his father was. Trying to win his approval through imitation.’
Angie tilted her head to one side. ‘That’s very perceptive, considering you’ve never met him,’ she said.
‘It’s common enough,’ said Shepherd.
‘What about you? Was your father a hired killer?’
‘My father was a baker. All I remember of him was the smell of flour.’
She smiled. ‘Don’t tell me you both needed the dough,’ she said.
Despite himself Shepherd laughed, and felt himself slip out of character. As Dan Shepherd, he liked the woman. But Tony Nelson wasn’t sitting in the Volvo with fifteen thousand pounds in his jacket pocket because he liked her. He was there to do a job. ‘Does he walk the dog on his own?’
Angie’s hand went up to her mouth. Her nails were a deep pink, Shepherd noticed. ‘Don’t do it in front of Brinks,’ she said. ‘Oh, God, that would be terrible.’
‘I need him to be on his own.’ Shepherd continued to flick through the photographs. Kerr standing with two men. Shepherd recognised them as Eddie Anderson and Ray Wates. Anderson was small and wiry with tight black curls. Wates was as tall as Kerr but broader, his head shaved. ‘Who are these guys?’ he asked Angie. One of the hardest things to do undercover was to compartmentalise what he knew and what others thought he knew. As Dan Shepherd he knew everything the police knew about Eddie Anderson and Ray Wates, but as Tony Nelson they were just faces in a photograph.
‘Eddie and Ray,’ she said. ‘They’re practically joined at the hip to Charlie these days.’ She tapped a fingernail on Anderson’s face. ‘That’s Eddie. He’s Charlie’s yes man. Everything Charlie says, Eddie agrees with him. He thinks the sun shines out of Charlie’s arse.’ She pointed to Wates’s burly chest. ‘Ray’s Charlie’s muscle. You wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.’
Shepherd nodded. Wates was a hard case, all right. He’d been sent down in his twenties on a seven stretch for GBH but had been released after four. Since he’d started working for Kerr he’d been charged by the police half a dozen times for threatening behaviour and assault, but witnesses had always failed to make it to court and Wates had walked each time.
‘They don’t stay at the house, though?’
‘Bloody right they don’t,’ said Angie. ‘But they’re there first thing in the morning and usually in for a nightcap last thing.’
‘Who drives your husband?’
‘Eddie.’
Shepherd took a pen and a notepad from his jacket pocket. He scribbled down the names. For her benefit, not his. ‘What’s your address?’
She told him and Shepherd wrote it down. It was a five-bedroom house with a double garage standing in almost an acre of gardens. There was a swimming-pool at the back and a tennis court. Shepherd had seen surveillance photographs and a floor plan of the internal layout.
‘And what car does he drive?’
He knew it was a black Range Rover, but Tony Nelson had to be spoon-fed the details.
Her mobile phone rang and she jumped as if she’d been stung. She fished it out of her bag and swore. ‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘Christ!’
‘Don’t answer it,’ he said.
‘He gets stroppy if he has to leave a message,’ she said. ‘Accuses me of all sorts.’ She pressed the button to take the call and put the phone to her ear. ‘Hiya,’ she said. Shepherd heard the stress in her voice. ‘At the supermarket,’she said.‘We needed wine.’ A pause. ‘That Frascati I like. We’re out of it.’ Another pause. ‘I know but I just felt like the Frascati.’ She bit her lower lip, her right hand clenched into fist. ‘Half an hour,’ she said. ‘I was going to get some seafood, too. Make a paella. Is that okay?’ The fist clenched and unclenched. ‘What time?’ She screwed up her face. ‘I’m not nagging,’ she said eventually. ‘I was just asking what . . . Hello? Charlie?’
She looked at Shepherd. ‘Hung up on me,’ she said, as she put her phone away. ‘He does that a lot.’
‘Was he giving you a hard time?’
‘He wanted to know why I wasn’t at home. Then when I asked what time he’d get back he went ballistic. Accused me of spying on him.’
‘How late does he stay out?’
‘Late. He comes back stinking of cheap perfume and thinks I won’t notice.’
‘The guys he does business with, do you know who they are?’
‘Why?’
‘I want to muddy the waters as much as possible,’ said Shepherd. ‘If I shoot him in the head in your back garden, the police will want to know where you were and if you and your husband had been rowing. If he gets shot in a Moss Side council block full of crack-heads and gang-bangers they’ll put it down to a business deal gone wrong. You said he dealt in cocaine. Does he sell it to crack dealers?’
‘He hates blacks,’ said Angie. ‘No way would he ever do business with them. Says they’d kill their own mothers for a tenner.’
‘What about South Americans? Last time we met you said he went to Miami twice a year. I figure it wasn’t for the sun, so who does he meet there?’
‘He never takes me,’ she said. ‘He says it’s business and I don’t know who he sees.’
Shepherd did. There were DEA files on the CD Hargrove had given him, along with photographs of Kerr meeting representatives of Carlos Rodriguez, one of Colombia’s most successful cocaine and heroin dealers. The DEA surveillance hadn’t produced any concrete evidence, but Shepherd doubted that the three-thousand-mile trip had been a social visit.
‘Does he take you to Spain?’ Kerr had a large villa overlooking Marbella. Six bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a pool twice the size of the one in Hale Barnes.
‘Three or four times a year,’ she said.
‘Does he go on his own?’
‘Why?’
‘I could do it there. If you were in the UK, no way would the police be looking at you. Shootings are ten a penny on the Costa del Crime.’
‘Usually I go with him, but I could come up with an excuse next time.’ She frowned. ‘Problem is, I don’t know when he’ll be going next. And I’d rather you did it sooner than later.’
‘Is there a rush?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s just that now I’ve decided I want it done, I want it done. I don’t want it hanging over me. Is it okay if I smoke?’
Shepherd nodded and she took a packet of Marlboro menthol out of her bag. She lit one and put the packet back. ‘Do you always ask this many questions?’ she asked. She opened the window and blew smoke through the gap.
‘The better prepared I am, the less chance there is of something going wrong,’ he said, ‘and from what you’ve told me, Charlie Kerr isn’t the typical target.’
‘What is typical?’ she asked.
‘Usually it’s a business disagreement that can’t be solved any other way. Or a way of teaching somebody a lesson.’
She chuckled throatily. ‘You don’t teach somebody a lesson by killing them,’ she said.
‘No, but you can kill someone as a warning to others,’ he said.
‘And you’ve done that?’
‘I do what I’m paid to do,’ he said. ‘You asked what a typical job was.’
‘You don’t have many wronged wives contacting you, then?’
‘Most wronged wives head for a solicitor,’ said Shepherd.
‘You think I’m being a bit drastic, don’t you?’
Shepherd didn’t reply.
Angie turned to him and pulled down the neck of her sweater. Just below the collar bone, on her right breast, was a circular scab. A cigarette burn, healing nicely. ‘Last time we had an argument, he did this to me. He’d had a bit to drink. Said he was sorry afterwards, said he only did it because he loves me so much, but it wasn’t the first time and I doubt it’ll be the last.’ She let go of the sweater and took a drag on the cigarette. ‘Bastard,’ she
