Max Wolfe 02.5 - Fresh Blood (7 page)

Because I felt the power in that good man’s arms and as we came apart our eyes met with the secret knowledge that Father Marvin was a better man than I would ever be, a man with the strength to hold a pillow over the face of a soul in torment, and the love in his heart to do it.

‘Our brother is at peace now,’ he said.

They found me looking at the Turners in the Tate.

I was sitting in front of a canvas that seemed to be painted in a thousand shades of red. ‘The Burning of the Houses of Parliament’, it said on the little brass plaque. ‘Joseph Mallord William Turner. c. 1834–5’.

In the painting the buildings all looked like phantoms, like the ghosts of buildings, or buildings glimpsed in a dream, and they were totally consumed by flames. Tiny figures huddled beneath the fire, jammed close together, and it looked like a vision of hell until you realised that there were rays of bright light aimed at the flames.

They were not starting the fire.

They were trying to put it out.

I snapped out of my reverie when DC Edie Wren kicked me, the toe of her trainer banging hard against the heel of my boot.

‘You don’t answer your phone?’ she said, and looked at DCI Whitestone with exasperation. ‘Jesus!’

Whitestone took off her glasses, giving her face a vulnerable, owlish look until she had cleaned them and put them back on. She still had the bookish air of a teacher or a librarian about her, but I knew there was not a more experienced homicide detective in the city.

‘We’ve got a call, Max,’ she said. ‘And we’re going right now. So if you’re coming, then you have to come now.’

I nodded.

‘There’s no end to it, is there?’ I said. ‘I think that’s what got to Curtis at the end. There’s no end to the wickedness, the cruelty, the evil. There’s only an end to us. We fight it – but it will outlive us.’

‘That’s right, but we’re going now’ Whitestone said, smiling kindly, and she turned away and walked through the Sunday afternoon crowds.

Edie scowled at me once before following her.

I took one last look at the Turner. And then I found myself following the pair of them to the pool car parked outside, the engine running.

We drove north, to a street that was just a few blocks beyond a fashionable area, which was far enough away to make it look as though we could be in any suburb in the country.

Our people were already there. The blue lights swirling at either end of the road. The uniforms putting up yellow tape and a white tent. The CSIs in their white Tyvek suits and blue latex gloves, filming and photographing and dusting. There were some local detectives, clearly shaken up. It was a nice neighbourhood and they were not accustomed to murder.

The dead man was on his back, his body half in the street and half on the pavement. The tent was going up around him. There wasn’t much blood, which made it look like it had been some kind of blow to the head. He was perhaps forty years old, although the carpet slippers he was wearing gave him the appearance of a much older man.

‘He was in his home,’ the local detective told us, nodding to a house that looked just like all the others on the street. ‘There were some yobs in the street – kicking cars, swearing loud, the usual rubbish – and he came out to tell them to stop.’

‘And they killed him,’ Whitestone said.

‘Kicked him to death,’ the local detective said. ‘His wife and kids are inside. They’re in pieces.’

Whitestone nodded. ‘Get their statements,’ she told Wren and me, all business as she pulled on blue latex gloves.

Edie and I went into the house.

Our people were inside but beyond them there was what remained of the shattered little family. A woman around forty years old. A girl of about sixteen. A boy perhaps a year younger. The wife, the daughter and the son of the dead man in the road. Holding on to each other, all three of them sobbing uncontrollably, and trying to understand these new wounds that would never heal.

‘I’m DC Wolfe and this is my colleague DC Wren,’ I said.

None of them looked at me.

‘I am so sorry for your loss,’ I said, and still they did not look at me. They held each other and they wept and the pain was more than they could endure.

I looked at Edie.

She nodded encouragement.

I took a breath and stepped towards the family.

‘I promise you that we are going to catch these men,’ I said.

And finally they looked at me.

After Friday prayers Mahmud Irani walked back to where he had parked his taxi and within a few minutes he had picked up the man who was going to kill him.

The man was standing opposite the entrance to London Zoo, dressed in a suit and tie, the jacket buttoned up despite the steaming midday heat. His eyes were hidden behind dark glasses and he had one arm already raised in the air to hail a cab, as if he was fully expecting Mahmud to be driving round Regent’s Park’s Outer Circle immediately after prayers, as if he knew he was coming.

As if he had been waiting.

Mahmud pulled up beside him, smelling the animal stink of the zoo in summer.

‘Cash only, boss,’ Mahmud said.

The man nodded, glancing at his phone before showing it to Mahmud. On the iPhone’s screen there was a map of the City with a red marker pinpointing their destination.

Newgate Street, EC1.

Less than four miles away but it meant crossing the middle of the city in the stagnant traffic of lunch hour. Mahmud grunted his reluctant assent and watched the man slide into the back seat.

In silence they drove east through the sweltering city.

Mahmud was turning his taxi onto Newgate Street when he glanced in his rear-view mirror and saw the man removing a small leather credit-card holder. Mahmud sighed. How many times did you have to tell these stupid people?

‘It’s cash only,’
he repeated, harder this time, tugging at his polo shirt, the sweat sticking.

