Fallen Angel (24 page)

Collins had just turned into Regent Street when she saw Jenkins turn the corner of a road that was a few streets up on her left. She increased her pace, ignoring the pain that was now shooting through her body.

By the time she reached the corner she had gained on him considerably. The sound of her footsteps was being muffled by the wailing sirens of the fire engines, the ambulances and the scores of police cars converging on the scene a few streets away.

It wasn't until she was within fifty feet of him that he turned, and saw her bearing down on him.

He began to run, his gait heavy and awkward, his breath coming in huge, urgent gasps. Collins was almost close enough to grab him. He reached into the bag that was swinging loose at his shoulder and pulled out something small, metallic and shiny, something that fitted into the palm of his hand.

And then he turned.

His face was sweaty and red with exertion. ‘If you take one more step,' he gasped, ‘the boy dies.'

Collins stared hard at Jenkins's hand, which was now raised up in the air, rising and falling in time with his breathing. ‘I mean it,' he continued. ‘I'll do it. I've killed before, and I'm not afraid to do it again. Back off or Michael Dawney dies this instant.'

There was no way to see exactly what it was that Jenkins was holding, no way to be sure if the device truly had the power to kill the hostage at a distance. One thing was certain, though: during the execution of his two kidnaps, Jenkins had displayed an expert knowledge of the latest technology. If anyone could manufacture a hand-held device that could deal out death in an instant, it would be Duncan Jenkins.

Collins backed off.

‘Give it up, Jenkins,' she said, speaking between deep breaths of her own. ‘There's a cordon round here. The whole place is surrounded. You've got nowhere to go. Just give it up. It's over.'

‘How do you know it's over?' he asked. ‘You don't know the first thing about my plans, about what I've been through. This could just be the beginning, for all you know.'

‘I know that you went through a lot of pain as a child.'

‘You don't know shit about what I went through.'

‘I know the pain of revenge.'

‘What do you know about it?'

‘I watched my father half beaten to death and crippled for life. Every time I see him, I want revenge – I understand that.' She began moving closer to him. ‘I know how that can shape you, can affect you. Please, Duncan, none of what happened to you is Michael's fault – you need to tell me where he is.'

For a second, Collins believed she might have got through. There seemed to be a softening of Jenkins's expression, an acceptance that everything he had done had ultimately been a waste of time, that his evil actions
hurt no one more than they had hurt him. But it was only fleeting. Almost as quickly as they had appeared, the vulnerabilities vanished again.

‘I told you once and I won't tell you again,' he hissed, holding the device higher still. ‘Back off.'

Jenkins started to move slowly backwards along the street, his eyes fixed on Collins. When he reached the corner, more than thirty feet away, he glanced to one side and then began to run. Almost immediately he bumped into a pedestrian coming the other way, and both men were sent sprawling.

When Jenkins hit the ground, the hand containing the device sprang open. There, on the corner, Collins saw it clearly for the first time: it was a tiny silver cigarette lighter. He had been bluffing all along.

Moments after he hit the ground, Jenkins was up again and on the move.

So far as Blackwell's team were concerned, Duncan Jenkins had been critically injured in the blast, and they would be doing their best to save him in order to find out where Michael was being held. Only she knew the truth, only she knew the tramp had been nothing but a decoy. That meant that she was Michael's only hope. If she lost Jenkins, the boy would almost certainly lose his life.

Collins made her way round the corner and saw Jenkins running towards the Marylebone Road. She went after him at full sprint.

Jenkins arrived at Regent's Park tube station and disappeared inside, with Collins following close behind. With some difficulty he vaulted the ticket barrier and raced for the platforms; Collins did the same.

‘Jenkins!'

His face was a picture of alarm. He turned and glanced at Collins, then began to hurry towards the open mouth of the tunnel. Within seconds Collins was on top of him. He was cornered. Nowhere to go. She had him exactly where she wanted him.

‘Give it up, Duncan,' she said, trying to sound as sympathetic as she could. ‘Give it up. I know you've been through some hard times, I know you've had your troubles. But it's all over now. You've nowhere left to go. Give it up and tell me where Michael is.'

