Final Target

by E. V. Seymour

  Out in the open I rolled up the collar of my jacket, slipped a hand in my pocket, felt the warm length of leather, entwined it around my fingers and, certain my would-be killer had caught up, set off.

  The lock-up was a no-go so I tracked in the other direction towards Regent’s Canal. Once a slum area, much of the basin had been cleared for apartments and leisure boats, another case of regeneration changing the urban landscape for the better. If my Russian thought he could knock me off and dispose of my body in the drink, he was mistaken.

  Up ahead was a narrow walkway in between two towering office blocks with windows facing the Battlebridge Basin. Not too many cyclists and joggers out today. Quiet and soulless, it would be the perfect place for my man to strike. I had other ideas.

  The temperature had dropped several degrees to a malicious minus. Damp intensified the bitter cold. The light was poor. My footsteps marked time in a strange syncopated rhythm with my prospective assassin. If I got this wrong, if I had not read him right, I was a minute away, maybe even seconds, from certain death.

  Out on an open stretch of moorings, it would be hard for my killer to take a shot unseen. Perhaps he was a gambling man. Maybe he was reckless. I didn’t think so. He’d hung back at the requisite distance. He hadn’t forced the pace. He hadn’t lost me. I respected him for that. An early lesson in my killing career was never to underestimate the enemy.

  My destination was a brick-built arch, dark and low lying with black, icy water beneath, the ultimate place for a kill. I increased my stride, eyes straight ahead, determined not to show out even though the guy probably had his hand on the pistol, safety off on the left of the slide, finger twitching on the trigger. It gave me enough time to get ahead and tuck myself into a narrow hollow where the bricks had crumbled. My eyes are quick at adjusting to poor light and I wondered how well my Russian would fare.

  Pretty well, as it happened.

  He burst through the tunnel and let off two shots, the put-put sound confirming the use of a silencer and that he meant to carry out his orders with a certain amount of finesse. Luckily for me, as he fired, he continued to move forward.

  I darted out and wrapped the leather tie around his neck with all the agility and speed of a black mamba. Leonid gasped, dropped the pistol, hands flying to his throat. He obviously hadn’t been instructed in the ‘never underestimate the enemy’ school of contract killing. One kick from me and the pistol hit the water. Put the odds back in my favour.

  I shouted above the clatter of boots scraping, limbs flying, the noise of a man caught in the grind. ‘Stop struggling. I’m not going to kill you.’

  He relaxed and I eased off the pressure. Next, he lowered his head, and as I cut him some slack, he lashed his head back, the strongest part of his skull butting me smartly on the nose. It caught me exactly on an old break, a souvenir of a game of rugby. Pain almost blinded me. A rush of warm blood cascaded over my chin and down the front of my jacket. I hauled hard to temporarily cut off the oxygen to his brain – enough to keep him quiet, not enough to kill him. But the wiry Russian wasn’t ready to give in yet. With a tremendous display of power that reverberated through my body, he bucked and twisted his muscular shoulders. I hung on with a terrible sense of déjà vu. What was it with these guys?

  ‘I need answers to questions.’

  ‘Nyet.’ His breath, sour and tainted with garlic, was too close for comfort.

  ‘Don’t give me that crap,’ I snarled. ‘Speak English. You understand what I’m saying.’

  Clearly he didn’t because he lifted his right foot and ran the heel of his boot painfully down my shin. It hurt. Properly cross, I twisted the leather in both hands, turned up the pressure, felt the guy gurgle. He tried to dig his fingers underneath my makeshift garrotte in a doomed attempt to release the pressure, but I wasn’t budging. Any moment his hyoid bone would fracture. I felt like a guy on a high wire, desperate to keep my balance. I wanted answers. I wanted to send a strong message back to China Hayes. I genuinely did not want to kill Leonid. He wasn’t like Konstantin. He was unarmed.

  ‘Screw this, talk to me.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he gasped. ‘I’m fucked anyway.’

