No Sleep for the Dead

Chapter 3

‘Well, that went really great, Riley. Thanks for your help — you were a star. I must get you to help me again sometime, then heap endless praise and gratitude on your head.’ Riley‘s voice dripped with sarcasm as she steered her Golf skilfully through a tangle of stalled traffic, narrowly missing most of a line of cones around a breached water main. A stray one rattled off the front wing, wobbled promisingly, but stayed upright. If Palmer noticed, he made no comment.

They were on their way back to Palmer’s office in Uxbridge. He hadn’t said much since leaving Gillivray’s office, intent on scowling up at the roof of the car instead, his head back on the seat rest. Even the cigarette between his lips remained unlit, which was a relief and a puzzle. Palmer being thoughtful was something Riley wasn’t really accustomed to. Quiet, yes; even half asleep was fairly normal. But not thoughtful. He usually left that to others.

‘Do what?’ He looked at her, then nodded. ‘Oh, right. Yes, you were great. Thanks.’ Then he went back to his thoughts, staring out at the passing scenery and whistling quietly.

When they reached his office, situated above a row of shops and small office suites, Riley switched off the engine and turned to face him. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Out with it. Something’s bugging you. Tell Auntie Riley or I’ll have to get out the electrodes.’

But Palmer climbed out and stood by the car door. ‘It’s nothing, don’t worry.’

‘What is it, Palmer?’ she insisted, peering up at him. ‘You haven’t even taken chunks out of me about my driving. You’re not going through the male menopause, are you?’

‘Of course not,’ he replied, tapping the roof of the car. ‘Just got a couple of things on, that’s all. Thanks for your help earlier. How about I spring for a meal. Day after tomorrow?’

Riley nearly laughed, relieved that he seemed to be shrugging off his earlier mood. ‘God, you’re offering to buy me food? You’re on. Come round to my place at seven — I know a great new Italian restaurant. The lights are so low they print the menus in Braille.’

Palmer looked sceptical. ‘You’re not getting all romantic on me, are you?’

‘No way.’ She slipped the car into gear. ‘The bad light means I can be seen with you without ruining my reputation.’ She stuck out her tongue as he closed the door, and pulled out into the traffic, leaving Palmer standing on the pavement, deep in thought.

Riley turned her thoughts to her own work schedule and headed north towards the outer reaches of Hertfordshire. It was an assignment she had left pending for too long, but needed to fill in some background information before deciding whether to continue with it or dump it as a dead loss. A rumour of an unlicensed landfill operation involving the illegal disposal of asbestos and oil waste near a primary school was now looking less and less likely, and much too thin to stand up to detailed scrutiny. While she didn’t mind going into bat for the occasional good cause, especially if the authorities were showing a reluctance to listen, being used as a loaded gun in what was looking more like someone’s private dispute over a local use of land was a no-win situation.

She came to a long line of traffic at a set of road works and tapped the speed-dial on her phone. Time to check in with her agent. Donald Brask, fat, gay and as busy as a bee on steroids, was her main source of income. He represented a string of journalists, media personalities and a handful of entertainment ‘names’, and regularly found reporting assignments for Riley, freelancing for magazines and dailies when extensive digging and an investigative eye for detail was required. He also put occasional work Frank Palmer’s way, of the sort needing a former military cop’s particular talents. It was how Riley and Palmer had met. So far the arrangement had worked a handful of times and suited them both.

‘Sweetie,’ murmured Donald, as soon as she identified herself. ‘How’s that horrid dumping business? Are we going to get an exclusive this side of Christmas or should I plan on early bankruptcy?’

Riley smiled and edged the car forward in the line of traffic. Donald had a waspish tongue whenever deadlines were concerned, and was openly insincere in many ways. But beneath his cutting manner was a warm heart, especially towards her. He occupied a house-cum-office in a large Victorian house in north London, surrounded by enough computer and communications equipment to run a NASA space station. It was his centre of operations, enabling him to keep in contact with clients and contacts around the world, day or night. Since he rarely seemed to sleep like normal people, it meant he was apt to call when most humans were fast asleep. Riley often thought the worst thing that could happen to Donald would be a total power failure. Unless he had a standby generator in the basement, he’d be utterly lost without the phones, faxes and computers which provided him with a constant flow of uninterrupted information and news every minute of the day.

‘It’s looking thin, I’m afraid,’ she told him. ‘I think there’s a hidden agenda somewhere that we haven’t been told about. I’m on my way to give it another try, but if it still looks doubtful, I’ll have to kill it.’

