Silenced for Good by Alex Coombs

Author:Alex Coombs [Coombs, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838898519
Publisher: Boldwood Books
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

16

Hanlon had showered and changed her clothes; now she lay on her bed checking her e-mails on her phone.

Nothing concerning the investigation against her.

Well, no news was maybe good news. Various possible scenarios, all unpleasant, all too sadly realistic, bobbed around in her consciousness. To take her mind off things she ran through the morning’s events.

Kai and Murdo: the delivery was on for the following week. Three kilos of cocaine. Maybe a hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth. If it was pure it would then be cut, so maybe double that amount. And Kai was going to meet up with Murdo on the Thursday to discuss it. Kai, with his Glasgow/Paisley contacts, probably money laundered through The Sleeket Mouse. She could probably, as the manageress, put a couple of grand a night through the till as non-existent sales of high-end wine and champagne. At say two hundred pounds a bottle, that would just be ten bottles on a fifty-cover night. It wouldn’t raise anyone’s eyebrows. Or fifty-pound glasses of whisky or cognac. Easy. Then invoices for non-existent sales of goods, black truffles, turbot, hand-dived scallops – it was probably easy to get quite a lot of money shifted that way.

Then there was the issue of Big Jim. Had he killed the German girl, Franca Gebauer? Hanlon still thought of her as Nose-stud. An attempt to have sex with her, Franca refusing, Big Jim lashing out as he had done at Hanlon. In the morning he might not have remembered. Or possibly Harriet had covered up for him as she had his drink-driving, the power behind the throne.

She found Harriet an oddly compelling character. She was obviously both competent and intelligent, so why was she in this backwater? Donald had every reason to be here, a rest from the stresses of working in London kitchens and his own plans to get a place of his own, but what was her reason?

Most of the criminals that she had met in her career hadn’t been particularly evil. But there were exceptions. Was she one of these? Hanlon could easily see Harriet as a Lady Macbeth figure, directing Big Jim’s actions. She was probably the one who had organised the sex parties. She had probably filmed Kai and Eva’s porn film. It was hard to imagine Big Jim doing it. And if things went wrong, it would be Big Jim who would carry the can. And Harriet would be managing the finances; he’d sign anything she gave him, in all probability.

Where had he been going when Hanlon had met him on the road? The thought of Harriet as Lady Macbeth had triggered the image of the three witches: ‘when shall we three meet again?’ She wondered if it was to discuss something with Murdo and Kai. Would Big Jim be there on Thursday?

Well, she’d be there in one form or another, that was for sure.

After lunch, Hanlon wandered around the back of the hotel to look for Donald.

He was sitting outside the kitchen on an upturned plastic mixer-crate drinking a pint of lager.

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