by Nick Oldham
‘RedFour,’ Donaldson said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘The code name of the team he uses, usually made up of ex-SAS officers and other people who may have certain skill-sets.’
‘OK, RedFour, better than the Unit, I suppose.’
‘Just happened to be up there when your so-called David Jones struck.’
‘So what had Lord Chalmers been up to that required a visit from them?’
‘I don’t know, Henry. Maybe we’ll never know.’
‘Not sure if I want to know … That’s not what this is about, this is about Alison and Ginny and a man who knows more than he’s willing to tell.’
‘Yeah, yeah … Anyway, he works somewhere in the bowels of Whitehall but exactly where I don’t know.’
‘So I’ll have to go and stand there until he walks past me?’
‘You could do that – or you could have breakfast with him.’
When that phone call ended, Henry spent a few minutes in the bar with the regulars and speaking to the staff, then went through to the back where he logged on to the internet, booked a train to London Euston from Preston later that evening and booked the room at the Hub in St Martins Lane for that night. Then he sped down to Preston and waited for a Virgin Pendolino with just a rucksack over his shoulder.
He received a call on his mobile whilst he was standing on platform 4 which, although it did not surprise him, still stunned him.
He was now standing close to the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery, looking over to St Martin’s Church and the glass entrance to the crypt below. Sandwich boards outside advertised the full English breakfasts served below.
Henry felt empty as if his guts had been scraped out, but he was not hungry.
Instead he was furious, confused and upset, fighting the urge to sink down to his knees and curl up into a foetal ball.
Suddenly there he was.
A. A. Jenkins. OBE. Spook. Chubby guy. State executioner. Bureaucrat. Civil servant. Butler to the Prime Minister. A man who slept soundly in his bed after sending other men to do the dirty work.
Henry added the ‘C’ word to that list.
Jenkins appeared from the direction of Whitehall, no doubt having slithered out from his lair, and turned into the crypt and disappeared down the steps with a battered briefcase in his hand.
Henry watched him go out of sight, then waited.
A few moments later and a black van with smoked-out windows drew up across the road and two people alighted from the side sliding door. One was a tall, lean man, the other a smartly dressed woman. They had hardly touched the pavement when the van edged back into the traffic again
The pair also went down into the crypt.
Henry heard a voice in his earpiece. ‘Here we are, Henry.’
All of a sudden, Henry was ravenously hungry.
Henry was impressed by the vaulted ceilings and the whole set-up below ground. He ordered a breakfast and took himself off to a corner from which he could clearly see Jenkins at another table with the man and the woman who had arrived shortly after him without making it too obvious he was glaring at them.
His eyes were on Jenkins in the flesh, amazed there were such people in the world.
The trio were having an amiable breakfast meeting, maybe a catch-up, maybe real business.
Henry didn’t care.
He was going to have his moment with this worm who knew the real identity of Alison’s killer.
Henry was determined to wring the truth out of him one way or the other and maybe a crypt was the best place to achieve this, on the villain’s home turf.
Henry dawdled over his meal, as did Jenkins and the other two, joking and laughing.
No other customers had yet arrived in the cafe, which was a good thing for what might follow.
Henry smiled grimly.
He knew one of the two people who had joined Jenkins for breakfast. His name was Karl Donaldson, his close friend.
As he sat there he recalled the conclusion of the phone call he’d had with Donaldson the previous evening when Donaldson had mentioned having breakfast with Jenkins, something that Henry did not quite get until Donaldson explained.
The American had run Jenkins’ photograph and details past his supervisor, who immediately recognized him and sneered. When Donaldson had revealed why he was asking, the lady melted a little when he said that Henry Christie was desperate to confront the man over Alison’s murder, giving her the full background. She asked how she could help without compromising her own position.
Donaldson said, ‘You mentioned you’ve met him a few times?’
‘Yes.’
‘I won’t ask why.’
‘Don’t,’ she said.
‘Would you like to meet him again?’
‘He’s a creep … On what pretext?’
