The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) Page 22

“Probably nothing,” Woodward replied.

  “There’s something.”

  “I can’t get hold of Hicks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not answering his phone.”

  Higgins frowned. Hicks was the newest member of the unit. The most vulnerable, perhaps. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that they couldn’t find him the day after the general’s safe deposit box was ransacked. Surely it was more likely that the robbery was opportunistic, as Woodward suggested, the chance to get at the jewels and other valuables that were stored in the vault. But Higgins was a careful man, and he did not like coincidences.

  #

  HIGGINS AND WOODWARD had to wait an hour before they were seen. They were called forward and directed to an interview room, where they were greeted by a young detective who ticked all of the boxes that Higgins had expected to have ticked: he was young and he looked hopelessly inexperienced.

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Albert Lane. I had a box in the vault.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, sir.”

  “I want to know what’s happened to it.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure you do. What number was it?”

  “287.”

  The officer looked down at the sheet on the desk. His face fell. “I’m sorry, sir. That box was opened.”

  “Opened? What does that mean? Were the contents taken?”

  “It’s a mess down there, Mr. Lane. Some boxes were opened and the contents were left. Others were emptied. We’re still working it out. Can you tell me what was in the box?”

  “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

  “You’ll need to tell us. We won’t be able to return stolen property if we don’t know who it belongs to.”

  “Yes, I appreciate that. But not until it’s necessary.”

  “Fine.” The officer laid his pen across his notebook.

  Higgins struggled to remain calm. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I’m afraid not. The investigation is ongoing.”

  “You must be able to tell me something.”

  The officer shook his head. “Just what has been released to the press. A number of men entered the vault last night. They went down the lift shaft, drilled through the wall and opened a number of the boxes.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say any more than that.”

  “You have no idea?”

  The officer stood. “We have your details, sir. We’ll be in touch with everyone who had a box in the vault as soon as we have more information on what was and what was not taken. But you will need to tell us what was inside. We won’t be able to return anything we recover without it.”

  Higgins felt himself tremble with rage, but he knew that ranting at this officer would serve him no purpose. The information he had received was almost worse than nothing—he knew now that his box had been opened, but not that its contents had been taken—and now he was being told that he would have to be patient before he was given anything even remotely useful. He knew he wouldn’t be able to reclaim the evidence. If it had been taken, then perhaps it would be abandoned. Perhaps the thieves wouldn’t recognise the significance of the photographs. But even if it was recovered, they would never be able to reclaim it.

  But his money… The fruit of his labours since he had left the Regiment, his reward for the operations that, he would have argued, had made his country a safer place—that would all have been lost, too. Higgins looked at the officer, who gazed at him with what he probably thought was understanding and pity, and wanted to smash the man’s face against the wall.

  Woodward knew Higgins better than anyone, and he must have seen the signs that usually preceded the eruption of his temper. He put a hand on the general’s shoulder and, with a quiet, “Come on, sir,” impelled him toward the door. Higgins shook his hand off angrily, but he knew his aide de camp was right. He followed him to the door and then out into the crazed bustle on the street outside.

  “We need to go and see Isaacs,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-One

  MILTON HAD taken a room in the Premier Inn near Waterloo station. He had no reason to fear that Frankie Fabian knew where he lived, but he was not in the business of taking risks, no matter how small they might be. The room was simple, adequately furnished and clean. There was a sink in the armoury and Milton had used it to wash the worst of the grime and muck from his face and the streaks of Hicks’s blood from his knuckles. He didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention to himself, but his shirt was still damp and he was still dirty.

  He stripped in his room’s small bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His skin was streaked with muck, and his clothes, when he ran his hand across them, left smudges of grime across his fingers. He went through into the bathroom and showered, looking down as the dirty water pooled around his feet and drained away. He scrubbed his skin until he was clean and then emptied the sachet of cheap complimentary shampoo into his hair and kneaded his scalp until the water ran clear. He took his clothes, washed and rinsed them in the shower, and then put them over the back of the heated towel rail so that they could dry.

  He wrapped a towel around his waist, went through into the tiny bedroom, and switched on the twenty-four-hour news channel. The headlines were read out at the top of the hour and, toward the end, reference was made to a heist in the heart of London’s diamond district. Milton waited until the newsreader had worked through the prior items until the image cut away to an outside broadcast. Milton took the remote and turned up the sound. The reporter was standing in front of the vault. The doors had been smashed open, and a uniformed policeman was standing guard outside them. The reporter suggested that a heist had taken place in the building overnight, and that goods with an unknown value had been taken. The rest of the information was sketchy, and, as the reporter handed back to the anchor, Milton concluded that there had been nothing to give him particular cause for concern. He had been careful.

