Private London Read online

  He also had a medium-sized bodywork and repair shop in Marylebone not far from the thrust and bustle of the High Street that would stand testimony to the truth of it. Certainly as far as the taxman was concerned that was how he made his money. Crash repairs, bodywork, paint jobs, brake and wheel replacements.

  In reality, though, he had a number of other profitable sidelines from which he derived his main income. None of them legal.

  He was sitting in his local, The Prince Regent – what he called a proper Victorian boozer – on Marylebone High Street, drinking a pint of Abbot Ale when I walked in and went up to him. I sat on the stool next to his.

  ‘Dan,’ he said, gesturing to the barmaid, and holding out his hand for me to shake. I waved his hand away.

  Gary Webster had a grip like a Russian arm-wrestler overloaded on steroids. He was a good three inches shorter than me and a good few inches off the chest too. I’m a forty-four long and he was about a thirty-eight, I reckoned. But his forearms were like legs of pork and I hadn’t shaken hands with him since he’d left the fifth form and gone to work with his dad. Not because I hadn’t seen him, but because I didn’t want my hand mangled.

  I slapped him on the shoulder instead and took the bottle of Corona the barmaid had brought across for me. It wasn’t the first time I had been in that particular pub.

  ‘How’s business?’ he asked.

  I waggled my hand in a banking-aeroplane movement. ‘I’ve had better days,’ I said.

  ‘Why you contacted your old pal, I guess?’

  I nodded in agreement. ‘Why I got in touch.’ I took a long pull on the Corona.

  ‘So … this is calling for something outside the legitimate range of your normal operations?’ He took a pull of his pint.

  ‘Again, your guess would be correct,’ I concurred.

  ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Same as last time.’

  He smiled sardonically. ‘Nothing for Tonto?’

  He was referring to Sam. They didn’t get on. ‘Sam doesn’t touch them – you know that.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that. Wuss.’

  ‘Say that to his face.’

  Gary grinned. ‘I would if I could reach that high.’

  I drained the Corona and he did likewise with two deep swallows of his ale.

  ‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff. It looks like pond water.’

  He stood up and slapped my shoulder. ‘It’s the canonical ale, Dan. Puts lead in your pencil – and might in your mitre.’

  We took Gary’s car. Nothing too flash on the outside: an oldish Mercedes saloon. A three-litre S320 about fourteen years old – you could probably pick one up for under a grand.

  You wouldn’t get one like this, though. Gary had tweaked it a little. Putting the kind of muscle under the bonnet that can get you from nought to sixty in the time it takes a patrol cop to switch on his siren, and out of sight before he’s made it into third gear. It wasn’t registered to him and he never made the mistake of boy-racering it through town. Time would come when its secret powers would be needed and when that time came he would make a nice little earner out of it.

  Gary always drew a line between business and pleasure. That was what marked the difference between the professionals and the amateurs in his game.

  You could feel the sheer power of the engine, though, even as it purred in low gear through Marylebone High Street. But it was muscle of a very different kind that had brought me to see Gary Webster.

  The killing kind.

  Chapter 55

  TEN MINUTES LATER we were in a lock-up about a quarter of a mile from Gary Webster’s garage.

  The place wasn’t registered in his name. Was registered, in fact, to a bogus person in a bogus company should anyone want to look too closely.

  Gary pulled the door shut behind him and flicked on the overhead strip lights. In the centre of the room was an almost new Jaguar XK five-litre V8 convertible. About seventy-three grand and upwards the last time I looked at one in the windows of the showroom in Berkeley Street, Mayfair.

  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there waiting to have its wheels balanced and a bit of detailing done.

  Gary led me past the car to the back of the lock-up. An old-fashioned safe was to one side amidst a pile of used motor parts. He spun the dial and opened the safe, taking out a pump-action shotgun and a semi-automatic pistol that he handed to me. I slipped them into a holdall I had brought along for that purpose.

  He reached in again and brought out a couple of boxes of ammunition, which I put in the bag as well. Then I pulled up one of the towels that I had put into the bag earlier to cover everything and zipped the bag closed.

  ‘Is it a good idea keeping stuff like this here, Gary?’ I asked.

  ‘The wife doesn’t like them at home.’

  ‘You’re not married.’

  ‘Anyway. They’re not here any more.’

  ‘Just a couple of days.’

  ‘You use them, you lose them.’

  ‘Goes without saying.’

  ‘Yeah, well, a lot of things best said go unsaid.’

  ‘You turning philosophical on me?’

  Gary gave me a quizzical look, building up to it. Anyone else it would have been no questions asked. But Gary Webster and I had been best friends at school and, even if we hadn’t seen a lot of each other over the years since, it was still a bond that would never be broken. We had both had to watch each other’s back too many times for that.

  ‘So …’ he said finally. ‘You going to tell me what the gig is?’

  I looked him square in the eye. ‘What’s the word on the street with Brendan Ferres?’

  Gary reacted. ‘Snake Ferres?’

  ‘Yup.’

