by Jaime Raven
She was taken to hospital in an ambulance with an armed police escort.
I watched from the pavement as they sped off. I was drenched in sweat and my lungs were aching from exhaustion. But at the same time I was feeling mightily pleased with myself.
Thanks to me Roy Slack was gone and his hired assassin was under arrest. There’d be no more threats. No more murders. Their reign of terror had been short-lived, but it had been devastating. Five dead. Six if you included my child. Two wounded. And many lives destroyed.
As I stood there being gawped at by strangers I felt a tide of emotion rise up through my body. I couldn’t believe that it was over. The threats. The shootings. The bloodshed. The abject fear that had gripped us all.
I wanted to cry. To let it all come pouring out. But I forced myself not to, and instead sent a text to Aidan and my mother in which I wrote: At last it’s over.
When Drummond arrived on the scene he was full of praise for what I’d done.
‘You’ve played a blinder, Laura,’ he said. ‘We’ll probably never know if she would have carried on killing but at least we do know that now she won’t be able to.’
I asked him if he had spoken to Alice Green, the woman who had tipped us off.
‘I’m calling on her next,’ he said. ‘You should go home or to the hospital to be with Aidan.’
But curiosity got the better of me and I insisted on going with him to interview her.
Alice Green was in pieces when we arrived at her apartment and I felt sorry for her. She told us how she had met the hot Latina chick at a West End club and how they’d fallen in love with each other.
‘I know it was ridiculously quick, but it was real,’ she sobbed. ‘She seemed so kind and so … normal.’
Alice confirmed that they had spent last night together on the South Bank and that Maria had sneaked off to shoot the police officer.
‘I swear I had no idea what she was going to do,’ she said. ‘She gave no clue, even after she did it. She joined me in the pub and then we had dinner. And I had no reason to suspect that anything had happened. Or that she was carrying a gun in her bag.’
It was such a sad story that I found myself fighting back tears. I wondered if The Slayer had really meant it when she told Alice that she intended to leave Mexico and move to London. Or had it merely been a cruel lie just so that she could have a sexual partner during her stay here?
It was one of the questions that we would put to her in the days ahead, along with what her real name was and who else she’d been in contact with since arriving in London.
But there was no knowing if she would bother to answer any of them. After all, there was nothing she could tell us that would encourage a judge to show even the slightest degree of leniency when it came to sentencing.
This woman was going to face the full force of the law. She had murdered four coppers, including the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. It was my guess she’d receive multiple life sentences and never be released from prison.
And throughout her incarceration she’d always be looking over her shoulder, wondering if her former boss in the cartel had put a price on her head for fear that one day she would reveal everything she knew about them.
76
Laura
A lot happened in the weeks following The Slayer’s arrest. She was remanded in custody, charged with various offences, including five counts of murder.
While she languished in jail, thousands of people lined the streets of London for the funerals of her victims. I was among them and so was Aidan who insisted on going along each time to pay his respects.
Roy Slack’s funeral was a much quieter affair and only a handful of people turned up. This was because many of those who had worked for the firm had been arrested or had fled abroad.
Danny Carver was among those facing long spells in prison. Others included two villains named Johnny Devonshire and Pat Knowles, who we discovered had been nearby when Roy Slack had battered to death the firearms officer Hugh Wallis.
They were then tasked with making arrangements to get rid of the body, which was put in a boat and attached to weights. It was dropped in the sea off the Sussex coast at night so they weren’t able to provide a location.
The pair were exposed as a result of a folder found in Slack’s hidden safe, which contained the deeds to a number of properties we didn’t know he’d owned, including one in Dulwich.
A detailed forensic search of the property uncovered traces of Wallis’s DNA and blood in the basement. The subsequent investigation led to Johnny Devonshire confessing to what he and Knowles had done.
It proved much quicker and easier to extract confessions from Tony Marsden and Kate Chappell. Marsden and three other police officers pleaded guilty to kidnapping Roy Slack. And Kate Chappell admitted taking bribes from the gangster over a number of years and providing him with confidential details about detectives on the task force. She also owned up to asking him to arrange for her husband to be run down by a car and killed after he walked out on her.
They were all now awaiting trial.
Needless to say Aidan and I didn’t manage to get away at Christmas. Instead we spent it at home with my mother and his parents who flew in from Spain.
