I've just left a slaughterhouse. In minutes, this place is going to be crawling with cops. They'll be hunting for witnesses, anyone who's seen anything or anyone suspicious, and I don't want them to remember me.
I steal a look behind me. The street's empty. Everything's quiet.
Too quiet. Even the sound of jazz from the park seems to have faded away.
I hear something. The scrape of a shoe on concrete. It comes from the other side of the road, and it stops as quickly as it began.
I stop too, tensing, ready to run.
There's movement coming from behind the cars opposite me, figures appearing like silent wraiths.
And then suddenly the whole street explodes into life. Car headlights come on; men in caps appear from every direction; there are shouts from a dozen different voices to my left and right, from the cars that are disgorging men in caps with big guns, even from among the cypress trees. They're all shouting the same thing: 'Armed police! Put your hands in the air!'
I count six men approaching me in a tight semi-circle, all of them in two-handed shooting poses. Two hold MP5 carbines, the others have pistols, and I know that these guys haven't just turned up. They've been here a while. They were waiting for me to come out.
As other men move in on me from either side, still barking terse orders, and cuff my hands behind my back, I think again that only two people knew I was coming here tonight. Lucas is dead. I smelled his blood. I felt the terrible knife wound he'd suffered.
Which leaves Alannah.
It's 10.05 p.m. and I'm in a holding cell at Paddington Green, the most secure police station in London, and probably the whole of the UK. It's where they bring terrorist suspects for questioning, safe in the knowledge that there's going to be no dramatic rescue attempt by their comrades in Al Qaeda. You don't get out of here unless they let you, and even if I had the energy, I wouldn't attempt it. I've been in close proximity to more violent death today than at any time since the killing fields of Sierra Leone, and it's going to take a Byzantine effort of persuasion to prove to the police that I'm a victim in all this as well.
I'm lying on the bunk staring at the ceiling.
It's hot in here, and even though the cell itself is modern and clean, there's still an underlying smell of stale sweat. The sweater I was wearing has been taken away for tests, and I'm in a T-shirt they've given me which is wet and clammy and sticking to my back. They've also removed my belt, even the laces from my Timberlands. I'm left here feeling like the low-life criminal they think I am.
I think of the people I care about who've had their lives snuffed out so horrifically today - Leah, Snowy, Lucas . . . The brutal yet straightforward truth is that they died because of their relationship with me. I am the target in all this. All three of them were simply collateral damage, killed because they were in the way or, like Leah, were expendable.
But why have I been targeted? It's the one question that keeps cropping up. Slowly but surely, I'm beginning to think it must be something to do with my past, something that happened in my army days. The presence in London of Eddie Cosick, the man I used to know as Colonel Stanic, and the fact that he seems to be the man Iain Ferrie, a former colleague, was blackmailing, makes it too much
of a coincidence to be otherwise. The problem is, this still doesn't help me because I didn't really know either man, and therefore have no idea why they would have chosen to involve me in their business deal.
I wonder about Alannah. She claimed to be a Serbian policewoman looking for her sister. She even showed me a photograph of her, and seemed genuinely concerned. Yet it looks certain that she betrayed me to the police, first at her house, then at Cosick's place. They can't have been responding to my 999 call. It was too fast. I know Lucas didn't call them, and I didn't. That only leaves her. She must have been there. Watching the place. Working with someone to set me up.
A thought strikes me then. There is still a main player out there, someone else involved in this. This person wanted the briefcase, and it looks like he now has it. So maybe it was him, not Cosick, who was being blackmailed. For some reason he wanted Cosick dead, but, more importantly, he wants to keep me alive. And there can only be one reason for that: so that I carry the can for everything that's happened today.
Alannah must be working for the main player. It's why she rescued me from the brothel. It's why she tried to get me to go to Cosick's place, knowing that the police would arrest me there. It's why, when I didn't bite, she called them to her house.
According to Ferrie, the person he was blackmailing hired a mysterious contract killer known as the Vampire to secure the briefcase. This Vampire must have been at the brothel today, and Marco and MAC-10 man must have delivered the briefcase to him there. He must then have discovered the tracking device, and guessed that someone had followed and was probably close by. In a remarkable show of brazenness, he'd then tracked Snowy down, and finished him off in his customary fashion.
But then, when I spoke to Alannah, she told me she'd not seen any strangers at the brothel. She might easily have been lying, but what if she wasn't?
I try to recall what both Ferrie and Lucas said about the Maxwell and Spann murders. The Vampire got past the security cameras and caught three men, including two highly trained bodyguards, completely off guard. Just like
Cosick and his men were caught off guard tonight. Ferrie spoke about him with awe. A shadowy killer who leaves no trail, as if he's invisible.
But maybe everyone's looking at this the wrong way. What if the Vampire managed to get close to his victims because there was something about him that made them let their guard down, that made them think he wasn't dangerous, that made detectives scouring any CCTV footage discount him out of hand? In other words, what if he wasn't a 'he' at all? What if 'he' was a 'she'? An attractive young woman with blonde hair and golden skin, who looked the very antithesis of everyone's idea of a contract killer?
So, no, Alannah wasn't lying about not seeing the Vampire back at the brothel.
She wasn't lying because
she
is the Vampire.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced I'm right about Alannah. But that leaves me no further forward. I still have a mountain to climb in terms of convincing the police of my innocence, and, if anything, it's now got a little bit higher.
There are, however, two factors running in my favour. Firstly, I am actually innocent, and I hope that that's going to count for something. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, I have secured extremely good legal representation in the form of my ex-wife, Adine.
