car
to shoot it.

Tony stopped before the television screen on the wall. Sky News was relaying live footage from the funeral in Bethnal Green. The broadcaster was fleshing out the slow progress with a criminal
history of the Butchers. For the umpteenth time that day Tony Butcher heard his name linked with the Great Diamond Heist of ’91. They talked about him and Eddie being sent down for their part
in disposing of the diamonds.

‘Say something we don’t all fucking know. You didn’t know how it was done then, and you don’t know now.’ Tony laughed at the image of him and Eddie being led away
to Wandsworth Prison in ’92.

‘Handsome-looking devil!’ he said about himself, and then turned away and sighed irritably. He went to stand by the open French windows and looked out to the sea beyond. The horizon
was sparkling, the sea was a colder colour blue that you only saw in winter: deep, dark, sapphire. He could hear the noise of traffic coming from the Golden Mile. He heard the sound of horns
beeping. The sparrows chattered in the garden below as they washed their feathers in the spray from the fountains. Years ago all these elements would have charmed him, made him feel relaxed and
happy with his world, but not now. Tony ached to ride his motorboat on the sea; he wanted to drive one of his many cars at break-neck speed along the Golden Mile, beeping his horn all the way. He
hated the noise of the sparrows. They seemed to say,
What you going to do, Tony? What you going to do?
Over and over again. He tried hard to ignore them but his senses were so highly tuned
that he could not. It made his blood boil. He had bought a falcon six months ago; he was going to train it to pick them off one by one, but it had attacked him and escaped and sometimes he thought
he saw it flying up in the sky. Sometimes he watched the vapour trails from planes and the brightness made his eyes water. It made him cry.

He turned his head to listen; his ears were too sensitive to every sound. Like a bat, he registered every small vibration in the house. Above the noise from the television and the sparrows, he
heard the faint creaking of movement in the house. Somewhere, there were footsteps shuffling, someone was sliding, instead of walking properly. He felt instantly furious. If the maids didn’t
start picking up one foot in front of another, he muttered to himself, he’d cut their legs off and make them shuffle around on their arses. Tony laughed to himself as he remembered a child he
knew on his street. Disabled from thalidomide, small stunted arms and legs, and they carried him around as if he were a prince. Tony had envied him and so had stolen the boy’s pet rabbit and
hung it from a tree in the woods. No one found the rabbit for days and Tony had been back many times to watch it decompose. Now the smell of that animal rotting was never far from his nose. The
fizzy smell of decomposition both repelled and excited him.

Tony looked down at the hairs on his shins and felt each follicle open, breathe, and the hair grow, and he began scratching furiously until his legs were bleeding. He stood wide-eyed and panting
from the exertion, skin and flesh beneath his nails. He felt his skull throb as it pushed against the skin on his face.

He knew he was beyond stir-crazy. He had become part of the dust that spun in the sunshine, part of the walls that closed in on him, one piece of the mosaic floor. He was one of the sparrows. He
turned at the words from the commentator.

Tony can’t leave his luxury villa.

He stamped his foot and swore at the television before crossing to the coffee table and tipping out cocaine from the packet he kept in a jewellery box. He tapped away angrily, chopping the
cocaine up to a fine powder with a credit card, moving it around meticulously and scraping it into fine straight lines. He picked up a rolled note and hoovered up a long line. Then he sat back to
allow it to settle down his throat.

‘
 
“Tony can’t leave his luxury villa,”
 
’ he mimicked. ‘Oh yes, he can, and he will, when he’s ready. When I come out of this place the whole world will
know about it. I haven’t been sat here on my arse for nothing. I’ve been incubating and I’m about ready to hatch.’ He grinned at the image of himself he had in his mind. A
flying moth, bigger than an eagle, flying above the planes fighting with the falcon.

He turned sharply at the noise of the fireworks on the television and ran towards the screen. He began to roar: ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’

‘How are things now?’

In Fletcher House, DI Carter was still watching the scene from outside St Matthew’s Church, when his colleague Detective Sergeant Willis walked in. She’d come straight from Bethnal
Green.

‘The paramedics had to perform CPR on one lad. He was lucky: the knife just missed his heart. No one from the crowd was hurt in the panic. Just the gangs causing trouble.’

Carter sighed, relieved. He knew that, even though the day hadn’t gone as well as he had hoped, it could have been worse.

‘Did they scrape Eddie Butcher back up okay?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Just about,’ Willis replied. ‘It would have been funny, except it wasn’t.’

‘Oh, believe me, it made us smile, didn’t it, Robbo?’

‘Absolutely not.’ Robbo hid a grin behind a cough.

Pam, at the third desk in the room, peered from around the side of her monitor and scowled at Robbo and Carter in turn.

Carter held up his hands in the air.

‘Apologies, Pam.’

Pam was a civilian who worked mainly on collating data from the Internet and monitoring social media groups for investigations. She and Robbo had worked together for twenty years, since back in
the day when Robbo was a serving police officer before he was forced to take retirement and chose to retrain as a crime analyst.

Willis took off her jacket and threw it over the back of the chair then dropped the black peak cap onto the desk.

Carter looked at it in disgust.

‘Where did you get that?’ he asked. ‘I couldn’t work out what you looked like: tired single parent or drug dealer.’

‘Lost property. I was going for a bit of both.’

‘Well, put it in the bin, for Christ’s sake.’

Willis moved it from on top of the desk to underneath it. She intended to keep it.

Carter swung round in his chair, stood and went across to help himself to a coffee from the cafetière on top of the filing cabinet.

Willis opened up the post-mortem report on Eddie Butcher.

