A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) Read online

  He stood behind her now. He could see the blonde curls of her hair spilling over her frayed collar as she tightened something under the car. The wheel that was missing was propped against a workbench, Huss’s body pressed against the axle end.

  ‘Pass me the clutch, Enver,’ she said. He looked around him. He’d never knowingly seen a clutch. On the bench was a metal object the size and shape of a small dinner plate that looked a bit like a landmine. On the floor by his feet was a much larger object like Darth Vader’s helmet made of grey metal.

  ‘Um, what does it look like?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Enver,’ said Huss. She manoeuvred herself out from under the car. Propped up at this weird angle on the jacks, its wheel off so you could see the silver steel of the axle, the large Freelander looked oddly vulnerable, pathetic, as if it was patiently undergoing surgery. Huss rose graciously from the floor, light on her feet despite her sturdy body shape.

  She stood in front of him. The sleeves of the boilersuit were rolled up over her powerful forearms. She was stocky in build and wore a beanie pulled over her blonde hair to protect it from engine grease and oil. The top buttons of the boilersuit were undone and Enver could see she was wearing a white tee underneath, its fabric stretched taut by her upper body. Huss was a curvy woman. She was wearing latex gloves, which she snapped off. Her fingernails were red.

  ‘That,’ she pointed at the landmine-like thing, ‘is a clutch.’

  ‘And what’s that then?’ said Enver, indicating the grey cowling on the floor.

  ‘That’s a gearbox.’ Her tone was slightly sarcastic, her broad attractive face slightly hostile. ‘And what brings you all the way out here? Other than automotive curiosity?’

  Enver thought, She obviously wants me to apologize but I don’t know what for. His gloom deepened. He’d been in this position once or twice before in his life. It was a conversation that went, Tell me what I’ve done to offend you, the answer to which was, If you have to ask there’s no point in me replying. An argument as circular as a clutch seemingly was. I’m no good with women, he thought. Or cars.

  He scratched his moustache, trying to think of something to say.

  ‘Can I buy you lunch, then I’ll tell you,’ he said. Huss’s face brightened at the thought of lunch with Enver. She had meant to be severely unpleasant to him, but the sight of his slightly battered, mournful face and his powerfully muscled body outlined by the wet fabric of his rain-soaked shirt and jacket softened her heart. She liked Enver very much. She’d forgotten how much she actually wanted him until this moment.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. She pointed at the gearbox. ‘Could you put that on the bench for me?’ she asked. Enver nodded, bent down and lifted the Freelander’s gearbox effortlessly from the floor and put it down on the workbench. That must weigh about fifty or sixty kilos, thought Huss. She breathed deeply, running her eyes over Enver’s shoulders, back and backside as he experimentally inspected where he’d placed it to make sure it was secure. Desire, she thought. That’s what I’m feeling now.

  She glanced down at where she’d been working. ‘Well, I suppose the dual-mass flywheel can wait,’ she said. ‘Where did you have in mind?’

  Enver’s face brightened. Melinda Huss was almost smiling at him.

  ‘Wherever you want.’

  Upstairs, my room, now, she thought. She wondered what he’d do if she said that. Faint probably.

  ‘There’s a new Lebanese in Woodstock.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Enver. Now she was smiling. It was all going better than expected.

  ‘I’ll get changed.’ As Huss crossed the yard to the back door of the farmhouse she thought savagely, If he so much as mentions that other bloody woman. . . DCI sodding Hanlon. . .

  8

  Joad parked in the short-term car park at Heathrow’s Terminal Five. As the automated gate barrier rose to let him through, he could see Hanlon’s red Audi three cars behind. Driving along slowly, looking for a space to park, he thought about Hanlon’s following them. It was a fairly risky manoeuvre, a one-car tail. It was so transparently obvious. Dimitri probably wouldn’t notice but, then, Dimitri was thick. You could tail him in an ice-cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’ and he’d be oblivious. Belanov would have spotted her. It was also such an indiscreet car, so vividly coloured. Hard to miss really.

