Simon Kernick - The Murder Exchange

I shrugged, thinking that whoever said money didn’t buy happiness was badly fucking mistaken. ‘Sure, Bermuda it is.’

‘Let’s have a little celebration, then. Fancy a beer?’

Life doesn’t get much better than that, does it? A beautiful naked woman with a devil tattooed on her shapely rear offering to go and get you a nice, cool lager while you lounge idly on her bed.

‘Yeah, I’d love one,’ I said, getting myself comfortable and lighting a cigarette of my own.

I watched as she breezed out of the bedroom, thinking that this time in a week I’d either be the happiest man on earth, or dead. And if I was dead, none of it was going to matter anyway. High stakes, yes, but then that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? That’s what made it all the more exciting. I remembered a phrase someone had quoted to me when I was out in Africa. It was something a French general had said to his men back in the nineteenth century when they were defending a town from the British. ‘The enemy have vastly superior numbers. They are coming at us from three sides. Soon their encirclement will be complete. Our right flank is collapsing, casualties are high, our forces are in retreat. Situation perfect. Attack.’ And that’s the thing. Half the joy is facing superior odds and winning. I might have thought I wanted the quiet life, but in the end, like all true soldiers, I longed for that old call to arms. Even better when there was a pot of gold at the end of it that would set me up for ever.

When Elaine returned with the beers, I had a grin on my face the size of China.

Gallan

I was in court all Friday afternoon giving evidence in the case of a child molester. He’d been accused of abusing young boys at the swimming club he helped run for inner-city kids with limited access to leisure facilities. It was something I’d worked on months before but, as everyone knows, the wheels of justice turn incredibly slowly. The defence barrister gave me as hard a time as possible in the stand, taking full advantage of the fact that forensic evidence was limited and that most of the case against his client rested solely on the words of children, several with learning difficulties, who could easily be lying. But I’m no pushover and I held my ground firmly and with barely concealed contempt for the man in front of me. The defendant already had three previous convictions for exactly this type of offence — not that the jury were aware of that — so, as far as I could see, the defence barrister had to be pretty damned sure the man he was defending was guilty. In which case, he was helping to put a dangerous man back on the street so that he could continue to prey on the kind of people least able to stop him. You can couch it how you want it, spout all this bullshit about everyone being entitled to a proper defence, but it was still wrong. As far as I was concerned, to put the rights of someone who abused children for his own enjoyment above those of the same children to live their lives free from these kinds of assaults was probably the single most perverted aspect of the British justice system, and one of the few things that made me doubt my own role in upholding the law. That well-educated, supposedly respectable men and women were paid sums of money vastly out of proportion to their talent to help keep this situation going, and from the public purse as well, only served to spawn that doubt.

The best way to combat this, however, is to beat them at their own game, and in that particular battle I knew I’d done just that, constantly staring my enemy down and using just the right levels of sarcasm in my answers to make him look foolish in front of the jury. It was a small victory — after all, the lawyer still went home with a nice fat sum of money for his efforts, if you can call them that — but it was a victory nonetheless, and I felt confident that a conviction was on the cards which, ultimately, was the most important thing.

So I was in good cheer when I escaped at just after five (the wheels of justice are not only incredibly slow but also work, with rare exceptions, to office hours) and took the DLR south of the river to pick up my daughter for the weekend. I hadn’t seen her in close to a month, so I was looking forward to it, and so it seemed was she, still being of the age where she can appreciate her dad’s company. We travelled back by Tube and I took her to the Pizza Express on Upper Street for an evening meal during which I caught up with everything in her life: school, fashion, friends, boyfriends, all that hair-raising stuff that makes you think kids grow up far too fast these days, while at the same time being careful to avoid the topic of her mother and the boyfriend. She mentioned him once, telling me about some clothes he’d bought her, but I changed the subject. I really didn’t want to hear about him. In the early days after I’d left, Rachel would ask me when I was going back home, and would say how much she missed me. She’d tell me how much she disliked Carrier and how he could never take my place, and it used to break my heart because I could do nothing about it. Over time, though, she’d complained about him less and less, and, although she always said she missed me, and would always give me an enthusiastic hug whenever we met, she talked less and less about me going back there, as if she’d finally got round to accepting the situation, and Carrier had finally got round to convincing her that he wasn’t such a bad bloke after all. Even though the bastard was.

During our meal that evening she talked just like a happy, well-adjusted kid leading a happy, well-adjusted life. It seemed I’d become somewhat surplus to requirements.

We didn’t get back to my flat until quarter past nine, and it was gone ten by the time I finally shut the door to the bedroom and left her sleeping. I’d forgotten how tiring kids can be.

I wanted to sit down and veg out in front of the TV but things were still bugging me on the case, and I’d promised myself I’d try a new angle, so I cracked open a beer and booted up my rarely used PC. It was time to see what the Internet had to offer as an investigative tool.

First of all I went through the ritual of checking my emails, which didn’t usually take very long as I rarely received any, and immediately saw that there was one from Malik entitled ‘Information as requested’ which came with a load of attachments. It appeared to have been sent that morning and had been copied to my PC at work.

The first set of attachments comprised photographs, mostly surveillance ones, and short biographies of known or suspected associates of Neil Vamen. There were nine of them in all and they included Jackie Slap Merriweather and several others I recognized. The biographies contained the criminal records of the nine, which encompassed a whole variety of offences with a particular emphasis on ones of violence, and a summary of each of their relationships with Vamen. I blew each photo up to full size and printed them off one by one so they could be shown to the neighbours of Shaun Matthews and Jean Tanner, in the hope that they might be familiar.

The second set of attachments contained details and photographs of three women suspected of being Vamen’s mistresses. One of them, as suggested by McBride and missed initially by Malik, was Jean Tanner. According to the records, Vamen had been seen visiting her home in Finchley on a number of occasions. He’d also taken her for a long weekend to his luxury apartment in Tenerife back in March with one of his other mistresses in tow. The report confirmed that she was a prostitute with two previous convictions, but said nothing else of note. Out of curiosity, I looked at the files on the other two mistresses and was vaguely interested to see that both women were very different. The one who’d accompanied Jean and Vamen to Tenerife was a glossy-looking nineteen-year-old former dental nurse, now full-time plaything, while the other was an attractive forty-six-year-old psychotherapist who’d fallen for his charms while she’d been reviewing his progress during his only stint in prison (drugs and weapons offences). They’d apparently been enjoying an on-off relationship for the past twelve years, ever since he’d been released, and I wondered idly if she was pleased with the way he’d come on.