  This was the equivalent of a symphony orchestra to my ears. I loosened my grasp enough to let him speak, not enough for him to try anything clever. Had anyone seen us together, we would have cut an odd picture. They’d possibly think I was getting up close and personal in an entirely different way to the one intended. ‘Did China send Konstantin?’

  ‘Nyet. Konstantin had his own score to settle.’

  So Darren’s information checked out, which was good. I intended to pay Barry Walls another visit in the hope that Darren would have more high-grade information for me. ‘Did China kill Daragh Dwyer?’

  He delayed for no more than a fraction of time. ‘No.’ I didn’t believe his hesitation was due to Leonid translating a Russian negative into an English negative.

  ‘But he knew it was going to happen?’

  ‘Da, yes.’

  ‘Faustino Testa?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘China was party to it?’

  ‘Party? I do not understand.’

  ‘He helped someone else do it.’

  ‘I do not know. Maybe he give out information.’

  Yes, that worked, I thought. China, the scheming bastard.

  ‘Chester Phipps, did China help with that too?’

  ‘I do not know for sure.’

  I tightened my grip infinitesimally.

  ‘Maybe,’ the Russian growled back.

  ‘Someone tampered with the brakes on China’s car and tried to kill him.’

  ‘I know nothing of this.’

  ‘One of his men was killed.’

  ‘You are one crazy man.’

  ‘Who is China working for?’

  ‘This I do not know.’

  Again, a tweak.

  ‘You cannot squeeze information out of a man who knows nothing,’ he rasped.

  Leonid was correct, probably because I wasn’t asking the right questions. ‘Why did he tell you to kill me?’

  ‘It is not my place to ask. I do as I am told.’

  That figured. ‘Have you heard the name McCallen?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Titus.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Simone.’

  ‘Da, China wants her dead.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she is in his business, in his face, taking money, cutting deals.’

  ‘You know this for a fact?’ I eased off a little.

  ‘I know this is what China tells me,’ Leonid said, exasperated. ‘I am from St Petersburg. Asking questions gets you killed.’

  With this I could identify. ‘Tell me about China.’

  ‘He is good man to work for. He pays good money. He –’

  ‘Is he under pressure?’ I didn’t want a CV or to know whether China paid into a pension plan for his employees. I wanted to find out who was pulling China’s strings. ‘Is he nervous, irritable, unpredictable?’

  Leonid let out a rough laugh. ‘All bosses are like this. Never happy. Believing someone is out to rip them off and take their business. They are all paranoid. It is what they are.’ I had to hand it to Leonid; he understood the idiosyncrasies of crime lords well. I was beginning to think I was running into a dead end. Maybe Leonid was getting as cold and miserable as me, maybe he wanted to go home to St Petersburg. A smart guy, he understood that if I were to release him, he had to trade. He fell silent for a moment. I gave him time to think out his position. It took all of ten seconds. Like I said, he was on it.

  ‘China mentioned someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A man, a German.’

  The light of recognition flared briefly inside my mind. ‘His name?’

  ‘I do now know. China only referred to him as the German.’

  ‘When was this?’

  Leonid gave a big shrug of his shoulders. ‘Many mont
hs ago.’

  Pallenberg, I thought.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Nothing more to tell.’

  ‘In what context did he mention the German?’

  ‘Same time he was bitching about Simone.’

  A connection between Simone and Pallenberg? I sifted through my conversation with Mathilde in Berlin. Then it hit me. I put it down to his increasing success and new circle of friends. Had Pallenberg fallen in with the smart set and frequented one of Simone’s sex parties? How likely was it, and how much of a coincidence was that?

  ‘One other thing,’ I said, ‘where will China hole up when he flees his riverside view in Kingston?’ If I were Leonid, I’d stay far away from Hayes and get the next flight back to the motherland. Leonid’s failure to report back to base with the equivalent of my head on a plate would be enough for China to realise that Leonid, like Konstantin, had failed in his task. He would be punished severely.

