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 whateverhernamewas’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
