The Iago Factor

By TONY NASH

DI John Hunter is back again and faced with one of his hated 'Thursday' murders: the partly decomposed body of a young girl dressed in authentic looking police uniform, fished out of the Thames at Staines. He knows that with no scene of crime, and any clues lost due to water and other damage, he is on a hiding to nothing, but that death has to go onto the back burner while he investigates the murder of a senior police officer, Commander Freddie Sloane, who headed up Vice.

It gradually becomes obvious that someone out there is determined to destroy John's marriage, using false evidence of both his and Jane's apparent infidelities and Jane's involvement in Freddie Sloane's murder. Her pistol, kept in their personal safe, was used to kill the Commander, and other equally damning evidence piles up against her, leading to her arrest on what appears to be a slam-dunk affair.

John is taken off the case, but continues investigating, receiving death threats from the Russian mafia along the way.

One of his suspects is Freddie Sloane's eldest daughter, and she is involved with a woman who runs a home for battered women. John is surprised to find one of his old loves, Maria, who is a technical wizard, in charge, and while there also sees a young Russian girl who is hiding from the mob.

Believing that some of the answers might be found there he arranges to have a colleague inserted undercover into the home.

He enlists the aid of his old friend Paddy and has him use his intercept techniques to eavesdrop on the leading players, and he learns that the mafia are about to raid the home to take back their 'possession': the young girl John saw there.

He and Paddy race there but arrive too late; the girl has gone and Maria has been killed.

The pieces come together and he locates the killer, but when he learns the facts he wants to 'look the other way', as he has done more than once before.

His detective partner will not agree and he is unable to do so, which results in the murderer's suicide, but John has been told enough to realise that both murders are related, and for Jane to be released.

With both cases closed, he attends Freddie Sloane's funeral, where he finds out that he has been a puppet, played throughout like an old, worn out one-string fiddle.

It is something he will never share with anyone, not even Jane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TONY NASH
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393439929

TONY NASH

Tony Nash is the author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels. He began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

Book preview

Other works by this author:

THE TONY DYCE/NORFOLK THRILLERS:

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Back Burner

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High ‘C’

Murder on Tiptoes

Bled and Breakfast

THE JOHN HUNTER/MET. COP THRILLERS:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Most Unkindest Cut

The Iago Factor

Blockbuster

Bloodlines

Beyond Another Curtain

HISTORICAL NOVELS – THE NORFOLK TRILOGY:

A Handful of Destiny

A Handful of Salt

A Handful of Courage (WWI EPIC)

No Tears For Tomorrow  WWII EPIC)

THE HARRY PAGE THRILLERS:

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

So Dark, The Spiral

THE NORWEGIAN SERIES

LOOT

CNUT – Past Present

CNUT – The Isiaih Prophesies

CNUT – Paid in Spades

CNUT – The Sin Debt

CNUT – They Tumble Headlong

CNUT – Night Prowler

CNUT -  Cry Wolf

CNUT -  When The Pie Was Opened

CNUT – The Bottom of the Pot

CNUT -  Mind Games

CNUT -  Nemesis

CNUT -  Cut and Come Again

OTHER NOVELS:

The Devil Deals Death 

The Makepeace Manifesto

Panic

The Last Laugh

The Sinister Side of the Moon

Hell and High Water

Hardrada’s Hoard

‘Y’ OH ‘Y’

The Thursday Syndrome

"Good name in man and woman, dear My Lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their soul,

Who steals my purse steals trash, ‘tis nothing

...But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed"

(‘Othello’ Act 3 1602)

Chapter One

Mondays? Naw! Thursday is my hate day – the day for punctures, breakages and bills, and for some weird reason the day I find the kookiest deaths.

Take the well dressed woman we found at her dining table, dead as last week’s mutton, but without a mark on her, lustrous shoulder length hair looking like she’d just come back from the stylist, freshly painted nails, perfect makeup, with a half eaten meal in front of her and a mouthful of salmon en croute and asparagus.

Even old Aggie Christie wouldn’t try to fool you with that one – poison - plain as that zit on the end of your nose that you just can’t get rid of, right?

