Sami had witnessed Garza’s moment of weakness and become his confessor, which then made him an embarrassment. That’s why Garza hadn’t spoken another word to him since. Sami was persona non grata, surplus to requirements, a waste of space.
Fuck him. Murphy and Garza could kill each other a dozen times over for all Sami cared. He just wants to get Nadia and to get away; to clean her up and say he’s sorry. After that he’ll tell the police everything. He’ll give himself up and throw himself on the mercy of the court. Unmerciful as it is.
Then his imagination really goes into overdrive. He starts fantasising about arresting Garza and Murphy and bringing down their operations. He can see the headlines spinning into focus: TERROR SUSPECT PARDONED and WANTED MAN TURNS HERO. Next he’s meeting the Prime Minister at Downing Street and watching him weep with gratitude. He gets a book deal, Guy Ritchie directs the movie and Sami walks Kate Tierney up the red carpet while she’s wearing one of those backless evening dresses that have the paparazzi shouldering each other out of the way and screaming her name. Charlie Cox plays Sami and Sienna Miller plays Kate. (As long as they don’t get Jude Law - any guy who’s engaged to Sienna Miller and gets caught shagging the nanny is a complete tosser.) All of this is flashing through Sami’s head like a badly cut rap video.
Meanwhile, the Landcruisers have crossed the Thames and are heading along Cheyne Walk and the Embankment. Five minutes later they pull up outside the Savoy. The door opens. Sami steps out and the coolness of the air makes him realise he’s been sweating.
The hotel doorman ushers Sami inside. He crosses the foyer. The Claw is smelling distance behind him. The knot in Sami’s bowels won’t go away.
They enter the lift. Sami presses 9. He glances at his minder and gets nothing back. The geezer has ice in his veins and a tumour the size of a football up his arse.
It’s not until they reach the corridor that Sami considers how he’s going to get in the suite. They’re outside the door. He doesn’t have an entry card.
‘I gave the key back to reception,’ explains Sami. ‘Should I knock?’
The Claw stares at him blankly. Maybe Sami should ask him one on sport.
Sami knocks. Nobody answers. A black housekeeper is further down the corridor. Shaped like a duck in a blue uniform, she gives Sami a flat stare as he explains that he’s locked himself out of his room. She takes a key card from her apron pocket. Slides it into the slot. The door clicks open.
‘Thank you, very much,’ says Sami. ‘Nice talking to you.’
She’s already waddling away.
The Claw is inside, checking out the room. Not touching anything. This guy is a professional, SAS most likely. The British Government trains these people and then lets them loose on society.
Sami takes a chair from the desk and sets it down near the wall. Steps up. Unclips the air-conditioning vent and reaches inside. The Beretta is wrapped tightly in a handtowel. He leaves the bags of cocaine and banknotes.
Sami tucks the semi-automatic into his belt, nestling against the small of his back. He checks his reflection in the mirror to make sure the bulge doesn’t show.
They take the lift back down to the foyer, not saying a word. Sami wants to ask The Claw about his hand. How did it happen? Was he wounded in Crap-istan? Did they torture him with a deep fat fryer?
The lift doors slide open. Kate is standing at the reception desk, talking on a phone. She’s dressed in her usual work clothes, looking every inch the hostess and hotel manager. Sami knows that body. He knows the colour of her underwear, the hollow between elastic and thigh, the small butterfly tattoo on her left ankle. He can smell her Pantene-scented hair. He can hear the mewling sound she makes when she’s nearing nirvana. Please don’t look up, he prays.
Kate puts down the phone. Her eyes latch on to his. She’s confused. Angry. She wants to walk towards him but Sami’s stare makes her hesitate. She looks past him at the minder. Sami steps through the turning door, crosses the footpath, doesn’t look back.
Kate’s hands are shaking. She opens her handbag and rummages through it, looking for Ruiz’s business card. She can’t find it. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Upending the bag, she spills the contents onto the counter - lipstick, car keys, breath mints, tissues, a compact …
‘Are you OK?’ asks her colleague.
