Jack Pendragon - 02 - Borgia Ring Read online

  Karim reached the metal fence at the point where it cut across a corner of land immediately in front of a row of shops with flats on the upper floors that fronted the Mile End Road. There was a gate in the mesh secured with a large padlocked chain. As he ran he rifled his pockets for the key. Karim stabbed at the padlock, repeatedly missing the keyhole. Blood dripped from his nose on to the lock. His face hurt terribly. The two men were fast approaching him. They rounded a pile of earth no more than ten metres away. He saw one of them bend down. When he straightened up again, he was holding a length of metal pipe in his right hand.

  Karim found the keyhole and twisted the key. The padlock snapped open and he yanked the chain away, slipped out of the gate and slammed it shut behind him. He tried desperately to lock it again but they were there. One of them grabbed the chain. Karim let it go and ran.

  He charged down a narrow passageway behind the row of shops. Ahead of him loomed a blank brick wall. He could see an open wooden gate to one side and sped towards it, tripping on a step and landing spread-eagled in a small courtyard. He cursed loudly and picked himself up. Two paces ahead stood a short stairway leading up to a flat roof. He hesitated for a moment. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped up there with no way out. But it was too late. The men were already in the passageway, he could hear their footsteps. They would be on him in a second.

  He dashed up the stairs. It was a large roof with two metal flues reaching to about waist-height and pointing at the sky. And, immediately, his worst fear was confirmed. There was only one way off this roof – the way he had come. Turning, he saw the two men burst into the courtyard. The one in front was slapping the metal pipe against his open palm.

  Karim backed towards the nearest flue. He peered down into it – blackness. Then, before he could make another move, the two men rushed him. He managed to duck away from the first swing and the pipe hit the flue, producing a low, hollow thud. He ran round the other side, but the second man was waiting for him there. He grabbed Karim’s arms and held them behind his back. Twisting away, he managed to land a kick in the taller man’s groin and make a run for it, but the short man with the pipe was ready for him. He brought the length of metal up hard under Karim’s chin, smashing his windpipe. He hit the floor face first with an audible crunch as bones broke and cartilage shattered. The shorter man brought the pipe down full force on the back of Karim’s skull. The sound of the impact was like a coconut being shattered with a hammer. Karim sighed once and was dead.

  Blood had run down the side of the victim’s face and pooled on the concrete. The taller man was panting and his hands were shaking. He stood staring at the body on the ground. With his hands pressed to his head, he kept repeating the same words: ‘Oh, fuck!’

  The other man kicked Karim’s body to ensure the job was done. ‘Grab his feet,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you deaf? His feet!’

  Moving like an automaton, his accomplice did as he was told. Together they turned the dead man over. He stared up at them through sightless eyes filmed with blood, his hair a matted red flecked with grey. The taller man let out a groan.

  ‘Don’t you dare fucking gag!’ the other man growled, resting the length of pipe across Karim’s chest.

  They half-dragged, half-carried the body the few feet back to the flue. Then the murderer snatched up the pipe again. They lifted Karim’s body almost upright and leaned him against the flue. His head lolled forward. Spots of blood splattered the taller man’s shirt.

  ‘Okay … on three,’ the murderer hissed. ‘One … two … three!’

  They lifted Karim off the ground, using the flue for support, and levered him over the edge. With a final effort they rammed his body inside the narrow opening and it tumbled down into blackness.

  Stepney, Saturday 4 June, 2.21 a.m.

  ‘ROCK DA HOUSE! … I SAID … EVERYBODY … ROCK DA HOUSE!’

  MC Jumbo, a one-hundred-and-fifty-kilo sweaty man mountain in an orange boiler suit, was screaming into the microphone as he flipped a turquoise twelve-inch and slotted it with expert precision on to one of the turntables. With his other hand he fingered a second piece of vinyl on his deck. His real name was Nigel Turnbull and he was a second-year student at Queen Mary College just down the road.

  MC Jumbo went into an indecipherable rant about the greatness of the next track, but Kath and Deb Wilson, twins and fellow students at Queen Mary, took no notice. They were happy simply to dance, trance-like, and to let the tab of E they had taken fifteen minutes earlier do its stuff.

