Relentless: A Novel Page 11

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  He gave a hollow chuckle. ‘You really have got a lot to catch up on.’

  There was certainly plenty of truth in that statement, but I wondered if he was going to be the one to update me. He made another turning, and a patch of wasteland opened up to our left. I began to get an uneasy feeling.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulling out a pack of Marlboro Lights, ‘I’m figuring that you’re telling the truth about not knowing anything about what it is we’re after.’ He put one of the cigarettes in his mouth and depressed the car lighter.

  ‘I am telling the truth. And can I have one of those cigarettes?’

  He proffered the pack and I took one and put it in my mouth. ‘So, would you be so kind as to tell me what the it we’re looking for is exactly?’

  The car lighter clicked and he used it to spark up his cigarette before passing it across to me. I lit my first smoke for ten years and took a long drag. I felt light-headed, but then I felt light-headed anyway. I repeated the question.

  ‘Well, that’s the problem. I don’t know what it is either. Neither does Mantani. We were only meant to get you over to the warehouse so that Lench could question you. I’m assuming he knows what it is.’

  I shook my head, feeling utterly confused, and took another drag on the cigarette. It tasted strange. ‘Then what the hell do we do now?’

  ‘What we do now,’ he replied evenly, ‘is find your wife. Because I’m telling you now, if you don’t know what or where it is, she does.’

  20

  Bolt and Mo arrived at the pub at five to nine. It was a small, old-fashioned place on the corner of one of the residential roads running off Highgate’s main drag, the sort that’s slowly being shut down to make way for the bigger, louder chains with their bars like aircraft hangars, which are steadily swallowing everything else up. The interior was threadbare, with a worn-out burgundy carpet peppered with cigarette burns, and walls and a ceiling that had long since been transformed from cream to a nicotine-stained pastiche of brown and yellow. The tables were arranged in a U-shape around a small central bar lined with a variety of draught beer pumps, behind which stood an ancient, stick-thin barman with a waxed moustache and skin the same colour as the walls. Even at this time on a Saturday night, it was quiet. A handful of older guys all of whom obviously knew each other sat on barstools chatting away to the barman, while perhaps a third of the tables were occupied by couples and groups of the same age.

  Just around the corner, not quite out of sight, and occupying a large booth, was the woman they were here to see. She saw them and nodded a greeting, then waited while they bought their drinks: an orange juice and lemonade for Bolt, who would have preferred something else but felt that two officers on alcohol wouldn’t look so good, and a Becks for Mo, who was officially off duty.

  Tina Boyd was an attractive woman in her late twenties, but the events of the past few months had taken their toll. Her dark hair, fashioned into a jaunty bob in the Police Review photo, hung lifelessly, and the skin beneath her eyes was puffy and tired. Even her posture as she stood up to shake hands, slumped as if she’d just finished shrugging her shoulders, suggested she’d taken one hit too many recently. She was dressed demurely in a plain white blouse, navy-blue cardigan and jeans, and wore no jewellery or make-up. Her smile wasn’t exactly forced, but nor, thought Bolt, was it on her face entirely of its own free will.

  Bolt and Mo made their introductions and joined her at the table. Mo got out his cigarettes and, seeing the open pack on the table in front of Tina, offered her one.

  When her cigarette had been lit, Bolt leaned forward in his seat and got straight down to business. ‘So, what have you got for us?’

  Tina picked up a half-full glass of wine and took a good-sized sip. Bolt noticed that her fingernails were chipped and bitten, revealing thin slithers of red-raw skin at the edges. He remembered how perfectly manicured they’d been in the photo on the cover of Police Review.

  ‘How far have you got with your case?’ she asked, just as directly. ‘Does it look like suicide?’

  ‘At the moment that’s the official line but, as I said earlier, we were at the scene of a murder of someone close to him tonight, and that makes us suspicious.’

  ‘You should be,’ she said.

  ‘Did you know our victim?’ asked Mo. ‘The Lord Chief Justice?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t, but I know something about him, something that no-one else knows.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Let me start from the beginning. You know about my ex-boyfriend, John Gallan?’

