Blood Red City Read online

  The morning had been fruitless, a trawl through his material on Jamie Tan. He’d had access to Tan’s email accounts for the past ten weeks, but Andriy Suslov’s name hadn’t come up once – no connection between the men, no pointers to why he’d have an interest in Tan. He double-checked it first thing, then rooted through Tan’s most recent items again to see if there was any kind of clue to who might’ve wanted him dead. Messages were still coming in, both from inside and outside his work. The industry jargon made much of it hard to penetrate, but there was nothing that even hinted at a threat to his life.

  From there, Stringer distilled months’ worth of appointments from Tan’s Outlook calendar into a list of contacts that cropped up regularly enough to warrant further investigation. It pissed him off because it was the tip of a vast iceberg of work that probably still wouldn’t shed any light on who killed him. And if he did turn something up, there was always the chance it would lead back to Suslov anyway.

  But then the call had come to say that Nigel Carlton hadn’t shown up for the lunchtime meeting he’d instructed him to attend. His contact went full-on meltdown on the phone.

  ‘I’ve rearranged for Mr Samuels to be there at five o’clock. Same office, same address. So now you get him to the cunting meeting, even if you have to drive the cunt there yourself, right?’

  It was the superficial aggression of a man out of his depth. The contact was a glorified estate agent called Ronald Simms, acting as go-between for a client who’d intended to stay anonymous. An information imbalance like that was a red rag to Stringer, so he’d run tails on the man until he led him back to the organ grinder: Sir Oliver Kent. Background on Kent revealed him to be a long-time local-government politician who’d spent the bulk of his career at City Hall, working on housing policy and planning, until he set up his own consultancy firm advising some of the UK’s biggest developers. Seats on various company boards followed, and the picture emerged of a man leveraging a lifetime of public-sector connections to get private-sector projects off the ground across London – making himself rich in the process. Which explained his interest in Nigel Carlton – a politician with the power to influence all manner of planning policy and approvals through his committee role, and the ambition to go way beyond that. Kent had clout and connections, and that was the only reason Stringer put up with Ronald Simms and his bullshit tough-guy act.

  Now he sat on a low wall on the plaza outside City Hall, waiting for a plenary session to break up. The building was nicknamed The Armadillo, but it looked more like The Gherkin had been driven into the ground at an angle, leaving only the top exposed. Even so, with the sunlight glinting off all that glass, the river and Tower Bridge in the background, the place radiated power and influence, and he understood its lure to small men like Carlton.

  Members started streaming out into the lobby, and Stringer took that as his cue to go inside. He spotted Carlton at the top of a staircase and watched as he ambled down it, talking to another man he was in stride with. Stringer went against the flow and stood by the end of the handrail, Carlton not seeing him until he’d almost walked into him.

  Carlton stopped abruptly on the bottom step, his colleague noticing the expression on his face and asking if everything was alright.

  ‘Yes. Yeah, let me catch you up, Tom…’

  The man nodded and carried on, a polite smile to Stringer as he passed.

  ‘Shall we talk outside?’ Stringer said.

  ‘I think here will do. And you can save your breath, because it should be clear now that I won’t be bending over for you.’

  The show of composure was unexpected. ‘The meeting’s been moved to five p.m.,’ Stringer said. ‘Same place. You’ll be there.’

  Carlton stepped off the staircase and faced him. ‘Do I look like I came down with the last shower? I know more people in the PR business than you can count. The second you move on me, your little story gets squashed and you’re dead in the water. And then I’ll come after you.’

  Give the man his due, he’d grown a spine in record time.

  ‘Do you recognise these, Nigel?’ Stringer pulled a Ziploc bag out of his suit pocket. Inside were a pair of white knickers.

  Carlton looked at them without moving his head. ‘No, I fucking don’t.’

  ‘They’re Jennifer Tully’s. You sure you don’t want to do this outside?’

  ‘I’m going to speak to security.’

