Blood Money (26 page)

Gibson now sets to work with his steel tape. Relative to the position of the hatch, he measures the distance to the front of the west-wall and then the depth of its arches. He also determines the size of each alcove, including the shelf positions relative to the floor. Then finally he measures the positions of all of the alcoves relative to the hatch in the church floor above him. It will be essential get his calculations totally right if he's going to pick the correct alcove and correctly determine the height he needs to make his excavations at.

Having made several pages of notes, John gathers up his things, turns off the lights and climbs back up the wooden steps. Now above ground, he closes the hatch and folds the brass ring flush into its recess. Once he's removed his suit and bootees he wraps them up in the same polythene sheet that he'd used to protect the floor and replaces the books he'd used for weights back on the bottom shelf exactly where they'd been taken from. Giving the floor around the hatch a ‘once-over', he's fully satisfied that there are no signs of dust or dirt to betray his visit. He now makes a few precise measurements as to the hatch's exact position relative to the church door and the western wall. And after one final check that nothing has been left behind and nothing's out of place John slips quietly and unobtrusively out of the church, firstly shutting the internal glass doors before stepping out onto the pavement outside and locking the heavy oak door behind him.

Lombard Street is quiet and deserted, so before he leaves for home he takes the opportunity to measure the distance from the church doorway to the boundary line between the Church's stone blocks and those of the bank building next door. Then John put away his tape measure, pen and notepad and slips away into the darkness of St Clement's Lane.

As he walks south he feels confident in being able to calculate the exact position of the hole he needs to make in the crypt wall, but right now he sees the heavy caskets sitting on the shelves as the biggest problem he faces. How will he pull such a tremendously weighty obstruction away from the wall single handedly, without dropping it and its contents onto the floor?

Behind the locked door to his private office, Eddie Slater is taking care of his boss's security concerns. And like most days, he's confident of having everything under control. Then the phone rings.

“Eddie, it's Fin. Sorry to have taken a couple of days to get back to you, but I've got that information you asked for on the Kavanagh investigation.”

Niall Finlay is a freelance journalist with an uncanny ability to put people completely at their ease. So much so that he can then extract from them whatever information he's after. Eddie doesn't like loose ends, and he's been waiting impatiently for this call so he can draw a line under this particular piece of work. “Come on then, -let's have it.”

“Yeah…so I met up with one of my contacts late last night and he's basically confirmed that the FSA woman's murder investigation is progressing extremely slowly because there's next to no evidence for them to follow-up on. All they've got is some CCTV of a white van whose plates traced back to some window cleaner who's owned the vehicle for over three years. The guy's got a cast-iron alibi so the case is a complete non-starter. There were no witnesses, except for one that is…the girl's fiancé. And I'm told he's being formally interviewed sometime today over at Scotland Yard.”

“Got a name?”

“Sure…give me a second…he serves in the City of London Police and his name's…ah yes…Detective Sergeant John Gibson, CID.”

Eddie recognises the name, but where from? “Give me a moment Fin. I'll call you back in a few minutes. Yeah?”

Hanging-up on the call, he feels himself beginning to sweat all over. Unexpected complications make Slater feel highly uncomfortable. Panic and uncertainty are unwelcome emotions for a man whose comfort zone is control and intimidation. Yeah, he knew the girl's boyfriend was some copper called John from listening-in on their conversations, but it takes a few moments before Eddie makes the vital connection and remembers where he knows the name from…
‘Shit!
'

He'd been so focussed on the female target outside Ark House that he hadn't paid much attention to her poncy looking boyfriend. With the benefit of hindsight, this had been a mistake…John Gibson was one of the two ‘City Coppers' who'd interviewed him and Alexis early last week about the attempted kidnapping in Birchin Lane.
‘Shit! Shit! Shit!'

And he remembers clearly how this guy had promised to help the FSA girl investigate Kronos in secret.

Should he be worried? –His gut reaction is ‘Yes.'

In Eddie's experience, individuals can react unpredictably when they're forced into stressful situations. When backed into a corner, people are likely to fight-back much harder than you might otherwise expect. And having had your flat broken into, your pet killed and your girlfriend slain just yards away from where you were stood would certainly count for that.

Without further delay, Eddie calls-back his freelance associate “Fin, my boy, it's Eddie. Cracking bit of info that. Thing is, I now need to know a lot more about this John Gibson fella. See, I've got a few concerns. Can you get onto your man at Bishopsgate nick pronto and give me the inside track on him.” Fin tries to explain that he's already made plans for the rest of the day, and it may have to wait, but Slater doesn't want to hear it.

