Incinerator (8 page)

“The who?” I said.

“Didn’t think so,” said Sherwood. He smiled because he knew something I didn’t, and sat back in his kid-leather executive chair. “OK, you want to negotiate new terms for your loan.” I noticed he wasn’t talking about Delroy’s loan any more, and I had a feeling any negotiations were going to be a bit one-sided. “Dean tells me you’re running a gym. Does it make any money?”

“We get by,” I said.

“You lease the place or own it?”

I knew what Sherwood wanted to hear. “I own it,” I lied. Maybe he had heard that Nicky had disappeared, but he didn’t know she’d disappeared before I’d managed to buy the freehold of the building, or he wouldn’t have asked.

“Who’s got the title deeds?”

“I have,” I lied some more.

“Well then, let’s say three grand a month, for two years, using this business of yours as collateral,” he said. “Bring the title deeds round here Monday and we’ll draw up the papers.”

“I don’t have a lawyer any more,” I said.

“Not a problem.” He smiled. “Mine will look after the paperwork. All part of the service.”

I’d never afford those payments, I knew, but that’s how Sherwood wanted it. He had no interest in owning a gym—he wasn’t the sort of guy who’d get up at five to mop a floor, and I doubted he would ask Dean to do it. He was planning to shut it down, gut the building, flog it for flats and walk away with the profit. Except that was never going to happen, because I didn’t own the building. But he didn’t need to know that yet.

Lying had given give me time to think of something. Right now it was important to look reluctant.

“I own the business with Delroy. I need to discuss it with him.”

“What’s to discuss? Tell him. He got you into this.”

“It’s not just my business—that’s my home,” I protested. “If you take it over, where do I live?”

“Make your payments and it won’t be an issue,” said Sherwood. “And if you come up short, drag yourself to Russia and borrow it from McGovern.” He flicked his head at Dean, who heaved himself upright and slouched over to open the door.

“Did you ever meet Nicky Hale?” I said.

Sherwood blinked, as if annoyed at me for changing the subject. “Never heard of him,” he said.

The doors to Sherwood’s office slammed shut behind me, and I tugged my collar up against the rain. It had been a shot in the dark anyway. Sherwood was going to benefit from Nicky’s disappearance, sure, but he was small-time, a punk and a bully—I couldn’t believe he’d have had a solicitor abducted just to get his hands on my tatty little gym.

So who was this new guy, the Turk? Sherwood hadn’t just heard of him, he’d talked to him, judging by the smug way he dropped his nickname. It seemed to me that boasting
about the big sharks you knew wasn’t a sensible thing for small fish like Sherwood to do. But that was his business, I decided, and it was high time I minded mine.

I had to come clean to Delroy. When things got sticky in the boxing ring I had always liked having Delroy in my corner, wiping me down, taping my cuts shut and telling me where I was going wrong. If he couldn’t offer advice he’d slag me off, wind me up and make me angry, and that used to work too. I just hoped that this time he wouldn’t get dragged into the ring with me.

“What are you going to do?” asked Delroy, as we wiped down the gym’s sparring kit in a quiet interval before the evening rush.

“I think as long as we keep making the payments,” I said, “I should be able to string him along.”

“How? We don’t turn over anything like that much.”

“I’ll cover it for now,” I said. The money Nicky hadn’t taken might keep Sherwood satisfied for a month or two. I could see Delroy wanted to protest, but he just nodded. He was out of his depth, I realized, and weak and ill and weary, and again I felt ashamed that I had ever got him involved in this business.

Delroy hung the last helmet up on a hook to dry off. “Oh yeah,” he remembered. “You
have a visitor.” I looked around. “She’s upstairs.” I would normally have expected him to announce news like that with a dirty grin, but he just looked grim, and abruptly I knew who it was.

Susan Horsfall was sitting on my ripped vinyl sofa, reading. She had draped my discarded shirts over the back and, I noted with some embarrassment, picked up my discarded underwear from the floor and put it in the bin liner I was using for dirty laundry.

“Make yourself at home,” I said.

She jumped, and looked up and laughed, a little nervously. “Finn. Hey. Sorry—your friend Delroy sent me up, and I thought you’d be here, or at least be back soon. And there wasn’t much in the way of reading material except these …” She held up one of the case files I had carried away from Nicky’s office. I decided this wasn’t the moment to explain why my place wasn’t strewn with novels and magazines. “How did you get hold of them?” she asked.

