Skeleton Hill

22

Of all the team, Keith would be the last to panic.

Diamond sprinted along the street, hailed the first taxi he sighted and gave the address Olena had supplied. ‘Put your foot down,’ he added, ignoring his phobia for high speeds.

‘Man, you’ve got to be hot for it,’ the West Indian driver said.

‘What do you mean?’

He got no answer except a throaty laugh. While the taxi rattled through the backstreets, he used the mobile to ask Louis to send a response car.

‘Say that address again,’ Louis said.

‘Marchant Street, Barnes.’

‘The number.’

‘I told you. Sixteen.’

‘We know sixteen Marchant Street. It’s a knocking shop.’

‘Can’t be,’ Diamond said. ‘Olena sent him there. One of her church people lives there with her English husband.’

‘Take it from me, Peter, it’s a brothel.’

Now he understood the cabby’s mirth.

‘Is there another Marchant Street?’ he asked Louis.

The driver shouted from the front, ‘Not in Barnes, my friend.’

‘Get someone there, anyway,’ Diamond said into the phone.

They joined a tailback waiting to cross Hammersmith Bridge. ‘Isn’t there a quicker route?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, you can fly,’ the cabby told him. ‘What are you on – Viagra?’

He subsided into silence.

Across the bridge, a left turn came up soon.

‘Sixteen. Should be on the right,’ he said.

‘You’re not the first I’ve brought here,’ the cabby said. ‘It’s the one with the blinds down. Shall I wait? I reckon you’re gonna be quick.’

‘No need.’ He got out and handed across a ten pound note. The driver turned the taxi and left, still grinning.

The house was part of a shabby Victorian terrace, three storeys high. The age of smog had blackened the brickwork and this wasn’t the class of address that got steam-cleaned. Broken window-boxes spoke of a once-respectable use, but not for some time. Olena the church worker, saviour of vulnerable girls, had been badly misinformed by her protégée, Viktoriya.

The disrepair wasn’t total. His attention was caught by a movement above the door. A small video camera had shifted its angle a fraction. Someone inside had seen him coming.

The door worked on an entry-phone. He pressed the control and a woman’s voice said, ‘Yes?’

‘John Smith. May I come in?’

The door buzzed. He pushed it and got inside.

‘Upstairs,’ called the same female voice.

For all she knew, he was a punter, a new client, and he’d play along with this for as long as it suited. The stairs had a serviceable carpet in brown cord. Presumably Keith had stepped up here, but at what point had he guessed the status of the house?

‘In here.’

He pushed at a partly open door and found himself in a room furnished with cheap sofas. A blonde, sharp-featured woman in a black trouser suit stood behind one of them displaying a set of clawlike fingernails painted blue, with silver streaks added. How would those go down at Sunday mass? he wondered. Maybe they were detachable.

She repeated the bland ‘Yes?’ he’d heard over the intercom.

‘My first time here,’ he said. ‘You were recommended. Would you be Viktoriya?’

‘I’m Vikki, yes. Who sent you, then?’ Her accent had only the slightest trace of East Europe.

‘I didn’t catch her name. A Ukrainian lady.’

‘Where?’

‘Holland Park area.’ He was assessing the room, trying to decide if heavies were waiting nearby to deal with troublemakers. If Vikki was the madam, as it appeared, she’d need some back-up. For the present her hands rested firmly on the chair back. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Vikki. A friend of mine came here an hour or more ago.’

‘Who was that?’ she said and gave an ironic smile. ‘Another John Smith?’

He was through with the play-acting. The response car would be here any minute. ‘He was a police officer, wanting information from you. Where is he now?’

‘I don’t know who you mean,’ she said, dropping all pretence of charm. ‘No one came here saying he was from the police.’

‘He may not have shown you his warrant, but he must have asked you questions about girls who went missing twenty years ago.’

She hesitated. ‘That guy? He left some time back.’

‘It won’t do,’ he said. ‘He called me to say he was in trouble.’

Her eyes had turned to the left. He took a step closer and saw the monochrome screen she was staring at. He guessed the police had arrived.

‘Come on, Vikki,’ he said. ‘Do you want cops storming through every room in the building?’

Alarmed, she put a hand to her mouth. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said, playing the innocent through the scary fingernails. ‘He came asking questions. Anyone could tell he wasn’t a punter.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

Then a shot was fired nearby, followed by another, somewhere outside the building. He knew gunfire. It wasn’t a firework or a car backfiring.

He started down the stairs just as the front door burst open and two uniformed cops from the Met charged in. They were ready to grab him until he pulled out his warrant card and shouted, ‘The garden.’

They carried on past the staircase and through a door at the back. Diamond followed them into a small kitchen where unwashed coffee mugs littered a table. One cop flung open the door to the garden, which was more of a concreted back yard than anything cultivated, a poor place to hide. A toolshed stood against a brick wall at the end. The cops went to look, with Diamond following, and the kitchen door slammed behind them.

He stopped, turned and tried the handle. The wind must have got behind it, not some inmate of the house, as he suspected, because it opened again.

‘No one here,’ shouted the cop who’d opened the shed.

His partner had made a leap at the wall and was hanging on by his arms, looking over. ‘Here!’ he yelled and scrambled up and out of sight. The other cop followed.

For a man of Diamond’s build, that wall was a major barrier, but he wasn’t giving up while Keith was in trouble. He took a wooden fruit box from the shed and stepped up, got a handhold, hauled his bulk to the top and toppled over. The two uniformed cops were already in hot pursuit of a man who had vaulted over a low garden fence into a neighbouring garden. A dog started barking and another responded from higher up. Suburban Barnes had not seen anything like it in years.

This second garden was heavily overgrown. Diamond hadn’t waded far through the sea of grass and weeds when he heard panting to his left. Briefly he thought of the dog and then recognised a human quality in the sound, more like someone gasping for breath. He forced his way through and found Keith lying on his back, his hand to his chest, blood seeping through his fingers.