  The room was a heaving mass of over-heated bodies, all pulsating to the incredibly loud bass-driven music pounding from an over-sized PA system. Little more than a concrete cube fitted out with some very expensive lights and a powerful sound system, The Love Shack was an acquired taste. With bare breeze-block walls and rough cement floor, it was a completely windowless semi-basement ventilated via ducted air-con. So, even though the music was played at a ridiculous volume, very little noise leaked out. In spite of its bland appearance, for many of the students at Queen Mary, situated a hundred yards away along Mile End Road, The Love Shack was the coolest venue in the world on a Friday night. As an unlicensed club, attendance there came with a frisson of danger, and for those in the know, it was the place to score any pharmaceutical under the sun.

  Kath and Deb had been coming here for most of the past academic year. This afternoon they had sat their final exam. It was time to de-stress. Letting the sound flow through them, it was easy to let go. As the track segued smoothly into the next, Kath gestured to Deb that she was going to get another bottle of water. Her twin nodded a ‘Me too, please’. Pointless to try to speak when Jumbo was on a roll. Everything had to be communicated via sign language and facial gestures.

  A few minutes later Kath was back. She handed her twin an ice-cold bottle of Evian and together they moved towards the centre of the dance-floor. Neither of them heard the rumbling sound that came from the ceiling just a few feet overhead, it was completely drowned out by the music. Unheeded by anyone, it grew louder. There was a flurry of scraping and rattling sounds, the grinding of metal against stone.

  Kath barely felt the liquid splatter her face, but Deb was staring straight at her and saw a red circle appear on her forehead. It ran down the side of her nose and Kath flicked a finger at it, mistaking it for sweat. Suddenly Deb stopped dancing and watched in horror as three more red marks appeared on her sister’s cheek. Kath froze and stood dabbing at her face.

  They both looked up at the same moment.

  Three metres above the dance-floor, a large air-vent cover started to come away from its fixings. First, one screw moved a millimetre. The metal slot into which it fitted yielded a fraction. Another screw began to loosen. The cover yawed open, sheared away from the support bracket and spiralled towards the dance-floor.

  One edge hit a dancer, knocking him to the ground with a fractured shoulder. He collided with a couple close by. They too were sent sprawling. Then a large, soft object slid through the hole in the ceiling and plunged into the fetid air of the club. It landed on the floor with a dull thud that no one heard.

  A dozen people screamed simultaneously, but over the thumping beat and the sizzling computer-generated melody no one could hear the sound. Everyone stopped moving. Hands went to faces, features froze … a dozen Edvard Munchs.

  Kath and Deb were just a few feet away from where the object landed. They saw a blurred shape falling through the air and hitting the ground. More liquid splashed across their faces. Deb touched her cheek and stared uncomprehendingly at her red fingertips. Then, as though a power switch had been tripped, the music stopped. MC Jumbo lurched away from his deck and wobbled down on to the eerily silent dance-floor.

  Deb had started to shake, her fingers held up in front of her terror-stricken face.

  With remarkable calm, Jumbo crouched down and rolled over the huddled object. They could all see its smashed face, the hair matted with dried blood,
the white of one eye. Then, as the DJ pulled himself quickly to his feet, another object tumbled from the air-vent and landed next to the body. Jumbo jumped back instinctively, as though nudged by a cattle-prod. Kath screamed. A muddied workman’s boot lay on the floor beside the dead man.

  Chief Inspector Jack Pendragon grabbed for the receiver, missed and knocked the phone to the floor along with a glass of water and his alarm clock. He could faintly hear the voice at the other end of the line as he scrambled in the dark to locate the receiver.

  ‘Pendragon,’ he said, trying to sound as together as possible.

  ‘Inspector Grant. I’m sorry to call you so early, sir. Something’s come up.’

  Pendragon rubbed his right eye and switched the phone to his free hand as he inched back up the bed. He glanced at the clock on the floor. The red letters told him it was 3.05 a.m.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Best see for yourself, guv. I’m …’ there was a pause ‘… four minutes from the crime scene.’

