The Murder Exchange (27 page)

I watched as she breezed out of the bedroom,
thinking that this time in a week I'd either be the
happiest man on earth, or dead. And if I was dead,
none of it was going to matter anyway. High stakes,
yes, but then that's what it's all about, isn't it?
That's what made it all the more exciting. I remembered
a phrase someone had quoted to me when I
was out in Africa. It was something a French
general had said to his men back in the nineteenth
century when they were defending a town from the
British. The enemy have vastly superior numbers.
They are coming at us from three sides. Soon their

247
encirclement will be complete. Our right flank is
collapsing, casualties are high, our forces are in
retreat. Situation perfect. Attack.' And that's the'
thing. Half the joy is facing superior odds and
winning. I might have thought I wanted the quiet
life, but in the end, like all true soldiers, I longed for
that old call to arms. Even better when there was a
pot of gold at the end of it that would set me up for
ever.

When Elaine returned with the beers, I had a grin
on my face the size of China.

248
Friday, nine days ago

Gallan

I was in court all Friday afternoon giving evidence
in the case of a child molester. He'd been accused of
,v_ i ing young boys at the swimming club he
helped run for inner-city kids with limited access to
leisure facilities. It was something I'd worked on
months before but, as everyone knows, the wheels
of justice turn incredibly slowly. The defence
barrister gave me as hard a time as possible in the
stand, taking full advantage of the fact that forensic
evidence was limited and that most of the case
against his client rested solely on the words of
children, several with learning difficulties, who
could easily be lying. But I'm no pushover and I
held my ground firmly and with barely concealed
contempt for the man in front of me. The defendant
already had three previous convictions for exactly
this type of offence - not that the jury were aware of
that - so, as far as I could see, the defence barrister
had to be pretty damned sure the man he
was defending was guilty. In which case, he was

249
helping to put a dangerous man back on the street
so that he could continue to prey on the kind of
people least able to stop him. You can couch it how
you want it, spout all this bullshit about everyone
being entitled to a proper defence, but it was still
wrong. As far as I was concerned, to put the rights
of someone who abused children for his own
enjoyment above those of the same children to live
their lives free from these kinds of assaults was
probably the single most perverted aspect of the
British justice system, and one of the few things
that made me doubt my own role in upholding the
law. That well-educated, supposedly respectable
men and women were paid sums of money vastly
out of proportion to their talent to help keep this
situation going, and from the public purse as well,
only served to spawn that doubt.

The best way to combat this, however, is to beat
them at their own game, and in that particular
battle I knew I'd done just that, constantly staring
my enemy down and using just the right levels of
sarcasm in my answers to make him look foolish in
front of the jury. It was a small victory - after all, the
lawyer still went home with a nice fat sum of
money for his efforts, if you can call them that - but
it was a victory nonetheless, and I felt confident
that a conviction was on the cards which,
ultimately, was the most important thing.

So I was in good cheer when I escaped at just
after five (the wheels of justice are not only incredibly
slow but also work, with rare exceptions,
to office hours) and took the DLR south of the river
to pick up my daughter for the weekend. I hadn't

250
seen her in close to a month, so I was looking forward
to it, and so it seemed was she, still being of
the age where she can appreciate her dad's company.
We travelled back by Tube and I took her to
the Pizza Express on Upper Street for an evening
meal during which I caught up with everything in
her life: school, fashion, friends, boyfriends, all that
hair-raising stuff that makes you think kids grow
up far too fast these days, while at the same
time being careful to avoid the topic of her mother
and the boyfriend. She mentioned him once, telling
me about some clothes he'd bought her, but I
changed the subject. I really didn't want to hear
about him. In the early days after I'd left, Rachel
v.'oriW ask me when I was going back home, and
wuuiU say how much she missed me. She'd tell me
how much she disliked Carrier and how he could
never take my place, and it used to break my heart
because I could do nothing about it. Over time,
though, she'd complained about him less and less,
and, although she always said she missed me, and
would always give me an enthusiastic hug whenever
we met, she talked less and less about me
going back there, as if she'd finally got round to
accepting the situation, and Carrier had finally got
round to convincing her that he wasn't such a bad
bloke after all. Even though the bastard was.

During our meal that evening she talked just like
a happy, well-adjusted kid leading a happy, well
adjusted life. It seemed I'd become somewhat
surplus to requirements.

We didn't get back to my flat until quarter past
nine, and it was gone ten by the time I finally shut

251
the door to the bedroom and left her sleeping. I'd
forgotten how tiring kids can be.

I wanted to sit down and veg out in front of the
TV but things were still bugging me on the case,
and I'd promised myself I'd try a new angle, so I
cracked open a beer and booted up my rarely used
PC. It was time to see what the Internet had to offer
as an investigative tool.

First of all I went through the ritual of checking
my emails, which didn't usually take very long as I
rarely received any, and immediately saw that there
was one from Malik entitled 'Information as
requested' which came with a load of attachments.
It appeared to have been sent that morning and had
been copied to my PC at work.

The first set of attachments comprised photographs,
mostly surveillance ones, and short
biographies of known or suspected associates of Neil
Vamen. There were nine of them in all and they
included Jackie Slap Merriweather and several others
I recognized. The biographies contained the criminal
records of the nine, which encompassed a whole
variety of offences with a particular emphasis on
ones of violence, and a summary of each of their
relationships with Vamen. I blew each photo up to
full size and printed them off one by one so they
could be shown to the neighbours of Shaun
Matthews and Jean Tanner, in the hope that they
might be familiar.