  He shook his head. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me,’ he said finally.

  I shook my own head.

  ‘Well, the word is he’s hung like a donkey and has a striking cobra tattooed on it.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the size of his Johnson, Gary.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it gives you an idea of his intelligence. His pain threshold too, come to think of it.’ He grimaced and then grinned. ‘He had the head of the snake tattooed on his bell end, for Christ’s sake!’

  I didn’t grin back. ‘Ferres might be mixed up in a bit of business.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A bit of business I’m going to sort.’

  Gary looked at me to see if I was being serious. I was.

  ‘Have you completely lost the plot? He’s Ronnie Allen’s right-hand man.’

  ‘I know exactly who he is.’

  ‘You can’t go up against Allen, Dan. Not even you.’ He shook his head again. ‘Especially not you.’

  ‘Brendan Ferres has waltzed into this particular dance. I can’t walk away from it, Gary.’

  ‘Quite right. You shouldn’t walk. You should bloody run!’

  ‘A student was kidnapped last night. Chancellors University.’

  Gary reacted, shaking his head. ‘That’s not Ronnie Allen’s style. Kidnapping. Never heard that.’

  ‘Maybe he’s branching out.’

  ‘Can’t see it.’

  ‘Brendan Ferres was seen going into the building earlier in the day. The building the students had just left before being assaulted, and one of them taken.’

  ‘Maybe it’s coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence.’

  ‘They happen, Dan. And for the sake of your health I suggest you start believing in them.’

  ‘One of the girls was abducted. One of them was cut with a knife. And one of them had a baseball bat taken to the back of her head.’

  ‘Jesus. Even so, Dan. Let it go.’

  I shook my head. ‘The girl someone took a baseball bat to was Chloe. It was Chloe Smith, Gary.’

  He took it in for a heartbeat and then his jaw set. ‘You need backup?’

  ‘No. This is my shout.’

  ‘You’ll let me know?�
�

  I nodded gratefully but I had no intention of involving him any more than I already had.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to go and ask him. Let him know if the girl is harmed in any way whatsoever … that there will be consequences.’

  ‘If he’s got her, that is. I can’t see that. Like I say, it’s not his style.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘If he’s got her.’

  ‘Brendan Ferres is a mountain gorilla in a suit. He doesn’t do anything unless Ronnie Allen tells him to.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And he’s engaged to his daughter.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, he is. And little Becky Allen is the apple of her father’s eye.’

  He was being a little sarcastic. Rebecca Allen was thirty-two years old, five foot ten tall and built like Kirstie Alley at her curvy best. There was nothing little about her – including her sexual appetites if the rumours about her fiancé were not exaggerated. And Gary was quite right – her father treated her like an absolute princess.

  ‘That I did know,’ I agreed.

  ‘So be careful. Could turn nasty. Face is everything to a man like Ferres.’

  ‘Still got to ask the question.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I hefted the bag. ‘And I appreciate the assist.’

  ‘You got it. You taking Sam with you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘See if you can persuade him to carry, then.’

  I smiled regretfully. ‘Never going to happen.’

  Chapter 56

  DI KIRSTY WEBB was wishing she had simply switched off her mobile phone and taken the weekend off.

  The drive out of London heading west into the boondocks had been a nightmare, with traffic clogging up Western Avenue and the air-conditioning unit on her car packing up. The first truly hot day of the year and that was when it decided to go on the blink! She had kept the windows open for a while but anyone who has been stuck in traffic in London knows it’s not an ideal solution for long.

  When she had broken clear of the M25 the roads had cleared, though, and she made better progress. But all in all she couldn’t help feeling it was bound to be a bit of a wild-goose chase.

  The old market town of Aylesbury is only some forty-five miles north and west of London, but on a good day it could still take an hour and a half to get there. Kirsty would have taken the A41 route but roadworks on the North Circular would have made the journey even more unbearable.

  Nice to get out of London, though, she thought, goose chase or not, as she drove into the large car park of Stoke Mandeville hospital and switched off the car radio.

  A female DI from the local force was waiting to meet her as she headed into reception. A formidable-looking woman in her late thirties but with steel-grey already dominating her hair.

  ‘Natalie James,’ she said, holding out her hand.

  ‘Kirsty Webb.’

  ‘You’d better come with me.’

  The DI walked off briskly and Kirsty followed her into the hospital, through reception and down a series of corridors.

  The body had been moved to a small side room. A young uniformed officer was standing guard outside. DI James gave him a cursory nod and opened the door, leading Kirsty in.

  The corpse was lying on a gurney and had been covered once more with a sheet.

  ‘His car was hit by a high-speed train going at full tilt. Brain death would have been near-instantaneous.’

  ‘I can well imagine.’

  ‘And his body took a considerable amount of trauma.’

  ‘So the injury to his hand could have happened at the same time?’

  ‘We thought so at first,’ said the grey-haired detective. ‘But a pathologist took a closer look. The top half of his finger was definitely severed post-mortem. No blood loss, et cetera. There’s no doubt about it.’

