The Eyewitness (30 page)

“Oh, God,” gasped Sasha. He snatched a large linen handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it against the bubbling wound.

“Don't you die on me,” he shouted.

“Don't you fucking die on me!”

Solomon waited until early afternoon in Sarajevo before he phoned Dragan Jovanovic at the Sarajevo Canton Police Headquarters. He wasn't at his desk and one of his colleagues had to fetch him.

“Jack?” asked the detective.

“How the hell are you?”

“I've been better,” said Solomon, but he didn't go into details. He told Dragan that Nicole had returned to Sarajevo.

“Do you think you can find her?”

“I'm not going to trawl around the brothels for you again,” said the policeman.

“I don't expect you to,” said Solomon.

“She arrived three or four weeks ago. Couldn't you check with Immigration?”

“Are you sure she travelled under her own name? Most hookers fly on false papers, remember?”

He was right, of course. And if she'd had used another name, there would be little or no chance of tracing her through official channels.

“What about Petrovic?” he asked.

“I don't think you should come back at the moment, if that's what you mean.”

“I meant, maybe she's gone back to work for him.”

“So you want me to have a quiet word with Sarajevo's most wanted, do you, on the basis of your long-standing friendship?”

“You could get someone to swing by the bar. See if she's there.”

“And what if she is? Are you going to fly over and walk into Petrovic's bar for another head-to-head? Because if so, you'd better hope there's another SFOR patrol passing by.”

“Are you okay?” Solomon asked.

“You sound a bit stressed.”

“No more than usual,” said the policeman.

“But you worry me. This girl has become an obsession.”

“Bollocks!” said Solomon.

“I just asked you to do me a favour, that's all. If you can't do it, fine.”

“Don't sulk,” said Dragan.

“I'll ask around. But if I were you, I'd forget about her. Move on with your life.”

“As of a few days ago, my life is on hold,” said Solomon.

“I've been sacked.”

“Why?”

“My boss says it's a budgetary problem but he's talking through his arse.”

“It might be for the best. The last thing you want right now is to be back here.”

“We'll see,” said Solomon.

“First things first. See if you can find out what's happened to Nicole.”

Dragan promised to do what he could, then cut the connection.

Solomon pulled the knitting needle out of his cast and dealt with an itch six inches below his knee. The doctor had said that it would be at least another three weeks before the cast could come off, then several months of physiotherapy. There was no point in Solomon looking for a new job until he was a hundred per cent fit. Aid work was demanding, and out of the question for a man who needed a walking-stick. Maybe Dragan had been right: if Petrovic was still on the warpath, Bosnia was the last place he should be thinking of going to.

Anna Gregson ran the last stack of twenty-pound notes through the electronic counter. Two thousand six hundred and eighty pounds. She used a calculator to add up the numbers she'd written down on a yellow legal pad. Thirteen thousand, seven hundred and twenty pounds in total, the receipts from two days. They hadn't been especially busy days, either.

To the left of the desk was a large safe and she put the money on top of the pile that was already in it, a little under a hundred thousand pounds altogether. Goncharov's accountant was due in later that evening: he would take the money away with him and ensure that it was paid into several different bank accounts. Anything over ten thousand pounds had to be reported to the authorities.

She closed the safe door and spun the dial, then went out to the main office. Six girls were sitting at desks, each wearing a headset connected to a mobile phone with a computer terminal in front of them. Each was taking bookings for an individual agency. The procedure was always the same. A call came in and the receptionist asked which girl the client wanted to see. If the caller was concealing his phone number, the receptionist would ask for a contact number so that they could confirm the booking. It was entered into a database and cross-referenced against the phone numbers of men who had used the agency before. That allowed the receptionist to recognise regulars, and punters who had caused problems in the past. Assuming there was no problem with the number, the receptionist would take the booking, then phone the girl to confirm it. Then she called back the client and told him the address. Most of the business was in call because many clients were married. Goncharov preferred it that way. It was easier to control the girls if he knew where they were.