  Hanlon was no fool, as Joad knew. If she was doing it this way it was either because she didn’t care if she was seen or because she had to. Joad would take a guess on the second option. He had noticed her doing her best to keep a discreet distance. She had a track record of unilateral action. Haven’t we all, he thought, although in fairness mine are all pretty much illegal. He was willing to bet a great deal of money that Hanlon had no official backing for this. If she had, it would have been more professionally done. He shrugged. At the moment it was no concern of his. His own story, should he be called to account, was that he too was befriending the Russians as part of his investigation into a brothel ring in Cowley.

  In the interim, he wasn’t going to tell the Russians about Hanlon. He would squirrel that piece of information away for later. For when it was needed. Joad was built for survival. Someone had once called him a rat by way of an insult. He hadn’t been offended. Rats were smart, they had unbelievably tough teeth and could chew through steel and concrete, they could swim half a mile and they could take on opponents many times their size. They could survive radiation that would kill a human and live longer without water than a camel.

  And, like the mythical rat on a sinking ship, Joad had a finely balanced nose for danger. All in all, he was happy to be a rat. He had a feeling that his association with the Russians was coming to an end and he certainly wasn’t going to lift a finger to help them. If Hanlon wanted to bring them down single-handedly, all the best to her.

  In fact, he thought, I might even help. It all depends.

  He started wondering about the plausibility of borrowing a large amount of money from Arkady. And the car. He was falling in love with the car. With a bit of luck, with Hanlon on one side of the equation and the Russians on the other, they’d manage to cancel each other out. Then it would be a loan that need never be repaid. And if Hanlon succeeded in putting Arkady away or forcing him out of the country, he wouldn’t be needing the Merc. Either way, he was going to come out of it in credit.

  It was the way things had always been, Ian Joad versus the world.

  So far, he was ahead on points.

  He drove up and through the short-term multi-storey car park at Terminal Five with practised ease, manoeuvring the large car with enviable skill and confidence through the confined, claustrophobic space. He could have let his passenger out before parking but didn’t. Joad was an excellent driver and he’d spotted the empty space in the bay and parked almost before Dimitri had time to think, reversing neatly in one smooth, swift move. The space he had found for the Mercedes was between a Range Rover and a transit van. The bay was small, the car wide. Joad, toothpaste-tube thin, easily slid out from behind the door. He stood by the bonnet of the elegant vehicle, smiling to himself, as he watched Dimitri struggle out of the narrow gap between the Mercedes and the Range Rover like a man playing Twister.

  He waited patiently, the infuriating smirk still on his face, then he and his giant companion headed off to the arrivals hall.

  Hanlon concealed herself as best she could in a far corner of the huge international arrivals area. She leaned against a wall, hands in the pockets of her jacket, trying to look innocuous. She could feel the silk fabric of a headscarf she’d forgotten she had in the right-hand one. She was pleased to find it again; it had cost a great deal of money. She had assumed she’d lost it. Her fingers caressed its smooth, light creases.

  She too had parked quickly and had run down ahead of the two men, her hair bouncing as she moved, vaulting over concrete and steel barriers and taking the stairs in a series of elegant leaps. She could see Dimitri now, walking through the car park entra
nce doors with his customary hard-man swagger, accompanied by another tall, slim man that she guessed was Joad.

  Her eyes narrowed at the sight of Dimitri. She had a visceral loathing of him and his fat boss Belanov. Belanov’s favourite way to keep his girls subservient was to use a plumber’s blowtorch on them, nearly two thousand degrees centigrade of concentrated blue flame on a woman’s skin. Belanov found that arousing. And Dimitri found it funny. She’d hurt them both once, but not, in her considered opinion, nearly enough.

  She’d known about Joad from a previous case she’d worked on. Her colleague, Enver Demirel, had warned her about this criminal informant in the Oxford CID, but they had no hard evidence and she had no wish to start an official investigation in which her own behavior at the time would be seen as highly questionable. She’d never seen Joad in person, but Enver’s one-word description, ‘sleazy’, even at this distance seemed appropriate. She had known somehow he’d be an amalgam of polyester, dandruff, faux leather and cheap aftershave. Even from here she could see her intuition was correct.

