You Will Never Find Me (49 page)

‘What?' said Lomax, exhausted, his defences already starting to break down.

‘Aren't you wondering what you're doing here?'

‘The police move in mysterious ways,' said Lomax.

‘Why were two officers waiting for you when you finally came back to your flat in Elm Park Gardens in your silver Golf GTI registration LG 59 KFC?'

‘Whim?'

‘Which we've since discovered contains a bottle of vodka and some cans of Coke.'

‘That's a crime now, is it?'

‘How well do you know Terence Mumby aka Tel?'

‘Not at all well, because I've never met him before in my life.'

‘So what was he doing driving your vehicle away from the Andover Estate last night?'

‘I can't think what you're talking about.'

‘His fingerprints are all over the front of the car, inside and out, all over the leather steering wheel and the leather gear stick,' said Hope. ‘I wouldn't let Terence Mumby anywhere near my car, even if I knew him . . . especially if I knew him.'

‘You're probably a very sensible man.'

‘Think about it,' said Hope. ‘Go over in your mind what you did last night that meant that two police officers were waiting for you when you came home.'

He had thought about it while he'd been sweating it out in the cells. He remembered holding the glasses and filling them with drinks. He'd taken his own and left the other two, but he was pretty sure they wouldn't get much in the way of fingerprints from them.

‘I've already thought about it,' said Lomax, ‘and decided that their presence must have been delirium-induced.'

‘You're a clever boy, aren't you, Miles? You're educated,' said Hope. ‘You're playing this game because you know what you're looking at here, don't you? Murder and kidnap.'

‘Kidnap?'

‘You were seen with Tel, carrying someone to your car,' said Hope. ‘She's been identified as a seventeen-year-old girl called Amy Boxer.'

He pushed the photograph Mercy had sent him across the table. Lomax, who was still trying to maintain his crumbling facade by sitting sideways and cross-legged, glanced over his shoulder at the shot.

‘Tel says she doesn't look like that now. The long hair's gone and it's in corn rows, but that was the only shot her mother had of her.'

Lomax blinked, said nothing, but the sight of Amy had restarted something in his mind.

‘I can see she's ringing bells with you, Miles,' said Hope. ‘Feeling a bit guilty about something, are we?'

Lomax felt himself pitchforked into a corner now, with this DI lunging at him at will. He didn't know Tel well enough. He could be blabbing away, trying to save himself from a kidnap charge. What was the sentence for that? He had no idea. What did they have on him that placed him at the scene? Or did they have the idiot Tel's word and bugger all else?

As he thought this he realised his brain had embarked on a little diversion to stop him thinking about what was really bothering him. Ever since he'd left Amy in the company of Dennis and Darren, ever since he'd whispered, ‘See you in Cardiff,' in her ear, he'd been thinking about her. He'd thought he was hard. He'd walked away from people many times before, people he could have saved from some very bad treatment, figured they would learn from it. But Amy was different. She wasn't part of the scene and this wasn't a question of a punishment beating. They couldn't rely on her to keep her mouth shut. The only sure way was to . . . He couldn't even say it to himself. He'd walked away from her, thinking he could do what he'd always done, but it had played on his mind and he'd found himself writhing in his seat at traffic lights, hands clenched on the steering wheel.

‘Glad to see you're thinking now,' said Hope. ‘Want a clue as to why we came knocking at your particular door?'

Lomax stared at him with ‘Go on then' eyes.

‘The neighbour said there was a party going on at Alice Grant's. She heard music. Amy Winehouse. Then it was turned off,' said Hope, and held up the evidence bag with the little remote in it. ‘This, I'm afraid, along with all the witness statements, and Tel's desperate blabbing, puts you at the scene.'

Lomax's face drained as he remembered. His panic at seeing Alice Grant convulsing on the bed. His attempt to put her into the recovery position. Amy coming in and seeing the state of her. The girl's instinct to call for an ambulance. Slapping the phone out of her hands. Her rush for the door. He'd picked up the remote, turned off the music, thrown it on the sofa. Dumb.

