Cleanskin (7 page)

K
AREN’S FROWN BECAME DEEPER
as she read the will. ‘What does that mean?’ she said, her red-rimmed eyes looking puzzled.

‘You inherit the lot,’ I said. ‘The will lists the main things. But it also says that you get anything else Ben owned, even if it isn’t laid out in so many words.’

‘Yeah, I got that,’ Karen said. ‘But why are the contents of his health club locker listed? Ben didn’t belong to a health club. He worked out at the police gym. He said health clubs were for wankers who wanted to pretend they were fit.’

‘That’s what I wondered.’ Because I also knew Ben’s views about health clubs. And this wasn’t just any health club. It was Smithson’s. The place where Jack Farrell had gone every morning with Danny Chu and Fancy Riley. And where, apparently, Ben Wilson had had a locker. I sighed. ‘I need to check this out, Karen.’

She frowned again. ‘You think that was where he put the things he wanted to keep secure?’

‘It’s possible. I’m going to need a note from you saying it’s OK for me to look in the locker, though.’ I hoped she was so dazed she’d agree. I knew I didn’t have enough for a search warrant.

I was in luck. ‘Anything I can do to help.’ Karen got to her feet and cast around for something to write on. In the end, I knocked something out on Ben’s computer and got her to sign it.

Just over an hour later, I was in the manager’s office at Smithson’s. It was better furnished than the living rooms of most of the cops I know. Lavish was clearly what they were aiming for, and they’d hit the target. The manager was a hawk-faced man in his thirties. I’d seen him before, in photos we’d snatched of Jack Farrell enjoying the high life at the health club. But he wasn’t smiling at me the way he smiled at Farrell. ‘This all seems a bit –’

‘Out of the usual run of things? I couldn’t agree more,’ I said. ‘But you know how it is when a cop is killed. We’re desperate to cover all the bases.’ I gave him the quick snake smile
that doesn’t get as far as my eyes. ‘I hope you’re not going to create a problem here? I do have his widow’s go-ahead, and a copy of the will where he mentions the locker by number.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Can we at least be discreet about this?’

I looked innocent. ‘That’s why I’m here alone. I could have come mob-handed, you know.’

‘You’ve got the combination?’ he said with ill grace.

I pointed to the will. ‘Right there.’

He took me down to the locker room, an annex off the changing rooms with a bench running between two banks of locked doors. He pointed out Ben’s locker, then hung around behind me. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll manage by myself now.’ He wasn’t happy about it, but he took the hint.

The locker was on the floor level. It was about thirty inches by twelve and when I opened it, most of the space was taken up by a sports holdall. I pulled it out, grunting at the unexpected weight of it. I laid it on the bench and unzipped it.

If I’d had any doubts about where Stella’s
logic had taken us, they died then. Ben hadn’t sold himself cheaply, that was for sure. The bag was rammed with bundles of fifty-pound notes. I had no idea how much was there, but it must have run well into six figures. ‘You bastard,’ I said.

The betrayal didn’t end there. The locker also held a couple of envelopes. One was labelled
Insurance
. It contained one of those life insurance policies with a big single premium and a huge payout. This one had been taken out a couple of years before and it would pay half a million pounds, all to Karen. I couldn’t believe how long this had been going on. A couple of years ago, he’d had fifty grand to blow on insurance. All the while complaining to me that he could barely afford to insure his bloody car.

I thought that was bad enough. But there was worse to come. The second envelope was addressed to Karen. I didn’t think twice. I ripped it open.

‘You bastard,’ I said again. With his fake account of where the money had come from, he’d slid out from under any link to Jack Farrell or any other criminal stuff.. And he’d pointed the finger straight at me. I couldn’t hand this in, not without spending the rest of my career as the subject of whispers and gossip about my honesty.

And I’d thought he was my friend. I felt an ache inside me, the kind you get when you’ve held back your tears for too long.

It wasn’t Ben’s death that was making me feel so bad.

It was what he’d done with his life.

T
HERE WAS GOOD NEWS
and bad news waiting for me when I got back to the office. Kirsty Blythe had returned with the news that John ‘Pirate’ Hawkins, the tattoo artist who had done Jack Farrell’s tattoos, had been reported missing by his girlfriend the day before the fake suicide. He was still on the missing list.

