Revenger (27 page)

Cropper collected the two drinks and Shelley took away the drained glass. Novak sipped at her water as she watched Cropper down half the fresh vodka. Now that his arrogance had gone, now that he was so obviously trying to summon up his courage, she had no respect for him at all.

He ran a finger round the inside of his shirt-collar, loosening it from his neck, and said, ‘So, right, what’s your message then?’

‘I was asked to tell you not to be concerned.’

Cropper visibly deflated in front of her as the tension that had held him taut and pumped-up poured from his body. ‘Fuck me . . . that’s a relief.’ He gave her a grateful smile. ‘I thought . . . well, I’ll be honest with you, love, I thought I was in the shit.’

‘The rest of the message is that they understand that it is not always possible to control events, and that sometimes things happen that were not planned for.’

‘Exactly! Exactly! Fuck, anyone who’s been in the army knows that. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and that—’

‘You are instructed to do nothing and say nothing to anyone . . .’

‘Fuck no! I’m staying proper schtum, don’t you worry about that!’

‘The mess will all be cleaned up.’

Novak sipped a bit more of the water and then got to her feet. ‘That is the end of my message. Thank you for the drink,’ she said and then walked away without bothering to acknowledge Cropper further in any way at all.

He leaned back against the bar and finished his drink as he watched her make her imperious way between the tables. ‘Fuck me.’ He sighed to himself. ‘That is one cold fucking bitch.’ Then he pulled himself together and waved at the two blondes who were still standing a few paces away, talking to one another with bored, exhausted looks on their faces.

‘Oi, you two little sluts!’ Cropper shouted. ‘Get your dirty arses over here!’

The girls trotted towards him, giggling at his brilliant wit. That was better, Cropper thought. They knew what was good for them.

A few minutes later, with Novak already on her way back to her hotel, Cropper started feeling unwell. Sweat was pouring off him. His heart was pounding like a madman’s drum kit. He clutched his hands to his chest. His legs gave way beneath him. And the last thing he heard was one of the blondes desperately screaming for a doctor.

62

AS CARVER TURNED
into Brewer Street he saw the light of an ambulance up the road. It was parked beneath a neon sign saying ‘Soho Gold – Home of the Golden Girls’, and the rear doors were opened in readiness for a patient. A knot of people were clustered on the pavement, some in anoraks and overcoats, others in their clubbing outfits. Heavyset men in black suits were running in and out of the club, talking into headsets, their composure shattered, panic setting in.

A couple were taking advantage of the chaos to sneak a crafty cigarette: a man in a suit and a young brunette wearing no more than lingerie, with the man’s overcoat draped across her shoulders. She had to be one of the famous Golden Girls. When Carver went up to them he realized that she had been crying.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

‘It’s the geezer that runs the place . . .’ said the man.

‘Danny,’ the girl added, with a sniff.

‘Yeah, Danny . . . well, he’s gone and had a heart attack. That’s what I heard, anyway. Someone told me he was dead.’

‘Don’t say that!’ cried the girl, feebly batting him with the back of her hand.

‘I’m sorry, love, but he’s gone all right . . . Look.’

Bodyguards were forcing a way through the crowd as two paramedics brought a stretcher on a gurney out of the door of the club. Underneath a blanket, the outline of a human body could be made out. The blanket covered its head.

The girl put a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide, then she sucked hard on her cigarette, shaking from shock as much as the cold night air. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, starting to cry again. ‘Poor Danny . . .’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Carver said to himself, feeling sick to his stomach as he saw his great scheme for uncovering the brains behind the riot falling apart before his eyes.

The girl misunderstood his disbelief. ‘I know,’ she sniffed. ‘He was so full of life. I can’t believe it, neither.’

The man put an arm round her shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry . . . Look, why don’t I get you a nice cup of tea, eh? That’ll make you feel better.’ He turned to look at Carver and winked, as if to say, ‘I’m in here.’