‘Now look, Miles. I know it's not your normal line of work, kidnapping,' said Hope, gentle now. ‘We know you're a drug dealer, which is why your prints are on our database. And this means we're inclined to believe that you're not doing this off your own bat, but because you have to. You owe someone. Is that right?'

Lomax gave him the long, hard ‘Go on' look that didn't concede anything until he knew what he could get in return.

‘We might be able to look at Alice Grant's death as manslaughter rather than murder, but only if you come completely clean about what you were doing with Amy Boxer. Where did you take her? Who were you taking her to? Unlike Alice Grant, Amy's is a life we can still save, and if we succeed in doing that then we can talk to the CPS on your behalf. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that you'll get off scot-free, but I'll make sure you don't go down for two life terms.'

A long silence followed in which trains of thought left and returned to the same undeniable terminus: the choice between two life terms or being hounded to death by the Chilcotts. But there were also a couple of deciding factors: the way the Chilcotts had looked at him, measuring him up for a coffin, and Amy. He had to admit it to himself: he liked her.

‘We took her to the derelict Rowland Estate at the back of a warehouse on Neckinger in Bermondsey,' he said.

Mercy, whose face was right up close to the viewing panel, dropped her forehead against the glass, closed her eyes and breathed out a long emotional sigh.

 

‘We're holding Charles Boxer,' said Dennis. ‘He's ready for you.'

Jaime told him that El Osito was still sleeping after his morphine jab in the afternoon.

‘I'll wake him up at eleven,' he said. ‘Send a car for us then.' Jaime sat on his hotel bed in the dark, looking out over the lights of the city, the bridges across the river, the traffic on the Embankment. He had a Walther PPK in his hand, which had been handed over to him in the Colombian restaurant in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre. It was a small gun, no larger than his hand, its metal warm from being close to his body. He aimed it out of the window at the intermittent flashes of the warning lights on the four towers of Battersea Power Station. Then he put it next to him on the bed, stared between his feet.

A while later he took another call, this time from the journalist Raul Brito in Spain, who gave him the latest developments in the case of the dismembered girl.

At 11:00
P.M.
he shrugged into a leather jacket, slipped the Walther PPK into an inside pocket, crossed the corridor to El Osito's room and let himself in. El Osito was still sleeping. He turned on a bedside lamp and took out a small bag of cocaine. On the glass surface of the bedside table he prepared two lines and nudged El Osito awake. He surfaced with a huge intake of breath through his nose and stared silently at Jaime with shining black eyes.

‘What's going on?'

‘They have the Englishman. They're sending a car now.'

‘What time is it?'

‘Just after 11:00
P.M.
local time,' said Jaime and handed him a rolled twenty.

El Osito, still fully clothed, leaned over and snorted the two prepared lines and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Jaime positioned the wheelchair next to the bed and dragged El Osito into the seat.

‘I want to change my shirt,' said El Osito. ‘I stink.'

Jaime found him a new shirt. El Osito peeled off the old one.

He dressed and Jaime put a jacket over his shoulders. They went down to the reception area, where one of Dennis's drivers was waiting with a VW Caravelle parked outside. They got El Osito into the back and locked off his wheelchair. Jaime sat with him, told him the latest news that Raul Brito had given him over the phone. El Osito laughed in a way that was so mirthless it sounded like the barking of a savage dog. He stopped as suddenly as he'd started and began doing some stretching exercises, twisting in his chair and then lifting himself with his powerful arms as if in readiness for what was to come.

Jaime leaned his head against the window and wondered with what horrific mental gymnastics El Osito had trained his mind in preparation for this event. Vicente had said that El Osito's torture sessions were the stuff of legend, but these were punishments meted out to wrongdoers as a warning to others. There was no precedent for anybody who'd done the sort of damage to him that Charles Boxer had. Jaime didn't want to think about it. He knew that violence was a necessary part of their business, but he'd never had the appetite for the excesses of some of his associates. Perhaps the heavy use of drugs had dehumanised and deranged them so that they saw others like animals. But that didn't really explain it.

