Omega Place

by Graham Marks

  ‘What is it, Ray?’

  ‘We got ’em, boss!’

  ‘Someone’s come through for us?’

  ‘Finally.’ Salter pushed his chair back. ‘They picked out all four of the pictures and have given up an address as well.’

  ‘We’d better get a team together.’

  ‘You want to go in tonight, boss?’

  Mercer sat down at her desk. ‘The sooner the better. I don’t want them slipping through our fingers. What’s the situation now, is anyone watching the place?’

  ‘Yeah, but nothing too close, in case the targets get spooked…’ Salter indicated his phone. ‘There’s someone at each end of the street, apparently.’

  ‘OK, good… do we have a plan of the house yet?’

  Salter frowned and shook his head. ‘Give us a chance, boss, I just took the call.’

  ‘Right, right… but get on to that, will you? Until we know the layout we won’t know how many people we should go in with. And tell Castleton to contact the duty officer and warn him that we’re going to need an emergency issue of shooters and body armour.’ Mercer picked up her phone, punched in a number and then put the receiver down. ‘I’ll email his BlackBerry…’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Markham…’ Mercer brought up the Outlook window on her computer and began typing a message to the Director of Internal Affairs. ‘I want a record on the system of what we’re planning. And I want official validation. Can’t be too careful nowadays.’

  ‘Let’s hope he emails his reply.’

  ‘With any luck he will…’ Mercer looked over at Salter as she typed. ‘What’s the news about Henry Garden – anything incriminating?’

  Salter shook his head. ‘He’s up to something, though. No one in his position leaves the office to make calls from public phone boxes, unless they really don’t want the conversation monitored.’

  Mercer sent the email and minimised the window. ‘When was the last call?’

  ‘Yesterday morning. He’d have had time to read the report about Bristol we had him specially copied in on.’

  ‘Do we know who he was calling?’

  ‘No. It was a mobile number, but we’ve not been able to trace it to an owner.’

  ‘Are you sure his people don’t know we’re interested in him?’

  ‘We’ve been very careful.’

  Mercer’s computer dinged that she had incoming mail, which she immediately checked. It wasn’t a reply from Alex Markham, and she looked away from the screen.

  ‘I wonder who he’s passing the information on to, and I wonder why he’s doing it?’

  ‘Might be a lifestyle glitch.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘He lives on his own, in a nice part of Tunbridge Wells…’

  ‘There’s a nasty part?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, boss, I’m just saying, the “bachelor” thing might have something to do with it.’

  ‘Really?’ God, Mercer thought, this job… the way it makes you think. ‘You reckon it’s blackmail, then?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘At home. Hasn’t been out all day.’

  As Salter picked up his phone, Mercer’s computer dinged again, and this time it was a reply from Markham. She opened the mail, then sat back, smiling.

  ‘We are to do, and I quote, “whatever needs to be done to expedite the situation”. That would appear to be carte blanche, so let’s get expediting.’

  33

  Saturday 19th August, Tunbridge Wells

  Henry Garden sat looking at the phone, still there on the table an arm’s reach away, exactly where it had been for the last hour. Was he ever going to find the courage to pick it up, or was he going to give in to his innate dread of being found out and just leave it where it was?

  There was no other way he could paint the picture. He was acting like a total coward. Yellow, through and through.

  And some little demon in his head kept dragging him, unwillingly, back to his school days. Bright, crystal-clear memories of that time repeatedly flashed in front of him; unwanted reminders of parallels he didn’t want to consider. Being laughed at as he stood on the side of the swimming pool, not daring to dive in, gripped by the fear that he would smash his head open on the bottom and die horribly if he did; not standing by a friend, but turning tail and running away when they got into a fight; watching someone else get the blame – and, more importantly, the punishment – for a rash of thefts he’d been entirely responsible for.

