He zipped up and called his partner. The two young men stared at the limb then peered into the interior. The remainder of the corpse lay on its back: a middle-aged white man, eyes open, staring sightlessly upwards in death. The partner called it in to their local precinct station. After that, the usual machine went into operation.
After ascertaining that life was extinct the street cops left the body alone. It was a matter for the detective branch and the medical examiner. Awaiting their arrival, the patrolmen scouted the immediate area and, in a nearby warehouse, rank and empty apart from scattered trash, one found ropes tied to some heating pipes. It looked as if – and the ME would confirm this from rope burns on the wrists – the victim had been tied to the pipes, apparently to take a beating.
An unmarked sedan arrived, carefully picking its way down an alley strewn with debris. Two detectives got out to join the uniforms and have a look at the body. A crime team came to fence off the dumpster and the surrounding area with tape. Passers-by would be forbidden from entering, but there were none. The thugs who had done this had chosen well.
Next came the ME himself. He took very little time to pronounce death, presumably murder, and permit the removal of the body. His team hauled it out of the dumpster and on to a stretcher, then to their van, and thence to the morgue. By this point the ME had been able to establish only that the body was fully clothed but had been stripped of valuables. There were pinch marks either side of the nose, but no eyeglasses. These were later found near the ropes in the warehouse. So, also, was a discarded handkerchief.
There was the mark of a signet ring on one finger, but no ring. All pockets were empty. No billfold and no identification. A more thorough examination would have to be done at the morgue.
It was there that the examiner, during the removal of the cadaver’s clothes, noticed two more oddities. There was a ring around the left wrist where a watch would have been, but no watch. Even stranger, the maker’s tags on the clothing indicated that none of it was American. The clothes looked to be British. The ME’s heart sank. A dead tourist, snatched and murdered in a slum, was bad news. He called down a senior detective.
For the rest, he could establish cause of death. It was heart failure. The victim had been punched hard in the face. The blow had broken his nose and there was congealed blood in the nostrils and around the mouth. He had also been punched in the solar plexus. It was clear, with the chest cavity open, that the victim had had a weak heart, although he might not have been aware of this, and the trauma to which he had been subjected – the terror, the pain, the beating – had provoked cardiac arrest. The detective from upstairs joined him.
He too examined the clothing labels. Jermyn Street. Was that not in London? The victim was middle-aged. A tad overweight, but not obese. Soft hands. He ordered the face to be cleaned up and photographed. And fingerprints taken, of course, plus a DNA sample. If he was a Britisher and a recent arrival, he must have come through immigration control, probably at Kennedy Airport.
What Detective Sean Devlin wanted was a name. Did the dead man have a residence in the city? Was he staying at an uptown hotel? With friends? In addition to the British clothes, there were other oddities. This had not been a street mugging gone wrong. Muggers pounced, struck, incapacitated, robbed and ran. This man must have been snatched from miles away, brought to this slum, tied to metal pipes and beaten. Why? Punishment? Information?
When he had the pictures Detective Devlin ran them to three state agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known simply as ICE; the omnipresent Department of Homeland Security; and, of course, the Bureau, the FBI. It took a day, and it was facial-recognition technology that clinched it. In the Brownsville precinct house to which Detective Devlin was attached, it suddenly rained FBI. The dead man was a new arrival as a resident and was under the protection of the Bureau. This was going to be embarrassing. But not for Detective Devlin. It went way upstairs to the FBI offices in New York.
Their records showed that Mr Harold Jennings had been granted permission to move to and settle in New York City and that the necessary and copious paperwork had been fast-tracked by the Bureau as a favour to the British Prime Minister, via Scotland Yard. The Yard had to be informed, with apologies.
Over in London, a man called Sir Adrian Weston was also informed. He motored out to Chandler’s Court and sadly relayed the information to Mrs Sue Jennings and her two sons. The younger one, Marcus, shed tears; the older one noted the death of his father as a fact, along with many others that he stored.
Sue Jennings asked if the body of her husband could be repatriated for burial in England. This was promised. The British consulate in New York was charged to liaise with the FBI so that this would happen as soon as the cadaver could be released. She mentioned a watch that she would like returned. It had sentimental value.