And it proved to be a joyous occasion. There was an overwhelming sense of happiness and relief. We knew we had a lot to be thankful for. We were all together as a family and Aidan was alive and recovering well. The doctors were now saying that they were confident he would regain full use of his arm within months, or perhaps even weeks.
I even felt the strong presence of my father and I could almost hear him telling me how proud he was of me for bringing the nightmare to an end, even though I’d crossed a line in order to do so.
I still hadn’t told anyone, including Aidan, about the miscarriage. Maybe in time I would, but I didn’t think they needed to know just yet. It was something I hadn’t yet come to terms with myself.
On Christmas morning we exchanged gifts, and the one that Aidan gave to me lifted my spirits still further. It was an engagement ring, and it came with a bended-knee proposal.
‘I want us to get married, Laura,’ he said. ‘We’ve put it off long enough. But what’s happened has made me realise that it’s time we tied the knot and started a family.’
This, of course, was music to my mother’s ears and when I said yes she started to cry.
It made me realise that this was the start of our journey back to normality. It was going to be long, hard and painful, but I had every confidence that we would get there in the end.
EPILOGUE
The Sinaloa cartel struck two months after Christmas.
Rosa Lopez was returning to her cell from a meeting with her lawyer at which she’d been told that a date had been set for her trial.
The news added to the weight of her depression and made her want to spew up her guts.
She was still finding it hard to accept that her life was over and that she would never be free again.
Prison life had already taken its toll. She’d lost a stone in weight and her skin had become tight and pasty. Even so she was still the most attractive woman on the high-risk wing. The others were mostly fat old hags or ugly young bitches with crude manners.
Some of them were hanging around on the landing as Rosa walked back to her cell. As usual she drew comments and wolf whistles.
One woman who was on remand for killing her baby son asked Rosa if she wanted her pussy licked. Another said, ‘You’re our hero, gorgeous. Shame you didn’t kill more fucking coppers.’
Rosa had so far preferred to keep to herself. She’d spent most of her time lying on her bed thinking about Alice Green and the life she could have had with her.
She didn’t blame Alice for calling the police that morning three months ago. She could only imagine how shocked the poor woman was when she saw the news and realised that her new girlfriend was an infamous killer.
Despite what happened, Rosa knew that Alice would
forever have a place in her heart.
When she got back to her cell she sat on the edge of her bed and buried her head in her hands.
An image of Alice flared in her mind and she thought about the first time they’d made love. Before long she was sobbing loudly and her face was wet with tears.
‘Cheer up, luvvie,’ someone said, and Rosa looked up to see a fellow inmate standing in the doorway with her hands behind her back.
The woman’s name was Olivia Todd and she’d been part of a notorious drug smuggling gang before being locked up for murder.
Rosa’s heart lurched, not because she was scared of the woman, but because a bunch of other inmates were gathered on the landing right outside her door. And whenever that happened it usually spelled trouble.
Rosa sprang to her feet, but before she could prepare to defend herself, Todd was across the cell and ramming into her, shoulder first.
Rosa fell back against the wall and her legs gave way. In the split second before she fell to the floor she glimpsed the makeshift knife in Todd’s right hand and felt the blade being plunged into her side.
‘It’s a gift from the cartel,’ Todd said. ‘Carlos Cruz wanted you to know that he hadn’t forgotten you.’
Rosa drifted in and out of consciousness. She was aware of her assailant running out of the cell and the group outside suddenly dispersing, having provided cover for the attack.
The cell door had been left open and she was dragging herself towards it when the guards appeared.
The next thing she knew she was on a stretcher and could hear snippets of a conversation.
‘An ambulance is on its way. It’ll need an armed escort.’
‘It’s a knife wound. She’s losing blood.’
‘The wing has been locked down, but I guarantee we won’t find the knife or any witnesses to what happened.’
She blacked out for a while then and when she regained consciousness she was in an ambulance. A paramedic was treating her wound and she could hear the siren blaring. Thankfully the pain in her side had been dulled by drugs.
‘We’re about to arrive at the hospital,’ the paramedic said. What seemed like just a few seconds later the ambulance stopped and the back door was opened.
She managed to stay awake as she was stretchered out of the ambulance.
