Death in Kabul, page 9
It wasn’t quite as simple a request as it sounded. The sloping ground fell away steeply in some places. In others, it was too rutted to drive over, or the tanks had been dumped too close together to pass between. Mac felt his bones being rattled, his teeth jarring, as they drove over stones and potholes. At the end of one row, two wide-eyed boys stared at them out of the gun turret of a T62. One of them half-heartedly threw a stone at the Surf but it missed by a mile. There were huge drifts of rusted metal and smashed armoured vehicles, cracked windscreens glinting in the weak sun.
A pack of dogs appeared suddenly in their path, barking and snarling, then scurried out of the way when Pamir revved the engine and cursed at them out of the window. Mac was relieved that he wasn’t searching on foot. There were millions of strays in the city and rabies was relatively common. Jananga made a pistol shape with his hand and a popping sound with his mouth as he fired at them.
There was something otherworldly about the place and Mac wondered how Marshall had felt, coming up here alone in the dead of night.
But still there was no sign of the Toyota they were looking for.
They returned to the road by which they’d come in – and moments later they were back at the industrial estate.
‘Okay, Pamir, let’s do this area now,’ said Mac.
This time they were more successful. Pamir took an immediate left turn and drove them through a row of interlinked units. At the end of the last building, tucked just around the corner, they came across a silver Toyota Surf. The number on the licence plate matched the number of the missing vehicle.
‘This is it,’ said Mac.
Had Marshall realised when he parked it here that he might never come back to it?
They pulled up and all three got out of the car. They walked around the Surf warily, peering through the windows in case there was anyone inside. Ginger took an under-vehicle inspection mirror out of the Land Cruiser’s boot and looked for explosives. Seeing this check always gave Mac a flurry of nerves, only quelled when the all-clear was given.
‘Nothing there.’
‘Thank you, Ginger,’ said Mac.
He dug Marshall’s car keys out of the pocket of his jeans.
‘You’ve got the keys?’ said Ginger. ‘I’m surprised that the army handed them over.’
‘They were in Marshall’s pocket. I took them from the morgue.’
Jananga snapped to attention with a frown. ‘Then you should have given them to me. I will take custody of all evidence for this case.’
‘Yeah, sorry.’ Only he wasn’t. Kabul Police HQ would probably be a black hole as far as evidence was concerned.
Jananga’s scowl deepened, but he didn’t say anything.
Mac dug a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket, pulled them on and then opened the driver’s door. The car interior smelled of stale cigarettes and there was a confetti of ash on the floor of the driver’s side. Marshall had clearly been a smoker, and the ashtray was open, crammed with stubs. Mac put the key into the ignition and turned it so he could take note of the mileage.
Jananga, also wearing latex gloves, opened the passenger door and looked through at him.
‘Was this Captain Marshall’s own car or a shared car?’ he asked.
‘It was assigned to him when he arrived at Souter, according to Holder,’ said Mac.
‘Then we should check for fingerprints.’
Mac had been about to do just that, but held his tongue. He didn’t need to look like he was playing catch-up. If it had been a pool car, it wouldn’t have been worth the bother as there would have been far too many to make sense of.
Jananga had taken a bag from the back of his Surf when they’d swapped to the Land Cruiser. Now he retrieved a fingerprint kit from it and handed it to Mac. It was pretty rudimentary compared with the kits Mac had used in the Met, but it would do the job. He set to work brushing the fine silver powder onto the door handles, the steering wheel, the gear knob and the rest of the controls. Jananga watched from the other side without comment as he lifted the prints. There would be Marshall’s, whoever he’d used as a driver, probably at least one or two different interpreters. Mac wasn’t at all sure they would tell him anything, but he had to hope that something would turn up at some point or he might as well give up and go home.
‘Check the glove box,’ he said.
Jananga opened it and extracted various items, which he dropped pointedly into clear plastic evidence bags – sunglasses, chewing gum, a book of matches, a couple of crumpled afghanis and a few American dollars. ‘This evidence comes with me.’ He pulled out a small, foil-wrapped package and held it up to his nose.