The good news was that Manuela the Spanish nanny wasn’t as clever about covering her tracks as Farrell. I’d had an alert put out on her credit card after she’d skipped the country. It had paid off. According to the report on my desk, she had used the card to buy a load of groceries, toiletries and clothes in a hypermarket on the outskirts of Calais.

Things were starting to fall into place. We knew Farrell had been using his boat as a base for making the deals when he’d been selling up, and that Fancy Riley had taken him off on a speedboat at the end of every day. That would
make sense if Farrell had a second boat that we knew nothing about. It would also explain why there had been no sightings of him. If he was using his boat to move between England and France, he could come and go more or less as he pleased. He could come here to torture and kill, then slip back to France the same night.

It didn’t narrow things down much, but it was a start. That evening, sitting at Stella’s dining table and working my way through a Chinese banquet, I brought her up to speed. I could see she was shaken by the depth of the sleaze Ben had crawled into. ‘What did you do with the money?’ she said.

I gave her a quick look out of the corner of my eye. ‘I gave Karen the insurance policy,’ I said. ‘I burned the letter. And the money’s sitting in my car.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’ Stella put down her chopsticks and gave me a stern look.

‘Give it away,’ I said. ‘Where it’ll do some good.’ I took a gulp of wine. ‘Karen’s got more than enough.’

Stella reached across and covered my hand with hers. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Andy. What Ben did, it’s not your fault.’

‘I should have seen it. I should have known,’ I said, a bitter taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with the food. ‘He was my right hand, and I didn’t know he was dirty. How can I call myself a cop when I let that happen?’

‘He chose which way to go. He chose to turn his whole life into a lie,’ Stella said. ‘I won’t sit back and let you blame yourself for that.’

‘I’m not blaming myself for his choice, I’m blaming myself for trusting a man who didn’t deserve it.’

Stella squeezed my hand. ‘You’re right about that, at least. But he must have worked very hard to make you trust him. He must have been scared shitless that you would find him out. And, frankly, he deserved every second of that fear. You’re a good man, Andy. And a good cop.’

I snorted. ‘I don’t think so, Stella. Ben fooled me. Jack Farrell’s still fooling me. He might be in France. He might be at sea.’ I drank more wine. ‘He might be sitting outside your flat laughing at us, for all I know.’

‘Why France?’

I told her about Manuela and the credit card. Stella let go of my hand and stood up. ‘I’ve got
an idea,’ she said. It must have been a good one. She was walking away from one of the best Chinese takeaways in London.

I followed her through to the space under the stairs that she’d converted into a study. She sat down at the computer, which she left running twenty-four seven in spite of my warnings about ID theft and hackers. She made her way to a private site for forensic experts who specialize in figuring out ways to identify bodies. She glanced up at me. ‘Could you get me my wine, please?’

By the time I got back, she was swapping instant messages with a colleague.

‘Who’s JPB?’ I asked, setting her drink down beside the keyboard.

She took a sip then said, ‘A skin man in Paris. I worked with him in Kosovo. He’s the one who taught me about tattoos.’ Before she could say
more, the computer beeped. JPB had come up with a couple of addresses of clinics in the right area.

Stella looked up at me with a grin. ‘I wondered why Manuela was in France. It didn’t seem to make sense unless she was there for Farrell. Which begged the question, why Calais? There are so many little places along the French coast where there would be much less chance of Farrell being spotted. There had to be a good reason.’

I grinned. ‘Like, getting rid of a unique set of
tattoos. Stella, you’re a better detective than me.’ I leaned down and kissed her. ‘But you’re also your own worst enemy. I’m going to have to go now and talk to the team about what we do next.’

‘Andy,’ she howled. ‘Surely it can wait till morning?’

I held my hands up, fending her off. ‘I’m not taking any chances,’ I said, backing towards the front door. ‘Save me some dinner in case I make it back later.’

I should have taken Stella’s idea straight to my boss and let him liaise with the French. But Jack Farrell was mine and I didn’t want him slipping through the net because some French cop who didn’t care enough was having a power nap at the wrong minute.

I hand-picked four officers, and we went off to France on the Eurostar. Once we were there, we hired three cars. We started staking out the clinic in four-hour shifts, holing up between times in a lorry drivers’ motel off the nearby motorway.

