Private London Read online

  ‘The ex not too pleased, I take it?’

  ‘Actually, Kirsty was fine with it. Her boss wasn’t quite so.’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Shame indeed.’

  My phone rang and I looked at the caller ID. It said withheld. ‘This better not be a bloody marketing company,’ I said and clicked the green telephone on. ‘Dan Carter.’

  A mechanical voice spoke. ‘Be at your office in two hours. We’ll give you instructions then. If you have just been speaking to the police you’ve signed her death warrant.’

  The line went dead.

  Sam looked across. ‘That them?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘They’re calling back in a couple of hours with details.’

  ‘What did he sound like?’

  I shrugged. ‘They used a voice distorter.’

  ‘How did they get your number?’

  ‘I would imagine Hannah gave it to them. She knows who we are, after all.’

  ‘They say anything else?’

  ‘They said if I’d been speaking to the police about it all bets were off.’

  ‘They knew you’d been arrested?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Sophisticated operation, then?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Which is a good thing, I guess.’

  ‘I guess so too,’ I agreed. Thinking that Hannah Shapiro already knew only too well how messy things could get with amateurs.

  A short while later Sam pulled the car to a stop in the car park of one of the CUL sports grounds. It was based off the city centre and had a brick-built single-storey clubhouse and two rugby pitches. One of them was being used by the CUL squad who were running training exercises.

  We walked over to the sidelines and watched for a while. Suzy had learned that they would be playing later that afternoon, in the annual grudge match between them and UCL. Just like the annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge. If you added the victories up, then Chancellors would be slightly ahead, but UCL had beaten them in the last two encounters and they were keen to redress the balance, as I explained to Sam.

  ‘They’re so keen to redress the balance,’ replied Sam, ‘you’d think they wouldn’t be out partying the night before.’

  I looked at him and grinned. ‘College boys. They have a quicker recovery time. You’re getting old, is all.’

  ‘Old nothing. I could give those silver-spoon-eating bookworms a two-minute start and still beat them over a mile.’

  He probably could have, too.

  ‘You ever play rugby?’

  ‘Rugby? Are you out of your Caucasian mind?’ Sam said, laying it on thick. ‘I went to the college of hard knocks, my friend. We don’t got no rugby in that particular school.’

  I smiled. I knew for a fact that he had gone to a Catholic grammar school, could have gone to a university of his choice. He’d chosen Hendon Police College instead. Something about growing up on an estate with limited life expectancy, I reckon. Where he’d watched two of his brothers getting themselves killed. Like I said earlier, he could have gone either way. Lucky for us he chose as he did.

  The practice session finished and the young men started walking towards the clubhouse. I jogged across to join them.

  ‘Hold up a minute.’

  They stopped and looked at me curiously. One of them, a tall guy – taller than me at least, but not as tall as Sam – stepped forward. He was about twenty-three had corkscrew-curly hair cut short, and a jagged scar on his forehead. Made him look like Harry Potter’s barbarian cousin. The guy who had been paying a lot of attention to the girls as they left the bar last night. Ashleigh Roughton, according to the details that Lucy had forwarded to my BlackBerry.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, giving me an unimpressed look. ‘You’re scouting for the Saracens and want to sign us up.’

  ‘No. I want to talk to you about the three girls from your university who were attacked last night.’

  ‘You the filth?’

  I smiled. Hard not to. He was trying to sound tough and down with it. But his accent was preppier than an Abercrombie and Fitch crew-neck sweater – in pastel.

  ‘In a manner of speaking, Ashleigh. In the private sector.’

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘We know who all of you are. We’re not here without sanction.’

  ‘You’re not the police, then we got nothing to say to you! We’ve already told the proper authorities all that we know. Which is nothing.’

  He turned his shoulder and nodded to his teammates. I stepped up quickly, put my hand on his shoulder and turned him back.

  ‘Hang on, I’m not done here.’

  ‘Get your hands off me,’ he said, brushing my hand away.

  ‘Like I said, I’ve got a couple of questions,’ I replied, stepping forward, getting into his face.

  ‘Hard to ask questions with a mouthful of broken teeth.’

  I laughed. ‘That supposed to be a threat?’

  He took a step back. A cocky smile playing on his lips. ‘What? You don’t think I could take you.’

  ‘You might be able to take a couple of the Wendys from the backs on your rugby squad there. But I hit people for a living, son.’

  Which wasn’t true, but hey – truth is always the first casualty in a conflict, isn’t it? That was what I’d heard. The ‘son’ bit had the desired effect. Maybe I should have said ‘I push buttons for a living’. His shoulder hunched forward and he might as well have written on a postcard what he was about to do and mailed it to me yesterday.

  Chapter 50

  I TILTED MY head back so that Roughton’s roundhouse punch sailed past my chin, and as he struggled to keep his balance I stepped forward quickly and jabbed my first two fingers hard into his solar plexus.

  He doubled up, making a sound like a broken washing machine, and fell on his side to the floor, his face turning purple.

  His teammates stepped forward and I held my hand up. ‘He’s just winded. He’s going to be fine.’

