Tina went to the kitchen to make coffee. And here was Ricardo – Angel Face – his hand out for a shake, his smile broad and genuine. They sat down and talked about the fact that summer had come too soon. Tina brought the coffee in on a tray, her smile no less cheery than his. She sat down with them and talked about old times.
Did Stella remember the flat on the eighteenth floor?
Stella remembered.
They’d had some good times there, hadn’t they?
Stella laughed.
Life had been far from easy, but they’d muddled through.
Stella agreed that life had been far from easy.
Tina recalled Stella at the kitchen table with her homework; Stella out on the walkway with a book.
Stella recalled the slap, the book turning and floating, its pages riffling in a breeze of its own making.
On the tray was a plate of the tea-cakes Stella had liked as a child, thin chocolate covering marshmallow with a biscuit base. She stared at them. Her hands trembled.
Tina explained that Ricardo was a businessman. A man in business. People trusted him, she said. The essence of good business practice was to be trustworthy. To be the kind of man people remembered as reliable. Ricardo nodded along to this. He echoed the odd word for emphasis: ‘Good business, yeah… Reliable, yeah…’
Tina remarked how good it was to be back after all this time. How sad it was that they had to leave, but… that’s life. Ricardo’s business came first, and they had to get away. It seemed an odd thing to say: We have to get away.
Stella took a tea-cake and bit into it. A flood of memories washed over her. Memories like a shock-wave, like drowning. The periphery of the room grew dim and cloudy, an old photograph, and her mother’s voice came from a place as far away as childhood.
She went to the bathroom and rinsed her face. Then she retched into the sink. A cry came from somewhere, and she thought the voice might be hers, until it came again, urgent and pained, from some other flat, some other life.
Stella set her mobile phone alarm clock to ring in five minutes, and laughed out loud at the cowardice that took. When she went back into the room, Tina was still talking and Ricardo was still smiling.
The alarm rang and she took a fake call. On the way out she shook Ricardo’s hand again, damp and soft; she took her mother’s kiss on the face, unflinching; she noticed the piles of home-made DVDs in the hallway – CAGE FIGHTS UNCENSORED; she remembered the splash of blood on the doorstep when she had called that day and got no answer.
On the walkway, heading for the stairs, she passed a man she recognized, someone from the old days. She only knew his nickname, Sekker, and why people called him that. She turned a corner, then turned back to see him ringing the bell of II69, Block B.
Now she remembered something in the area reports: that a man had been found with his hands nailed to the arms of a chair, his thumbs neatly clipped off, a clean cut through the bone. A call from a pay phone had sent the local cops to the address. She remembered Ricardo’s damp handshake and his pinned-on smile, her mother’s nervous chatter, the fond farewell.
Sekker at the door.
We have to get away.
60
The day was warming up.
Two drivers went nose to nose in a side street north of Notting Hill. They flashed their lights, they leaned on their horns, they got out and hammered away at each other, their cars ticking over. Ripe scents of blood and diesel fumes.
A man walked into a convenience store and showed the owner a gun. He yelled instructions, but the owner was too scared to understand, so the gunman tagged him with a shot that took him in the belly, left-side low. Piss and cordite.
A woman walking her dog on the towpath was raped by two men who laughed at the dog as it stood a few feet off, barking rhythmically. River mud and hawthorn blossom.
The Boys in the Beamer were cruising enemy territory, the first drugs of the day seeping through. A car they recognized was coming the other way: a tuned Toyota with smoked glass and a fuck-off sound-system. As it floated towards them, the boy with the Brocock leaned out and waggled the gun.
The Toyota was impassive behind its black, blank windows. The Toyota was cool. The Toyota, it seemed, didn’t give a shit.
The Beamer Boy took loose aim and pulled off a quick shot that went through the Toyota’s bodywork with a flat thap! followed by a high-pitched ring.
The Toyota pulled over and stopped. The Beamer weaved and laid some rubber. Shouts and laughter.
