Philip Kerr - January Window

I’d heard enough to know where I stood with the nice policewoman.

I came out of the ladies’ and went back along the corridor. Phil Hobday followed me as he exited the dining room; his office was near mine and he said he wanted to make some calls, but halfway there he stopped me.

‘When you’re through with her,’ he said, ‘Viktor wants you to drop in to KPG for a talk.’

KPG was Kensington Palace Gardens, the ultra-exclusive road in Kensington where Viktor lived in a seventy-million-pound mansion.

I paused. ‘What about?’

Phil shrugged. ‘I don’t know. No, really, I have no idea. And I wouldn’t dream of trying to second-guess Viktor Sokolnikov. It’s on your way home.’

‘All right.’ I glanced at the enormous Hublot on my wrist. ‘But I might be late.’

‘How long does it take to say a prayer? I didn’t even know you were religious.’

‘I am if it involves the people I love.’

‘So what time shall I say you’ll be there?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Scott. This is Viktor we’re talking about, not a drink in the Star Tavern.’

The Star was the posh pub in Belgravia where occasionally I met Phil for a drink. Calling it a pub at all was a bit like calling Phil’s Rolls-Royce a motor car.

‘Then tell him ten thirty.’

‘All right. And by the way, good work back there, the way you turned that cop around.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’

‘Not bad-looking, though.’

‘If you like that sort of thing.’

Phil grinned. ‘As a matter of fact I do. I like that sort of thing very much indeed.’

‘Ambitious, I should say.’

‘I like that, too.’

Outside Zarco’s door was a uniformed policeman who was checking his mobile phone. I nodded at him and went into my own adjoining office; the poor copper wasn’t to know that there was a door connecting Zarco’s office with mine and that the minute my door was closed I was through there with the flashlight app on my iPhone to see what I could discover on his desk and in his drawers. I knew there were some sex-toys and bondage paraphernalia — a remote-control vibrator and handcuffs — that no one needed to know about. It wasn’t simply the fact that I didn’t trust the police to find their own arseholes, let alone Zarco’s murderer; it was also that I had his reputation to protect, and not just his reputation but the club’s as well. The Met has a habit of selling sidebar stories to newspapers when they’re supposed to be doing something else; and the newspapers have a habit of burying the people they’ve already praised. Like my old friend Gary Speed; once you’re dead, and they’ve said a few nice things about you and wrung their handkerchiefs a bit, then they can say what the fuck they like. Of course, I already had Zarco’s ‘play phone’ and his ‘something else’ phone in my drawer, but I had to make sure there was nothing that might have left my friend’s family having to deal with a tabloid exposé: The Real João Zarco , or The João Zarco Nobody Knew . Or just as bad, a Twitter storm. Fuck that.

I wasn’t bent for myself, but I was quite prepared to be bent for my friends and for my club.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Maurice. ‘Look at that lot, will you?’ He nodded. ‘They’re going to do him proud.’

‘Looks like it.’

We were in my Range Rover, leaving London City Football Club for KPG. It was dark and bitterly cold and the air was full of sleet, but hundreds of fans had gathered to pay their tributes to João Zarco, and there were so many orange scarves tied to the gates of Silvertown Dock that it already looked like a sort of Hindu shrine. Some of the fans were singing the club songs — including what else but The Clash?

London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared — and battle come down...

A few even managed Joe Strummer’s werewolf howl at the end of the lyric.

I was silent for a while as the song and the howls stayed in my head, giving me gooseflesh.

‘That’s the great thing about football,’ said Maurice. ‘When you go, people like to show their respect. Who else gets that these days?’

‘Michael Jackson?’ I suggested. ‘That hotel we stayed at in Munich. The Bayerischer Hof. They’ve still got a shrine going outside the front door.’

Maurice winced. ‘That’s just the fucking Germans.’

‘Hey, careful what you say about the Germans. I’m half German, remember?’

‘Well then answer me this, Fritz. How come they do that — make a shrine to him — when everyone knows he was a kiddy fiddler? Doesn’t make sense.’

‘In some ways the Germans — Bavarians especially — they’d prefer not to know about that sort of thing.’

‘Yeah, well, they’ve got a form for it, haven’t they?’ growled Maurice. ‘Preferring not to know about someone’s past.’

‘I wish he could have seen that,’ I said, ignoring the history lesson. ‘Zarco, I mean. Not the plastic guy.’

‘Did you actually see his body?’ asked Maurice.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘His legs, I guess. Where the body was — it wasn’t a very large space. There were three or four CSU officers around him, plus all their gear — spotlights, tripods, cameras and laptops. These days a murder scene looks more like they’re shooting a commercial.’

‘What a thing to happen to a guy like João,’ said Maurice. ‘How old was he anyway?’

‘Forty-nine.’

‘Christ. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ He pursed his lips. ‘Tragic, that’s what it is. Without question. But it ain’t a fucking murder.’

‘Listen to him: Inspector Morse.’

‘At least not a murder in the old sense, that is, with intent. Yeah, it’s reasonably foreseeable that if you’re handing out some GBH you might kill a bloke. But I don’t see any intent here, according to how most blokes round our way would look at this.’

‘Keep talking.’

‘You remember how it was in the nick. Nine times out of ten, if someone wanted to kill a bloke, they didn’t do it with a beating. They used a blade. Or they strangled him. And if it was on the outside they’d shoot him or have him shot. But they didn’t kick the shit out of him. If a bloke dies after a beating then that’s a beating that went wrong or simply got out of hand. More like an accident. Manslaughter. No, if you ask me, someone wanted Zarco hurt, but not dead. This was revenge, or a warning, but it wasn’t supposed to be goodnight Vienna.’

‘I’m no Rumpole but the law says different, I think.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the law, isn’t it? There’s not much common sense in the law these days. If there was we wouldn’t be in the EU, would we? We wouldn’t have the Human Rights Act and all that shit. Abu Hamza. Cunts like that make a monkey out of the courts in this fucking country.’ Maurice paused as some blue light spilled into the Range Rover. ‘Talking of monkeys,’ he said, ‘we’ve got some law on our tail.’

I checked the side mirror and nodded.

‘Let me handle it, okay?’

‘Be my guest.’

We pulled up and I lowered the tinted window a few inches.

A traffic policeman presented himself at the side of the Range Rover; he was already holding a breathalyser unit in one hand and adjusting his peaked hat with the other.

‘Would you step out of the car, please, sir?’

‘Certainly.’

I got out of the car and closed the door behind me.

‘Is this your vehicle, sir?’

‘Yes it is.’ I handed him my plastic licence. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

He glanced at the licence. ‘You were driving erratically, sir. And you were doing thirty-five miles per hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone.’