Fat chance of that, I think.
An hour later, I walk out of the hospital with my few meagre possessions in a bag and start off down the street. The heatwave's gone now, and the temperature's back to normal for early September. The sky's a gunmetal grey, and it's drizzling fine rain. I think about getting a cab home, but then decide that, having been cooped up in a hospital bed for the past week, a long walk'll probably do me a lot of good.
I haven't gone thirty yards when a car pulls up beside me and a very attractive blonde woman pokes her head out of the open window.
'Need a ride anywhere?' asks Alannah, the traces of an Eastern European accent still there, but less noticeable than before.
As usual, curiosity gets the better of me. 'You'll tell me who you really are this time?'
She smiles invitingly. 'Promise.'
The car's a Toyota Corolla, and not a particularly new one either. As I get inside, she pulls away from the kerb.
'I heard they released you.'
'You heard right,' I answer, not wanting to make it easy for her. Where Alannah's concerned, I still feel a sense of betrayal, although given the other people who've put the knife into me these past few weeks, hers is fairly small-scale.
'I also wanted to thank you properly for saving my life,' she adds.
'I actually saved it then, did I?'
'Come on, Tyler, don't be like that.'
'You'll forgive me if I'm feeling a little jaded, but I'm getting tired of being bullshitted the whole time.'
'I didn't want to have to lie to you, I promise.'
I fix her with a sceptical expression.
'What I'm going to tell you,' she says, turning my way, looking as beautiful as ever, 'I don't want repeated to anyone. Understand?'
'OK,' I answer uncertainly.
'I
am
a police officer, and I
am
from the old Yugoslavia, originally at least, but I work over here now. I can't tell you who I'm with or where I'm based, but my role's an undercover one. I infiltrated Eddie Cosick's organization to try to gather evidence on his people-trafficking business. We never realized the true extent of what he was up to, and how many other people it involved, but in the last days of the operation I did realize that something very important was happening, although when I first ran into you I still didn't know what it was. I intervened on your behalf in the brothel when I found out they were going to kill you. I was deep cover, but not so deep that I could stand by while someone was murdered.
'But the problem was that as soon as I got involved, I effectively blew my cover. When you came to Marco's flat, he genuinely was trying to kill me, so yes, you did save me. After that, though, I didn't know what to do about you. When you told me about the case I knew we needed to see it as well. I thought that if I got you to go to Cosick's house, we could use this as an excuse to raid the place. We could say we'd got an anonymous call about an intruder, go
inside and recover the evidence that we could use to hold him.'
'But the girl in the photo you showed me, Petra . . .'
'No, she wasn't my sister. But Petra is her name, and her story's a true one. We were approached by her sister, who is a police officer in Belgrade, who told us she was missing, and about Eddie Cosick's people-smuggling operation. I thought if you showed the photo to Cosick, it would panic him.'
I think of the girl in her school uniform, smiling self-consciously at the camera, and I remember her photo from the briefcase. 'And she's one of the murder victims, isn't she?' I ask, knowing what the answer's going to be.
Alannah nods grimly. 'Yes. She is.'
We're silent for a few moments. I feel an overwhelming sadness at the thought of this young girl dying a depraved, lonely death thousands of miles from her home and family at the hands of such cold-hearted killers. The grim irony that if it hadn't been for Major Ryan they might have got away with it is not lost on me.
I look at Alannah. 'I suppose when I told you I wasn't going to go to Cosick's place, that's
when you called in your colleagues to arrest me?'
She nods.
'And you called the police to Cosick's place as well?'
She nods again. 'I did.'
'How did you know I was there?'
'Technology,' she says. 'When you were back at my place, I planted a tracking device in your shoe.'
That explains a few things, not least how the police managed to turn up at Ryan's house too, but it doesn't make me feel any better. 'So you could have caught me at any time?'
'Yes, but I was ordered to let things run and see what happened. We moved in when we saw you were heading to Cosick's place, but we weren't quick enough to stop you going in, or to prevent the death of your friend.'
'I know you weren't,' I say bitterly.
The news that Lucas's death could have been avoided is a real blow. In the days since I watched him die, I've thought about him often, more often than I ever did in life. With him gone, my world's an emptier place.
'I'm sorry about that, Tyler.'
I don't acknowledge the apology. 'And what happened after I was arrested? How come I was let go again?'
'I had nothing to do with that. But again, the idea was to let you run and see what you turned up. There was a feeling you knew more about things than you were letting on, and you were followed discreetly, from a distance. Unfortunately, we lost the signal on the tracker when you entered the woodland around Leo Ryan's house, and it took some time to locate you.'
'By which time I could have been killed.'
I look out of the window at the ordinary people passing on the pavement outside as they go about their ordinary lives, and I hear Alannah apologizing again.
'OK. Well, I guess the apology's accepted,' I say at last. 'And thanks for helping me back at the brothel.'
She smiles, showing gleaming white teeth, then her expression becomes more serious. 'Listen, Tyler . . .' She pauses a moment, and I try to read whatever's behind her dark eyes. 'When I kissed you back at the safe house, I wasn't putting it on, you know. That's partly
why I'm here.' We're turning into my road now, only yards from home. 'I was hoping that maybe we could take things a step further. Maybe, you know, go out some time. Finish off what we started.' She comes to a halt outside the front door and looks at me expectantly, brushing a curl of blonde hair from her face.
She really is beautiful, a vision in various shades of gold.
'I don't think so,' I say with a tight smile, 'but thanks for the offer.'
