‘Room service,’ he said in a low voice.
No response. He tried the handle. Shit. Locked.
He kept up the pattern of ‘room service’, shoving down the handle of each room he came to. But they were all locked. It was going to be game over if he didn’t get into one of these rooms soon.
There was one room left. Room 28. The door was flung open after he called out ‘room service’. In the doorway stood a woman, middle-aged, with hair a sleek black that matched her spikey false eyelashes, body-hugging leather top and trousers, and hands jammed, fuck-you style, on her hips. Before he could speak she spat out, ‘Room service? In this fleapit? Piss off mate, I’ve got work to do.’
She slammed the door in his face.
Below there was the sound of a key turning in a lock and the sound of heavy feet filing into room 19.
It was too late now for Mac to go downstairs; there was nowhere to hide upstairs. He looked upwards. Ran his gaze along the ceiling. There had to be an attic somewhere. Even a skylight. But where? Where?
He went to tap on the door of Room 28 again but thought better of it. Instead he tried the handle. In her eagerness to get back to work, the woman had left it unlocked. The woman looked round in shock when Mac entered. She opened her mouth but it snapped shut when Mac flipped his jacket back, displaying his Luger. She backed into the room while he clipped the door shut with the heel of his boot. ‘I’ll be in and out of here quickly so that you can get on with your business.’
Her business was an overweight man, spreadeagled and tied to the posts of the bed with a Union Jack-patterned hood over his head. He looked back at the woman and saw what he should have seen the first time he clapped eyes on her – the hard face of a woman who’d been turning tricks for a long time.
She hissed at him, ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to know how to get into the attic.’
‘The attic? Look mate, if you’re looking for money or drugs, I can’t help.’
Mac walked towards her, but she stood her ground. But instead of stopping when he reached her he carried straight on past. Didn’t stop until he reached the bed. She let out a gasp when he pulled out the gun and aimed it at the head of the hooded man.
‘A dead punter is bad for your business. And your DNA will be all over the body, condoms or no condoms . . .’ Mac shook slightly as his own words echoed around his head.
The man on the bed began bucking against his bonds, making muffled sounds.
‘You know this hotel, so stop dicking me around and tell me where the attic is.’
She looked at the Luger. Looked at her customer. Back at Mac. ‘There’s a storeroom at the end of the corridor. You can get up to the attic through that. I’ve seen the owner doing it.’
‘Get his wallet,’ Mac said, gun still fixed on the other man.
The prostitute rushed over to the man’s clothing on the seat of a chair and rifled through his jacket. She handed Mac a tan-coloured wallet.
Mac shoved the wallet into his pocket and said to the man, ‘If the cops come knocking, you say nothing. You might think that you can make a deal with them so that nice wife of yours at home won’t find out about your out-of-office-hours activities.’ He didn’t need to ask if the man had a woman waiting for him at home; his type always did. ‘But I’ve got your wallet, which means I’ve got your name, which means I can find out where you live. If I get to hear you’ve been opening your mouth, one morning your wife’s going to get a small package. Inside that package will be your wallet with a little note about what you’ve been doing when you said you were working hard to support your family.’
Without another word, Mac headed for the door. As he opened it, the woman called out, ‘Hang on, you can’t take his wallet, I haven’t been paid yet . . .’
Mac put the gun away. Closed the door. The storeroom door was white and flush with the wall, explaining how Mac had missed it earlier. But now he had no problem prising it open and switching on the light. Small, littered with paint pots, old carpet and mattresses. And resting against the wall was a stepladder, which led up to a trapdoor with access to the attic. He closed the door behind him. Climbed up the ladder, his bag bumping against his back. As he went up and opened the attic door, he heard voices and footsteps in the corridor outside.
‘Get everyone out of these rooms and make them assemble downstairs.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘And you – are there any other rooms up here?’
The receptionist’s voice told him, ‘Yeah – there’s a storeroom and an attic upstairs, but we don’t use them much.’
Mac scrambled up into the attic. Pushed inside. Caught the trapdoor and gently eased it back into place so it made no sound. The place was dark, so Mac used the torch on his mobile to check out the space. He found an old tea chest that he moved over the trapdoor so that it couldn’t be opened from below and then he examined the roof. No skylight. He was trapped. And now he could hear voices below him in the storeroom.
Mac carefully examined the roof, through which he could see occasional chinks of sunlight. He reeled back in surprise when he kicked over a bucket that had been catching rainwater and sent a couple of gallons of water spilling out over the floor. Down below he could hear the voices of the police becoming more urgent. Standing on the sodden floorboards, with the silence of a thief, Mac began tearing away at the damp and moulding lining of the roof where the rotting wood strained under the weight of the slates above. Someone started pushing and then banging against the other side of the attic door.
three
It was only a matter of time before they got in. Mac kept tearing and pulling until he was through to the cracked and loose slates themselves. Pulled them off. Laid them to one side, one on top of the other. Flushes of fresh air blew into the musty attic and oblongs of daylight began to appear.
Behind Mac, the noise against the door stopped.
Silence.