  Milton made himself busy. First, he took the bag and put it on the bed. The money was still inside, but he left it there and took out all of the photographs and spread them out on the bed. He examined them, one by one. He looked at Leo Isaacs, much younger then, but still recognisable as the man in the Internet news reports that Milton had seen while he was researching him. There was one photograph in particular that he found himself returning to: Isaacs was shirtless, a champagne flute in his right hand as his left arm was draped around the shoulders of a boy, also shirtless. Isaacs was looking right into the camera, obviously unaware that it was there. His eyes were wide, his golden hair was messy and ruffled, and his mouth was open to expose two rows of small, perfectly white teeth. The photograph had captured something in Isaac’s eyes that Milton found disturbing. It was an excitement, a hunger, not yet sated.

  The boy was unmistakeably Eddie Fabian.

  Milton took out his smartphone and photographed the pictures so that he had backups, should he need them. He emailed them all to his Gmail account so that he had a fall-back should he lose his phone, and then, in an abundance of caution, copied them to his Dropbox. Finally, once he was satisfied with his work, he put the pictures back into the folder and slid them under the mattress of the bed.

  He emailed Olivia with the suggestion that they meet that afternoon, and then he lay down on the bed. He closed his eyes and allowed himself a few hours of rest. He was asleep within moments.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  MILTON STOPPED at Waterloo Station and checked the bag with the money into a left-luggage locker, paying in advance for a week’s rent. Then he went down into the underground and took the Bakerloo Line north to Piccadilly Circus. Milton made sure to arrive fifteen minutes early and spent the additional time walking to Savile Row and then looping back again so that he could satisfy himself that he had not been followed. He was happy that he had not.

  He returned to the Circus with five minutes to spare and found a
spot next to a branch of the Allied Irish Bank where he was able to watch the ever-shifting throng of people as they emerged from and disappeared into the various subways that led to the underground station below. Olivia emerged at a minute before the hour and made her way to the statue. She was dressed in denim jeans, a white shirt and a faded brown leather jacket. She looked anxious, looking left and right in an attempt to locate Milton. He was partially obscured by a telephone box, and she didn’t see him. He watched the crowd. There were hundreds of people. It would be almost impossible for him to say whether she had been followed.

  He crossed the road and made his way directly to her.

  She was facing away as Milton reached her. He reached out and gently took her arm by the elbow.

  “Shit,” she said. “You startled me.”

  “This way,” Milton said. He impelled her to follow him toward Leicester Square.

  “What’s going on?” she asked with a little concern.

  “Just follow me.”

  Milton picked a way through the crowds of tourists into Leicester Square. It had just recently been renovated, and it looked nothing like the seedy, dirty confluence that Milton remembered. Lazy pigeons were gorging on spilt popcorn from the Vue and they fluttered up as Milton led the way north into Leicester Court, the alley that led between the cinema and the Hippodrome Casino. It was pedestrianized, much less busy than the Square itself, and Milton paused at the junction with Lisle Street and looked back. A man had also paused. The man reached into his pocket and withdrew his phone, putting it to his ear, but not before Milton locked eyes with him. The man spoke into the phone and took a quarter turn away, facing the casino, no longer looking at Milton or Olivia.

  Milton felt uneasy. “Come on,” he said.

  “What?”

  He didn’t reply. Lisle Street became Chinatown to the left of them. Strings of red, white and green paper lanterns hung overhead. Milton took Olivia by the arm and hurried into the throng of people. They passed restaurants on both sides of the street—Kintaro, Imperial China, Hing Loon, Beijing Dumpling—all of them marked by the gaudy menus in the windows and the waiters who patrolled the doorways, eager to usher wavering patrons inside. Milton turned his head as they walked and glanced back toward the junction. He couldn’t see the man, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had been correct and the man had been following Olivia, there could be others.

  “What are we doing?”

  Milton hurried them onward.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I think you were followed,” he said grimly. “We need to get away from here.”

  They passed Waxy’s Little Sister, the pub hidden behind a row of scaffolding and protective sheeting, and reached the junction with Wardour Street. Milton looked north and saw a black cab heading toward them from Shaftesbury Avenue. He put out his arm and whistled. The cabbie indicated that he had seen him and pulled over. Milton opened the door, ushered Olivia inside, and sat down next to her.

  “Where to, guv?” the cabbie asked.

  “Liverpool Street,” he said.

  Milton looked out of the smeared window as they rolled ahead, passing the entrances to Chinatown and then Leicester Square. There were hundreds of people on the street. There was no way of knowing whether any of them were watching Olivia, but he had survived for as long as he had by trusting his instincts, and he knew that this was the right thing to do. He looked back as they rolled through an orange light and picked up speed onto Whitcomb Street. He was looking for other cabs that might have been stopped, or vehicles that might have run the light in an attempt to keep up with them. He saw nothing.

  #

  LIVERPOOL STREET station was to the east of the city, on the edge of the financial district.

  “What’s going on?” Olivia asked as they drove past Bloomsbury Square.

  “You were followed.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know that. But there was a man behind us and I didn’t like the look of him.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Just a gut feeling.”