Wrong!

Believe it or not she’d been drowned, and not only drowned, but in seawater that forensics narrowed down to an area on the Cornish coast near Falmouth. You had to hand it to him – that murderer was an artist. Tracey Emin, eat your heart out - he’d have taken first prize at the Tate any day.

Or the guy who’d apparently died of a heart attack while taking his ease sunbathing on the beach, towel laid out neatly beneath him and skin well impregnated with factor fifty, except that he’d been emasculated not long pre-mortem and what was left of his testes was found in his stomach, partly digested, having been eaten at least half a day before his death. And no, there was no gravy.

Did he fall or was he pushed? That was the big question, and the answer – a real corker - was a long time coming and was weirder still.

Then we had the alien masquerading as a senior cabinet minister – or was it the other way round?

Those had all been Thursday humdingers, and I could feel it in my water - this one was another that would qualify for the hate category: a petite female, dressed in authentic looking police uniform, but with no numbers or badges of rank, swimming like a brick in the Thames half a mile downriver from the railway bridge at Staines. With the damage to the face it was difficult to be sure, but to my mind she didn’t look old enough to be in the Force.

Glancing at Jane to make sure she wasn’t looking I rubbed my right ear. I’d always in the past made a surreptitious little sign of the cross with my right hand when coming across a corpse, but she’d noticed, and ribbed me for doing it, and I’d changed my way of warding off the evil eye since the last time. It was my only outward sign of OCD, and a relic of the two years spent with my third foster mother, a fire-and-brimstone Christian, who believed that all little boys were vessels filled to the brim with evil and needed it beaten out of them daily with a big stick. The local clergy had lauded her to the heavens and recommended her highly as a foster mother. How times change. The physical scars had healed, but the mental ones remained. None of my other working partners had ever noticed it, or if they had, had ignored it. Detectives were no different from anyone else: we all had our foibles and superstitions – probably more than most, with what we had to witness sometimes. I guessed that Jane, being my wife as well as my work partner, thought she had carte blanche to take the piss.

She was grinning when she asked, ‘Does your ear itch, darling?’

I might have known I was fooling myself - she didn’t miss a trick - sharp as a tack, and it was just one of the many reasons I loved her so much, along with gorgeous, young, funny, sexy, terrific – you name it.

‘Mmm.’ It was noncommittal enough, I thought, but I’d have to go back to using the cross, and do it inside my jacket, as if scratching myself, or maybe a little one in my pocket. On second thoughts, not that – it would look too much as if I were playing with myself. Whatever - not doing it was not an option – that was the trouble with OCD – you knew what you were doing, but couldn’t stop yourself, no matter what. I’d read reams about it: there were people who checked that taps were turned off or locks locked half a dozen times, then after walking off would go back and check again. I should have explained the problem to her long ago - she would have understood, I knew, but I just couldn’t bring myself to show the weakness: a hard nut old detective with a little boy’s problem. Funnily enough I knew deep down that she would only love me the more for admitting to it, but it was a non-starter - I’d covered it up for far too long. At least she hadn’t yet noticed how I always turned my socks inside out down to the toes before pulling them on, to check for earwigs. Christ Almighty, a man’s got to have some secrets. Perhaps I should show her that she had her odd little quirks too. I’d never had a go at her for the way she always squeezed out too much toothpaste, and then pushed it down into the bristle with her tongue, so that it didn’t fly everywhere when she switched on the electric toothbrush. And, like most women, she squeezed the middle of the tube all the time, instead of the bottom, so that when the tube was half used up, you couldn’t get any out of the top. I guessed in her rich daddy’s household they didn’t have to watch how much they used, and would throw the tube away at that point. Us kids had just a tiny spot measured out for us.

I forced my mind back to the problem in hand.

I knew we’d have heard about it, had a female officer gone missing, but protocol had to be observed - I rang in to the office for a nationwide check, before turning back to assess the scene for the report.