‘Chars.’ Hashish. He placed it into a bag.
Mac glanced up at him. ‘Will you check the back seat and the boot?’ he said.
‘The boot?’
‘The trunk,’ said Mac, realising that the English Jananga had learned was actually American.
‘Sure.’
There wasn’t much in the back of the car. A pair of gloves, discarded on the back seat, and half a dozen or so empty plastic water bottles in the footwell. If they were in the UK, these could be sent for DNA testing, but that wasn’t going to be an option here.
‘We can check them for prints back at Police HQ,’ said Mac. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll tell us much.’
The boot was more interesting. Mac checked the outer catch for finger marks, then Jananga opened it. Empty at first sight, Mac scoured the worn black carpeting that lined its base. There was grit and dirt, as one might have expected, but also a scattering of small pieces of straw. Mac carefully picked up as many of them as he could and put them into an evidence bag.
Why straw?
‘Look,’ said Jananga, pointing into the furthest corner.
Mac bent further into the boot. There was something pale caught in the black fibres of the carpet.
‘Ginger, grab the torch from the car.’
A minute later, in the harsh beam of a sturdy black flashlight, Mac could see what it was.
A tiny scrap of hessian sacking.
He picked it up and showed it to Jananga.
‘Any thoughts?’
The major shook his head. ‘Only that he’s moved something in his car. But that’s his job, yes?’
Ginger looked down at the triangle of material on Mac’s palm. ‘It doesn’t look familiar army issue. The stuff the loggies bring in comes in wooden crates and gets loaded onto lorries.’
Mac added it to the evidence they’d already collected. But there was no sign of Marshall’s Browning.
‘Right, let’s get this stuff back to town. Can you check all these prints against your fingerprint database, Major?’
Jananga’s eyes widened. ‘Database? We don’t have a database of fingerprints.’ He sounded mortified.
Of course they didn’t.
‘Okay, Ginger. Can you get in touch with Holder and ask him to organise fingerprints for anyone in the camp who had access to Marshall’s vehicle? Then at least we’ll be able to rule them out. And, if we feel the need, we can request the army to send items back to the UK for DNA testing.’ He wondered if he was promising more than the army would deliver.
Jananga frowned at this. ‘I don’t think we’ll need to send evidence out of the country.’
In theory, it was his jurisdiction, but Mac was at a loss as to how he was going to run the case without proper access to fingerprints and forensics.
‘Let’s just wait and see what the evidence suggests.’ He wasn’t going to get into an argument over it at this point. ‘Right, let’s go. Ginger, take the Land Cruiser. I’ll follow you in Marshall’s car. We’ll reconvene at Police HQ.’
For once his plan didn’t cause an argument and a moment later, he slid in behind the wheel of Marshall’s Surf. He was still wearing his latex gloves – he didn’t want to contaminate the car with his own prints and, furthermore, everything was covered in a dusting of the silver fingerprint powder that was worse than glitter for spreading from surface to surface.
As Jananga walked back to his Surf and Ginger got into the Land Cruiser with Pamir, Mac put the vehicle into reverse and eased out of the narrow space it was parked in.
An unexpected crunch under one of the back wheels made him hit the brakes.
Ginger and Jananga both looked round, then hurried towards the car as Mac got out.
‘What the hell was that?’
There were slivers of glass and plastic by the nearside rear wheel.
‘Pull it forward a little,’ said Jananga.
Mac moved the car.
When he got out again, Jananga was picking up the broken pieces and dropping them into an evidence bag.
‘Marshall’s phone possibly?’ he said. It was definitely someone’s phone, crushed into a multitude of pieces, its circuit board bent and broken.
‘Damn! He must have stashed it on top of the rear tyre,’ said Mac.
‘Why?’ said Ginger.
‘To prevent someone from tracking him or because he thought it would be stolen. Or maybe to ensure that anything incriminating was destroyed if it wasn’t him that came back to the car… I don’t know. But now we’ve lost anything useful that might have been on it.’
