Sabbathman (3 page)

The drive back took an age, an endless series of traffic snarl-ups. Dropping in from the M25, two miles short of Leytonstone, Kingdom glanced at his watch. Twenty to eight, the pubs well and truly open, a chance for a pint or two before another long evening in the gloomy silence of the tiny terrace house. He turned into the car park of the first pub he found. Inside, the lounge bar was empty except for a couple of lads locked in conversation over pints of lager. In one corner, away from the bar, a television stood high up on a shelf, and Kingdom recognised the face on the screen, an ex-Minister, one of the many who’d sealed their careers with a 600-page memoir and one of the lucky few to cap it with a series of well-funded TV documentaries.

Kingdom ordered a Guinness and sat down. The ex-Minister was talking about loyalty and the final days of Margaret Thatcher. His own conscience was clear, he was saying. He’d supported her to the hilt, and he was appalled at the way the party had closed ranks against her. Kingdom sipped at the Guinness, recognising the rhetoric for what it was: a bid to get the story straight before the historians reached for their pens, and demolished the fantasy.

Kingdom settled back against the red velvet banquette. Early in his Special Branch career, after the driving school, and the comms classes, and the firearms course at Lippitt’s Hill, he’d spent
nearly three years in the Close Protection Squad, as bodyguard to a succession of public figures. One or two he’d liked, minor members of the Royal Family especially, decent people with a ready sense of humour and seemingly limitless patience. But the politicians, by and large, had been a different proposition: men and women trapped in a web of their own making, caged by their civil servants, rushing pell-mell from meeting to meeting, progressively more detached from the punters they were supposed to represent.

The ones he’d known best – the ones he’d guarded, advised, shopped-for, discreetly shepherded up and down the country – had simply been overwhelmed by the job: by the paperwork, by the never-ending phone calls, and by the growing realisation that little they did would ever make any difference. The latter was the real killer. That was when their grip began to slacken. That’s when the exhaustion, and the alcohol, finally took over.

Kingdom took a long pull at the Guinness, still half-watching the screen. Towards the end, he’d noticed, you could see it in their eyes. They lost focus, especially on the rougher days. And then that first drink of the day, the one that got you back to normal, would produce an instant sheen, a filminess that slowed them down, and returned a smile to their ravaged faces, steadying the nerves enough to dish out more of the usual nonsense. Kingdom smiled. The ex-Minister was talking now about enterprise. The people, he said, had been set free. The dead hand of government had been lifted. Only now, with the blessings of real choice, could Britain truly prosper. Kingdom looked round the empty pub, the young lads gone, the landlord half-asleep, the unfed fruit machine winking in the corner, the lunchtime pasties still curling in the hot cabinet. Enterprise? Prosperity? Choice? He smiled, reaching for his glass again.

Kingdom left the pub an hour and a half later. He’d found a copy of the
Observer
and read it front to back. Beside the lavatories, on the way out, he spotted a pay phone. He fumbled for change, piling coins on the window-sill, and then dialled his ex-wife’s number. She and the two boys still lived in the modest semi on the
edges of Bexleyheath. For thirteen years, he’d called the place home. The number answered, his ex-wife’s voice.

‘Wendy? Alan. If the boys are still up I’d like to–’

‘You said you’d come round.’

‘I know. I got held up.’

‘They were expecting you, Alan. You said you’d come.’

‘I know, I know, I told you, I–’

‘Have you any idea how much they want to see you? Have you any idea what that means to them? Do I have to spell it out again?’

‘No, love, it’s just–’

‘Don’t “love” me, Alan. That’s a word I don’t want to hear. If you loved any of us, you’d have come. You’d have been here. Instead of …’

She broke off, the usual mixture of anger and grief.

Kingdom frowned. ‘Instead of what?’ he said.

Wendy blew her nose. Then she came back on the phone, her voice unsteady. ‘You’re in the pub again, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Alan, don’t bugger me about, I can almost smell it.’

