She checked the clock on the car. She was always punctual. Being late was a sign of grave moral weakness in Hanlon’s eyes.
Edmonton wasn’t an area she knew well. She’d been on a team that had recovered a body from the reservoir years before, but that was about it. She also knew it had Britain’s largest incinerator. Greenpeace called it London’s Cancer Factory. LondonWaste, its current owners, call it London EcoPark. A rose by any other name, thought Hanlon. Doubtless the Andersons had made use of its facilities on more than one occasion. She could see its huge, slim tower thrusting into the sky from here, like a minatory finger.
The street that the pub was in looked poor and rough. The cars parked by the side of the road were old, most of the tax discs out of date. The tarmac was worn, the pavement cracked and the terraced houses that lined the street, each with a satellite dish pointed hopefully at the sky above, were in urgent need of repair. Curtains sagged, paint peeled. Front gardens were unkempt, with weeds and uncut grass, breeze blocks, mattresses and other detritus. It was an unloved street, in an unloved part of London. Several windows had right-wing flyers displayed and there were a couple of ragged St George flags, hanging from rudimentary poles out of top windows.
There was a group of kids, all of them white, although it was a very ethnically diverse neighbourhood, playing football on the pavement. The street, Gilpin Road, was a cul de sac. Outside the pub, two large, shaven-headed men stood, menacingly watchful. They weren’t smoking, they didn’t have drinks; part of Anderson’s Praetorian guard, thought Hanlon. They were wearing a bouncer’s off-duty uniform of crombie coat and shiny DMs. Hanlon could see the faint bulge at the front of the shoes that indicated they were steel-toed. The Three Compasses was not a pub you went to for a drink, unless you had dealings with the Andersons. It was a business premises, not a licensed premises.
The kids, seven of them, formed a little semi-circle round Hanlon as she got out of the Audi and locked it. One of them, aged she guessed about eleven or twelve, took a pace forward. He was small and stocky, his blond hair cut short. He exuded confidence.
‘Nice car, miss,’ he said, with mock politeness. He was wearing a very new pair of Air Jordan Nike trainers. Hanlon guessed they cost over three figures. He had a Lonsdale T-shirt and a gold chain. The eyes looking at Hanlon were those of an adult, not those of a child. They were disconcertingly vicious. He was the kind of child who would find it amusing to throw bricks at a cat, she thought.
‘Mind your car for you, can we?’
Hanlon wondered what the going rate for her Audi would be, if she didn’t want to return and find it keyed and the tyres let down, or punctured.
Her silence and impassive face were beginning to annoy the kid. He glared at her with an expression no child should have. It belonged to a much older head. He wondered if she spoke English.
‘Twenty quid,’ he said.
Hanlon pointed at the pub. ‘You know Dave Anderson, don’t you?’ Her voice was quiet, but the kid flinched. He knew a threat when he heard it. Her face was sinister in the gathering gloom of the evening.
The kid nodded; he didn’t look so tough now. He looked worried. Hanlon carried on, menacingly. ‘I’m meeting him over there. Anything happens to my car, if so much as a leaf blows on it, I’ll ask him to sort it out with you. I’m holding you personally responsible. You got that?’
The kid nodded.
‘You know what he’ll do to you.’
The kid nodded again.
‘Good,’ said Hanlon.
She crossed the road to the pub. The kids resumed their game of football, but this time much further down the street. No one wanted to accidentally kick the ball against her car.
Anderson hadn’t changed since she’d last seen him. His hair was still long and slightly ratty, the face still thin and the mouth narrow-lipped. He always looked slightly malnourished, she thought. Then again, perhaps he was.
She’d seen pictures of his father leaving court thirty years ago. He had been a bit of a ladies’ man. He’d looked like a seventies’ footballer, leather bomber jacket, big-collared shirt, sideburns and tight, flared trousers with zip-up ankle boots. He’d have worn Brut and driven a souped-up Ford Capri.
Dave Anderson made no such concessions to the fairer sex or ‘the ladies, God bless ’em’, as his dad would have put it. He was just violence in human form, dangerous and highly intelligent.
They sat in a room at the back of the small pub, a poolroom with two tables, the baize scuffed and stained. His personal worth, as they say in Rich List terms, must have been several million but financial success, thought Hanlon sardonically, hadn’t changed him. He was still the man who’d nailed someone to a door, the kind of man who would methodically torture you then knock your teeth out with a brick for fun, the kind of man whose only publicized regret, in a particularly brutal killing, was that the victim had died far too soon.
