robbery and the investment of the proceeds in dope deals. He might well have done, but I didn’t like the way he thought it was worth boasting about. You could tell he thought he was better than us, sort of a cut above us riffraff who had to earn their livings by actually working, though fuck knows why. A thief and a dope peddler. He was hardly royalty, was he?
Still, as Joe had pointed out, he knew how to handle a gun, which meant he was less likely to use it. The last thing we needed was a shootout in the brothel. The whole thing had to be neat and professional. That way, as always, lay the route to success. And if he didn’t want to say much, then that was fine by me. Johnny more than made up for his brooding silence.
I sat back in the seat and relaxed, unaffected by the boredom of the wait. I’d learnt how to be patient a long time back. It was one of the first things you got used to in the army.
Another hour passed. Then two. Kalinski shuffled about, stretched, muttered the odd curse, and at one point told us a story about how he’d once been out with a Lady someone or other who had apparently liked nothing better than to have Kalinski dress up in a balaclava, complete with sawn-off shooter, and pound her from behind while calling her a dirty rich whore. Kalinski seemed to think this made him come across like a stud, but I thought that it would be a bit of an insult if some chick I was sleeping with asked me to put a mask over my face, although in Lady whateverhername-was’s case, I could see her point. Kalinski was not what you’d call a handsome sort. He had a face like a frog and pockmarked skin.
Neither I nor Joe reacted much to his story and, seeing that he hadn’t impressed us with his sexual forays into the upper classes, he settled back into sullen silence, which was just the way we liked it.
In the front, I heard Johnny say that he needed a mickey bliss, like some annoying fucking kid. Tugger, once he’d deciphered what he was trying to say, told him to piss in an empty bottle of mineral water, but Johnny said fuck that, he would wait. He didn’t sound too pleased.
At ten to three I heard a car pull up somewhere across the street and I tensed, stretching, hoping that this was it. But Tugger made no signal. Just another punter looking for an enjoyable end to the evening.
At three o’clock I heard the sound of Johnny finally succumbing to nature’s demand as he took a leak into the bottle, continuing for what seemed like an impressively long time.
At five past, I turned to Joe and said that we might as well call it a night. Kalinski grunted something in agreement, and Joe, who’d been half-asleep, nodded. I banged the interior wall four times. Thirty seconds later the engine was on, and Johnny was pulling away from the kerb.
I lit a cigarette and hoped we didn’t have to do this for too many more nights. But that, I suppose, is what warfare is all about. Hours, sometimes days, of long waiting, then a few stunning moments of adrenalin and excitement that are gone before you know it, but live on in the memory, etched with pride, for years afterwards.
Tuesday, five days ago
Gallan
I hadn’t been down that road since the investigation had wound down all those months ago. It was an attractive tree-lined street of large semi-detached whitewashed villas that meandered north of the Lower Holloway Road past the greenery of Highbury Fields. An oasis of calm in the midst of the bustling city. From where I stood now, looking down the incline in the direction of Clerkenwell, I could see the imposing spire of Union Chapel on Upper Street as it towered upwards above the trees that peppered the bottom of the park in the foreground. So often London’s residents and councils liked to tag the word ‘village’ onto the end of their middle-class ghettoes in a usually futile bid to create the illusion of community and push up the area’s property prices, but the description actually seemed to fit here. You could almost be in the middle of rural Gloucestershire. Even the traffic wasn’t that bad. It was a place that reeked of money.
Perhaps that was why I felt I should have looked into the background of Tony Franks more. A man who worked in security wasn’t the sort who could afford to live on a street like this. As I recalled, a lot of the neighbours had been bankers and lawyers, the sort of people with serious cash. I thought he might have said something about being part-owner of the firm he was employed by but I couldn’t remember for sure, and there was nothing in the notes to confirm it. At that time, I hadn’t been unduly interested in Tony Franks. He had no criminal record as such, didn’t come across like he had anything to hide, and, rightly or wrongly, simply wasn’t a suspect. We’d always assumed that Robert had been snatched by a predatory paedophile who’d taken advantage of the dark morning and the quieter residential area to abduct his prey from the street. Robert had been a small boy, four feet eleven, and wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a resistance if his attacker was of a reasonable size, and determined.
The weather was fine and sunny that morning, very different from the bitterly cold February mornings when we’d been doing the house-to-house enquiries on this, probably the grimmest case I’d ever worked on. I stood on the spot where Robert had last been seen alive by an accountant for Citibank who was leaving for work. The time then had been five to seven and Robert had been walking past the man’s driveway as he’d pulled out in his car. The man had recognized him instantly because Robert wore a distinctive woolly hat with a green fluorescent strip running round it. He’d been doing the round for more than six months, and they often saw each other in the morning. Robert had given him a brief wave and the accountant had waved back. He’d started crying when he’d related this story to the detectives because he had a son of his own the same age. I knew how he felt. There was nothing worse than the taking of a child’s life, particularly for a parent. I remembered how grimly determined I’d been to solve the case and bring the perpetrator to justice, and how impotent I’d felt when we’d finally had to scale everything down because the leads had simply not materialized.
It was difficult to believe that a crime so heinous had taken place on what was such a quiet and peaceful street, and for me that’s the worst thing about policework, the knowledge that effectively nowhere’s safe. In a free country, those with evil in their hearts can roam wherever they want.
I’d wanted to come here alone. I’d told Berrin that this was because it would waste less time. I’d got him hunting down any further information he could find on Contracts International, and chasing Leppel for the list of Bosnian operatives. The real reason, however, was to give me an opportunity to revisit the scene of what I considered one of my most important pieces of unfinished business, and perhaps take a bit more time to reflect on what had happened that cold, dark morning.
The newsagent for whom Robert did his round was situated on Highbury Grove, approximately half a mile north-east of where I now stood. This street, Runmayne Avenue, was about halfway along his route. He would make his way down Runmayne, which was just under a quarter of a mile long, then come back the other way on Fairfield Avenue, the next street down, before returning along the main road back to the newsagent’s. I was sure it was on this street that Robert had been snatched. Even at that time in the morning, there were cars and people about. Not that many, but enough to expect that if he’d continued the whole length of it he’d have been seen by someone else. After all, he would hardly have been inconspicuous.
Franks’s house was about a hundred yards further along from the spot where Robert had last been seen and wasn’t one to which he delivered. Slowly, I started towards it, trying to remember the exact route he would have taken and which houses he delivered to, but without much success. It was too long ago. Too much time and too many cases had come to pass since then, and already the life of Robert Jones was passing into ancient history. He would always be remembered, of course, by his parents and his sister, but even they would think about him less and less as time wore on, and to everyone else he would simply become a vague memory, a smiling, permanently young face in a photograph that would occasionally inspire a sad and wistful conversation. It was more than a tragedy, it was an injustice. Someone, some day, would have to pay.
Franks’s place was the end extension of a huge villa, set back a few yards from the road, that probably housed at least half a dozen professionally spacious flats and which had two grand entrance porticoes along its length. The extension had been built much later than the villa, probably in the sixties, and looked as if it had been attached at a slightly crooked angle. The paintwork was a fading sky blue rather than the white of the rest of the building, making it stand out for the wrong reasons. Apart from that, though, it looked OK. Small, but reasonably well kept. Newish windows had been installed on both floors, and there was a tiny, recently cobbled driveway in front of it with room for two cars at a squeeze. A high stone wall separated it from the main parking area in front of
