by Chris Ryan
‘Not looking for someone here. I’m looking for someone who was here,’ said Chet. ‘A chick.’
A broad grin crossed the guard’s face.
‘I did a little security job here this morning. The name’s Chet Freeman. Check your computer if you like.’
The guard shrugged and tapped at the keyboard of his terminal. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a moment. ‘I got you.’
‘So I got talking to this girl. Said her name was Suze. Cleaning lady. Redhead. Kind of . . .’ Chet made a gesture with his hands to indicate a shapely figure. ‘Should have got her number there and then, I guess . . .’
A troubled look came on to the guard’s face. ‘Ah, I don’t know, man. I’m not supposed to give that kind of information out. You know, home addresses and shit.’
‘Hey, course not. I understand. I was just thinking, you know, maybe a phone number . . . if you had it . . .’
He winked at the guard, who gave an amused shake of the head and replied, ‘I don’t know, brother. She must have been pretty cute for you to come chasing after her at this time of night.’
‘Yeah. Or maybe I’m just desperate.’
The guard laughed, then once more tapped on his keyboard. ‘Suze McArthur?’ he asked.
‘That’s my girl.’
‘She’s a temp. Only worked here yesterday.’ The guard scrawled a number on a yellow Post-It note and handed it to Chet. ‘Hope you get yourself some pussy, brother.’
Chet grinned. ‘You and me both, my friend.’
He turned and walked out of the building, the square of paper clasped firmly in his right hand.
It took him half an hour to get back to his car. It would have taken him less, but he went a roundabout way, down quiet side streets where he could look back and check he wasn’t being followed. By the time he’d got back to his vehicle, his leg was killing him – sharp, stabbing pains shooting from the stump up into the thigh, and a nagging soreness where flesh met prosthesis. It was a relief to sit behind the wheel. He drove out of the West End, pulling over on Tottenham Court Road to check he wasn’t being trailed, before heading to Aldenham Street in the maze between Camden and Euston Station. There were modern housing blocks on either side, but the street was deserted at this time of night and he parked in the gloom below a broken street lamp. He recovered his rucksack and removed one of the bulky mobile phones that he’d used to debug the offices earlier.
Seconds later he was dialling Suze’s number.
It rang six times.
Seven.
He was about to hang up when a voice came on the line. It was sleepy.
‘Hello?’
‘Suze McArthur?’
‘What . . . who is this?’ The girl sounded suspicious. Frightened.
‘Your friend from the roof.’
A pause.
‘How did you get my number?’ Her voice cracked slightly.
‘How did you get your hands on a laser listening device?’
Silence.
‘I let you escape today,’ he said finally. ‘You owe me. I want to know what you thought you were listening . . .’
‘I’m hanging up.’ Suze’s voice was wavering as she interrupted him.
‘Don’t you fucking dare.’
‘I’m hanging up . . .’ She sounded like a scared kid standing up to a bully. ‘I’m hanging up now.’
A click on the line, then silence.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Chet muttered. He dialled the number again, but this time it rang out.
He chucked the phone on to the passenger seat, leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. He was dead beat. The beer, the scuffle at the flat, walking too far with his bad leg – it was all taking its toll. He ought to rest, but rest wasn’t on the menu. He’d be insane to go back home, but he needed somewhere to lie low. Where he couldn’t be found. Somewhere to get his head in order. With someone he could trust.
But as far as Chet was concerned, trustworthy people were as rare as a nun in a bikini. If Luke Mercer was in the country, Chet would already be on the way to Hereford. But he wasn’t, and in the absence of his old SAS mucker, there was only one other person he would even think of approaching. He picked up his phone and called a number that he knew by heart.
It rang for several seconds before a voice answered. ‘Who the hell . . . ?’
‘Doug, it’s me. Chet.’
A heavy sigh. ‘Jesus, Chet. What time is it?’
‘I don’t know – about 01.00? Listen, mate, I need a favour.’
‘Chet, this a wind-up? You been on the beers?’
‘No. Yes, but . . . look, can you meet me?’
A pause.
‘Now?’
‘Now. It’s important.’
‘Mate, I can’t. I’m out of town. Trains are done for the day. You never called – I went to the girlfriend’s place.’
Chet vaguely remembered Doug saying that his latest squeeze lived somewhere south of town. Mitcham Junction, was it?
‘Plus,’ Doug continued, ‘it’s one o’clock in the fucking morning.’
Chet cursed silently, his brain still racing.
‘Can you RV first thing?’
‘I guess . . .’
‘Clapham Junction. Platform 15 – one five – 06.30.’
‘Fine. Look, Chet, what the hell’s this all about?’
I wish I knew, Chet thought to himself.
‘06.30,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t be late.’
He hung up before Doug could reply.
Chet threw the phone down again and caught himself checking the rear-view mirror. Checking for what? He didn’t know, but he knew his heart was racing and his mouth was dry.
Fear? Damn right. But that didn’t mean he was going to succumb to it. He kept his gaze on the mirror, and prepared to sit it out till morning.
Suze McArthur stared at her phone like it was a snake. She was shaking. How had that guy tracked her down? Who was he working for?