I had plenty of time to think about Katie Farrell’s murder. It had been more than a week
since Ben had died, and there hadn’t been any more bodies. Plus his was the only murder marked out with a fire. To me, it seemed clear. Jack Farrell had tortured and murdered his way to the answer. Then he had sent a message to the rest of us with the fire that linked Ben’s death to Katie’s. Only a dad who loved his kids like Ben would know how much damage Katie’s murder would do. I didn’t know why he’d done it, but all my instincts as a cop said that he had.

On the third day, we got lucky. Kirsty Blythe and her partner spotted Manuela dropping Farrell off at the side door of the clinic just before seven in the morning. She picked him up again two hours later. By then, all five of us were in place for a perfect tail.

First we followed them to a private marina where they loaded some hypermarket plastic bags on board a good-sized floating gin palace. We couldn’t get inside without keys, but I got out the binoculars and made sure I knew which boat.

Then we followed them about twenty miles into the countryside. There was no chance of losing them on the long flat straight roads lined with poplars. They pulled in at a large modern
villa on the far edge of a smart little village that looked like a movie set. After they’d taken the rest of the shopping inside, we carried on a few miles to the next village where we celebrated quietly with beers all round.

‘That villa’s a bitch to stake out,’ Blythe said.

‘We don’t need to stake it out. There’s only one road through the village. We just need to split ourselves up. Two cars to the north, one to the south. We’ll pick them up when they leave.’

Nobody had a better idea. It meant we were more or less trapped with the vehicles, but it could have been worse. And luckily, it didn’t go on very long.

Just before midnight that night, the first car on the road north called in to say Farrell had just driven past, alone and pedal to the metal. Blythe and I swung straight out into the road and kept a steady speed till we saw headlights behind us. We picked up our pace so he wouldn’t overtake us too soon and to give the others a chance to catch up.

There were a couple of hairy moments, but we managed to keep on his tail all the way to the marina car park. As Farrell walked towards the gate, we made our move, screeching the
cars to a halt around him, jumping out and taking him down. It took four of us to subdue him, but he never really stood a chance.

We cuffed him, took his keys off him and marched him to his boat while Kirsty parked the cars up neatly and left the keys under the drivers’ seats. We’d call the rental company when we got home.

The main reason I’d chosen Kirsty came to the fore now. She could sail. She’d been messing around on boats since she was a kid and she’d been crisscrossing the Channel on her parents’ little cabin cruiser for as long as she could remember.

We stuck Farrell below in the main bedroom, while those of us who weren’t driving sat in the saloon and played cards. Farrell kept up a steady stream of swearing and shouting for a while, but he got tired of it before we did.

We were back on English soil in time for breakfast. The story was simple. We’d had a tip that Farrell was on his way back and we’d caught him as he stepped ashore. His word against five of ours. No contest.

At first, it looked like there wasn’t much we could charge him with. Faking a suicide isn’t
that big a deal. But thanks to Stella, that soon changed. She got an ID for the body we’d mistaken for Farrell. The guy worked in Farrell’s porn business and he’d last been seen leaving a bar with Fancy Riley and Farrell himself. That was good, but even better was the discovery of the knife that had killed Brian Cooper and Ben Wilson. It was in the cutlery drawer on Farrell’s boat, his prints all over it. The final nail in the coffin was the experts matching traces of explosive in a locker on the boat to the stuff that had blown Joey Scardino to bits.

It’s been almost a year since the night Katie Farrell died. Her father’s due to stand trial in a few weeks. Funny how many rats came out of the woodwork to lay stuff at his door once they knew we had him bang to rights on something major.

It’s been a long journey for all of us. Karen Wilson’s still adrift in grief and her kids look like lost souls. We kept Ben’s name clean and I think that’ll survive the trial. But I feel like I’ve paid a high price for that. After Ben, I can’t find it in me to trust anyone. Something I couldn’t hide from Stella. She left for Knoxville, Tennessee and the Body Farm a couple of weeks
ago. As far as I can see, the only winners have been a bunch of charities that help homeless kids, drug addicts and women sold into sexual slavery.

Like I said, when a child dies, everybody hurts. And some hurts can’t ever be healed.