‘Consider it dead, buried and decomposing, sweetie,’ Donald muttered flatly. ‘I’ve been hearing things, too. It’s hardly a headliner. Never mind, I’ve got two more jobs, if you’re interested. I’ll email you the briefs in a minute. One of them may require the additional talents of that roughneck, Palmer. I’ll send him the details, too. You can compare notes over a cup of camomile.’

‘Okay. I’ll be at home.’ Riley clicked off and at the first opportunity, headed back to west London. She was quietly relieved to have got rid of the dumping job, even if it was lost income. But she was looking forward to something fresh to get her teeth into — although it might mean some element of risk, hence the need for Palmer’s help. The main advantage of working freelance was the variety in her working life. It was something she had learned to appreciate early on after starting out on a small local newspaper with little in the way of excitement, when the idea of working to the same format or deadlines every day had lost its appeal very quickly.

She climbed the steps to the front entrance and saw Mr Grobowski, the ground floor tenant, watering some plants in the communal hallway. As the self-appointed neighbourhood watch officer and concierge, he rarely missed anything, especially Riley’s comings and goings. He straightened up now with a friendly smile on his craggy face.

‘Miss,’ he yelled happily. ‘How are you doings? Busy days, I bet.’ Mr Grobowski was built like a blockhouse, with a head topped by a flat mat of coarse hair which refused all attempts to tame it. With a mild-to-serious case of deafness, he presumed everyone else had the same problem and spoke at maximum volume. In addition, sixty years of living in London had not diminished his Polish accent, and he constantly mangled the language with cheerful abandon. He also insisted on calling Riley ‘Miss’ in spite of her numerous attempts to get him to use her name.

‘Fine, thanks, Mr G,’ Riley replied. She looked for signs of her cat, the only non-human tenant of the building. She hadn’t yet got round to giving him a name, in spite of inheriting him from a former neighbour in Fulham some time ago. Mr Grobowski had tried calling him Lipinski, after a famous Polish violinist, but the cat seemed supremely unimpressed by this honour, answering only to the signs and smells of food. With one of Mr Grobowski’s interests being a part-time volunteer worker, cooking for his fellow countrymen at the local Polish community centre, this was something he always had in abundance.

‘Tchah! Is no good looking for Lipinksi,’ he warned her mock-grumpily. ‘He eat like a horses and never say a thank you. He most likely visiting his womens friends in other buildings, I bet.’

‘If that’s so,’ Riley told him cheerfully, ‘he’s living on memories. He had the chop last year.’ She left the old man to his watering, and made her way up to her first floor flat. As usual, there was no sign of the old lady she referred to as the dowager, who lived on the third floor. She was almost never seen in daylight and seemed to live the life of a bat.

She checked her email. Along with the usual collection of spam messages promising a life of unrelenting fulfilment, she found the promised attachments from Donald. Her phone contained five voice messages, none of them urgent or interesting except one from John Mitcheson. He had called from his home in sunny California, with the teasing sounds of surf and music in the background to remind her of what she was missing.

While she waited for the printer to spit out Donald’s email and attachments, she dialled Mitcheson’s number. She could never quite figure out what the time difference was, but with luck, he should be lining up his second glass of OJ after completing his customary early morning run.

Thoughts of John always left her feeling unsettled. Currently hanging on by their fingertips to a tenuous and long-distance relationship, with Mitcheson living in the States where he was running a security company, it was hardly an ideal situation. After having become involved with other former soldiers in a vicious gangland feud masterminded by a murderous old woman named Lottie Grossman, John was persona non grata in the UK. Although there were no active charges against him, and the evil Lottie had since disappeared, probably killed off by her many rivals in the underworld, they had decided it was better for Mitcheson to go into self-imposed exile until further notice. Now, when they met, it was always too fleeting, usually confined to a snatched few days wherever and whenever the two of them could match timetables.

‘Swine,’ she muttered calmly, when he answered. He sounded half asleep and she wondered if he’d had a late night. After years in the army, he was, like Frank Palmer, something of a night bird and kept unusual hours.

‘What did I do?’ he protested, the pleasure of hearing from her evident in his voice.

‘More like what you haven’t done,’ she said earthily, wandering around the room, ‘And I need a holiday. I suppose there’s no chance of you coming over this way soon, is there?’

‘I’d like to,’ he replied with feeling. ‘Let me look at some dates and I’ll get back to you. How’s Frank?’ He always made a point of asking after Palmer, something for which Riley was grateful. She used to think it might have been a touch of jealousy on his part, knowing as he did that she and Frank often worked together. But she had finally come to the conclusion that it was genuine interest, coloured perhaps by the fact that Palmer had saved him from arrest after the gang business.

