Fall From Grace (23 page)

As he finally moved and turned to face the kiln, I saw he was holding another backpack at his side, partially hidden. He took a further step, into the warehouse, and kicked the door shut behind him with his heel. Then he stopped again, as perfectly still as before, the hood covering his face. The only thing moving was the backpack, gently swinging back and forth beside him like a metronome. Now it was like he was listening.

I’d chased him down earlier, got within feet of him, been confident of taking him if I’d ever been given the opportunity. But not now. There was something different about him: quiet, controlled, menacing. I’d surprised him earlier. He hadn’t been prepared.

But he was prepared this time.

About ten seconds later, he moved again, across to the kiln, looking in through the door at the fire. As he watched the flames burn, eating their way through all the evidence he’d dumped, he flipped back his hood and I got my first proper look at him, without the hood, without the balaclava.

He was in his early forties, shaved hair, light from the fire glinting in the dome of his head. Five-ten, five-eleven, a little overweight, but not enough to slow him down. He had the build of a lapsed bodybuilder, muscle indent still evident, even as his shape had started to change. But there was a weird dichotomy to him: he looked like a nightclub bouncer, all brawn, like he should have been slow and cumbersome. Yet as I recalled him out on the walkway of the tower block – his small, aggressive movements – and now watched him again here, I realized that was exactly why he was so unnerving.

He hid who he really was.

Automatically, I felt myself stiffen as he left the kiln and came across to the table. It was about thirty feet to my left. He placed the backpack down on top and began to unpack it: a six-pack of beer, a sandwich, crisps, a magazine. He set the fallen radio the right way, then flicked it on. It was tuned to a station playing heavy metal, volume down low. He didn’t adjust it. Instead he continued to unpack the bag. More food: chocolate, tinned fruit, cereal, milk. But then the food stopped coming.

A hard drive.

Duct tape. Rope.

He pushed the tape and the rope to one side, checked to see if there was anything else in the bag, then tossed it aside. Unzipping his body warmer, he went to the inside pockets. From one he took out his mobile phone. He checked the screen, the light briefly illuminating his face and surroundings. I silently edged back into the darkness, trying not to get caught in the glow, and then looked off across the warehouse to the only way out. I could make a break for it, perhaps get a two-second head start on him – but I’d have to avoid shelving units on the way, would waste a second opening the door, then another at the exterior. By that time, he’d be on me.
Or you could try to take him
. I turned back in his direction and saw he had his hand in the pocket on the other side of his body warmer.

He brought out a gun.

I felt myself tense again, a ripple of alarm following it. He placed it down next to the other items, its casing making a soft thud, and then started to unpack the sandwich. I looked between him and the door. If he was settling in for the night, I didn’t want to get caught here. But, equally, I didn’t want a bullet in the back either. All I had as protection, as a way to fight back, was the rubberized casing of the flashlight. My wallet. My phone.

Nothing else.

I’d walked into a dead end.

I shifted slightly in the dark, trying to get further away from him. He wouldn’t be able to put the lights on because they weren’t working, but he already felt too close. I edged to my left, moving on my haunches, and came to rest next to another shelf. I adjusted quietly beside it – and the metal zip on my jacket tapped against the shelving.

It pinged.

He turned immediately, eyes on my position. I quickly shifted again, further back. Apart from the kiln popping and crackling, the warehouse was silent. Picking up the gun, he stepped away from the table, shed his body warmer and let it drop to the floor behind him. His head tilted slightly, trying to see beyond the shadows, and then he took a step forward, his back to the kiln, and instantly became a silhouette. I couldn’t make out his face at all now. Not where his eyes were, not even in which direction he was facing.

I was blind.

My heart banged against my ribcage.

Turn around
.

And then his phone erupted into life.

It buzzed across the table behind him in a series of robotic beeps – a mechanical heartbeat – light strobing across the walls, a pale green glow thrown along one side of his face. I saw his eyes move inside the shadows of his eye sockets, catching the light like a mirrored panel: there, gone, there, gone. He stayed in the same place, unmoved, ignoring the phone, his gun up in front of him.