  They both nodded, and Mo said that he was sorry about what had happened.

  ‘Just after Christmas last year, John started acting a little strangely and it was obvious that he had something on his mind. Our relationship was getting quite serious, so I asked him about it, but he just told me there was nothing wrong. He could be close-lipped when he wanted to be, but it still worried me. We didn’t tend to have secrets, or at least I thought we didn’t, but as the weeks went by I began to get more and more concerned. He was still acting strangely, and I couldn’t work out why this was. I’d even gone to the lengths of letting myself into his flat when he was out, and looking through his stuff.’ She gave them a sheepish look. ‘I’m not usually so paranoid, but to be honest, I thought he was having an affair.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Anyway, one evening towards the end of January, we were out for dinner and he got a call on his mobile in the middle of the meal. He excused himself and went outside to take it, and when he came back in he was really agitated. That was it, I’d had enough. I was sure it was a woman so I confronted him about it. I was surprised by his reaction. Very quietly, very seriously, he told me that a few weeks earlier he’d received some confidential information from an anonymous source about a criminal matter. He hadn’t been able to talk about it until he got the necessary security clearance; he was in discussions with liaison officers from the highest echelons of Scotland Yard while they looked into it. It was one of the liaison officers who’d called, and the reason John was agitated was because the man on the other end of the phone had told him that as a result of their enquiries they weren’t going to be pursuing the matter any further. They’d also told him not to talk about it with anyone, as by doing so he could be in breach of the Official Secrets Act. Naturally he was upset, and he apologized for not having told me anything earlier, which was typical of him. Even though I’d accused him unjustly of having an affair, he ended up being the one saying sorry.’

  She took a drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke in the direction of a picture on the wall that showed a group of dogs playing pool. There was a deep sense of regret in her expression as she raked over the coals of her recent past, and Bolt felt for her. For a moment, he thought she might break down, but then her expression became neutral again. She drank some more wine before continuing.

  ‘He didn’t want to tell me about it, even then. Not because he was scared that he might get prosecuted – that sort of threat wouldn’t have worried him – but because he was so bloody honest. He’d been told not to say anything, so he wasn’t going to. He obviously wasn’t in a good mood, but when we got back to his place we broke open a bottle of wine, and by the time we’d polished it off he was ready to talk.’

  She took a last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

  ‘What he had to say . . . frankly, I found it difficult to believe at the time.’ For the first time, she made the effort to look them both in the eye. Hers were dark and bleak, the pain they were reflecting almost tangible. ‘I almost wish he’d never told me.’

  There was silence at the table for a few seconds. From the bar came the sound of gravelly laughter. Although only a few yards away, it felt distant. Bolt knew instinctively that what was coming was both relevant to their inquiry, and bad. Neithe
r he nor Mo prompted Tina. They simply waited.

  ‘He told me that a man – someone I have a feeling he must have known, but who he never identified – had given him a dossier he’d compiled on a paedophile ring that had been active in south-east England in the late 1990s, and which involved several men who were high up in the establishment. This group of men had apparently murdered a young girl in 1998 and dumped her body in a lake in Dorset soon afterwards. People attached to them were also thought to be responsible for a number of murders in London late last year when they were trying to cover up the death of this girl, including the stabbing of my partner at the time, DCI Simon Barron.’

  It was for this reason that Tina Boyd had got her nickname, the Black Widow. People around her had a habit of dying.

  ‘You were working on a case with DCI Barron at the time of his murder, though. Didn’t you find out anything about this paedophile ring?’ Bolt asked her.

  ‘No. DCI Barron’s death was, and is, officially unsolved, and there was never any evidence of a group of people matching this description. But the dossier John had named names, several of whom died in mysterious circumstances last year. They included your suicide victim, Tristram Parnham-Jones.’

  Bolt was shocked. He looked at Mo, who was clearly feeling the same way. ‘You’re talking about the Parnham-Jones, the Lord Chief Justice?’ Bolt knew she was, but felt he had to ask. It was that sort of revelation.

  ‘Yes,’ she said frostily, as if she felt her intelligence was being questioned. ‘Your suicide victim. He was apparently involved in the murder of the girl in 1998.’