  She mentally cursed herself for not having brought along some form of camera. She wanted a record of who Dimitri was meeting. She had a feeling that Heathrow required a permit for photography but as police she’d get away with it, should anyone ask. But all she had was her phone and there was no way she could get close enough to use it. Dimitri would probably attack her on sight if he saw her. She doubted his ability to control himself. He certainly wouldn’t forget what she looked like, unless he’d suffered memory loss after she had felled him with the butt of a shotgun. I probably haunt your dreams at night, she thought with a grim smile.

  Hanlon had no idea how much he and Belanov burned for revenge.

  International Arrivals, Heathrow, Terminal Five. The space was vast, the ceiling immensely high, glass and steel predominated, the primary colours silver and black and yellow and white. It was teeming with people. She was pleased by the numbers. She felt comfortably inconspicuous.

  In the distance she could see Joad and Dimitri. They were almost certainly there to pick up some crony of Arkady Belanov’s from the motherland. Maybe even the vor himself. But Charlie hadn’t known his name and Charlie hadn’t known what he looked like.

  The more she thought about it, the more Hanlon had a growing feeling that today she would find out. Why else would Belanov have sent this welcome committee? Today she would get to see the face of the vor and begin to take revenge for Oksana.

  Whoever he might be. Charlie Taverner’s files hadn’t been as informative as Oksana had believed.

  The information contained on the memory stick was the outline of a PowerPoint presentation to be given to Corrigan at the meeting that Taverner had failed to attend. It was an overview of the sex industry in London. Plenty of money to be made by energetic Russian criminals. There were several graph-based pages of statistics and figures, showing the rise of East European prostitutes in the capital, and the message was quite clear. That whether or not the rise in former Soviet Union sex workers was the result of increased activity by the Bratva, the russakaya mafia or, in plain English, the Russian mafia, or if the criminal gangs followed the girls, it would mean an increase in crime.

  Taverner thought ‘increase’ was an understatement. There’d be an explosion in crime and one that the Met would be ill equipped to deal with.

  Hanlon could easily imagine Corrigan wishing to defuse any potential threat to his position from the Home Secretary.

  But this was all theoretical. Here the situation was not a briefing; it was real. She moved political considerations about the Russian crime threat to the back of her mind and concentrated on the here and now.

  Hanlon tilted her head back and her keen, grey eyes scanned the arrivals board. A BA flight from Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow had just landed. She guessed that was what Dimitri and Joad were waiting for.

  Moscow. Charlie Taverner was obsessed with an unnamed man known as the Butcher of Moscow. He controlled a significant amount of the city’s prostitution. Prostitution at the high-end level.

  Moscow, for Charlie, had meant crime.

  There were two main criminal gangs in Moscow, the Solntsevskaya Bratva and their rivals, the Tambovskaya Bratva. The latter – who had been prosecuted in Bulgaria for laundering $1.4 billion of profits, Taverner noted, to give some idea of their financial worth – had the lion’s share, and both were committed to the removal of the Butcher as a business competitor.

  The Butcher, Miasnik in Russian, was small scale compared to his gangland rivals. All of the gangs were violent. Most of their soldiers were or had been just that, soldiers. Trained to kill in Chechnya and Ossetia; some of the older ones trained in Afghanistan.

  But the Butcher specialized in flamboyant killing, shock and awe murder. That was his calling card. Beheading, seemingly, was a speciality.

  And now, thought Hanlon, now he was coming over here. Coming to a brothel near you. Coming with his soldiers, former paratroopers and former Spetsnatz and the finest graduates of Russia’s dread prisons.

  The noticeboard changed to Baggage in hall for the Moscow flight. Two passing police, Heckler and Koch automatics slung around their necks, regarded Hanlon suspiciously, slowing their measured walk as they did so. It wasn’t her slightly tough good looks or even the black eye that caused them to give her a professional once-over. It was the calm air of certainty that surrounded Hanlon, an aura of hard-edged competence. She met their gaze with rock-steady confidence. They walked past her and carried on by.