‘Could we offer him something … a snippet, maybe? And can I come with you?’
‘We could,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He’d be there like a shot anyway, snippet or not.’
‘How come?’
‘Desperate to get his hands into my panties, and maybe having this guy by the balls could be very useful.’
And so the meeting was arranged. Donaldson had listened to his boss’s side of the conversation as she purred down the line to Jenkins. He had to admit he would have responded with the same alacrity because she was a very fine lady who ruled the FBI office in London with a rod of steel covered with silk.
‘Nine a.m., St Martin’s crypt,’ she announced as she hung up. ‘His usual breakfast haunt, apparently … off the beaten track. Shall we have some sport with the weasel?’
Henry had to admit that Donaldson’s boss – he had only ever heard her referred to as ‘K’ (whether that was ‘K’ as in James Bond’s ‘M’ or Kaye was her name, Henry didn’t know) – was a stunning-looking lady, but like his appreciation of the crypt, it was something he put on the back burner.
He could see Jenkins fawning from where he sat, his body language spelled out in big fat letters.
Eventually their breakfasts were over.
‘K’ stood up and excused herself – a rest-room visit, as planned – leaving Donaldson and Jenkins at the table.
They chatted and waited for her return which, Henry knew, would not happen.
Henry pushed his plate away and stood up.
‘She’s taking her time … women, eh?’ Jenkins twitched his thick eyebrows at Donaldson. ‘Worth one, eh?’
Donaldson smiled thinly, wanting to be the one who planted a very big, thick, heavy fist into the man’s face.
Jenkins frowned at him. ‘We haven’t met before, have we? No, didn’t think so, but you look familiar … can’t just place …’
Donaldson understood this man’s role more than he had admitted to Henry as he himself had been unleashed by men like this. But there was something wrong about Jenkins and the whole set up of The Unit that he did not like.
Firstly the question of Lord Chalmers worried him. It seemed that Jenkins had used The Unit to murder a member of the aristocracy, but for what reason? Secondly, keeping the identity of a rogue killer under wraps just to save face was simply outrageous. Surely it would have been the best approach to admit it openly so this assassin could be brought quickly to justice? It was this side of things that had swayed K – as she was known – to help out this morning. The FBI could easily afford not be linked to a man like Jenkins. It would actually be in their interests to be on the side that brought the killer to book.
Donaldson rubbed the back of his right hand, then showed it to Jenkins.
‘My, my, that looks painful,’ Jenkins commented.
‘It is, it burns like hell.’ Donaldson looked into Jenkins’ bloodshot eyes.
The civil servant shrugged, uninterested, but reluctantly asked, ‘How did it happen?’
‘Came across a bad guy.’
Jenkins’ eyes narrowed, perhaps now placing Donaldson. He glanced around to see where K was, bu
t all he saw was a man approaching across the crypt floor, like a monster from a Frankenstein movie, his eyes shrunken in their sockets, his head shaved, one ear a ragged mess.
‘A very bad guy,’ Donaldson added for effect.
Jenkins’ sloppy mouth drooped open as something clicked with him. His head jerked around and he looked properly at Henry. He tried to stand up.
‘I’ve been fucking set up here—’
Donaldson rose and stepped quickly behind him. He placed his big hands on Jenkins’ shoulders, squeezed tight and slammed him back down on to the chair.
Henry moved in slowly, sat opposite and slid his rucksack on to the floor.
‘What? What the damned hell?’ Jenkins demanded. ‘You let go, you big oaf.’
Jenkins waited to be set free but Donaldson simply held him in place and leaned to bring his lips close to Jenkins’ right ear. ‘You keep your voice level,’ he whispered. ‘You keep calm and maybe you’ll walk out of here. Do something silly and I’ll break your neck and leave you sitting here dead. Understood?’
With sweat instantly pouring out of his head, Jenkins nodded, but said, ‘This is outrageous. You shall be receiving a formal comp—’
Donaldson smashed an open palm across Jenkins’ ear, just hard enough to send shockwaves through his ear canal, but not burst his eardrum.
