Private London Read online

  Chapter 72

  PETER CHAPPEL WAS a forty-five-year-old ophthalmic optician with a small practice in Chesham, a quiet Buckinghamshire market town set amidst the rolling natural beauty of the Chilterns.

  His premises were on the High Street and, although it was a Sunday, he had come into his shop to sort through some paperwork and receipts that he needed to send off to his accountant for the quarterly VAT return. He had an elderly female assistant who worked with him, but as often as not he would find himself coming into the shop on his day off to catch up with the admin.

  He put all the receipts together into a large white envelope, sealed and addressed it, walked through to the reception area and left it on his assistant’s desk to go out in the morning post. He was ahead of schedule but Peter Chappel was a man who paid attention to detail.

  He walked back to his examination room. It was windowless, with an old-fashioned roll-top desk in the corner that he used for an office. He unplugged and picked up the laptop that was sitting on the faded green leather and deliberated for a moment.

  It was a few minutes past three o’clock and Peter Chappel made a decision. Pulling at an eye-test chart, he swung it out from the wall to reveal a safe behind it.

  He put the laptop into the safe, closed the door and spun the dial. Then he put the eye chart back in place and bustled back out through reception.

  He picked up a couple of carrier bags that he had left by the front door and then went out onto the street, putting them down again so he could lock the door behind him.

  He looked at his watch again and set off for home. He was a little late but not much and he certainly didn’t want to miss any of the fun. Luckily he lived just a hundred yards or so away from his shop in Punch Bowl Lane. Quite appropriate, Peter Chappel thought to himself as he strolled quickly along Red Lion Street – there was no show without Punch, after all, as the old saying goes.

  Chapter 73

  TOM CHALLONER HAD worked for the Underground for thirty years.

  He was a stationmaster and would be retiring in the autumn. At ten minutes past three he was sitting at his desk taking what he considered a well-earned tea break, timing himself as he finished The Times crossword.

  The shock waves from the explosion shattered the window of his office and knocked him from his chair to lie unconscious on the floor.

  Near Edgware Road Tube station, Kirsty Webb was sitting at her desk in one of the CID offices at Paddington Green. Cursing the ever-increasing bureaucratic demands that meant she and her colleagues spent more time doing paperwork than they ever did out on the street solving crimes. Or trying to.

  She had given up on the paperwork an hour ago and had been working on a presentation that she would be giving in a few days’ time in Manchester. She had been shortlisted as one of three final applicants for the new post in the newly created division. Each of them had to give a fifteen-minute talk. A case study of a successful murder case on which they had worked.

  Kirsty had wanted to give her presentation on the ‘Ring-Finger Murders’ as one of the red-top papers had named them – a title that had been taken up by most of the broadcast media. But she had been sidelined on the case because it had been taken over by the serial-crimes unit and she found herself relegated back to donkey work. Taking statements, filing reports, dead-end policing.

  She put her pen down, picked up a sheet of paper with random thoughts and doodles on it, screwed it into a ball and was about to throw it across the room into a waste-paper bin when a call came.

  She looked at the caller ID, then across the room to where a couple of male colleagues were discussing yesterday’s football game. She walked out of the office, along to the steps at the end of the corridor and answered it.

  ‘DI Webb,’ she said.

  ‘Kirsty, it’s Doctor Lee. I’ve got some news.’ Kirsty felt a small flutter of expectation. She could tell by the woman’s voice that something significant had happened.

  ‘What have you got for me, Wendy?’

  ‘Dan had me run the DNA analysis for you.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Kirsty impatiently.

  ‘We’ve got a hit.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Kirsty lodged the phone in the crook of her shoulder and pulled out her notepad and pen.

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘She’s a Romanian national. A nurse – and she’s got a criminal record back at home so we got lucky. You wouldn’t have got a hit on your police systems and would have had to go to Interpol, which would have taken even longer.’

  ‘Thanks, Wendy.’

  ‘Thank Dan. He put me on it on my day off.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘I’m only kidding. I was just waiting for a call at my end. We’re all eyes out on the Shapiro case, anyway. Nobody’s having any time off.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘So you can buy Dan a beer when you see him.’

  ‘If I can get hold of him I will. He’s not answering his phone.’

  ‘I know – I tried him first. Probably out of network coverage or his phone’s run down.’

  Kirsty nodded.

  ‘So, my Jane Doe. What’s her name?’

  ‘Adriana Kisslinger. She was twenty-seven.’

  ‘What was her offence?’

  ‘Prostitution. She was offering executive bed baths in the hospital she was working at, apparently. The ward sister didn’t approve.’

  ‘And it’s illegal in Romania?’

  ‘Prostitution is, yes. Ironic, isn’t it? Romania is listed as one of the biggest sources of human trafficking in the world.’

  ‘I know. Thanks again for this, Wendy.’

  ‘Like I said—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know,’ Kirsty interrupted. ‘I will when I speak with him.’

  Chapter 74

  HANNAH SHAPIRO LOOKED up, surprised, as I walked towards her.

