The Murder Exchange

my heart because I could do nothing about it. Over time, though, she’d complained about him less and less, and, although she always said she missed me, and would always give me an enthusiastic hug whenever we met, she talked less and less about me going back there, as if she’d finally got round to accepting the situation, and Carrier had finally got round to convincing her that he wasn’t such a bad bloke after all. Even though the bastard was.

During our meal that evening she talked just like a happy, well-adjusted kid leading a happy, well-adjusted life. It seemed I’d become somewhat surplus to requirements.

We didn’t get back to my flat until quarter past nine, and it was gone ten by the time I finally shut the door to the bedroom and left her sleeping. I’d forgotten how tiring kids can be.

I wanted to sit down and veg out in front of the TV but things were still bugging me on the case, and I’d promised myself I’d try a new angle, so I cracked open a beer and booted up my rarely used PC. It was time to see what the Internet had to offer as an investigative tool.

First of all I went through the ritual of checking my emails, which didn’t usually take very long as I rarely received any, and immediately saw that there was one from Malik entitled ‘Information as requested’ which came with a load of attachments. It appeared to have been sent that morning and had been copied to my PC at work.

The first set of attachments comprised photographs, mostly surveillance ones, and short biographies of known or suspected associates of Neil Vamen. There were nine of them in all and they included Jackie Slap Merriweather and several others I recognized. The biographies contained the criminal records of the nine, which encompassed a whole variety of offences with a particular emphasis on ones of violence, and a summary of each of their relationships with Vamen. I blew each photo up to full size and printed them off one by one so they could be shown to the neighbours of Shaun Matthews and Jean Tanner, in the hope that they might be familiar.

The second set of attachments contained details and photographs of three women suspected of being Vamen’s mistresses. One of them, as suggested by McBride and missed initially by Malik, was Jean Tanner. According to the records, Vamen had been seen visiting her home in Finchley on a number of occasions. He’d also taken her for a long weekend to his luxury apartment in Tenerife back in March with one of his other mistresses in tow. The report confirmed that she was a prostitute with two previous convictions, but said nothing else of note. Out of curiosity, I looked at the files on the other two mistresses and was vaguely interested to see that both women were very different. The one who’d accompanied Jean and Vamen to Tenerife was a glossy-looking nineteen-year-old former dental nurse, now full-time plaything, while the other was an attractive forty-six-year-old psychotherapist who’d fallen for his charms while she’d been reviewing his progress during his only stint in prison (drugs and weapons offences). They’d apparently been enjoying an on-off relationship for the past twelve years, ever since he’d been released, and I wondered idly if she was pleased with the way he’d come on.

But nothing really stood out, so I sent a quick message back to Malik, thanking him for his help, and moved on to the net proper. I started by finding a search engine and typed in the words ‘snake poison’, which I thought ought to give me some hits. It did, far too many, most of which were totally irrelevant. I tried different search engines, then narrowed the hunt down, putting in ‘venom’, ‘snake venom’, ‘elapid venom’ and, finally, ‘viper venom’. I reeled through the dozens of hits I picked up, switched search engines constantly, and went back over Boyd’s notes on the subject, all the time racking my brains for ideas that could actually move me forward.

I’d been at it well over an hour, and was already beginning to agree with Boyd’s assertion that the Internet was a hopelessly overhyped means of uncovering information, when something caught my eye. The intro line read: ‘Snake Venom part of Mujahidin Arsenal’ and referred the reader to what looked like an eastern European media website. I yawned and double-clicked. Outside, I could hear the rain tumbling down, and the ominous rumble of thunder.