Ginger opened the back of his phone. ‘Got Marshall’s sim card?’ he asked. ‘Let’s try it in here.’
Mac winkled it out of the buckled sim-card slot and passed it to Ginger. It had to be worth a try. If it worked, they might be able to find out who’d arranged to meet that evening, or at least some more about what he’d been up to. Ginger inserted it into his own phone and switched on. He frowned as he studied the screen, then shook his head.
‘Nah, nothing doing. It must be fucked.’
Of course it was.
Mac kicked the tyre that had done the damage. Now what?
Chapter 11
Monday, 8 December 2003
Mac realised the trail to discover Marshall’s killer was going cold fast, so he needed to pick up the pace of the investigation. Marshall’s vehicle was now impounded in the concrete yard of the Kabul police compound, and the evidence they’d collected from it was logged in.
He spent the morning going over the photocopies of the Souter gate log, and the afternoon listing all the points of evidence they’d gathered so far. But after hours of churning over the facts, the lack of progress was frustrating him. Desperate for a change of scene, he suggested that they head up Foreign Affairs Ministry Road to pay a visit to the Elbow Room Bar and Restaurant. Located in an alley next to the Chinese embassy, a tiny door in a wall led into a spacious bar and restaurant decorated in what Mac liked to think of as Kabul-chic – pistachio green walls, brown velvet sofas and spiky chrome bar stools on which a drunk man could easily do himself an injury.
‘Gotta say, this beats teaching the Joes how to wipe their own arses and the endless chicken and rice,’ said Ginger as they settled at a small table near the back.
‘I’m sure they can oblige on the chicken and rice front,’ said Mac.
‘Ha fucking ha! A cold beer and a club sandwich will be heaven.’
* * *
‘Someone knows something,’ Mac said, as he and Ginger laid into a couple of bottles of Bud.
‘The killer,’ said Ginger. ‘He knows why he did it.’
The waiter arrived with their sandwiches.
Mac took a giant bite and spoke with his mouth full. ‘Someone else. Marshall had been up to no good. Out all night, drinking, meeting someone in a deserted part of the city in the small hours. I think Neil Dixon knows more than he’s spilling. He’s shifty, nervous about something.’
‘So what do you propose we do?’
‘It’s time to dig deeper. What was the name of that bar he said they all go to?’
‘The Jungle Bar.’
‘Know it?’
Ginger nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘Their beer better than this?’
Ginger laughed, finished the rest of his sandwich and motioned to the waiter for the bill. Five minutes later, they were cruising down the Zargona Road and took a right at Shahid Road. Ginger pulled the car up outside a narrow shopfront. The windows were shielded by heavy blinds, and Mac would never have guessed it was a bar. You definitely had to be in the know to come here.
Ginger pushed open the door and Mac followed him in. It was not quite what he expected, but then bars in Kabul never were. Maybe he’d made the mistake of imagining what a bar called the Jungle Bar would be like back home – fake vegetation and plastic snakes, with brightly coloured tropical cocktails. But there was nothing bright or tropical inside this Jungle Bar.
The interior was dark, with drifting banks of smoke almost obscuring the dim lights. Beneath the acrid stench of cigarettes and ashtrays, Mac could smell sweat and just a whiff of hashish. When it came to décor, there wasn’t any to speak of. A tiled floor, Formica table-tops, plain walls painted a dull red. There was a handful of punters – all westerners, mostly middle-aged men with weather-beaten faces, nursing beers or whisky, or both. Engineering or energy contractors. On one table, the drinkers were younger, with longer hair and trendier clothes. Sure to be NGO workers – they all had beer, and no whisky chasers.
The barman was tall and blond, and although easily into his fifties, he was wearing a stained wife beater, shorts and flip-flops. His arms sported blurry naval tattoos – hearts and anchors, and a ship in full sail.
‘What can I get you guys?’ he said. The Australian accent came as no surprise, given the flip-flops.