“Listen Niall…I'm putting way too much cash into your back pocket for an answer like that. When I say pronto you do as your bleedin-well told…Ok? Now, I want to know everything about this man and I do mean everything, like is he brave or timid, lazy or resourceful, relaxed or excitable? Tell me how his mates think he's coping since his girlfriend got killed? How's it affecting him? What are his plans? All of that kind of good shit…Oh and this time don't take all day, if you don't call me back by lunchtime with some good answers there's gonna be unpleasant repercussions…
Got it?”

With no alternative other than to wait patiently until his man calls back, Eddie begins pacing up and down inside his windowless chamber. At some point he's going to have to explain this complication to Alexis, and he knows if he doesn't cover all the possible angles quickly enough then it's going to leave him looking like a rank amateur.

To kill time, the bodyguard reviews the CCTV recordings from the morning of Tuesday 26th from the camera covering the bank's entrance hall. The pin-sharp pictures show Gibson and Warren approaching the reception desk at 10:58am. The images bring back all of Eddie's recollections of them: Gibson, the classic ‘waste of space' desk-bound copper who wouldn't know how to fight his way out of an old people's home. Not smart, not scruffy, just plain and unremarkable. Dark, medium length hair and a clean shaven youthful face. Eddie remembers him as being a good inch or so shorter than himself and relatively slightly built, hardly the type to seem physically threatening. The tapes confirm his partner Bill Warren as being much older, practically at retirement age. An overweight ‘soft in the head' pudding of a man, hiding behind his warrant badge like that could ever protect him. Eddie bristles with irritation until his face reddens and his lips curl into a snarl.

*

The only other person allowed inside his private office other than himself is his boss. And even Alexis only gets invited-in when extreme situations arise, such as the need to confidentially discuss how best to neutralise security threats.

Despite being fully air-conditioned, there's a pervasive smell emanating from two overflowing rubbish bins. Clearly the fastidious care that Eddie takes in gathering data and keeping records does not extend to domestic cleanliness. Fully focussed on assessing and managing threats to his boss's operation he's oblivious to the dust lying on every surface and the rolls of grey fluff that lie around the edges of the room.

His Greek boss is a man who breaks the law as easily and as frequently as he breaks wind. So the assignment Alexis had set him back in 2009 hadn't come as much of a surprise. He'd been instructed to find some serving police officers in both the City of London and the Metropolitan Police Service who could be groomed into becoming paid informants. Eddie had persuaded his boss that it'd be far better to do this indirectly though a freelance journalist, and there were a couple of very good reasons to suggest this. Firstly it'd be unwise for someone directly employed at Kronos to be seen bribing police officers and secondly a journalist would already have the documentation, personality and skills to carry such a task out in an effective manner. The Greek had reluctantly agreed to ‘outsource' the task, a concession that Eddie was mightily relieved about because he hated having anything to do with policemen.

It had only taken about half dozen approaches (journo's aren't known for turning down free lunches) before he knew he'd found the right man, someone with a modicum of charm, an unscrupulous nature and a quick brain. Slater agreed to keep Niall Finlay on a handsome annual retainer plus £500 for each and every day his services were called upon. Expenses such as bribe-money were additional, with no questions asked (so long as it didn't become too much of a piss-take).

Even though Niall had got one contact in the Met already, Eddie instructed him to get at least two more, and then at least one in each of the three City of London police stations as well. Just a handful of corrupt internal contacts were all he needed to open-up the entire policing organisation.

A short while after lunch, the follow-up call from Niall Finlay comes in.

“Ok Eddie, here's what I've got on DS John Gibson…–In summary, he's thought of as a nice guy and his colleagues seem pretty upset for him right now. Nobody's got a bad word to say, basically. He's considered to be a good, honest copper. Works boiler room fraud and seems to be pretty competent at it. There are no commendations for bravery on his record or anything like that, but then again, there's not many opportunities for that kind of thing in fraud.

He's on bereavement leave at the moment as you can imagine. Nobody's quite sure for how long because the coroner's still holding his fiancée's body, so as yet no funeral arrangements can be made. The main rumour going round Bishopsgate Station is that it might have happened because he's pissed off some criminal and his girlfriend was killed to get even, though when I questioned this there was nothing substantive behind it. The other theory that came out was that some of them think it was probably just some random act of violence by a local kid trying to prove something and the Kavanagh girl had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, everyone's been asked to give him a bit of space to allow him to come to terms with his loss, so no one's seen anything of him since his missus died.

