Little Sister (A Group 15 Novella) Read online

  It was strange that Björn, usually so rational, had agreed with Olya. That worried her. She had always trusted her big brother’s judgement.

  Well, they were both wrong. She knew Finlay wasn’t a killer.

  Didn’t she?

  The trouble was that Olya’s suspicions resonated with her, and that she was unwilling to listen because she was unwilling to believe Finlay had done anything wrong. But Olya was right: Jesse’s reaction had been strange. Something was going on there. Maybe it was just the blackmail. That would be enough to put you on edge. But then maybe the blackmail was the reason Kevin had been killed.

  No. No way. She refused to believe it.

  Since she was fifteen, Gudrún had been used to men older than her wanting to become her friend. And Finlay was much older than her. Yet for all his wealth and power, he was genuinely interested in her, in her art, in her country. They had taken to going to galleries together, and Finlay had listened to Gudrún’s opinions. They had bought a couple of pieces together, slowly, carefully, after much discussion.

  And she had shown interest in his work, in those complicated trades he did. She was a smart woman; he was good at explaining. She was beginning to understand what Lochalsh Capital did and how it made so much money. Unexpectedly, it fascinated her.

  Finlay didn’t treat her like a pretty little toy; he treated her like an equal. And a compliment from someone as smart as Finlay, as successful as he was, that was something.

  And he cared for her. She was sure he cared for her.

  Yet, what if Björn and Olya were right? What if he had murdered Walsh in cold blood?

  She needed to be sure.

  Finlay didn’t get home until nine. Although Gudrún had had no idea of when he was going to arrive, Mackay seemed to know, because a meal appeared miraculously on the table just as he came in the door.

  Gudrún had already drunk half a bottle of wine; what else was there to do? Finlay seemed pleased to see her, kissing her warmly, and they sat down to eat the cod in a lightly spiced coconut sauce that Mackay had prepared.

  “Are we going to have Mr. Sturridge with us in Scotland?” Gudrún asked.

  “Him or Mr. Jessop.”

  “Is it really necessary?”

  “Jesse thinks so. Arbarov can get violent, so Jesse says. And he’s pissed that DarGold is going to win the mineral rights. He’s trying to scare us off. It’s only for a couple of weeks. Once the licence has been granted, there’ll be nothing more Arbarov can do.”

  “You don’t seem frightened.”

  Finlay took a forkful of fish. “I’m not. I think Jesse is overreacting. I’m more worried about your brother.” He grinned at Gudrún, but his brown eyes were questioning.

  “And this has nothing to do with Kevin?”

  “Nothing. Kevin was threatening us. I told you. But we don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  “Because you killed him?”

  Finlay looked hard at her. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s not go there. Olya must’ve been smoking something. And pretty girls are persuasive; she’s got your brother thinking the same thing.”

  “You swear?”

  His brow wrinkled with the slightest of frowns. “It’s a crying shame what happened to Kevin, but facts are facts: he got killed trying to score drugs on the beach. It’s that simple.”

  Gudrún lowered her eyes and stared at her plate. Either she confronted Finlay now, or she never did. “I don’t believe you,” she said, although she desperately wanted to believe him. “I think he was blackmailing you, and you had to shut him up. So you did.”

  Finlay took a sip of his water – he wasn’t drinking wine – and leaned back in his chair. “Please. This is crazy. Just think about what you’re accusing me of doing. Murder? Come on.”

  Gudrún swallowed. She had devised a test. “What if I went to the police?”

  Finlay’s eyes, usually so confident, were momentarily clouded with confusion. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because I think you killed someone.”

  “Do you want me to go to jail? I thought you said you loved me?”

  Gudrún looked straight at him. No, she didn’t want him to go to jail. Yes, she did love him. But she had to know what he would do next.

  “I think I should go to the police.”

  Finlay stared straight at her, his brown eyes boring deep into her soul. But she held his gaze. She knew what he was thinking. Was she bluffing? She wasn’t sure herself; maybe she was bluffing. But she had to know. She had to know what he would do next.

