Simon Kernick - The Murder Exchange

‘I’m all right,’ said Berrin belligerently.

‘Well, I want you both to know that we’re taking over this case now. This is our patch and we’re investigating it. Thanks very much for alerting us to yet another fucking suspicious death in the division, but we won’t be needing any more help from you. So, if you’ll excuse us …’

‘Hold on,’ I said, ignoring the murderous glare he shot me. ‘We need to speak to Miss Tanner regarding the Shaun Matthews murder case. It’s important. Sir.’

‘When we locate her, Sergeant, you’ll be given the necessary access to question her about your own case, if you follow the procedures. Now, we’re very fucking busy so I’d like it if you could be on your way before you mess anything else up. I’ll inform your superiors when and if we have her in custody.’

‘I’d also like access to the results of the postmortem on McBride.’

‘You’ll get the information when we have it,’ he said. ‘Now, goodbye.’ He turned and stalked back towards the open door of Jean’s apartment, leaving the two of us standing there like lemons.

Sometimes you genuinely wonder why you bother. When even your own people don’t seem to want to help you, then you really are kicking a lead door. I’ve met plenty of coppers like Burley — far too many, if the truth be told — and, like him, they’re generally the older guys with too many years on the Force who’ve never quite done as well as they think their talents deserve, and who hold a grudge because of it. They’re also the ones who are most prone to corruption. I wondered briefly whether there was more to Burley’s eagerness to get us off the premises than he was letting on. It also seemed strange that he’d got here so fast. As if he’d been waiting just round the corner.

‘Where to now?’ asked Berrin with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

I sighed, forcing down the frustration. When one avenue fails, try another one. ‘Let’s go and see Neil Vamen,’ I told him.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea, Sarge?’ said Berrin. He still looked sick. Sick and nervous.

It was twelve-thirty and we were walking towards the Seven Bells, a pub in Barnsbury which, according to the profile we had on him, was supposedly the Sunday lunchtime haunt of Neil Vamen. The place, no doubt, where he felt most at home among ‘his people’. Barnsbury, the traditionally working-class, now partly gentrified district of south Islington that encompasses the area between the Caledonian and Liverpool Roads north of Pentonville, was in many way the spiritual home of the Holtz organization, since it was there that all the senior members had grown up and plotted their first scams together. Most had long since moved out to larger, more ostentatious properties in the suburbs, including Vamen, but he apparently still retained a special affection for the area, not least because his mother still lived there, and he visited regularly.

It probably wasn’t a good idea to go and see him. After all, I didn’t expect him suddenly to blurt out everything he knew about the death of Shaun Matthews and Craig McBride, as well as the whereabouts of his alleged girlfriend, Jean Tanner. As Berrin had pointed out more than once this morning, he might have known nothing about any of it, but I wasn’t so sure. Jean had been linked to him by a man who was now dead. She’d been seeing another man who was also now dead. At least one of those deaths, and almost certainly both, were not from natural causes, and now Jean was missing. I didn’t have any particular theory of what Vamen’s involvement might be, it was still too early for that, but at least by turning up out of the blue we might be able to rattle him. Particularly if he thought we knew more than we actually did.

‘I don’t honestly know if it’s a good idea or not but I don’t see any alternative. I mean, who else is there left to talk to? We’ve got a murder inquiry where everyone we want to interview is either missing or dead. Have you thought about that? Fowler’s nowhere to be seen, McBride talks, then twenty-four hours later he’s dead, and now Jean Tanner’s disappeared into thin air. At least Vamen’s still capable of opening his mouth.’

‘I’m not criticizing, Sarge, but don’t you think we ought to have checked it out with Capper first?’

‘Look, this is just a friendly little chat, following up on a lead. We’re just using some initiative, that’s all.’

We stopped outside the pub, a small, old-fashioned place with grimy windows and a battered door that fitted in snugly in the quiet, slightly run-down street of terraced housing just off the southern end of the Caledonian Road. The windows were open and we could hear the steady buzz of conversation and the occasional clinking of glasses. It’s a sound I usually like because it’s welcoming, but I had a feeling the welcome here wasn’t going to get much above frosty. We’d both taken off our jackets in deference to the intense midday heat but now put them on again. It was best to be formal.

‘I’ll do the talking,’ I said, thinking that at that moment Berrin looked like a student in a suit at his first job interview. ‘You just stand up straight and don’t look too queasy.’

‘They’re not likely to try to rough us up, are they?’ he asked, showing a worrying naivety. Sometimes I couldn’t help but think that it was only the shortage of detectives in the Met that had put Berrin in plain clothes, and that he’d been promoted above his experience. In the fight against crime, you didn’t like to think that the front line was made up of too many men like him.

‘He might be a nasty bastard, Dave, but he’s still a businessman. He won’t want to do anything that brings him unwanted attention. Now, come on.’

I stepped inside with Berrin following. The interior was deceptively large and seemed to go back a long way, as is often the way with London pubs. It was split into two bars, the right-hand one near enough empty except for a handful of old geezers in caps smoking pipes and generally not taking too much notice of one another. Two of them were playing cribbage and they were the only ones who looked up as we arrived.

The other bar, in contrast, was a lot younger and a fair bit livelier, although it was still early so nowhere near crowded. A jukebox played one of the numerous covers of the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’ and three or four groups of people — mainly men, but some women — milled about in a way that suggested they all knew one another. Most of them were in their thirties and forties, and at the far end of the bar, closely watched by Jack Merriweather and two powerfully built bodyguards, stood Neil Vamen. He was talking to another of the groups — two middle-aged men and their younger, pneumatic blonde partners — who were hanging on to his every word. Vamen was smiling broadly and I got the feeling he was telling a joke.

That all stopped as soon as we stepped inside. In fact, everything stopped, bar the music, the singer continuing to warble boringly while the whole bar gave us what I can only describe as the evil eye. I suppose we just looked like coppers. The barman studiously ignored us and for a couple of seconds I simply stood there, thinking that it might actually have been a big mistake coming here.

Confidence. It’s all about confidence. You can command the respect of anyone, even a room full of gangsters, if you walk like you know the walk. So, trying to ignore the fact that I was sweating, I ambled casually through the crowd, Berrin behind me, and stopped when I reached Neil Vamen. His bodyguards tensed but made no move. Jackie Slap’s lip curled in an expression of distaste, as if the very presence of police officers caused him to experience an allergic reaction, which it probably did. Vamen, meanwhile, eyed me with a mixture of mild contempt and idle curiosity, his turquoise eyes twinkling playfully. I could almost feel the stares of every other person in the place on my back, and I hoped Berrin didn’t do anything stupid, like faint.