‘Coincidence? The suicide?’
Jess shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps. There’s a cached Facebook page about it. Deleted but still readable. It’s strange. But the thing is… He was a historian of medieval Europe. It’s difficult to see a connection between him and the Moche in eighth-century Peru. Fifteen thousand miles away.’ She was one kilometre away from her destination. ‘Yet that is definitely who the gunman named. Archie McLintock. A dead Scottish medievalist. Who recently drove into a wall. About the same time someone killed Pablo.’
A silence in the cabin. The squeal of brakes. Larry was pulling over. ‘All very sinister. I might ask for a raise if there are gonna be evil assassins. Anyway. We’re here, babe. The supermercado.’
Jess alighted from the Chevy pick-up, smiling. ‘Thanks for the lift, Larry.’
Larry lifted a dismissive hand. ‘Hey, the company was good. We all need to stick together. Buzz me on the cell when you’ve finished shopping and I’ll pick you up later. Stay safe.’
The Chevy pulled out. Jessica watched it depart into the dust and melee. Then she turned and waited; then glanced at the burbling noise of the shadowy market across the square from the modern supermercardo.
That’s where she was really headed; she didn’t want the Roski supermarket: that was a ruse. Jess felt a need to keep her investigations to herself right now. She wanted the witches’ market, inside the town market. She wanted to ask about ulluchu, and she reckoned that maybe, just maybe, some of the people here, descendants of the Moche themselves, might know something about it. The blood of the unknown Moche god.
Immediately she crossed into the darkness, she was lost in the bustle and the shouting and the odours. Boiling tripes in cauldrons. Piles of yams and dirty potatoes and lurid red peppers and secondhand mannequins with gouged-out eyes wearing terrible nylon clothes. Headless, goosepimpled chickens sprawled on blood-smeared counters. Women in bowler hats sat at rough wooden benches eating skewered beef hearts, anticuchos, under a saccharine portrait of Jesus in a luminous toga. Here was the corner which led to the witches’ market proper. She paused.
A baby was lying on the floor of the market. Just lying there, face up, in nylon swaddling. Staring quietly at the ceiling, all alone, with damp concrete beneath him. Peruvians often did this, especially native women — just left babies on the ground to go off to do their shopping. Probably the baby was fine. Yet the sight was reflexively painful for a Westerner: it broke every taboo, abandoning a child on the dirty floor of a crowded market, where it could be crushed or run over or kicked.
The least she could do was put something under the baby, protect it somehow. She had to do something. Hurrying across the dirty concrete, she rushed up to the blank-faced child and as she did she wondered if something was wrong. The baby’s face, the way it wasn’t doing anything, it was just a doll, was it just a doll? And then she saw blackness.
She was grabbed and hooded, roughly. Musty sweat and horror flared her nostrils, she kicked out and screamed; heard a suppressed curse, voices raised. The hood tightened like a noose around her neck, her arms were lashed. Jess was being kidnapped.
26
Barbican, City of London
‘Everything is in position? Everyone?’
Ibsen was sitting nervously in the front seat of his Met car, listening to his police radio, hanging from a hook on the dash.
A radioed voice came over, loud and distinct: DS Larkham sitting in another car two hundred metres down Whitecross Street.
‘Yes, sir. We have his flat on surveillance. Kilo 1 and Kilo 2 are right outside.’
‘Armed response at the ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the door, you’re sure it’s the only one?’
‘Yes, sir. Checked a dozen times. If he comes out we will see him.’
Ibsen sat back, half-satisfied, and watched some noisy London schoolkids swinging satchels at each other, ambling in that loud, sweary, litter-chucking, end-of-school way that was so typical and so persistently annoying to anyone over eighteen. The air was freezing outside, bitterly icy, and the sky was that pure, expectant whiteness that precedes a heavy snowfall.
He regarded these lanky, lairy teenagers, thinking about his own children: ten and eleven years old. Would they soon end up like this, surly teenagers, scattering swear words and empty crisp packets?
The radio crackled.
‘Sir!’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s coming now, he’s coming out right now.’
‘On his own?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, so, you know what we discussed. Send me shots and a video, immediately. Follow him, but don’t do anything else, until I’ve given the go-ahead.’
Ibsen estimated his own pulse rate had reached the 115 mark. Extremely alert, but nothing dangerous. Not the 175 where you make a terrible decision. With an armed response team.
He listened to nothing, saw a single flake of snow settle on the windscreen. Just one, then two. And then his computer pinged and he found the communication.
It was the video, shot by surveillance officer Kilo 1 two minutes ago. The quality was excellent, the zoom precise, the face clearly pictured — the same face as in all the photos Ibsen had seen over the last few urgent hours. This was their man: Tony Ritter.
‘Team K,’ he said firmly and clearly, into his radio. ‘You are good to go. Surveil and pursue. Follow but do not apprehend.’
The DCI motioned to his driver: go that way, very slowly.
Their car was a good three hundred yards behind the surveillance officers, who were on foot. Their duet of reports buzzed over Ibsen’s radio.
‘Suspect X walking quickly up Goswell Road.’
‘Turning right, into Clerkenwell.’
‘Walking fast, very fast.’
‘I can see him stopping, looking at something in his hand-’
Ibsen intervened. ‘What? What’s in his hand?’
A defiant pause. What was going on? Ibsen cursed the lack of time to get a proper surveillance team, to call in more officers, to put a GPS on Ritter’s person, somehow; this was fly-by-your-seat police work, with a potentially very dangerous suspect, involved in some brutal ‘suicides’ that might not turn out to be suicides at all.
‘Samsung Zaf.’
‘What?’
‘He’s looking into a mobile, sir. Think he’s reading a map. He’s just standing by a bus stop on Clerkenwell Road.’
The pause returned. A third and fourth flake of snow settled on the windscreen; then more. Ibsen churned, mentally, what little else they knew of Antonio Ritter. He was a serious Californian villain, father Texan, mother Puerto Rican. He was linked to organized crime in Europe and elsewhere, people trafficking in particular. He had several convictions for violence. And he’d gone to ground recently after a stint in an LA jail.
What about those prison terms? Ritter had done some hard time in some nasty Californian clinks. Is this where he had got the tattoos? Did this suicide sex cult originate in some gruesome Californian jail? Full of Latinos and Yardies and Koreans, each with their lethal gang? And their own special tattoo?
The snow was whirling, thickening, settling.
Ibsen mused. The tatts could be gang colours of some kind.
‘He’s moving again — fast. Walking briskly. Like he suddenly remembered where he’s going.’
