Revenger (28 page)

‘Good. Then I need to speak to him. Now.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ the sister replied. ‘And don’t give me a speech about dead children, or national security. I’ve already fallen for it once tonight, and it won’t make any difference. You still can’t talk to the patient.’

‘Why not?’ asked Keane, with barely suppressed irritation.

‘Because one of the side-effects of fentanyl is aphasia. Or to put it another way, you can ask your man all the questions you like. But he won’t reply. You see, he’s lost the power of speech.’

Jesus wept: was nothing going to go right tonight?

Keane’s phone rang. She ignored the glare of disapproval in the ward sister’s eyes and answered. It was Walcott. ‘The suspect’s been spotted.’

‘When, where?’ Keane asked, feeling her spirits rise. Maybe it wasn’t all lost, after all.

‘An all-night caff in Brewer Street. The owner called the helpline saying that he’d just had a customer come in who looked exactly like the photofit. Two units from Agar Street nick were immediately dispatched there, but the suspect had legged it. He must have been spooked because he went outside, saying he was going for a quick fag, and never came back.’

Keane’s spirits sank as fast as they’d surged. ‘Did we get anything – anything at all?’

‘Yeah, a little. A suede jacket was found in a dumpster just down the road. It resembled the one described by the Panus, and the people in the caff confirmed that the man they’d seen had been wearing it. It’s been sent to forensics for immediate examination. I
told
them to drop everything else and get straight on it. Hope that was the right call.’

‘Completely – a live suspect has to be a greater priority than dead victims.’

‘And there was one more thing,’ Walcott went on. ‘There were two other customers in the caff: a dancer from that strip joint Soho Gold and one of her customers. They said that they’d seen the man outside the club just a few minutes before he turned up in the caff. Seems like the bloke who runs the club, name of Danny Cropper, died about an hour ago. He had a sudden, fatal heart attack, right out of the blue. Then our man turns up and looks disturbed when he hears the news of Cropper’s death. The stripper thought they must have been friends or something.’

‘So he comes here waving an MOD pass under people’s noses. He incapacitates one of our men. He interrogates another officer before incapacitating him, too. Then he goes straight to the club, presumably looking for Cropper, and discovers that he’s just had a fatal heart attack. What the hell is going on?’

‘I don’t know, ma’am, but there’s something else. I’ve started looking into Cropper, and guess what he used to do for a living . . .’

‘Please don’t tell me that he was in the Royal Marines.’

‘Close. He was a warrant officer in the Parachute Regiment.’

65

A TRAMP WAS
sitting by a street corner, wide awake, watching Carver run down the street. The tramp held out his hand for money and called out, ‘Spare us a quid, guv.’

Carver had no intention of stopping until he saw the green military jungle hat the tramp was wearing. It had a floppy brim that cast a shadow over his face.

‘I’ll give you twenty for the hat,’ he said.

The tramp looked at him. Anyone willing to make an offer like that was clearly either mad or desperate enough to go higher. ‘Fifty,’ he said.

Carver got out his wallet and held out two twenty-pound notes. ‘Forty, or I take it for free.’

The tramp grabbed the notes from Carver’s hand and gave him the hat in exchange. It was filthy, greasy and it stank, but Carver didn’t care. His most easily identifiable item of clothing had gone and his face was half-hidden by the hat. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

He walked down Carnaby Street, past all the closed-down
boutiques
that had once catered to the tourists who weren’t coming to Britain – or anywhere else – any more. So now what? The police had his face, but they hadn’t put a name to it yet, and he didn’t think they’d find it too easy to do that. There weren’t too many people who knew Carver’s full identity – not unless Grantham gave him up, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Grantham didn’t want him sitting in a police cell any more than he did: they both had too much to lose. If anything, Grantham’d want to help him get out.