‘He’s okay. Actually, a bit weird.’ She briefly related the morning’s events, until a distant doorbell at Mitcheson’s end led him to cut short the conversation.

‘Sorry, kid,’ he said regretfully. ‘Gotta go. I’ll call you.’

Riley put down the phone and went to study the two briefs Donald Brask had sent her. It was work, but way better than dwelling on her various frustrations.

One assignment was a simple reporting job with minimal legwork, involving a National Health Service trust manager suspected of having financial links to a large and successful chain of funeral homes. The fact that the company’s name seemed to figure with unusual prominence on a number of hospital lists, to the exclusion of others, implied he was not suffering too much from any conflict of interest. Given the right approach and the waving of some documentary proof, Riley was sure she might be able to get him to fold. It wasn’t a headliner, as Donald would have called it, but being NHS, it was interesting enough to be picked up for the news value. The other was, as Donald had hinted, on the heavy side, and involved the hiring and importing of gangs of fruit pickers from eastern Europe. The suspicion from other pickers and gangs was that some of them were being used to bring in more than just their strong backs and their abilities with a fruit knife.

She decided the latter assignment had more immediate news potential and dialled Palmer’s number. If they were to be working together on this, they’d need to go over the details. Which meant bringing forward their dinner date.

There was no reply from Palmer’s phone. Probably already out on one of the jobs he’d mentioned. She hung up and looked at the cat, sitting pointedly in the doorway to the kitchen.

‘Looks like it’s you, me and the NHS for the rest of the day,’ said Riley, heading for the fridge. She added as a warning: ‘Although I’m not sure you’re going to like this, not after Mr Grobowski’s fancy cooking…’

‘We could have a small problem. There was a man in the lift earlier. I’ve met him before. I think he might remember me.’

The speaker was in an office on the first floor of the block in Harrow, and was staring out of the window at the advancing evening, hands thrust into his pockets. The up-glow of lights from the street was throwing an unearthly haze across the horizon, and down in the street, the throb of traffic was building to its customary frenzied pitch as commuters made their way home. As if echoing the scene outside, doors slamming in the building and the whine of the lifts heralded the same activity.

The office was large and neat, furnished comfortably with a well-stocked fridge in one corner and a scattering of soft chairs and discreet lighting. It was adequate for the man’s needs; he was too old for anything more humble, the days of roughing it for Queen and country long gone. But a more lavish base would have attracted unwanted attention, something he had always worked instinctively to avoid.

His name was Arthur Radnor, and he had just concluded a lengthy telephone conversation. He turned to look at a younger figure leaning against the wall by the door, hands clasped across his middle in a relaxed pose. His name was Michael Rubinov and, unlike Radnor, whose skin was tanned like old leather after a lifetime in foreign climes, he was ghostly pale, emphasising the dark sheen of his eyes, his black hair and habitual dark suits and highly-burnished shoes.

‘Where do you know him from?’ Michael’s accent was slight, the words polished and precise. It took a keen ear — or someone who cared — to spot that his origins were from several hundred miles away on the eastern side of an expanding Europe, deep in what had once been Soviet Russia.

‘Germany, some years ago. There was a shooting on the east-west border — I mentioned it to you?’ Michael nodded, remembering, and Radnor continued: ‘He was one of the military policeman who attended the scene.’

‘Ah.’ Michael understood. ‘That’s not good.’

‘No.’ Radnor agreed. ‘It’s not.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Nothing yet.’ Radnor picked up a glass of whisky and finished it in a gulp. Michael’s character had long ago been formed by his membership of a sub-directorate of the old KGB. The word ‘do’ in his vocabulary carried a variety of connotations and, as had happened once or twice in their shared past, often ended in spilled blood. While there were times when this approach had undoubtedly proved useful, it had occasionally caused problems. ‘Just watch him for now. Check his background. If he looks like taking too close an interest… well, we’ll do whatever is necessary.’

Michael shrugged, as if that was no big thing. ‘Okay. Military policeman, you say? He didn’t look ex-military.’

‘He was a British Redcap. He wasn’t much of one at the time — he was young and inexperienced. But he wouldn’t have stayed that way; they train them too well.’ He shook his head. ‘Not that it matters. His name’s Palmer. Frank Palmer. And the way he looks doesn’t come into it. Once a cop, always a cop.’ He reached for the whisky bottle and poured a fresh shot, surprised his memory should still serve him so well after all these years. ‘Find out why he was here, what he was doing. It could be nothing, but I’m not prepared to take the risk.’