TURKISH DELIGHT Read online

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents in it

  are the work of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or act relating to any

  persons, living or dead, locations or

  events involving them, is entirely alleged

  or coincidental.

  Published by BSA Publishing 2021 who

  assert the right that no part of this

  publication may be reproduced, stored in

  a retrieval system or transmitted by any

  means without the prior permission of the

  publishers.

  Copyright @ B.L.Faulkner 2021 who

  asserts the moral right to be identified as

  the author of this work

  Proof read/editing by Zeldos

  Cover art by Orphan Print, Hereford

  Private eye BEN NEVIS and the GOLD DIGGER book 1.

  TURKISH DELIGHT

  ***********************

  26 years ago .

  The Juvenile Court in the Southwark Crown Court building was in session. The judge read the papers of the case before him and looked up at the boy standing in the dock with a policeman for company.

  ‘How old are you, Ben?’ he asked, taking off his reading glasses.

  ‘Sixteen, sir.’ The boy’s lawyer had told him to always address the Judge as sir. No bravado, no cheek – just respect. Then, maybe...?

  ‘Sixteen.’ The judge took a deep breath. ‘Not doing very well for sixteen, are you Ben.’ It was a statement.

  Did it require an answer? Ben wasn’t sure. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Two periods in a Young Offender Institution for car thefts, and a charge of assault remaining on your file.’ The judge paused for a moment or two. ‘Where is your father, Ben?’

  ‘Wormwood Scrubs, sir.’

  ‘And your elder brother?’

  ‘Brixton, sir.’

  ‘Ben, you worry me. I have read the reports from your school and from the psychiatrist and probation office. You are not a fool, Ben. Your academic achievements are very good. Your school praises you, as does the Army Cadet Force you belong to, and under normal circumstances you would undoubtedly make something of yourself and your life either in commerce or the military.’ Another pause. ‘But coming from the family that you do, the temptation to take another path – that of criminality – is a very strong one. So what do I do, Ben? Do I send you away into a six-foot square cell for a month or two in the hope you mend your ways?’

  Ben didn’t answer, but the reality of the situation was beginning to break in his mind.

  The judge beckoned the lawyer and the prosecutor to his bench and they spoke in hushed tones. Ben cast a sideways glance to the public gallery. The usual rubberneckers where there; some came every day, having nothing better to do – some even brought sandwiches. He locked eyes with his mother; she looked sad, and that made him feel bad. She had tried to steer him away from the family’s criminal trait, but it was difficult. It felt good to have things his mates didn’t have: the top of the range BMX, the latest games consoles and the latest games, an uncle with a box at the Arsenal, and most of all the attention of the local girls. It hadn’t struck him that none of that would be there in a six-foot cell.

  The lawyer and prosecutor went back to their desks. Ben’s lawyer gave him a smile.

  The judge thought for a while and then addressed Ben. ‘I am given to understand that your mother has asked for total parental control, and I am minded to give you one last chance, Ben. And I mean that – this is your last chance to knuckle down and make something of yourself. You will be required to accept a curfew – that means that you must be at home between the hours of six in the evening and seven in the morning. You will sign in at school on every school day and sign out when you leave, but these restrictions will be eased at weekends. But listen to me, Ben – your mother has underwritten these conditions. If you break them, she will be in very serious trouble. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Good. The current charge will stay on the file and if you break the conditions it will be pressed forward. You may go, Ben.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘One more thing, Ben.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I never want to see you in this courtroom again, understand?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Mum had already got plans for me. Three weeks later I was having a medical for the Army, got accepted, and was on my way into a career that would end up with me being a killer! Not sure that was what the judge had in mind.

  *****************************

  CHAPTER 1.

  PRESENT DAY

  I felt like I had wandered into the pages of an Ed McBain novel. The lady sitting in the chair the other side of my office desk was very attractive – very, very attractive. She knew she was very attractive too; she kept crossing and uncrossing her legs – good legs, long slim legs. Her smile was a wide smile that had no doubt launched a thousand flutters in male hearts. Mid-thirties, slim, poised, with dark hair in a forties-style bob, and her tight two-piece suit shouted money and power as much as the Gucci handbag hanging on her shoulder. The accent was Mediteranean and the slightly dark skin put her firmly in that area.

  ‘It’s not much of an office, Mr Nevis, pretty minimal,’ she noted as she cast her blue eyes around.

  She was right too, but who needs an expensive office when you’re hardly ever there? I’ve got a top floor two-room office plus WC in a modern block in the Borough High Street, London Bridge end. I’d paid extra for a double parking space in the underground car park - one for me, and one for the Gold Digger. But more of the Gold Digger later. The furniture in the office is bespoke – that’s the modern word for unsold ex-auction lots from the local saleroom, off loaded cheap to make room for the next lot. It had been remarked more than once that coming into my office was a bit like going back in time to the fifties. It suits me.

  ‘I don’t spend a lot of my time in here,’ I countered the lady’s remark whilst picking up the business card she had put in front of me when she had entered, unannounced and without an appointment. ‘So what can I do for you... Eve Rambart?’

