No Tears for the Lost

CHAPTER ONE

‘Die, you time-wasting bitch!’ Riley Gavin stabbed the keyboard to eliminate another batch of spam. The focus of her attention today was someone calling herself Morwena, no doubt a pseudonym for a pimply youth in a sweatshop computer room somewhere in deepest Michigan. Thirty-three junk mails, most of them cheap offers of Viagra for those suffering from something called an ‘unflatering erectoin’. ‘And,’ she added, ‘try learning to spell.’

As she sat back and sipped her coffee, which had gone cold, the email tone announced another arrival. This time the name of the sender was Tristram. Untypically, the message box was empty, but the subject line contained a single line of type.

Sir Kenneth Myburghe has a nasty secret.

Lucky Sir Kenneth, thought Riley. Whoever he is. She stabbed delete and sent Tristram’s missive winging off to join all the others. At least this last one was a little subtler in his sales pitch. So subtle, in fact, there was no pitch at all. Maybe he was having an off day.

She glanced at the on-screen clock. It was almost ten and so far the morning had produced little in the way of interesting new work other than a vague rumour of an alleged call-girl racket operating out of a government building in Croydon. The girls were being run, her contact had insisted in her email, by a manager in the Immigration section, and featured teenagers from Nigeria, Uganda and Romania, all being supplied with papers and accommodation in return for ‘favours’.

It didn’t need much imagination to guess what those favours might be.

She wondered if the story had legs, or whether it had already been picked up by other hacks and was now doing the rounds in search of a home. She’d stumbled over two others like it within the past month, and each time they had led nowhere. But it had taken time and money to reach that conclusion. If she didn’t come up with something soon, she was going to have to fall on the tender mercies of Donald Brask, her sometime agent, who played the airwaves with Svengali-like expertise to seek out stories and places to sell them.

Not that she begrudged going through Donald for work. With his uncanny nose for business, he knew more people in the media, government and police than anyone she’d ever met. But her innate independence meant she preferred to find her own assignments whenever possible, and set the terms accordingly. It made the work all the more satisfying, somehow.

Coffee, she thought. I need another belt of coffee, only stronger. It wouldn’t magic up another assignment, but it might sharpen the thought processes and help get things moving with a bit more determination.

As she stood up, the computer beeped again.

It was Tristram. Again?

Sir Kenneth Myburghe isn’t what he seems.

Riley sighed. Was she supposed to be impressed? If the mystery sender was hoping to draw in a gullible user, why not include a hyperlink on which to click? And who the hell was Sir Kenneth Myburghe, anyway? If there was one thing she hated, it was anonymous informants who dribbled information as if they were passing out gold dust. She hit the delete button with a hiss of irritation and shut down the machine.

It was the signal for the cat to appear. She hadn’t seen it since yesterday, when it had gone walkabout. It had evidently decided that it was Riley’s day to play maidservant.

‘Good timing,’ she congratulated him. Walking obediently into the kitchen and taking a tin of meat from the fridge, she spooned some into a dish. He responded with a chainsaw buzz and dropped his face into the food with the grace of a born binge-eater.

The cat, a solid and confident tabby with a broad head and the shoulders of a bruiser, had arrived courtesy of a former neighbour, adopting Riley by default and nominating her as a provider of food, comfort and convenience. It responded to her largesse carefully, with a strictly rationed show of affection, and strictly on its own terms.

When it wasn’t using her first floor flat to crash in, located in a quiet house off west London’s Holland Park Avenue, it toyed with the affections of Mr Grobowski, Riley’s Polish neighbour on the ground floor. Unlike Riley, who hadn’t felt able to saddle the animal with a name, Mr Grobowski called it Lipinski, in honour of a Polish musician, and fed it vast helpings of his native food, which he cooked for a nearby community centre.

Half an hour later, showered and changed from her house sweats to comfortable jeans and a jacket, and having run a quick brush through her collar-length blonde hair, she was immersed in the morning newspapers and an industrial-strength latte at her local Caffé Nero.

Then someone dropped heavily into the seat next to her. She caught a strong smell of mints and aftershave, rising over the warm aroma of roasted coffee beans.

‘Why, if it isn’t Riley Gavin, journo extraordinaire,’ said a dry male voice. ‘Just the person I was looking for.’

The newcomer was tall and broad-shouldered, with brush-cut greying hair and high cheekbones. He wore a well-cut pinstripe suit and a crisp, white shirt and dark tie.

Matthew Weller was something high up in the Metropolitan police. Riley wasn’t sure of his current rank, and was surprised to see him. Senior officers from the Met didn’t normally cruise the coffee bars of London in search of journalists, not when a beckoning finger would get most hacks running to them in the hopes of a story and glory. She wondered what he wanted.

‘Morning,’ she said cautiously.

