House of Mourning (9781301227112) Page 3

  He smiled, and held her hand in both of his. ‘Whatever you want to do is all right with me. Are you sure about the crèche? If you want, we can get Jack another nanny – a proper one this time?’

  ‘No more nannies. Jack will be fine in the crèche. I know the people in there. It’ll work out better.’

  It had taken her a week to arrange everything, but she seemed her normal self again now.

  Then there had been work. It was as if they’d been away for six months instead of six days. DCI Colville had told them to re-visit their cold cases and begin whittling away at the tottering piles of files.

  He’d had to rescue Digby from the kennels, visit Jerry and Ray, and a bunch of other people he didn’t even know. Yes, life had a way of filling up your time so that you couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

  They reached Cheshunt and turned down Windmill Lane.

  ‘You know I can’t sleep at night for thinking about what might be in that briefcase, and what Epsilon 5 means, and who that man was in America that left you the envelope with the left luggage ticket inside, and . . .’

  ‘It was locked in the hotel room safe. He didn’t actually leave it for me. And . . . you need to go back for more counselling.’

  ‘I know, but the envelope was the only thing in that safe. He knew that someone would find it and pass it on to you. We have to go and get that briefcase.’

  ‘You’re just being nosy.’

  ‘I could kill you, take the left luggage ticket and go to Wembley myself.’

  ‘If you knew where the ticket was.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Have you been rifling through my things again?’

  ‘Moi? I would never do such a thing.’

  ‘You already have, half a dozen times. I’m going to get a safe installed. The best safe money can buy.’

  ‘You’d be wasting your money. I’d be able to get into it.’

  ‘Yes, I bet you would, as well.’

  ‘So, when are we going to Wembley?’

  ‘As soon as you solve this case.’

  ‘I’m going to hold you to that.’

  ‘I know you will.’

  Toadstone was waiting for them in Crabtree Alley.

  ‘Hello, Sir. How are you?’

  ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius, Toadstone.’

  Toadstone smiled. ‘Supposedly said by Oscar Wilde at Customs Control in New York, 1882.’

  Richards clapped her hands together. ‘Ha! He beat you again, didn’t he?’

  ‘This is not win or lose, Richards. I’m merely keeping our Head of Forensics on his toes. I’d hate for his brain to calcify on my watch.’

  ‘He beat you, admit it.’

  ‘You’re looking particularly beautiful this morning, Mary.’

  ‘Thank you, Paul.’

  Parish took Toadstone by the elbow and led him a short distance away. ‘How is the personality course going?’

  ‘I thought it was going well, but I have the feeling you’re going to tell me different.’

  ‘You’ve not done the session on time and place yet?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Which is exactly the problem. This is neither the time nor the place to tell Richards how beautiful she looks – save it for a special occasion. When she looks in the mirror and recalls your words, is she going to associate them with a gory murder scene.’

  ‘Ah! I see what you mean.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I’m never going to get the hang of being a real person.’

  Parish put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You will. One day, a light will come on in your head, and then there’ll be no stopping you. You’ll be like Rudolph Valentino on Viagra. So, tell me what we’ve got.’

  Chapter Three

  Parque Lleras Apartments

  Municipality of Medellín, Columbia

  9:50am

  Oscar Gamboa knew nothing about accountancy. In fact, he knew nothing about a lot of things on account of him never having attended school. Well, not a proper school anyway. He couldn’t read or write, but he knew about drugs, he knew about killing and he knew about people. His knowledge of drugs and killing had made him worth keeping around, and his knowledge of people had kept him alive.

  He had risen from working the streets to his current position as lieutenant in the los cambios cartel. Esteben Garcia trusted him, which he was thinking now might be the death of him.

  Usually, he was sent to kill someone, or supervise a shipment of cocaine or heroin being transported to the United States, or lead a raid on a rival organisation. Locating stolen money was a task he was not equipped for.

  He needed help, and the one person whom he knew could help him was a woman who had refused his offer of marriage – Rosibel Caballero. In fact, she had refused the flowers, the designer dresses and shoes, the diamond ring, the pearl necklace, all of his dinner invitations . . . everything. She had made it perfectly clear that she wanted nothing to do with him.

  Oscar knew about people, but Rosibel Caballero wasn’t people – she was a woman. And everyone knew that women weren’t people, they were another species entirely.

  He knocked on the door of number thirty-seven. His heart was pounding like a steel drum at the carnival. He spat on his hand and slicked down his hair. Mother Teresa! What was he doing here? He held the flowers up in front of him, whipped them behind his back again, and then put them back in front of him . . .

  The door opened.

  She was so beautiful. He had loved her ever since they’d been children together in the village of Puente de Calamate. He’d been working the streets, and each day she passed – laughing and joking with her friends on her way to school – she stole a piece of his heart. Now, there was nothing left for anyone else.

  His tongue had swollen to twice its normal size.

  ‘Yes?’ She wore a towelling bathrobe and was still drying her waist-length black hair with a towel.