“They’re the files on Nicky’s other clients,” I said, ducking the question for Vora’s sake.

“You really think she hasn’t absconded? That something happened to her?”

“Presumably you do too,” I said, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

She wasn’t as cocky as the last time we’d met; she looked worried, and slightly ashamed. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said. “I kept thinking, what if you were right? It’s easier to believe she did do a runner, that she’s safe somewhere spending someone else’s money, than …”

“Whatever the alternative is,” I said.

“Nicky and I didn’t always get on,” said Susan. “I mean, there was a lot of crap in our childhood, and some of it was my fault. But the thought of her being taken, maybe being held prisoner, and nobody even knowing … it’s horrible. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone … even my cow of a sister.” I could see she was trying to lighten the darkness with a feeble gag, and it wasn’t working. I heard a catch in her throat, and the papers trembled in her hands.

“If you want to do something about it, you could help me,” I said.

“How?”

“You could tell me what’s in those files. I’m not the fastest reader in the world.”

“You think one of her clients might have had something to do with her disappearing?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “I’m just shaking all the trees to see what falls out.”

She turned back to the two box files. “There are only two personal clients here, as far as I can see,” she said. “Joan Bisham, and Jeremy Zeto.”

“Who’s Joan Bisham?”

“Property developer being charged with insurance fraud. A building her company bought—some old pub—mysteriously burned down, with two squatters inside. One of them died in the fire. This guy Leslie survived.” She passed me a photocopy of an article from what looked like a local free newspaper. The main picture was of a man in his thirties with half of his face swathed in bandages.

“Fraud? Why isn’t she being done for attempted murder?”

“Her husband got done for the fire. The insurers think she was in on it. The case comes to trial in a week or so.”

“What about the other file?”

“Zeto? There’s not much to that one. He’s a vicar being done for drink-driving.”

“All that paperwork for one drunk driver?”

“Nicky really went to town on the defence, by the look of it. Witness statements … psychiatric report …”

“Let me have a look.” I held out my hand and she passed the report to me. It was unreadable jargon, as I expected, but at least there wasn’t much of it—it was only two pages long. Maybe Zeto was paying for his own defence, and that was all he could afford. I dug through the rest of the papers in the box file. About a dozen witness statements, so dense and closely typed my eyes ached just glancing at them. What had Nicky been trying to do—drown the prosecution case under loads of bumpf?

Under that bundle was a single printout of a photo that seemed to have been blown up from a website mugshot, of a heavily built bloke in a cheap suit with jowls that bulged over his collar. A copper, I knew almost immediately, probably from the way his narrowed suspicious eyes seemed ready to follow me around the room. He wore a shallow grin that
suggested that while the picture was being taken the Met’s PR department was holding a gun to his kidneys.

“Who’s the filth?” I said.

“Officer in charge of the case, I think.”

I flipped the photo over. On the reverse was Nicky’s handwriting:
DS Ian
something.

“Can you read Nicky’s handwriting?” I asked, as casually as I could.

Susan glanced at it. “DS Ian Lovegrove,” she read out. “North Met Traffic division. There’s a phone number too, but no email … What do you suppose this is?” She held up a black square of plastic—a memory card. It must have been lying loose in the box file when Vora stuffed the copies into it.

“Let’s stick it in the PC and have a look,” I said.

My old Dell laptop wheezed and clanked into action, and after an age of waiting presented us with a desktop. I clicked on the icon for the SD slot, and we waited another hour or two for the window to open. I wished I’d bought a machine that wasn’t powered by elastic bands while I’d still been able to afford it.

The memory card held only one file, a digital
video. I double-clicked on it, aware of Susan hovering at my shoulder. She used the same scented soap as Nicky, I noticed, and deep down I felt a stab of desire.

The video was grainy black and white. The camera was mounted behind a windscreen, recording a journey along an anonymous stretch of night-time motorway. White numbers flickered in the corner—the time and date, I supposed. The viewpoint seemed quite high, which suggested the vehicle was either a coach or a truck, travelling in the middle lane, overtaking vans and caravans on one side and being overtaken on the other by speeding saloons and big four-by-fours. These days a lot of trucks had cameras in the cab, I knew, to act like black-box flight recorders, providing footage that could be used in the case of an accident. The figure in the corner of the picture flickered between 64 and 65—presumably the speed of the truck the camera was mounted in. I kept my eye on the overtaking lane to the right, waiting to see this demon vicar come tearing past, when in the middle of the screen a shifting constellation of brake lights dead
ahead burst into life, flashing, weaving, and swerving from side to side.