She’d first met Weller at a press briefing after a street crime initiative had gone sour a few months ago. The Met had been forced onto the defensive when the Home Office had left them high and dry with months of hard work ruined by a sudden budget crisis. Weller had been wheeled out as one of the big guns to do some reassuring interviews. Rumour had it that he was now with SOCA — the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

‘Am I under arrest?’ she asked mildly. ‘Can I finish my coffee or should I duck under a blanket and let you drag me screaming to the nearest nick so I can sell my life story and claim police harrassment?’

‘No, yes and no,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, the cells are at full capacity so we’re not nicking anyone at the moment.’ He showed her a line of uneven teeth and chomped down on a mint like a terrier chewing a rat. In the relative quiet of the coffee shop, the crunching was loud and intrusive. Weller stared bullishly at the few heads turning his way, then offered Riley a crumpled bag.

She declined. After researching a piece about how many millions of germs were transmitted through bowls of hospitality sweets, she reckoned the number could be multiplied several times over with Weller. Not that he was a health hazard, but in the course of his work, he shook hands with some very unsavoury people.

‘How’s your friend, Palmer?’ he queried. He flicked a piece of lint from the knee of his pinstripe and crossed his legs, giving Riley a brief glimpse of fine burgundy wool above gleaming shoes. Weller’s teeth may have been uneven, but there was nothing wrong with his dress sense.

‘He’s fine, as far as I know. I didn’t know you two were acquainted.’

‘We’re not. But word gets around. You and he seem to be a team.’ He looked about him. ‘He’s not here, is he? I wouldn’t want to steal his chair.’

‘He’s not. What can I do for you — Chief Superintendent, is it? Or have you moved up the greasy pole a bit further?’

Weller shrugged easily. ‘It’ll do. You can call me Weller, if you like. Most people do.’ He sounded casual, even bored, but she wasn’t fooled. Officers like Weller were never off-duty. He was after something.

‘Okay. Out with it. Has the Home Office dumped you since that last fiasco or have they just slashed your budget by a few million?’

‘Nothing so simple,’ he murmured, popping another mint into his mouth. ‘I have rivers of information flowing across my desk every day. Most of it’s crap — the need to know because it’s there kind of stuff. But every now and then I spot an item which interests me.’ He crunched the mint and looked at her. ‘Like yesterday.’

Riley sipped her coffee and waited. No doubt he would tell her soon enough; but she was determined not to play the over-eager journo for him. And she felt certain she hadn’t done anything recently that would have hit the official information channels. When he didn’t say anything, she nudged him by asking, ‘Is this a guessing game?’

‘Your mate, Palmer.’ His eyes were blank, but it was clear he was waiting for a reaction. When she didn’t respond, he said, ‘We know what he does to earn a buck, and we know you two sometimes work together.’ He inclined his head to one side. ‘Ergo, it begs the question: what’s he up to at the moment?’

‘Why don’t you ask him? I’m sure you can get one of your boys to find his office. It’s only in Uxbridge. That’s a suburb to the west of London — just before you start seeing countryside stuff like trees and grass.’

‘I would, but he doesn’t appear to be around. Any ideas?’

Riley shook her head. Frank Palmer was a former Royal Military Police investigator, now private detective. He was also her occasional colleague on some of the trickier assignments she took on, where someone with a background in investigative work and a willingness not to be frightened off was a definite asset. Not that Riley shied away from the occasional spot of trouble, but she wasn’t frightened to acknowledge that Palmer, a lean, tough forty-something, could handle certain things better than she could.

When he wasn’t working with Riley, Palmer spent his life on surveillance or making security assessments for private or corporate clients. He was often incommunicado for days at a time, either playing with his computer or in a car somewhere, watching someone. His absence now was therefore hardly a cause for concern. On the other hand, she didn’t see why she should help the forces of law and order dip their collective noses into his business.

‘Is this official government interest, or do you have some common criminal reason for asking?’

Weller grinned and nodded. ‘Good question, Riley. Clever. If I say it’s official government business, you’ll get an attack of the goosebumps. Only you know it won’t go anywhere because we’ll sit on it. That’ll get you more interested. If I say it’s a criminal matter, you’ll get the same goosebumps and as much interest, only with what you fondly hope is more chance of a story.’

‘Cynic.’

‘True.’ He pondered the question for a moment, turning to eye an unshaven youth with spiked hair, sitting against the rear wall. The youth wasn’t drinking coffee, but appeared to be taking a close interest in a handbag lying on a chair at the next table.

Weller cleared his throat noisily until the youth dragged his eyes away from the bag. When he saw Weller, he shot up from his chair and walked out without looking back.

‘These places are a playground for maggots like him,’ Weller murmured. ‘What was I saying? Oh, yes. Palmer and you. Well, Palmer, anyway.’ He peered into his sweet bag again as if it might contain the secrets of the universe. ‘I’d like to have a chat with him.’

‘I can’t help,’ she answered truthfully. ‘Contrary to your information, we don’t spend much time together, except when we’re working — which isn’t as often as you might imagine.’

‘But you would tell me if you knew, wouldn’t you?’ His eyes were as flat as his voice, and Riley felt a chill descending. Weller wasn’t joking.