Roland could feel the tension begin to slide away. The old bastard looked as though he approved. ‘I mean, I banged myself a few times,’ added Roland, pointing to the fading graze mark on his forehead. ‘I had to make it look convincing. But, yes, then… I took it to the police and said he’d threatened me with a gun, that he wanted his revenge… That he was a dangerous man. Out of control.’

  Rovshan reached out for a delicate porcelain cup of herbal tea. He gently sipped it, then set it back down on its saucer. ‘Clever boy. Good decision.’

  Roland grinned. ‘I think so. I think it’s worked out well. He’s a fugitive now. He’s on the run.’

  ‘This is fine. The police in this town are ours,’ said Rovshan. ‘We will find him and deal with him.’

  ‘But… one thing, sir?’

  ‘What is it?’ His irritated voice lacked the threatening, room-filling bark it’d had barely a year ago. However, though it now rustled like paper being screwed up, his voice was enough to command silence. Even the gentle crackling coming from the fireplace seemed to have quietened.

  ‘It’s best that he’s not arrested,’ continued Roland. ‘We need him dead. He knows too much.’

  Rovshan closed his eyes and spoke slowly. ‘Listen to me, my boy… this is not Georgia. You cannot do here as we do at home. You must be –’ he rubbed his thumb and index finger together as he hunted for the word– ‘discreet.’

  The old man opened his eyes again. ‘Roland, you were careless. Foolish.’ He sighed. ‘I do not condemn my children for making mistake, but I do expect them to fix it. And to learn from it.’

  ‘It’s just this man, Turner,’ Roland replied, ‘then it’ll all be fixed. I’ll deal with the planning officer your way, Father, and we will have no more problems down in Hastings.’

  Rovshan gave that a moment’s consideration and nodded at last. ‘No problems in Hastings. Good. I want this town to clean all the family silver. You understand this?’

  Roland nodded.

  The old man reached for his tea again. ‘You can take Gregor. And he will take whoever else he needs. But –’ he wagged a cautionary finger – ‘leave me no problems, yes?’

  Roland nodded eagerly. This could not have gone any better. ‘Of course.’

  31

  ‘Okeke’s been suspended?!’

  Sutherland shook his head. ‘Not suspended, Boyd. I put it down as sick leave.’ He sighed. ‘In other words, she’s getting paid to do bugger all.’

  Boyd looked across at her desk, almost expecting to see a sign hooked onto the back of her chair informing him that her workstation was ‘closed for business’.

  ‘But why? She can still work on the main floor,’ he protested.

  ‘Hatcher’s orders,’ Sutherland replied. ‘There’s a personal connection, Boyd. There’s no way she can be wandering around CID while there’s a manhunt going on for her boyfriend. You know that.’

  To be honest, he’d known this might happen, although the fact that she’d been removed, rather than redeployed to a smaller station, smacked of Hatcher’s growing panic. Her Madge clearly wanted Okeke well out of the way. Away from interacting with colleagues and most definitely away from interacting with LEDS.

  Boyd opened the door to the Incident Room and immediately noticed the Chief Super sitting at the back of the crowded room, cradling a mug of coffee. Her eyes locked on to him.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, nodding at her, and made his way to the digital whiteboard at the front. Minter had a laptop plugged in and the action log open, ready for updates.

  ‘Morning, everyone,’ Boyd barked over the chatter. ‘Let’s crack on.’ The room quickly quietened down. Hatcher remained perched at the back.

  ‘Let’s start by running through yesterday’s action points. O’Neal, Fox? Anything on Turner’s gym mates?’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ DC Fox answered. ‘We got four names to look into. Everyone down in the weights section seems to know everyone else.’ He looked at Minter and grinned. ‘They all know you, sergeant. You’re a bit of a superstar there apparently.’

  There was a chuckling across the floor, while Minter tried to ignore them. The whole station knew about the modelling scout and the dubious-looking calling card.

  ‘All right, that’s enough, folks,’ Boyd cut in. ‘O’Neal?’

  ‘We have several names – but there’s a Greg Howler at the top of the list. Me and Foxy are going to door-knock him right after this.’