She saw the entrance to the hospital’s emergency department and there were two armed cops standing in front of it.
When the shooting started she watched as they both fell to the ground. Screams rang out and there were more shots and a lot of shouting.
She heard a man’s voice order the paramedics to step away from the stretcher. As she turned her head towards the voice she glimpsed a figure in a balaclava holding a sawn-off shotgun.
She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t know what was happening. The ambulance was being ambushed and she was being snatched. But why and by whom?
The questions hung in the air as she was picked up off the stretcher by a pair of strong hands. She was carried a short way and placed on a mattress in the back of a van. Two women wearing what looked like surgical gowns sat either side of the mattress.
Rosa tried to speak, but one of the women told her to stay quiet and then started to examine her wound.
At the same time the van jolted forward and it was immediately obvious to Rosa that it was speeding away from the hospital.
She lay on the mattress, her mind reeling as she tried to make sense of what was happening.
Then suddenly a needle was injected into her arm and she fell into a deep, dark pit.
She awoke to find that she was no longer in the back of the van. She was on a bed in a room with white walls and soft lighting.
It was a moment before she realised that her arm was attached to a drip and a man in a white coat was standing next to the bed holding a clipboard. He was tall and middle-aged with jet-black hair and olive skin like hers.
‘Hello, Miss Lopez,’ he said, with an accent that convinced her he was Mexican. ‘My name is Antonio. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. How do you feel?’
She swallowed and blinked away the crust from her eyes.
‘Confused,’ she said. ‘Where am I?’
‘A very private facility,’ he replied. ‘The authorities don’t know you’re here and let me reassure you that we’ve tended to your wound and you’re going to be fine. You lost a significant amount of blood but no organs were damaged. The knife penetrated the soft tissue at the side of your torso below the ribs and above the hip. That’s precisely where your attacker was told to place it so as not to cause a life-threatening injury. You’ll have a scar, but it’s a small price to pay for your freedom. You’ll soon be up and about and on your way back to Mexico.’
For a moment Rosa thought she was dreaming. She closed her eyes briefly and when she opened them the man who called himself Antonio was still standing there, smiling.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
He reached out and gently touched her arm. ‘The cartel mounted the operation in order to spring you from jail, Miss Lopez. Your attacker was paid to stab you so that you would have to be sent to hospital. Our team were on stand-by and as soon as you arrived there they launched an ambush. It was easier than we thought it would be. Two police officers were shot, but naturally we won’t be shedding any tears for them.’
Rosa was stunned. She’d thought the cartel might arrange for her to be killed to stop her talking, but she hadn’t considered the possibility of a rescue mission.
‘I’ve been asked to pass on a message from Mr Cruz,’ the man said. ‘He wants you to know that he never had any intention of abandoning you. He told me to tell you that you’re a valued member of the cartel family and that we always look after our own. He’s got a bottle of champagne on ice for when we eventually get you back to Mexico. And he’d like you to carry on working for him as long as you are able. As far as he is concerned you are his best sicaria and he doesn’t want to lose you.’
It was enough to make Rosa smile. The thought of going back to her old life was suddenly quite appealing, and was certainly preferable to wasting away in a prison cell.
It wasn’t as if she had been unhappy before coming to London. She’d enjoyed working for the cartel, and had been content doing a job that paid so well.
Alice Green, bless her, had offered something different. Something better. Safer.
But a future with Alice was no longer an option. And neither was going it alone.
Right now Rosa needed the cartel more than they needed her. And despite everything she knew that without them she would struggle to survive.
‘Can you inform Mr Cruz that I am very grateful to him,’ she said to Antonio. ‘And tell him that The Slayer will soon be back in business.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once again my thanks to the team at Avon/HarperCollins for all their support during the writing of this novel. But a special thank you goes to my editor, Victoria Oundjian. Her insightful input turned The Rebel into a far better book than it would otherwise have been. The changes she suggested made such a big difference to the storyline and the development of the characters. And for that I’m really grateful.
Murder, loyalty and vengeance collide in a gritty read perfect for fans of Martina Cole and Kimberley Chambers.
Out now.
A perfect crime needs a perfect alibi …
Out now.
I’ve taken your daughter, as punishment for what you did …
Out now.
Also by Jaime Raven
The Madam
The Alibi
The Mother
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