  They sat in silence for what was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like minutes. Then he spoke. “Going to the police would be a really, really dumb idea.” He paused. “Do you understand?”

  There it was. He didn’t have to spell it out. The way he said it, the way he looked at her as he spoke the words… it was a threat. It was clear and unambiguous. He was threatening to do to her what he had done to Walsh.

  At least now she knew.

  But then everything crumbled. She had loved this man. She probably still loved this man. And he was a murderer. He had just threatened to kill her.

  What should she do?

  What could she do?

  Rage, fear, sadness, loss; they churned within her. She pushed back her chair and ran to their bedroom, shutting the door behind her. She threw herself on to her bed and wept.

  He left her alone.

  Eventually the tears stopped and her head cleared. She was scared. She needed a plan.

  Gudrún lay flat on her back, naked, Finlay’s sweat clinging to her body, his smell enveloping her. She stared at the dim outline of the ceiling; Finlay’s breathing next to her was light and regular in sleep.

  They had had sex. Gudrún had known it had to be done, and in the end it had been a violent tumult of emotions for both of them. Love, lust, rage, revulsion. It had overwhelmed her and him. Afterwards, she had whispered in his ear: “I love you.” And, “I know you had to do what you did.”

  That had made him fall asleep. That had made him trust her. It had bought her a few hours.

  What the hell should she do now?

  9

  Izzie Jarvis walked up to the bar of the pub at the corner of Mount Street and South Audley Street and ordered herself a cup of coffee.

  The pub was empty; it was not yet midday. Izzie found herself the ideal seat by the window, from where she could watch Mount Street heading west towards Hyde Park. Directly opposite stood a shop boasting brown marble columns and a grand façade topped with a royal coat of arms: Purdey’s Gun and Rifle Manufacturers, strangely at home among its boutique neighbours catering to more feminine tastes. Izzie saw one of her colleagues wander in to browse.

  Izzie was nervous. This was the first time she had been involved directly in an operation. This one required extended surveillance of two locations: Lochalsh Capital’s offices in Mayfair, and Karsh’s apartment in Southwark. There were eight Group Three agents working each location, and they had been on duty since six that morning.

  Two of Izzie’s colleagues had seen Karsh arrive just before seven, with his bodyguard. His partner, Jesse Brenner, had shown up in a taxi from Heathrow at nine and had left again just after eleven fifteen, having picked up his own protection. Karsh was still inside.

  Izzie had been shown countless photographs of the target, Patrice Bertin, many of them enhanced with assorted facial hair and wigs. The key features were his prominent straight-edged nose and his drooping earlobes. Those were hard to hide.

  They had set a trap. Two doors down from Lochalsh, on the other side of the street, a set of offices sat empty, the letting agent’s name prominently displayed. A perfect base from which Bertin could observe the entrance to Lochalsh and take out Karsh. Four of Izzie’s colleagues were watching the letting agent’s office from a couple of blocks away, waiting for Bertin to show up and make inquiries. They had laid a number of traps like that. Izzie’s boss was confident that one of them would
be sprung.

  As noon approached, one or two customers began to drift into the pub. Then he arrived. Unmistakeable; he was making no attempt to hide his identity. He was dressed in an expensive blue Italian suit, no tie. He looked like one of the many European hedge-fund managers who inhabited Mayfair. In her briefing, Izzie had been told that more money was managed by hedge funds in Mayfair than in the whole of Frankfurt. A large proportion of the graceful red-brick townhouses in the area had been converted into offices for discreet managers who preferred the elegance of the West End to the crude blocks of the City or the soulless towers of Canary Wharf.

  Long nose, dangling lobes: it was him, all right.

  He ordered a bottle of Peroni at the bar. Izzie was examining her phone, a predictable activity for a lone woman in a pub, but she could feel him looking at her. It was then she realised she had made a mistake: she occupied the seat he wanted, the one with the best view of Mount Street.