  ‘I would like you to find my husband. I will pay you a million pounds.’

  ‘You will, a million pounds?’ Was she for real? Seeing that my usual timeframe for finding a missing person is about four days, it sounded a good deal – a ridiculously good deal. Ten years in the N14 branch of the SAS, and another ten in the Met’s Organised Crime Squad when I got too old for N14 had built me a good range of contacts in both; and as most of the information on people that a private eye needs is on one or other of those organisations’ databases, I could usually find whatever I needed pretty quickly. So, for a million quid this sounded a very good deal.

  ‘Yes, I would like you to find him and then kill him.’

  Now that didn’t sound so good a deal. Okay, yes, I had killed people in the line of duty, and since I left the services and had gone private a couple more – usually a gangland hit for a mobster who didn’t want it traced back to him. I do a good job, the body is never found – no body means no trail and no evidence. That’s the sort of care I take. You can pay a lot less for a couple of Glaswegian knobheads on scooters with two rented pistols, but there’s no guarantee of a clean kill and there’s always a mess for the police to clear up that’s full of clues. Rented guns are okay, but once one falls into the hands of the police and forensics analyse it against their data on bullets recovered from various killings and woundings the walls can come tumbling down pretty quickly if the renter gets pulled in and sees a plea deal as a better option than life inside and starts to talk about his clients. My current rat
e for a hit is one hundred grand, and the only people who know I carry out that service are very few and far between indeed. Was this lady for real? Was somebody playing a game, a joke? Her name wasn’t ringing any bells in my head. If it was a gangland hit she was proposing then she was probably representing somebody else; and with so many Eastern European gangsters setting up bases in the UK recently it was quite possible and after all I thought I’d detected an accent to her voice. She was smiling at me – expecting what, to be thrown out or an immediate acceptance of the job?

  ‘I’m not a hit man, Mrs Rambart. I’m a private detective.’ I used the honorific Mrs as you couldn’t not notice the wedding ring with a diamond big enough to plays bowls with on her left-hand finger.

  ‘I know exactly what you are, Mr Nevis. If I wasn’t confident that this sort of work was within your...’ she searched for the right word, ‘…portfolio, I wouldn’t be here. You come highly recommended.’

  ‘I do? Who by?’

  ‘Jameson Reynolds.’

  That was a surprise. Jameson Reynolds was indeed a client of mine, and a very good one at that: an ex-gangster who had taken his ill-gotten gains and used them to progress into being a city financier and hedge fund director, operating in stocks and shares and international money movement. It’s quite common for a lot of the big boys in crime to try and legitimise their businesses in the field of commerce; few succeed, but Reynolds has. I handle his security and do monthly bug sweeps of his trading floor and offices in the city. He is paranoid that his competitors are spying on him, trying to find out his money trades on Forex or what stocks he’s buying and then piggyback on them. At least that’s what he tells me, but personally I think he’s terrified of one of his old adversaries from his criminal days taking him out with a hidden bomb – otherwise why would he insist we sweep for bugs and explosives? The team I hire to do the sweeps have never found a bug in six years, but now and again I take one into his office and tell him we found it. Well on a retainer of five grand a month, wouldn’t you?

  So anyway, I digress… Jameson Reynolds knows this lady, does he? I wonder in what capacity he knows her? She read my thoughts.

  ‘No, we are not having an affair, Mr Nevis. Jameson is my financial investment advisor.’ Her smile turned into a small laugh. ‘I like the older man, Mr Nevis, but Jameson isn’t my type. And nor are you,’ she added as an afterthought.

  I smiled back. ‘I never mix my social life with my business life,’ I countered, not sure whether to take umbrage that at forty-two she looked on me as an ‘older man’.

  She rose and slung the Gucci over her shoulder. ‘I will expect to hear from you in forty-eight hours if you will take the job, no contact if you won’t.’ She turned to leave and stopped at my office door, pointing to the rather discoloured lettering that had once been pristine and bright. ‘Is that really your name, Ben Nevis?’

  How many times had I been asked that, eh? ‘Yes, it really is.’

  ‘You are named after a mountain?’

  ‘No, I am named after a race horse. My surname is Nevis, my father had an interest in a business owned by a racehorse owner and got a tip to back a horse called Ben Nevis in the 1980 Grand National and won a fortune. He celebrated by naming me Ben.’

  She gave me a last smile. ‘I’ll expect a call.’ And she was gone, leaving behind a whiff of perfume in the air that probably cost more per bottle than my monthly rent.

  I studied her business card: not much information there, just the name Eve Rambart and a mobile number.

  A million pounds is a lot of money for a hit, and also a lot of time in prison if you get caught. I wouldn’t get caught – I work to a plan, a plan I always stick to. I’ve done some pretty illegal things in my time, all PIs do. Well, not all – some just do the usual ‘follow the wife and see who’s shagging her’ type work for divorce lawyers. Not my scene. I mainly offer protection work for celebs, keeping the fans and paparazzi at arm’s length, or I negotiate with some heavy crime boss for the return of a stolen piece of art on behalf of the insurance company. They’d rather pay a thief a couple of hundred thousand pounds to get it returned than a couple of million to the policy holder if it isn’t.