*
Delaney was sitting in a bar near the House of Commons drinking a lunch-time beer with a man he had once punched in the mouth. It was while ago. He and Nathan Prior had been stopped on a country road by a couple of Serb checkpoint guards who had started the day on Slivovitz and were looking for some action. Being a checkpoint guard isn’t glamorous; in fact, it’s demeaning; and in a long day’s checkpoint guard duty, the most fun you can have is shooting a bastard journalist, especially if you’re getting bad press in the bastard journalist’s country of origin.
Delaney had seen it coming. When they were ordered out of the car and he saw one of the farm boys in uniform unsling his gun, he started ranting at Prior as if the scab had just come off an old argument. Prior understood; he ranted right back. The guards stood off and laughed, but it was still fifty-fifty until Delaney threw the punch. Prior’s lip split, and he sat down heavily. Delaney got back into the car and drove off, Prior running behind, the guards laughing harder and longer now. In some obscure way, honour was satisfied.
Delaney had stopped fifty yards down the road. When Prior got into the car, he said: ‘Next time, it’ll be my turn to save your life,’ and spat blood on to the floor of the car.
While Prior went to the bar, Delaney watched the traffic of journos and spin-doctors, turncoats and lobby fodder. The bar was called the Agenda, so clearly the owner had a sense of humour. Prior came back with their drinks and sat with his back to the room, as if declaring himself temporarily off the case.
He said, ‘So far as I know, Neil Morgan’s pretty straight. Why do you want to know?’
‘It’s nothing hot.’
‘Is there a story?’ Prior asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Delaney said, ‘but if I find one, it’s yours.’
Prior believed him. He knew that Delaney had never had a taste for the backstabbing and smoking guns of politics.
‘You’re just curious about Neil Morgan but for no particular reason?’ Prior laughed as he asked the question.
‘Pretend it’s that.’
Prior shrugged. ‘He’s considered a coming man, of course; he’s ambitious; he’s got a raft of directorships, nothing new there; it’s rumoured that he’s got an offshore bank account; nothing much new there either. He’s thought of as a bit of a dilettante by some of his own people. You know – party politics as insider’s game. Which probably means he’s in line to be party leader: he’s not issue-led.’
‘No?’
‘Well, only when it pays to make the right noises: hard line on the war, soft on Europe, tough on crime, liberal-right, looks for specific advantage in domestic issues. They all need a cause, and he seems to have decided on social justice, which has the dual advantage of sounding virtuous and being largely meaningless.’
‘The offshore bank account,’ Delaney said. ‘Suspect money?’
‘Could be, I suppose. Why?’
Delaney took a small risk. ‘He might have had clandestine meetings with an American company, name and nature of business unknown.’
‘Really?’ Prior’s interest sparked. ‘Well, could be anything. The Americans are all over us just at the moment; they’re using the WTO as a can-opener: closing down fair-trade organizations, promoting GM foods, you name it. The multinationals have more lobbyists in the WTO corridors than dogs have fleas. You think Morgan’s getting his hands dirty?’
‘I don’t know,’ Delaney said. ‘I’m whistling in the dark.’
‘Is it
personal?’ Prior asked. ‘You’re obviously not coming at this from a professional point of view, are you?’
‘No. I mean, no, it’s not personal.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Prior said. ‘He’s fucking rich.’
Delaney laughed. ‘Yes. That much I do know.’
Gideon Woolf was prepping. He didn’t think of it that way, but it’s what he was doing. He’d already decided on his killing ground, and he’d devised a method. A tactic. Now he was sitting cross-legged in his room, eyes closed, running through the event in his head. As if he could see it on a screen.
You observe and you plan. You watch and you wait. You have a couple of dry runs in the hope that they will alert you to the unexpected, though, if things go wrong on the day, you just have to take your chances. Your only advantage – big advantage – is that you’re the one with the nasty surprise. You’re the one to fear.
