Willing Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page B

warrant, he says …’
    ‘Jesus! How long will it take?’
    ‘The papers are with DCI Pennington,’ says Josie.
    ‘And where’s the phone?’
     
    Josie opens her drawer, picks up a sealed plastic bag with the gold Nokia inside.
    Staffe looks around the room and hisses to Josie, ‘You keep it with you. All the time. And I mean all the time. If anybody calls, you answer it, pretending to be her. You find out who’s calling and where they live.’
    ‘You’re sure, sir?’
    ‘And here.’ He tosses her a field recorder. ‘Record some interference off the radio and play it when you answer.’
    ‘What did she sound like?’
    ‘She’s foreign, is my guess. Break your English when you answer. Say as little as you can.’
    Josie leaves and Staffe has the place to himself. Soon, he is lost in thoughts: this case isn’t about him or Rimmer, but the beautiful girl, lying butterflied for autopsy.
    ‘Staffe!’ DCI Pennington is standing in the doorway, immaculately suited, pencil thin. He says, through pursed lips, ‘Christ, man. Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.’
    ‘I was thinking, sir.’
    ‘Well think on this, Staffe. I’ve heard about you barging in on Taki Markary last night.’
    ‘How do you know that?’
    ‘You give this man absolutely no cause for complaint. You’re only just off the hook, remember.’
     
    Staffe looks at the floor and swallows words. Pennington suckered him into the Jadus Golding conviction because the DCI extracted a ‘revised’ statement from a key witness, back in the summer. Staffe shouldn’t have covered up for his chief. But he did. ‘I remember everything about Golding.’
    ‘If you go after Markary, he’d better be the right man, and you’d better have the evidence. I suggest you reappraise. Think of him as living in a castle.’
    ‘A castle?’
    ‘Surrounded by a moat full of eggshells.’
    ‘I’ll have the evidence, sir.’ He thinks of the DNA Janine can summon from a being the size of a grape.
    Pennington shoots him a warning look. ‘What exactly have you got on Markary?’
    ‘He called the victim.’
    ‘After she was killed.’
    ‘He’s withholding evidence.’
    Pennington gives Staffe a withering look.
    ‘The victim was pregnant. There was a foetus.’
    ‘You’d better hear me, Staffe.’ Pennington turns on his heel, walks out, head high and back straight. ‘Loud and clear.’ He doesn’t shut the door behind him.
    *
    ‘You sure we should be going to see Markary, sir?’ says Pulford, sitting alongside Staffe in the Peugeot, the list of names and numbers from the gold Nokia in his lap.
    ‘Keep reading the names, Sergeant.’
    ‘Mobile number. Name Crystal.’
    ‘No,’ says Staffe.
    ‘Landline, inner London. Name Bobo.’
    ‘Mark it.’ Staffe knows that, in time, all these numbers will be traced, but he’s picking the men who have called the dead woman in the past week, prioritising landlines – for speed. You find your killer in seventy-two hours. After that, the tide turns against.
    ‘Darius A’Court. Mobile number.’
    ‘Contract?’
    ‘I’ll check.’ Pulford carries on to the end of the list.
    Staffe says, ‘Get Josie to come up with the addresses and full names.’
    He parks up four doors down, opposite Markary’s place on Mount Street. It is midday, but the lights are on in the house. With such fog in Mayfair’s Georgian preserve, you wouldn’t blink if a horse and carriage drew up, if a gent in tails swanned out with a cane. You couldn’t call Markary a gent. Not in Staffe’s book, but he had clearly got into the right club. Somehow.
    ‘Here we are, sir,’ says Pulford, reading from his Blackberry.
     
    Staffe is sad at the thought of bookies getting rich on Pulford’s misery and wonders what is so lacking in the young man’s life as to send him down that road. ‘Go on. Let’s have it.’
    ‘Bobo is a Boris Bogdanovich, lives in the Atlee, Bethnal Green.’
    ‘Russian? Find out how long he has been in the