  They were all there. The small, pathetic and dirty little secrets were all coming back to haunt him tonight…

  34

  Sunday 20th August, Kingsland Road

  Dean Mayhew checked his watch. 01:58:34. Time to go. He’d spent the last thirty minutes lying down right at the back of the shit-heap of a garden that belonged to the target house. Hidden in the darkness, waiting. Observing. He’d got there by going over the walls and through the back gardens of the houses at the rear, an unseen shadow, a silent but lethal ghost. Even the rats were keeping well away.

  Then he was moving. Running quickly, keeping low to the ground, he zigzagged towards the back door of the house; reaching its shadows, he snapped on a pair of thin latex gloves. The lock kept him out for all of seven seconds and then he was inside, standing motionless in the kitchen, letting his eyes adjust, sniffing the air and listening to the house and what it was telling him. He could smell dope and he could hear someone’s breathing, quite nearby.

  His watch said it was now 02:02:05. Enough pissing about. Dean unholstered his .45 automatic pistol, took the suppressor out of its pocket in his black denim jacket and screwed it on to the barrel. He pulled the slide back, chambered a round and cocked the weapon, the perfectly maintained parts making almost no sound as they meshed. Now he was ready. Checking all safeties were off, he moved out of the kitchen and into the room where the deep, regular breathing was coming from.

  The aroma of dope was stronger, but in the gloom he couldn’t yet see where the sleeping person was. With the Glock 21, now almost fifteen inches long with its silencer attached, hanging by his side, Dean skirted the furniture and finally saw the prone figure. Slumped in one of the armchairs, legs right out in front of him, was the older man. Dead to the world. Dean considered making his condition a permanent one, but that wasn’t part of his brief and he saw no reason to waste the bullets. The man was so wasted he wasn’t going to wake up, but, if he was unfortunate enough to do so, and he got in the way, it would be for the last time…

  02:04:19. He backed out of the room and entered the hallway, stopping to listen again. Nothing. He took out a small Maglite torch, turned it on and inspected the stairs; covered in threadbare carpeting, they were going to squeak like mice, more than likely, but if he kept to the wall side and took them three steps at a time he should make the minimum amount of noise…

  02:05:01. Dean stood on the first-floor landing. Four doors and a staircase going up another floor. Door one: bathroom; door two: boxroom, empty, smell of dope; door three: twin bedroom, empty, perfume; door four: two beds and a camp bed, one bed occupied by the sleeping figure of the other crop-cut boy. The air was rank with sweat, aftershave, beer and feet. Just like the army…

  02:06:48. The door to the loft room at the top of the next set of stairs was closed. Behind it must be his target. And, as she was nowhere else, the second girl. Tough break for her, if she was serious about this man, but that was the way it went sometimes. Dean turned the door handle and very carefully pushed it open a foot or so; slipping into the room he saw two figures on the double mattress on the floor.

  He took the photo Nick had given him out of his pocket and checked it against the sleeping man, lying on his back with his mouth half open. He was older and had less hair, his glasses were on the book by the bed, but it was him. Curled up next to him, one arm thrown over his chest, the dark-haired girl he’d seen in the back garden was smiling in her sleep. Well, at least he wasn’t goin
g to die alone. The smallest of mercies…

  02:07:23. Dean moved round so the ejected cartridge cases would fall where he could find them easily and brought the Glock up so it was half an inch from the man’s forehead. This, he thought to himself as he sighted, braced his right wrist and prepared to pull the trigger twice in quick succession, was a direct consequence of not doing as you were told.

  THEWW… THEWW…

  The sound – ‘soft, like the breath of an angry angel’, as someone he knew had once described it – escaped as the suppressor did its job, instantly reducing the pressure and cooling the gases blown out after the two bullets exited the barrel.

