‘Any thoughts?’ Corbett asked, his eyes snapping back round to meet hers.
‘Judging from the injury, it looks like a professional job. Some sort of hit.’
‘Agreed.’ Corbett nodded, his eyes narrowing slightly as if he was re-appraising Jennifer in the light of her quick diagnosis.
‘And it was public. The body dumped where they knew it would be quickly found.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That they’re not worried about getting caught. Or that maybe they wanted to send someone a message.’
Corbett nodded his agreement.
‘Perhaps both. Best guess is that he was killed round about midnight on the sixteenth of July, give or take three or four hours either way.’ He got up and padded noiselessly over to the filing cabinet, Jennifer noticing now that he seemingly kept his pockets empty of change and keys or anything else that might give away his position, like a cat who had had the bell on its collar removed so that it might be better able to stalk its unsuspecting prey. She continued to leaf through the file.
‘From what we know, Ranieri trained as a Catholic priest and then worked at the Vatican Institute for Religious Works.’
Jennifer looked up in surprise.
‘The Vatican Bank?’
‘As it’s also known, yes.’ Corbett raised his eyebrows, clearly impressed now. ‘He was there for about ten years before going missing about three years ago, along with a couple of million dollars from one of their Cayman Island accounts.’
Jennifer swivelled her chair round towards him, her forehead wrinkled in anticipation. She sensed that he was building up to something. Tucker, meanwhile, sat enthralled with his arms crossed and resting on his belly, his mouth slack and half open. Corbett ran his finger along the top of the filing cabinet as if checking for dust. She knew there wouldn’t be any. Not in her office.
‘He must have spent all the cash though, because he turned up in Paris last year. The French say he set himself up as a low-level fence. Nothing big. A painting here, a necklace there, but he was making a living; a good living, judging from the size of him.’
All three of them laughed and the tingle that Jennifer had felt slowly building inside her chest vanished like steam rising into warm air. Corbett moved back round to the chair and sat down again, Jennifer just getting a glimpse of the top of his shoes where over the years the constant rubbing of his suit trousers had buffed the leather to a slightly deeper shade of black than the rest of them.
‘I don’t get it.’ Jennifer replaced the file on the desk and sat back in her chair, confused. ‘Sounds to me like he got whacked by someone he ripped off. Or maybe he had some sort of deal go sour. Either way, it’s got nothing to do with us.’
Corbett locked eyes with her and the tingle reappeared and instantly sublimated into a cold, hard knot in the pit of her stomach.
‘Our angle, Agent Browne – and you won’t find this in the autopsy report – is that when they opened him up, they found something in his stomach. Something he’d swallowed just before he died. Something he clearly didn’t want his killers to find.’
Corbett reached into his pocket and, leaning forward, slid something sealed inside a small clear plastic bag across the desk towards her. Against the desk’s veneered expanse an eagle soared proudly, its majestic flight etched in solid gold.
It was a coin.
Clerkenwell, London18th July – 4:30pm
Outside, the afternoon rush hour traffic rumbled past, a never-ending river of rubber and steel that surged and stalled in tidy blocks to the beat of the traffic lights.
Inside, the shop windows glowed yellow as the sunlight fought to shine though their white-washed panes. In a few places, the paint had been scratched off and here narrow shafts of light pierced the gloom, the dust dancing through their pale beams like raindrops falling across car headlights.
The room itself was a mess – the orange walls blistered, the rough wooden floor suffocating in a thick down of old newspapers and junk food wrappers, while bare wires hung down menacingly from the cracked ceiling like tentacles.
At the back of the room, almost lost in the shadows, two tea chests rested on the uneven floor. Hunched forward on one of them, Tom Kirk was lost deep in thought, his chin in his hands.
Although he was just thirty-five years old, a few grey hairs flecked the sides of his head, becoming more noticeable in the several days of rough stubble that covered his face, the hair slightly darker in the shallow cleft of his square chin.
He reminded everyone of his father, or so everyone told him, much to his annoyance. Certainly he shared his delicately angular face, messy brown hair and deep-set blue eyes that nestled under thick brown eyebrows.
He was more athletic than his father though; a lithe, sinewy five foot eleven physique that suggested someone both quick enough to steal second base and strong enough to crack a shot into the bleachers if he had to. The irony, of course, was that he’d never been much of a big-hitter in high school, his signature play instead being a split-fingered fastball that had batters swinging at thin air as it broke violently downward. It fooled them every time.
Perched on the chest opposite him, a large backgammon board threatened to slide onto the floor at any moment. It was an intricately inlaid set that he’d picked up for next to nothing in some dusty side street off the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul years ago. It still smelled of glue and grease and spices. When he couldn’t sleep, he would sometimes play against himself for hours; checking the probabilities, shifting the pieces around the board, studying how different moves and strategies evolved. The half-empty bottle of Grey Goose on the floor next to him suggested that it had been a long night.
But Tom wasn’t even looking at the board. Instead he was considering the black ski mask that lay in his lap, carefully cradled as if made from the finest Limoges porcelain. With a half smile, he slipped his right hand into the neck opening and then stuck a finger out of each of the eye holes, wiggling them playfully up and down like fish chasing each other in and out of a skull’s eye sockets.
He had long, elegant fingers that made graceful, precise movements, each joint flexing like individual links in a chain, large white half moons at the bottom of each neatly clipped nail. And yet the back of his knuckles were covered in small white scars and his palms were rough and worn. It was almost as if he was a concert pianist who moonlighted as a bare knuckle fighter.
Tom knew that he couldn’t avoid making the call any longer. He’d been out of contact for three weeks now and didn’t have a choice. But would Archie understand? Would he even believe him? Abruptly his smile vanished and he flung the mask as far as he could across the room, willing it to shatter into a thousand pieces against the opposite wall.
He took his phone out of his back pocket and dialled, the high-pitched tones echoing back over the traffic’s low rumble. It was answered almost immediately, but there was silence from the other end. Tom coughed and then spoke, his voice smooth and soothing, his slight American accent more pronounced than usual as it often was when he was nervous.
‘Archie, it’s Felix.’
‘Jesus Christ, Felix!’
Felix. A name that he’d been christened with years ago when he had first got going in the game and one that he was stuck with now.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘I got … held up,’ Tom answered.
‘Held up? I thought you’d been nicked.’
Archie. The best fence in the business. Tom had often wondered whether