‘Couple of beers,’ said Ginger.
Mac looked around. There didn’t seem to be any squaddies in, but then he spotted a table just round the end of the bar. Loud English accents and short haircuts – they were definitely soldiers, despite being out in civvies. And there was Dixon, sitting with his back to them.
As Ginger carried their drinks to a nearby table, Mac went over to the soldiers.
‘Sergeant Dixon, got a minute?’
A shadow of suspicion crossed Dixon’s features, but then he nodded. ‘Okay.’
Mac gestured with his head. ‘Sit with us.’
Dixon came over to their table. After a couple of curious glances, his companions got back to their banter as one of them got up to get another round.
‘Make mine a whisky sour,’ called Dixon as the man passed. ‘How can I help you?’
His cheeks were flushed and his eyes a little glassy. Mac reckoned he must have been in here some time already.
‘I was just wondering where you were last Thursday evening?’ said Mac.
Dixon polished off the remains of the beer he’d brought to the table with him.
‘Thursday night?’ said Dixon, feigning thought. ‘In my room probably… or maybe playing pool with a couple of the guys.’
‘Playing pool where?’
‘In camp.’
‘That’s odd,’ said Mac, feigning surprise. ‘Because the log in the gatehouse shows you as being signed out. From eight twenty till gone midnight.’
‘Thursday? You sure?’
‘That’s what it says. Where were you?’
There was long pause and Dixon stared longingly towards the bar. Then he looked back at Mac.
‘Ah, Thursday. You’re right. I was out.’
Mac raised an eyebrow.
‘Me and the lads, I think we were here. Wanted to let off a bit of steam. Sink a few pints. You know how it is.’
Mac knew, but acted like he didn’t.
‘The lads, eh? Which lads would they be?’
‘Benj… Sutton… Tarzan – guys from the troop.’ Dixon nodded across towards the table he’d been at.
‘Oh, I see.’ He paused. ‘I can go back and check the log, but I don’t remember that you were signed out as part of a group. Maybe I’m wrong.’
‘I met them here. They went out earlier than me.’
‘Is that so?’
Dixon nodded.
‘Captain Harvey was also signed out that evening.’
The surprise on Dixon’s face looked entirely genuine. So he hadn’t been with Harvey. Then who had she been out with?
‘I wasn’t with her. That bitch doesn’t even give me the time of day anymore.’ Which was virtually an admittance that there’d been something between them.
‘So if she wasn’t seeing you, who was she seeing?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ He looked away and muttered something that sounded like, ‘Regimental bike.’
Ginger leant forwards, bringing his face close to Dixon’s.
‘Listen, soldier. If you know anything about what went on that evening – with Marshall or with Harvey – you need to come clean. Were you and Marshall fighting over her?’
Dixon blanched, shaking his head. ‘No way.’
Mac believed him. A fight over a woman might end in a punch up, and a punch up could go wrong if someone fell and hit their head, but slitting another soldier’s throat over a woman? No, that wasn’t going to happen. Ginger was barking up the wrong tree. But it wouldn’t do any harm to apply a little extra pressure, see what they could shake out of the tree.
‘My understanding was that you and her were in a relationship.’
Dixon’s cheeks went a shade darker. At least he had the decency to blush.
‘It was nothing.’
‘Enough to make her feel the need to change troops.’
‘Look, there was a rumour doing the rounds. It was baseless, but it made life uncomfortable for Harvey, so Colonel Tomlinson agreed with her that a swap would be better for the men.’
‘That’s all there was to it?’
‘That’s all.’ Dixon’s voice was sharp. He was losing his temper, and the alcohol wasn’t helping.
‘Did she in fact have something going on with Davie Marshall?’
Dixon looked relieved that the spotlight was being turned on somebody else.
‘Both of them were signed out on Thursday night,’ said Ginger. ‘Got any idea where they were?’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ His tone was still hostile. ‘But I doubt she was with Marshall. You’re on the wrong track there.’
‘Meaning what?’