Ten seconds. Twelve. Fifteen.

When he finally came to life again, he turned halfway – side on to where I was – and glanced at the phone, before his eyes flicked back towards me. Brow furrowed.

He knew something was up.

He could sense it.

But then, as the phone stopped ringing, he shuddered out of his stillness, turned back towards the table and picked the mobile up. He looked at the screen, clicked a couple of options, then tossed it back on to the table. Picking up his sandwich, he pulled a chair out from under the table, slid in, and started using the laptop.

After a couple of minutes, a thought occurred to me:
What if my own phone goes off?
As quickly as I could, I reached into my pocket, felt around for it and turned it off.

When I looked back, my heart dropped: the man had turned slightly and through the corner of his eye he was looking off into the dark, to the position I’d been in when I’d brushed the shelving unit. A video was playing on the laptop, but he wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he started looking for something else. A second later I realized what.

The torch
.

I moved again in the direction of the loading doors, quickly and silently, using the nearest shelving unit as a guide. Dust kicked up, getting into my throat, and I had to cover my face to subdue any noise. I heard a clatter and looked up in time to see the man placing the gun down and picking up the torch. He flicked it on, stood where he was and shone it into the space I’d first occupied. I kept moving, slower now, as he swept the cone of light from left to right, a spotlight tracking my route. Out of the dark in front of me came the loading doors, a thin glow escaping under it. I’d gone as far as I could.

Shit
.

But then the cone of light stopped five feet to my right, the torch dropping away to his side, light skittering back across the warehouse and forming a pool next to his leg.

He switched it off.

After a brief pause, he returned to the kiln, opened the door and stood there, face lit, eyes lucent, as if thinking. A moment later, he walked back to the table. Putting his body warmer back on, he checked his phone again, packed everything into the bag, including the gun – and then he left.

31

I heard the main door close, then footsteps passing outside the loading bay, crunching on compacted snow. Getting to my feet, stiff from keeping so still, I took off after him, leaving the heat of the warehouse behind me. In the corridor, it was a relief to feel a slight drop in temperature – and it felt even better hitting the sub-zero chill of the night air.

He was already at the top of the road.

I moved quickly along the pavement, trying to keep noise to a minimum. I didn’t want anyone out on the Old Kent Road to hear my approach, or to place me at the scene if things went south. It was only nine-forty, so the main road was still busy: traffic passed easily across trails of grit, people too, following pavements where snow had been pushed into piles, or reduced to slush. At the mouth of the road, I paused: I had a gap of about ten seconds between passers-by. Slipping out of Bayleaf Avenue and into the pedestrian flow, I spotted him about a hundred and fifty feet ahead of me. He had the hood up on his top, body warmer zipped up, hands in his pockets, heading north towards Walworth.

I powered on my phone and picked up the pace. Ahead of me, three identical eighteen-storey tower blocks rose like fingers out of the earth, hundreds of windows illuminated against the black of the sky.

A couple of minutes later, as the man continued along the Old Kent Road, he looked back over his shoulder. I took a subtle half-step to the left, moving in behind a couple a yard in front of me. Anything more, any great shift into the shadows at the edges of the pavement, and he’d notice. After a few seconds, I leaned – peeking past the couple again – and saw him passing a Chinese takeaway flanked by stone dragons. He’d slowed down a little now, head bowed, fiddling with something in front of him. As he came to a junction, he stopped, still concentrating on what he was holding. I slowed, using the shadows of a building, set back from the street, as cover. Then I saw what he had in his hands.

His phone.

Is he texting someone?

Or is someone texting him?

