Adrian Magson - No Kiss For The Devil

It was bad enough that Asiyah’s lover was allegedly Israeli — heinous indeed for the wife of a staunchly proud Egyptian. But there was worse to come — at least, from Al-Bashir’s point of view.

His wife’s alleged lover was another woman.

‘You said nobody would come… that we would remain undisturbed here. You guaranteed it!’

Grigori’s eyes were flat and grey like the early morning sky outside, his voice dulled with anger. Emotion had brought an unusual level of colour to his cheeks, but it was not a good sign. He stared for several seconds at the two men before him with all the friendliness of a snake, waiting for an answer. ‘Well?’

‘We don’t know why they came, boss. It was not a scheduled visit.’ His assistant, Radko, was the spokesman, which was his job.

The man beside him, named Pechov, squat as a dumpster and blank-eyed, seemed impervious to the vitriolic atmosphere. He had the disinterest of a junior employee, and chewed rhythmically on a toffee. He remained silent, which was his job.

‘How, not scheduled? You said the supervisor, Goricz, would warn you. Yet suddenly, last night, two people come up here and ask to look around. Did we not pay him enough?’ He leaned forward over the desk strewn with the papers he’d been working on. ‘Or perhaps you did not frighten him enough? What happened — is he taking money from someone else?’

‘No, boss. I don’t think so. It was a genuine visit. Two people — a man and a woman — came with an agent to view the empty floor. It was short notice, Goricz said, and he couldn’t turn them away. They were from out of town, and couldn’t see the place any other time. They went in, looked round, then left.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders and gave a soothing smile. ‘It was nothing, I promise.’

‘You promise?’ Grigori’s words were coated with sarcasm, wiping the smile from his assistant’s face. ‘Like you promised the Bellamy woman would be dealt with properly? Like you promised we would remain secure in this building? Like you guaranteed the German woman would do what we wanted?’

‘The German was not my fault.’ Radko’s face went pale beneath his tan, his eyes flinty with resentment at being taken to task in front of Pechov. But he remained polite, wary. ‘She was not my choice. As for Bellamy, she is already forgotten. The police have found nothing and nor will they. Her place has been cleared, her briefcase and work records destroyed.’ He paused for a moment, before adding softly, ‘As for Goricz, I will deal with him.’

‘No. You won’t,’ Grigori countered quickly. ‘If anything happens to Goricz, it will only draw attention to this building — and we still need it for a while yet.’ He looked his assistant in the eye and said deliberately, ‘But once we are finished here, I do not expect the Serb or his family to see another day. Understand?’

‘All of them?’ Radko exchanged an appalled look with the silent Pechov. ‘But here, in London? It would be a huge risk-’

‘All of them! If you cannot do it, then I will find somebody who can.’ The statement hung in the air between them, the meaning chillingly clear.

Without another word, Grigori flicked a dismissive hand and turned to the papers on the desk before him as if the men did not exist.

He forced himself to remain calm. He was disturbed by what had just happened. Was Radko beginning to show signs of weakness? He hoped not, for that was something he could not allow. A weak link threatened them all, and would be seen by others as a challenge to his authority.

Several miles away, across London, Ray Szulu drummed his fingers on his mobile and waited. It was gone nine am. He was usually up and out earlier than this, but there had been no call yet, and he was still in his skivvies. He was waiting for Ayso, the controller and manager of the mini-cab firm, to give him some work. The limousine company had nothing, he’d already checked that, so here he was again, worrying about earning some money from short drives and wondering if his moans about Ayso’s pig-ugly accent had somehow got back to the man. It would be just like him to make Szulu squirm and wait for a job out of spite.

‘Hey, Raymond. You comin’ back to bed? I’m getting cold!’ The girl’s voice cut through from the bedroom of Szulu’s one-bed flat in what she probably thought was a sexy, seductive tone. All it did was set Szulu’s teeth on edge.

When he’d first started talking to her yesterday evening in a club in Hammersmith, her voice had sounded husky and alluring, muffled slightly by the driving bass line of the music and the constant hubbub of talk and laughter. And when she’d run her fingertips across his bullet scar, mention of which he’d dropped casually into the conversation the way he always did, because the ladies just ached to know they were talking to a real, live, wounded man who’d seen some action, she’d sounded positively honey-toned and had fluttered her eyelashes as if they were powered by Duracell.

But once outside and on the way back to his place, with her hanging on his arm — his wounded left arm — her voice had turned out to be sharp enough to stop the traffic.

He fingered the slight indentation in his upper arm. It wasn’t hurting this morning. Not that he’d admit that to her, of course. As far as the ladies were concerned, the pain was always there, a reminder of how close he’d come to leaving this life and moving onto the next. As usual, he always skirted round what had happened to the man who’d shot him and dwelt on himself. After all, he was still here, wasn’t he?

‘Raymond — you comin’ or what?’

Szulu dropped the mobile and made his way back to bed. Work or not, screechy voice or not, he had a reputation to uphold. Another job would come along sooner or later. Until then, there were other comforts.

Small blessings, as his ma used to say about all of life’s ups and downs. Small blessings.

‘Mr Palmer? DI Craig Pell.’ The detective walked into Palmer’s Uxbridge office, leaving a uniformed officer hovering at the top of the stairs. It was just after eleven and the morning street noise had died to a rumble.

Palmer swung his feet down from his open desk drawer and stood up. He’d left a message for Pell earlier, and the man had called back to say he would drop by for a ‘chat’. The speed with which he had done so and the presence of uniformed back-up weren’t necessarily significant, but neither was it a good sign.

He offered Pell coffee, but the policeman declined and sat down heavily on one of the hard chairs, thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets. The man’s face was all planes and angles, and Palmer guessed he would be the same mentally. A tough cop, he judged, and young for his rank. It meant he was good at his job.

‘You say you knew Helen Bellamy,’ Pell began without preamble. ‘Would you care to describe how and when?’

Palmer sat down and related how he had met Helen when he was hired by a businessman she happened to be profiling at the time for a trade journal. Palmer was doing a security assessment on the man’s factory, and had bumped into her in the company car park. They had exchanged telephone numbers, and from there it had progressed through dinner to more dates, and into what had been a very pleasant relationship, even it hadn’t been long-lasting.

‘Really? Why’s that?’

Palmer shrugged, aware that Pell was looking for clues as to how well he and Helen had known each other. ‘Work, mostly. Helen was trying to make a name for herself; I was away a lot. At the time, it didn’t suit either of us to try for anything more than that.’ He heard the words and thought how bland and casual it must sound, as if their relationship hadn’t been worth more effort.