‘Sit, listen, respond,’ Donaldson said.
Clutching his ear, his face distorted in pain, Jenkins demanded, ‘What do you want?’
Donaldson nodded at Henry.
‘I think you know me, don’t you?’ Henry said.
‘No, should I?’
‘I have things you need to see.’
Henry unzipped the rucksack, reached in and extracted a blue A4 folder which he placed in front of him lengthways. He opened the flap and took out a photograph, twizzled it around and slid it towards Jenkins, who purposely did not look at it, knowing that once a thing is seen, it cannot be unseen.
‘Look at it,’ Henry said.
‘Why?’
SMACK! Donaldson crashed the palm of his hand across Jenkins’ ear again, sending another jolt of excruciating pain from one side of his skull to the other. Donaldson then gripped the back of the man’s head, his fingers splayed as though he was holding a basketball and forced Jenkins to look down.
Henry laid his finger on the photograph. It was one he had taken from a frame on the sideboard in the living room of himself and Alison proudly standing outside the front of the Tawny Owl.
‘Me … my fiancée, Alison Marsh,’ Henry said, laying a fingertip on each person.
‘Very nice.’
Henry took out another photo and slid it over the first one, covering it.
‘My fiancée,’ he said, ‘Alison Marsh.’
This time it was a lurid crime-scene photograph, Alison dead and mutilated in the hospital toilet cubicle, a gruesome, terrible, blood-soaked scene.
There was just the merest hint of a reaction from Jenkins’ eyes. His mouth did a little ‘popping’ noise.
Henry took out another photograph and placed it over the first two.
‘My fiancée’s daughter, Virginia – Ginny.’
Jenkins was breathing heavily, his fat nostrils dilating with the stress of the encounter. His face was becoming redder and a shade of purple at the same time. Donaldson was still holding his head in position.
Henry dipped his hand into the rucksack again and came out with a mini iPad which he placed on top of the photographs. It was already switched on. He turned it around and pressed play on screen and the short video, taken from the CCTV camera in the hospital car park, showed Ginny being kidnapped.
‘Ginny being kidnapped,’ Henry said simply, ‘by your man after he had murdered her mother, my fiancée, Alison Marsh by cutting her throat and almost severing her head from her body.’
Jenkins watched unblinking.
Henry was relentless.
He took out another photograph. This was of Tod Rawstron’s dead body, naked on a mortuary slab just after he had been moved there from the scene of his death and not cleaned up in any way.
‘Tod Rawstron, nineteen years old, killed by your man.’
Henry went on, placed another dreadful photograph on top of the pile. This was of the crime-scene investigator, Ray Bower, who had caught the full blast of the grenade in the VW camper van.
‘A wife and two kids, no dad any more.’
‘Let me go,’ Jenkins said.
Donaldson released his grip.
‘He cannot be linked to us,’ Jenkins babbled to Henry. ‘I’ve already told your chief constable that.’
‘He’s not my chief constable,’ Henry corrected him.
‘Whatever … He went rogue after suffering a mental breakdown, PTSD or whatever the hell it’s called. He had been sectioned to a secure unit at a military hospital in Essex. He killed two nurses and escaped one night. We never expected to see him again. And don’t you understand? If he is caught it can never be revealed who he really is because if it ever came out that the government has a unit that sanctions murder, it would be disastrous.’
‘For who?’ Henry asked.
‘The government, you idiot. We are a civilized nation, we don’t do things like that, bring ourselves down to the level of the people who are against us … except we do and I am the man who oversees it.’
‘Let me tell you something, Mr A. A. Jenkins, I don’t give a rat’s arse about this government. I care about bringing this man to justice.’
‘That will never happen.’
‘Just watch me.’
‘You’re not even a cop any more,’ Jenkins said.
‘So you do know who I am!’
Jenkins blinked at his mistake.
Henry suddenly changed tack. ‘Why was Lord Chalmers murdered?’