The article from which the intro line came had been written in October 1995 and concerned the socalled mujahidin, foreign Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting alongside fellow Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina. It seemed they had become an integral part of the conflict, being both well organized and well financed, with extensive backing from a number of Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. According to the article, they were also using some interesting weapons in their fight, one of which was snake venom. Vials of venom from the Egyptian viper, or asp, had been used by their spies within the enemy camps to poison senior enemy officers. In one cited instance three Bosnian Croat officers, including a colonel, had had the venom slipped into their food by a female Muslim cook posing as a Croat (an easy thing to do since they were essentially the same ethnic group) and all had died before the plot had been uncovered. The article didn’t say what had happened to the cook but stated that the poisons definitely existed and had originated with the mujahidin and, in particular, an Arab officer with the nom de guerre Tajab.

At last I had something. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Malik had mentioned Bosnia as a supply route used by the Holtzes to bring both drugs and illegal immigrants into western Europe and, ultimately, Britain, although the connection was a tenuous one. There was a list of related articles on the left-hand side of the screen and I scrolled through them, skim-reading about the role the fundamentalists had played in what was described, quite accurately it seemed, as the bloodiest European conflict since 1945. Ruthless in battle, they were a formidable fighting force, their infamy far outweighing their actual numbers. So much so that, according to one of the articles written in January 1996, the United Nations demanded their removal as part of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement between the warring parties. The next article, written later that month, continued in the same vein, this time citing a claim made by the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that mujahidin had attacked Serb positions north-west of Zenica, and that, in separate ceasefire violations, Iranian military advisers and British mercenaries were continuing to train Muslim forces in bases east and south of Sarajevo.

The British connection again. Still tenuous, but there all the same. I made some notes, then left the website and typed in ‘mercenaries in Bosnia’ in the search-engine box. Plenty of hits came up, as expected, and once again I began the long trawl.

As I looked, I began to wonder whether this man Karadzic was making things up. After all, all wars contain plenty of lies and propaganda. But then I found an article in the New York Times, dated October 1995, which covered the story of foreign involvement in the war, stretching back to its beginnings in early 1992, and contained information about who’d been involved. There’d been the usual suspects: the mujahidin; the occasional middleclass Western boys who’d been so sickened by the atrocities being visited on the Muslims that they’d gone out to try to help; the adventure seekers and nutters who for some reason are always attracted to the world’s troublespots; and there’d been a company called Contracts International, based in London, who’d been supplying former British soldiers to help train Muslim forces in a variety of military techniques, including guerrilla warfare. The spokesman for Contracts International was Martin Leppel, a former captain in the Parachute Regiment. In the article, he admitted that some of the firm’s employees were in Bosnia but declined to comment any further. The writers stated that no fewer than twenty-one of the company’s operatives were there, and that it was almost certain they were being bankrolled by senior members of the Saudi Arabian royal family.

I noted the name of the company and its representative, then checked to see if they had a website. Not surprisingly they didn’t, so I did a search on Contracts International and discovered a number of newspaper articles about the company. Founded in 1991 by Leppel, and with a full-time staff estimated at two hundred, they’d been involved in conflicts all over the world, but I concentrated solely on Bosnia. From what I could gather, there was nothing untoward about their activities in the region. You could even say, depending on your point of view I suppose, that they were actually providing a service, since the Muslims were so hopelessly outgunned. But the other warring parties had demanded they leave after the Dayton Accord because their presence was seen as provocative, although there was evidence that some had stayed behind to continue their work in breach of the treaty.

It was getting close to midnight when I opened an article from Der Spiegel, dated September 1997, in which the words Contracts International appeared. I was too tired to take in the fact that it was written in German, but something immediately caught my eye. It was a black and white photograph of two men walking towards a camera along what looked like a mountain road. One of the men, the younger of the two, was dressed in military fatigues, the other in a dark suit. They appeared to be talking to each other, and neither was looking at the camera. In fact, it looked as if they were unaware their picture was being taken.

The one on the left, the soldier, looked familiar, but I couldn’t work out from where. It wasn’t a particularly good shot of him, but I knew I wasn’t mistaken. I’d definitely seen the man before.

As for the one in the suit, he was even more familiar. But then he would have been. Not only had Malik supplied me with his photograph: I’d run into him only days earlier.