by Tony Parsons
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘Contact. He’s had something done. I don’t know. Some work to his face. But that’s him. Contact. Confirming visual identification. Contact.’
‘Sniper 1 in range,’ said a voice, and across the street I saw the shooters for the first time, three figures moving on the rooftops above a shabby strip of shops and restaurants, their weapons winking in the sunlight. Police marksmen, settling into position.
Our last resort, if it all went wrong. And it was already starting to go wrong.
‘Sniper 2 in range. But I don’t have a trigger. No clear shot. It’s crowded down there.’
The man with the red backpack had paused on the far side of the road, waiting for the lights to change. Traffic thundered by, and in the gaps there were flashes of safety red. I touched my earpiece. Suddenly nobody was talking to me any more.
‘That’s our boy,’ I said. ‘Positive ID. Contact. Contact. Over.’
The lights changed and the traffic reluctantly stopped. The commuters began to shuffle across the road. The man with the red backpack went with them.
I spoke slowly and clearly: ‘This is Delta 1 confirming contact. The target is about to enter the grab zone. Do you copy me? Over.’
And nothing but the white noise in response.
And then: ‘Possible. Checking. Stand by.’
I shook my head and was about to speak again when the calm voice of DCS Swire said, ‘It’s a negative, Wolfe. That’s not him. Negative. Cancel.’
And then the voice of the surveillance officer: ‘Negative. Cancel. Stand down all stations.’
The lights changed again.
The man with the red backpack had crossed the road.
He was heading for the railway station.
‘Do you expect him to wear a burka?’ I said. ‘That’s Bravo 1. That’s the target. That’s our boy. His face—’
‘We do not have visual confirmation,’ the surveillance officer said. ‘We do not have positive ID, Delta 1.’
And then Swire. ‘That’s not him,’ she repeated. ‘Stop talking, Wolfe.’ A note of steel now. ‘You had one task. It is concluded. No further action necessary. We’re standing down all units. Negative. Cancel. Thank you everyone.’
The crowd slowed outside the station as it merged with the flow of commuters coming over from King’s Cross. I figured that I had one minute to stop him before he disappeared inside the station. Once on a mainline train or down on the tube or on the concourse of the station itself, the man with the red backpack would simply touch his hands together and the world would blow apart.
The battery he probably already held in one hand would create an electric current connecting it to a simple terminal held in the other. The current would then pass down two wires and into that red backpack – a discreet slit would have been cut in the side – where a modified light bulb would trip a detonator stored inside a small tube. This would trigger the main charge – the hydrogen peroxide I had watched him buy with eleven £50 notes on CCTV.
At the same time he had bought a bulk supply of six-inch steel nails. Sacks of them. They would be taped to the outside of the main charge to inflict enough misery to last for several hundred lifetimes.
If it detonated.
If he was that smart.
If he hadn’t messed up the cook.
I choked down a lump of hot bitter nausea as it rose in my throat.
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘That’s him. Contact.’
I had been inside his lock-up. I had seen the hundreds of empty bottles of hair bleach. I had watched the CCTV footage of the day he bought them until my eyes were burning with the sight of him.
I didn’t need the photographs taped to the dash. I knew him. He was in my head.
He could not hide from me.
‘Stand down all units,’ a self-consciously calm voice was saying. ‘Do you copy me, Delta 1?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re breaking up.’
Thirty seconds now.
And among all those crowds, and surrounded by all those firearms, I was on my own with the man who was planning to die.
I once attended a lecture at the police academy in Bramshill, Hampshire – the Oxford and Cambridge of police higher education.
An FBI agent had been flown over to help us combat terrorism. I had been impressed by the whiteness of the agent’s teeth. They were a fine set of teeth. Very American teeth. But what impressed me more was that the man knew his business.
His teeth shining, he told us that the FBI had identified twenty-five threat areas for terrorist activity. It wasn’t quite an A to Z, but it was close – it was an A to T, from airports to tattoo parlours.
Everywhere, basically.
The Fed also suggested what possible terrorists might look like.
Everyone, basically.
The students at Bramshill, the brightest and the best, all these fast-tracked cops, the next generation of CID, young and tough and smart, had almost wet themselves with laughter. But unlike the rest of them, I did not find the talk useless. Just the opposite. Because I remembered the FBI man’s number one point of potential indicators.
The suspect significantly alters his appearance.
Although my colleagues had smirked and rolled their eyes, I thought that was a point well worth making. Never overlook the obvious. Don’t expect him to look like the photographs and the CCTV images. Be ready for him to look like someone else.
And here was another thing the FBI agent could have mentioned. The target who significantly alters his appearance will probably not bother to get a new bag.
‘The same backpack,’ I said, opening the car door. ‘In the CCTV. Red backpack. When he bought the gear. Red backpack. All the way through. That’s the red backpack. And that’s him.’
‘You can’t park here, mate,’ an Afro-Cockney voice said through my window, and I jumped to hear a voice that did not come from somewhere inside my head.
A traffic warden was writing me a parking ticket. I got out of the car. He was a tall man with West African tribal scars on his cheeks, and he reared back slightly, expecting trouble. I looked past him and could see the man with the red backpack.