  ‘Good. Okay. DI Shannon, how’s it going with the background on Turner?’

  ‘We’ve gone through all the socials on his phone, boss. He has a lot of casual mates, mostly gym mates, pub mates. Louie Collins and Greg Howler seem to be the ones he talked to most on WhatsApp and Messenger. There are no secret girlfriends, or –’

  ‘Or Okeke would skin him alive,’ Warren cut in.

  There was another ripple of amusement.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Shannon. ‘I mean… most of his messages, the lion’s portion of it, are with DC Okeke. And that’s mostly, you know, personal stuff which… errr…’

  ‘Which is understandable,’ Boyd interrupted. The room really didn’t need to rake through Okeke and Jay’s private exchanges. ‘Right, so Greg Howler seems to be the next stop. What about search histories? Anything useful there? Any locations to focus on?’

  ‘Nothing that stands out,’ Shannon replied.

  ‘Anything about guns? Getting hold of one? Owning one? Any sign of Tor or dark-web browsing?’

  Shannon shook his head. ‘But then he’s going out with Okeke…’ He shrugged, then grinned. ‘I bet he has to hand his phone over to her to check every day.’

  More laughter.

  Boyd waited for the room to quieten down again. ‘What about Turner’s family?’ he asked.

  ‘We checked on LEDS. His mother died when he was ten. She had two kids with different partners; there’s a younger sibling called Karl Craymore. The boys were fostered together for the first few years and then separated.’

  ‘Why were they separated?’

  ‘Jason Turner was a bit of a problem child; he ended up being bounced around from one place to another, whereas Karl found a foster home that worked for him and stayed put.’

  ‘Right. So there’s no other family?’ Boyd asked.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Are they in touch?’ interjected Hatcher. ‘The brothers?’ All heads swivelled to look back at her. ‘That’s something that should be checked immediately,’ she added. ‘People do reach out in later years.’

  Boyd nodded. ‘Yes, of course, ma’am. Shannon, you’d better look into that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Okay, then… so what about ANPR hits on his van? Who’s on that?’

  ‘Me,’ replied Warren. ‘We’ve had a couple in and around Hastings yesterday and this morning at the Tesco in Ore.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t sound like a man on the run,’ said DI Abbott.

  ‘He’s obviously done a vehicle swap with someone, you muppet,’ said DI Shannon.

  Boyd nodded. ‘It sounds like it. O’Neal, check that with this Greg Howler and the other gym mates. Check for the regs of their vehicles and check for Jay’s van. Check garages too. Whether they want you to or not. Okay?’

  ‘On it,’ replied O’Neal.

  Boyd looked down at his notepad. ‘And who went to his workshop?’

  A hand went up.

  ‘DC Carmichael, sir. We pulled it apart. There’s nothing useful. No address books, no invoices or accounts. His furniture business looks pretty ad hoc and informal. Probably cash-in-hand jobs.’

  ‘Right,’ Boyd said.

  ‘I think we need to bring Okeke in, Boyd,’ said Hatcher. ‘I know she’s one of us, but – let’s be blunt here – Turner’s her partner. It would be hard to believe that he hasn’t tried contacting her from a payphone or another mobile.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes of course, ma’am.’

  The meeting ended five minutes later and Boyd watched his team file out of the Incident Room to the main floor. Through the glass wall, he thought he caught a glimpse of Chief Superintendent Hatcher walking just behind O’Neal. He wouldn’t have given it a second thought if it wasn’t for the fact that O’Neal looked, even walking away from Boyd, incredibly uncomfortable.

  Is she asking him to keep an eye on me?

  That didn’t sit well at all. If Hatcher was doing that, then she was having doubts about him. And if that was fed back to the Salikovs, he wondered how long it would be before one of them paid him a personal visit and reminded him that they liked their results fast.

  32

  Roland felt like Al Pacino. Like Tony Montana.

  The SUV had tinted windows and a bulletproof windscreen. It was a proper mobster’s motor. And Roland had his very own pet mobsters to command like minions. Driving the SUV was a thickset ape in his forties with a forest of hair on each forearm, a thick black beard and a perfectly round bald spot like a monk’s tonsure on the top of his head. The man didn’t speak a word of English.