After closely watching a rod that had not so much as twitched for four solid hours, the pike fisherman who’d caught her had, as any angler knows is par for the course, a long awaited cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other when he got the tremendous bite. It was Sod’s Law every time. Again, as always happens, both were flung to the ground in his excitement as he grabbed the rod, but at that point, the normal scenario of finding nothing on the other end of the line changed, and reeling in what he fondly hoped was going to be a record, he must have had the most traumatic experience of his young life. What surprised me was that having pulled her in to the bank, obviously in a state of severe shock, he’d had the presence of mind to wind his line round his rod rest before chucking the rod down, leaving the grisly catch floating near the surface.

The girl’s corpse was face up, what was left of it, and his whole herring bait, still on the hook, was hanging on the lapel of her jacket like a unique corsage, giving her the appearance of a grisly, tardy guest at some ghostly fishmonger’s wedding.

The two uniforms who’d answered the call stood a little way back from the riverbank, where I could see two lots of yellow gunge seeping into the grass. One, I knew, would have been from the fisherman, standing now a good twenty yards away down the bank, his head turned determinedly away from the scene. The other witness who had lost his breakfast was, without doubt, the young copper. He looked no more than sixteen, with his baby blue eyes and corn-blond wavy hair. In fact the stupid thought went through my mind that he would have made a good partner for the corpse. He’d taken his hat off and was sweating badly, although the morning was cold and damp with a strong wind – obviously still feeling sick. I guessed it was his first year in the Force, and probably his first dead body. A shame for him that it had to be one that was decomposing. What had probably got to him were the empty eye sockets.

I’d had my share of stinking corpses – in fact I often reckoned Someone Up There arranged it so that I got half of everyone else’s as well. He’d been unlucky - most cops started with nice fresh bodies and worked their way up to the nasties, but looking on the bright side, it would all be downhill for him from now on.

The knowing, rheumy eyes of his aged fellow officer, who had about as much spare flesh on him as a skeleton with a season ticket to Weightwatchers, told me that he, like me, had seen it all.

Jane squeezed my arm, leaned in close and whispered, ‘Aren’t you going to take her out of the water?’

I’d been considering just that ever since we’d arrived five minutes earlier. The normal route would have been to call in Ken Bryson and his team of SOCOs, but with this one, wherever the scene of crime might have been, it was most definitely not here. The pathologist, Janet Keller, was on her way, and I was just covering my arse in waiting for her. Protocol again.

‘Janet will be here shortly. Let’s wait until she arrives.’

I saw the cloud come over Jane’s face. For some reason she felt insecure whenever I came face to face with Janet. Right from the start, wanting no secrets between us, I’d made no bones about telling her of our long-finished affair, and that Janet still carried a flaming torch for me. I’d told her dozens of times that any feelings I’d had for Janet were long since dead. In fact I had never loved her, nor once told her I loved her – not even in the heat of lovemaking. I liked her well enough, sure - she was good company and she was a great looking, highly intelligent woman: five ten, a svelte, sexy figure, with long blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes. Even better, she had good taste: she liked my music. The sex was something else too: she took longer to climax than any other woman I’d ever known and when she did finally make it she let the whole world know about it - in spades! I’d often felt like fitting her with a silencer. When we began the affair I’d just divorced Anita, my first wife, and was only looking to get laid, with no strings attached. Sadly, and unbelievably, Janet had fallen hard for my ugly mug, and had not only never got over it, but still insisted on pushing it whenever she had the chance. I knew she was not even dating. I could never understand what women saw in me. Whenever I looked in the mirror, I saw a visage that looked like a ploughed field you might just possibly want to plant potatoes in. Rugged and craggy maybe, handsome I definitely was not, and figure wise I was only average height and more than average weight. Not exactly fat, but well over forty. It had to be my electric personality that attracted them.

I’d well understood and made allowance for Jane’s insecurity during the seven months following our wedding when she could not make love, but now the regular daily sex was great, and she had a permanently satisfied husband who loved her to bits, and would never look at another woman. There was no need to feel insecure. Funnily enough, it was only with Janet that it happened, and the only thing I could put it down to was Janet’s outward similarity to Jane in everything but facial attributes and age: Janet was nine years older. Height, weight, hair and eye colouring, figure and deportment were almost identical, although their personal characters were totally different. With others of my ex-lovers whom Jane knew about, like DI Annie Green, who often kidded me openly about my sexual habits, she was fine, and even joined in the banter. Women! I’ll never understand them.