  ‘Can you be a bit more precise?’

  ‘A body in a club. Don’t know much else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Mile End Road. Some sort of bunker behind a jewellery shop called Jangles.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll find it.’

  He ran the shower and waited for the water to warm up. He had only arrived at Brick Lane Police Station the previous evening. His commanding officer, Superintendent Jill Hughes, had shown him around and then gone through the team’s files with him. He had two inspectors under his command: Rob Grant, twenty-six, hard-working, hard-nosed and tough, a high-flier; and Kenneth Towers, thirty-one, not terribly ambitious, a bit of a plodder. Then there was Jez Turner, one of three sergeants under him and the one assigned as his ‘principal sergeant’. Jez was twenty-two, keen, a bit of a lad, but a promising young cop who would, in theory at least, follow him round like a loyal puppy. But, like all the staff at the station, Sergeant Turner had in fact greeted Pendragon’s arrival with a blend of outward respect and barely disguised scepticism. He knew the score when it came to new arrivals without promotion. They were seen as having failed in their last posting and consequently had to prove themselves in a new one. Pendragon also came with baggage, personal issues that had probably been discussed and dissected before he arrived to fill the role of number two at the station, answerable directly to the Super.

  And that brought Jill Hughes back to mind: a career cop, confident, almost androgynous except for the softness of her face and the shapely figure her uniform could not disguise. Her large brown eyes were attractive but betrayed no hint of sensuality. Superintendent Hughes was, Pendragon knew, a very tough, very strong-willed woman and an exceptional officer. At thirty-two, she was perhaps the youngest Super in the country, but she had little practical experience. Like himself twenty years earlier, she had been a top graduate from Sulhampstead Police College. Her team at Brick Lane had grown to respect her razor-sharp mind; but there was no denying the fact, Jack reflected, that she would be relying on him and on the case experience he could offer.

  He gargled some mouthwash as he did up his tie and rubbed his hand over the just-acceptable stubble on his chin. At forty-six, allowing for a slight paunch, he had kept his athletic build, and although his hair was now more white than black, the flesh on his face was still taut. In a good light, he could just about pass for early-forties.

  He had been looking forward to a weekend spent revisiting his old stamping ground. Pendragon had been born within half a mile of the station and had lived in the heart of the East End of London for the first eighteen years of his life. There had been a few trips back after going up to Magdalen, Oxford, but when his parents died in the late-80s he’d felt no further inclination to return. Until, that is … He picked up his keys and made for the stairs.

  The front desk was unmanned as Pendragon crossed the hotel foyer and exited on to the street. The hotel was close to Moorgate tube station in the City, a five-minute drive from Mile End Road at this time of day. The streets were aglow with reflected neon. Pendragon followed his nose. He knew his way around London by simple instinct. The roads and the buildings might, on the surface, have changed during the decades since he had left, but the inner structure was immutable, the underlying topography intact. He could follow these roads as though they were leylines. London was ingrained into the very fabric of his being.

  And some things had not been tarmacked over or given a radical facelift. Most of the shops were now owned by Indian and Bangladeshi tradespeople, but some of the long-established family businesses remained. And although most of the old pubs had taken on new, trendy names and been made over, the landmarks of his youth still jumped out at him. Passing the Grave Maurice public house and the Blind Beggar, he remembered that they had once been favourite haunts of the Kray twins. The gangsters had been more powerful than God in this area when he was a boy.

  As he approached Jangles, an ambulance pulled away from the kerb and sped past him towards the London Hospital a few hundred yards down the road. Pendragon could see two police cars parked outside the shop, their blue lights splashing brightness across the drab brick and discoloured concrete surroundings. The shop window had been emptied before closing, anything precious safely locked away. The glass was masked with inch-thick steel bars. A scratched and scuffed blue-painted door set to the side of the shop stood ajar. Sergeant Jez Turner emerged from it and approached Pendragon’s car as he pulled up at the kerb.