  02:07:56. Scrambled brains for breakfast, Dean thought as he glanced at the girl to see if she was going to stir, but she didn’t. Picking up the two expelled cartridge cases, he tucked them, still warm, in the back pocket of his jeans, left the room and shut the door behind him. Job done. Money in the bank. He stood on the stairs for a moment and listened. Again, nothing, just house noises. He carried on down, gripping the silencer in his left hand as he crossed the landing, about to start unscrewing it, but then thinking no, maybe not. He wasn’t away quite yet…

  As the thought crossed Dean’s mind, the door to his left opened; Dean looked over his shoulder to find the crop-haired boy standing there in a creased, beer-stained T-shirt and his boxers, weaving slightly from side to side. Not asleep any more.

  The boy frowned and you could almost hear his brain attempting to work out what was going on.

  ‘Who the fu… wha the…?’

  His voice was loud in the silence. Unacceptably loud, for Dean’s purposes. He’d have to shut him up.

  ‘Oi, you… I said, like, din’t I… right?’ The boy stumbled out of the room, pointing at him.

  Dean crossed the landing in two strides, grabbed the boy’s shoulder and spun him sharply round and slammed him into the wall. ‘Shut it!’ he whispered in the boy’s ear, smelling the dope and the alcohol he was sweating out. ‘Shut-it-right-up…’

  He raised his right hand and was about to use the gun butt to turn the kid’s lights out when he lurched backwards, his fists flailing, and Dean had to quickly step out of his way.

  ‘Don’cha tell me wha’a fu-in do!’

  Dean glanced at his watch. 02:09:11. This was not how it was supposed to be going. Not. At. All. This bloody drunken kid was screwing everything up, making a mess of all his timings! It was almost like a switch had been flicked in his head and the control program taken offline. Dean went all the way from ‘chilled’ to ‘ballistic’ in one breath. The boy went from standing to eating the carpet in the same length of time.

  ‘You stupid…’ One knee on the boy’s spine, and holding him down by the neck, Dean placed the silenced barrel at the base of the kid’s skull, fired twice and stood up. Then he fired once more. ‘… little shit.’

  In the quiet he took a deep, deep breath, inhaling the sweet smell of combat; he loved the fumes of battle, even a crap little fight like this. Dean could feel a calmness descending on him as his anger faded and the feral beast side of his nature retreated to whatever part of his brain that it hid in. Waiting to be let out again.

  As he watched the dark liquid pool around the boy’s head he saw the crucifix he was wearing on a thin gold chain round his neck. Reaching down, he yanked the chain and it broke.

  ‘Not much use, was it?’ he muttered, throwing it into the shadows.

  Dean stood, reassessing his situation. Two people still left alive in the house who could possibly cause him trouble. Ten bullets left. The maths worked out OK. He checked his watch again as he bent down to pick up the shell cases. 02:09:49. He was overrunning, and it was definitely time he got out of this place.

  35

  Sunday 20th August, Leicester Square, London

  It had been good to get out of the house. Be on the street, but not have to think about flyering or stickering or getting caught smashing some piece of equipment or being scared shitless you were going to fall and get smashed yourself. Walking to the bus stop with Rob and Terri Paul’d really felt a part of Omega Place, part of something that was doing important stuff, really important. He believed they were forcing people to look at who was looking at them. You had to make that kind of noise, like Orlando said, otherwise the public just acted like children and got led around by the nose, thinking that everything politicians did was in their best interests.

  As they’d waited for a bus, Paul had watched the people walking by. They had to be told, but you also had to have a good time sometime, else you’d get totally like… well, totally like Orlando, and who wanted to be like that? Not him. Not the others, either. And not tonight, when they were going to have a laugh. He could do with a laugh.

  Paul hadn’t had this much fun, ever. Not ever. Everything had been a gas, starting with finding that he’d picked up the wrong jacket when he’d left the house and was wearing Tommy’s. Had Tommy’s wallet and everything! And you could say what you liked about Rob, but he knew how to have a good time, and he was mad, mad, bad mad company. Did not care what he did or what he said. But then Paul pretty much knew that about him already. He just hadn’t seen him in action, out on the town kind of thing.