She explained it was a Rolex Oyster in gold. She had presented it to her husband on their tenth wedding anniversary and it was inscribed. On the reverse were the words ‘To Harold, with love from Sue, on our tenth anniversary’.
New York replied that there was no watch but the hunt for the killers was ongoing and the New York Police Department would put out a BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for a gold Rolex inscribed in that manner. There was a list that went regularly to pawnbrokers and jewellery shops, and the BOLO went on it but yielded nothing.
Sir Adrian was troubled by the New York incident. It was too coincidental. If Moscow had made a connection between the disaster of the Admiral Nakhimov and the United Kingdom, they had done so incredibly fast – that was worrying. He called the FBI in New York and asked to speak with the detective who had been assigned to the case.
With the Bureau’s help, he had a long talk with Detective Devlin in Brooklyn, who was as helpful as he could be, which was not much. And there, for a week, the trail died.
On the day that the body found in the New York dumpster was identified as Harold Jennings, eight of the most powerful oceangoing tugs in the West assembled in the Strait of Dover and were hooked up to the stranded battlecruiser. Steel cables the thickness of a man’s waist snaked from their sterns to the immobile leviathan. At the height of the spring tide they hauled together. The two massive pr
opellers of the Nakhimov churned up tons of fine sand beneath her stern. Inch by inch, then foot by foot, then yard by yard, she slipped backwards off the Goodwins into deep water.
For ten days, the Admiral Nakhimov had been a tourist attraction. Enterprising owners of launches up and down the Kent coast had run trips out into that patch of safe water between the Goodwins and the shore known as the Downs. Visitors took millions of photos, usually of themselves standing, beaming, with the battlecruiser in the background.
Once she was free, the eight tugs unhitched and scattered to their bases; the Russians set off for the Baltic and the Dutch and French who had been summoned to help to their respective ports. The Nakhimov, however, did not get far in her journey to the Russian Far East. She needed a hull examination. Once under way again, she turned north, back towards Sevmash, in perfect working order. For the Kent locals, the spectacle was over. That was not the view of the Kremlin.
As so often with police inquiries, the break, when it came, was a fluke. A mugger was arrested and he was wearing an inscribed gold Rolex watch. And he was Russian.
There are 600,000 Russians in New York City, and half of them live and work in the zone known as Brighton Beach. This is a community in the southern section of the borough of Brooklyn, running along the shore of the Coney Island peninsula. It contains a vigorous and violent crime world made up of several known gangs. The NYPD has a large team of Russian-speaking officers for whom Brighton Beach and its gangs are the sole concern.
The arrested man was called Viktor Ulyanov, and he was making it plain he intended to say nothing. He was clearly a gang-fringe lowlife and extremely stupid.
He had tried a solo mugging in leafy Queens, miles from home, selecting a respectable-looking executive type walking down the street where he lived. But it had not been Viktor’s day. The middle-aged businessman had boxed at light-heavyweight for the USA in the Atlanta Olympics and his right fist was still an impressive assemblage of muscle and bone.
Before Ulyanov could use his knife his target’s fist had made acquaintance with his jaw and he had woken up on the sidewalk to find several blue-clad legs around him. Down at the station house he was an object of mockery and lapsed into sullen misery. And all his possessions were confiscated before he went into his cell.
On an upper level a bright young recruit looked at the watch and recalled a BOLO that had gone out a week earlier that mentioned an inscribed gold watch belonging to a dead Brit. He raised the matter with his sergeant and was duly praised for his sharp wits. Then the detectives took over and alerted the FBI.
Mrs Sue Jennings was shown a picture of the watch as she returned to Chandler’s Court from her late husband’s funeral at a nearby church and confirmed it had been his. Over in New York, Ulyanov was informed that the charge against him was being raised from street assault to murder in the first.
He recalled perfectly clearly what had happened. He had been recruited into the gang assigned to undertake the snatch of the British accountant only at the last minute because a smarter gang member had fallen out. There had been five of them, and it was a contract job. They had had no idea they had been contracted by a Russian agent working for the SVR in Moscow.
The job was to go to an apartment in Queens, ring the bell and, when it was answered by the sole tenant of the flat, march him at gunpoint out to the sidewalk and into their van. This duly happened, with the terrified prisoner doing exactly what he was told. It had been dark, close to midnight, and no one had noticed a thing.