  ‘Was there any hard evidence implicating Parnham-Jones?’ asked Mo.

  ‘The dossier contained the exact resting place of the young girl’s body, and her identity. The name matched that of a girl who’d gone missing at about the right time, but the liaison officer told John that a search of the lake in question hadn’t revealed any remains.’

  Bolt leaned forward in his seat. ‘So, it’s possible – and believe me, I’m not saying it is – but it’s possible that this dossier could have been some sort of elaborate hoax?’

  ‘At the time I thought that was possible, of course I did. It was a pretty outlandish accusation. It was also obvious from what John told me that Scotland Yard had looked at it, and had probably even acted on parts of it, like searching the lake, but weren’t going to devote any more resources to proving or disproving the contents. So I suppose they thought it was a hoax too. But John was convinced of its truth, and he was no fool, I can promise you that.’

  ‘I know a little bit about his background,’ said Bolt, ‘so I’m aware that he knew what he was doing.’

  She forced a smile, but her face remained as bleak as ever. ‘He did.’

  ‘Did you ever see the dossier?’ asked Mo.

  She shook her head. ‘I asked to see it, but he didn’t want me to. He said there was nothing that could be done so there was no point. I think it hurt him that Scotland Yard had decided against continuing to look into it. I think he also believed that they were covering things up because Parnham-Jones was such a high-profile figure.’

  Bolt exhaled. ‘He was certainly that. Did John make any further enquiries of his own, do you know?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He certainly brooded over it, and he couldn’t seem to let it go, but I don’t know what else he did, or could have done, for that matter. I know one thing, though: it damaged our relationship, and we saw each other a lot less in February than we had done previously. I didn’t like to think that events involving the top judge in our country could have ended up being connected to the murder of a young child, or of one of my colleagues, and I didn’t want my boyfriend obsessing about it either. I’m a realist. I know my limitations. I don’t like to see bad people get away with crimes they’ve committed. But at the same time I don’t like to damn them when the evidence is flimsy. And in this case it was near enough non-existent.’ She paused. ‘But now, looking back on it, I should have done something.’

  ‘But what could you have done?’ asked Bolt, feeling the need to reassure her, the pain in her expression affecting him more than he would have liked.

  ‘I don’t know, but I know this: a month after he took that call in the restaurant, John was dead.’

  ‘He committed suicide, didn’t he?’

  ‘That was the verdict, yes.’

  ‘But you don’t believe it?’

  ‘John wasn’t suicidal, Mike. He had a teenage daughter he doted on. He would never have left her behind. He had too much of a sense of responsibility for that. He wasn’t the type either. And before you say that the people left behind always say that, I was a copper long enough to know the type. I would have seen the signs.’

  ‘You said he was brooding, though,’ put in Mo. ‘Could it be possible that you . . .’ He thought about what he was going to say for a moment. Mo was always a diplomat when it mattered. ‘That you saw the signs but didn’t realize the seriousness of them?’

  ‘He wasn’t acting suicidal. He was acting as if he was obsessed with this particular case, and was frustrated by the fact that his hands were tied. But he would never have killed himself over it. I’m absolutely sure of that.’

  She took another mouthful of wine, and Bolt noticed that her hand was shaking. A thought struck him.

  ‘What was the actual cause of death?’

  ‘An overdose of sleeping pills,’ she answered. ‘And that’s another thing: he never took sleeping pills.’

  Mo and Bolt exchanged glances. Tina picked up on this and immediately asked how Parnham-Jones had died.

  Bolt sighed. ‘Off the record, and it’s very much off the record’ – Tina nodded to show she understood – ‘it was sleeping pills. Dilantin, to be precise.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Snap.’

  ‘You’re saying John overdosed on dilantin?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’

  Another thought struck Bolt. ‘Did he leave a note?’

  For the first time, he saw doubt cross her face.

  ‘He did. A short two-liner.’

  ‘Typed or handwritten?’

  ‘Typed.’

  ‘Signed?’

  She nodded. Parnham-Jones’s letter hadn’t been, and Bolt felt his initial excitement fading a little.