The dailies from the last week were piled on the floor. He was headline news, he was famous, he was the subject of a dozen theories, twenty profiles, fifty feature articles. None came anywhere near the truth; none knew his purpose. A few days back he had gone to the gym and alternated weights with aerobics for two hours without a break. In the cafeteria, afterwards, he’d sat with his freshly squeezed juice and listened to a couple of fair-weather workouts at a nearby table swap ideas about him, and he had barely kept from laughing out loud.
He was everywhere. Everyone knew about him. Simply walking down a street was an act of pride, and, in honour of his new status, he had decided to award himself a decoration. He couldn’t have risked going to a tattoo parlour, so he had sat with a needle and Indian ink and given himself a small jailhouse tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. He’d used Drysol to staunch the bleeding and rubbing alcohol to clean the site. It looked good. It looked just like the one Silent Wolf carried in the same place.
He put on the combat pants and the high-laced boots. The broad-bladed knife went into his boot, the SIG Sauer in the square, snap-down pocket of the pants. The long, black leather coat hid the haft of the knife. He put a touch of gel to his hair and combed it back off his forehead so it hung straight and heavy to the nape of his neck. He put a small, palm-sized reel of gardening wire into his coat pocket, then picked up an A–Z from the table and took a last look. Know your ground; know the terrain.
Propped upon the table was a photo-booth four-frame picture of Aimée. They had passed a pharmacy on the walk from the Park Clinic to her flat, and she had pulled him in and thumbed coins and sat on the adjustable stool, smiling at her own reflection. Two of the snaps were against a white background and the flash had been too fierce, her face smudged white, her smile almost lost. She had pulled the blue curtain across for the remaining two, and they showed better the fact that she was pretty, that her soft brown hair could use a colour-lift and a good cut, that she wore a touch too much lipstick, that there were care lines over the bridge of her nose. She was smiling hugely; smiling like a woman who, after a long time, has just remembered how it’s done.
The computer carried a screen-saver image of Silent Wolf: it was the logo that announced a new game. He stood on a rooftop, looking out over the city, the skirts of his long coat belling and curling, his hair streaming in the wind.
Gideon Woolf went to the window and looked down. A tremor ran through his body, and, for a moment, he leaned his forehead against the glass, letting the adrenalin surge.
If only he had known, before, that it would be this easy.
61
A bright day, but he walked in the sharp-edged shadows, he walked on the blind side. He used alleyways and side streets. The map in his head enabled him to steer clear of diversions and dead ends. It took him an hour and a half, because he wouldn’t hop buses or ride the tube. If you sit still, people notice you.
He’d left time; his timing was good. In a matter like this, you worked off habit: you relied on the fact that people do pretty much the same things every day – travel, work, take a break, work, travel. Day after day, month after month, year after year, life is repetitions, then it ends. Woolf had been watching a certain man’s life patterns for a couple of weeks, and they didn’t vary. This man’s timetable could be interrupted only by illness or death.
Woolf had paced himself to reach the street just on time: a quiet street that led to nowhere in particular. The windows of the small terraced houses reflected the sun. An old Volvo estate wagon was parked outside the fifteenth house on the west side of the road. Woolf walked past the car and checked his watch. He reckoned a minute, two at the most. At the end of the street he turned back and saw the man locking the door of his house, then turning and blipping the central locking on his car.
When he got in, Woolf got in too, though the man wasn’t sure, at first, quite what had happened: some sudden weight or movement in the back, as if someone had nudged the car or pushed against it. He looked into the driver’s mirror, half expecting to see a vehicle trying to pull out with too-little room, but there was nothing of that sort. He started the car and looked again in the mirror, and Woolf’s face came into view.
The man gasped; his heart lurched. He turned and began to speak, then fell silent when Woolf showed him the SIG Sauer. The man started to pant as if he’d been running; his hands moved in front of his face, little half-formed defensive gestures. He looked up and down the street, but it was empty.
Woolf said, ‘Drive the car.’
‘Where to?’
‘The usual place. The place you usually go to.’
The man stared at Woolf, the fog of fear lifting a moment.