Bang. The battering against the door started up again, stronger this time. A brief shaft of light from below appeared before the tea chest forced the door back down. Mac threw his bag out onto the roof. Gathered together the slates and put them on the roof, outside the hole he’d made. The attic shook as the police kept up the pressure, trying to force the trapdoor. Mac arranged paint pots on top of each other and used them as steps to climb up through his newly created exit.
Gusts of wind, after the rank air in the attic, caught Mac like a stiff drink. He gasped slightly as he carefully sat down on the unsteady roof. Then he put back the slates, using the sodden moss lying around to hold them steady and fill in the gaps through which daylight shone. As the last slate fell into place, the noise from the attempt to break into the attic below faded and became muffled. Mac crouched on the roof, which was littered with bits of pottery, weeds, old TV aerials and bird droppings. He clung to the hope that the frantic activity on the street below would mean no one would look up – in the same way he clung to the tiles.
He knew this street. He’d made it his business to check all streets and buildings before he used them, in case of an emergency, and this was just such an emergency. As carefully as he could, swaying sometimes in the wind, he began to thread his way over the roof. But should he look up or look down? He kept his head down, watching for loose or broken tiles, of which there were many. From time to time a piece of slate would come loose and tumble over the guttering before cracking in the courtyards below, but with the pulse of traffic, shouting and voices on the street where Elena’s murder had taken place, the crashing slates went unnoticed. He was a good thirty-five to forty feet from ground level. He knew the rule. Don’t look down. But he broke the rule, as people always do. He felt the long drop below deep in his stomach. Fall from this height and he was a dead man.
Mac stayed steady, keeping a sure foot, with only pigeons perched on chimney stacks to witness his escape. He crossed five roofs until he reached another building. No skylight, so he moved on to his next target. Two roofs further dow
n the street. He kept moving until he finally saw the outline of a skylight.
And that’s when Mac really should’ve been looking up, because two pigeons flew out of nowhere near his head. He arched back. Tried to control the wobble in his legs. His feet slipped away from under him. His body slid down the roof towards the concrete back yard below.
four
A nail tore through the flesh of his hand. Mac’s head bent back at the pain. Desperately he tried to grab hold of anything that might break his fall, but it was like catching an eel. His head caught the metal guttering; with a supreme effort, he tried to jam his foot under the eaves while using a flailing arm to hook his elbow onto a rusty aerial that had fallen from a chimney and was hanging from black wiring looped over one of the stacks. Feet dangling, he broke his fall. He looked down at the dizzy drop to the bone-shatteringly hard ground below. He swung his legs up. Got back into position. With bloodied and bruised hands he crawled towards the skylight.
Peered in through the dirty, smeared and opaque glass – a landing with no one on it. He fished around in his bag and found a nail file among Elena’s stash of make-up. Used it to scrape away the wood round the lock, which, like most of the fittings on this street’s buildings, was rotten and decayed. He applied pressure. The skylight lifted up. Mac leaned in head first and listened. No one around. He dropped his bag onto the well-trodden carpet below. Lowered himself. He hung suspended, the tendons in his arms so stretched he thought they would snap. Let go. Dropped into a neat body roll. Wiped his hands and knew that his calculation had been correct. This was another one of the street’s seedy hotels.
He picked himself and the bag up and walked smartly down the stairs to reception. The area was empty. Mac banged the bell and two people emerged from the doorstep out front where they’d been watching the police at work and wondering what all the fuss was about.
One spun slowly round in a wheelchair. A bony, older woman, with the last remnants of beauty fading from her skin, her eyes hidden behind a pair of Catwoman-style sunglasses.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked, wheeling herself towards the back of the reception desk.
‘I’d like a room please.’
He could see she was baffled as to how he’d appeared in her reception without her noticing, but she kept those types of questions to herself.
Instead she asked, ‘How long for?’
‘One night should be enough. And can I have a room facing the street?’
‘Facing the street?’
Mac looked away from her face; even though he couldn’t see her eyes, that stare of hers seemed to know too much.
‘Yeah, I’m afraid it’s a tic of mine. I have to be facing the street . . .’
The woman asked no more questions. Mac paid in cash. She made him sign the register. Passed him an old-style key. Room 26.
five
7:36 a.m.
Door closed behind him, the first thing Mac did was to put the TV on. He wasn’t even aware of doing it, just one of those automatic survival reflexes he had when entering a hotel room. One of the top ten rules of his job was to make sure the world never heard what you were doing by masking your activities with noise. He hiked the volume up slightly. The TV was showing a documentary, It Happened in 1979, and on the screen were Russian tanks grinding through mountains, unhappy soldiers mounted on the back as they invaded Afghanistan.
That’s when Mac felt the tremors in his body. The blood and bones shaking in his legs. Suddenly the room around him hazed over. His vision blurred. He blinked. Blinked. But that made it worse as the room around him moved, swayed. Or was it him that was tilting?
Blink.
Blink.
He could barely see. Not now. He had too much of the present to torture him. He didn’t need the past as well. No . . .
Flash.