Carver thought about the kind of man that Danny Cropper must have been. He’d run a strip joint, selling female flesh. He’d been an equal-opportunity exploiter, of course, because he’d traded male muscle, too. But he hadn’t made the men who worked for him sell their naked bodies the way the women had to do. And though he might have screwed the men over metaphorically, he hadn’t done it literally, as he surely had with any girl who’d wanted to be golden. Then again, a half-decent stripper in Soho Gold probably earned more than ninety-five per cent of the British population did, so that might explain why one of them would cry at Cropper’s demise.

It had to be a hit, Carver thought. Adams, or someone around him, was cleaning up, breaking all the connections between themselves and the riot. So what had the killer used? Ideally, it would be something whose effects weren’t immediately obvious. That way
there
was time to get away before anyone knew that anything was wrong. And using something that hit the heart was a smart move, too. Cropper was ex-forces, so the chances were he smoked. It was a certainty that he liked a drink or two. And he wouldn’t be the kind of man who ate a lot of salad, either. Carver imagined a burly Para, going to seed, maybe in his early forties, making his legitimate money running a strip joint. He was a heart attack waiting to happen. On this night, of all nights, with every morgue in central London filled with bomb- and gunshot-victims, no one was going to have the time or the inclination to do a post-mortem on Danny Cropper. So no one would even think of looking for a killer.

But there had been a killer, and a good one too. Whoever did this wasn’t your common-or-garden hitman, walking through a crowded nightclub with a gun in his hand. This was someone who could pass the guards on the door, get close enough to Cropper to slip him the poison and then get out unobserved. And that meant a serious, high-end professional.

At which point two further thoughts occurred to Carver. The first was that anyone who wanted rid of Danny Cropper would soon work out they had to get rid of him, too. And the second was that poison was often considered a woman’s weapon.

63

DIPAK SHARMA WAS
a smart guy. He knew that Ajay Panu’s confession was rubbish, and he knew that the police knew that too. But there it was, in black and white, given without any improper pressure from the officer doing the interview, and so it had to be dealt with. Then there was the matter of the illegal shotgun that had been in Maninder Panu’s possession. It had been used to kill eight people, and he had to deal with that, too. So when Keane told him that she could make all that trouble go away, if only his clients would tell him everything they knew about the man who had actually carried out the shootings, and fabricated the explosive device that had killed all the victims in the Lion Market, well, he didn’t need a second invitation. His clients were advised to give the police their full cooperation.

Half an hour later a police technician was seated at a computer screen, putting together an image of the man suspected of being both the second Lion Market shooter and the person responsible for the fatal explosion. Both Panus and Chrystal Prentice had helped compile the image.

‘Get it out to the media, right away. I want it on every website, every TV channel, every front page – now!’ Keane said when the image was done.

And then she looked again at the face and realized that she had seen it herself, less than an hour earlier. She called Walcott over, pointed at the screen and said, ‘Does he look familiar to you?’

Walcott shrugged. ‘Should he?’

‘Look again. Think about Tommy’s . . .’

‘Oh shit.’ Walcott gasped. ‘He was right there, in front of us. I mean you . . .’

‘Yes . . . I bumped into the Second Man. He was right there and . . .’ she shook her head in disbelief, ‘. . . I actually apologized to him.’

‘You want me to get the car again?’

‘Yes . . . we’re going back to Tommy’s. If our man was there, then we need to know why.’

64

CARVER HAD HIT
a brick wall. Now he needed a Plan B. He also needed a coffee to keep him awake and alert. There didn’t look to be anything open on the street except clubs and sex joints, but he found a Turkish café a few hundred metres away near the Berwick Street market. As he walked in he realized that the only other customers were the couple he’d met outside Soho Gold. Christ, he thought, giving them an embarrassed nod of acknowledgement, they must think I’m stalking them. He went up to the bar and ordered a double espresso and a glass of still water, no ice. The waiter behind the counter looked at him strangely and seemed nervous as he served him. No sooner had Carver paid him than he vanished into a back room, hurrying away as though to an unmissable appointment, like the White Rabbit in a grubby, neon-lit wonderland.

