The Sweeney 03
Page 15
At three-thirty Regan left the police canteen lorry. Everything had fallen into place in his mind. All he’d wanted was the attitudes, the reasonings, sorted out. If he died, he didn’t want those last seconds spent with the added agony of knowing he’d been suckered himself. He’d have to know that he’d taken the initiative and reworked a set of reasons so that they were sound for him. ‘George, I appreciated the advice. Thanks,’ said Regan.
Carter nodded and walked off.
Regan made one last telephone call. It was to the armourer at Scotland Yard instructing him to come out to North Square with a quality rifle and ammunition, and a docket to be made out to Regan which he would sign.
At four o’clock, he toured the square with Harris and a couple of DI’s from Bayswater. He was pleased to find the atmosphere among the cops relaxed, the tension reduced to very low key. The square, the mews behind the south side, was now evacuated and blocked off. The police staffing had been reduced to eighty as soon as police sharpshooters had been installed in selected eyries overlooking all exits, doors and windows of the Hijaz house. The public had dwindled to a hundred and fifty of the staunchly curious, still lingering, though excluded from all views of the house. There were a dozen disconcerted pressmen wandering around – nobody could give them any more information than that an Arab had shot a cop and was holed up with some pals in a converted house. Regan returned to the Communications van. He and his colleagues would wait it out until dark.
Maynon phoned at six-thirty p.m. He wanted to know how it was going. Regan told him – everything under control. Regan said he had no initiative planned for at least another five or six hours.
At seven o’clock a truck arrived from the Central Electricity Generating Board, and a couple of electricians unloaded six halogen floodlights and started to set them up on the front, side and rear of the Hijaz building. Regan told the sparks to get it right. There would be no testing. He would shout at some point for the lights to come on, and they’d better come on.
At seven-thirty Regan picked up the phone which had been re-routed through the Mobile Communications van and dialled the number of Hijaz’s apartment.
He sat and listened to the phone ringing for ten minutes. He could imagine the atmosphere in the darkened apartment as the four men also listened to the ringing phone.
Suddenly the phone was picked up.
‘Hijaz? Regan.’ There was a pause. ‘Hijaz. You there?’
The voice came back, more a growl than a word. ‘Yes.’
‘We’re not going to piss around with you or your pals. We’re coming in to get you at nine o’clock exactly. That’s the deal. Unless you walk out of that house at nine o’clock, not a minute before, not a second after, I’m coming in. That’s all I have to say. Nine o’clock.’
Regan replaced the phone, turned to Harris and the other two DI’s sitting on the bench inside the Mobile Communications van. They’d heard everything he’d said. If he lived, and there was an enquiry afterwards, they would be the witnesses to his apparent innocence, the lie to his coldblooded guilt. He then dialled Maynon’s extension at the Yard. He got through to a secretary, left the message of what he’d said to Hijaz, and added that he’d appreciate it if Maynon could be at North Square by eight-thirty at the latest. Five minutes later Maynon called the Mobile Communications van. He’d received the message. He would be there at eight-thirty.
Regan now took the rifle he’d obtained from the Yard armourer out of its canvas bag. It was a .404 sharpshooter Remington, with a 4x Bushnell telescopic sight. It was not a very sophisticated rifle, but a reliable one. He checked the gun, snapped a first bullet into the breech. He turned to Harris and asked the Inspector whether he would accompany him on a last tour of the square. Harris nodded.
They set off across the enclosed silence of the night square, small movements of cops in the shadows, torches clicking on and off, all the houses now evacuated, not one watt of light from any window. Streetlamps were burning on three sides of the square. But the south side, a chimera of shapes of various intensities of darkness, a stillness there like a twig had cracked under a predator’s foot in a screeching night jungle. The silence pregnant, waiting for something to happen to measure its potential.
Regan and Harris proceeded with caution, heads down, striding fast. They looked in the shadows for the men who were guarding them. Any of those men could bear a vital function in an hour from now. They looked for the silhouettes against the roof profiles of four buildings. Up there, with identical Remingtons, four highly trained sharpshooters. Two would have the new rank UV nightsights.
They looked for faults in the composition of the spider’s web of security that covered all exits from the square. There was no way out now for Hijaz and the other three. But they would not learn that. Regan had left an absolute order with the inspector running the Mobile Communications van. He must intercept, but not answer, any outgoing call from the Hijaz apartment. They had made their beds, now they must lie and sweat in them.