A chill sickness welled up in her stomach. She found herself shivering, and felt as though all the strength had left her limbs. She pulled her blanket more tightly around her, but that did no good.
A noise in the corridor outside.
Suze heard herself gasp.
It was nothing, she told herself. She remembered being a child, terrified by strange sounds after her lights had been turned out. Her doctor father, when he was not away, would come in and smooth down her hair. ‘There’s no one here, princess,’ he’d whisper. ‘Just Mummy and Daddy, and we won’t let anything scare you. All you can hear is our old house creaking. That’s what happens at night.’
But there was nobody here to smooth her hair down now. Her father was dead, killed by a landmine in Angola when he was out there tending to sick children. Her mother couldn’t look after herself, let alone Suze.
Another noise. ‘It’s just the old house creaking,’ she whispered to herself.
The front door was locked. The windows too.
So why didn’t she feel safe?
It crossed her mind that she could go downstairs. Sometimes she picked up groceries for Vern and Dorothy, the sweet old couple who lived underneath her. She’d become friends with them. They were always on her case, telling her she should be settling down with a nice young man. A week ago they’d gone off on a cruise of the Norwegian fjords, and had left their key with Suze, just in case. But something prevented her even from moving, let alone venturing down the staircase in the middle of the night.
I should get out of here, she thought. Go somewhere else for a few days. Get my head straight.
That’s what she’d do. First thing in the morning. Pack a bag. Get out of London.
But morning seemed a long way off. She glanced over her shoulder at the front door. She had locked it, hadn’t she?
Another chill ran through her. She felt too scared to get up and check.
03.26 hrs.
Chet awoke suddenly.
It took him a few seconds to remember why h
e was sitting behind the wheel of his car in this dark side street, and he cursed himself for having dropped off. He was frozen. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a police siren. But this street was quiet.
Almost.
He squinted in the gloom. Through the windscreen he could see a figure up ahead. Twenty metres away, max, and walking towards him.
Instinctively, Chet felt his fingers creeping towards the ignition key. The figure was moving quickly. At fifteen metres, he could make out that it was a woman. Slim. He couldn’t see her face, not in the darkness.
The angry features of the intruder in his flat flashed through his mind.
Ten metres. Chet started the engine and put the lights on full beam. The figure stopped, throwing her hands up to her face, alarmed by the sudden glare. When her hands moved away, Chet saw that her skin was elderly and wrinkled, her hair grey and her clothes old. She cast a fearful look in Chet’s direction, then turned heel and hurried off.
Just an old woman wandering the streets at night. Chet turned off the engine and the lights, aware of a damp patch of sweat against his back despite the coldness of the air. He cursed his paranoia. Of course nobody knew where he was.
He checked his watch. 03.28. Three hours till he RV’d with Doug. It couldn’t come soon enough.
06.23 hrs.
Early, but the main roads of London were already crammed with traffic. The bus drivers were beeping their horns in frustration at each other as their headlamps glowed in the semi-darkness.
Commuters were already hurrying into Clapham Junction in their suits and overcoats, beating the crowds as they gripped their briefcases and free sheets and paper cups from Starbucks with plastic lids. Their breath steamed in the cold morning air, and nobody seemed in any way interested in anyone else around them.
Certainly nobody gave Chet a second glance as he queued up to buy a ticket from the machine. He decided to use cash rather than his card – too easy to trace.
Ticket in hand, he walked along the covered walkway from which a number of flights of wide stairs led down to the platforms. The sound of trains arriving and departing was everywhere. Station announcements echoed over the Tannoy. Chet checked his watch. 06.29. Platform 15 was at the other end of the walkway. He limped towards it as commuters hurried past.
He was at the top of the steps leading down to Platform 15 when he heard the sound of a train coming into the station, its wheels making the familiar, rhythmic sound over the tracks, blotting out the sound of a station announcement; and he was just hauling himself down the steps when he heard a man scream.
Chet stopped. He could hear the train braking quickly, then there was shouting. He limped quickly to the top of the stairs, where he saw an already crowded platform. There was a commotion at the end of the platform from which the train had arrived and it sent a sick feeling through Chet’s body. ‘Get out of my way,’ he roared as he barged past a couple of commuters. ‘Move!’
The train had stopped now. Chet turned left, towards the front end. The other travellers were giving each other anxious looks, as if they didn’t know quite what to do; a few made angry remarks as Chet stormed through them.
He was alongside the front carriage when he heard a second scream. A woman. Hysterical. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’
Chet continued to push his way through.
‘Someone help him,’ the woman sobbed.
He reached the edge of the platform and pulled the sobbing woman out of the way. There was a streak of blood on the front of the train, and through the windscreen glass he could see the driver with a horrified look on his face.
Chet stared down at the track. It was impossible to make out the features on the mangled body that lay there. The side of the face that was visible was just an oozing welt of gore. One arm was pinned behind the figure’s back in a gruesomely unnatural position, the shoulder joint and the elbow obviously snapped and splintered; the other arm was simply crushed.