He hoped the girl wouldn't be there. He wished he could speak English better, to impress on Dennis how important it was that El Osito shouldn't know about the girl. That was a scenario he dreaded. Vicente had told him that El Osito's torture sessions had been based on extensive reading about the Chilean DINA's methods, under Pinochet in the 1970s. He had been particularly fascinated by the activities in a torture centre in Santiago that was known by two names: the Discotheque and La Venda Sexy. Jaime hadn't wanted to know any more than that.

M
ercy was on the phone to Makepeace giving him a recap of the Lomax interview.

‘And you've tried calling Charles?'

‘His mobile's turned off,' said Mercy. ‘The last I heard from him was the text message he sent early this morning, which started me off on this investigation. I've contacted the hospital where his mother is being treated and they said he went to see her this morning, early. I've also spoken to his girlfriend, and she says she saw him at lunchtime and he left abruptly in the late afternoon having behaved quite . . . strangely. Since then, nothing.'

‘So, given Lomax's testimony, you think Charles has handed himself over in return for Amy's release and that what he's been doing today is . . . clearing the decks, as it were?' said Makepeace, finishing awkwardly.

‘Saying his goodbyes is what it feels like to me,' said Mercy. ‘My concern is that Lomax doesn't know what it's really about. They wouldn't tell him anything beyond that it was a hostage exchange.'

‘An exchange?'

‘That was the original intention.'

‘And what changed?'

‘Amy tried to escape and saw Lomax's face in the process. He had to report that to his bosses because it presents a risk of exposure to the whole organisation,' said Mercy. ‘So it seems likely they're going to renege on their deal to release Amy.'

‘What do we know about Dennis and Darren Chilcott?'

‘Surprisingly little. I contacted the project team in the Special and Organised Crime Command who've been tracking Lomax and they're very excited about it. This is the supplier they've been looking for. The Chilcotts were completely under their radar.'

‘This place, the Rowland Estate, do we have access?'

‘Lomax has said he will cooperate fully.'

‘How many people does Lomax think will be involved?'

‘He reckons there'll be at least one person in the warehouse, possibly two. There'll be another person outside the basement where they're keeping the hostages because there's no phone signal inside and they can't hear what's going on outside, especially in the two soundproofed rooms.'

‘Any CCTV?'

‘There's none in Neckinger itself, except on some council buildings, but there's two in the yard outside the Chilcotts' warehouse, but Lomax will help us get around that.'

‘So a four-man firearms unit should be enough for the job,' said Makepeace. ‘I'll make my way to Bermondsey with them now. Let's meet at the Neckinger end of Grange Walk. You bring Lomax and an accurate set of plans and we'll mount the assault from there.'

 

The VW Caravelle pulled into the yard from Neckinger and reversed into the warehouse. The driver and Jaime lifted El Osito out in his wheelchair. He propelled himself down the warehouse towards Dennis Chilcott, who was walking up to meet him.

‘We have a small problem,' said Dennis.

‘Tell me,' said El Osito, used to problems, relaxed about them now.

‘I agreed to release the girl if Charles Boxer handed himself over,' said Dennis, ‘but the girl tried to escape and in the process saw one of my dealers' faces. I've arranged to have the dealer terminated, but we don't know if that's been successful yet. If we let her go, she can compromise our whole operation.'

‘That is not a problem,' said El Osito. ‘I will deal with them both, personally.'

Dennis glanced at Jaime, who sent his eyebrows over a low jump.

‘Follow me,' said Dennis.

El Osito had to restrain himself, constantly braking to stop from running into the back of Dennis's legs. They reached the steps to the basement. Dennis trotted ahead and opened the door, looked down the corridor, beckoned to Darren.

‘Where's the girl?' he said quietly.

‘She's in a separate room,' said Darren, pointing to a closed door.