  She was standing, holding on to one of the poles in the doors section of the carriage. Surrounded by more excited women but, whereas their faces were bright with anticipation, hers was crumpled, her haunted eyes still free of make-up. They welled with tears as I quietly said her name. She spun round and walked straight into my enfolding arms.

  I hugged her tight to me. She was wearing an oversized white raincoat and not much beneath it.

  Which was good news. She might have just had her underwear on but at least she wasn’t strapped around with explosives. After a moment she stepped back a little and I was glad that she did. Like I said, Hannah had grown quite a bit since I had last seen her.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked her.

  ‘They took my dad, Mister Carter. They’ve taken him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When the train stopped in the tunnel. There was someone outside, waiting. They went through those.’ She pointed at the connecting doors.

  They had got off the train the same way I had got on. But it didn’t make any sense – they could hardly have walked back through the tunnel. Not with the trains running.

  ‘Did you recognise any of the men who took you?’ I asked as daylight filled the train once more as it pulled into Baker Street station.

  Hannah shook her head. ‘They were wearing masks when they jumped on us in the street. And I never saw their faces in the house they kept me in. I was in the dark the whole time.’

  ‘And today?’

  ‘This morning they were all painted black. They painted me, too.’

  I nodded. ‘I saw you but we couldn’t get to you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And this afternoon they were all wearing comedy Take That face masks.’

  ‘Where did you get on the train?’

  ‘I don’t know. Out in the country.’

  We stepped out onto the platform and she wobbled a little, holding my arm to steady herself and then gripping it harder.

  ‘How are Chloe and Laura?’ she asked, her voice even more tremulous.

  ‘Laura suffered a cut to her arm but she’s okay.�
�

  ‘And Chloe?’

  ‘Is still in hospital, Hannah. But she’s going to be fine.’

  I figured that if I said it confidently enough it might make it so. People were still pouring out of the train, heading for the eastbound platform of the Jubilee Line. A guard was waiting for them to clear so he could whistle the train on. I went up to him and told him that I had seen an unattended bag on one of the storage racks over the seats.

  It held up the train long enough for me to have a word with the driver. He had stopped in the tunnel due to signalling. It was a common enough occurrence when a train was waiting for traffic to clear ahead. There would be trains doing the very same thing now because we had backed up the system.

  Fifteen minutes later and we were outside in one of Private’s mobile offices. A large black van with blacked-out windows and a state-of-the-art communications system inside.

  We had put a transmitting device on Harlan Shapiro, strong enough to track from above the tunnel. That section wasn’t very deep, after all: it was classified as subsurface, not really underground at all. The device was disguised as a tie clip and the signal it was broadcasting translated as a flashing dot on our computer monitor displaying a map of central London. I called up the schematic of the London Underground system and superimposed it. Sure enough, the flashing light corresponded with where the train had stopped in the tunnel. The dot wasn’t moving.

  ‘He can’t still be down there,’ said Sam who was standing beside me with Del Rio.

  Hannah Shapiro was sitting huddled on one of the bench seats along the left side of the van, holding a cup of tea but not really drinking it. I guessed she was lost in dark memories and darker imaginings about what might be happening to her father. Personally, I was kicking myself. Harlan Shapiro had been the target all along. Never mind the golden egg, they had wanted the golden goddamned goose.

  I moved the remote-control mouse and clicked it, this time synchronising Google Street View with the flashing symbol.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ I said out loud.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Del Rio.

  It was unlikely he would know what it was. Not a lot of people in London did, either.

  We were looking at a bricked-up building. A series of arches all filled in with the same dark grey brick as the rest of it. It looked like a church or a Victorian orangery, maybe, if the arches had been filled with glass. Up until a few years ago, the building had housed a Chinese restaurant but now it was standing empty, waiting to become part of the infrastructure again as a substation. It had been built in 1868 and closed in 1939 when England was at war with Germany and the USA was still watching from the sidelines.

  ‘It’s Marlborough Road,’ I said.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Marlborough Road Tube Station,’ I explained. ‘One of many old Tube stations hidden throughout the Underground network. The platform for it isn’t even underground – they walked up and out and could be anywhere by now.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ asked Del Rio.

  I looked over at Hannah Shapiro looking into her mug of hot tea as if the answers might be found within it. Somehow I doubted it.

  ‘It leaves us with a job to do,’ I said determinedly. ‘And I know just where to start.’

  Chapter 75

  DI KIRSTY WEBB was feeling the kind of excitement she got when the ‘tide’ of a case changed.

  She’d considered taking the information to her superiors but she would have had to explain where and how she had got the identification.

  She didn’t want to do that. It could cost her her detective-inspector status. It would certainly cost her the shot at the promotion she wanted and the move to Manchester that she’d thought she wanted – and wasn’t the hell sure about now. Damn Dan Carter! Why did she have to go and jump into bed with him again like some drunken teenager!