Carver took his coffee and water to a scuffed, dirty table and sat down on a rickety chair. He drank some coffee and sat for a minute or two, considering where to start. There were a number of issues to sort out. Was he going to keep trying to get to the bottom of the
riot
? Maybe he should go public with the stuff on the head cam: stick it on YouTube, or just give it to the cops. There was enough on that to make anyone realize that there had been some kind of conspiracy. Once that ball got rolling, with all the media chasing after it just as hard as the authorities, it wouldn’t stop until the whole truth came out. But his face was on that tape, too. He had to edit it . . . but where?

He needed somewhere to spend the night. It wasn’t just the camera footage. He’d already got an idea about how he was getting out of the country, but it would take time to put together. But first, before anything else, he needed information. He had to know how far the police had got, how close they were on his trail. Carver got out the iPad and waited for it to come to life. Then he opened Safari and went to the BBC website to check out the news.

And now he knew why the man behind the counter couldn’t wait to get away from him.

His picture was on the homepage of bbc.co.uk, beneath the headline: ‘Lion Market “Second Man” – Police Issue Picture of Suspect’. It was a photofit, but there was no mistaking the resemblance. And when Carver opened up the story the copy spoke of the suspect, ‘wearing dark-blue jeans and a long brown suede jacket, over a black waistcoat’.

A police spokesman was quoted: ‘This man is very dangerous. Members of the public should on no account approach him, but should call the Metropolitan Police at the first opportunity.’

It didn’t take a genius to work out that that was exactly what the waiter had just done. Carver tried to work out how long he’d spent sitting at his table before he’d logged on to the site. Five minutes? Could be ten, even? He thought about where the nearest twenty-four-hour police station was: somewhere off the Strand, if he remembered correctly. It wouldn’t take them long to get to Berwick Street, not in the early hours of the morning. Carver got up and walked towards the door. The Golden Girl glanced at him.

‘Just nipping out for a quick smoke,’ he said.

As soon as he was out of sight of the café Carver looked for the
first
large rubbish bin he could find. It was full to the brim and surrounded by discarded boxes and bulging garbage bags, but it would have to do. He emptied the pockets of his jacket and then dumped it in the bin, pushing it down as far as it would go before walking on up the road. At the corner he turned left, towards Carnaby Street, and started running hard. He could hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. He couldn’t afford to slow down.

Keane and Walcott were at the hospital, and none of the news was good. The armed officer who had been assigned to guard the intensive care unit had been found halfway up a staircase, trussed up like a dirty judge in an S & M dungeon. His G36 rifle was lying in pieces on the landing. His pistol was missing. And though the officer had tried his best not to admit it, the man who had done this to him had been unarmed. ‘Had’ was the operative word. Keane had to assume that the Second Man was now armed with a fully loaded Glock.

Both the officer and the ward sister confirmed that the man, who conformed exactly to the descriptions given by the Panus, had identified himself as a Ministry of Defence official called Andy Jenkins. Keane assumed that in this context ‘Ministry of Defence’ had the same relationship to the man’s real job – if he was genuine – as the Home Office IDs carried by MI5 agents, and the Foreign Office status of MI6. So now she had a dead ex-Marine and someone who either was or was posing as some kind of military intelligence operative. That was, at least, consistent with the genuinely terrifying skill set he had demonstrated over the past few hours, and it raised the even scarier prospect that there was government involvement in the evening’s events.

Keane prayed for anything but that. She’d seen enough in her job to rid her of most of her illusions, but she’d never thought that someone in power would be crazy enough to start riots in which tens of people were killed. Worse still, she could see no way in which she could follow that line of investigation without causing serious, even terminal, damage to her career.

The one person who might be able to shed some light on all this was the patient known as ‘Curtis’. Keane had recently received a call informing her that he was in fact an undercover police officer: real name and rank Detective Sergeant Kevin Mallinson. The ward sister revealed that he had been rendered unconscious by an extremely strong dose of a painkiller called fentanyl. Luckily, however, doctors had been able to revive him easily enough.