‘Hello, DCI Hanlon,’ he said.
Hanlon nodded politely. Very few people could have known about her promotion. It was Anderson’s way of letting her know how powerful he was; his way of telling her he had an informant in the force. She had expected nothing less. You’d always find a bent copper somewhere or other. They’re like rats; you’re never less than a few feet away from one. She looked around her, making the usual, careful inventory of her surroundings.
The back bar room they were in had no natural light, no windows, and was dimly lit by cheap imitation-candle wall fittings, with dirty, brown shades. Most of the fittings were crooked and the wallpaper old and nicotine-stained. It had been there for years. Some of the marks on the green of the pool-table baize looked suspiciously like blood. She guessed it was in here that Anderson would mete out punishments.
It looked that sort of place.
There was a strong element of theatricality in Anderson’s brutality, thought Hanlon. If you were brought in here against your will, just his reputation would suffice. And this room was like a stage set. It looked like the kind of place where a London hard man would kick you to death. Just looking around would lower anyone’s spirits.
Anything in here would look like an instrument of torture or death, from the stained pool table, to the small plumber’s blowtorch standing on the end of the bar next to a pair of pliers. In a workman’s toolbox, pliers were an innocent, useful device, but with Anderson, pliers conjured up images of teeth, nipples, genitalia, any soft tissue, in their metal jaws.
Even the pool balls ceased to look innocent and more like something useful to be stuffed inside a sock and used as a makeshift club.
‘Mr Anderson would like a word.’ Not what you would want breathed into your shell-like.
Anderson indicated a table with two chairs. She’d forgotten how big his hands were. They sat down and he offered her a drink. She declined with a shake of the head. One of Anderson’s employees stood attentively behind the chair that he was sitting on, like a large, none-too-bright Alsatian, at his master’s heel.
‘So, what did you want to talk about?’ asked Anderson. He had immediately agreed to see Hanlon. She intrigued him, maybe not least because she was one of the very few people he’d ever met who wasn’t afraid of him. Others in that category had been either criminally insane or unbelievably stupid. He didn’t wonder at all how she got her black eye. Such things were commonplace in his world.
‘A specialist S&M brothel in Oxford. It’ll be centrally located off St Giles, I’d guess off the Banbury or Woodstock Road,’ she said.
He smiled, or rather his mouth did. ‘It’s a bit off my manor.’
‘I realize that. But Iris Campion would know, wouldn’t she.’
Anderson laughed. ‘Soho Iris. You move in peculiar circles, DCI Hanlon.’ He turned to the bodyguard behind him. ‘Danny, go and tell my dad I’ve got a copper here asking about Soho Iris. That’ll give him a laugh.’
Danny gave Hanlon a warning glance, as if to say don’t you dare do anything while I’m gone, although quite what he had in mind she couldn’t begin to imagine. He turned and left the room.
‘So how’s your sergeant then, the one that was in a coma?’
‘Still in a coma,’ Hanlon replied. Then she asked, ‘And your dad?’
Anderson shrugged. ‘Still dying.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Busy planning his funeral. It’s going to be huge. He’s working out seating arrangements now. For the meal afterwards. People get very touchy about things like that. He was always good at planning, Dad. He never felt he got the credit he deserved for his jobs. He was always Mad Malc, oh fuck, it’s Malcy with a sawn-off, Malcy’ll break your legs, but I tell you something for nothing. Seventeen armoured vans before he got caught, he was the brains and it was only because he was grassed up by that Maltese Alex, that he ever did serious time.’
Nothing like a stroll down memory lane, thought Hanlon. Happy days, blags, the Sweeney, armoured cars, shooters. Dave Anderson would have been a baby when all this was going on. She knew the names only from old-timers she’d worked with. DCI Tremayne would have recognized the name. She’d been thinking a lot about him of late.
‘Disappeared didn’t he, Maltese Alex,’ said Hanlon.
‘Did you know that Edmonton incinerator’s chimney is a hundred metres high,’ said Anderson elliptically. ‘They started it up in 1971. Lot of things have been burned there over the years. Gone up in smoke. Cremated.’ The two of them contemplated Maltese Alex’s demise, his dust particles scattered to the North London winds. ‘He wasn’t even Maltese, you know, he was from fucking Pinner.’ He shook his head in contempt. ‘What a tosser,’ he added with real scorn.
