The Lost

Chapter 32

Jonah didn’t dare risk going back to his flat after he’d left Wilkes. Now he’d pointed Fletcher towards Eliana Salim it was only a matter of time before her sister was identified, and when that happened he’d have awkward questions to answer. The DI would want to know how he knew about Gavin’s old case, and this time he wouldn’t be fobbed off. Jonah would have to provide answers at some point, but he couldn’t afford to be tied up by a police interview today. However bad it looked, he needed to avoid Fletcher until this was over. After that...

After that, it didn’t matter.

It left him with nowhere to go. Chrissie and her husband would phone him when they’d gathered the money together, or as much of it as they could, and Wilkes didn’t want Jonah with him when he bought the gun. At his insistence, they’d agreed to meet at half past eleven that night on the waste ground at Slaughter Quay. Jonah would have preferred to pick Wilkes up first in the rented Volvo. Stokes had said he should deliver the money alone, so having two cars showing up was a risk.

But only if Stokes saw them. If he went to the quayside by boat like last time, then he wouldn’t know. And even if he didn’t, the chances were that by then he’d already be waiting for Jonah at the warehouse, Wilkes argued. He could follow behind Jonah, staying out of sight but ready to rush to help or call for back-up if it was needed.

Jonah didn’t like it, but the ex-detective had been adamant. Apart from anything else, he couldn’t say how long it would take him to get the gun. If the buy took longer than anticipated it was better for Jonah to be waiting at the quayside than sitting outside Wilkes’s house.

‘What if you can’t make it there by twelve?’ Jonah had asked.

‘Then something’s gone tits up and we’re both fucked,’ he’d answered.

Jonah hated waiting. He could feel the nervous energy running in him like an over-revved engine. It was the same before an op, when the adrenaline was pumping and the imagination was free to think of all the things that could go wrong.

He needed something to occupy his mind.

The last of the light was fading outside as he parked on a quiet street to wait for Chrissie’s call. He’d bought a pre-packed sandwich and bottled water, and he took out his phone as he ate. A search for Daniel Kimani revealed notices on missing persons websites, which meant the police still hadn’t publicly confirmed the identification. There was a photograph showing a plump and smiling young man, cropped to cut out the other people from it, and in addition to the official sites, a Facebook page had been set up by Kimani’s friends and family. Jonah guessed that was how Daly had started the trail. He considered contacting them himself, but if they hadn’t been informed that a formal identification had been made, he didn’t want to be the one to break the news. Always assuming it had, he reminded himself. Neither Fletcher nor Bennet had confirmed it to him.

Regardless, chasing down information on Daniel Kimani would take more time and concentration than he could spare just then. Checking the time, he cleared the search from his phone and then typed in Anna Donari.

The spelling was a best guess, based on how Salim had pronounced the name. There were thousands of results, far too many to be of any use. Jonah added UK and tried again. That reduced the number of hits, but when nothing obvious jumped out he keyed in London as well. He didn’t even know if that was where Donari was from, but he had to try something. Even so, he was still dispirited at the unpromising list of results that filled the screen.

Then one caught his eye. He almost skipped past it at first, because it was a variant of the name: Ana, not Anna and Donauri rather than Donari. The first thing that caught his attention was the date. The entry was from ten years ago.

A week after Theo vanished.

It was a report from a local newspaper. A woman’s body found in an alley near Euston Station had been identified as Ana Donauri, a thirty-seven-year-old Georgian national. The cause of death wasn’t given, but the report said the body’s hands had both been cut off. Jonah frowned at that, but the piece didn’t elaborate. Retyping the name with the new spelling, he searched again. That yielded an earlier report in the same newspaper, from when the body had been discovered. But there were no more details than the later piece. It ended with the stock phrase, ‘Police are continuing with their enquiries.’