  ‘More than you’re going to be, mate.’ One of them had found his voice. Another preppie trying to sound tough.

  Sam took off his jacket. ‘Any of you care to hold this for me?’

  The guy who had spoken up was Tim Graham, according to my notes – five foot eleven and half the weight of Sam, by the looks of him. Graham stared across at my partner, his expression suddenly not so confident.

  I held my hands up, placatingly. ‘Hold on, now. You lot could rush us and – who knows – eventually you might take us down. But not before some of you get hurt. I mean seriously hurt.’

  I looked down as Ashleigh Roughton got to his feet, breathing deeply, moisture in his eyes.

  ‘You’re only winded,’ I said to him. ‘I sucker-punched you.’

  He nodded. I hadn’t done any such thing, of course, but I figured it might help defuse the situation if I gave him some of his face back. I wasn’t going to be doing much good finding Chloe’s attackers if I was in an intensive-care bed myself.

  Another guy stepped forward, five nine but enormous. I figured him for a hooker. Rugbywise that was. He had the kind of face that even a mother would find hard to love.

  ‘You the Riddler?’ he asked, ignoring me and looking straight at Sam.

  ‘I never liked that nickname much,’ he replied.

  The ugly man’s face broke into a grin. ‘My dad took me to see you fight once. Years ago. You were awesome. Met Police against the RAF. You won.’

  ‘I remember. Who was your dad?’

  ‘Chief Superintendent Patrick Connolley. He’s retired now.’

  ‘He was a good man.’

  The guy nodded, still grinning. ‘Awesome,’ he said again.

  I sensed a shift in mood. I held my hands out. ‘What say we just ask you all a few questions? Then you can channel your aggression into kicking ten shades of crap out of UCL this afternoon.’

  Half an hour later we had spoken to each member
of the team and were heading out of the sports ground, back to Sam’s car.

  ‘Well, we didn’t learn much from that,’ he said.

  I jumped in the car and pulled my seat belt across. But Sam was wrong, I figured we had learned something. Something important.

  The guy I’d floored, Ashleigh Roughton, had something to hide or my name wasn’t Dan Carter. I was very far from smiling but things were starting to get shifting now. The opposition had the next move but I could feel the tide turning. So far they’d been calling all the shots. I intended to change that.

  Chapter 51

  MISTER ALISTAIR LLOYD gestured to his assistant, a thirty-year-old Canadian woman.

  ‘Close her up, Michaela,’ he said.

  As he walked out of the theatre he was surprised to see a couple of police officers, his colleague John Ferguson, and an animated young woman with an unhappy expression on her face waiting to see him.

  ‘There’s a bit of a problem, Alistair,’ said Ferguson.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My brother would never have signed a donor card. There’s been a mistake,’ said Penelope Harris.

  ‘I’m sorry? I don’t follow.’

  ‘I want the operation stopped.’

  The surgeon shrugged. There wasn’t much apology in the gesture. ‘It’s too late, I’m afraid. The transplant has been done. It was clearly what your brother wanted.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. I want to see him.’

  ‘Of course. You have to understand that he was in a serious accident. He suffered major injuries.’

  ‘I know that. I need to know it’s him.’

  One of the police officers stepped forward. ‘We need a formal identification.’

  ‘Of course you do. Come with me, then.’

  A short while later Alistair Lloyd nodded at the mortuary assistant who slid open the drawer and revealed the body. The dead man had suffered considerable trauma but his face, although lacerated, was recognisable. Penelope gasped holding a hand to her mouth. Then she nodded, unable to speak.

  The surgeon gestured to the assistant to close the drawer again. As he did, Penelope’s brother’s left hand flopped loose from the covering sheet.

  ‘What happened to his hand?’ Penelope asked, puzzled.

  John Ferguson looked down, shocked. The third finger of the dead man’s hand had been severed at the second knuckle.

  ‘It wasn’t like that when he came in,’ he said.

  Chapter 52

  SAM WAS PARKING the car as I jogged up the stairs to our office.

  There was some activity in the offices of Chambers, Chambers and Mason. But not a great deal of it. Lawyers, it seemed, were not always on the case. Not on Saturday afternoons, at any rate.

  Lucy was back at her reception desk, typing on her computer.

  ‘Where’s Suzy?’ I asked her.

  ‘She’s still down at the university.’

  ‘You get anything more?’

  ‘We made contact with Laura Skelton. She’s pretty shell-shocked by what happened.’

  ‘She would be. She add anything new?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘Suzy’s still with her. They seemed to be getting on pretty well. She thought it might be useful to strike up a friendship.’

  ‘Keep me posted. And tell her to dig into a meatball by the name of Ashleigh Roughton while she’s down there. Captain of the rugby team. Make him a priority.’

  ‘On it!’ She snatched up the phone.

  Maybe we’d make a field agent out of her yet. I walked across the office to the water cooler, pulled a cup out of the dispenser and poured myself some.

  Sipping on the water, I strolled over to Adrian Tuttle’s workstation. He had three computers on it, a big Apple cinema display screen and two laptops. The footage of Hannah bound and reading the message that her captors had given her was freeze-framed. Adrian looked up from the laptop he was working on as I approached.