  ‘I do not know. Maybe the warehouse.’

  ‘Where?’

  He told me the name of a trading estate in Deptford. If China was this stupid he deserved everything that was coming to him. I released my grasp, pulled out a handkerchief and did my best to mop up the blood. Leonid took a step to the side, put a hand to the raw weal on his neck and looked at me with curious eyes. ‘You are letting me go.’

  ‘I am. If you see China, warn him that the next time our paths cross, I’ll kill him.’

  ‘But not me?’

  ‘Not you. You are free to go.’

  He gave me another quizzical look. If I were Leonid I’d have said ‘thanks very much’ and fled. The Russian was made of stronger, more resilient material. ‘People call you Hex, the magician.’

  They did once, not now. I nodded assent.

  ‘You are not what people say you are.’

  I smiled and walked away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I returned to the lock-up, changed my shirt, put money in my wallet and called Mathilde Brommer, Lars’s ex-girlfriend and the lady who’d collared me outside the Pallenbergs’ apartment in Berlin. She sounded tired or as if she were in the middle of something and I’d interrupted. I couldn’t claim that she was pleased to hear from me. Once we’d got basic civilities out of the way, never my strong suit, I launched in.

  ‘Mathilde, you mentioned Lars had got in with a new crowd of people in London.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘People in the art establishment.’

  ‘Any particular names?’

  She rattled off a list of people I’d never heard of bar one: a BBC journalist specialising in the arts.

  ‘Did Lars ever talk to you about a man called China Hayes?’

  She waited a beat. I could almost hear her trawling through her memory bank for an elusive connection. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘A bad guy.’ I wondered fleetingly if Hayes was responsible for Lars’s death. How the hell did that fit together? Mathilde followed my line of thinking and asked the same question.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I’m going to find out.’

  ‘Really? I thought you were an art dealer. Does this man, China Hayes, paint?’ Mathilde’s tone was caustic.

  There followed an awkward silence in which I thought she’d hung up. Eventually, she spoke. ‘You are most persistent.’

  She had no idea. ‘Mathilde, what did Lars do for fun?’

  ‘Lorna Spencer,’ she said, no trace of humour.

  A name assumed by McCallen. I closed my eyes and wished I wasn’t talking to a woman. They could be so vengeful. As soon as the thought entered my brain, I wondered why I’d discounted the most obvious possibility. ‘Aside from Lorna, who did he mix with socially? Did he attend parties with the great and the good?

  Mathilde let out a short, dry laugh. ‘Why are you asking these questions?’

  ‘Because I’m trying to find out who killed Lars.’

  ‘That’s a heavy allegation,’ she said fast as electricity lightning.

  ‘It is,’ I said simply. ‘Did he mix in playboy circles?’

  ‘Himmel, Arsch und Zwirn, how the hell should I know?’

  ‘Is it likely?’

  ‘For the old Lars, no. For the new Lars, perhaps.’

  Perhaps was good enough. ‘Did he ever mention a French woman by the name of Simone Fabron?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You are absolutely certain?’

  ‘What makes you think he’d confide in me?’

  ‘Because he told you that he was being followed. He told you he felt under threat. Mathilde, the man still cared about you despite what you think.’

  It wasn’t like me to get empathic but I believed Lars had cared. Whether or not Mathilde had once cared for Lars until, emotions trampled, she’d reached the point of no return was up for debate.

  ‘I hope so,’ she said in a small voice before hanging up.

  * * *

  Removing a finely tailored suit and a smart pair of shoes from my collection, I took a Tube to the Barbican and booked into a hotel – part of an upmarket chain in Charterhouse Square – for a couple of nights. I needed somewhere to clean up, eat a decent meal, sleep and think. I was frustrated. McCallen’s mobile had sprung back to life but McCallen was still missing. Every lead revealed loose associations and, at the dark heart of a murderous campaign of revenge, the ghost of Billy Squeeze hovered. I wasn’t exactly running on empty. I still had the party the next evening. Darren was sniffing around on my behalf. In twenty-four hours, China would have got the message, cleared out of his riverside apartment and gone to ground. I hoped Leonid was right about his boss’s chosen lair.