The Met's been dealing with the investigation on their own and it seems like City of London Police are happy to let them get on with it. I'm told Scotland Yard have got a pretty good team working the case but like I said earlier, they've got next to nothing to go on. And finally, my man inside Bishopsgate promised to contact me should any further developments occur. Alright?”

“Thanks Fin. That seems like a pretty thorough piece of journalism…–I may be in touch quite a bit over the next few days, so don't go turning your phone off. Speak to you later.”

*

Eddie was sure the Met wouldn't be making any significant breakthroughs any time soon. He might have been forced into rushing the job slightly, but he'd still been fastidious in making sure the killing had been ‘clean'. He'd taken all the normal precautions afterwards, the decorators van had been pressure-washed, his equipment had been removed, the carpets and upholstery ripped-out and burnt, then a local scrap-yard had crushed it into a cube that would be taken away and melted down within a fortnight. His precious knife had been kept, but he'd taken particular care to clean it in bleach to eliminate all traces of DNA from its surfaces.

It'd now been exactly a week since Eddie had killed Rebecca Kavanagh, so since then what on earth had been going on in John Gibson's mind? Surely the guy couldn't be so thick that he wouldn't put the pieces of this simple puzzle together? The break-in and murder were clearly connected. Wouldn't it be blatantly obvious that the man who'd broken-in must have had a good knowledge of Rebecca and must've been very close to her in order to take her set of house keys? That cat thing had been a simple-enough message: ‘I'm a ruthless killer. You know who I work for, and if you don't back-off I'll kill you.'

If only Eddie could still hear inside the flat. Who had Gibson been speaking to recently? What had he been talking about? What had he been doing and more importantly what was he planning on doing?

The ultra-slim UHF listening device that Eddie had used (though perfect for concealment) had two significant limitations. Firstly it's ten micro-watt transmission power limited it's range and forced you to stay within eighty metres of it in order to listen-in. Secondly, the limited life of its 3 volt lithium coin battery meant it would expire after just 40 hours of uninterrupted use.

Despairingly, he knows he's run out of time. The Greek upstairs will want to fly back to Monaco shortly so he'll have to brief him and seeing no point in delaying the inevitable Eddie picks up the phone. “Alexis, I need to bring you up-to-speed on something, can you come down to the security office at your earliest opportunity. I assure you, it is very important.”

Ten minutes later, Alexis's fat, pock-marked face appears on the video screen connected to his security door and he doesn't look in a good mood.

He gets buzzed inside.

“This had better be urgent Eddie. I really haven't got the time. Robertson's just taken on an outrageous position and is shitting himself. If I don't keep a close eye on him he's going to bottle-it and pull out too early, so make it quick, what's this about…?” Slater pauses, desperately trying to find the right words. “Speak-up man, what's the problem?” Alexis can see there's a serious issue, -it's written all over his bodyguard's grizzled face. “I do hope you're not going to tell me any bad news Eddie. I pay you handsomely so I don't have to listen to bad news.”

“There are no mistakes to tell you about, just a complication that you need to be aware of. The FSA girl, Rebecca Kavanagh, -well her boyfriend is CID at Bishopsgate Station.”

“Should I be concerned?”

“There's something else, I've only just found out that he turns out to be the younger of the two police officers who came over to interview us last Tuesday following the kidnap attempt. You might remember his name, -John Gibson.”

“Yeah, I remember him. Seemed like a total non-entity at first, but nevertheless it was him who asked most of the questions during my interview and he seemed pretty sure of himself. The older guy mostly looked-on and took a few notes as I recall.” Alexis considers the situation for a moment before passing comment. “Ok, so her boyfriend just happens to be a copper. Worst case scenario, you've just killed his girlfriend after brutally stabbing dead their cat, so it's only going to take one loose end, one piece of evidence pointing in our direction and the entire police force is going to come down on us like a tonne of bricks. Best case scenario…you've not slipped-up so far and you haven't slipped-up this time either. If that's the case, nothing's going to come of it. Let me think things through for just a moment…”

Once Vasilakos is done considering the situation he begins to vehemently lecture his employee. “The problem with you Eddie is that you like killing people too much. You've got to learn to reign yourself in a bit my son. I'm starting to think you've got a problem, and it's getting a little out of control. Don't get me wrong, it's nice having your skills to hand, but you're starting to make yourself a bit of a fucking liability. If you want to remain in my employment you'll need to start listening to me more instead of always resorting to violence.
Do we understand each other?”