The Jackdaw (53 page)

‘You all right?’ Sean asked when he reached him.

‘Not really,’ Donnelly answered.

Sean looked him in the eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told him. ‘I didn’t know it would go down like this.’

‘Really?’ Donnelly asked. ‘Then why did you make me bring the gun – if you didn’t know it would come to this?’

‘Just in case,’ Sean tried to reassure him.

‘You never thought it was Howard, did you?’

‘He was a good suspect,’ Sean explained, ‘but he lacked envy.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Donnelly admitted. ‘What’s envy got to do with it?’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ Sean told him. ‘It was Goldsboro and now he’s dead. It’s over.’

‘I know,’ Donnelly reminded him with barely concealed bitterness.

‘There’ll be an investigation,’ Sean warned him.

‘Aye,’ Donnelly agreed, ‘that’s what worries me. Ethics and Standards, IPCC, the media – they’re all going to murder me when they find out I didn’t shout a warning before firing.’

‘You didn’t have time,’ Sean argued. ‘By the time you shouted a warning he would have killed me.’

‘They won’t care about that,’ Donnelly explained. ‘All they’ll care about is procedure. I didn’t warn him – so that’s me fucked.’

‘But you did shout a warning,’ Sean told him, ‘just before he started to raise the shotgun at me and just after he’d said he would kill me. You remember now, don’t you?’

Donnelly nodded he understood before looking towards the ARV crew. ‘And them? What about what they heard?’

‘They were too far away to hear anything other than the shots,’ Sean assured him. ‘They couldn’t have heard you warning him to drop the gun – not from that distance.’

‘No,’ Donnelly agreed. ‘I suppose not.’

‘And … thanks,’ Sean added. ‘He was going to do it. He was going to shoot me. You saved my arse.’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly replied, ‘but to be honest, I’m not really sure how I feel about that right now. I had to kill a man because of you.’

Before Sean could answer, his phone rang. It was Sally.

‘Sean,’ she began. ‘What the hell’s going on? The ARV crew are telling me there’s been shots fired at the Hampstead Golf Course – that someone’s been killed?’

‘It’s all right,’ he reassured her. ‘We’re fine.’

‘Goldsboro?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ Sean confirmed. ‘Killed. We had no choice.’

‘
We
had no choice?’

Sean took a few steps away from Donnelly, as if it would prevent him from hearing. ‘Dave was the shooter. He had to. Goldsboro was about to fire on me.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Sally reprimanded him. ‘You were supposed to let the ARV crew make the arrest. You promised.’

‘I couldn’t,’ he tried to explain. ‘He had a hostage. He was going to get away. I had no choice.’ There was a long silence.

‘OK,’ Sally eventually softened and took a breath before continuing. ‘I can’t believe he thought he’d get away with it. Arrogant bastard. We’d have found out eventually,’ she reasoned. ‘Something would have given him away – forensics, a witness. Something.’

‘But you’re forgetting one thing,’ Sean told her. ‘We wouldn’t have been looking any more. Nobody would be.’

‘You would be,’ she accused him, ‘because you knew, didn’t you?’

‘No,’ Sean answered solemnly. ‘Not a hundred per cent. Not until I lifted the mask.’

‘Don’t play games with us any more, Sean,’ Sally whispered down the phone. ‘You went to that golf course alone because you wanted to face him, even if it meant getting yourself killed.’

‘That’s not true,’ Sean tried to convince her. ‘I was just trying to stop him from taking Waldegrave. I had no choice.’

‘No,’ Sally argued. ‘You had a choice. You just made the wrong one. Question is, Sean, why?’

He sighed before giving up. ‘I’ll see you later. I’ll explain more then.’ He pressed the end call icon and walked the few steps back to a morose-looking Donnelly.

‘Problem?’ he asked.

‘Sally,’ Sean explained. ‘She’s pissed off with me.’

‘
She’s
pissed off with you!’ Donnelly shrugged his shoulders, already starting to rebuild his detective’s façade. ‘Ah well. She’ll get over it. She always does.’

‘Maybe,’ Sean replied, expressionless.

