the team at risk. They miss the point of what we're trying to do. They're selfish and superior to colleagues. Any creep with a mission is not a team player. Fuck off, and when you've had some sleep, may be you should reflect on what to do about being too high, too mighty, to get pissed with the rest of us.
You've no future here.'
Joey walked out of the room and away down the corridor, his bag banging against his leg. He swiped his card at the door, stepped out onto the pavement, avoided the regular little clutch having their first cigarette of the day, and headed for the Underground station.
From Bank he could have taken a direct Northern line train south to Tooting Bee and his bed-sit, and he could have slept. Instead, he bought a ticket to go north on the Northern line to King's Cross, then to change for the Piccadilly line trains heading out into the suburbs.
Taking advice, good or bad, had never been an especial talent of Joey Cann.
He'd often had coffee in the wide, plant-strewn atrium, but it was the first time that Frank Williams had been into a room at the Holiday Inn. He'd brought two local policemen with him, reckoned it would be a good education for them to watch him at work, would give them a chance to learn basic policing exercises.
The bed was still made. The desk top was empty, except for the hotel's stationery pouch. He found two suits in the wardrobe where two more Italian shirts were hanging, with a pair of soft leather shoes underneath them. Beside the telephone there was a pad for note-taking, and he routinely tore off the top two pages and slipped them into a plastic sachet. He was looking for a passport, a briefcase, anything to put flesh on the occupier of the room, a family photograph; but he found nothing. Sunlight streamed into the room. If he had not been a policeman he would have felt that he intruded on privacy. He had already tried the Saraj, the Grand and the Motel Belveder, but none had a missing foreigner. It was the sort of basic police work that Frank Williams was good at. He was slow and thorough, and he made the local men wear the gloves with which he had provided them. Because they were young they were probably still honest, but they'd soon catch on. Another six months and they wouldn't have been down on the carpet, looking under the bed, or climbing on a chair to peer above the wardrobe, they'd have been out at a road-block, fining motorists, cash only and no receipts, for speeding or having defective lights. No passport, no briefcase, no wallet, no personal organizer, no cheque book or credit cards, no work papers, no mobile telephone, no tourist guides, but the room was held in the name of Duncan Dubbs, of 48 River Mansions, Narrow Street, London E14. The description of the room's occupier was a probable match to the battered face of the man from the river, and the certainty came quickly.
What sort of man, with what sort of business, left a hotel room sterilized of his work, background and personality? He was thinking about i t… He saw the flash from the sheen of the material and heard the raucous laugh from the younger of the local men – he had the bottom drawer of the chest open and was holding up a pair of underpants to be examined by the older one. Frank Williams reached out and snatched the underpants, checked the label and made the match. They were silk… Shitty enough to die far f rom home, he thought, but worse when your secrets became. 1 joke for strangers.
Mister was back.
For two men, at the top of his priority list, the news of the trial's collapse came too late for them to take flight. Neither had had time to board a plane to Miami, the Algarve, Spain or anywhere. One, during the eight months of Mister's imprisonment on remand, had defaulted on a payment in excess of three-quarters of a million pounds. The other, in Mister's absence, had muscled into the dealer network and imported his own Afghan- produced and Turkish-refined heroin.
To Mister, it was necessary to show that he was back.
The defaulter had been taken from his apartment, with his suitcase only half filled in a scramble of packing, too quickly for him to get to the Uzi submachine-gun kept for emergencies under a floor-board. That morning, he was in the intensive care unit of Charing Cross Hospital where a medical team struggled to keep him alive… The muscler lay on a bed in a similar unit at University College Hospital, festooned with monitoring wires and drip tubes.
When the Cards had come for him, in the small hours, at the drinking and snooker club he owned in Hackney, he had not known that his minders had flaked away from the front and rear doors.
Liberties had been taken while Mister was away. It had not been expected that he would regain his free dom without warning. It was not possible for Mister to retain his authority, his power, after eight months away, unless his strength was demonstrated. He had sent a message that night, twice.
A detective sergeant, at Charing Cross Hospital, asked a consultant to speculate how the right leg of the victim had been taken off at the knee. Ashen-faced, the consultant suggested the detective should go and look for a heavy-duty industrial strimmer, the sort used by workmen employed by Parks and Gardens to clear light undergrowth and scrub. 'How long would that have taken?'
'To sever it completely? Not less than a minute, maybe a bit more.'
Another detective sat in an alcove close to the cubicle at University College Hospital, alongside the useless presence of an armed police protection team, and had been told the victim had suffered huge abdominal damage from the discharge of a short-barrel shotgun. A doctor had asked him, 'Who does that sort of thing?'
'We call it 'bad on bad'. For them it's normal business procedure. You and I would fire off a lawyer's letter, they do it with a twelve-bore, sawn-off.'
The body, stitched up, was trolleyed back to the cold store.
The pathologist stripped off his messy gloves and his assistant untied the long apron's back cords and he shrugged out of it.
'Death by drowning,' the pathologist drawled, English language and American accent. 'Considerable alcohol in the stomach, and a meal – I really don't have time to tell you what he ate. There is no indication of criminality. The injuries, abrasions, are consistant with what would happen to a cadaver after thirty hours in the river. There is no reason why the cadaver should not be shipped home to the family for burial.' He paused to look up at Frank Williams.
'Now, please excuse me.'
Frank thought the pathologist would be earning, maximum, five hundred German marks a month.
That would equate to around forty pounds sterling a week, before tax. The man was trained, a professional, had probably learned how to cut up bodies at an American university. While he was attached to the IPTF in Bosnia, Frank made six hundred pounds sterling a week, after tax, and had no college education. He believed nothing he was told by a government employee in Sarajevo; it could be that there were no criminal injuries, it could be that there were criminal injuries unnoticed by the pathologist, or perhaps criminal injuries that the pathologist had been paid not to identify. They were in a basement area of the Kosevo Hospital, and he could imagine what it would have been like here, in the candlelight during the siege, like a slaughterhouse, a carnage hell.
A young diplomat from the embassy was beside him.
'That's that, is it?' Hearn, the diplomat, asked. He grimaced. 'First time I've been at one, glad I missed lunch.'
Frank said, and overstated the irony, 'Well, isn't that convenient? You're staying in a hotel on business.
Problem: none of your business papers are in your room. So, incredibly, you are one of Sarajevo's five tourists a year. Problem: none of your guidebooks or local maps are in your room. All right, you're drunk and incapable. Problem: how do you climb over the railings on the bridges, or the walls on the river's edge, when you're fifty- something, and chuck yourself in after you've lost your wallet and every other piece of identification?'
' S o…? '
'Well, it's not good enough.'
'I've marked it, thank you. Leave it with me, and let's see where it runs/
The SIO stood. The chief investigation officer sat at his desk.
'There's no way round it, Brian.'
'I think I know that.' The SIO sweated.
'Sierra Quebec Golf, in its present form, is dismantled, and you – if you'll forgive my bluntness – are supernumerary.'
'It's been more than thirty years of my life.' He shouldn't have said that, didn't want to sound self-pitying. He'd known he'd be called in, but had hoped it would be later and that the drink would have been further through his system.
'That's a shame, and you have to believe it's sincerely m e a n t