A seventh girl, a Spanish brunette called Chloe', was making coffee in the kitchenette at the far end of the office. Anna called her over. Chloe had worked as an escort for six months but had been taken to hospital with a burst ovary and was still unable to work. Anna had offered her the chance to work in the office and she was doing such a good job that she probably wouldn't return to escorting. A good receptionist could earn a hundred thousand pounds a year. They had to have a good phone manner and a confident sales technique so that if the girl a client wanted was busy they could sell him another. They had to be able to handle the girls, too. Sometimes a client would call in with a special request for a sexual activity that many would regard as perverse: a good receptionist could often persuade a hesitant escort to expand her limits. It no longer surprised Anna how quickly they adapted to the work. The girls Goncharov brought into the country had no say in the services they had to provide, but there were several dozen English girls on the books who started work declaring that they wouldn't do anal, oral without a condom, or allow clients to urinate over them. Within months they had usually agreed to virtually anything, providing that the price was right. A good receptionist knew exactly what each girl was prepared to do, which meant clients were never disappointed. And happy clients meant regular clients.

Anna told Chloe to go to three post-office-box locations around the city one in Chelsea, one in Kensington and one in Battersea. Most of the girls who worked for Goncharov's agencies had no idea where the main office was. And few got to meet him in person. Contact was usually through Anna or two other senior girls, who helped handle problems with Immigration, landlords or difficult customers.

The escorts paid their money to the agency twice a week. Each girl was issued with a notebook in which she had to record the name of each client, the day, times at which he arrived and left, the amount he paid, and the one-third share that was due to the agency, unless the girl was indebted to Goncharov in which case the agency received all the money. They were instructed to put the cash due to the agency in an envelope along with all the written details of their bookings and deliver it by hand to the post-office-box nearest them. The boxes were opened every day and the money checked against the agency's computer records.

Chloe picked up her jacket and opened the door. She screamed as a heavy-set man in a leather jacket pushed her in the chest and sent her sprawling on her back. He was holding a handgun, which he pointed menacingly at the receptionists as he told them to step away from the terminals. Two more men piled into the office, also waving handguns. One of the girls was sobbing hysterically. The man in the leather jacket pistol-whipped her across the face, knocking her to the floor.

“No!” Anna shouted.

“Leave her alone!”

A fourth man walked into the office. He was in his thirties with a square face and short, dark brown hair. He was wearing sunglasses and a black-leather knee-length coat. A small cigar was stuck between his lips.

“Where is Goncharov?” he asked. He didn't have a gun but there was something in his hand, something that glinted under the overhead lights.

“He's not here,” said Anna.

“If it's money you want, it's in the safe.” There was never more than a few day's money in the office and Anna would rather hand it over than have any of her girls hurt.

“Show me,” said the man.

One of the others bolted the door as Anna took him into Goncharov's office.

“If you know Sergei, you know what he'll do to you when he finds you,” she said.

The man gestured at the safe.

“Open it,” he said. He stubbed out the cigar in a crystal ashtray on the desk.

Anna twisted the dial and pulled open the door. The man looked over her shoulder and nodded. He tossed her a Harrods carrier-bag and told her to fill it.

She did so, and he took it, then showed her what he was holding in his right hand. It was a Stanley knife with two blades that had been separated with a matchstick.

“You see this?” said the man.

Anna nodded.

“I slash your face with this, there's not a plastic surgeon in the world who can fix the scar. Now, where is Goncharov?”

Anna stared at the double-bladed knife.

“Sarajevo,” she said.

“When did he go?”

“This morning.”

“When's he coming back?”

“He didn't say.”

“He left you in charge?”

“Yes.”

The man indicated that she should move away from the safe. He bent down, checked that there was no money left in it and rooted through the papers that were there. He found a manila envelope and emptied the contents on to the desk. There were more than two dozen passports Russian, Latvian, Bosnian, Ukrainian, Thai, all belonging to girls working for the agencies. He scooped the passports into the Harrods bag.