  He sat down two tables away, sipped his beer and stared out of the window.

  Izzie slipped out of her own seat and headed for the toilets. As soon as she was out of the target’s sight, she called it in.

  “This is Echo Two Five. Target is in the Audley Arms, window table, facing South Audley Street.”

  “Echo Two Five, this is Phantom. Roger that. All units disperse. I say again, disperse.”

  Izzie had never met the agent with the codename of Phantom and was surprised to hear a woman’s voice. The plan was that as soon as the target was identified the watchers should scatter, leaving Phantom to do what he, or she as it turned out, had to do. Whatever that was, exactly, was never mentioned explicitly. There should be no witnesses.

  Izzie went down to the toilets, washed her hands and then headed back upstairs, only to see the target leave the pub.

  Izzie had intended to leave before him. Now she wasn’t sure what to do: stay, or follow her original orders.

  She left, and headed south on South Audley Street, away from Mount Street. A short woman wearing a cheap blue anorak brushed past her. Ahead, Izzie saw the target. Damn! Unintentionally, she was following him.

  That wouldn’t do. Izzie stopped and looked in Purdey’s window, examining the expensive sports jackets and lavish picnic hampers on show. Unsurprisingly, the guns and rifles were not on display in the window.

  She couldn’t resist a glance to her left. She saw the target turn off South Audley, down a small side street, followed moments later by the short woman in the anorak.

  It must have been Phantom.

  The perfect spot for a close-quarters operation.

  Izzie should have turned away and headed north, but curiosity overcame her, and she sauntered down South Audley Street. She glanced down the side street and saw there were even smaller mews branching off on either side. No sign of Phantom and the target.

  She made her slow way south, her heart thudding. How long would it take before someone discovered the results of Phantom’s work?

  Then she saw him. The target, striding rapidly on to South Audley Street and heading south towards Green Park. Izzie paused, waiting for Phantom to appear.

  Nothing.

  Izzie’s instructions had been clear. On hearing the order “disperse”, leave the area. Make no attempt to engage with the target or with Phantom either. Get out of there.

  Screw that. She hurried into the little street from which the target had emerged and then turned up the first mews, which ran parallel to South Audley Street. It was narrow, lined with garages on one side and small townhouses converted from stables on the other.

  Izzie almost ran past her. A bright red stain on concrete steps pointed down from street level to a body slumped next to the entrance of a basement flat, surrounded by a widening pool of blood.

  Izzie scrambled down the steps and turned the body over. Phantom’s eyes stared up at her in a scowl of death, blood pumping from her neck. A SIG Sauer semi-automatic pistol lay on the bottom step where she had dropped it.

  She had never got the chance to use it.

  10

  Olya and Gudrún took the long escalator up from the Underground at Angel and set off through a network of side streets to the Georgian restaurant where they had agreed to meet Björn.

  Gudrún had arrived at Olya’s flat in South Kensington that morning, distraught. She had left Finlay’s apartment to go shopping just after ten o’clock, taking her passport with her, and given Mr. Sturridge the slip in Harvey Nichols. Olya was pleased to see her friend, but she shared Gudrún’s fear.

  Finlay was going to be furious when he found out. Furious and suspicious. And he probably knew already: Mr. Sturridge would have told him, once he was sure he had lost Gudrún.

  They concocted a plan. Olya had a friend from Moscow, Dmitri, a student at the School of Slavonic Studies who lived in Highgate. They had met up with him at lunch time in Bloomsbury and gone back to his flat in Highgate, where she and Gudrún would both stay that night. Next, they booked Gudrún on to an Icelandair flight from Heathrow to Keflavík the following morning. The plan was that once Gudrún was in the air, Olya would march into Lochalsh and speak to either Finlay or Jesse before they flew up to Scotland. Olya would promise them that neither she nor Gudrún would ever breathe a word about Kevin to anyone. All Finlay and Jesse had to do was leave them alone.