The crowds had thinned now.
He was about to enter the station.
Fifteen seconds.
Then a voice inside my head: ‘This is DCS Swire. Get back in the bloody car, Wolfe.’
All pretence at calm now gone.
I hesitated for a moment.
Then I got back into the car.
The traffic warden was tucking a ticket under my windscreen wiper. I shook my head and looked in the rear-view mirror. The man with the red backpack was directly behind me now, standing right outside the main entrance to the station. The crowds were melting away. There was nothing stopping him entering. But he had paused directly outside the station.
He was talking to himself.
No.
He was praying.
Ten seconds.
The man with the red backpack moved forward.
Nine seconds.
I stuck the car into reverse.
Eight seconds.
I twisted in my seat and slammed my foot to the ground.
The car shot backwards and I stared at the man with the red backpack as I hurtled towards him. I had one arm braced across the passenger seat for the shock of impact and the hand on the wheel pressed down hard on the horn, keeping it there, scattering the stray commuters.
He did not move.
But he looked into my eyes as the old X5 shot towards him, his mouth no longer praying.
Five seconds.
The car ploughed into him, striking him just above the kneecaps, shattering the thigh bones of both legs as it whipped his torso forward against the back of the car. His face shattered the rear window and the rear window did the same to his face.
Then the impact threw him backwards into a wall of red Victorian brick where the back of his head erupted like a soft-boiled egg being hit with a
sledgehammer.
Three seconds.
I stuck the car in drive and tore back across the forecourt to where the traffic warden was staring at me, motionless, open-mouthed, his ticket machine still in his hand.
I put the car into reverse, ready to go again.
But there was no need to go again.
Zero.
I slowly got out of the car.
People were screaming. Some of them were commuters. Some of them were the voices in my head. A dog, getting closer every second, was barking wildly.
One voice in my ear was shouting about gross misconduct and manslaughter. Another was shouting about murder.
‘Wolfe!’
Swire.
I tore out the earpiece and threw it away.
The man with the red backpack was sitting up against the brick wall, staring straight at me with a baffled expression on his ruined face. One hand still twitched with the surprise of sudden death. Both of his hands were empty.
I was not expecting his hands to be empty.
Suddenly there were armed men in balaclavas. Guns were trained on the dead man. Glock SLP 9mm pistols. Heckler & Koch submachine guns. Then I saw that some of them were pointing at me.
‘He was the target,’ I said.
Armed officers from SCO19 were everywhere. Commuters were running and crawling for cover. A lot of people were screaming and crying because these men with guns did not look remotely like police officers. They wore Kevlar body armour. They had metal carabiners on their shoulders so they could more easily be dragged away if they were down. The black balaclavas they wore had the eyes and mouths cut out. They looked like paramilitary bank robbers.
People thought it was to protect their identity but I knew it was to spread terror.
And it worked.
They were shouting into the radios attached just above their hearts. The masked faces were bawling at me to get down and stay down and lie on my face.
Now. Now. Now. Do it now!
Slowly I took my warrant card out of my jeans, showed it, and tossed it at them. Then I held up my hands. But I wasn’t getting on my knees for them. I wasn’t getting down on my face. I kept walking towards the man on the ground.
Because I had to know if I was right.
Last chance! Do it now!
Crouching above the dead man on the ground, I saw that the impact had not cracked the back of his skull. It had removed it.
A huge slick of fresh blood was already spreading across the pavement.
All around there were the screams of terror and fury. The dog was so close now that I could smell it, so close now that I could feel its breath.
I could see the strange flat-nosed Glocks in the corner of my vision, aimed at the dead man on the ground and also at my face. The safety catches were released.
But this was our boy, wasn’t it?
I looked at my hands with wonder.
They were covered in the dead man’s blood.
But they were not shaking as I tore open the red backpack and looked inside.
2
‘SORRY,’ I SAID, my body clenched tight inside the suit I had not worn since my wedding day.
The office was crowded with the full cast of a murder investigation. A SOCO was standing directly in front of me, trying to get past, all in white apart from the blue facemask that covered everything but the irritation in her eyes. I was in a big corner room near the top of a shining glass tower, but I flashed briefly on the many school playgrounds of my childhood, and how you can feel both invisible and in the way just because you are new.
And then there was a spark of recognition in the SOCO’s eyes.
‘I know you,’ she said.
‘I’m the new man,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re the hero. At the railway station. When did you start working Homicide?’
‘Today.’
Now she was smiling behind her blue facemask.
‘Cool. What did they call you in court?’
‘Officer A.’
‘You kill anybody this week, Officer A?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But it’s only Monday morning.’
She laughed and left me standing by the dead man’s desk. There wasn’t much on it. Just fresh blood and an old photograph.
In the photograph, seven young men in military uniform smiled for the camera as if they were looking at their unbreakable future. Blood had splattered across one corner of the glass. But it did nothing to hide their cocky faces.
It was a strange photograph to have on an office desk. No wife, no kids, no dog. Just seven young soldiers, defaced now with a bright spurt of blood.