  ‘You got any good news for me, Adrian?’ I asked.

  He shook his head apologetically. ‘The email address is a hotmail account, as you know. Use it and lose it kind of thing.’

  ‘And the YouTube account?’

  ‘Linked to that address. I’m trying to get the computer signature but I’m not having any luck.’

  ‘YouTube won’t release it?’

  ‘Not short of a warrant. And the original film has been taken down.’

  ‘You can’t trace the ISP remotely?’

  Adrian shook his head. ‘Sponge might have been able to but …’ He shrugged. ‘Outside of my pay grade.’

  I nodded. Nothing I didn’t expect. ‘Keep on it.’

  The phone rang. Lucy answered it and waved me across.

  ‘It’s them,’ she said.

  ‘Put it through to my office, Lucy, I’ll take it there.’

  I gestured to Sam to follow me and headed into my office. As Sam closed the door behind me I hit my speakerphone button.

  ‘It’s Dan Carter. Talk to me.’

  ‘There’s a trade on the table if you’re interested.’

  ‘Of course we’re interested.’

  ‘Good. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Parliament Square. There is a statue of Sir Robert Peel on the south-west corner of it.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Good again. Be there then. Be alone. And have one million pounds’ worth of cut diamonds with you.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘That might be tricky to arrange in time.’

  ‘Your problem, not mine. And make sure they are perfect. No flaws. After all … neither of us want to be left with damaged goods when this trade is completed, do we?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Picturing Hannah Shapiro dressed in her underwear, terrified. I gripped the phone tighter.

  ‘Then we have an understanding?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I agreed.

  ‘Any …’ there was a slight hesitation ‘… woodentops, as you call them, show up … and it’s on your head, Mister Carter. Don’t let her down. She’s counting on you.’

  ‘I want to hear her voice.’

  The line went dead.

  I clicked on my computer screen and pulled up the incoming-call register. Nothing. I slammed the phone down. ‘Son of a bitch!’

  ‘At least we know something from that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not an American outfit that’s taken her.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He said woodentops. Quite pointedly. Not likely an American would use the expression.’

  ‘Not impossible. They have English cop shows over there too, and he said as you call them. Meaning the British, as though he were foreign.’

  ‘It’s more a term used in the force than out. And it’s hardly a current one, is it?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Could have been deliberate.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure everything he said was deliberate.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Get the diamonds. Make the trade.’

  ‘No cops.’

  ‘Absolutely no cops. We can handle this,’ I said with a degree of confidence that I certainly didn’t feel.

  Chapter 53

  PROFESSOR ANNABELLE WESTON looked at her watch and pushed aside a second-year student’s essay that she had been marking.

  Jungian archetypes in contemporary graphic novels. She sighed dismissively and picked up the telephone, tapping in some numbers. After a while, the phone she was calling clicked into a recorded message – she waited for it to finish.

  ‘Laura, this is Professor Weston, just to remind you that you were due for a tutorial. I can understand if you’re not coming in but I just wanted to make sure you’re all right. Please give me a call.’

  She hung up and twirled a perfectly manicured finger around a lock of her strawberry-blonde hair. She looked at the first paragraph of the essay again and put it to one side once more, unable to concentrate.

  She snatched the phone up again, consulted a bus
iness card that was sitting on her desk and dialled another number. After a second or two it was answered.

  ‘Dan Carter.’

  She smiled a little hesitantly. ‘Dan, it’s Professor Weston. Annabelle.’

  ‘Hi,’ he said and she could hear the warmth in his voice, picture the smile at the other end of the line. He had a nice smile. He was bright, too, she could tell that much.

  ‘I just wondered if there had been any developments your end? I have spoken to the police, of course, and all they can tell me is that they are pursuing all lines of enquiry. Which I take to mean that they have no idea.’

  ‘They’ll be doing all they can.’

  ‘I guess they are. I just feel so helpless. I feel like I should be doing something.’

  ‘I know it’s hard. But remember what the poet said. “They also serve who only stand and wait”.’

  ‘Shakespeare?’

  ‘John Milton. He was referring to his blindness. And even if it does feel like we are stumbling around in the dark, professor, we’re not. There is light ahead and we will guide Hannah home by it.’

  ‘You sound like something has happened.’

  ‘Just experience. Things happen for a reason. And when we understand why – then we can take steps to deal with them.’

  ‘And you are close to an understanding?’

  ‘I believe we are working towards that, yes.’

  ‘And you’ll let me know when you can?’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Thanks, then.’

  Annabelle Weston hung up, running her thumb and the first finger of her right hand around the wedding-ring finger of her left. There was still a faint white band from where her wedding ring had been removed some years earlier.

  A slight smile tugged wistfully at the corners of her lips. I wonder what Dan Carter would be like in bed? she thought to herself.

  Her smile faded as she picked the phone up for a third time and hit the speed-dial button.

  ‘Kht Mn Qlby …’ she said as the call was answered. ‘It’s me.’

  Chapter 54

  GARY WEBSTER HAD the word Mechanic written in the job section of his out-of-date passport.