Proxy, page 15
Sensing she had little more to add, Ray stood. “Do you have any idea of Paul Green’s current whereabouts?”
“None.” Her gaze remained fixed on the now-empty glass, which she turned back and forth on the tabletop. “I suppose you want to talk to him too.”
“I don’t know if he can explain why Raphael’s showing a sudden interest in Stacy’s welfare, but he might know something.” And that, in turn, could reveal some further chink in Raphael’s armour that Ray could exploit.
Her gaze flicked up to meet his. “I don’t care about my reputation so much nowadays, Mr Thomas. But I do very much care about Stacy. It was hard for me when she left for the continent, although I entirely understand why she did.”
“You never told her about her real father, did you?”
“I was afraid if she learned about Isaac, she might try to confront Raphael over his disappearance. Not knowing what else Raphael might be capable of, I couldn’t take that risk.”
“I understand.” Walking over to the still-open door, he looked back at her. “Please don’t go anywhere until I say otherwise. I don’t want to have to come looking for you again. Because I will, if I have to.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
RAY
Eunice’s home and place of work occupied most of a block in Hackney, a crumbling brick building that had started life as a Victorian women’s prison, then later a textiles factory and, in its most recent incarnation, a call centre. It had subsequently lain derelict for nearly thirty years following the great exodus of international finance to mainland Europe and throughout the pandemic years.
Some enterprising artist had painted the exterior in a faux-Soviet style, heavy on reds and blacks. Ray stepped towards the entrance, noting the two tattooed heavies who stood guard outside it. From within came the powerful aroma of Moroccan kush and the throb of bass-heavy electronic music.
“What do you want?” asked one of the men in a heavy Eastern European accent. His tattoos covered the entirety of his face and shaven scalp.
“Eunice,” said Ray. “She’s expecting me.”
The other guard deigned to give him a look-over. “What’s your name?” he growled in the voice of someone who’d spent his formative years in Brixton.
“Ray Thomas.”
“Ray…” Brixton’s face darkened. “Wait, are you that fucking cop?”
Ray did his best to mask his dismay. “And why would you say that?”
“’Cause my Uncle Harry told me if I ever met someone with that name, I should break his fucking head open.”
“I’m thinking there’s probably more than one Ray Thomas in London,” Ray offered, steeling himself.
“And I’m thinking there’s not,” the heavy replied with a snarl, bringing his fist back in preparation to drive it into Ray’s face.
Before he could do any such thing, the thug’s back arched and his eyes widened with shock. A noisy buzzing filled the air, like a robot insect trapped in a microwave. Then, slowly, the guard crumpled to his knees to reveal Eunice standing behind him at the open door, a taser gripped in one wizened hand.
“Fuckin’ hell,” she said, staring down at the guard where he lay in a foetal position, “you trying to put me out of business or sumthin’?”
“He’s a professional snitch!” Brixton grunted through clenched jaws. “My Uncle Harry told me he caught him in his garage trying to—!”
“Shut up, Barry,” said Eunice, her voice weary. Her own accent came via the East End, laden with gravel and tarry as the depths of the Thames. Pushing the taser she had used on Barry into a pocket of her knitted cardigan, and leaning heavily on her walking stick, she finally turned her attention to Ray. “Stirring up trouble again, I see.”
Ray felt his cheeks grow warm. “Doing my job, more like.”
Eunice shrugged. “Whatever.” Turning, she hobbled back inside, her long, grey hair tied into a messy bun, bar some strands that flowed down over a faded and very ancient Gary Numan T-shirt. “Just hand your gear over and get the fuck inside, Ray.”
First Ray divested himself of his bracelet, a chip-phone he kept for backup and a crumpled smart-screen, then stood with his arms spread as a third member of Eunice’s security team ran a scanner along all four of his limbs.
Once he was declared clean of all electronics, weapons or potential bugging devices, he followed Eunice into an elevator that looked like it dated from the Victorian era. It shuddered and clanked as it carried them up to the fourth floor.
As soon as the doors of the elevator rattled open to reveal Eunice’s private quarters, half a dozen cats appeared from different corners. An overpowering odour of cat urine hit Ray. As on previous visits, he made a point to breathe through his mouth.
The old woman’s quarters took up most of the fourth floor. Three walls were entirely hidden behind bookshelves crammed with paper books and pieces of ageing computer equipment. A desk large enough to sail, were you to attach rigging to it, supported a variety of computer components—hard drives, backup units, and five huge screens.
Eunice hobbled over to a swivel chair behind the desk and collapsed into it. A cat jumped up onto her lap and she stroked its fur. Ray found another chair and pulled it up next to one side of the desk where he could see her past the cluster of screens.
“So?” he asked. “You got it?”
“The CCTV?” Eunice shrugged as if stealing police evidence from secure databases barely rated a mention. “Easy-peasy. I’m almost insulted that’s all you wanted from me. You know most people are saying it’s a fake?”
“What is?”