I open the passenger door and get out, and as I walk to my front door, fishing in my pocket for the keys - a sadder yet wiser man than I was before all this started - I don't look back, nor do I feel even a twinge of regret.
I may be alone, but sometimes, just sometimes, that's the best thing to be.
THE END
DEADLINE
is the gripping new novel
from SIMON KERNICK
Here's the first chapter to get
your pulse racing . . .
When his girlfriend greeted him at the door dressed only in a T-shirt and thong, then kissed him hard on the mouth without a word before pulling him into her ground-floor bedroom, she was so worked up she didn't even notice that he was wearing gloves. They'd talked on the phone five minutes earlier and in that conversation he'd explained in intimate detail what he planned to do with her when he got to her place. So it was with a hint of regret that, as her hands headed southwards, he kicked shut the bedroom door, slipped the knife from the concealed sheath beneath his cheap suit jacket, and drove it silently between her ribs and directly into her heart. In the short time he'd known her, the girl had proved to be adept and enthusiastic in bed, and it would have been a pleasant distraction to have had sex with her one last time. But that would have meant leaving behind incriminating evidence, and he was a professional who didn't let the desire for cheap gratification get in the way of business.
He clasped her close to him while she died. The single blow had been enough, as he knew it would be, having used this method of killing on several occasions in the past. The girl made barely a sound. There was the surprised, pained gasp as the blade went in, of course, which was accompanied by a single juddering spasm, not unlike an orgasm, as her muscles tensed for a final time and her fingernails dug into the material of his suit jacket, but it didn't last long and was quickly followed by the long, slow release of breath as she relaxed in his arms.
He counted to ten in his head, then, still holding on to her, reached into the inside pocket of his jacket with his knife hand and produced a handkerchief. The blade made a strange, hissing sound as it was slowly withdrawn, and he used a well-practised combination of both hands to wipe it clean, before replacing it in its sheath. When this was done, he placed the body on the carpet next to the unmade bed and briefly admired his handiwork. Because she'd died so quickly, there was very little blood, and she looked remarkably peaceful lying there with her eyes closed. It was the quietest he'd seen her. In life, she'd been quite a talker.
Leaning down, he tried to push her under the bed, but there wasn't enough of a gap between the bottom of the frame and the floor, so he
squeezed her as far in as she would go, then covered the rest of the body with one end of the duvet cover. It was only a tidying-up gesture: concealing the body would do nothing to mask the smell that would soon be coming from it, but he wasn't overly concerned about that. He doubted if she'd be discovered for a while. She lived alone in her tiny ground-floor flat, and had few friends in the city, which had always been one of her complaints about it. He knew she spoke to her mother back home once a week but that was always on a Sunday, so it would be another six days before the mother had a reason to worry about her daughter, and several days more, at least, before anyone did anything about it.
No one had ever seen him with her. Their few clandestine meetings had always been in this flat. As far as he knew, she hadn't told anyone about him either, although even if she had it would make no difference. He'd given her a false name and background, one of four different identities he periodically used in order to always keep one step ahead of the authorities. His DNA would be in this room, of course, but then so would the DNA of those few friends the girl had, and since they were mainly illegals, it would be difficult to trace them.
He saw the girl's pink Nokia mobile phone on
the bedside table. He picked it up and put it in his pocket to be disposed of later, then took a last look round. Seeing nothing else that might incriminate him, he left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him, leaving the girl in her makeshift tomb.
As he stepped out of the front door and into the bright sunlight, he looked at his watch.
It was time.
The first thing that Andrea Devern noticed when she stepped out of her Mercedes C-Class Cabriolet was that there were no lights on in the house. It was 8.45 p.m. on a breezy Tuesday evening in early May, darkness had just about fallen, and she had only fifteen seconds of normality left in her life.
Clicking on the Mercedes' central locking, she walked the five yards to her front gate, glancing both ways along the quiet residential street because as a Londoner born and bred Andrea was never complacent about the potential for street crime, even in an area as upmarket as Hampstead. Criminals moved around these days. They no longer kept to their own patches. They gravitated towards the money, and on Andrea's tree-lined avenue of grand four-storey townhouses, barely spitting distance from the Heath, there was plenty of that.
But there was nothing out of place tonight, unless you counted the fact that her house was in darkness. Andrea tried to remember if Pat
had told her that he had arrangements, or whether he'd taken Emma off somewhere. She'd had a stressful day dealing with the management team of one of the five health spas she and her business partner owned. They'd taken it over a year ago and it had underperformed ever since. Now they were going to have to make redundancies, something that Andrea never liked doing, and it was up to her to decide who was for the push. She'd been mulling over who was going to have to go all the way back from Bedfordshire, and still she couldn't decide. By rights, it should have been the manager. He was paid well over the odds, and since he'd been the one presiding over the mess the spa was now in, it appealed to Andrea's sense of justice to give him the boot, but with no one to replace him, that was looking less and less viable. Better the devil you know, and all that . . .
Andrea decided to worry about it tomorrow. For now, she needed a long, slow glass of Sancerre and a relaxing cigarette. Not the healthiest of options, but a woman needs some pleasures in life, especially when she worked as hard as she did. She pressed the card key against the pressure pad on the security system and stepped through the gap as the gate slid open smoothly. As always, when she entered
her front garden and left the outside world behind her, she experienced a familiar sense of relief and pleasure. Sheltered by a high brick wall, the garden was a riot of colour, courtesy of the eight hundred quid a month she paid to the gardening company who were responsible for making it look like something from the front cover of a magazine.