Danny appeared at the door. ‘He wants to come down, boss.’
Anderson rolled his eyes and stood up. ‘He won’t have a stair lift put in. He says it’s for old people. I’ll be back in a minute.’
A short while later he reappeared, carrying his father in his arms, as you would a child. He didn’t look much heavier than one now. The old man had one arm around his son’s neck. Hanlon guessed the skeletal Malcolm Anderson would weigh in now at under six stone. Danny was behind with a small oxygen tank and, with a free hand, pulled an old armchair forward that was in the corner. Dave Anderson settled his father down in it. The old man gestured for the oxygen and put the ends of the clips from the tubing connected to the cylinder in his nose. He closed his eyes and breathed as deeply as he could.
His skin was waxy, translucent, and his breathing was laboured from the cancer. He’d had one lung removed and the other was barely functioning. His pupils were dilated from opiates, but his eyes still had the same angry look as his son’s.
Hanlon had stood up out of respect. Now the old man indicated she should sit down. She waited until he’d caught his breath. Malcolm Anderson looked at her appreciatively and spoke. ‘Always a pleasure when David brings a nice girl home.’ He gave a kind of wheezing laugh. ‘And I hear you’ve got a steady job too.’
Hanlon found herself grudgingly drawn to the terminally ill old criminal, who could still keep a sense of humour in the face of death, now only kissing distance away. Grace under pressure.
‘It’s only our second date. Don’t get your hopes up,’ said Hanlon.
Malcolm Anderson smiled and grimaced, as a wave of pain struck him. He adjusted something on a belt around his waist. Hanlon guessed it was a pump for morphine.
‘So, tell me about Iris, I haven’t seen her for ages.’ His voice was little louder than a whisper.
Hanlon told him about the brothel without mentioning Fuller. He was particularly amused by her description of Iris’s maid.
He closed his eyes and fell silent. ‘I knew her before, before you know.’ He brushed one sunken cheek with his fingertips, miming a cutting action. ‘Razor Lewis, he was called. Obvious reasons really. I was glad I killed that cunt for her.’ He gave a wheezy, faint laugh. ‘I can say that now, no one’s going to nick me. I’ve done a few things I regret now, too late of course, but not that. Razor Lewis, that takes me back.’ He closed his eyes momentarily and a smile both wistful and ominous played over his lips. For a second Hanlon could imagine him as he was before the illness.
He opened his eyes and now they were hard and unforgiving. ‘I hated that bloke. He was so fucking...’ he paused, searching for the right word, ‘uncouth.’
His eyes closed again. ‘You go and see her, see Iris. Tell her I told you she’d help. Give her my love, darling.’ He hissed to himself from the pain. ‘Up we go, David.’
Gently, Dave Anderson lifted his father up, much as he in his turn had been carried up the same stairs as a sleepy child by his dad years ago.
The door closed behind them and Hanlon stood up. ‘Say thank you to your boss,’ she said to Danny. She looked round the empty pool room. The impassive Danny, hands folded in front of him, stood quietly in a corner. He nodded and watched Hanlon leave the back bar.
Out in the street the kids were gone and her Audi was unscathed. She got in and drove slowly home through the North London streets.
Hanlon thought to herself, that’s the first time anyone has called me darling in a very long time.
Sunday morning and the City, London’s financial square mile, was practically empty. It always felt strange to her, the eerie silence that enveloped the district at weekends, like being in a zombie film or some post-apocalyptic disaster movie.
Hanlon rode through the deserted streets on her Fuji triathlon bike, enjoying the freedom and the absence of traffic. Tomorrow, Monday, three hundred thousand workers would be decanted into the area. Today, on a Sunday, there’d be fewer than seven thousand and most of those would be invisible. Weekends were a great time to cycle around the City, particularly a Sunday, when she had no training to be done. Sunday was a rest day and she limited herself to light exercise, like cycling around just for fun. Sometimes she just liked to enjoy her body for a change.
She ate breakfast at a café, chewing her way without enthusiasm through an omelette, and returned home. She felt restless and irritable. The following day she’d decided to go and see Campion at the brothel.