“That stuff on the news.” She waved one nicotine-stained hand in the air. “The Markov girl, the mob in the hospital and all the rest of that palaver.”
“I was there,” Ray said with a frown. “I can assure you it happened.”
“Oh, I believe you. Can’t actually fake all those separate CCTV feeds, whatever people say, and I got them straight from the source. But it’s unnatural, the way all those people acted, which is why, I think, some prefer to think otherwise.” Eunice regarded him with unabashed curiosity. “So what are they, a cult or summat?”
“I’m here to find out myself, Eunice. How about you show me what you’ve got?”
Pulling a keyboard from out of a pile of half a dozen other keyboards, Eunice began to type on it. The screens, which had been either dark or running screensavers, all came to life.
Ray shuffled his chair around to get a better look. The screens showed numerous still images of the interior of the Peartree Institute. One showed Stacy Cotter propped upright against a mound of pillows, her expression blank and her lips slightly parted, as if she were sleeping with her eyes open.
Eunice looked at Ray. “Drugged to the ‘effing eyeballs,” she offered. “That’s the girl they came for, right?”
Ray nodded. Eunice’s wizened fingers once again danced across the keyboard.
“I filched a couple of the arrest reports while I was poking around the Met’s databases,” she added. “Seems a lot of the people who were in that mob all claimed they were proxying with someone else the whole time this was going on. You know anything about that?”
Ray nodded, his mouth set in a thin, taut line. “I heard the same from a friend in the Met.”
“Someone you used to work with?”
Ray nodded. According to the same friend, a certain DCI Edwards, slightly more than two hundred people in all had been identified as being involved in Stacy’s kidnapping.
“Apparently,” said Ray, “of the people interviewed so far who were in that mob, the person they each claimed to have been proxying with turned out to be part of the same mob. But so far they haven’t found any connection between any of those people and either Stacy Cotter or Raphael Markov.”
“Huh.” Eunice tapped some more, then nodded at another screen. “They don’t look like kidnappers, if you know what I mean. They just look like…”
“Like ordinary people,” Ray finished for her. “Who decided to get together, walk into a private hospital and snatch one of its patients while acting perfectly in concert.”
“Hang on,” said Eunice. “What’s the point of proxying with someone else if both of you are going to go and do the exact same thing in the exact same place? You might as well just do it in your own body unless you’re disabled or into sex-swapping or something.”
“Exactly,” Ray agreed. “It makes no sense. But it gets weirder. They all claim not to remember anything, like they were asleep the whole time the raid was underway.”
Eunice stared at him. “Asleep?” Her expression made it clear she thought he was having her on. “I must have missed that detail.”
“Or at least not conscious, according to what I’ve heard about their statements.” Ray gave her a significant look. “The only commonality is that most of their proxy sessions were a long way from ending. A few of them are still linked even now.”
“You’re talking about hopscotch. Christ.” Eunice waved a hand at the screens. “So what the fuck do you need me for if you’ve got a mate on the inside telling you all this?”
“Because I need more than just CCTV footage,” said Ray. “I also want you to track every vehicle that was in close vicinity to the Institute during the raid. You can use the footage to identify them, then track them down.”
Eunice was silent for a moment. “That,” she said pointedly, “will cost you.”
“It’s for a client. They’re paying.”
Which was far from true, although he hoped Amy Cotter might cover at least some costs. And if not…well, he could worry about that sometime in the future. The alternative was giving up before he got his hands on the man who’d ruined him.
“The current theory,” Ray continued, “is that the people who took Stacy Cotter switched cars a number of times after they left the Institute. I know that the Met tracked the first few of these vehicles, but after that, whoever took her got her out of sight of any cameras long enough for her to vanish.” He gave her a sly grin. “I know you well enough to know you can get ahead of the Met if you want to.”
“Sounds like a challenge,” said Eunice, a hungry look in her centenarian gaze. “Tomorrow good enough for you?”
“That soon?” Ray couldn’t conceal his surprise.
“Why not?” she replied and shrugged. “I can ask around as well. What cameras can’t see, people can.”
“Great,” said Ray. “There’s just one more thing.”
“Go on.”
“They know which car Stacy Cotter was put in once they had her outside the Institute. I want to see who was in the car with her.”
“Can’t your mate in the Met tell you that?”
“A proxy investigator’s the lowest of the low,” he reminded her. “There’s only so much I can beg from a former colleague.”
Eunice shook her head and got to work, presenting Ray with a number of video feeds within a few minutes. One feed showed two people quickly guiding Stacy inside an expensive coupé. They were barely visible amidst a milling crowd who, nonetheless, worked in perfect coordination to keep Markov’s hired security from getting anywhere near the girl.
On one side of Stacy stood a tall, skinny man, in late middle-age and with wiry hair. On her other side was a grey-haired woman wearing a knee-length parka over what looked like pyjamas.
The three of them got into the coupé. The moment it started moving, more than a dozen other vehicles scattered up and down the street in front of the Institute also came to life, zooming here and there in different directions. Ray caught a glimpse of himself, searching frantically, his face a mask of almost comic befuddlement.
