think I knew all about the dealing that went on there. I told him that that side of it was nothing to do with me, and gave him all the paperwork. I didn’t like his attitude. He was treating me like some sort of third-class citizen. I’d heard he was a real bastard but I didn’t expect him to be quite so fucking out of order. He kept calling me “hired help”, and then, when I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to know about the dealing, he told me I was a lying bitch. He said that we’d all been cooking the books down there. Roy, me, and Warren Case, the bloke who supplied the doormen.’ She was fiddling intently with a ring on her index finger as she spoke, and shaking her head. Finally, she looked me right in the eye. ‘You know me, Max, I don’t like being insulted, whoever it is doing the insulting. I told him I was telling the truth and if he didn’t believe me that was his fucking lookout. Then I told him I was leaving.’
‘What happened then?’
‘He hit me. The bastard stood up and smacked me right in the face.’ She touched her cheek where his fist had connected, and I felt the rage building. ‘I couldn’t believe it. No man’s ever done that to me before, not in my whole life. Then he came over and picked me up by my hair, telling me I was going to have to learn some fucking manners. The whole thing happened so fast I didn’t even have time to be scared, so I called him a cowardly cunt and tried to knee him in the balls, but he just stepped out of the way. Then he started slapping me round the face with one hand and half-strangling me with the other, and all the time he kept saying that I was going to have to learn some manners.’ She stopped for a moment, and I thought she might lose her composure, but she held on, her voice quiet. ‘At one point, I think the dirty bastard must have started getting turned on because he pushed me back onto the desk and I could feel him getting all hard up against me, and he was saying I was a fucking whore and pawing me all over, getting really worked up … Christ, it was horrible. I tried to fight him, Max, I really did, but he was so fucking strong. I could hardly breathe with his hand round my neck. I thought he was going to kill me.’
I went over and put my arm around her. I felt sick to the gut. It was difficult to believe what I was hearing. I wondered how much worse things could get. ‘Did he rape you?’ I asked quietly, desperate for the answer to be no.
She shook her head and removed her hands from her face, but still didn’t look at me. I felt relief that lasted for all of about two seconds. ‘He did other things,’ she whispered, her disgusted tone leaving little doubt as to what those things might have been. ‘And when he’d finished, he just looked at me like I was nothing and told me to fuck off. Like I was nothing, Max. No one … no one’s ever done that to me before.’ She shook her head slowly like she was trying to shake the memories out of her head. She looked distant, and I thought then that I didn’t want to lose her. To be honest, amid all the frustration and rage in my head, that was when I sort of knew I loved her. A bit hasty, yes, but sometimes these things really do happen.
We held each other for a long time. Five minutes, ten minutes, it was difficult to tell. It could have been longer. Eventually she sighed and took a drink from the glass of brandy.
‘I need a cigarette,’ she said.
‘I’ll find you one.’ I opened up the drawer of her bedside table and found a pack and a lighter. I lit two and passed one to her.
‘Don’t do anything, Max. For Christ’s sake. I just want to forget about it, that’s all. At least now I’ve left the club. I don’t think anyone’s going to expect me to work my notice after that.’
‘What? You’re going to ignore the fact that a piece of shit like Krys Holtz did that to you?’ I tried to keep my voice calm, knowing that she could hardly be blamed for wanting to put an incident like that behind her, but it was difficult.
‘He’s Stefan Holtz’s son, for fuck’s sake! What can we do?’
I shook my head. ‘Fuck that. I keep hearing about these Holtzes and how fucking invincible they are, but let me tell you something, no one’s invincible. I might be on the run but I’m not going to leave London with my tail between my legs. And I’m not going to move one more fucking foot until I get this sorted out.’
‘It won’t help anything.’
‘It’ll help me,’ I said, and got up and went to get the rest of the brandy from the kitchen. My blood was up; I needed something to get it back down again. I poured myself a glass, then took the bottle back to the bedroom and poured some more for Elaine. ‘You know something, I’ve never met Stefan Holtz or any of his extended family, never done a fucking thing to any of them, but these people seem to be doing everything in their power to fuck up my life.’
‘They fuck up a lot of people.’
‘There’s one way I can get back at them. And get revenge for what happened to you. I can off that arsewipe Krys.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m a trained soldier, Elaine. I’m perfectly capable of doing it. And it’ll make me feel one hell of a lot better.’
‘Then what happens? You’ll be on the run for ever.’
‘I’m on the run anyway, so what’s the difference? And I’ll have got them back, for me and for you. Krys’ll be dead, and his dad’ll have to live with the fact that he’s lost a son. And if I do it right, they’ll never know it was me.’
Something in her face hardened. ‘He’s not going to be that easy to kill, Max. Someone like him’s got a lot of enemies. He’s got bodyguards.’
I shrugged. The idea of killing bodyguards didn’t bother me either. I knew it could be done. I could also see that Elaine was now coming round to the idea. We both sat looking at each other for a few moments, each of us wondering how far we were really going to go.
‘I hate that bastard for what he’s just done to me,’ she said eventually, ‘but I don’t want to do anything that’s going to make things worse for you and for us. Do you know what I mean?’
But the thing was, I’d made up my mind. ‘He’s going to have to die, Elaine,’ I said simply.
She took a drag on her cigarette and eyed me closely through the bluish haze of smoke. Then, for the first time since returning that night, her gloom seemed to lift. ‘There’s a better way,’ she said.
Gallan
Berrin remained off sick on Monday. The flu, or whatever it was, had supposedly got worse. If the truth be told, he’d picked a good day to be absent. It was another stinking hot one and tempers in CID were frayed. Knox chaired the meeting of the Shaun Matthews murder squad, during which the events of the weekend, including the death of the possible witness McBride, were discussed, but there remained a feeling that everything had ground to a halt on the inquiry, and Knox was preoccupied by other events. A thirteen-year-old girl, just one year older than my daughter, had been dragged onto wasteground in broad daylight by a man in his thirties while walking home from the park, and violently sexually assaulted. The ordeal had lasted as long as half an hour and the attacker had also slashed her arm with a knife or a razor, even though she’d made no move to resist him. This was a particularly nasty type of crime, one that upset the public, and therefore one that upset the Brass. Which meant immediate pressure to get it solved. By nine-thirty that morning, there’d also been two missing persons reports, one of them a teenage schoolgirl, and Knox was being pushed from above to reorganize his resources. This meant cutting the size of the Matthews murder squad. With the case nine days old, and other business piling up all over the place, Knox reduced it to himself, Capper, DC Hunsdon, myself and Berrin (whenever he turned up for work again). However, due to further staff shortages within CID, I was informed that I was also going to have to work the other missing persons case, that of a fifty-three-year-old ex-con and former soldier named Eric Horne, who’d been missing since the previous Thursday.
At this point, the meeting became heated, and I’d pressed, with a lot less diplomacy than I usually exhibit in front of the boss, for far more serious efforts to be made in tracking down Jean Tanner since if she was alive she at least might be able to help. I also brought up the Neil Vamen angle, undeterred by how it had all gone the previous day, and suggested that he too might have had some involvement. ‘And surely, if we’ve got the opportunity, we want to put someone like him behind bars?’
Knox attempted to answer my concerns as thoroughly as possible, explaining that he would speak to his counterpart on the McBride case straight away, and get what details he could, although he added that the hunt for Miss Tanner was not our responsibility since McBride had not died on our patch. We would, said Knox, continue to look at the possibility of Neil Vamen’s own possible motives, but he suggested that, with the death of the one person who’d mentioned his name in connection with the case, it was going to be extremely difficult to prove any
