Private London - James Patterson [61]
‘He can’t still be down there,’ said Sam who was standing beside me with Del Rio.
Hannah Shapiro was sitting huddled on one of the bench seats along the left side of the van, holding a cup of tea but not really drinking it. I guessed she was lost in dark memories and darker imaginings about what might be happening to her father. Personally, I was kicking myself. Harlan Shapiro had been the target all along. Never mind the golden egg, they had wanted the golden goddamned goose.
I moved the remote-control mouse and clicked it, this time synchronising Google Street View with the flashing symbol.
‘Son of a bitch,’ I said out loud.
‘What is it?’ asked Del Rio.
It was unlikely he would know what it was. Not a lot of people in London did, either.
We were looking at a bricked-up building. A series of arches all filled in with the same dark grey brick as the rest of it. It looked like a church or a Victorian orangery, maybe, if the arches had been filled with glass. Up until a few years ago, the building had housed a Chinese restaurant but now it was standing empty, waiting to become part of the infrastructure again as a substation. It had been built in 1868 and closed in 1939 when England was at war with Germany and the USA was still watching from the sidelines.
‘It’s Marlborough Road,’ I said.
‘Which is?’
‘Marlborough Road Tube Station,’ I explained. ‘One of many old Tube stations hidden throughout the Underground network. The platform for it isn’t even underground – they walked up and out and could be anywhere by now.’
‘So where does that leave us?’ asked Del Rio.
I looked over at Hannah Shapiro looking into her mug of hot tea as if the answers might be found within it. Somehow I doubted it.
‘It leaves us with a job to do,’ I said determinedly. ‘And I know just where to start.’
Chapter 75
DI KIRSTY WEBB was feeling the kind of excitement she got when the ‘tide’ of a case changed.
She’d considered taking the information to her superiors but she would have had to explain where and how she had got the identification.
She didn’t want to do that. It could cost her her detective-inspector status. It would certainly cost her the shot at the promotion she wanted and the move to Manchester that she’d thought she wanted – and wasn’t the hell sure about now. Damn Dan Carter! Why did she have to go and jump into bed with him again like some drunken teenager!
Kirsty shook away the thought and concentrated on her computer screen. Adriana Kisslinger had come into the country over a year ago and had worked on a temporary basis at a number of hospitals. Moving around London as an agency nurse: Northwick Park Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Then, bingo, she had also worked a three-month stint at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire. After that nothing was showing for a few months. If she had been working anywhere she’d been doing it off the books. Unless she had gone back to her sideline, of course. Not every prostitute filled in a tax return.
A couple of calls later and Kirsty had Adriana Kisslinger’s last known address. It was in Punch Bowl Lane in Chesham.
Chapter 76
BACK IN THE office I had assembled the troops.
The bad feeling in the air was palpable. We had brought back Hannah Shapiro. But no one was celebrating. Harlan Shapiro had known what was at stake. He had been very clear: he had lost his daughter once – he wasn’t about to lose her again. Whatever the cost. And he knew full well it was not just a monetary cost.
We didn’t have a clue what their next move would be. Harlan Shapiro was worth billions. His daughter had been a sprat set to catch a diamond-studded mackerel. The ransom demand had always seemed small to us. Now we knew why. Looked like it was seed money to set up the real deal. The stakes were about to go very high.
Kirsty had been as good as her word and had copied everything