“Sergei Goncharov is out of business, as of today,” said the man.

“Do you understand?”

Anna nodded.

“If you want to set up on your own, that's fine. I don't have a problem with you. But I will be running these agencies, and I will be taking over the girls.”

"You can't do that began Anna.

The man stepped forward and pushed the knife against her throat.

“I can do whatever I want,” he hissed.

“Understand?”

“Yes,” said Anna, her voice quivering.

The man pushed her back to the main office. The receptionists were all lying face down on the carpet. One of the men was switching off the mobile phones and putting them into a blue nylon holdall. Another was unplugging the computers and disconnecting the VDUs.

“Lie down,” the man told Anna.

The man with the sunglasses spoke to his colleagues in a language Anna didn't recognise. She didn't know who the men were, but she knew one thing for sure that when Sergei Goncharov discovered what they'd done, they would be dead. And that before they died, they would suffer.

Solomon eased himself down on to the wooden bench and stuck out his cast in front of him. He took out a bag of peanuts. Two grey squirrels scampered down a tree and sat watching him, rubbing their paws together. Solomon tossed them each a nut, which they grabbed then ran away.

It was a sunny day. He was wearing a red polo shirt and yet another pair of jeans with the left leg slashed up to the thigh to accommodate the cast. When it came off, he was going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe of trousers.

The squirrels returned, wary but eager for more peanuts. Solomon tossed a couple in their direction. As the squirrels headed back to the tree with their booty, Solomon heard footsteps behind him. He turned. Two men were walking towards him. They were big men in dark coats and his stomach lurched. He looked around frantically, but no one else was within earshot. He looked back at the men, now only a dozen yards away. One was familiar. He had a square jaw, a crew-cut and thin, bloodless lips. His hands were in his coat pockets and he was saying something to his colleague.

Solomon reached for his stick, but he knew there was no point in trying to escape or to fight them off. His heart pounded and his breath caught in his throat.

The two men moved apart as they approached the bench, the square-jawed man came to stand in front of him, his colleague stayed behind the bench. Solomon glanced around. The nearest person was a young woman striding purposefully along a path, a briefcase in one hand, a mobile phone clamped to her ear with the other. His mobile phone was in the back pocket of his jeans and he grabbed for it, but even as he started to tap out nine-nine-nine he knew he'd never make it. He was going to die on Clapham Common, shot on a park bench by men who killed for a living.

The square-jawed man pulled his right hand out of his coat pocket. Solomon flinched, then saw there was no gun.

“Sasha wants to talk to you,” the man said, his accent almost impenetrable.

Solomon remembered where he'd seen him before: he had been in the front seat of the Mercedes that had taken him from Sasha's flat to Bayswater. He cancelled the nine-nine-nine call.

“He can talk to me here,” he said.

The man pointed to a BMW parked at the far side of the common.

“He wants you to come to him.”

“Some sort of power game?” asked Solomon. He was angry with the men for frightening him, and even angrier with himself for being scared.

“I'm through playing games. If he wants to see me, he can come here.”

The man behind Solomon bent down.

“We were attacked yesterday,” he said.

“Sasha was almost killed. We would prefer him to stay in the car.”

For the first time Solomon noticed the small cuts on the square-jawed man's face and a bruise above his left cheekbone.

“Who was it?” he asked.

The man didn't reply. The pair waited in silence. Solomon pushed himself up with his stick and walked towards the car.

As Solomon reached the BMW the rear door opened. He climbed in. Sasha was sitting in the back. He pushed his sunglasses on top of his head before he spoke.

“That fucking Russian tried to kill me yesterday,” he said.

“If I'd been sitting in my regular seat, I'd be dead now. He killed one of my girls, and one of my friends.”

“Not Inga?” said Solomon, quickly. Too quickly.

Sasha looked at him scornfully.