The Murder Exchange (30 page)

'Glad to hear it.'

'If you do get to speak to Tony, send him my
regards, will you?' he said as he led us out to the lifts.

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I nodded, and said that I would. 'Did you get on well with him, then?'

'He was good company, and very professional. I
like dealing with people like him.'

When we were outside, I looked at my watch.
Twenty past five. The streets of the City of London
were beginning to fill with the first wave of smartly
dressed workers hurrying like ants in every
direction, none looking as if they had a moment to
spare.

'Do you think this Tony Franks character could
have something to do with Matthews's death, then,
Sarge?' asked Benin as we started walking towards
Moorgate Tube.

He's linked to the Holtzes, albeit fairly indirectly,
and he's linked, again indirectly, to the
snake poison. It's not a lot to go on, but it's something.
Did the name mean anything to you?'

Benin shook his head. 'No, never heard of him.
Does it to you?'

'It does, but I can't think from where.'

'Something's going on at that Tiger Solutions,
though, isn't it?'

The name keeps coming up, that's for sure, and
it's not a name you're going to forget. We're going
to have to pay another visit to Joe Riggs, but I think
maybe we should leave it for a day or two. I'd like
to have something to pressure him with, and at the
moment we haven't got much.'

'At least now we're beginning to get somewhere,
though.' For the first time in a while, he sounded enthused.

When we got to Moorgate Tube it was shut by a

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security alert, and the traffic had near enough
ground to a halt. I called Malik on my mobile but he
wasn't answering, so I left a message, asking him to
call back urgently. I'd intended to go back to the
station, but by the time the two of us had walked
up to Old Street it was twenty to six and hardly
worth it, so we went our separate ways.

But on the Underground, heading back home, ,„ sweating with the commuters, I couldn't get the ***
name Tony Franks out of my mind. It bugged me,
so much so that I got off at Highbury and Islington
and returned to work, thinking that I'd never be
able to relax until I'd satisfied my curiosity.

As usual, the incident room was empty, which
suited me just fine. I switched on my PC, got a coffee ^
while it booted up, and logged on to our criminal =*
database. I then typed in: Franks, Anthony.

One match.

I opened the file and a photograph of a good
looking, youngish man with short dark hair and a
calm, almost mocking expression appeared. It was
the same man in the photograph with Jackie Slap.
According to the computer, he'd been arrested in
December 1997 on suspicion of the importation of
Class A drugs, but released without charge. He had
no convictions, and did not appear to have been
arrested on any further charges.

I looked at the mugshot for a long time, racking
my brains, trying to remember where the hell I
knew him from. I'd questioned him about something.
Something not that recent, but also not that
long ago. It had been a serious crime but Franks
had not been a suspect. He'd answered the

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questions put to him helpfully and with the right
level of concern. I remembered I'd found him a likeable
character. He'd said he worked in security.
He'd once been a bodyguard for Geri Halliwell.

And then it came to me, and I was puzzled
because I wasn't sure what the information meant.
I'd questioned him at his home, and the reason was
that Tony Franks had lived on the very same street
on which thirteen-year-old paperboy Robert Jones
had last been seen alive on a cold, dark February
morning all those months ago.

Iversson

'Go you can't tell me nothing about it?' said Johnny
looking at me like he honestly thought I might
suddenly change my mind.

'Not at the moment,' I pulled the cap low over
my face, then climbed into the passenger side of the
red Mercedes van that would be used to transport
Krys Holtz the two miles from Heavenly Girls to
the lock-up in Finchley Joe had rented the previous
day where we'd be changing vehicles. Johnny got
in the driver's side and took the car out onto City
Road.

'I hope it's nothing that's going to get me in
trouble, Max. I like a quiet life, you know.'

'As do I, Johnny, which is something you should
have thought about when your recommendation
almost got me blown away.'

'Give us a Scooby.'

'A what?'

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'AScooby Doo, clue. Just so I've got some idea. Is
it something illegal?'

'I've asked you to steal two vehicles, both of
which are going to end up burnt out. What do you
think?'

'I think I'm fucking nervous.'

'Don't be.'

Where are we heading, then?'

'A pick-up in Muswell Hill.' I gave him the
address and the main road it was off. 'You know
how to get there?'

He nodded. 'Sure.' It was half ten and long dark.
The streets were fairly quiet, it being a Monday
night, and a light rain was falling. 'So, I might not
be needed after tonight, then?'

'Not if all goes according to plan, but don't bet on
it. It might take a while.'
We didn't speak for the rest of the journey.
Johnny continued to look nervous and uncomfortable
but he drove without losing concentration and
within fifteen minutes we'd pulled up outside Joe's
place, a flat in a slightly worn-out-looking redbrick
townhouse. I rang up to him on the mobile and a
couple of minutes later Joe, Tugger Lewis and Mike
Kalinski came out of the door. Tugger was dressed
in a suit while Joe and Kalinski wore similar boiler
suits to the ones Johnny and I were wearing, and
both were carrying holdalls. Tugger came round to
my door while the other two went straight to the
back of the van and climbed inside. I stepped out and
let him in. Johnny, Tugger. Tugger, Johnny. You two
are going to be spending some time together.
Johnny, do whatever Tugger says.'

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'Hold on, Max. I thought--'

'I'm going in the back. Less attention that way.'

I gave Johnny the address of Heavenly Girls, shut
the passenger door, and got in the back with Joe
and Kalinski. Joe gave a double knock on the
interior panel separating the back from the front,
and Johnny pulled away from the kerb.

Ten minutes later, the van parked up and I heard
Tugger gettm§ out to feed the meter. I looked at my
watch. It was five to eleven.

An hour passed, and we sat there in relative
silence, occasionally hearing Johnny's muffled
voice jabbering on about something in the front,
and the odd bored-sounding reply from Tugger.
Traffic on the road seemed quiet. Joe had watched il..'.- place the previous night and Krys hadn't
shown. It was anyone's guess whether he'd come
again this evening, but if he did we were
prepared.

I watched Kalinski as he sat staring up at the
van's ceiling, chainsmoking Rothmans. To be
honest, I didn't much like him. He was too flash; a
typical robber really. When I'd met him the
previous night, he'd been dressed in an immaculately
tailored suit, with gold cufflinks on his
shirtsleeves and a thick gold Rolex any self
respecting mugger would have killed him for. I
don't like people who think they're bigshots, and
Kalinski definitely rated himself as one. Joe had
told me that he'd claimed to have earned more than
a million quid down the years through armed
robbery and the investment of the proceeds in dope
deals. He might well have done, but I didn't like the

281

way he thought it was worth boasting about. You
could tell he thought he was better than us, sort of
a cut above us riffraff who had to earn their livings
by actually working, though fuck knows why. A
thief and a dope peddler. He was hardly royalty,
was he?

Still, as Joe had pointed out, he knew how to
handle a gun, which meant he was less likely to use
it. The last thing we needed was a shootout in the
brothel. The whole thing had to be neat and professional.
That way, as always, lay the route to
success. And if he didn't want to say much, then
that was fine by me. Johnny more than made up for
his brooding silence.

I sat back in the seat and relaxed, unaffected by
the boredom of the wait. I'd learnt how to be
patient a long time back. It was one of the first
things you got used to in the army.

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.

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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, hut 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
g von ing

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.

283

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 semidetached
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.

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r

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
paedopnile 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

285

doing the round for more than six months, and they
often saw each other in the morning. Robert i
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.