The second set of attachments contained details
and photographs of three women suspected of being
Vamen's mistresses. One of them, as suggested by
McBride and missed initially by Malik, was Jean

252
Tanner. According to the records, Vamen had been
seen visiting her home in Finchley on a number of
occasions. He'd also taken her for a long weekend to
his luxury apartment in Tenerife back in March with
one of his other mistresses in tow. The report confirmed
that she was a prostitute with two previous
convictions, but said nothing else of note. Out of
curiosity, I looked at the files on the other two
mistresses and was vaguely interested to see that
both women were very different. The one who'd
accompanied Jean and Vamen to Tenerife was a
glossy-looking nineteen-year-old former dental
nurse, now full-time plaything, while the other was
an attractive forty-six-year-old psychotherapist
who'd fallen for his charms while she'd been review
ii.0 lus progress during his only stint in prison (drugs
and weapons offences). They'd apparently been
enjoying an on-off relationship for the past twelve
years, ever since he'd been released, and I wondered
idly if she was pleased with the way he'd come on.

But nothing really stood out, so I sent a quick
message back to Malik, thanking him for his help,
and moved on to the net proper. I started by
finding a search engine and typed in the words
'snake poison', which I thought ought to give me
some hits. It did, far too many, most of which
were totally irrelevant. I tried different search
engines, then narrowed the hunt down, putting in
'venom', 'snake venom', 'elapid venom' and,
finally, 'viper venom'. I reeled through the
dozens of hits I picked up, switched search
engines constantly, and went back over Boyd's
notes on the subject, all the time racking my brains

253
for ideas that could actually move me forward.

I'd been at it well over an hour, and was already
beginning to agree with Boyd's assertion that the
Internet was a hopelessly overhyped means of
uncovering information, when something caught
my eye. The intro line read: 'Snake Venom part of
Mujahidin Arsenal' and referred the reader to what
looked like an eastern European media website. I
yawned and double-clicked. Outside, I could hear
the rain tumbling down, and the ominous rumble
of thunder.

The article from which the intro line came had
been written in October 1995 and concerned the so
called mujahidin, foreign Islamic fundamentalists
who were fighting alongside fellow Muslims in
Bosnia Herzegovina. It seemed they had become an
integral part of the conflict, being both well organized
and well financed, with extensive backing
from a number of Gulf states, particularly Saudi
Arabia. According to the article, they were also
using some interesting weapons in their fight, one
of which was snake venom. Vials of venom from
the Egyptian viper, or asp, had been used by their
spies within the enemy camps to poison senior
enemy officers. In one cited instance three Bosnian
Croat officers, including a colonel, had had the
venom slipped into their food by a female Muslim
cook posing as a Croat (an easy thing to do since
they were essentially the same ethnic group) and all
had died before the plot had been uncovered. The
article didn't say what had happened to the cook
but stated that the poisons definitely existed and
had originated with the mujahidin and, in particular,

254
an Arab officer with the nom de guerre Tajab.

At last I had something. It wasn't much, but it
was a start. Malik had mentioned Bosnia as a
supply route used by the Holtzes to bring both
drugs and illegal immigrants into western Europe
and, ultimately, Britain, although the connection was a tenuous one. There was a list of related
articles on the left-hand side of the screen and I
scrolled through them, skim-reading about the role
the fundamentalists had played in what was
described, quite accurately it seemed, as the
bloodiest European conflict since 1945. Ruthless in
battle, they were a formidable fighting force, their
infamy far outweighing their actual numbers. So
much so that, according to one of the articles
.v^U^ii in January 1996, the United Nations
demanded their removal as part of the 1995 Dayton
Peace Agreement between the warring parties. The
next article, written later that month, continued in
the same vein, this time citing a claim made by the
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that
mujahidin had attacked Serb positions northwest
of Zenica, and that, in separate ceasefire violations,
Iranian military advisers and British mercenaries
were continuing to train Muslim forces in bases east
and south of Sarajevo.

The British connection again. Still tenuous, but
there all the same. I made some notes, then left the
website and typed in 'mercenaries in Bosnia' in
the search-engine box. Plenty of hits came up, as
expected, and once again I began the long trawl.

As I looked, I began to wonder whether this man
Karadzic was making things up. After all, all wars

255
contain plenty of lies and propaganda. But then I
found an article in the New York Times, dated
October 1995, which covered the story of foreign
involvement in the war, stretching back to its beginnings
in early 1992, and contained information
about who'd been involved. There'd been the usual
suspects: the mujahidin; the occasional middle
class Western boys who'd been so sickened by the
atrocities being visited on the Muslims that they'd
gone out to try to help; the adventure seekers and
nutters who for some reason are always attracted to
the world's troublespots; and there'd been a
company called Contracts International, based in
London, who'd been supplying former British
soldiers to help train Muslim forces in a variety of
military techniques, including guerrilla warfare.
The spokesman for Contracts International was
Martin Leppel, a former captain in the Parachute
Regiment. In the article, he admitted that some of
the firm's employees were in Bosnia but declined to
comment any further. The writers stated that no
fewer than twenty-one of the company's operatives
were there, and that it was almost certain they were
being bankrolled by senior members of the Saudi
Arabian royal family.

I noted the name of the company and its representative,
then checked to see if they had a website.
Not surprisingly they didn't, so I did a search on
Contracts International and discovered a number of
newspaper articles about the company. Founded in
1991 by Leppel, and with a full-time staff estimated
at two hundred, they'd been involved in conflicts all
over the world, but I concentrated solely on Bosnia.

256
From what I could gather, there was nothing untoward
about their activities in the region. You could
even say, depending on your point of view I
suppose, that they were actually providing a service,
since the Muslims were so hopelessly outgunned.
But the other warring parries had demanded they
leave after the Dayton Accord because their presence
was seen as provocative, although there was
evidence that some had stayed behind to continue
their work in breach of the treaty.