  The DI lifted the blanket covering the left side of Colin Harris’s body and showed Kirsty the mutilated hand.

  Kirsty shook her head, not quite believing it. ‘Do we know what was used?’

  ‘We think a scalpel.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I understand you have some similar cases?’

  ‘Kind of. Only ours were two women. Early to mid-twenties. Both as of yet unidentified.’

  ‘And both had the same finger chopped off.’

  ‘The wedding-ring finger. Half of it, anyway. And they both had organs removed.’

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ The DI was obviously a little rattled. You weren’t supposed to have serial killers in Buckinghamshire.

  ‘I don’t know, inspector. But we’ve got a break in the pattern here. That could be significant.’

  ‘How could somebody have known, though? Then sneak into our morgue and cut a finger off a dead body in broad daylight!’

  ‘Who was it who authorised the transplant? What’s the procedure?’

  The DI pulled out a small black book and consulted her notes. ‘First of all, brain death has to be established by two independent doctors.’

  ‘Independent of the hospital?’

  ‘No, of the doctors involved with the donation or the transplantation team.’

  ‘So brain death was established by two independent doctors. And then what happened?’

  ‘The body was kept alive by life-support machinery, the heart removed and transplanted into the recipient.’

  ‘And the sister maintains that her brother was vehemently against being a donor.’

  ‘It’s what she says. Although she also says she had become estranged from her brother. They hadn’t talked in quite a few years.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘She didn’t say. I get the feeling that Penelope Harris isn’t much of what you might call a people person.’

  ‘Can I speak to her?’

  ‘Of course you can. We’ll do all we can to help.’

  ‘I have to warn you, inspector …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘If this is our serial fruit-loop, or even if it is a copycat, London serious crimes squad are going to be down here en masse. You’re going to be kept busy.’

  ‘Why didn’t they come straight away, then?’

  ‘Because they didn’t think there was a connection and my time is a lot less valuable to waste.’

  ‘But you do think there is a connection with your two Jane Does?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector James. I do.’

  Chapter 57

  KIRSTY WEBB WAS beginning to dislike Penelope Harris.

  The woman seemed to be angry not at her brother’s death but at the inconvenience it was causing her.

  ‘I just want to go home,’ said the woman in question.

  ‘And you will. I just need to go over a few things first,’ replied Kirsty, trying to keep her own anger in check.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake – I’ve been over it a hundred times. And it isn’t me you should be interrogating.’

  ‘It’s an interview, not an interrogation …’

  ‘It’s those surgeons. They’re the ones who killed my brother, who took his heart like some kind of spare part.’

  ‘Your brother was declared brain-dead, Miss Harris. And he carried an organ-donor card.’

  ‘It wasn’t his.’

  ‘They don’t just go by the card, Penelope,’ Kirsty said softly, using the woman’s first name to try and get her on side. It didn’t work.

  ‘“Miss Harris” is fine, thank you very much!’

  Kirsty sighed inwardly but kept her expression neutral. ‘Like I say,’ she persisted. ‘They don’t just go with the card – they check with the organ-donor registry and your brother’s name was on it.’

  ‘So that just gives them the right to go ahead and do what they did, does it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it does.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t.’

  ‘Do you have a particular reason to be so against organ donation?’

  �
�We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

  Kirsty frowned, puzzled. ‘I understood that Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t against organ donation, just blood transfusions.’

  ‘It’s a matter of personal conscience and a number of us are against it. And those that are for it still demand that all blood be drained before transplantation.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And was it?’

  Kirsty shrugged ever so slightly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that what you should be finding out?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean? Of course it matters.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be insensitive. But what I meant is that the woman who received your brother’s heart is not a Jehovah’s Witness.’

  Penelope Harris considered it for a moment. ‘It’s the principle,’ she said finally, putting the detective in mind of a sulky schoolchild.

  Kirsty pulled out a piece of paper enclosed in a clear plastic envelope.

  ‘Is that the note he left?’ asked Penelope Harris.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Can I see it, please?’

  Kirsty put it on the table in front of her. It consisted of two simple lines and read: I am sorry for what I have done. But at least the suffering will stop now. Colin.

  The Harris woman looked at it briefly, then back up at Kirsty, the angry defiance back in her eyes.

  ‘Okay, he may have decided to carry an organ-donor card. I doubt it very much.’ She shrugged. ‘But he definitely didn’t write that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he never called himself Colin – he absolutely hated the name. It’s his real name but he always used his second name: Paul. He only ever used Colin on official documentation because he had to.’

  Kirsty nodded.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ said the dead man’s sister.

  ‘I’m not, Miss Harris,’ said the dark-haired detective. ‘I think your brother was murdered.’

  Chapter 58

  WALKING INTO THE Turk’s Head Tavern in Tufnell Park with a gun in your pocket is seriously not a good idea.

  But I did it anyway.

  The conversation didn’t exactly stop when Sam and I stepped through the pub’s door. But it was pretty damn close.