But Chet didn’t need to see the face. All he needed to see was the prosthetic leg, almost identical to his own. It was still vaguely attached to Doug’s knee, but pointing out at a ninety-degree angle, and split about halfway down.
Dread and anger seeped through Chet’s bones in equal measure. He staggered back from the edge of the platform to allow two Transport Police officers to take his place. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please step back from the platform,’ one said loudly. ‘Please step back – the emergency services need to come through.’
Chet hardly heard them. He pressed his back against a rail map on the platform wall as the chaos unfolded, trying to suppress the sickness, trying to think clearly.
Was his friend dead by coincidence? Like hell he was.
But with the possible exception of Doug’s girlfriend, nobody knew they were meeting. Nobody knew they were there.
Suddenly Chet felt his blood turn cold. He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and stared at it.
Somebody must have been listening in to their conversation.
He cursed himself for being so stupid, then quickly fumbled with the handset’s rear panel and removed the battery and SIM card so that the phone couldn’t be tracked. He stuffed the SIM card into his wallet; the phone he could dump when he found a bin.
Quickly he replayed in his head what he and his friend had said on the phone. Would any eavesdropper have known that Doug was an amputee too? Chet didn’t think so. And there was only one conclusion to draw from that . . .
‘Jesus, mate,’ he whispered to himself. ‘They were after me, not you. I’m so fucking sorry.’
Then his skin prickled as another realisation hit him.
He’d made more than one call using this phone the night before.
A face rose in his mind. Red hair. A small silver stud in her pretty, turned-up nose.
Suze McArthur.
Chet stuffed the dismembered phone in his pocket and started to push his way hurriedly back along the platform. He had no idea where the young woman lived. He had no idea what she knew. But he had to get to her now. And fast.
Before someone else did.
TEN
Chet had a name. He had a phone number. Ten minutes later, after a call from a public phone box to an old army mate of his who had access to the Police National Computer, he had an address committed to memory.
Flat 6, 124 Wimbourne Terrace, W2. He consulted his mental map of the capital. Suze McArthur, whoever she was, lived on the other side of London. It would take him the best part of an hour to get there, and an hour could easily be too long. He called her number: maybe he could persuade her to get the hell out of her flat. But the phone rang out. Was that good or bad? Chet didn’t know. He slammed the receiver down and limped back to his car. His only option was to struggle through the rush-hour traffic.
It was getting lighter now, but the sky was cloudy and grey. He kept seeing the intruder – her cold face – and Doug’s mangled and broken body. He kept hearing the American voice he’d overheard the day before. Trust me, Prime Minister Stratton. This war is good to go . . . the Americans are all on board. The question is, how are you going to get it through . . . ?
There was something more to it than that. There had to be. What else had they been saying in that meeting? What was so important that somebody had tried to kill him, and succeeded in taking the life of his friend? There was only one person who might know the answer to that, and Chet had to get to her soonest.
He lost count of the number of cars he cut up, or of red lights that he ran, or of angry shouts from drivers as he forced his way across London. Even with all that, it was still just shy of 07.45 when he pulled into the top of Wimbourne Terrace, a narrow street of mansion-block flats round the back of Edgware Road tube station.
It was a residential road. No shops or cafés, but still a fair number of people walking along either side. Chet drove slowly down the road, looking out for number 124. It would be on the right, and . . .
He took a sharp breath.
Numbe
r 124 looked like all the other blocks with its black and white chequerboard pathway leading up to an ornate red-painted door with two frosted-glass panels. But on the other side of the road, sitting in a white VW Golf, was a woman he recognised. Dark, wavy hair. A beautiful face. The last time he’d seen her was in the rear-view mirror of his own car, as she stood outside his flat, pistol in hand.
Chet lowered his head as he passed. Had the intruder clocked him? He fucking hoped not.
At the far end of Wimbourne Terrace, some twenty metres away, he pulled into the kerb. He realised he was breathing deeply, trying to keep his mind and body steady. Was she alone? Were there others conducting surveillance on Suze McArthur’s flat? What was her strategy – to wait until the girl left, then follow her? Or was an accomplice already inside?
Whatever was happening, Chet couldn’t just walk up to the door and ring the bell. The woman in the Golf was, to Chet’s certain knowledge, armed; he wasn’t. She was able-bodied; Chet was far from it. He considered moving round to the back of the block to see if there was another entrance, but there was no way he was going to take his eyes off the woman. He needed a distraction. Something quick.
There was a public phone in a Perspex booth a few metres from the car. Leaving the car on a double yellow – there was no other choice – he hurried over to the booth. He looked around, checking for CCTV. Nothing jumped out, not that that meant much. Whether he was on camera or not, he had to act quickly.
He could still see the Golf as he picked up the receiver and dialled 999.
A female voice answered after two rings. ‘Which service do you require?’
‘Police,’ Chet replied.
‘Please hold the line.’
A pause, then a new voice. ‘Go ahead, caller. You’re through to the police.’
Chet affected a note of panic. ‘I . . . I think I’ve seen someone with a gun.’
‘Where did you see this?’
‘Wimbourne Terrace, W2. It’s a woman. I saw her getting into a white VW Golf.’
‘Do you have the registration number, caller?’