  ‘Was the signature a forgery?’

  ‘No,’ she said reluctantly, ‘I saw it. It looked like his handwriting. But there was something wrong with the letter. It was the words. They just weren’t . . .’ She worked hard to come up with the right phrase. ‘They just weren’t him. He would never have said something like “I’m sorry but I just can’t take the pain of living”. And he would have written a lot more. He would have explained his actions, and he would definitely have made some reference to Rachel, his daughter, or he would have left her a note of her own.’ She stopped speaking suddenly and looked at them both intensely. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  The excitement had returned and was racing through Bolt with a vengeance. ‘Can you remember the exact words of the suicide note?’ he asked, his tone as even as he could manage.

  Tina lit another cigarette and looked down at the table, clearly trying to compose herself. ‘I read it plenty of times,’ she said eventually, ‘so, yes, I remember the contents. As I told you, it wasn’t very long. It went: “This letter is to all of those I care and have cared about. I’m sorry but I just can’t take the pain of living. The world’s problems can sometimes be too much to bear. Love” – and then he signed it with his formal signature, which again wasn’t like him. He always signed his notes “John”.’

  Bolt heard Mo exhale. He exhaled himself. The wording was identical to that which Parnham-Jones had typed on the headed paper he’d left on the bedside table beside him as he died.

  21

  I stared intensely at Daniels, trying without any great success to fathom him out. We were stopped at traffic lights
and it was raining hard.

  ‘Why the hell should I help you find my wife?’ I demanded.

  ‘Because,’ he said, turning in his seat and fixing me with a pretty intense stare of his own, ‘at the moment I’m the only person who actually does believe you know nothing about what’s going on. The whole world is after you. You need all the help you can get, and at the moment I’m it.’

  I sighed and took a long drag on my cigarette as the lights went green and we pulled away. It was beginning to taste better than it had done at the beginning, but still not good enough to justify why I’d bothered getting through twenty-five of them a day during my formative years. Outside the window, the wet night streets of an unfamiliar stretch of London swept past us, the whole journey seeming nightmarishly surreal.

  ‘Who is Lench?’ I asked. ‘And why would he think a man like me, a fucking software salesman, for Christ’s sake, could possibly have something he wanted?’

  ‘Lench is a hitman, a killer. We’ve got him down for about four murders and two disappearances, and that’s just the stuff we’re sure about. He could be involved in as many as twenty deaths.’

  ‘Jesus. How come he hasn’t been arrested?’

  Daniels’ lips formed into a thin smile. ‘You’ve got a touching faith in the powers of the police, haven’t you?’

  ‘What? And you haven’t? Great.’ Today, it seemed, was definitely a day for bursting the bubbles of my preconceptions.

  ‘We know all this,’ he continued, ignoring my sarcasm, ‘but the problem is Lench is careful. He doesn’t leave loose ends, often there aren’t even any corpses, and the only people he uses are those he trusts absolutely, and who are involved so much themselves that there’s no way they’ll ever testify against him in a court of law. In fact, even now we still don’t know his true identity. So, you have to get someone in on the inside and gather the evidence against him that way.’

  ‘You say he’s a hitman. Who does he do his hits for?’

  ‘He works for a very rich businessman who’s involved in all kinds of projects, mainly legitimate these days. I can’t tell you his name because he’s someone you may have heard of, but he started out in cocaine and heroin smuggling, and rather than pissing up his profits against the wall like a lot of these guys do, he invested his money in property and built up a major portfolio. Then it was a matter of expanding into construction – so that he was building the properties rather than just buying them up – and other related businesses. He’s been enormously successful, and one of the main reasons for that is the fact that he’s kept to the same methods he used in his drug-smuggling days. Whenever he hits any opposition to his plans, he either bribes them or, if that fails, he gets Lench and his people to make the problem go away. We’ve been after this individual for years but he keeps so far away from the action we reckoned the only way we were going to get him was to secure the evidence needed to bring down Lench, and then use him to testify that our main target was the man pulling the strings. And now, suddenly, it’s all fucked up.’