I first met Adine at something most law-abiding citizens won't ever have come across. It's called an acquittal party, which is exactly
what it says it is. It was four years back. A guy from our old unit named Harry Foxley had just been found not guilty of GBH for his part in a fight that had left two men seriously injured, one of them with a fractured skull.
To be fair, it wasn't Harry's fault. He was walking home from a friend's house late one night when a gang of about half a dozen drunken teenagers decided to pick a fight with him. Harry's only a little guy, barely five seven, and I suppose in the dim light, and from their position across the road, he must have made a tempting target. They started throwing abuse at him, and when he ignored them and carried on walking, they took this as a sign of cowardice. Hyped up with bravado and booze, they crossed the road and began following him, still keeping up the steady stream of abuse.
It was a very bad move. Some of the hardest people I've ever met have been little guys, and Harry's no exception. He has the lean, wiry build of a champion flyweight, and there isn't an ounce of fat or spare flesh on him. At least there wasn't then. Things may have changed, although somehow I doubt it. He smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish but possessed
reserves of stamina that would put most men to shame. He was the battalion's arm-wrestling champion three years running, beating men twice his size, and although he wasn't the kind of man to look for trouble, he wasn't the sort to shirk it either. So when his tormentors had worked themselves up sufficiently to launch an attack, they got one hell of a lot more than they bargained for.
Harry knocked the leader out with a single left hook, then went charging into the others, fists flying, spreading immediate panic among their number as they realized belatedly that this was going to be no walkover. One made the mistake of pulling a knife. Harry broke his wrist, then his jaw, before slamming him head-first into a brick wall. The others ran for it.
Unfortunately, the first guy he'd punched cracked his skull as he hit the pavement and spent the next six weeks in a coma, and it was alleged by one of the gang that Harry had kicked him while he lay on the ground unconscious, which is something I know he wouldn't have done.
The police, though, took a different view. Harry was one of the five men from our unit
court-martialled and imprisoned for their part in the revenge attack at the pub in Crossmaglen, and he'd only just come off parole, so their decision to charge him with two counts of GBH may well have been coloured by what they perceived as his history of violent behaviour.
I didn't attend the trial, but it lasted more than a week, and I know from what I read and heard that the prosecution lawyers attempted a serious character assassination on Harry, dredging up the worst aspects of his past to bolster their arguments. However, both they and the police should have realized that in these violent days in which we live, juries tend to sympathize with individuals who are the victims of un-provoked gang attacks, and feel that they should have the right to fight back, even if the damage they inflict is pretty serious. So it was no real surprise to anyone with an ounce of common sense that Harry was acquitted on both charges.
The story, then, had a happy ending, and a party was held in a pub in the West End to celebrate. I was on leave at the time and was back in London. I can't remember now who called to tell me about it, but I ended up going
anyway. I hadn't seen the guys for a long time so I thought it would be nice to catch up.
When I got there, the place was packed. Harry was holding court to a crowd at the bar where he was giving a blow-by-blow account of the events of the fateful night and looking none the worse for his ordeal. There were quite a few faces from the past, including, as I recall, Maxwell and Spann, but it was a dark-haired woman about my age, wearing a two-piece business suit and thick-rimmed black glasses, who caught my attention. She was slim and very pale-skinned, with a look you might call severely pretty, like one of those sexy secretaries who can suddenly transform themselves into a completely different woman with a quick flick of the hair and a dumping of the specs. She was standing on the periphery, nursing a glass of white wine in both hands, and looking out of place amid the revelry as she spoke with Maxwell, who'd never been one of the world's great conversationalists. I joined them and introduced myself, and pretty soon Maxwell melted away and it was just her and me.
It turned out that Adine King was Harry's solicitor. She'd been involved in his case from
the start and had been with him during all the initial police interviews. We got talking, I turned on the charm, and I ended up taking her to dinner that very night at an Italian restaurant in Soho.
I don't know if you'd ever have called it a match made in heaven. We got on well enough, but we were hardly well suited. She was a well-educated member of the legal profession with a well-to-do stockbroker for a father (her mother had died when she was young) and a sister who was high up in some government department. I was still a career soldier - and not exactly a high-ranking one either - on a soldier's wage. But somehow the relationship grew. I think that at the time we were both looking for someone to settle down with. She was thirty-two and about a year earlier had come out of a long-term relationship with a City lawyer who was meant to have been 'the one', but hadn't been. Her job didn't exactly throw up many potential suitors, and her biological clock was ticking. She wanted to start a family, and I guess I was in the right place at the right time. I also liked the idea of the pitter-patter of tiny feet running around the place. Why not? I come from a big family, I
didn't want to grow old alone, and I didn't meet that many eligible women in my job either.
So we got engaged. Her old man was mortified. Her sister, who was married to a director of some hotshot company dealing with internet security, was equally gobsmacked, and neither of them was backwards in telling her so. But of course this just served to spur Adine on. Like a lot of people, she didn't like being told what to do, or who she should be seeing, and we just grew closer. She wanted me to move in to her flashy apartment in Muswell Hill, and she also wanted me to leave the army.
The thing was, at the time I was in love. I'd been a soldier for fifteen years and I'd come into some money too, the result of an aunt dying, so I figured now was the time to make a break. I'd always been interested in cars, so I put all my money into buying a BMW franchise, supplemented by some cash from the bank and even Adine's reluctant (although loaded) father.
And the rest should have been history, but life, of course, never works that simply. I did leave the army and I did move in with her, and at first things went well, but it wasn't long before they began to go downhill. We were both
working long hours - me learning how to run a business from scratch (something the army gives you no preparation for), she trying to establish herself in her profession. We were trying for a baby as well, but that wasn't proving very successful either.