  ‘You stand the fuck still.’ Stringer crowded him. ‘You go to that meeting today, or these get left in your bedroom at an opportune time for your wife to find them.’ He was angry enough to add a line about Mrs Carlton doing so when she came home from fucking her bureaucrat in Brussels, but he didn’t need him getting sidetracked.

  ‘I’m confident my wife wouldn’t give a damn to learn I was screwing someone behind her back.’

  Brass-necked motherfucker…

  ‘Even a teenager?’

  ‘We both know that silly bitch is nothing of the sort.’

  Stringer blinked, a white flash behind his eyes. He took a slow breath. ‘How is it you’re always a step behind?’

  ‘I think you’re out of bullets and you know it.’

  ‘I haven’t even started. Who do you think I’ll take with me when I leave these in your house?’

  Carlton’s eyes narrowed.

  Stringer turned to look through the glass doors of the entrance, to the plaza outside. Angie Cross, in her hastiest Jennifer Tully makeup, was sitting on the same low wall. Carlton made eye contact and she lit up into a smile.

  ‘What the fuck is…?’

  ‘She’ll be with me, leaving it all there. Fingerprints, hairs, DNA – you won’t be able to move for traces of Jennifer Tully. Which is going to look bad for you when she disappears right at the same time. And then your love letters to her get leaked, and your wife finds the panties and … oh fuck, you’re the chief suspect.’

  Angie waggled her fingers at him, making eyes across the plaza like a lovesick kid.

  Carlton couldn’t stop looking. ‘It would never … The police would see through it in a minute. She’s not real.’

  Stringer shook his head. ‘It’ll stick long enough to make sure your only way into parliament is on a guided tour.’

  ‘Parliament? Who’s talking about…?’

  ‘Don’t waste my time, Nigel, your ambitions are no secret. This is your career, in the shitter.’

  Carlton finally tore his eyes away, shifting his document case into his other hand. He looked at Stringer again. ‘If you ruin me, then I won’t be able to do what you want anyway. You’ll have shot yourself in the foot.’

  ‘Are you slow? If you’re not at that meeting in four hours, you’re already no use to me. Which leaves me out of pocket and predisposed to do everything I’ve talked about, purely out of spite. Because you pissed me off.’ Stringer checked his watch. ‘Now, economists say we respond better to incentives than threats, so here’s your carrot: when you play nicely, you make friends. Friends who can help you when the time does come to get yourself elected.’

  ‘Don’t pretend you have that kind of weight.’

  ‘Not me, idiot. The people I work for.’

  ‘And who the fuck is that?’

  ‘People with deep pockets. The friends you need.’ He laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Five o’clock.’

  Stringer watched his eyes and saw the greed spreading inside them, like blood in water. He wheeled around and walked out through the glass doors. He broke his stride to take a breath, trying to get something clean inside himself. Then he saw Angie looking at him and he moved off again.

  She stood up as he came close. ‘That poor bastard’s face. Looks like it did the trick?’

  He took the Ziploc out of his pocket and tossed it to her.

  CHAPTER 23

  Lydia looked up the address in Surrey Sam Waterhouse had given her as she took the train back from Hampstead Heath. It was a place near the river, not far from Hampton Court – her only point of
reference on the map, the area of southwest London displayed not one she knew at all. The TfL website said the journey would take an hour and a quarter each way, so she went home first to change, so she could go straight from there to work that night.

  An incoming call displaced the TfL page on screen – Tammy. Lydia pressed accept. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘I got your message. She Facebooked me as well.’ Tammy sounded breathless.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She said she doesn’t want to talk, that it was all a big mistake.’

  ‘Same thing she said to me.’

  ‘She sounded frightened, don’t you think? I mean, as much as you can tell from a message.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’ Lydia glanced around, feeling as if all the other passengers were watching her. She got out of her seat and walked to the central part of the carriage. ‘Something’s not right. I spoke to a neighbour, there were two blokes watching her flat at the weekend.’