  In the front passenger seat was another, much younger, man with long wavy black hair pulled back into a man bun, and a tattoo of a snake that went up the side of his neck. He looked like an imported Premier League footballer wearing joggers, trainers and a Lacoste sweatshirt. And he didn’t speak a word of English either.

  Beside Roland sat Gregor: a scrawny little rat-like man with a buzzcut of silver hair, pockmarked skin and cold grey eyes. He looked old enough to have flown in Sputnik alongside Laika. He did speak English, but it was so heavily accented that Roland had to concentrate hard to get the gist of what he was saying. Sometimes he had to wait until the end of the man’s short guttural outbursts to build enough context to decipher the intended meaning.

  Gregor, then, was Roland’s interface with the other two. Roland chuckled to himself ‘Tony Soprano’ was driving, and his sidekick was ‘Cristiano Ronaldo’, who was currently checking himself out in the window’s reflection.

  ‘So what is plan?’ growled Gregor beside him.

  ‘When we get our hands on the bastard, we will kill the bastard,’ replied Roland. He was feeling good this morning, in control, and he liked how that had sounded coming out of his mouth: ruthless, cold, precise. No mealy-mouthed synonyms, just a plain-as-day command for his troops.

  ‘The police will track him down for us.’

  ‘You trust this police?’

  Roland had got the woman’s number from Karovic. The old fart had been extremely reluctant to hand it over, arguing that it was best practice for there to be an indirect link between the Salikovs and the Chief Superintendent. Roland had had to remind Karovic that Rovshan had given him carte blanche to fix this problem. More to the point, there was going to be a time, one day soon, when Rovshan wasn’t going to be the Big Boss any more. It would be Roland himself.

  Anyway, he now had a direct line to the top cop – one Margaret Hatcher – and as soon as the police had a location for Turner, she’d promised to make contact.

  ‘We sit tight,’ he told Gregor, ‘until we get a call. You’d better tell those two what the plan is.’

  Gregor spoke to the other two men in Georgian. Both of them laughed. He had a nagging suspicion that the laughter might be something to do with him.

  ‘What did you just say?’ he asked Gregor.

  ‘I tell them plan,’ he replied.

  ‘And what was so bloody funny?’

  Gregor looked at him and smiled. ‘They like plan very much.’

  Karl had gone into work this morning and left Jay to his own devices with strict instructions not to mess around with his sound system and, even more importantly, not to go wandering around in the mews outside his place. He was meant to be in hiding, not on holiday.

  His parting words had been ominous. ‘I read up on this Rovshan Salikov last night. Bro, you have no idea how big a shit-splat you’ve stepped in, do you? We’ll talk later.’

  Until that point Jay had thought himself well aware. He’d threatened a Russian mobster’s son and would have to lay low for a bit. That was it. He hadn’t even hit him, he reasoned; he’d just given the little twat a piece of his mind.

  It was a shitty note on which to leave him as he went to work. ‘You’re totally fucked, bro, but I’ll explain in what way later.’

  Absently his thumb stroked the buttons of his cheap phone. He desperately wanted to talk to Sam, to check that she was all right and to ask her if she knew any more about these scary Russians he’d managed to piss off.

  But he resisted the urge. The more information he shared with her, the greater danger he might be putting her in. At the very least, there would be damage to her career prospects if she was forced to lie about what knowledge she did and didn’t have.

  Karl had promised to be back at lunchtime to talk through Jay’s options. Which were pretty stark and limited, according to him.

  Jay pulled a beer from Karl’s fridge and put on the TV, wondering, in a sudden fit of paranoia, if he’d made the local news yet, but there was nothing. He tried to calm himself down as he flicked through several other stations until SpongeBob SquarePants appeared on the screen. It was a cartoon he happily watched with a beer or two after his shift at the nightclub. Clearly TV schedulers were aware that out there in Viewer Land there was an appetite for the show long after all the kids had gone to bed. An audience of mildly pissed people who identified with the persistent life-draining cynicism of Squidward and wished they had the inexhaustible life-affirming optimism of SpongeBob.