  He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her. Instead, he proffered the flowers. They had cost him twenty-five pesos on the street outside. The flower seller – recognising him – offered to let him have them for free, but he had paid the old man.

  She ignored the flowers. ‘Is there something you want? As you can see, I’m trying to get ready for work.’

  He let the flowers drop to his side.

  She could have been a supermodel instead of a journalist. Her eyes were like smouldering lava fires, and he could easily have wrapped both of his hands around her tiny waist. She was simply perfect, and he would have given anything to possess her.

  If he’d wanted to, he could simply have come for her in the middle of the night and taken her, but that was not the type of man he was. He wanted her to love him as he loved her – nothing else was acceptable. If he could never have her . . .Well, he didn’t know what he’d do.

  ‘Please . . .’

  She looked at him as if he were an imbecile. ‘Please what? Haven’t I made myself perfectly clear?’

  He bowed his head and shuffled his feet. What was wrong with him? He opened his mouth, but only the strangled call of a capybara came out.

  She shut the door in his face.

  If Mr Garcia could see the pathetic creature his trusted lieutenant had become he’d shoot him in the head as an act of mercy.

  He knocked on the door again. It was the knock of a man who meant business.

  This time he’d . . .

  The door flew open. ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t go away.’

  He smirked. Now she was talking his language. ‘I have a lot of friends in the police.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  She began to shut the door again.

  He wedged his boot in the gap.

  ‘Have you come to kill me just because I won’t accept your gifts or have dinner with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is becoming tiresome. What do you want?’

  ‘Your help.’

  ‘Ha! You
’re crazy. I’ve been waging a war against you murdering drug-peddling child-killing bastards for nearly a year, and now you want me to help you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She waited.

  He found himself staring at a droplet of water finding a tortuous path down the flesh between her breasts where she hadn’t pulled the two sides of the dressing gown together. Mother Teresa! He should be tied to the back of a horse, whipped and dragged through the streets naked for the thoughts inside his head.

  Seeing the direction of his eyes, she yanked the dressing gown tighter. ‘Well?’

  ‘Please, let me in. This is not a good place to talk.’

  ‘You talk with your mouth,’ she said, swishing around and going back into her apartment. ‘Your eyes look at the floor and your hands stay in your pocket playing with your peanuts.’

  She had a heart of stone.

  ‘How can a simple reporter help the los cambios drug cartel?’

  Huh! She was anything but simple.

  He told her about Esteben Garcia’s missing money and the dead Victor Miranda.’

  Her forehead creased. ‘You’re going to kill me now, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m not going to kill you.’ How could he kill the woman he loved?

  ‘You’ve just told me information that makes me a walking corpse.’

  ‘Only if you don’t help me.’

  ‘But I don’t want to help you.’

  ‘Then I will have to kill every member of your family, until you are the only Caballero left.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  He didn’t bother with a response. They both knew that he would. If Oscar Gamboa knew anything, he knew how to kill whole families.

  She ripped open the towelling dressing gown. ‘Is this what you want?’

  His eyes were transfixed for just a moment, but in that moment he saw himself burning for eternity in the fires of hell. He turned around and covered his eyes with his hand. Mother Teresa and all the saints!

  ‘Please, cover yourself up. Miss Caballero.’

  ‘I thought that’s what you wanted.’

  ‘I do, but unless it’s what you want as well, then it would be meaningless.’

  ‘You’re a strange one, Oscar Gamboa. Okay, you can turn around now.’

  He turned back to face her.

  She had closed the gown again.

  ‘So, are you going to tell me what you want?’

  ‘I want you to find out who owns the numbered account that the money was transferred to at the First Caribbean Bank in the Cayman Islands.’

  ‘Why can’t you do it?’

  He shuffled his feet. ‘There are reasons.’

  ‘You can’t read or write, can you?’

  ‘Is that so terrible?’

  ‘Those banks with numbered accounts never reveal who their customers are. Otherwise you’d be in jail now instead of here threatening to kill my whole family.’

  ‘We have three weeks to work something out.’

  ‘What if I can’t find out what you want?’

  ‘Then you won’t need to worry about your family being murdered because we’ll both be dead.’

  ‘Why come to me?’

  He shrugged. ‘You need to pack a bag. We’re flying to Grand Cayman at two o’clock, and we have to book in first.’

  ‘But . . . I’m meant to be at work.’

  ‘Tell them you’re hunting down a story. I’m sure you can come up with something.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘Three weeks. We might have to go somewhere else once we find out who owns the account.’

  She sighed. ‘You’ve got some nerve.’

  ‘Think of it as an all-expenses paid holiday.’

  She made a sound with her mouth. ‘Paid for with the dying screams of little children.’

  He looked at his watch.

  She picked up the phone and told the editor she was going away for three weeks. It obviously hadn’t gone well, because she shouted, ‘So, fucking sack me,’ into the receiver before smashing the phone back down.

  ‘Me cago en tus muertos,’ she spat at him, and then flounced into the bedroom.

  He was sure that she would shit on his dead relatives given the opportunity. First though, he had three weeks in which to find out who owned that numbered account, and to make her love him.