  ‘What for?’ Tammy cut herself off. ‘Sorry, stupid question. But what’s that about?’

  ‘God knows. So I’m going to ask. I’ve got the address the car’s registered to, it’s in bloody Surrey. I’m on my way back to my place then I’m going to head straight there. Fancy it?’

  ‘Now? I can’t, I’m on my way out myself. I might have a way to identify our victim: Joe the Banker.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I put the word out I was looking for information on big-time money laundering – some of my old contacts. One of them’s working on a story about dark money flows out of Eastern Europe, and he’s put me on to a guy in the city who’s supposedly plugged into that world, reckons if anyone might know the players involved it’d be him. I’m going to his office now.’

  ‘Okay. Then we should get together later to compare notes. Can you do this evening?’

  ‘I can but maybe you should hold off on the Surrey thing for a couple of hours. That way I can come with you?’

  ‘I can’t, I’ve got to be back for work tonight. I’ll be fine. It’s Surrey – it’s all poshos down there.’

  ‘Lyds, I’m serious. If these guys were watching her flat…’

  ‘You’re the one going to speak to the international money-laundering guru. Honestly, I’ll be fine. About eight tonight?’

  ‘Okay, if you’re sure. I’ll text you somewhere central to meet when I’m done.’

  ‘Cool. Oh, Tam, one more thing – can you re-send me the video?’

  ‘Why, what happened?’

  ‘Someone deleted it.’

  ‘From your phone?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Shit … So you were targeted.’

  Lydia said nothing, the silence its own answer.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lydia, I had no idea…’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘But how did they find you? That was the whole reason I sent it anonymously, so there’d be no connection to me. I thought I was being paranoid.’

  ‘I guess not.’ The train pulled in to her stop and she moved over to the doors. ‘Just be careful, yeah?’

  Lydia’s room was sweltering when she went into the flat, and she stripped off her top straight away, new sweat marks blooming on top of the ones she’d made crossing the heath. She turned her computer on and left it loading up while she made a sandwich for the journey.

  When she got back to her bedroom, Tammy’s forwarded message was waiting in her inbox. She fired back a thank-you then downloaded the video onto her laptop and saved it to her cloud drive. Then she changed her email password again for good measure.

  She played the video through, watching for the best image of the victim. His face wasn’t totally clear at any point; he was in profile almost the whole time, and the camera resolution wasn’t great. Still she spotted one that might work. She made a screen grab of the paused image, cropped and enlarged it, and then saved it to her hard drive.

  Then she posted it to her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, writing a short message to accompany it: Need to identify this man. Contact me if you have info. Can DM me in confidence. Please share #JournoRequest

  The Surrey address the car was registered to wasn’t near the Thames – it was on it. Not a new build, but someone had spent big money updating it. It was hidden behind a sculpted hedge that masked the black iron railings protecting the front of the house, but through one of the driveway gates, Lydia could see the bottom storey was almost all glass. On display inside, lots of clean lines and high-spec furniture, the look of a show home. There was more glass at the rear of the property so she could see right through the ground floor to a wide lawn outside that ran all the way to the riverbank. A small boathouse clung to the end of the garden, right next to the water.

  There was an intercom system built into the wall next to the entry gate, its plaque engraved with the property name – Withshaw. She couldn’t see anyone inside and there were no cars on the semi-circular driveway. The place radiated a stillness that made her think no one had been there recently. She pressed the button anyway, on the off chance it was one of the new ones that connected remotely to the owner’s phone.

  No one answered the muted ring. Looking again, she saw there weren’t even any tyre tracks in the gravel out front. There was a small camera above the speaker, the black lens giving her the feeling someone was watching her. She pressed the buzzer one more time, but moved away before it rang out.

  She tried two of the neighbours, but no one was home at the first, and a cleaner opened the door at the second. The man didn’t even know who owned the house he was cleaning, let alone the one two doors down – which on this street was two hundred metres away. She thought about the relative ease with which she’d tracked down Paulina Dobriska’s address – not to mention how someone had left her purse on her doormat. Anonymity was at a premium in 2018, the preserve of the rich.