  He watched a few episodes before getting up to explore Karl’s open-plan apartment. He had the whole top floor of an old, perhaps Victorian-era, brewery. It had been restored and made fashionably modern while leaving exposed the old wooden beams of the roof and the austere weathered brick walls.

  Karl had stamped his personality on the place with a few additions of his own: a large wooden mannequin with articulated limbs – for what reason, Jay could not fathom. He presumed it was Karl’s nerdish idea of art. Jay amused himself for a while, posing the arms and raising the legs, before leaving it looking like it was getting ready to do a dump. He chuckled to himself and moved on. There was an archery target on a stand at one end of the floor and a crossbow hung on the wall beside it. He was sorely tempted to give that a go. And of course the inevitable recycled vintage jukebox, rescued from some old American diner.

  He wandered down the metal stairway to the old brewery’s ground floor and tried the light switch. Nothing happened. There was no feed down here. Faint daylight pierced a few shuttered windows and, from what he could see in the gloom, it was nothing more than a dust-covered, web-filled labyrinth of barrels, vats, pipes and discarded furniture.

  Jay was back upstairs on the leather couch watching SpongeBob again when he heard the large front door open downstairs. He switched the TV off, rather than be caught watching a kids show, just as Karl emerged from the top of the stairs.

  ‘I’ve cleared my in-tray for a few days,’ Karl said. ‘Maybe even a week.’ He clocked the half-empty bottle of beer in Jay’s fist. ‘Good idea.’

  He grabbed one from the fridge, popped it open, sat down on the beanbag sofa in front of his giant TV and took a long glug.

  ‘Karl,’ Jay asked. ‘Are you going to tell me what kind of shit I’m in, then?’

  33

  ‘Is this some sort of disciplinary thing?’ asked Okeke.

  Boyd shook his head before Hatcher could say otherwise. ‘You’ve done nothing wrong, Sam. We just need your help.’

  Okeke eyed Her Madge suspiciously. ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Agreed,’ she replied. ‘We need to find Mr Turner as soon as possible, before he does any harm to anyone else.’

  Okeke looked around the interview room. It was the smallest one. There was no observation window – just a camera in the corner, which, she noted, showed no red light.

  It was off.

  ‘Jay isn’t going to do any harm to anyone else,’ she said, ‘because he didn’t do any harm to anyone in the first place.’

  ‘Well, this is exactly why he needs to come in,’ Hatcher replied, ‘so that he can give his side of the story.’

  ‘There’s no side he needs to give!’ Okeke said, her voice rising. ‘He was set up by Hammond. We all know that.’

  ‘Okeke,’ said Hatcher softly, ‘we want what’s best for Jay. If you know where he is, the best way that you can help him is to let us know.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Okeke said. ‘He made a run for it when armed police crashed into our place. And, honestly, I can’t say I blame him.’

  ‘And why would he run? If he had nothing to run for? If he was entirely innocent?’ Hatcher pressed.

  Okeke shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he thought he was in danger of being accidentally shot while resisting arrest? How’s that for starters?’

  She studied the Chief Super and could see that the knuckles of Her Madge’s interlaced fingers bulged white. The woman looked as brittle as a bundle of dried twigs.

  She’s going to lose it.

  Okeke glanced at Boyd. He was doing his best to look calm and professional. Impartial.

  Are you really on my side, guv? she wondered. There was no way to be certain at this point, was there? If he’d had another delivery in a cardboard box, would he have told her? He was playing the stony-faced, task-focused cop for Hatcher, and the I’ve-secretly-got-Jay’s-back role for her. Could she trust him?

  ‘All right,’ said Hatcher. ‘I don’t think any of us have the time or the energy for this nonsense. Get your phones out, Okeke.’

  ‘You’re not looking through my phones without a warrant,’ she replied.

  ‘If you’re being straight with us, Okeke… then why don’t you just show us right now? Unlock them and let us have a look,’ Hatcher demanded.

  Boyd nodded. ‘She’s right.’ He looked directly at her. ‘Sam, I know you’ve got nothing you want to hide.’