  Turner was slim and rangy, his hair gelled back retro matinée-idol style. He had large dark eyes and a long narrow nose. His suit, a Hugo Boss he had found in a designer discount sale on Kensington High Street, was too good for the job. He knew it and the thought pleased him.

  ‘What’s the story?’ Pendragon asked, coming round the back of the car.

  Turner went ahead of him along a narrow corridor. It took them through the building and into a small courtyard. A short staircase led on to the flat roof of a concrete extension taking up most of the back garden of the property. Another door from the passage opened on to a short staircase leading downward.

  ‘Packed dance-floor, lots of E, I expect,’ Turner said. ‘Then … a body drops from the ceiling. SPLAT!’ He turned to Pendragon with a mischievous grin and started to sing. ‘“I believe I can fly …”’

  Pendragon ignored him and Turner ushered the Chief Inspector down into the large semi-basement. It stank of sweat and was unbearably hot. Two men stood in the centre of the room: a middle-aged constable and a morbidly obese man dressed in an orange boiler suit. Close by, a pathologist in green plastic forensic gear over his civvies was crouching beside the body of a man who lay twisted to one side, his neck clearly snapped. The victim was a man of colour, perhaps Indian, but his face was now dark and discoloured from internal bleeding. His black hair was matted with blood and grey matter. He was wearing a light-coloured short-sleeved shirt. Just visible were the words Bridgeport Construction printed on the fabric.

  Pendragon crouched down to take a closer look. ‘Time of death?’ he asked the pathologist. The man stared blankly at him and then at Turner before realising who Pendragon was.

  ‘Sometime between one-thirty and two-thirty a.m. And it’s Dr Neil Jones.’

  ‘Thanks, Dr Jones.’ Pendragon straightened up, turned to the constable and nodded at the figure in the orange boiler suit. ‘Who’s this?’

  The constable glanced at his pad. ‘Nigel Turnbull, sir. Aka MC … er, Jumbo.’ He intoned the words with some distaste. ‘A second-year student at Queen Mary College. He made the call.’

  Pendragon eyed the youth. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  Turnbull was calm and concise. He recounted events from just before the body appeared, the panic that then ensued and how he had called for an ambulance and notified the police. He omitted to mention first texting a friend to get over ASAP to take care of two hundred tabs of E.

  ‘And the time?’

  ‘Just before two-thirty. I remember loo
king at my watch a few minutes before … before this happened.’ He waved towards the corpse.

  ‘A miracle only one person was injured. I suppose there’s no point asking you for names.’

  Jumbo looked at him blankly. ‘I know a few of the regulars, but we don’t use membership cards.’

  ‘Well, Nigel, perhaps a trip to the station will help jog your memory.’

  Turnbull’s face dropped. ‘Look, I’m only a DJ here. I have no probs with giving you a few names, but they’re just students, same as me.’

  ‘Excellent. Sergeant Turner here has a sharpened pencil at the ready.’

  Pendragon turned back to the constable. ‘Where’s Inspector Grant?’

  ‘Upstairs, sir. He’s talking to the owner of the building.’

  Dr Jones stepped forward and caught Pendragon’s eye. The pathologist was a short, solidly built man, with a thick greying beard and a shock of curls; an over-sized Tolkien dwarf. ‘I’d like to get the body to the lab, if it’s all the same to you,’ he said. ‘Forensics will go over every inch of this place.’

  ‘Fine. And … you’re sure of the time of death?’

  ‘You know I can’t give you the minute and second, but as I said – definitely between one-thirty and two-thirty.’

  Jez Turner placed a cup of vending-machine coffee on the desk beside Pendragon’s elbow.

  ‘Thanks,’ said the Chief Inspector, and took a sip. ‘Bloody hell!’

  Turner held his hands up. ‘Don’t blame me.’

  ‘But this is …’

  ‘… perfectly adequate.’ It was Superintendent Jill Hughes at the door to his office. Jack made to get up, but at a signal from Hughes sat back again.

  ‘You’re perfectly welcome to bring in your own blend if you prefer, Chief Inspector.’