‘Get the number of that car.’
‘Which car?’
‘The one that’s leaving now.’
Kate finds the card and scoops her belongings into her handbag. ‘I have to go.’
‘Where?’
‘Tell Magna I’m not feeling well.’
She runs for the door, stumbling as her left heel slips on the polished marble. The four-wheel drive carrying Sami has stopped at traffic lights in Savoy Lane, fifty yards away.
‘Follow that car,’ Kate tells a cab driver, as she opens the car door. The driver looks at her through the glass partition, thinking it’s a wind-up.
‘Are you going to take me or do I get another cab?’
‘No problem, love.’
She punches Ruiz’s number into her mobile. He’s not answering. She sends a text, using both thumbs to punch the letters.
Sami at Savoy 2nite. Fubar. Following him now. Call ASAP.
58
It’s almost stopped raining. The police car splashes through puddles and Ruiz watches headlights flaring on the wet windows. Even in darkness he can recognise the location. He’s been here before.
Crime scene tape bulges in the breeze as it twirls from posts on either side of a lane. A group of black teenagers are watching from a pizza place across the road, acting like they own the neighbourhood and resent any trespassers.
Ruiz gets out of the car, ducks under the tape. He can smell curry cooking. A fat woman in a pink sari is watching from a balcony. She shields her face with a veil and turns away from his eyes.
They are a few blocks from the river. The last time Ruiz was here he entered on the other side of the building. The place used to be a furniture factory, according to Baxter, until it was turned into council flats and then sold off to a developer who had plans to bulldoze the place and erect luxury flats. He ran into liquidity problems - namely, water in the lungs. They found him floating in the river near the Thames Barrier.
Thirty yards ahead a bright pool of light has bleached the cobblestones and thrown warped shadows against the brick walls. A car is parked at the centre of the light - a Fiat Panda. As they get closer, Ruiz notices the car has no roof. Closer still he realises that the roof has been pressed in by the weight of an object falling from above.
Beside it now, the object has become a body - a Rastafarian with beaded hair, who has hit the car with such force it has turned it into a bathtub full of blood. Most people travel a good distance and take a lifetime to reach hell. Puffa managed it in seventy feet and less than five seconds.
Baxter’s second in command is a Detective Sergeant Frome. Pale, tall, blade-faced, he looks like an undertaker touting for business. Tonight he’s been lucky.
‘Two witnesses say he took a hit of Ice, climbed onto the roof and did a swan dive from the fifth floor,’ he tells Baxter.
‘Anyone else on the roof with him?’
‘That’s the only thing they agree upon - perhaps a little too strenuously.’
Ruiz glances up to the roof and back to the car. Twenty feet separate the nearside tyres from the edge of the building.
‘Either Puffa was the lovechild of Bob Beaman or someone threw him,’ he says.
‘Bob who?’ asks Frome.
‘Mexico. 1968. The Olympics. Beaman set a world record for the long jump and it was twenty-three years before anybody broke it. They called it the greatest leap in history.’
‘Before my time,’ says Frome dismissively.
‘So were the dinosaurs but it doesn’t stop people digging them up. Can I talk to the witnesses?’
‘You’re here to answer questions, not ask them,’ replies Baxter.
/> ‘You want to blame me for this as well?’
‘Two men are dead. You visited both of them on Saturday. Witnesses claim you assaulted and threatened them. I’d say that makes you a suspect. And you might want to tell me why Crim Intel put your car at Tony Murphy’s house today; a known villain.’
Ruiz can feel his mobile vibrating and tries to ignore it.
‘The problem with you, Baxter, is that you’re like the blind man who touches the elephant’s trunk and thinks he’s holding a snake.’
‘And you’re the elephant.’
‘I’m the big swinging dick.’
Ruiz’s mobile has stopped shaking. It beeps instead. Kate Tierney has sent him a text message.
‘What does “fubar” mean?’ he asks Baxter.
‘Fucked up beyond all recognition.’
