[b]Fulham
1:49 PM[/b]

Etan Ben-David eyed up the mouldy apartment building with a grimace. From the outside it was not dissimilar to from own building in Brixton. The differences became clearer when he entered it. Where Etan’s housed mostly Carribbeans and Asians unable to find accommodation elsewhere, the building that Zinkman & Sons security guard Colin Craggs lived in mostly seemed to cater for alcoholics. Its gloomy corridors were lined with men with bulbous stomachs eyeing Ben-David suspiciously.

Craggs was the last of the security guards on Etan’s list. The first two had checked out. He’d visited them both at their homes and asked a long list of questions designed to confirm their whereabouts, any potential criminal associations they might have, but most importantly of all their character. Character mattered to Mr. Zinkman more than anything else.

One of Ben-David’s fists slammed against the door to Colin Cragg’s apartment. Dust rattled free from the doorframe. From inside the apartment Etan could hear footsteps approaching the door slowly. The peephole turned black as Colin pressed his eye against it.

“Who are you?”

“I’m an associate of Mr. Zinkman,” Ben-David said calmly.

“Oh yeah,” Craggs said as he opened the door with a frown. “Well if you haven’t noticed it’s the weekend, so whatever you’re here to talk about can wait until Tuesday.”

He was a tall man. Six foot three, pushing at least sixteen or seventeen stone, with arms that looked like granite – or at least had looked like granite once upon a time. Ex-military, Etan thought for a second, though one peek into Craggs’ filthy apartment banished that idea from his mind in an instant.

Ben-David stepped forward. “I’m afraid it cannot wait.”

Colin attempted to slam the door shut but one of Etan’s feet kept it jammed open. The two men struggled quietly for a few moments, the drunkards in the hallway watching on in bemusement, until finally Ben-David got the better of Cragg and pushed his way in.

“What the hell are you doing?” Colin shouted as he followed after Etan. “Zinkman or no Zinkman, you can’t just barge your way into my house.”

It wasn’t much of a house. His own domicile was Spartan. He needed very little in the way of creature comforts. The camps had seen to it that Ben-David never quite developed an appetite for food or drink, even less so for paintings or wall hangings. He knew what scarcity looked like – and what it was to be truly starving. But Craggs’ apartment was something altogether different than that. It was the filth that set Etan aback. It looked like someone had set a pack of wild hogs loose inside of it for weeks on end.

He gritted his teeth and turned to face Craggs. “I just want to ask you a few questions.”

In the openness of Colin’s living room, all six foot three inches of the security guard loomed larger than it had done through a crack in a doorway. His shadow crept towards Etan as he approached him. He stopped a few centimetres away from Ben-David and prodded him in the chest with a finger as long as a child’s forearm.

“And I told you that your questions can wait until Tuesday.”

“Call the police,” Ben-David said coolly.
 
“Pardon me?”

“You heard me,” Etan reiterated. This time he reached for Craggs’ phone and pressed it towards the security guard’s chest. “Call the police and tell them there’s an intruder in your home that’s refusing to leave.”

Craggs said nothing. The look on his face revealed everything that Etan needed to know about the man. He might not have been involved in the break-in at the Diamond Exchange, but there was something that wasn’t quite kosher about Colin and Etan intended to find out what it was. 

“Sit down.”

Ben-David set the telephone back down on the table and pulled a small notepad from one of his pockets. 

“Where were you last night, Mr. Craggs?”

“Same place I am every night,” Craggs grumbled from across the table. “Right here in my front room.”

“Can anyone corroborate that?”

Colin muttered a profanity under his breath and then gestured to the filth around him. “Does it look like I entertain often?”

Etan wrote the words “NO ALIBI” beneath Colin’s name in his notepad. He took a few moments to write down some other observations about Craggs: all along the lines of belligerent and uncooperative. Nervous, he added last, as he noticed that Colin’s knee was bouncing up and down beneath the table. 

Finally Craggs seemed to give in to the impatience. “What exactly am I being accused of here?”

“There was an incident at the Exchange last night – a break-in that resulted in the loss of some precious stones. One that could not happened without the assistance, tacit or otherwise, of a Zinkman & Sons employee.”

Ben-David’s eyes were trained on Craggs. There was nothing. He was no more or less nervous than he had been before Etan had told him. It irked him. There were enough pieces here to put the security guard in the frame for something but Ben-David still wasn’t sure how the pieces fit. Was Craggs driving the black car that fled the scene? There had to be something.

He repeated the information Colin had already given him in the hope that some tiny tell would show on the security guard’s face. “You are the only Zinkman & Sons employee without an alibi for last night.”

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” Craggs said with a mocking laugh. “Surely if I was in on it I would have gone out of my way to get one? I mean, it might not look like it from the state of this place, but I do have some friends. Why wouldn’t I get one of them to lie for me and say I was with them?”

Etan could not fault the security guard’s logic. It had been a desperate move on his part, maybe too desperate, he thought as it appeared Craggs too realised the weakness of Ben-David’s position. A self-satisfied grin appeared on Colin’s face.

There was a faint squeak from the corner of the room. Ben-David’s eyes shot in its direction. Cragg’s grin disappeared and a second, more intense wave of nervousness seemed to flood over him as he spotted Etan eyeing a stack of boxes.

“Is there something you aren’t telling me, Mr. Craggs?”

Ben-David stood up from his seat and started towards them. 

Colin leapt from his seat. “What are you doing? Get away from there.” 

It was too late. Etan weaved his way through the mess of discarded cans of beer and mice droppings towards the boxes. He popped one of them open and stared down at its contents. There were dozens and dozens of pictures. It took him a moment to divine the nature of the pictures but once he did he grimaced in shock. 

They were children. Some no older than five or six. Craggs was frozen to the spot as Etan knocked the top box over, spilling the pictures across Colin’s filthy floor, and tore open the next one. There was more of the same. Etan could feel his blood boiling as he made his way through the piles. He threw a handful of the pictures onto the ground and then made his way towards the door.

“Oi! Where are you going?” Craggs appealed to him. “Those pictures aren’t mine. You have to believe me – I don’t know how they got in there.”

As he reached the front door one of Colin’s huge hands wrapped around his wrist. It was wet through. He did his best to tug his arm away but Cragg tightened his grip on his arm. Without a second’s hesitation, Ben-David brought the heel of his shoe down on the side of Cragg’s kneecap. There was a loud crunch and Colin fell to the ground in a heap.

Etan looked down on him scornfully, considering for a moment whether to draw for his weapon and end his pitiful life right there and then. No, he remembered, he had made a promise to Mr. Zinkman. That came above all else.

“May God have mercy on your soul,” Ben-David murmured in Yiddish as he took his leave.