Stephen Leather - Cold Kill

‘Lots. Sharpe got the registration number of the Mercedes, and the French got an address and we were outside all the time you were in the apartment. The guy who owns it is a big fish, and Europol are very excited. Kreshnik Zagreda is Albanian but he’s had French citizenship for the last ten years. Brings cannabis in from Morocco, runs weapons into Algeria, prostitution, extortion.’

‘And untouchable. He told me he’d never been inside.’

‘So far. Obeys all the rules. Doesn’t go near the illegal stuff, doesn’t go near the money, only deals with people he knows.’

‘So we’re not going to get him on the currency.’

‘On his track record, probably not. But it’s the first that Europol has heard about him being involved in counterfeiting. It’s another piece of the puzzle. The guys who took you in are two of his lieutenants, Ervin Ristani and Artur Veseli. They’re working on the driver now. Ristani and Veseli will be under round-the-clock surveillance until you do your run. There’s a good chance they’ll get their hands dirty and the hope is that they’ll roll over on Kreshnik.’

‘They didn’t seem the type that would roll over,’ said Shepherd. ‘And Kreshnik didn’t seem the type who’d let them.’ He rubbed the back of his neck. The tendons were as taut as steel cables. ‘I tried luring him on a drugs run, but he was noncommittal. Wanted to wait and see.’

‘We might get him on conspiracy down the line,’ said Hargrove. ‘Send you back with a wire. Or get his place bugged.’

‘No wires,’ said Shepherd, emphatically. ‘They gave me a full going-over and I got the feeling it was standard practice.’

‘I’ll talk to Europol and see what they say,’ said Hargrove. ‘The important thing is that you’re back in one piece and the operation’s still on. The Uddin brothers will organise the currency run and, hopefully, we’ll tie up both ends.’

Shepherd took out the passport and offered it to the superintendent. ‘It looks genuine to me,’ he said.

Hargrove flicked through the pages. ‘If it isn’t, it’s a first-class forgery,’ he said.

‘Ten grand’s expensive for a fake,’ said Shepherd. ‘I think it’s the real deal.’

Hargrove handed it back. ‘We’ll have it checked. When you get to Waterloo, slip it to Sharpe.’

‘The toilets again?’

‘You can change phones at the same time.’

‘Lucky we did that,’ said Shepherd. ‘Kreshnik took the phone apart. Checked the Sim card, too.’

‘Luck doesn’t come into it,’ said Hargrove. ‘Hopefully the brothers will call you tomorrow. We need to know date and time, pick-up and delivery points.’

‘Are you going to bust them, or wait?’ asked Shepherd.

‘The French will let their end run, I’m sure of that,’ said Hargrove. ‘I think they want Kreshnik on a drugs charge, if they can get him. And they want to nail the counterfeit euros. It really is starting to become a Europol investigation so that means they’re going to be setting the rules. If we bust the Uddins, Kreshnik might go to ground.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ said Shepherd. ‘It always gets messy when I get hauled in.’

‘But the passport is our investigation, and definitely worth pursuing,’ said the superintendent. ‘We want to know who their man is, and who else he’s fixed up passports for.’

‘You think they’ll tell me?’ asked Shepherd.

‘Make them your new best friends,’ said Hargrove. ‘That’s what you’re good at.’

After he’d exchanged phones with Sharpe and given him the Peter Devereux passport, Shepherd caught a black cab from Waterloo and had it drop him close to the multi-storey car park where he’d left the Land Rover. It was close to eleven o’clock and he wanted to get home, but there was something he had to check first and that meant driving to Dover. Salik knew where Tony Corke lived. He’d seen the address on the driving licence and Shepherd figured that he would have viewed Corke’s trip to Paris as too good an opportunity to miss.

He stuck to the speed limit on the motorway, although there was little traffic. He parked in front of the two-up, two-down terraced house in a quiet street on the outskirts of the town. The door keys were in the glove compartment. Shepherd let himself in and switched on the hall light. The burglar-alarm system began to beep and Shepherd tapped in the four-digit code on a keyboard by the light switch. He looked around slowly. Half a dozen envelopes lay on the threadbare carpet, all bills and all in the name of Tony Corke. On a side table there was a phone and a telephone directory, and on the wall above it a framed photograph of the Titanic leaving port on its appointment with destiny. The house had been dressed by experts who worked for Hargrove’s unit, two gay men who could furnish a house or apartment to fit any legend. Everything from the food in the refrigerator to the clothes hanging in the cheap, teak-effect MFI wardrobes had been selected to accommodate Tony Corke’s personality.

Shepherd walked slowly down the hall. The door to the sitting room was open. A black plastic leather-effect sofa, a wooden coffee table pockmarked with cigarette burns and beer-can rings, an old television set. A handful of letters was scattered across the coffee table, court papers and correspondence from Corke’s solicitor, including a bill for legal fees of more than twenty thousand pounds. Shepherd stood looking down at them and flashed back in his memory to the last time he’d been in the room. The bill had been further to the right. Six inches, maybe a bit more. It had been moved.

He walked round the room, looking for other signs that he had been visited in his absence. There was an old gas fire in a cast-iron fireplace, covered with decades of paint. On the mantelpiece, a wedge of rejection letters from various shipping lines, all dated within the previous year, and credit-card statements, all showing substantial debts, was pushed behind a brass ornament of three monkeys – hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. A statement from a building society detailed the amount outstanding on Tony Corke’s mortgage. They had been moved, too. Someone had rifled through them.

Shepherd went upstairs and opened the wardrobe in the main bedroom. Cheap, well-worn clothes. A lot of thick wool pullovers and denim shirts, work socks in a drawer, a pile of towels, several of which had the logos of ferry companies. It was little touches, like the stolen towels, that added authenticity to any cover story. Shepherd ran his hand along the clothes on the hangers. They’d been moved, too, since the last time he’d been in the house. Now, at least, he knew where he stood. On the surface Salik Uddin might appear to be an easy-going family man but he was shrewd enough to take advantage of Shepherd’s absence to check out the house. It had been a professional job: there was no sign of a forced entry, which meant that the lock had been professionally picked and the alarm system dealt with. It wasn’t difficult – Hargrove had several operatives on his team who could have got past the lock and the alarm in less than thirty seconds – but whoever Salik had used was an expert. Shepherd doubted that Salik was a locksmith but he clearly had access to someone with the necessary skills.

Shepherd reset the alarm and locked the door. On the drive back to Ealing he phoned Hargrove and briefed him on what had happened.

The Saudi walked up to the three-storey house and glanced at the top floor. A figure was silhouetted at the window, looking down, so the Saudi didn’t press the bell. He stood with his back to the door, swinging his briefcase from side to side. He had taken a taxi to the residential street and had it drop him round the corner, then spent the best part of an hour reassuring himself that the area was not under surveillance.