Within seconds, and just as he remembered, the road was once again almost entirely clear of vehicles. A chill gripped Ray when he saw how the milling crowd shifted out of the path of the cars with such nimble speed that it made the whole thing appear to have been carefully choreographed beforehand. He’d been too busy searching for Stacy at the time to notice.
Eunice rolled the video back again to a point where Stacy stood next to the coupé, then froze the image. Flashing brackets appeared around the faces of the man and woman flanking her. Long lists of information appeared on several other screens.
“The old bird’s name is Olga Lubchik,” Eunice said, reading from a screen. “She’s a refugee from the six-second war and works as a teacher. The bloke with the frizzy hair is Dominic Fiori.” She frowned and tapped again. “Not much information on him.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Could be all kinds of reasons.” A quick glance at another screen elicited a frown. “Fiori’s records only go back to the early 2030s. There’s a birth certificate from before that which shows him as fifty-four, but there’s nothing about which hospital he was born in, or anything else for that matter, which is very odd in this day and age.” She peered past the screens at Ray. “If I had to guess, he’s under an assumed identity.” Amusement showed in the curl of Eunice’s lips. “If you can look past the blatant and highly illegal abuse of government databases, I could cross-reference him with national criminal records.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” said Ray, inwardly marvelling at the things the woman was capable of.
It only took another minute before she was done. “Nothing.” Her swivel chair squeaked softly beneath her as she leaned back. “So either he’s had plastic surgery, or he’s done nothing criminal in his life. I—”
Eunice came to a halt mid-sentence, peering at a screen. “Wait a second.”
Ray leaned forward as she tapped at a keyboard for more than a minute. “What?”
“It says here that a man with that same name was reported missing from a privately owned psychiatric hospital a couple of days ago.”
A prickling sensation worked its way up Ray’s spine. “What was he in for?”
“According to this, he was under observation following a psychotic break.”
“Anything else?”
Eunice shook her head. “That’s all I can find.”
“It’s a start.” Ray stood, feeling just a touch of disappointment. He’d hoped for something more conclusive and less random than a teacher and a mental patient. “Thanks, Eunice. Give me a copy of what you’ve got so far and you can let me know when you track those other vehicles down.”
“Be nice to hear how all this works out in the end,” said Eunice, tapping away. A printer whirred and a blank sheet of faintly reflective material as far beyond paper as paper was beyond stone tablets spat out of its slot. After first giving it a quick shake so it lost its programmed rigidity, Eunice passed the sheet to him.
Rolling it into a tight tube, Ray thrust the sheet inside his jacket. With a last farewell, he departed Eunice’s building, and was glad to see Barry was no longer on duty at the entrance.
Stepping across the road and around a corner, Ray darted a quick look around to see if there were any cameras looking his way, then took the sheet back out and unrolled it.
He soon found himself swiping through page after page of biographical information about Lubchik. Fiori’s biographical information, by contrast, occupied barely a single page.
Ray’s bracelet vibrated. A glance at its screen revealed an update on the Stacy Cotter kidnapping. Lawyers for Raphael Markov had held a press conference claiming Stacy had in fact been bundled into a car by hospital staff seeking to take her to safety at an undisclosed location.
This explanation stank of so much bullshit Ray was astounded that any lawyer had the gall to stand up in front of the press and say such a thing out loud. Yet the police appeared to be going along with it. It spoke volumes about the power Raphael Markov wielded.
After heading home, Ray handed in his notice to his landlord, made some calls to a couple of agencies, packed the few things he needed into a duffel bag along with some other necessities and headed for a new flat he’d rented on a six-month lease and several miles from his old place; staying there was out of the question, now he knew Harry Cutts had goons out looking for him.
And God forbid Stokes should pay him an unexpected visit.
Once he had collected the keys and walked into his new place, Ray found the bedroom, dropped the duffel bag on the floor, collapsed onto a bare mattress and immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Ray woke, immediately alert, to the sound of someone knocking loudly at his door.
Reaching into his duffel-bag, he pulled out a sawn-off shotgun, then walked, still muzzy, through to the living-room of his new place. He peered through the spyhole, afraid he might see Stokes or one of his mates standing outside his front door with a baseball bat.
Instead he saw a woman in her early twenties wearing a courier’s uniform.
“Package,” said the woman when Ray swung the front door open. He kept the sawn-off shotgun out of sight behind the door.
The courier thrust an envelope towards him. She had long, sharp features that seemed oddly familiar.
“Don’t want me to sign anything?” he asked, taking the envelope with his free hand.
“Here.” The courier produced a picture postcard and handed it to him.
Ray studied the postcard in puzzlement. Flipping it over, he saw a picture of Hawaii. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an actual, physical postcard. Not since he’d been very young, certainly.
“Does anyone even make these things any more?” he asked, holding the card up.
“Write on it that you’re having a lovely time.” The courier produced a pen and handed it to him. “But don’t put your signature. That way Eunice knows you got your stuff.”