  The German connection bothered me. Something that struck me in conversation with Mathilde made me view events in a different way. What if there was no link between McCallen’s disappearance and Lars Pallenberg’s death? What if things had happened simultaneously? In other words, was Mathilde innocent? Had heartbreak morphed into humiliation and then led to violence?

  Mathilde came across as level-headed, a good soul, but the more I thought about it, the happenstance of her being in the right place at the right time, outside the Pallenberg’s apartment at the moment of my arrival, forced me to wonder whether I’d missed the obvious. Mathilde Brommer had more reason than anyone to want Lars Pallenberg dead. McCallen had smashed the certainty that Mathilde was ever going to marry the man she’d loved and lived with for over a decade. I frowned. I’d never been hired to settle domestic scores. Wasn’t my bag. In spite of my lack of experience in such things, it doesn’t take a degree in relationship counselling to know that a scorned woman is immensely dangerous. Truth was I had to face the possibility that Mathilde had ordered the death of her former lover. I cursed my failure to consider this before. How it tied in with McCallen’s fate, I was less certain.

  I took out my phone and ran through the crime scene shots, attempting to profile the psyche of the killer from the evidence on the ground. The method spoke of cool, calm surgical precision followed by total wipeout. It didn’t bode well for McCallen’s chances.

  Unless I’d got it all wrong about the solitary killer.

  Recalibrating my thinking with regard to McCallen’s disappearance, I reckoned it needed one person to abduct, another to do the business. An operational phone was no proof of life and yet, inexplicably, I still believed, and in spite of so many days without news, that McCallen was in the land of the living. She might be in poor shape, be close to death or at risk of dying. Mine was not blind optimism. I simply had a strong, almost visceral, sense of her existence. Right now, gut instinct was all I had and, until proved otherwise, I determined to hang on to it.

  I bathed, fixed my nose with a strip of plaster and stared at my reflection in the mirror. The skin around my eyes had turned a deep shade of blue, Leonid’s calling card stamped all over my face. Not a terrific look for my forthcoming party. Frankly, I was more troubled by what I read in my expressio
n. I saw hunger and thirst there. Hunger for justice, thirst for action. The sight of the dead man lying at the bottom of the quarry had woken old demons. An unarmed householder is no match for a thug with a Magnum. In the ordinary scheme of things, I’d be hailed as a hero for using reasonable force, but my life was not ordinary. It never had been. Aside from the past twelve months, I’d lived it full-throttle and out loud. This raised wider questions.

  How long could I hold out without resorting to my wild and wicked ways? How long before I contacted an old supplier, issued the precise specifications of the model of the gun and ammunition I needed? Would it be hours, a day, a week before I caved in? And then what? Would I ditch my newfound career in property development, say goodbye to Dan and the lads, leave the only place I’d ever been able to call home, the place where I’d once, long ago, had a life with a mother I loved? Was I destined to kill and sleep in the arms of strangers until I got too ancient or too slow and someone younger and fitter took me out of the game?

  In despair, I turned away from the unbearable prospect, dressed in dark and sober clothes and ordered room service. I had to do everything in my power to avoid a return to the terrible life I’d known and once lived. I’d be a dead man inside if I didn’t.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Early the next morning I called Barry Wall. I didn’t know the hours he kept. I suspected that, as a corrupt screw, he fitted the job around four meals a day and snacks.

  The phone rang. I waited for an answering facility to kick in, but nothing happened. About to cut the call, there was a click and Barry’s wheezy voice came on the line. I imagined him out of breath from the exertion of dragging himself away from the kitchen table at a critical moment. I gave him a few seconds to compose himself. I did not announce who I was; there was no need.