‘I’m not going there,’ Jenkins protested.
Donaldson slammed Jenkins’ face into his plate and smeared his face in the remnants of the fat and egg yolk. The crockery clattered, Jenkins raised his egg-covered face.
‘What was in the briefcase in Lady Chalmers’ plane?’
‘What briefcase?’ Jenkins wiped his cheek with a napkin. His nose had started to bleed, just a dribble.
‘The one she took on the plane with her, given to her by a man who was subsequently murdered by your RedFour team? Yeah, I know the jargon.’
‘There is no briefcase, I can assure you of that.’
Henry shrugged. ‘You are a liar, Mr Jenkins, OBE.’
‘I have a job to do and I do it fucking well. I protect the government, particularly the Prime Minister’s office …’
‘So you are his private little army?’
‘Possibly … What I do is not nice, but it’s a necessary evil.’
‘Ordering assassinations?’
‘If the cap fits.’
‘So … tell me about the man who murdered my fiancée and kidnapped her daughter. Tell me about him.’
‘What’s there to tell? Brilliant sniper. Trained up, sent out, did his job, was well remunerated for it, became a real hunter, then he lost it, had a breakdown, we tried to cure him, he escaped …’
‘And somehow ended up in Lancashire? Now how the fuck did that happen? How did he end up in a one-horse town in rural Lancashire? Answer me that, you sack of shit.’
‘Just happened, I suppose. No rhyme or reason for these things.’
‘And you continue to lie … I’ll tell you what “just” happened. What “just” happened was that he turned up in Lancashire at the same time as your RedFour team were sent to murder Lord Chalmers and then tried to murder me. That’s what “just” happened, that was the coincidence and there is no connection between these events. But it was no accident that that your mentally scarred assassin escaped from a secure unit and decided to kidnap a girl in Lancashire, was it?’
‘Don’t know what you mean,’ Jenkins said, wiping tomato sauce from his eyebrow and dabbing his bleeding nose with a napkin.
&
nbsp; ‘Tell me his real name,’ Henry insisted.
‘No.’
He reached into his rucksack – Jenkins groaned – and pulled out two sheets of A4 paper with what looked like a complex of graphs and bar charts printed on them. He laid one on top of the other. He had printed these off earlier this morning at his hotel.
‘Any idea what this is?’ He tapped the paper with his fingertip.
Jenkins shook his head. ‘Should I?’
‘It’s a DNA profile. This’ – he continued to tap the sheet – ‘is the DNA profile of your man.’
‘How did you get that?’ Jenkins asked with a hint of menace.
‘A DNA sample was lifted from some of the items he left at the scene of the kidnapping at the Tawny Owl, the syringe, the gaffer tape. It was then analysed.’
‘It was blocked,’ he said desperately. His eyes zigzagged sideways and back as if he was weighing up an escape route.
‘Blocked only when it was submitted to the DNA database … just like the fingerprints were when they were checked. It doesn’t prevent an expert from making a comparison to another DNA profile he or she might have access to.’
‘You’re talking riddles.’
‘Yeah, I’m a real joker.’ Henry slid the second sheet out from underneath the first and laid it alongside.
Jenkins shrugged. ‘And?’
Henry laid a finger on the second sheet. ‘As you can see, another DNA profile.’
Jenkins waited.
‘This is the DNA profile of Ginny Marsh, my fiancée’s stepdaughter. They are not blood related, therefore, but these two people are.’ Henry now looked Jenkins straight in the eye, firm, unwavering, his bubbling rage evident in the look. Jenkins tried to shrink away. ‘A scientist compared these two profiles,’ he went on, ‘and they conclusively show that the man who killed my fiancée and abducted and may have killed Ginny Marsh is her father.’
Henry reached into the rucksack once more.
His hands dithered as he placed an A4 photograph on top of all the other documents. He had removed it from a picture frame on Ginny’s dressing table. It was a lovely family photo of Ginny, aged around five, together with Alison and her father, Jack Marsh.