59
Tony Murphy lifts his face to the sky, feeling the light drizzle cling to his eyelashes. Lately his life seems to be unravelling but tonight he gets it back on track. They say boredom is the brother of misery but after the past few weeks he’d settle for a boring life rather than a dangerous one.
He checks his watch - it’s half eleven - and presses speed dial on his mobile.
‘You heard anything, Bones?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No radio chatter?’
‘None.’
‘Any mention of Putney Bridge?’
‘Is that where it’s going down?’
‘At midnight,’ says Murphy.
‘What about the kid?’
‘He’ll be joining his ancestors.’
Murphy ends the call and tucks the phone into his pocket.
Ray Jnr is sitting in a car with Nadia. Shadows like rivulets of rain are running down his face. He needs another line to get the adrenalin flowing.
‘You ought to stop snorting that stuff,’ say Murphy.
‘And you ought to go jogging.’
The windows are fogged with humidity. One of them is cracked a little to let out Sinbad’s cigarette smoke.
‘Let’s do it,’ says Murphy.
‘Give it a minute,’ replies Ray Jnr, ‘it hasn’t stopped raining.’
He looks nervous, skittish, like a child waiting for a party to begin. Nadia is beside him, sitting on her hands. Her heart-shaped face is pale, devoid of make-up. Her light cotton dress and sweater cling to her like a second skin. The past week has been a nightmarish blur of drugs, paranoia and revulsion. Now she’s going home, according to Murphy. Sami is coming to get her.
She takes a cigarette from a packet on her lap; needs both hands to light it. Blinks smoke from her elongated eyes. Oily coils of her hair hang down across her cheeks as inner demons work their magic on her. Desire. Obsession. Addiction.
A bolt of lightning leaps across the western sky. The rain has eased.
‘It’s time,’ says Murphy.
60
Sami has been waiting on the bridge for fifteen minutes, smelling the brine and feeling the cold dampness blowing off the water. A solitary boat is visible, tethered to a pylon near the boat ramp.
The traffic has thinned out. It’s mainly cabs and minicabs and people coming home late. Light seems to evaporate from the surface of the asphalt as each vehicle passes.
Ray Garza and his men must be somewhere nearby, although he can’t see any of them.
The number 22 bus from Piccadilly Circus to Putney Common pulls onto the north side of the bridge and pauses at a bus shelter. A passenger gets off. The double-decker pulls away. The figure disappears down stone steps on the east side of the bridge.
The bus has almost rumbled past Sami before he notices two people alone on the brightly lit upper deck. One of them is Nadia. She’s sitting near the front, staring straight ahead. A man is directly behind her, head down, face hidden.
A massive flood of relief washes through Sami. Nadia’s alive. She’s only yards away. He yells and starts running, trying to get her attention but the bus is pulling further away, turning right into Lower Richmond Road.
There’s a bus stop around the corner. There’s nobody waiting. The driver carries on.
Sami cuts across the road, dodges a car and tears along the footpath past mansion blocks, a row of shops, terraces, a petrol station … It must be a trick; a trap. Murphy’s doing. Sami’s mind is telling him this but his legs are still moving; sprinting after the bus as it veers away from the river.
He’s a hundred yards behind and can’t see if Nadia is still on board. The Beretta is coming loose from his belt. He reaches back to stop it falling.
Brake lights flare. The bus is stopping. Somebody steps off. It’s not Nadia. Still sixty yards away Sami screams at the bus to stop but the driver can’t hear him. The doors are closing. Gears engage.
The disembarked passenger throws himself against a wall, holding his briefcase like a shield.
‘Where does that bus go?’ yells Sami, spinning to confront him.
‘Putney Common.’
‘How far is that?’
‘About two stops.’
The double-decker is disappearing again. Sami sprints after it, trying to keep the bus in sight. The shops and restaurants are closed and shuttered but he can still smell the hot oil and the rubbish bins out back. Bill posters have plastered the streetlights and the windows of empty shops.