There was that little shit from Number 10, Cameron Young. He wouldn’t do anything public: he had almost as much to lose as Grantham if Carver started spilling the dirt. But they’d never exactly been best buddies, and Young was just the kind of creep who’d enjoy getting his own back by grassing Carver up anonymously. And what about Adams and Bell? They didn’t know his surname, and they’d have to think very carefully before they did anything. Adams would be admitting that he’d had dinner with the Second Man . . . Shit! The restaurant staff – they could put him at Adams’s table. That would lead the police to Adams, who would have to cooperate, and even if he didn’t have Carver’s name, he had Alix’s and the address of the hotel where she was staying.

Carver had to call her, warn her, tell her to get out right away.

Alix was anything but weak. She didn’t cry easily, or give in to despair, or let herself be overcome by regrets. But there were exceptions to every rule, and tonight was one of them.

She wept because she hated seeing Carver go and she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that she would never see him again. She couldn’t bear the thought of this ‘accident’ he was going to arrange. The whole point of his accidents was that people died. How was he planning to get out alive? And she bitterly regretted that she hadn’t told Carver about the baby. She hadn’t wanted to burden him, not when he had so many other things, including his own survival, to think about. But if he’d known, surely he’d have abandoned his attempt to find out what had happened tonight and stayed with her
instead
. He’d have found a way to get them out: him, her and their child. Or maybe she’d just have been a burden to him. Perhaps the best thing to do was concentrate on herself and the child. Hadn’t he said that the further she was from him the safer she’d be?

Alix was just going round in circles, getting nowhere, and she had to get some rest. So she turned off her phone and told the hotel switchboard that she didn’t want to be disturbed under any circumstances. Then she curled herself up, her posture as foetal as the baby inside her, and waited for sleep to take her.

No matter how many times he called Alix’s number, or how hard he argued with the hotel operator, Carver couldn’t get through. In the end he left a simple message. ‘Switch to Plan B. Text me your location. Just make sure I’m the only one who can understand it. And, yeah . . . I love you.’

Carver kept hitting brick walls. He could feel the presence of the mind behind the riot: simultaneously invisible and yet so close he could almost touch it. Cropper was dead and the links in the chain were broken, but there had to be another way of finding the answer. So now, as he walked through the filthy heart of London, his head down to keep his face away from the cameras, Carver was working out his next move.

66

CARVER HEADED SOUTH,
towards the river, moving fast to keep himself warm. Along the way he called Grantham. The phone was answered with a tired, irritable, ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Carver.’

Suddenly Grantham was wide awake. ‘Where are you?’

‘London. I had that drink tonight. The one I told you about.’

‘Yes.’

‘So now you know what happened.’

‘Yes. What do you plan to do about it?’

‘I’d hoped to find out who set everything up. But they’re cleaning up the trail. There was a man called Cropper, ran a strip joint, Soho Gold. He was definitely involved in it, but I don’t know how exactly, owing to the fact he just happened to die of a sudden heart attack minutes before I could get to him. He needs a seriously thorough post-mortem, to see what actually killed him.’

‘I’ll look into it. Meanwhile, you realize the entire Metropolitan Police force is after you?’

‘Yeah, I’d gathered.’

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘I’ve got an idea, but I need a place to hang out, just for a few hours . . . just long enough to work a few things out and get a couple of hours’ rest. I was wondering about that flat you had in Lambeth. The one I used before. Is anyone in it?’

‘Not at the moment. But it’s locked. You’ll never get in.’

‘Yes I will. I never gave you back the keys.’

Grantham managed a dry, exhausted chuckle. ‘Come to think of it, you didn’t.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be gone in the morning; eight or nine at the latest.’

‘When you say gone . . .’

‘I mean really gone. For good . . . I don’t have much of a choice.’

‘With a supermarket full of dead bodies, no, you don’t.’

‘So, anyway . . . it’s been, ah . . .’

‘Yes, it has. Goodbye, Carver.’

The line went dead. There was no point in long-drawn-out farewells. Carver understood that Grantham was a practical man. He was helping him get away because it suited him to do so. After that he was cutting him loose. That was fair enough. They were both in the same business. They both understood that you couldn’t have real friends. You just had some contacts that you disliked less than the rest of them. So there were no hard feelings. Feelings didn’t come into it.