Woolf said, ‘Drive the car.’
‘My God,’ the man said.
‘Drive the car.’
‘My God, are you who I think you are?’
Aimée watched as her husband, Peter, and her son, Ben, got ready for the game. Ben was said to be a safe pair of hands. Peter’s role was to stand on the touchline and cheer. They were having a good-natured disagreement about Ben’s new goal-keeping gloves, which Peter thought too large. Ben, of course, was eager to wear them. Peter gave in easily, as he always did: not because he thought he was wrong, but because he knew that, in the end, it didn’t matter. It was the same in all things. He would smile and nod and agree, because conflict over such issues was a waste of time and created bad feeling. Peter was in favour of good feeling. In favour of feeling good. When they made love, Aimée felt that the need was all hers, the giving all his.
After they’d gone, she went upstairs and lay on the bed. She hoped to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. It was hot in the room, and she took her clothes off. Being naked made her think about Woolf. She walked round the room, feeling the air on her body, feeling the way her body moved when it was unconstrained.
She lay on the bed and closed her eyes, imagining him there with her. She wet her finger with her mouth, then rolled over, her hand between her thighs. She could feel him alongside. She knelt up, head on the pillow, her hand busy, offering herself to him, feeling a flush come to her throat. She said his name out loud and shivered, as if she had felt his touch, felt him moving up behind her.
It was over too soon. She lay flat out and tried to think things through. Peter would do whatever was for the best. She would see Ben often, of course. Maybe he would even come to live with them: with herself and Woolf. It would be easy, an easy transition to make.
She slept, after a while, and had dreams that were forgotten on waking.
A side road led up to a rise in the ground; the rise fell away to a large field. Woolf drove the old Volvo up to the crest and looked down, then backed off twenty feet to where some tall shrubbery bordered a wall. Beyond the wall was a disused hospital, its windows boarded up, its brickwork covered in graffiti from the ground to a height of about eight feet, which was as far as the local pre-teens could reach.
Before driving to the field, Woolf had spent some time in the old hospital together with the other man, the pair of them there in the half-light, the di
m, echoing corridors, the empty wards. There was still some equipment lying about: a gurney or two, a wheelchair, half a dozen beds. Woolf had found a small room, what had once been a side ward, perhaps. It was on the western side, and the planks that boarded the windows weren’t butted up that well. Lines of hard, white light fell in straight rows on the floor.
The man had said, ‘What do you want? What can you possibly want with me after all this time?’
Stella was taking her one-in-seven, her rest day. Delaney was covering the last two from his Rich List: a captain of industry who never slept and a self-made man who had recently acquired a knighthood and insisted on being addressed by his title. The man’s given name was Naim, and Delaney had taken delight, throughout the interview, in calling him Sirnaim. He returned to the flat to find Stella constructing a temporary white-board on one wall, complete with scene-of-crime shots, abstracts of interviews, flow charts and a progress checker. The SOC photos brought back memories for Delaney: a street after sniper activity, stillness and blood; echoes of violence ringing in the air.
He said, ‘Isn’t that a little obsessive?’
‘I am obsessed. We’re getting nowhere with this. Random killings; it’s the worst thing. Except nothing’s random, really. There’s a pattern, even if it’s only in the mind of the killer. If I look long enough at the parts, I might catch a glimpse of the whole.’
She was adding wild cards to the known facts, a technique of her own devising. It involved swooping arrows drawn on to spreadsheets. One concerned the possible confusion between Leonard Pigeon and Neil Morgan.
Delaney saw the name and said, ‘An offshore bank account – maybe. It’s all I could get.’
Stella looked baffled for a moment. Then: ‘Oh, sure, secret money, big surprise.’ Out of nowhere, she said, ‘I went to see my mother.’
Delaney stopped in the act of uncapping a beer. Stella had her back to him, busy with the white-board. He poured the beer, waiting for more, but nothing came. Finally, he asked, ‘Why did you tell me?’
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