There was a click as she put the phone down and then the line went dead. Kingdom hesitated a moment in the darkened lobby. Then he retrieved his coins from the window-sill and pushed through the door.

Out in the car park, he unlocked the Wolseley and slid in behind the wheel. The smell – partly leather, partly the sweetish scent of the little pink deodorising balls his father used to hang from the driving mirror – engulfed him again, and for a minute or two he simply sat there, immobile. Leaving his kids had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. He’d thought at the time that nothing in life could ever be more painful. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. The old man in the house up the road wasn’t his father at all but someone else, and the shame of it was that he’d never had a chance to say what he’d wanted to say. Simple things. Things like goodbye, God Bless, and thanks. Now, the phrases would be meaningless, more fragments in the gibberish that passed for conversation, but once they would have meant everything. His father would have
earned them. And, being the man he was, they would have brought tears to his eyes.

Kingdom frowned, fumbling for the keys he’d dropped on the floor, surprised and a little alarmed by the force of his own feelings. Checking the mirror, he stirred the old engine into life, and swung out of the car park onto the main road. His father’s house was a few minutes away, an easy drive in light traffic, and Kingdom relaxed his long frame, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching for the radio. The radio was tuned to Classic FM, an evening concert, a piece of Dvorak, suitably wistful. He reached out, adjusting the mirror, recognising the shape of a Ford Escort perhaps ten yards behind. The Escort was black with low-slung suspension and rally lights. There were two men inside. One appeared to be talking into a handset.

Kingdom frowned. A well-developed instinct for danger had served him well over the years. It was something that had surprised a succession of guv’nors. They’d always said he looked too sleepy, too detached, too laid-back, but it was there nonetheless. Indeed, in Northern Ireland, it had twice saved his life. He had a natural eye for detail, for the smallest print of any scene, and now he knew that something was wrong. At the next intersection he turned left, no warning, hauling the big old car round the corner, and changing down a couple of gears to urge it up a shallow climb. He was in a quiet suburban road now, bay-fronted semis behind neatly trimmed hedges. He checked the mirror again. The road behind was empty, the junction at the foot of the hill receding into the dusk. Then, unmistakably, the lights of the Escort reappeared, and he heard a squeal of tyres as the driver floored the throttle.

Kingdom closed his eyes a moment, cursing himself for the Guinness. Two pints would have been adequate, three pints a treat. But four? Given the likely outcome of the next few minutes, four pints was madness. If he’d read the threat properly, if the guys in the Escort were who he thought they were, he was in imminent danger of making the late news. He knew the way they’d do it, up alongside him, the passenger window wound down, the ski masks on, the guy on the sharp end taking his time, levelling the automatic, those specially drilled rounds they liked to use to guarantee a decent hole. In Belfast they called the guns ‘shorts’,
and Kingdom remembered the word now, cursing again as he did so.

How had they traced him? How long had they been watching? Had they found the house? His father’s place? Had they shadowed him all the way to Thorpe Park? Had Allder’s bodyguard put them off? Was that the way it had been?

Kingdom turned left again, another street, narrower, quieter realising too late that he’d driven into a cul-de-sac. He accelerated towards the end, slewing the car sideways on the handbrake, reaching for the glove compartment, relieved to find the big automatic still there. He pushed the door open, rolling onto the cold asphalt on the blind side of the car, hearing the howl of gears as the Escort changed down. On his knees now, the gun readied, he peered into the gathering darkness. The Escort swung into view at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and Kingdom began to raise the heavy Browning, his hand steady, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the headlights, a perfect head-on shot. Then he paused. Something else was wrong, something else that made no sense. On top of the car, blinking, was a blue police light, the portable kind you stick on for emergencies. Kingdom stared at it. A trick? Something new in the repertoire?

The Escort braked sharply, and stopped no more than ten yards from the Wolseley. The headlights stayed on, and one of the doors opened. Kingdom was still crouching behind the Wolseley’s boot. Someone got out and began to walk towards Kingdom. Only when he was very close did Kingdom let him see the gun.

