Philip Kerr - January Window

‘You’ll really let me go if I tell you?’ he asked.

‘You have my word. You can even keep the money you were paid. I’m assuming the two grand in fifties was your fee.’

‘What about my gun?’

‘Would you have used it?’

‘Just for show. Made a noise if necessary. I’d use blanks but you can’t get them; there’s just no call for them these days.’

‘That’s a comforting thought,’ said Maurice.

‘You can have the gun back, too,’ I said. ‘But not the bullets. We’ll hang onto those, just in case you come back here with an attitude.’

‘Fair enough, guvnor.’

‘But don’t dick us around with any lies. My girlfriend dumped me last night and I’m not in the mood to be patient.’

He finished his tea, replaced the mug on my desk and shook his head. ‘I should have known better than to rob someone from me own fucking club. S’right. I’m a City fan meself. So I had my doubts, yeah? It felt unlucky. Any other London club — the Yids, the Arsenal, Chelsea, Fulham, the Hammers — I’d have been laughing to do a job there. But not City.’

‘More facts, less fart,’ I said.

‘I’m just saying I didn’t want this job, that’s all. It felt unlucky. But the guy who paid me to do the job — an Italian bloke, called Paolo Gentile — he was paying good money.’

‘Gentile. It figures.’

‘Anyway, he told me to collect a package that was in suite 123. I was on my way there when you spotted me.’

‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘I already searched that suite from top to bottom and found nothing.’

‘Yeah, but did you check the fridge? Inside the freezer cabinet?’

‘No.’

‘That’s where it is, apparently. The package I was supposed to grab. Job couldn’t have been simpler, you’d have thought. A quick in and out. But it’s always the easy ones you fuck up, not the jobs that require some planning.’

‘Whose idea was the Plod uniform?’ asked Maurice.

‘Mine. The Italian bloke said the place would be swarming with law ’cos of Zarco’s murder, so I thought I’d be all right dressed like this. Blend in, like. I thought no one would face down a copper. Not even another copper. Rented it off a mate who’s a real rozzer, in Teddington, I did. Cost me two hundred quid. Never gave a thought to the fucking cap badge until you mentioned it.’

‘Blimey,’ said Maurice. ‘The old Bill these days is getting to be like Berman’s and Nathan’s.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Then what?’

‘There’s a FedEx box in my car, with a waybill already filled out for an address in Italy and everything. Business documents, it says. That’s what I was told, anyway. I was to put the package from the freezer in the box and take it to the FedEx office in Dartford first thing this morning. Unit 14, Newton’s Court. Apparently they open at 7.30 a.m. It was all on account so I wouldn’t have to pay anything.’

‘How did you get the job?’

‘On the phone. Friend of a friend.’

‘And you spoke to Gentile? On the phone?’

‘S’right. He was in Milan, he said. It wasn’t even stealing, he said. It was him what put the package there in the first place.’

‘What about the key to the box? How did you get that?’

‘From Mr Gentile’s offices in Kingston. Really that was the only part of the job that involved any breaking and entering. I had to get in there on Sunday morning and collect the key from his office drawer. And two grand in fifties that was in the cash box. Straight up, guv, that’s the God’s truth. All of it, I swear.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Wait here with my friend.’

I went back up to the suite, opened the fridge and plucked the freezer door towards me. The package was there, just like Terence Shelley had said it would be — a large Jiffy bag that was wrapped in a thick plastic bin bag. I opened it up and found ten pink bricks of nice new fifties. The bricks of notes were a little hard but none the worse for a weekend below zero. Hot money never felt so cold. It was clear Shelley had spoken the truth; if the FedEx box was in his car as he’d said it was then I’d send him on his way like I’d promised. Quite apart from the risk to Zarco’s reputation the last thing I wanted was Detective Chief Inspector Byrne upsetting our new goalkeeper by asking him about the details of his own transfer.

The chain of causation was beginning to seem clear enough, too. Zarco would have known that the Qatari guy who owned suite 123 wasn’t likely to be using it for a while and figured he could use the room as his letterbox. Gentile would have taken the fifty grand to the suite and left it in the fridge freezer, as instructed in Zarco’s texts; but when the news of Zarco’s death broke the Italian agent must have realised that only he and Zarco knew about the bung and figured that he might as well try and recover the money. It was just sitting there, getting cold, and with the key it would have been easy enough, but at the same time Gentile couldn’t have risked leaving the cash there for much longer as there was a match against the Hammers on Tuesday night and, unlike Zarco, he had no way of knowing if suite 123 would remain unoccupied by its usual owner.

It was time I spoke to Gentile, so I called him on my mobile and on this occasion he answered.

‘Scott,’ he said, ‘I was just about to phone and congratulate you. It’s too bad about João. He was truly one of the greats and I shall miss him a great deal. But I hope you and I can do business together in the future.’

I’d met Paolo Gentile on several occasions; it was hard to be the assistant manager of a top English football club owned by a billionaire and not have met Paolo Gentile. Where there is a huge picnic laid out on a perfect lawn there are also wasps, and Gentile was one of the largest and most persistent. FIFA seemed to have him under permanent investigation but nothing ever stuck. And unlike most English football agents, who couldn’t have looked less like their clients, Gentile was smooth and cool and strikingly handsome, in a very Italian way. He always dressed well, in Brioni, and his many white Ferraris were his trademark and just the thing to excite the impressionable and usually car-crazy young men who were the subject of his relentless human trafficking. Incredibly thin — he seemed to survive on a diet of tennis, cigarettes and coffee — Gentile had a hooked nose that lent him the profile of some Renaissance princeling or Doge of Venice. And he was just as cunning as either.

My Italian was usually better than his English but on this occasion I wanted him to be the one who was paying close attention and so I sat down on the sofa and continued the conversation in my own first language.

‘That all depends, Paolo,’ I said. ‘You see, I’ve just been having a little chat with a friend of yours. Terry Shelley. I caught him raiding the fridge here yesterday evening. It seems as if he was trying to find you a late-night snack. That’s what fifty grand is to someone like you, isn’t it, Paolo? A snack.’

‘Terry Shelley. I don’t know him, Scott. Unless he’s the boy who plays up front for QPR.’

‘Nobody plays up front for QPR, Paolo. If they’ve any sense they sit back and defend. And if you’ve any sense you’ll sit back and try to do the same. Only the ball’s already in the back of your net, old son. It only remains for me to decide on the proper course of action. Whether to involve FIFA or the Metropolitan Police. After all, there is a murder inquiry going on here at Silvertown Dock. And you were trying to get hold of what the police might consider to be vital evidence that might shed some light on who killed João Zarco.’

‘I had nothing to do with what happened to Zarco,’ said Gentile. ‘Really, I am as mystified by what happened as you probably are. But you know that already, of course. Otherwise you wouldn’t be calling me like this, would you? And you must also have the money, too. Perhaps you have even decided to keep it for yourself. I certainly couldn’t stop you. So the only question is what else do you want, Scott?’