  “You told me you were a cook, John.”

  “Yeah,” Milton said. “I am. But I’ve done other things.”

  It took thirty minutes to get to Liverpool Street, and they made the rest of the journey in silence. Milton spent the time looking out of the windows, checking the cars behind them in the event that he saw something that gave him cause for suspicion. The roads were busy, as they always were, and the traffic behaved normally. None of the cars or motorbikes seemed particularly interested in them. They reached the Rotunda, the roundabout that accommodated the Museum of London at the Barbican. Milton told the driver to go around it twice, and, as he stared back at the cars in their wake, none of them tried to follow their manoeuver. The busy nature of a city like London meant that you could never say for sure, but, as far as Milton was concerned, they were clean.

  “John,” Olivia said, “what the hell?”

  “Just wait,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  THERE WAS A BRANCH of Starbucks on the north side of the station and Milton led the way inside. He told Olivia to go and buy two coffees. She did, and Milton used the opportunity to find a table at the back of the room where he could sit and face the entrance. He watched carefully, satisfying himself once again that they had not been tailed.

  Olivia returned with two coffees and set them down on the table. She sat down, pried the lid off her cup and poured in a sachet of brown sugar. “So?” she said after she had taken a sip.

  Milton left his coffee untouched and looked straight at her. “I need you to be honest with me.”

  “What makes you think I haven’t been honest before?”

  “Come on,” Milton said. “No more games. I know that Eddie told you things that you’ve kept from me. You have to be straight with me now. It’s very important.”

  “About what?”

  “There was more than just the abuse, wasn’t there? Eddie told you about more than that.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “This is how it’s going to be. I’m going to be straight with you and you’re going to be straight with me. No secrets. Okay?”

  She nodded a little dubiously. “Okay.”

  “Eddie was in Alcoholics Anonymous. I am, too. That’s how we met. He was having trouble with the ninth step. You know what that is?”

  His admission didn’t fluster her. “No,” she said.

  He looked her in the eye. “Alcoholics agree that they have to make amends to the people that they’ve hurt.” She shuffled in her chair a little. “Eddie was going to get justice for himself, for what happened to him when he was a boy. But he wanted justice for someone else, too. Someone he thought that he had hurt. He wasn’t a hypocrite. He wanted to make amends.”

  He reached into his bag and took out the scrapbook that he had taken from Eddie’s flat. He laid his palm atop it and slid it across the table. Olivia took the book from him and flipped through the pages. She bit down on her bottom lip as she scanned the newspaper reports that Eddie had collected.

  “He was involved in that robbery,” Milton said. “A man was killed. Eddie’s family was responsible. His brothers. Eddie had a lot of demons. He was going to unburden himself of everything. The things he’d done, and the things that were done to him. And that’s the other reason he was speaking to you.”

  Olivia’s bottom lip had whitened from the bite. “He made me promise not to say anything about that,” she said.

  “That doesn’t really matter any more.”

  “No,” she said after a pause. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was there. He was the driver. His brothers had guns. They ambushed the truck and took the money. There was a struggle. One of the guards rugby-tackled Spencer Fabian, and Fabian shot him. Eddie has been cut up about it for years. It’s like you said. He said he blamed himself. You’
re right: he did. He wanted to make it right.”

  Milton exhaled. He understood everything now. The angles were all revealed, the connections that joined events, the motivations of the players. “Have you told anyone else that he was talking to you about it?”

  Olivia paused, then looked away.

  Milton’s heart sank. “Who?”

  “Frankie Fabian.”

  “What? When?”

  “Two days ago. I went back to Halewell Close.”

  Milton had to stifle his groan.

  “What?” she protested. “Eddie was dead. What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t getting anywhere. I met you, but you went quiet. I didn’t think you were going to give me anything. The story was just going to die, and I wasn’t going to let it.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I told him that Eddie had spoken to me about being involved in a robbery. I asked him whether he had anything to say about it.”

  Milton closed his eyes. “And?”

  “He said it was crazy. He said Eddie was unstable. Eddie had said all sorts of things like that in the past—you just had to look at what he’d done to himself to know that he wasn’t rational. He said that what Eddie said couldn’t be trusted. Frankie’s a good actor, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t press it too hard, either. He’s frightening.”

  Milton put his elbow on the table and rested his forehead against his palm.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He paused, wondering whether he could trust her with everything that he knew. She was a journalist; everything was subservient to the story. He decided that he would take the chance. He needed a second opinion. “A car registered to Eddie’s father was seen next to his cab in the driveway of the house where he killed himself. I think Frankie was there.”

  “How on earth could you know that?”

  Milton shook his head. “Someone saw it. I can’t tell you who. But Eddie got himself into a real mess. He was murdered that night. It wasn’t because of what he was going to say to you about Leo Isaacs. It was because he’d told his family that he was about to expose them.”