Travel blood. Fresh from an artery.
I looked closer and saw the photograph was taken in the eighties, judging by the washed-out colours and the mullet haircuts of the cocky lads. Their hair was from another decade and their uniforms were from another century. They looked like Duran Duran at Waterloo.
And I saw that they were not men. These were boys who would be boys for perhaps one more summer. And despite the military uniforms, they were not real soldiers. Just students dressed as soldiers. Two of them looked like twins. One of them was the dead man on the far side of the desk. He had grown up to be a banker. He had grown up to be murdered.
I stood aside as a forensic photographer started taking pictures of the desk’s bloody mess.
‘Who would want to kill a banker?’ the photographer said.
It got a laugh. Mostly among the SOCOs, chuckling away behind their facemasks. Spend your life collecting microscopic samples of blood, semen and dirt and you are grateful for any laugh you can get. But the senior detective standing on the far side of the desk did not smile, although I could not tell if he had not heard the remark, or if he was preoccupied with the corpse before him, or if he disapproved of levity in the presence of death.
He was waiting patiently while a small man with a briefcase – the divisional surgeon, here to pronounce death – knelt over the body.
The detective’s large head was shaved so clean it shined, and despite his extravagantly broken nose – and it had been broken so often that it looked like a wonky ski run – he had enough vanity to keep his pale goatee beard neatly trimmed.
He turned his piercing blue eyes on me and I thought that he looked like a Viking. I could imagine that pale, fierce face coming up the beach for a spot of pillaging and monk bothering. But Vikings didn’t wear glasses and the detective’s were round and rimless, John Lennon Imagine specs; they softened his ferocious appearance and gave his hard face a kindly, slightly perplexed expression.
My new boss.
‘DC Wolfe, sir,’ I said.
‘Ah, our new man,’ he said, the quiet voice precise and clipped with the vowels of the distant north, Aberdeen or beyond, the kind of Highlands accent that sounds as if every word is carved from granite. ‘I’m DCI Mallory.’
I already knew his name. I had never met him before but I had heard of him enough. Detective Chief Inspector Victor Mallory was one of the reasons I wanted the transfer to Homicide and Serious Crime Command.
We were both wearing thin blue gloves and made no attempt to reach across the desk and shake hands. But we smiled, and took a second to size each other up.
DCI Mallory looked very fit, not just for a man in his early fifties but for a man of any age, and it looked like the kind of fitness that comes from natural athleticism rather than hours in the gym. He watched me with his blue eyes as the divisional surgeon fussed briskly over the corpse.
‘You’re just in time,’ Mallory said. ‘We’re about to begin. Welcome to Homicide.’
Friendly, but skipping all small talk.
The divisional surgeon was standing up.
‘He’s dead all right,’ he said, snapping his bag shut.
Mallory thanked him and gave me the nod. I stepped forward. ‘Come and have a look at our body, Wolfe,’ he said, ‘and tell me if you’ve ever seen anything like it.’
&nb
sp; I joined DCI Mallory on the far side of the desk and we stood above the dead man. At first all I saw was the blood. Lavish arterial sprays with a man in a shirt and tie somewhere beneath it all.
‘The deceased is Hugo Buck,’ Mallory said. ‘Thirty-five years old. Investment banker with ChinaCorps. Body discovered by cleaning staff at six a.m. He gets in early. Works with the Asian markets. While he was having his first coffee, somebody cut his throat.’ Mallory looked at me keenly. ‘Ever seen one of these?’
I did not know how to respond.
The banker’s throat had been more than cut. It had been ripped wide open. The front half of his neck was cleaved away, sliced out with clean precision. He was flat on his back but it felt like only a bit of bony gristle was keeping his head attached to his body. The blood had erupted from his neck in great spurts; his shirt and tie looked like some monstrous red bib. I could smell it now, the copper stink of freshly spilt blood. I shut my mind to it.
Hugo Buck’s jacket was still on the back of his chair. Somehow the fountains of blood had not touched it.
I looked quickly at Mallory and then back at the dead man.
‘I’ve seen three cut throats, sir,’ I said.
I hesitated and he nodded once, telling me to carry on.
‘First week in uniform, there was a husband who saw a text message on his wife’s phone from his best friend and reached for a carving knife. Maybe a year later I attended a robbery in a jewellery shop where a gun failed to discharge and the thief produced an axe and went for the man who pushed the security button. And then there was a wedding reception where the father of the bride objected to the best man’s speech and shoved a champagne flute into his neck. Three cut throats.’
‘Did any of them look anything like this?’
‘No, sir.’
‘This is almost a decapitation,’ Mallory said.
I looked around.
‘Somebody must have heard something,’ I said.
‘Nobody heard a thing,’ Mallory said. ‘There are people around in a building like this even at that time of day. But nobody hears a thing when a man almost gets his head chopped off.’
He considered me with his pale blue eyes. But I didn’t get it.
‘Because the victim’s windpipe was cut,’ he said. ‘The trachea. There was no air. And you need air to scream. Nobody heard anything because there was nothing to hear.’