  But Gudrún had insisted on seeing Björn before she returned to Iceland. Olya wasn’t so keen on the idea. “Are you sure your brother won’t suggest you go to the police?” she asked Gudrún as they hurried through the darkened streets of Islington.

  “I don’t think he will,” Gudrún replied. “I think he will put my safety first. And if he does try to insist, we’ll just tell him I won’t do it.”

  “But what if he goes himself?” said Olya. “Once you are back in Iceland.”

  Gudrún turned to her friend. “I have to speak to him. If I’d listened to him right from the beginning, none of this would have happened. I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything that would put me in danger.”

  “Or me?”

  “Or you.”

  “Hello, ladies. Got any change for a cup of tea?”

  Both women turned towards a scruffy-looking man wearing a torn jacket and stained tracksuit trousers. He was dark-haired with black stubble and olive skin, and he had a guttural accent of some sort. Balkan? Turkish? He was twitching, his head jerking from side to side.

  Gudrún stared at him, but Olya raised her chin, ignoring him.

  “Come on, ladies,” said the man, falling into step with them. “I’ve got nowhere to live! I need something to warm me up.”

  He needs drugs, more like, thought Olya. They were in a short empty street, lined with darkened terraced houses. Gudrún was a magnet for these kinds of bums, but Olya usually had no trouble brushing them off. Her fingers curled around the small canister of pepper spray she kept in her coat pocket. She had used it once during her time in London, the previous April when some Greek guy had come on too strong with her outside a club in Hoxton.

  “Come on, Gudrún,” she said, quickening her pace.

  But the man skipped in front of them, blocking their way.

  “Give me your bag,” he said to Gudrún. From nowhere a short grey handgun appeared, pointed at Gudrún’s stomach.

  Gudrún let out an involuntary yelp, a strangled scream.

  Olya’s fingers clasped the pepper spray, but she was frozen to the spot. There was no way she could use the spray before the man pulled the trigger.

  The man seemed totally focussed now. No jerking, no twitching.

  “Give him your bag, Gudrún,” said Olya.

  Gudrún moved to reach for her bag. But the man pointed his gun higher, until it was aimed at Gudrún’s head, and pulled the trigger twice.

  Olya whipped out the canister and sprayed at the man’s eyes, just as he was turning the gun towards her. The man swore in a foreign language and doubled up. Gudrún was slumping to the ground in silence. Blood poured out of the holes in her
head.

  Olya turned and ran. She had been on the track team at high school and won the regional two hundred metres. She was fast.

  In less than a minute she was in a busy street. She ran another hundred metres or so and then halted, whipping out her mobile phone.

  A couple of young guys stopped next to her. “Can I help you? Are you all right?”

  “Just stay with me,” said Olya, gasping for breath. “I need to call the police.”

  11

  Björn sat at a table for three at the Georgian restaurant sipping Georgian red wine and reading his book.

  Gudrún and Olya were late. That didn’t surprise him. Gudrún was often late and Olya didn’t really have an air of punctuality about her either. Björn had been relieved to get his sister’s text. Although she hadn’t been specific about what had happened, Björn took it as a very good sign that she wanted to see him with Olya. She must have been listening to him in the pub in Southwark after all.

  Björn had never been to a Georgian restaurant before. The house red was surprisingly good and the menu looked interesting. Olya’s suggestion, no doubt.

  He was re-reading Egil’s Saga. It was one of Iceland’s most famous books and, on exercise in the Regiment, he had always tried to keep it with him. Since he had returned to studying Norse literature at UCL he had almost stopped reading the sagas for pleasure, but this was his favourite and he had never really given it up. Egil – a Viking who had been born in Norway, settled in Iceland and fought the Anglo-Saxons in Yorkshire – was one of the most ferocious Norsemen in the sagas and also the sweetest poet. The combination appealed to Björn.

  The sound of a police siren swirled into the restaurant from the night outside, and then another. For a moment, Björn was concerned. But then he took another sip of wine and went back to his book.