  Hanlon knew that one of her major faults lay in not seeing the bigger picture; she tended to concentrate on the now, rather than worry about the consequences. Trying to do, say, Corrigan’s job – marshal large numbers of officers and support staff to fight not just crime but terrorism, whilst steering a deft course through government policy, the police federation, civil liberties and human rights, a fickle public constantly veering from opinions that ‘all coppers are bastards’ to ‘string ’em up or lock ’em up and throw away the key’, budgetary constraints, the media and maybe ten to fifteen million Londoners – she’d have been disastrous. And then all the tedious meetings with Data Processing, monitoring the traffic on mobiles and computers, the technicalities and legalities of what they were and were not permitted to access, which she was hopeless at. Her mind just switched off in such situations. And as for tact and trying to keep the public on side, well, even a Hanlon enthusiast would duck that question. Hanlon and PR, a key part of Corrigan’s job, were irreconcilable.

  Corrigan had once said to her that the criminals were the easy part of their job. She was beginning to realize the truth of what he had said. But if she lacked strategic vision, she made up for it in the tactical.

  She noted the increased tension in the officers’ posture. Hanlon was failing the attitude test. Most people avoid the attention of heavily armed policemen. Hanlon’s slightly arrogant poise and athletic build together with her black eye, an injury from sparring at the boxing gym she used, had aroused their suspicions. One of them had even checked her footwear as they’d passed. Hanlon was wearing knee-length boots with a short skirt. Good for running in. The officer had added it to his checklist.

  In a minute they’d be back. While they engaged her in polite, meaningless chat, wanting to confirm ID, etc., Joad, Dimitri and whoever they were meeting could have come and gone. She looked around her for inspiration.

  She saw them immediately. The answer to a prayer.

  Salvation.

  It wasn’t a Guido Fawkes V-for-Vendetta mask – it was a piece of very expensive silk cloth, courtesy of Hermès, but it was equally effective. The arrangement of the barriers at International Arrivals was asymmetric and, as the metal curved round, Hanlon joined a group of about twenty Arab Muslim women waiting to greet arrivals from, she guessed, a Middle Eastern flight. The women all had their heads covered and half of them were wearing the shapeless, figure-concealing clothes favoured by the religious, the other half wearing West
ern clothes, jackets and jeans predominating.

  Hanlon, her hair covered by her dark Hermès scarf, tagged along at the end of the group. The crowd that assembles at Arrivals is always excitable, always vibrant, never static. The attention of the greeters is universally concentrated on the focal point of the door through which the travellers appear. The women in the crowd, too, all seemed armed with mobile phones, either using them to talk to whoever they’d come to pick up or photographing their loved ones as they arrived.

  Hanlon followed suit. She would be able to use her phone with impunity. Everyone else was. The images she had through the screen of the camera weren’t perfect, but they were good enough. Dimitri and Joad were just a few metres away but their attention was fixed on the doors to Arrivals. They’d glanced at the Muslim women but it had been a glance of dismissal. No threat there to them and, also, nothing to ogle. All they’d seen was a mass of headscarves; that was enough for them. Hanlon got busy with her phone.

  Click. Dimitri glowering at the floor, Joad looking bored.

  Click. Joad yawning, holding his sign. Hanlon couldn’t read the Cyrillic letters; she’d have them deciphered later.

  It suddenly occurred to Hanlon that Dimitri obviously didn’t know what the Butcher looked like, otherwise why bother with the sign. Clearly he was a man who valued his anonymity.

  Click. Dimitri and Joad in profile now, both looking alert, like pointers who have scented the prey.

  Hanlon changed the phone’s camera to video as the first-class Moscow passengers started to arrive, filtering through from airside to terminal.

  She would have missed Myasnikov if he hadn’t gone to greet Dimitri and Joad. Middle-aged, average height, conservatively dressed with a neatly trimmed greying beard, he looked as unlike her mental image of a blood-soaked gang leader as it was possible to get.