Carver kept walking. He stopped at a number of cash machines along the way, using a series of different cards to draw more than one thousand five hundred pounds in total. On every occasion he kept his head tilted away from the CCTV camera monitoring the machine. At one point he came within one hundred metres of the Agar Street police station, several of whose officers were still combing the area near the café in Berwick Street, looking for him. On the corner of Trafalgar Square and Northumberland Avenue he went into a Tesco twenty-four-hour store and bought coffee, porridge oats, milk, nuts and raisins. Along with the chocolate he’d bought in the Lion Market earlier, that was enough basic nutrition
to
keep him going all day. To this he added a razor, shaving foam and a packet of dark-blonde hair-colouring mousse.

Something had been bothering Carver: an element of his appearance he’d forgotten to deal with. At the checkout he asked for an extra plastic bag, and when he got out on the pavement, he stuck his satchel in it. A delivery van pulled up right by him. The driver had a bundle of early-edition morning papers next to him on the front seat. As he carried them into the store, Carver caught a fleeting glimpse of a single front page, but he saw enough to know he was on it. Thank God for short winter days, the darkness that still afforded him some protection, and the deep shadows cast by the tramp’s floppy hat.

When he reached the Embankment he walked across the Thames on the Hungerford footbridge. Even in these bad times the view past the South Bank complex and the Tate Modern gallery, across the bend in the river towards the City and St Paul’s on the far side, was still magnificent. The cathedral’s dome was a comforting reminder that some things remained as symbols of solidity and permanence long after all the people who tried to tear civilization down had departed.

He walked past the rundown, half-empty terrace of restaurants and shops that ran alongside the Festival Hall and past Waterloo Station, heading for the flat he and Grantham had discussed: a grubby, decrepit apartment that was used as an occasional safe house in a development halfway between the station and the Imperial War Museum. It was about as welcoming as a prison cell, and rather less tastefully decorated, but Carver had a few good memories of the place.

Once inside, Carver went into the bathroom, covered his head with mousse and – thanking God that the flat was not equipped with any surveillance cameras – put a plastic bath cap on his head to keep the colourant in place. He fixed himself a cup of instant coffee – a poor substitute for the espresso he’d had to leave behind at the café. Then he cooked up the milk and porridge oats, pouring a large helping of raisins and nuts into the mix and stirring
it
all together. He ate it all straight from the pan, finished the coffee and then went back to the bathroom and rinsed the gunk out of his hair. There was a single thin, dirty towel hanging on a rail by the bath. Carver rubbed it over his head a few times and then waited for his own body-heat to finish the job, scuffing his fingers through his short-cropped hair a few times, just to hurry everything along.

He looked in the bathroom mirror. His hair was several shades lighter; not blond exactly, so much as a pale, nondescript, mousey brown. The kind of colour a witness would find difficult to describe.

Next he shaved his temples and forehead, giving himself a receding hairline, which he emphasized by shaving a large bald spot on the crown of his head and then chopping at the remaining hair around it to make it look thin and uneven. He looked in the mirror, slumping his shoulders, letting his stomach muscles relax into a little pot belly, slackening his facial expression and drooping his lips. He practised a weedy, nasal London accent, channelling the sound of David Beckham in one of his early interviews. The man who now greeted him in the mirror was no one’s idea of a trained killer, capable of taking on a mob single-handed. He was a loser, an invisible man, of no interest whatever to males or females alike.

So that was one job done. Now to get on with the rest.

The flat where Carver was doing his best to make himself untraceable was less than half a mile from the Kennington nick where the police were still working to trace him. Keane had gone home to get some rest, leaving Walcott in charge. So he was the one who got the call from forensics regarding the brown suede jacket, found in Berwick Street.

‘There was gunshot residue on both sleeves, and blood spatter, too. We’re just collecting DNA to see if it matches any we get from the bodies out on Netherton Street or in the supermarket.’

‘So this was the shooter, then?’

‘Most probably. It’s like Cinderella’s slipper. Find the man who fits this jacket and you’ve got your killer.’