She read out loud, ‘No alcohol, no drugs. No food in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten for twelve hours.’ She stood and went across to pin up a photo of Eddie Butcher from the
post-mortem. ‘Cause of death – still awaiting results on the organs. He was reverse-hung,’ she said, ‘with his hands tied behind his back by the wrists; then he was
suspended. It caused his shoulders to dislocate.’

‘Strappado,’ said Robbo. ‘It’s a recognised form of torture, normally accompanied by electric-shock treatment. The Colombians love it.’

Willis pinned up the photographs of small pairs of wounds around the genitalia of the victim.

‘Two electrode points which caused fifty-eight injury sites of second-degree burns made by a Taser-type machine.’ She added a close-up of Eddie Butcher’s left hand.
‘Nails were pulled, probably using point-edged pliers.’

‘Nasty. So they came prepared?’ Carter said, as he swivelled in his chair and watched her pin up the photos. ‘Very professional. If this was done for fun, then they make a
habit of it. If this was for information, pretty sure they would have found out what they needed to know.’

‘That’s if he knew the answers to their questions,’ answered Robbo. ‘For a man who builds houses for a living, he’s died a pretty violent death. He must have pissed
off some South American cartel to get his tongue dragged through his neck.’

‘Builds houses using what kind of money?’ asked Carter. ‘Laundered? Stolen? I suppose that’s the question. You can take the man out of the villainous East End, but can
you take the East End villain out of the man? This isn’t your average property developer who might get a loan from the bank, this is a man who kick-started his career by stealing from other
people.’

Pam stopped her typing to look up over her reading glasses.

‘Just found a photo of Eddie’s corpse on the Internet,’ she said. ‘He was still in the car park when this was taken.’

Carter went across to look at her screen.

‘Yeah, got to be one of the bin men; probably took a selfie, too. A photo was bound to be leaked to the press. It’s been a month since he was murdered. I’m surprised they
waited this long,’ said Carter, walking back to his desk. ‘Sign of the times, I’m afraid.’

‘The bin men must see a lot of death,’ said Willis, as she stood back to study the images she’d pinned up so far. ‘Drug overdoses, homeless.’

‘Not usually tortured, with a bullet between the eyes and a tongue pulled through his neck.’ Carter sat upright and took a swig of coffee. He was watching the church on the screen.
‘Okay, here we go, they’re coming out.’

Willis and Robbo came across to look at Carter’s screen together.

‘There’s Laurence Butcher with Sandra now,’ said Robbo. ‘He’s always been a mummy’s boy. Not sure who’s supporting who. Sandra looks like she’s
carrying him.’ Robbo squinted at the screen. ‘Those two women at the back, with hats, are Sandra’s sisters. Harold’s ex-wife, Lucinda, is there. Her kids: Harold’s
stepkids.’

The family were thanking mourners outside the church as people passed them one by one. Della Butcher took her place at the end of the line of family members. She turned her head from the rain
that was driving sideways, and the net across her face lifted in the wind.

‘Are any of Della Butcher’s family there?’ asked Willis.

‘No,’ answered Carter. ‘We’ll get a detailed list when Intel has had time to look at all this footage.’

‘His widow looks different from what I expected,’ said Willis. ‘I thought she’d be more of a footballer’s wife type, but she’s dressed a lot more discreetly
than his mother Sandra with her fur-trimmed coat and diamonds. Plus, she looks young.’ Willis looked at her notes. ‘Eddie Butcher was what, fifty-two?’

‘She’s thirty-eight,’ answered Carter. ‘She married Eddie in 2004.’ Willis glanced across to see if Carter was reading the information, but he wasn’t.

They watched the coffin being loaded inside the hearse. It was now wrapped in a Union flag, to hide the damage done by the reversing wheels of the carriage.

‘I thought the immediate mourners are supposed to leave together, in the same car,’ said Willis. ‘Della’s gone in the one with Harold’s ex-wife. Is that
significant?’

‘Yeah,’ said Carter, ‘that’s what she is to them now, an ex-wife, back of the queue.’

Robbo glanced across at Pam. ‘What’s their itinerary?’

‘From here, they’re going for a private burial in Chingford Cemetery. They have a plot near the Krays. Then they’re staying in the area for a wake in a country estate on the
edge of Epping Forest. It’s a place called Giddewell Park.’

‘It’s a pretty low-key affair,’ said Willis. ‘Only the immediate relatives and close friends are invited. The family are staying the night there.’

Robbo looked at Carter. ‘Are you going out there?’

Carter shook his head. ‘I have no intention of driving out there. Plus, we’ve spent enough taxpayers’ money on policing the funeral. I don’t care if someone wants to
shoot the lot of them.’

‘I think that’s interesting,’ said Willis. She had walked back across to the photos of Eddie Butcher’s injuries. ‘Someone killed him first then pulled the tongue
through afterwards. It was as if they were slightly uncomfortable with killing him like that, so they dispatched him with a bullet.’

‘They might have run out of time,’ said Robbo as he walked across to join her.

‘But they definitely wanted us to know this had to do with the cartels. Cartels on British soil. Or British cartels?’

Tony was still shaking with rage. The television screen was frozen on the anguished face of his mother Sandra cradling his brother’s corpse. Tony hadn’t moved from
the spot for thirty minutes, then he heard the sound of the main gates opening. He took long slow breaths as he forced himself calm. He turned the television off and walked out to greet the people
he was expecting. Two men got out of the car. One was Marco, a tall, blond mix of Dutch and Colombian: big-boned and sallow-skinned, with a man-bun and low-slung pinstriped trousers, a big-buckled
designer belt and a black, open-chested shirt. The other was a Spaniard and shorter, dressed in a dark-blue business suit and tie; he was carrying a briefcase. Tony was watching from the hallway,
his bare feet on the mosaic sundial.