The Luger was in his hand. Primed, loaded, his finger a hair’s breadth from kicking back the trigger. And there she was, looking up at him from the bath. Elena. Her eyes, usually so soft, bulged with hard fear. Her mouth moved with words he couldn’t hear. The air froze around him. He levelled the 9 mm at her face. Elena’s mouth widened, stayed open, with the bellow of a scream he wouldn’t let reach his ears. His finger jacked back . . .
Mac’s mind came crashing back into the hotel room. He was no longer standing, but backed up against the wall, on his haunches, in the pose of a dog that had been beaten down. His breathing spurted out, echoes of the horror of the flashback. But was it a flashback? Could he believe what his mind was telling him? He’d suffered too many false flashbacks this past year to trust what his mind told him. Had he murdered Elena? That had been his gun near her body.
Elena’s dead. Elena’s dead. And you killed her.
six
Bile rose high into his throat. Gagging, Mac staggered up and bolted into the one place he didn’t want to be, the bathroom. He heaved and heaved into the toilet bowl. Then wiped his lips as he slumped onto the cold tile floor. He didn’t believe what the evidence was plainly telling him. Why would he do it? Why would he take the life of the one person he’d come to care for this last six months? The only answer he got was the ache and twitch of the wound in his head. A wound he suspected Elena had inflicted when she’d tried to defend herself. Shit, he couldn’t blame her. If someone had attacked him, he’d have done everything and anything to rip them apart. But Mac still couldn’t believe what his mind was telling him was true. No, he’d had flashbacks before, the type of flashbacks that were only reality in his head.
The ring of his mobile inside his jacket brought his thoughts to an end. He pulled out the phone. With it came the bracelet he’d taken from Elena’s body. He fingered the tiny rabbit charm. One afternoon, after they’d made love, she told him it had been a gift from her father. The small rabbit in memory of her favourite Russian nursery rhyme her father would tell her as a child. A story about a hunter shooting a rabbit. He’d told her that didn’t sound like the type of happy tale grown men told their daughters. She’d smiled, as she whispered, her heated breath brushing his lips, that it had a happy ending. But he never found out what that ending was because she’d kissed him.
Mac shook the memories back as he dropped the bracelet back in its hiding place. Stared back at the phone. He didn’t answer it, just stared at the screen. It displayed ‘Tom’. ‘Tom’ meant Phil Delaney. And what the hell was he going to tell him about this mess? Mac gave it a half-minute before he unlocked his phone and hit the Messages icon. Three unopened voicemails, two from last night, one from fifteen seconds ago, all from Phil. He listened:
‘Mac! Where are you? You missed our evening meeting.’
‘Mac, where the fuck are you? Call me.’
‘Listen – try and get me a message, any way you can. If I have to come looking for you . . . Well, you know what that might mean.’
Yeah, he knew what that meant all right, but he couldn’t think about Phil now. As he started to turn the mobile off, it pinged. Text message, but not Phil this time:
‘Friends. Please be reminded. My beloved son is six today. His celebration is at one p.m. Please be welcome and he looks forward to seeing our honoured friends.’
Awkward English. Dangerous man. Reuben. The leader of the gang he’d been in for the last nine months. Both Phil and Reuben should have been history by now. Elena and he should have been long gone. And what were Reuben and Phil going to do when they found out about Elena?
Mac pulled himself up and walked over to the window to check out what was happening with the cops on the street. All the trappings of a murder investigation were falling into place. Police cars, some plain, some with their flashing blues-and-twos lights going, pulling up; blue and white tape across the street; uniformed officers standing guard. His fingers stilled as he saw a black woman getting out of a car. Tall, with quite a body on her, she was done up in the full regalia of a party girl. She seemed to get into a fast-paced verbal battle with the uniform behind the tape.
‘I’ve alre
ady told you once to step back,’ the uniformed policeman said as he shifted his body in front of the black woman to stop her getting past the ‘Do not cross’ crime-scene tape.
The woman was decked out in gold heels that matched her moon-shaped earrings, miniskirt, jeans jacket over a sparkling boob-tube top. Her glistening brown legs long in contrast to her mini finger-combed ’fro.
‘I don’t think you understand,’ she threw back, shifting one hand onto her tilted hip. ‘I’m . . .’
He cut her off as he pushed his face into her space. ‘I understand all right. This is where you bring your customers . . .’
‘Excuse me?’ Her head reared back, making her earrings dance in the early-morning air.
‘I said move it along before I arrest you for soliciting . . .’
‘What the hell is going on?’ Another voice joined them.
The uniformed policeman turned to find a young, plainclothes detective behind him.
‘Nothing sir. I’m taking care of this.’ He waved his hand at the woman. ‘I’m just informing this . . . uh . . . woman that the hotel is not open for business . . .’
The detective looked back at him, his mouth dropping open slightly, but before he could say anything, the woman got there first.
‘I’m black, dressed like this, so I must be a working girl. Is that it?’ Her blunt, dark gaze hit the uniformed cop straight in his face. She reached inside her jacket as she continued, ‘I’m a working girl all right.’ She flashed what looked like an open wallet in his face. ‘And get an eyeful of my sexy bit of bling, which my punters just luurve.’
The uniformed cop swallowed as he read the name inside The Met Police badge in front of his face.
Vendetta Page 2