He passed a burnt-out building, sandwiched between an English-language centre and a vacant record shop. Windows were boarded up. Graffiti adorned the lower floors. Charred tongues of smoke licked their way up the paintwork. And then, suddenly, as we moved left on to New Kent Road, I saw where he was heading: towards the Tube at Elephant and Castle. Up ahead, framed by the grim shell of the shopping centre, were the grey-green glass panels it was housed in. Above that, the sky was black, light rain starting to drift in. The drizzle was barely visible, but I could feel it against my face and hear it against the buildings around me. It beat a soft tempo, like a distant chant.

Inside the station, he took the escalators down into the earth, heading for the northbound platform on the Northern line. I hung back, conscious of being seen. It was after ten now and the platform was almost empty. Hovering in the gangway between the concourse and the line, I held my position, the man about thirty feet further down, on the platform edge. Over his shoulder, along the gloom of the line, headlights started to burn holes in the dark, the tracks making an electrified twang, brakes starting to squeal. Then, finally, the train entered the station, whipping past the man, his face reflected in the glass over and over, countless windows forming and re-forming him. I edged closer, his features replicated more fully as the carriage slowed to a halt. Inside the hood I saw the paleness of his face and eye sockets reduced to black puddles under the overhead lights.

As he boarded, his back to me, I did the same, casually striding through an open door, at the end of the next carriage down from his. I looked through to the next car and could see him clearly, half turned towards me, muscular arms reaching to a handhold. After a couple of seconds, he seemed to sense someone watching him and started to turn in my direction. I backed away from the glass, out of sight. The door closed. The train juddered into motion. I grabbed a handhold myself, deciding not to look again for now.

But then he came into view again.

He was back out on the platform.

His eyes moved along the passing carriages, one to the next, until he found me. I stepped forward. When his gaze met mine, a smile splintered across his face and he followed me with his eyes, all the way along the station until we finally disappeared from each other’s line of sight. And then the darkness of the tunnel claimed back the train.

Shit
.

He’d figured out I was tailing him
.

But I hadn’t made any errors, any slip-ups.

It was a textbook tail.

My thoughts quickly came together, as I remembered him using his phone on the walk up from the warehouse. Had he been warned I was on to him? If he’d been warned, it meant someone had been stalking me while I’d been shadowing him. But that didn’t make sense to me either: I’d been so conscious of my surroundings, of him, of other people, it seemed impossible I’d missed a tail.

Unless the tail wasn’t physical
.

I got out my own mobile phone.

Unless they never had to move at all
.

32

By the time I got to Borough, I’d removed the battery and SIM card from my phone. I double backed to Elephant and Castle, then exited and returned to where I’d left my car. As I slid in at the wheel and fired up the engine, I popped the SIM back in and powered on the phone briefly, to check if I’d missed any messages. A few seconds later, it buzzed.

Craw.

I quickly called her back.

‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ she said, and immediately it was clear that something had got to her. ‘I might as well go out with a bang before I get the sack in the morning.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I did your database search.’

I thought of the man I’d just lost on the Tube. She meant she’d gone against all her instincts and put his description through the computer. I couldn’t say I was disappointed.

‘And?’

‘And you were right.’

‘About what?’

‘The chipped tooth got us a match.’

I grabbed my notepad. ‘Who’s the match?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Everything’s complicated.’

‘It is when you’re involved.’

She was on the defensive because she felt I’d forced her hand; that I’d made her go searching in the database against her will. But she wouldn’t have gone searching if she didn’t want answers. Craw was one of the most uncompromising people I’d ever met.

‘Remember, it’s
your
father I’m trying to find here.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you sure?’

A pause that doubled as an apology.

‘He was a cop,’ she said finally.

‘Who?’

‘Chipped incisor.’

I thought of him standing on the platform. Looking off into the dark of the warehouse. Holding a knife to the boy’s throat. ‘So he’s not a cop any more?’

‘No. Reason he’s on the database is because he got done for speeding on the M25 two years ago. Like,
really
speeding. One hundred and thirty-two miles per hour. It was his second serious speeding offence in as many years, so this time he got twenty hours’ community service and a five-year driving ban.’