Zeto’s tinny little hatchback wasn’t overtaking the truck—it was coming straight towards it at top speed down the wrong side of the motorway, in the middle lane. I’d heard God moved in mysterious ways, but how he’d managed to keep Zeto from killing himself and twenty other drivers was sure as hell a mystery to me. The truck with the camera mounted in its cab jammed on its brakes while cars ahead of it lurched and rear-ended and side-swiped each other to get out of Zeto’s way. Finally one white box-van with nowhere to go slammed into Zeto’s car, not quite head-on, piling it into the central barrier and leaving it perched there with one wheel hanging off, while the box-van rocked and wobbled to a halt behind a crowd of dented, crumpled vehicles. The camera truck too had slewed to a halt, and the video showed dazed drivers climbing groggily out their cars before the image froze, crumpled and cut to white noise.

“Jesus,” I said. “This could make us a fortune on YouTube.”

“Finn, this is evidence in a court case,” said Susan. “We shouldn’t even be watching it.”

“Relax,” I said. “I’ll send it back. Once I’ve copied it.” I clicked on the file and dragged it to my desktop. The laptop grunted and wheezed as it started copying the file. It would only take it most of the night, I reckoned. “How much communion wine do you have to neck to pull a stunt like that?” I asked Susan. She was flicking through another printed report.

“About a crateful, I’d imagine,” she said. “But this says his blood-test results are awaiting confirmation.” She stood up and promptly banged her head on the low ceiling.

“Mind the low ceiling,” I said.

“How the hell do you put up with it?” She rubbed her scalp. “You must be what, six foot three?”

“I generally move about on my hands and knees,” I said.

Susan chucked the folder back into its crate. “I can’t see how this stupid vicar can have anything to do with Nicky disappearing.”

“Neither can I, right now,” I said, “but I’d like to find him and ask him.”

“And what about Nicky’s phone?”

“What about it?”

“Do you still have it?”

“Why?” I said.

“Shouldn’t we show it to the police?”

“When I’ve finished with it,” I said.

“But don’t they need to know about these threatening messages?”

“They already do,” I said.

And that was true, because according to Vora, Nicky had told them. Knowing the cops, of course, they’d never make that connection now. They’d have stuffed Nicky’s original complaint down the back of a filing cabinet and forgotten about it. If I wanted to know the truth, that meant finding it out for myself—not passing the buck to a bunch of uniformed jobsworths whose most urgent priority was a cup of tea and a biscuit.

“You liked Nicky, didn’t you?” asked Susan.

“She was a friend,” I said. “Is.”

“I got the impression she was more than that.”

I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t know what the truth was, so I said nothing.

“Because you’re taking a hell of a risk for her. Interfering with evidence. We could be
charged with perverting the course of justice, even.”

“Maybe, if the cops ever find out.” I looked at her. She laughed. She resembled Nicky so much I felt as if I’d known her for months, instead of days; and for a moment I wondered if she was doing it on purpose.

“I’m not going to tell them,” she said. “You need me to help, I’ll help.”

“Could you dig out an address for this arsonist property developer?”

Joan Bisham’s place was in a quiet, prosperous suburb a twenty-minute bus ride away. I had thought a property developer would live in something flash and sleek, maybe designed by an architect, but I was wrong. Hers was a huge rambling, crumbling red-brick house that had been divided into a dozen dingy flats not long ago—one stretch of wall still bore a crudely painted 14A and a wobbly arrow pointing to the basement. There were two front doors to choose from, but I went for the one that looked the cleanest, and heard a bell ring somewhere in the distance. A few minutes later the door was jerked open by a smartly dressed
woman in her forties with big brown eyes and shoulder-length chestnut hair that didn’t quite conceal intricate earrings of blue stones on gold wire. We hesitated a moment, surprised to recognize each other, and I realized where I’d seen her before—on one of my visits to Nicky’s office she’d been leaving as I arrived.