‘Stop there,’ Kingdom said, ‘Put your hands on your head.’

The man did what he was told. Against the headlights, his face was a mask of darkness.

‘What’s this about then?’

Kingdom peered at him, saying nothing. It wasn’t the voice he’d expected. It wasn’t a voice from the Falls, or the Ardoyne, but a London voice, youngish, flat, slightly muffled by a heavy cold.

‘Well?’ the man said. ‘You gonna tell me or what?’

Kingdom, still crouching, shifted his bodyweight. In the Escort, the driver had the radio tuned to the police control frequency. Even at ten yards, Kingdom could hear enough to know it was authentic, though it might still have been a ruse, a cassette
tape recorded earlier, or one of the cheap scanners available everywhere.

‘Police?’ Kingdom said warily.

The figure in front of him nodded. ‘Yeah …’ He paused. ‘CID.’

‘Prove it. Tell your mate to call in.’

The man in front glanced over his shoulder at the driver in the car.

Kingdom heard the driver start mumbling into the handset. ‘Speak up,’ he shouted, ‘I can’t hear.’

‘Juliet Three,’ the driver said, ‘corner of Blackstone Road and Park View. I/C One. Thirty. Thirty-five. Tall. Thin. Estimate six-one, six-two. Black hair, long. Jeans. Leather jacket. Bloke’s armed.’ He paused, ‘Urgent assistance.’

Kingdom looked hard at the man in front of him. ‘Urgent assistance’ was a call for the cavalry, the balloon you sent up when you were facing a thousand drunks, or a tooled-up drug dealer. Under different circumstances, it might have been funny. Now, it was anything but.

The driver signed off. There was a silence.

Kingdom stood up. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘My mistake.’

The man in front stepped forward and extended a hand. Kingdom shook it.

‘The gun, you clown. Give me the fucking gun.’

Kingdom stared at him a moment, then did what he was told. The detective briefly examined the gun. Then he tucked it into his waistband and told Kingdom to turn round and put his hands flat on the car roof.

‘Why?’

‘I’m going to search you.’

‘Why?’

The detective didn’t bother answering. After the search was over, he patted the butt of the gun.

‘What’s with this, then? What’ve we spoiled?’

Kingdom felt in his jacket and found his ID. ‘SB,’ he said briefly, ‘The name’s Alan Kingdom.’

The driver from the Escort joined the detective beside Kingdom. They both examined the ID in the glare of the headlights,
then the driver took it back to the car. Kingdom could hear him on the radio, checking the details. The man beside him was very close.

‘Been on the hit and miss, have we?’ he muttered. ‘Life getting a bit dull?’

‘Listen …’ Kingdom began.

‘No, clown, you listen–’

The detective pulled Kingdom round, the top of Kingdom’s shirt bunched in his fist, the gun in his other hand, an inch from Kingdom’s ear. Kingdom looked at him, wondering whether he hadn’t been right all along, two hit-men, hired locally, with a personal message from the folk across the water. Clever, he thought, eyeing the Escort. Fucking clever. The driver left the car and joined his colleague.

‘What they say?’

‘Kosher.’

‘Oh …’

The detective let Kingdom go, pushing him away, disappointment sopping up the last of the adrenalin. Kingdom brushed the sleeve of his jacket, the night air suddenly cold on his face.

‘So why the pull?’ he said after a while. ‘Why the aggro? Why all this?’

The two detectives exchanged glances.

Then one of them patted the Wolseley. ‘Nice motor,’ he said. ‘We’ve got it down as nicked.’

Charlie Truman was reading a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
when Kingdom finally made it to the office. Kingdom sat in front of his desk, his trench-coat dripping rain onto the worn square of Afghan rug. He’d come across to Ilford by bus, a journey of eight miles that had taken just under an hour. Charlie looked up, one finger still anchored in the middle of the front page. Upside down, Kingdom could read the headline. ‘MP SHOT DEAD,’ it went, ‘HUGE POLICE HUNT.’