A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) Read Free Page B

won then. Is nothing more to say.’
    Hanlon stiffened behind her desk. Arkady Belanov. Now Oksana had her interest.
    ‘Please sit down, Mrs Taverner. I think I’ve just changed my mind.’
    Oksana Ilyinichna Taverner, née Yegorov, put her hand in her pocket and took out a memory stick.
    ‘It is all here, if you want it.’
    Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Shona McIntyre, her colleague, had told her that.
    Hanlon nodded and took the memory stick. Oksana gave her a curt, formal smile and sat down.
    ‘Why don’t we begin at the beginning, Mrs Taverner?’
    ‘Thank you, DCI Hanlon. Please call me Oksana.’ She nodded at the stick in Hanlon’s fingers. ‘Time for you to meet the Butcher of Moscow. Charlie’s killer.’
    ‘And Arkady Belanov,’ added Hanlon.
    ‘Him too,’ said Oksana.
    Hello, Arkady, thought Hanlon, still hurting women then? It’ll be nice to see you again.

2
     
    Assistant Commissioner Corrigan of the Metropolitan Police, naked except for a small towel preserving his modesty, looked thoughtfully at the man, similarly attired, sitting opposite him in the steam room.
    The hot, heavy damp air, like being inside a heated cloud, billowed around them, obscuring vision, deadening sound. The thick, grey marble walls, a century old, dripped and ran with condensed moisture.
    Through the mist, Corrigan saw a heavily built man in his late twenties, early thirties. His body was muscular, not the overly defined, chiselled look of the gym but spectacularly solid. His waistline was beginning to carry a couple of folds of surplus fat, but he wasn’t too far removed from the boxer he had once been. Corrigan, whose family had almost all to a man worked in construction, knew strength when he saw it. Enver Demirel was a powerful individual. He had a mournful face that bore the traces of the boxing ring, a heavy drooping moustache and sad, brown eyes like a seal’s. Corrigan’s gaze dropped momentarily to the man’s right foot. There was a small, red puckered scar where DI Demirel had been shot a year or so ago in the line of duty.
    DI Enver Demirel stared unhappily back at the assistant commissioner. Corrigan was a huge man, six feet five, and the towel wrapped around his waist looked like a face flannel against his massive bulk, a weightlifter run to seed. Generations of Corrigans had done nothing but heavy, manual labour, and in some kind of Darwinian way the results of centuries of coded musculature were there in the AC’s body.
    Enver averted his eyes. He hated public nakedness and was very uncomfortable in these surroundings. He was also uncomfortable with deviation from routine and he suspected that Corrigan had brought him here for some off-the-record discussion that he most certainly did not want to be having.
    They were in the basement of Corrigan’s club. Most of the members were military or businessmen who’d done time in the Guards, so it was old-school masculine, scuffed Chesterfields and deer heads on the wall. The walls were wood-panelled, the heavy pictures portraits of long-dead, long-forgotten generals or military events – Rorke’s Drift , Saving the Colours , that kind of genre. A huge stuffed pike dominated the bar from above the fireplace. The club was open to women, but Enver had never seen one in there. He wondered what they would make of Hanlon.
    Enver knew from office gossip that the AC had rented out his flat in Notting Hill for an astronomical sum and moved Mrs Corrigan to their cottage in Sussex. Corrigan had bought the flat when Notting Hill had been predominantly Irish and Afro-Caribbean. ( No blacks, no Irish, no dogs , the signs in rented properties had often read in those days.) Now only the super-rich could afford to live there. If you’d forecast that at the time, people would have questioned your sanity. Thirty years ago, Corrigan’s neighbours had been a squat full of dope-smoking hippies on one side and a West Indian drinking den on the other. Now he had a TV