Simon Kernick - The Murder Exchange

‘Keep quiet about it. That’s the best thing. If they find out you knew too much about what was going on, well …’ I tailed off, knowing I’d made my point. ‘Anyway, I’m the one who’s got things to worry about. Not only am I on the run through no fault of my own, I’m a witness, too. I saw two men die. The law are going to be very interested in getting me to talk. The Holtzes are going to be very interested in making sure I don’t.’

‘But you couldn’t pin anything on them, could you? It was your friend, Tony, who did the actual shooting, so he’s the only one who could actually get in any trouble.’

‘Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, they might not see it like that. Especially if the coppers manage to trace the blood on the back seat of my car back to Fowler. If that gets public then I’m going to be on the Holtzes’ hitlist, aren’t I? As well as everyone else’s.’

We didn’t speak for a few moments. She sat there, watching me now, puffing on her cigarette. It was difficult to tell what she was thinking behind the dark eyes.

‘I feel partly responsible for what happened,’ she said eventually. I didn’t bother telling her that she was partly responsible. At that moment I needed all the friends I could get. ‘You can stay here for a couple of days if you want, until things die down.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘I appreciate it.’

‘Do you want a drink? A proper one?’

‘Yeah, I think I need one. What have you got?’

‘Most things. What do you want?’

‘A brandy, please. And a beer, too, if that’s all right.’ I thought that I might as well take advantage of the hospitality on offer, not sure how long it was going to be lasting. She didn’t look like she’d taken offence and smiled as she got up and kicked off her shoes. Her toenails were painted a bright red, which they always say is a sign of passion. I began to stop thinking about my current woes and instead concentrated on more immediate possibilities.

She went into the kitchen to make up the drinks and I took my shoe off and casually followed her in. ‘You’re looking really good, you know,’ I said, thinking that I was going to have to buy a book on chat-up lines or at least put more thought into them. The thing is, I’ve always been a man who preferred the more direct approach. If I thought I was in with a chance — and to be honest with you, I reckoned Elaine owed me one — I tended to go straight in for the kill.

‘Thanks,’ she said, pouring the brandies. ‘You’re not looking so bad yourself. You seem to have improved with age.’ She gave me a quick once-over, like she was checking out a dress. ‘You’ve bulked out as well. It suits you. You were always a bit too skinny in school.’

Cheeky mare.

I took the brandy with one hand and moved the other round towards her shapely rear, thinking that I was taking a bit of a risk here, since she didn’t seem like the sort of person who’d suffer unwanted attentions in silence, and if she kicked me out I really was bolloxed because I had pretty much nowhere else to go. But as the hand made contact, and I gave the left cheek a gentle stroke, she shot me a look that said that after all the fucking mishaps of the day — and by God there’d been a few — I’d finally struck gold. Our lips met Mills and Boon style and her fingers crept up my inner thigh.

Not everything had changed since school, then.

Gallan

‘Do you ever stop work, Sarge?’ asked Berrin, nursing his black coffee. ‘Turning up at the Arcadia on your tod at half eleven at night, getting involved in a scuffle, and then coming to work next morning. That’s the sort of thing you’re meant to do when you’re like eighteen, isn’t it?’

‘I was trying to recapture the fading spirit of youth. I won’t be trying again for a while.’

‘So, did you get anything else from Elaine Toms?’

‘Nothing of any use. She said she hadn’t heard a word from Fowler, and she claimed she didn’t know who Max Iversson was.’

‘Do you believe her?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him with her so she could be telling the truth. There just seemed something a bit coincidental about it.’

It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning and Berrin and I were the only people in the Matthews incident room. I hadn’t left the club until quarter to one and I was tired. However, I didn’t look as bad as Berrin, who was carrying a mean hangover, and whose breath smelled of long-dead fish. About the only thing he’d got remotely enthusiastic about in the ten minutes since we’d got in was the altercation I’d had with Iversson. He’d found it particularly amusing that the ex-para had chucked someone at me while they’d still been taking a leak. ‘Simple but very effective, I should think,’ was how he’d summed it up. Fair enough, I suppose. He was right.

It was day six of the heatwave and day seven of the Matthews murder inquiry, and we had plenty to keep us busy. Knox, who wasn’t coming in until later, had dropped on my desk a note with a photograph of a hard-looking blonde with Myra Hindley’s haircut and the same sort of amiable, light-up-the-world expression. The note identified her as Jean Tanner, a former call-girl, two of whose partial prints had been recovered from Matthews’s flat, one of them on a coffee mug, suggesting she’d been more than simply a passing punter after some gear. Knox had supplied us with the address, somewhere up in Finchley, and had instructed us to go round, take a statement from her and find out what she’d been up to there. Like a lot of the work on a murder investigation it was routine stuff, but something that had to be done. He signed off by telling us to continue trying to track down Fowler, whose prints had also been found on a number of items in Matthews’s flat, even though he’d claimed the two had never socialized.

Before we collared Ms Tanner, we drove over to the Priory Green estate to show her photo to Matthews’s neighbours and see if she was the blonde woman identified by two of them as having gone to his flat more than once in the past few weeks. This, at least, would give us something to throw at her if, for some reason, she proved uncooperative.

The estate itself, a medium-rise collection of red-and greybrick buildings just north of the NatWest building on Pentonville Road, was leafy, quiet and relatively well kept. A few years earlier it had received a large cheque from the National Lottery’s Heritage Fund to spruce things up, and there was still a lot of building work going on. So far the money looked to have been pretty well spent, which isn’t always the case with construction projects. Priory Green had none of the menace of so many of London’s sixties- and seventies-designed council estates, those graffiti-stained fortresses with their mazes of darkened walkways so beloved of muggers everywhere, that for a copper always feel like enemy territory. Bad things might have gone on here, but they were done in quite a pleasant setting.

Things got off to a good start as well. Both the witnesses — a young black woman with a very fat baby and several other yowling kids in the background, and an elderly man who insisted on haranguing us about the estate’s supposed litter problem — were in residence and able to confirm that they’d seen the woman in the photo going either in or out of the flat on several occasions, though not in the past couple of weeks. The elderly man thought he might have seen her three times, but he couldn’t be sure. While we were there we knocked on a few other doors to see if we could jog some memories but, where anyone bothered to answer, we were given the kind of welcome usually reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and no one could provide any help.