  ***

  Cookie turned over and found a man in her bed. She sat up, realised that she was naked, and dragged the quilt up to her throat.

  ‘What the . . . ?’

  The man groaned.

  Cookie kicked him.

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  He opened his eyes, put his hands behind his head and grinned. ‘I’m the guy who gave you what you wanted last night. You were very grateful.’ He moved his right hand down the top of the quilt to point out his erection. ‘And I’m happy to satisfy your needs this morning as well.’

  He was an old man. Her head throbbed. How had she ended up with someone who was old enough to be her father? Hadn’t she killed that bastard? Wiped him from her memory? She couldn’t remember anything after nine o’clock last night. Normally, she remembered everything, but none of the doctors she’d ever seen knew why. But when she drank alcohol, she couldn’t remember a damned thing – how strange was that?

  She pushed him out of the bed with her feet. ‘Get out.’

  He fell on the floor with a thump. ‘That’s not what you said last night.’

  ‘Last night I was drunk and I couldn’t see how ugly you were. This morning I’m sober and I can.’

  ‘Your loss, baby.’

  ‘I’m willing to make the sacrifice. Get out and take your bad smell with you.’

  Once he’d gone, she ran to the bathroom and vomited in the toilet. Every time she promised herself she’d never do it again, but every time she broke that promise. She hated herself for being so weak. She took a morning-after pill from the packet she kept for emergencies in the glass-fronted cabinet, popped it in her mouth and swilled it down with running water from the cold tap. The last thing she needed at nineteen years old was a stranger’s baby.

  She caught a glimpse in the mirror of the marks on her back and realised she was completely naked. Shit! What time was it? Nobody ever saw her naked – not even herself. Hmmm, she needed to shave her legs and a trim down there wouldn’t be a catastrophe.

  Seeing as she was in the bathroom, and there didn’t seem to be any of the others about, she jumped in the shower. As hot as she could stand would have been ideal, but her father had made sure she could never do that again. Barely warm was all she could manage with the striated marks the bastard had left her with. He used to whip her, her mum and her two younger sisters. He must have had sex with her mum, but he liked to get off by torturing the women in his life as well. That’s why she’d run away from home three years ago. Arranging his death was the best day’s work she’d ever done.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Shrek.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘I need to go.’

  ‘Well, you can’t. I’m in here.’

  ‘I could come and join you.’

  ‘I’ve already got rid of one idiot.’

  She switched the shower off and realised she didn’t have a towel with her. ‘Your only chance of getting in here before you piss yourself is to go and get my towel off the radiator in my room, and don’t touch any of my stuff.’

  He was back knocking on the door before she’d even stepped out of the shower.

  ‘Hurry,’ he urged.

  She unlocked the door. He barged in, handing over her towel as he rushed to the toilet with his erect penis poking out of his pyjamas bottoms.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said wrapping the towel around her.

  ‘Ayah!’ Shrek sighed.

  She stood and watched as he emptied his bladder in the toilet.

  ‘I needed that,’ he said,
popping his penis back through the slit and washing his hands in the sink.

  ‘Interesting,’ Cookie mused.

  ‘The sheer enormity of it? The ease with which I controlled the monster? The . . . ?’

  ‘How someone could pee through something so small. Have you quite finished, I’ve still got things to do?’

  ‘I could help, if you want? I’m something of an expert when it comes to early morning massages.’

  She pushed him out and locked the door again.

  None of the four living in the squat had jobs. Why work when that nice Mr Cameron was willing to pay them to stay at home? Jobseeker’s Allowance ha! As soon as the people interviewing her at the jobs she sought saw the four rings in her bottom lip, her multicoloured hair and her charity-shop dress sense, they were escorting her off the premises. The fact that she was a fucking genius didn’t seem to matter. Well, fuck ‘em that’s all she had to say.

  Her mobile was doing a jig on the table by the window. She picked it up and pressed ‘accept’.

  ‘And?’ She hadn’t even had her coffee and toast yet.

  ‘I thought you’d have rung me as soon as you found out anything.’

  It was Jerry – the policeman’s wife. ‘And I’m sure I would have done if I had.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Lorna Boyce is a thirty-nine year old divorcee who works as the office manager at the Winton’s factory on the Woodford Green industrial estate – boring. She’s got a Facebook page where anybody can learn her pathetically non-eventful life story. She likes to tell everyone how she keeps ending up with losers – and there’s been a few of them. She’s a loser herself. If someone’s trying to kill her it’s because she’s so boring.’

  ‘That’s hardly the answer. What about her ex-husband, or the men she’s been with?’

  ‘More boring people living boring lives. Maybe she’s making it up about somebody trying to kill her, so that she’s got something interesting to tell the boring people on her Facebook page.’

  ‘Aren’t you ever boring?’

  ‘No. And I don’t sleep with losers either.’

  ‘What about the place where she works?’

  ‘It’s just a boring food processing factory. They supply wholesale meat, game and poultry to the hospitality and catering industry throughout the UK.’ She yawned to emphasise her boredom. ‘They’ve been in operation since 1986.’