  Kirsty shook away the thought and concentrated on her computer screen. Adriana Kisslinger had come into the country over a year ago and had worked on a temporary basis at a number of hospitals. Moving around London as an agency nurse: Northwick Park Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Then, bingo, she had also worked a three-month stint at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire. After that nothing was showing for a few months. If she had been working anywhere she’d been doing it off the books. Unless she had gone back to her sideline, of course. Not every prostitute filled in a tax return.

  A couple of calls later and Kirsty had Adriana Kisslinger’s last known address. It was in Punch Bowl Lane in Chesham.

  Chapter 76

  BACK IN THE office I had assembled the troops.

  The bad feeling in the air was palpable. We had brought back Hannah Shapiro. But no one was celebrating. Harlan Shapiro had known what was at stake. He had been very clear: he had lost his daughter once – he wasn’t about to lose her again. Whatever the cost. And he knew full well it was not just a monetary cost.

  We didn’t have a clue what their next move would be. Harlan Shapiro was worth billions. His daughter had been a sprat set to catch a diamond-studded mackerel. The ransom demand had always seemed small to us. Now we knew why. Looked like it was seed money to set up the real deal. The stakes were about to go very high.

  Kirsty had been as good as her word and had copied everything the Met had on the case over to me. Maybe there was something in all the data that had been missed.

  Del Rio had taken Hannah back to her college rooms. She needed a shower and clean clothes. Suzy had gone with them.

  I was sitting with Adrian Tuttle, working our way through the photographs that the SOCO team had collected. They were all digital, not as good as Adrian would have taken, and were displayed on his widescreen Apple monitor.

  Doctor Wendy Lee, meanwhile, was looking at the other forensic reports. Sam was reading through the police interviews of the students and staff who had been in the bar, or near it, when the abduction had gone down.

  On the screen Adrian Tuttle had yet another shot of the cobbled street. Close-ups of the blood which we already knew was Laura Skelton’s.

  He clicked his mouse and moved onto a wide-angle shot of the street. Pretty much an exact version of the same pictures that we had taken when our people had got to the scene. Except that had been later and the police had gone by then.

  I moved the mouse and clicked on the next photo.

  Another wide-angle shot of the scene from another perspective. But Adrian muttered something and snatched the mouse from me, clicking back to the previous shot.

  I looked at the picture, puzzled. He’d seen something I hadn’t. ‘What?’ I asked.

  Chapter 77

  ADRIAN TUTTLE IGNORED me, clicking on a series of icons and drop-down menus. The screen split in two and he pulled down more menus.

  The picture we had been looking at remained on the left-hand screen. On the right he had called up our own forensic photos that had been taken on the night of the kidnapping. Adrian hadn’t been responsible for those: he had been working on the woman found in the lock-up in King’s Cross.

  He flicked through the images until he found a wide-angle shot that matched the one the police had taken. If it was a spot-the-difference competition I couldn’t have circled one, let alone ten.

  He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the first picture. ‘See that?’

  I shrugged. ‘Just the differences of light,’ I said. ‘Ours were taken later, remember, and they had their lights set up in different positions.’

  Adrian shook his head. ‘It’s not a trick of the light.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘It’s an object. It was here in this street when the police SOCO unit were there. And it wasn’t there an hour or so later when we took our photos.’

  ‘So what is it, then?’ I repeated.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Adrian clicked on the mouse again, dragging a dotted line around the small area and releasing it to blow up the image. The picture became pixelated, even
more blurred.

  ‘Still none the wiser, Adrian,’ I said.

  ‘We can do something about that,’ he replied.

  He typed on his keyboard and bounced the image across to Sci in the Los Angeles headquarters.

  Within minutes, a message pinged back across the Atlantic and Adrian opened the attachment. Our American associate had run the image through a powerful image-enhancement system. The kind of technology that analyses space-telescope imagery of landscapes on Mars.

  What we had was the corner and a fold or two of a blanket. Dark brown and red, in a chequered or tartan pattern. One edge of the blanket was folded across but there was part of a label visible, with the letters Q and U on it.

  ‘Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid, Dan,’ said Adrian apologetically.

  See, Adrian was good with the detail. He hadn’t even taken the photograph and yet he remembered the smallest discrepancy between the two images. But me? I knew a goddamned clue when I saw one!

  Chapter 78

  ‘SHIT!’

  DI Kirsty Webb kicked the tyre of her car. But it did little to ease her frustration.

  She had thought she’d made a breakthrough in the case but now that she had arrived in Chesham it seemed extremely probable that she was looking at another dead end.

  Literally.

  The house she had come to had had a sizeable chunk blown out of it. Debris strewn all around. The windows smashed in the small station across the road from it.

  She checked the address on the open page of her notebook as she walked up to the Police – Do Not Cross line. No mistake about it. It was the last known address of Adriana Kisslinger.

  She ducked under the tape and flashed a quick, humourless smile to the young uniformed officer who approached her. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, flashing her warrant card. ‘DI Webb. So, what have we got?’

  ‘There’s been an accident.’