Jenkins only smiled and looked back over his shoulder into the gaping mouth of the tunnel beside him. He turned to look at Collins, sighed and then put down his bag. Collins felt an enormous sense of relief sweep over her. She took a step forward, but his words stopped her dead in her tracks.

‘Do you know anything about military miniatures?'

Collins frowned. ‘You mean the toy soldiers? I saw the ones you have in your home.'

Jenkins shook his head slowly. ‘Toy soldiers are the things that children play with. Pre-packaged pieces of plastic that are ready straight out of the box. I'm talking about military miniatures, detailed metal figurines that require painting and hours of preparation.'

‘The only thing I care about right now is finding Michael –'

‘It was H. G. Wells, the author, the man who wrote
The Time Machine
and
War of the Worlds
, who first popularized them. He wrote a book called
Little Wars
, which
was the first time anyone had drawn up a set of rules about how the campaigns should be fought. We call it wargaming.

‘You see, Wells was a pacifist. He believed that fighting battles with miniature figures was a cathartic experience. That it could help to ease man's natural aggression. Wells believed that if everyone fought battles with military miniatures, real wars in the future might be prevented.'

Again Collins frowned. ‘I don't understand –'

‘That's what I was trying to do. I was trying to get rid of my aggression, the anger and the hurt that I felt because of what had happened, what Peter Dawney had done to me. But it was no good. It was always there. And then it got much worse. When I was fifteen the doctors told me I'd never have children. I guess it didn't matter too much back then. I was too young and didn't really understand what it meant. And, as I got older, I knew no woman would ever want to be with me, not in that way.

‘But then I read a story about Peter, about how well he was doing. I discovered that he was living a lie and that he'd been having an affair. And then I found out he had another child he didn't even know about. I wanted him to suffer, I wanted him to feel the pain that I did. I wanted him to know about losing everything. So I decided to take his children away from him.'

While he'd been speaking, Jenkins had been moving closer and closer to the platform edge. Wind from an oncoming train began to blast out from the tunnel. ‘I've done that, and now that my mother is gone, there is nothing left for me in this world. Nothing left for me at
all. It's time for my mother and I to be together again.'

Collins realized what was going on: he was making his peace.

‘Listen, Duncan, whatever you're thinking, you need to stop and … for God's sake you need to tell me where Michael is. There will be no peace for you unless you spare the life of this innocent little boy. You can't punish the child for the sins of the father. He's just a little boy, he's just a little –'

Jenkins held up a hand to silence her, his eyes lifting towards the heavens. ‘Isn't God the most inspired architect of all? Every single person is a work of pure genius. So what on earth did I do to deserve to be turned into this abomination?' He returned his gaze to Collins, his eyes burning into her. ‘You're too late,' he said. ‘You're much too late.'

She watched in horror as Duncan grabbed the sides of his shirt and ripped it open, exposing the flesh of his chest and belly. Like some grotesque tattoo, the skin was a patchwork of ragged shapes and colours, the result of dozens of grafting operations. There was no belly button, no hair, just a mass of ridges and scars.

A sudden gust of wind pushed a cloud of dust from the mouth of the tunnel and up into her eyes. She raised her hand to clear them, and, as she did so, saw Duncan's shirt-tails flapping in the air as he leaped from the platform edge and into the path of the moving train.

The sound of screams. The horrified face of the driver. The too-late squeal of brakes, and the sickening thud and rumble of human flesh hitting hard steel.

The train continued to make its way into the station,
and Duncan's body slipped underneath its front wheels, crushed and broken.

Duncan Jenkins was dead.

Collins felt sick to her stomach. It was a combination of the horrific sight she had just seen and the sudden and awful realization that she now had no way of finding out where Michael Dawney was being held. The moment Duncan Jenkins had thrown himself under that train, he had in effect taken two lives.

Her entire career was in the balance because of the death of Duncan Jenkins, even though he had actually taken his own life. Everyone would blame her. She couldn't face her colleagues, and she couldn't face Peter Dawney.