Regan timed his arrival at the east side of the square for about a minute to eight. He had just talked again to the two electricians who had rigged the half dozen floodlights when he saw a movement from the Hijaz house. Somewhere in the facade of darkness fifty yards away a door had opened. Regan howled one word and ran. ‘Lights!’
One of the electricians was so alarmed by the frantic shout that he fumbled the switch gear he was carrying. There was a four seconds’ delay punctuated with the man’s curses, then the south end of the square lit up like it had been hit by napalm.
The four men were trapped, frozen, blinded by light, a tableau like a child’s game of pretending to be statues. Hijaz, armed with a sub-machine gun, the others unarmed. Regan was running at full tilt at them, was twenty feet away from Hijaz, when the blinded man swung the M38 and fired. Regan felt the physical pulse of bullets pass within inches to the left and right of his temples as he threw himself in a bone-jarring crunch forward on to the pavement.
But in the fall he fired twice. The first bullet blew off Hijaz’s right ear and some of his head, in a bag of blood. The second went through his chest, killed him as he stood there, rocked him as he made a first dead step sideways in flight. Hijaz went down. Six hands shot up above the heads of his three colleagues. The movement seemed interlinked, a natural reflex, but there was nothing natural about the white faces, and the man soaking in a floodlit pool of blood on the pavement. And Regan was still lying on the pavement, gunsight pressed to his eyes, willing them, praying that one of them would make a move to grab for the fallen M38. More must die for Jo, and the deaths in Beaulieu. But the three wouldn’t move as they robbed him of the chance for total revenge.
Two and a half hours later Regan entered Maynon’s office. Maynon’s eyes were cold fury. He made a sharp brushing gesture towards a seat.
Regan sat down.
Maynon was reading a file. Regan could identify it. He’d seen it on several occasions over the years. It was his file. Why, Regan wondered, was Maynon reading his file? He cautioned himself to silence. Maynon’s eyes would not come off the pages. But Regan guessed he was not reading them. Maynon was about to say something and was phrasing it internally first, and refining it.
Then he looked up. ‘You murdered him.’ Maynon said it so quietly that Regan for a second thought his fury had gone. It hadn’t. ‘I’m staggered. You murdered him in cold blood.’ This said much louder.
‘I deny that, sir.’ Regan’s voice was low.
‘The watch on Hijaz’s hand was reading one hour fast. The watches on his companions all read one hour fast. They’re on French time. You knew that. When you arrived in London, your watch was one hour fast. So you ordered them to come out of the house at nine p.m. You knew perfectly well they’d come out an hour earlier.’
‘There’s always an announcement on the plane to correct watches forward,’ Regan countered.
‘There isn’t, Regan. Not on a private Cessna. Hijaz and the other three arrived on priv
ate Cessnas. In normal circumstances maybe they would have spotted the airport clocks. But in both cases on touchdown they had plenty on their minds. Hijaz was arrested, the other three had just come from a mass murder.’ Maynon seemed to be getting more furious. ‘The point is, it was no gamble. You had all the cards, it either worked or it wouldn’t work, and if it didn’t you’d think of some other way to murder them. I’m accusing you of murder. You pretended they were trying to sneak out of the house early. You used that as an excuse to open fire on that man.’
‘Ask a half dozen witnesses at the scene. Hijaz fired at me first,’ Regan said flatly.
‘He fired because he saw a cop running flat out towards him with a rifle.’
Regan said nothing. The silence in the office grew heavier.
Maynon’s eyes were still boring into him. ‘I understand you were very involved with the girl killed in the Beaulieu raid.’
Regan said nothing.
Silence again, heavy on the air, and Maynon still working it out, the fury trying to form itself into decision. Regan was not helping a bit.
‘He killed your girl, or was instrumental in her death, six gendarmes dead, a wounded London constable.’
Regan said nothing.
Maynon made up his mind. ‘Get out of here. Get out of my sight for a week at least. Take a holiday. Spend seven days thinking about what you’ve done today, how you arrived at your decisions, why you decided you would be able to live with them. I think you should resign from the force. I think this time you went just too bloody far...’
Regan stood up, walked to the door and out. He had no answer to any observations Maynon had made.
He took a day extra – went to Aldeburgh for six days, then on to Norwich for two. He was drunk every night from six p.m. until, with protests, the hotel barmen threw him out. He thought about what Maynon had said. It didn’t make a fart’s worth of difference. He could live with what he’d done. Sod them all, he’d live to be a hundred and he wouldn’t lose one hour’s sleep over it.