  Him and Rob and Terri had been to a couple of bars and one club, possibly two. They’d been thrown out of one of the clubs because Rob had bothered some girls. Apparently. He said he’d just asked them to dance. Terri said he’d probably tried to slip his tongue down their throats when he was doing the asking.

  Anyway. Whatever. It didn’t matter because it was two o’clock and they were now at some all-night caff near Leicester Square, eating kebabs with chilli sauce, drinking Coke float, with extra vodka that Terri had got from somewhere or other, and they were rerunning everything they’d just done, surrounded by loads of other people doing exactly the same thing. How weird was that? Truly weird, but a hell of a lot better than being back at the house, they all agreed about that. Tonight was not a night for being shut away. It was a night for doing things you were going to regret the next day, but couldn’t care less about at the time.

  Like trying to snog Terri.

  Actually, not that. Some small, but vitally important part of Paul’s head that had to do with survival had still been aware enough to know that he wouldn’t have to wait till the morning to very much regret doing that. Unlike Rob. But then Rob appeared to have the attention span of a goldfish and never learnt from his mistakes. Just got better at making them. Terri had punched his face out when he’d tried to kiss her a second time, but nothing got broken and Rob was drunk enough to think it was very funny, the way girls punched, so everything was still A-OK, as his dad said.

  His dad…

  Paul wondered what he was doing on this Saturday-night-Sunday-morning. He’d been gone now almost a month. Would his dad even know? Would his mam have told him he’d run off? Maybe, if she could find a way of making it look like it was his dad’s fault. But probably not, because she wouldn’t want his dad to be able to blame the replacement. Oh no.

  God, how hard was it to get on with people? You should be able to get on with the ones you knew best, ferchris-sake, as you had the most practice with them. But that never seemed to be the case, leastways, not with anyone he knew back home. It seemed you liked the people best who were your friends, not your family. But then you could leave friends behind, say about someone ‘they were my friend, once’. But you never could do that with family. Family were for ever and you couldn’t say ‘he was once my dad’. You might want to, but you couldn’t.

  Paul realised he’d kind of zoned out long enough for the ice cream in his glass to melt completely. Rob, who was attempting to chat up some foreign students at the next table, seemed not to have noticed, but Terri was smiling at him across the table as she constructed another cigarette.

  ‘You were miles away.’ She licked the paper and rolled. ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Where the heart is? Some girlfriend you
left behind when you followed me down?’

  Paul felt himself blush. ‘No… thinking about me dad.’

  Terri flicked her lighter. ‘If I never see mine again it’ll be too soon.’

  There was no answer to that, Paul reckoned, so he kept his trap shut, not wanting to say the wrong thing. He looked out of the café window and hoped there would never be a time when he felt like that about his own dad.

  36

  Sunday 20th August, Kingsland Road

  Dean Mayhew liked to think of himself as a kind of an alternative, twenty-first-century Buddhist. He believed that all existence was suffering. And that most of the cause of the suffering was desire. Certainly it was true that, for him, not getting what he wanted caused both him and the person not giving it to him pain. Buddhists also believed that freedom from suffering was nirvana, which was attained through ethical conduct, wisdom and mental discipline; Dean believed he could tick all those boxes. While he knew that his ethics were not those most people would understand, he stuck to them like tin to a magnet; he was very wise in the ways of the world he lived in and his mental discipline was awesome… unless he lost his temper. After all, no one was perfect.

  Looking down at the floor he felt a momentary spike of regret, a tiny, instantly forgettable pinprick on his scarred conscience, for what he’d done to the crop-haired boy; but you would never attain nirvana if you didn’t move on. Onwards and upwards. He was about to scoop up the three ejected shell cases when there was a massive blow that shook the house, and then the front door, the bottom of which he could just see from where he was standing, flew inwards. Glass and wood splinters everywhere.