But, if Collins had learned one thing and one thing alone during the course of the investigation, it was that Duncan Jenkins was the kind of man who never did anything without putting a great deal of thought into it. Everything had a meaning, everything had a purpose. Everything was a piece of the puzzle. The trouble was, only Duncan Jenkins knew what the entire picture actually looked like, and now he was dead.

She tried to get inside the dead man's mind, to imagine the rage and frustration that drove him to commit such acts in the first place. To catch a killer, you had to become a killer. She hadn't actually taken a life herself, but when she'd backed Jenkins into a corner, she'd given him no choice.

He'd been rushing, rushing to get on the train. Rushing to get somewhere. Rushing to get to Michael in order to finish him off? Was it really too late, or was that just wishful thinking on Duncan's part? Surely it was too late only because she didn't know where Michael was being held. If she could solve that one mystery, there was still a chance she could save the boy's life.

The echo of the squealing brakes of the tube train, the screams of the commuters as they ran from the platform and the sound of the station alarm were ringing in her ears as she took a few steps forward in order to retrieve the bag that Jenkins had been carrying, now lying at the entrance to the tunnel.

It seemed pointless to look in it now. Everything seemed pointless. She felt the weight of failure and defeat pressing down on her shoulders. He himself had told her it was too late. She picked up the bag and rummaged through its contents. No need for gloves now. Jenkins was dead, and so was the enquiry.

Yet a part of Collins refused to give up all hope. There was a chance, there had to be. Jenkins had been at the scene in order to set off the explosion, to destroy the money. He wouldn't have risked killing Michael beforehand in case something went wrong. If his aim had been to make Peter Dawney suffer for as long as possible, he would have waited. And there was one more thing, something he'd said earlier, that was bugging her.

The bag contained an old Bible and a mobile phone. She called up the phone's list of recently dialled numbers, hoping it might give her some clue as to Michael's whereabouts. There were three numbers listed: the first one
belonged to Blackwell's mobile; the second was the number of the phone she had collected at the jewellery shop; the third she didn't recognize at all. She thought about dialling it but was too far underground to get a signal.

Collins made her way along the platform to the front of the train, passing members of the London Underground staff who were in the process of escorting passengers away from the scene. One casually dressed man caught her attention: he was standing over Duncan Jenkins and using his mobile phone to record a clip of his mangled body.

It instantly made her see red, and she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. ‘What the fuck are you doing?' he squealed, dropping the phone, which flew over the edge of the platform and on to the tracks below. Collins pulled him towards her until he was only an inch away from her face. ‘Get the fuck out of here,' she hissed.

‘You lost me my phone!'

She gritted her teeth and spoke slowly, her voice full of anger. ‘Leave before I have you nicked, you sick fuck.' When she let go of him, the man turned and skulked away.

As she looked up at the entrance to the platform, she noticed Woods and a group of uniformed and plain-clothes officers rushing down towards her.

‘What's happened? Blackwell's been following you on CCTV ever since he realized the tramp was a decoy.' He was breathing hard, having run all the way there. ‘Where's Jenkins?'

‘He jumped.'

‘Fuck. What about Michael? Did he say anything?'

Collins shook her head. ‘Nothing. Just that it was too late.'

Tube staff were gathering around them, and she glanced at them anxiously. ‘Listen, Tony, I don't have time for this. We need to get out of here.'

Woods looked concerned. ‘You've got to be kidding. Blackwell's throwing a fit. He's ordered half the teams to make their way here. You've got to stay. They're going to want to know exactly what happened.'

‘The whole thing's been caught on CCTV. That will have to do for now.' She pulled him to one side. ‘Listen, something's been bugging me. Do you remember what we talked about at Jenkins's house?'

‘What are you on about?'

‘Think, Tony. When we were searching it, what did we talk about?'

‘I dunno. All sorts. It isn't the time for this.'

‘Yes, it is. What did we talk about? I need you to remember. Did we talk about Sophie?'

Woods frowned in concentration. ‘Yes, at the end when we went back into the lounge. I asked how you two were getting on now after she ran away.'

Collins nodded. ‘We've got to get back to the house.'

‘Why?'

‘Because he was there.'

‘Who?'

‘Jenkins. He heard our conversation. He must have been there the whole time.'