But the man was not getting out a credit card.

He leaned forward between the gap in the front seats and placed an old-fashioned razor blade firmly against Mahmud Irani’s left eyelid.

Mahmud drew in his breath and did not let it go.

He felt the thin cold steel of the blade’s cutting edge settle into the folds of soft flesh beneath his eyebrow. The fine layer of skin covering his eye fluttered wildly against the razor blade. Pure naked terror rose up inside him.

‘Please,’ Mahmud said. ‘Please. Just take the money. It’s under my seat.’

The man laughed.

‘I don’t want your money. Keep driving. Nice and easy now.’

Mahmud drove as if in a dream, driving with one eye squeezed closed, trying to concentrate on the road ahead with a razor blade pressed against his eyelid.

Following the man’s directions, he drove to the end of the street and then turned left onto a huge building site. It was deserted, one of those little pockets of total silence and emptiness that suddenly surprise you in the city. Another tower of glass and steel was being erected here, but there was nobody working this afternoon. They were all alone. Ahead of them was a yawning hole in the uneven ground.

‘Down there,’ the man said.

‘I have a wife and children.’

‘Too late for all that now, pal.’

The razor blade pressed more firmly into Mahmud’s flesh and he felt his eyeball move, a sick rolling feeling as the eye recoiled from the cutting edge. Mahmud drove into the hole and down, bumping over a speed bump and then over some random rubble before entering a vast basement twilight.

What was this place?

Mahmud could not tell if it had once been an underground car park or if that’s what it would be in the future. Right now it was simply a massive expanse of empty space with a very low ceiling; a subterranean basement with no lights apart from the shafts of summer sun coming in from somewhere.

‘Where are we going?’ Mahmud said, unable to stop himself talking, and this time the man slid the razor blade very gently across his eyelid, just one inch, but enough to cut into flesh and make Mahmud cry out from the shock of sudden pain.

A warm trickle of blood oozed slowly around the curve of Mahmud’s left eyelid.

And he did not speak after that.

They got out of the car and that was a moment when Mahmud thought he could run away if he was not so stricken with terror, so paralysed with disbelief that this was happening, so appalled by the warm blood that ran now on either side of his left eye, so scared witless that he did not fully register the chance to escape until the moment had passed.

Then the man stood behind Mahmud, the razor blade returned to the soft fold of flesh above the left eye and the man’s other hand gently taking the taxi driver’s wrist.

They walked across the wide-open space to a door.

They went down some steps.

The air got colder.

They descended into total darkness and walked along a narrow passage until suddenly a thin shaft of natural light was coming from somewhere high above their heads. Mahmud could see ancient white brickwork that was stained green by time and weather. It was very cold now. The summer was on another planet. The air was fetid with what smelled like stagnant water. It was like stepping into another world.

And then there were the others.

Three of them.

Their faces hidden by black masks that revealed only their eyes.

One of them had a red light shining in their hands.

It was some kind of camera, and it was pointing at Mahmud Irani.

There was a stool. A kitchen step stool. Mahmud could not understand what was happening as hands helped him onto the stool and something was placed around his neck. The blood was in his eyes as he watched the man from the car consulting with the one who held the camera. Mahmud wiped away the blood with the palm of his hands and he tried to balance himself, afraid he would fall from the stool.

His fingers nervously felt his neck.

It was a rope.

They had put a rope around his neck.

He looked up and saw that it was attached to a rusted tangle of ancient pipes in the ceiling.

Hands were touching his arms. He heard a metallic click. He found that his arms were secured behind his back.

And now the words came in a torrent. Now he had no difficulty at all in speaking. Now even the razor blade pressed against his eyeball could not have shut his mouth.

‘I have a wife and children!’ he screamed, and his voice echoed back at him in this secret basement.

Wife and children!

Wife and children!

‘I’m just a taxi driver! Please! You have the wrong person!’

The man from the car was covering his face with a black mask. Like an executioner. He turned to Mahmud Irani.

‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’
he asked.

Mahmud stuttered, ‘What? This – what? I don’t understand. What? I’m a taxi driver–’

But then the words choked in his throat because, beyond the red light of the camera, one of them was sticking A4 sheets of paper to the worn white bricks of this underground place.

The A4 sheets of paper were portraits that had been downloaded from the Internet.

They were all the faces of girls. Young girls. Smiling girls.

And, yes, they were all smiling, every one of them – although some of them had smiles that were stiff and shy, and some had smiles that were natural and full of confidence.

They all smiled in their own way. The school photographers had insisted upon a smile, encouraged them to smile, tried to make them laugh.

They were formal portraits, the kind that a school takes every year to record and honour a student’s growth, and they caught the girls at the fleeting moment in their lives when they were poised between the children they had so recently been and the women they would one day become.

The smiling faces watched Mahmud Irani.

And he knew these faces. All of them.

He had known them in rooms full of laughing men. He had heard the girls scream for help when no help was coming. He had seen them blurry and on the edge of unconsciousness, foggy with cheap booze and strong drugs as their clothes were removed.