  She found a coffee shop on the way back to the station and took a seat next to the windows, folded open to one side so the room was open to the fresh air. She ordered a double-shot Americano and checked her phone. Her post had been shared several dozen times across the various platforms, but no one had replied. However low her expectations when she’d arrived, hitting another dead end sapped her. A converted flat in Whetstone and an empty mansion on the Thames: locations a city apart, tenuously linked by a flash SUV – but what was the connection?

  She Googled the property and its name, Withshaw, looking for its occurrence on the electoral register. A commercial website came up offering data scraped from the official database; it showed some basic anonymised details about the house’s occupants over time, but the names and other specifics were hidden behind a paywall. Turned out it didn’t matter – the last listing for the house ran to 2015, meaning the current occupant had removed themselves from the open version of the roll.

  She went back to the search results. The next one down was a link to Companies House. Clicking on it, she found that Withshaw Ltd was a private company whose registered address was the one she’d just been to; its business was shown as property management. She clicked another tab that displayed the directors; one was Simon Shelby, a solicitor with an office in Bloomsbury, and the other was a company itself – Arpeggio Holdings, based in the Isle of Man. She clicked the last tab, showing appointments and filings. Shelby and Arpeggio had been appointed directors in 2015 when Withshaw Ltd was founded – presumably when the current owner had first acquired the house.

  Her coffee arrived and she sat back in her chair. A property bought by a company, presumably set up as an investment vehicle, itself run by a solicitor and an offshore corporate director. It was a lot of trouble to go to just to own a house, even one worth a small fortune. But of course, it could be one of many; and besides, it didn’t have to be anything more sinister than a legal tax avoidance structure.

  She swiped her phone and opened Facebook Messenger to re-read her conversation with Paulina Dobriska. A witness but no victim; a crime but no crime sce
ne; too many questions without answers. She typed a message: What the fuck do you know, Paulina? She couldn’t work up the courage to send it.

  CHAPTER 24

  Sir Oliver’s go-between phoned Stringer at 5.30 that evening. He took the call on loudspeaker as he cruised down Camden Road, driving back from dropping Angie at her crash pad.

  ‘Nigel Carlton showed up for the meet this time,’ Simms said.

  ‘Good. When can I expect payment?’

  ‘Let’s see what he does first. My client is not impressed that you couldn’t get him there first time.’

  Stringer thought about Carlton’s value to someone like Sir Oliver Kent. A man who’d spent a lifetime building connections, networks, influence; Carlton surely just the latest in a long line of useful pols he’d have cultivated over the decades. ‘A few hours’ delay doesn’t derail anyone’s plans.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘Exactly, it’s a wrinkle. So when can I expect payment?’

  ‘The client has bought a result, not a service.’

  He braked hard at a red light, seeing it late. ‘He got his result.’ He nearly dropped Kent’s name, just to fuck with the man. ‘What happens next is in your hands.’

  ‘They could’ve paid for a taxi if all they wanted was to get him there.’

  ‘He showed up at the meeting, he’s in your pocket.’

  ‘Maybe. But you don’t pay your builder when he’s just torn your old kitchen out, do you?’

  ‘You’ve got your incentives backward. You don’t pay me, I’ll rip up the measures that brought you Carlton. Then see how co-operative he is.’

  ‘You’re not that stupid.’

  ‘Don’t ever fucking threaten me.’

  There was silence on the line. The traffic light turned green and Stringer hit the accelerator.

  ‘See the job through and you’ll get your money,’ Simms said. ‘Anything else is a mistake.’ He hung up.

  Stringer dropped the phone into the console but noticed there was a notification on the screen. He tried to read it as he drove – a Google alert. He’d set one for Lydia Wright’s name, to tell him anytime she published anything new. There was a bus lane running alongside him, nowhere to pull over. He slowed down to let the next set of lights turn red, then grabbed up the phone again.