The bus is three hundred yards ahead, indicating left. It’s turning. Sami is growing tired. His shoes weren’t meant for running. The row of terraces ends suddenly but the road continues across the common, swallowed by darkness. It’s as though a section of the city has collapsed into a black hole leaving only the streetlights behind.
Sami turns the corner. The double-decker has stopped. He can see the driver climbing out from behind the wheel. The bus doors are open. Sami swings inside, ignoring his protests. He runs through the lower deck; climbs the stairs; searches in vain. Nadia’s not there.
‘Did you see a girl? Where did she get off?’
The driver is a big guy, gut over his belt.
‘She’s gone.’
‘Where did she go?’
He points across the road towards the common. ‘They headed that way.’
Sami scans the darkness, the street, the muddy paths, the deeper shadows. Then he spies something moving a hundred yards away barely visible against the dark walls of a building rising high above the treetops silhouetted against the faint glow of the sky.
‘What’s that place?’ he asks.
‘The old Putney Hospital.’
‘Why is it dark?’
‘They closed it down years ago,’ says the driver. ‘They can’t decide what to do with it.’
He mentions something about making movies there, but Sami is already crossing the road. Slipping the Beretta from his belt, he unclips the safety. Holds it in both hands. He’s not thinking any more. Logic, reason, common sense were abandoned back on the bridge when he chose to ignore his own instructions and let Tony Murphy dictate events.
A metal boom gate is padlocked in place across the entrance to the car park and weeds sprout from broken asphalt in the ambulance bays. Odd things are scattered through the weeds. Junk mostly, broken furniture, old appliances, a plastic jerry can collecting rainwater.
The red brick hospital is four storeys high and could fill a city block, but appears out of place on the edge of the common, surrounded by heath and parkland. The doors are sealed with sheets of metal and wood, bolted in place, and guarded by steel mesh fences. The lower windows are also covered, but the upper windows have been left unprotected and many have been punctured with rocks. Knotted and filthy curtains billow from inside.
Security lights are attached to the outer walls, illuminating yellow warning signs:
DANGER
Private Property
KEEP OUT
This site contains serious hazards.
All valuables have been removed.
Sami pauses and for a moment catches a glint of something revealed, a shadow in front of
him, which disappears in a patter of raindrops. He listens. Nothing. Glancing up at a window on the second floor, he notices a torch beam flash across the broken glass and disappear.
A metal gate lies open ten yards to his right. A sign on the wall says Accident & Emergency: All Enquiries to Reception.
Sami forces open an iron sheet, which is curling at one corner. Nails rip from the rotting frame. He pulls a trailing vine from his ankles and steps inside, smelling the mould and faeces.
His eyes adjust to the dark. He wants to stand still. He wants to move.
Pushing open a second door he emerges into a wide corridor. Low wattage security lights are evenly spaced along the walls, providing just enough light to see as far as a central staircase. Ceiling panels lie broken or missing with wires hanging through them and pools of water have dried and left stains on the grey linoleum floor.
There are doors along either side of the corridor and lighter squares of paintwork where paintings once hung on the walls. Discarded metal trolleys lie abandoned and covered in dust.
Sami scans the scene; listens to the drip of brown water into a sink.
A sign opposite the nursing station gives directions to the various wards. Occupational Therapy and the Rehabilitation Units are on the second floor.
Sami reaches the stairs, which are in darkness. He has to feel his way upwards, one step at a time. On the first floor is another corridor with doors down either side. The X-ray department is ahead; a strip of light leaks from beneath the door. A sign says, Danger: Radiation.
He pushes it open, every muscle tense. Nadia is sitting on a metal chair with her hands beneath her thighs, her red eyes like wounds. The robot-like arms of X-ray equipment seem to be imprisoning her as part of some fearful experiment.
Her eyes meet his; pleading, fearful.
Sami does everything wrong. He steps towards her. Something moves to his left. He gets the Beretta halfway to horizontal before an object smashes hard across his arm sending the gun skittering across the floor.
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