A brand new white Audi A4 I didn’t recognise drew up behind my car and Janet got out and sashayed across the broad expanse of grass down to where we stood. The way she moved I reckoned she’d been watching those models in the TV adverts: it was new for her.

Avoiding her glance I asked, ‘Won the lottery?’

In my quarter vision I saw her shake her head in that trademark gesture of hers, her golden locks flicking back and forth sexily, her tongue caressing her top lip before speaking, ‘I wish! I had an endowment reach maturity and thought I’d treat myself. Anyway, you have a new car too, I see.’

‘Hardly new.’ The top-of-the-range Laurin & Klement Skoda Octavia that I’d bought well below book price had just passed its fifth birthday, but had been owned by a ninety-three-year-old lady, who had decided to give up driving. During those five years she had managed to put the magnificent total of three thousand two hundred miles on the clock. I guess it was pretty new at that.

Jane tried a bit of oneupwomanship, taking my arm possessively, ‘He wrote his old Mondeo off riding to my rescue. My white knight.’

Janet saw a way back. She gushed, ‘And he loved that old car. I enjoyed all my rides in it.’

Ouch, I thought – please desist. I remembered some of those ‘rides’. They were enough to make a monkey grin, but I managed somehow to keep deadpan.

Jane’s face showed that the jibe had hit home. She changed the subject, ‘Your boys not with you?’

‘They should be on their way. I’ve just sent them an email. They’re getting married next week, and the clergyman who’s marrying them wanted to clear up a few details. I gave them a couple of hours off.

Graham and Alastair, her two dieners, had been a couple for over five years. It made sense, I guessed, in the modern fashion, if you were that way inclined. They were nice guys, and didn’t often push their homosexuality, except to make themselves the butt of a joke.

‘We’ve waited for you before removing the corpse from the water. Do you want it done now?’

She nodded, ‘I don’t see any reason why not. There’s nothing to be gained by leaving her there. All the work on her will be done back in the lab.’

I beckoned the two uniforms over, ‘Okay, officers. Get her out of the water, please.’

I could see they’d had no idea they would have to carry out that duty, and the older one of the pair, obviously on the verge of retirement, opened his mouth and seemed about to refuse, his face like thunder, then thought better of it. He sat down on the bank and slid his legs into the water.

The youngster carefully removed his shoes and socks and rolled his trouser legs up above the knees before joining him.

I saw the old man’s smirk and had to hide a grin myself. I knew which of them would be given the rest of the morning off to go home and change. No doubt his youthful partner would learn in the fullness of time.

They pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled, the wet uniform on the corpse and the decaying flesh making the job difficult, until they had her on the bank.

Junior had kept his eyes closed most of the time, his face turning that fetching shade of yellow-green that told me that last night’s dinner was likely to follow his breakfast in short order.

When they clambered out I told them, ‘That’s it then. You can resume your normal duties – we’ll take over now.’

Neither said a word and both looked mighty pissed off. What did they expect – a handout? As they walked off, the youngster holding his socks and shoes in his hand, I heard angry, unintelligible muttering from the oldster, which made me grin. I felt like telling them they shouldn’t have joined if they couldn’t take a joke. It’s childish, I know, but I get a perverse pleasure from upsetting people whose attitude has been less than agreeable.

I realised Jane was watching me, one eyebrow raised, doing her you-rotten-bastard headshake, and frowning in disapproval. How well she knew me.

She turned to Janet and asked, ‘How long do you think she’s been in the water?’

‘Ignoring what the American signal crayfish and eels have done to her I’d say a month at least, possibly a bit longer. I can give you a more accurate time scale when I’ve done the post.’

I asked, ‘When are you likely to do it?’

‘This afternoon, probably. I have a suicide already prepped that I was going to start on as soon as the boys returned, and I’d like to