  But I’d never been offered a hit in such an open way. With crime bosses it usually comes from an intermediary of an intermediary of an intermediary, ten steps down the ladder from the boss who orders it so he can go to the funeral and shed crocodile tears as he plots to take over the deceased’s turf. I rang the Gold Digger.

  Alison Gold, nickname Gold Digger – I just call her Gold: five foot eight, late thirties, medium build, hair in a fringe to her neck – sometimes she’s blonde, sometimes brunette, sometimes redhead – with natural brown eyes that would change depending on what colour contact lenses she had in. Overall, Alison is a nice attractive-looking lady, but beneath the well-groomed exterior lays another Alison – the Alison who’s parents and siblings had been killed in their Ashkelad home by a rocket fired across the Palestinian border from Gaza into Israel by Hamas; the Alison who had refused to be fostered and formed a bad habit back in her teens of Gold Digging, hitting on wealthy men of a certain age and relieving them not of their sexual urges but of a good proportion of their wealth in cash or expensive gifts in order to live, which is where her nickname came from. She always targeted a married man with a reputation to lose or a ‘celeb name’, so calling in the police once you’d been duped by the Gold Digger wasn’t an option if you wanted to maintain your reputation or fan base; and especially not if the duped one had a wife who might not be very understanding to the situation. Alison had been conscripted into national service with the Israeli Defence Force and found she liked the life. It gave her security and the chance of revenge for her family loss. She was soon noticed as a bit special and moved into Mossad. She was an ideal fit, exactly what they and most elite military squads want, a person with no family ties and the ability to make a cool and measured assessment of a situation. That’s Alison.

  We go back to the Afghan war when the N14 unit I was attached to in 2011 went into Pakistan by Chinook to cover a USA special ops SEAL unit that been sent in to kill Osama Bin Laden and then had one of their choppers malfunction. Our emergency brief was to blow up the trapped chopper if it couldn’t get back and totally destroy Bin Laden’s compound – anything of use to an enemy had to be destroyed. We were low on manpower at that time with many operations against Al Qaeda going on and requested help from Mossad to assist in case the Pakistanis got wind of the operation and came to stop it. The Mossad unit we got was their Kidon unit which specialises in assassinations. Originally formed by Golda Meir in 1972 after the Munich Olympic’s Israeli athlete murders to track and kill every one of the PLO Black September group that had carried out those murders. By 1979 that mission had been accomplished and Kidon was reassigned to assassinate Iran nuclear scientists and top military generals of the Iran Revolutionary Guard; the latest one being Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, their top nuclear scientist killed by a machine gun mounted on a truck and operated via a satellite using facial recognition software. It’s a long way from a bullet in the head or a slit throat which were the kill options of choice in my active days.

  Anyway, everything went fine at the Bin Laden compound, the USA copter got off the ground and we all fled over the Pakistan border before they could react. At the debriefings Gold and I, as heads of our units, were debriefed together to make sure our stories matched, and then we went our separate ways. I went over the age limit for N14 and was seconded into the Met’s Organised Crime Squad, did a stint there and then moved into the private sector where I am now. Gold ended her association with Kidon as they only use you for three years, and went back to her elite Israeli military group Flotilla 13; finding that didn’t set the adrenalin alight after Kidon, she left and went into personal security in London with a nice sideline by resuming her gold-digging. She made one mistake: she targeted one of my top clients, and I quickly sussed her out and stepped in. We recognised each other and beca
me good friends and sort of business partners; she had skills in the cyber world of IT and the dark web, whilst I could present a pretty hard face to any of her victims who got nasty. As a reliable back-up, she’s second to none – I wouldn’t want anybody else.

  ‘Yeah,’ she answered my call – her mobile would show me as the caller. She was a lady of few words.

  ‘You busy?’

  ‘Waiting for a mark.’

  ‘I’m going to text you a name to do some digging on.’

  ‘Okay, why?’

  ‘She’s offered me a job.’

  ‘Take it. Rent to pay, food to buy – take it. How much?’

  ‘A million.’

  ‘A million pounds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is the victim?’

  ‘Her husband. How do you know it’s a hit job?’

  ‘A million quid? Bit over the top for a marital bust up, isn’t it? Bit over the top for a hit too.’

  ‘I thought that.’

  She laughed. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Nothing more to tell. Do some digging and come round the office tomorrow afternoon and I’ll fill in the gaps.’

  I texted Eve Rambart’s name to Gold and shut the phone. You never know who’s got a tap on your phone, so I never say more than I need to. When I’m on a job I use burners and dump them pretty regularly – costs me a fortune, but keeps me safe from hackers. The society and showbiz page journos of the tabloids and internet entertainment websites know I’m the number one call for celebs and high-flyers who stray over the line and need things kept quiet and covered up, so I’d be their top target for a phone hack. And despite the News of The World court cases, don’t think that has changed a thing – it hasn’t.

  ********************************

  ‘So what’s the job?’