‘One thing does bother me though,’ Donnelly changed the subject, ‘what you said to Sally – about how we could never have proved it was Goldsboro. There’s one thing both you and she seem to have forgotten.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The shotgun,’ Donnelly answered. ‘If he killed Howard in the white room then he’d have to have left the shotgun at the scene otherwise we would have known someone else must have been involved. And if he had to leave it we would have easily traced it back to Goldsboro. He would have had a hell of a job explaining how his shotgun ended up there.’

‘He’d have thought of it,’ Sean told him. ‘Would have had it covered. I doubt he kept his guns in his London place – with his sort of money he’s probably got a place in the country. Somewhere a burglary could easily be staged – and guess what was stolen?’

‘A McKay Brown shotgun,’ Donnelly answered.

‘I’d bet my pension on it.’

‘But why would Howard take a gun belonging to one of the people he also abducted and tortured?’

‘Why not?’ Sean explained. ‘Even when we still thought this was all about someone taking revenge on the bankers we didn’t have him down as a criminal who had the connections to get his hands on a gun. So why not take one from one of the people we thought he’d been following – learning everything about – including the fact they had shotguns and where they kept them?’

‘Jesus,’ Donnelly sighed. ‘You got this whole thing worked out, don’t you?’

‘Now I do,’ Sean answered. ‘Easy to see the picture once the puzzle’s been solved. Not so easy until then.’

‘And now you’ve stood in front of him,’ Donnelly asked, ‘d’you think he always had the potential to be a killer?’

‘I suppose.’ Sean considered it. ‘Deep down inside. But I don’t believe he was a psychopath. If anything he was something more – something even colder.’

‘A sociopath then?’ Donnelly almost whispered.

‘Maybe,’ Sean partially agreed – understanding more and more how Goldsboro had managed to lock him out of his mind. ‘If such a person really exists. His job kept it all at bay, satisfied his needs for dominance and power, but once that was taken away he changed – stepped into our world.’

‘A killer in the boardroom, eh?’ Donnelly half joked.

‘You could say that,’ Sean agreed.

Donnelly looked down at the body of Jeremy Goldsboro as the uniformed officers covered him with a large, blue plastic sheet. ‘At least there won’t be any trial this time, except maybe mine.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ Sean assured him, even managing to rest a hand in his shoulder. ‘It might just take a little time. It always just takes a little time.’

‘Well, there’ll be a lot of disappointed people out there,’ Donnelly told him. ‘A lot of people actually believed in The Jackdaw – felt empowered by him. Finally someone was standing up for them. But in the end it was nothing more than a rich man’s revenge. The Jackdaw stood for something, meant something – but this means nothing.’

‘It’s better this way,’ Sean explained. ‘It’s better it meant nothing. Better for everyone.’

Geoff Jackson sat at his desk in the open-plan office of
The World
thinking about how best to maximize the coverage of The Jackdaw’s final victim, not to mention his own suicide, when something coming from the large TV screen adorning the room made him look up from his computer screen. Sky News was showing a smartly dressed woman in her thirties, who looked more like a model than a reporter, standing on the edge of some car park or another. The caption in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen read, ‘Shooting at Hampstead Golf Course’, while the rolling news bar on the bottom of the screen said, ‘Police shooting in Hampstead, north London. Unconfirmed reports say man shot is The Jackdaw’.

‘Shit,’ Jackson cursed loudly as he saw the story of the year coming to an untimely conclusion.

‘Bad luck,’ one of his colleagues told him with a grin. ‘Bloody Sky. Already all over it. I guess there’ll be no more interviews with The Jackdaw then.’

‘Bollocks,’ Jackson told no one in particular.

‘Better luck next time, eh,’ the colleague told him and walked off as Jackson continued to watch the coverage – the footage cutting away from the reporter to a slightly older shot taken through a long-range lens, making the pictures from deep inside the car park appear a little grainy and ever so slightly out of focus, but good enough for him to be able to make out the dark-haired man as he walked to the white van where a blue sheet of plastic covered something on the ground. His experience told him it was a body – the body of The Jackdaw.

‘Corrigan,’ Jackson hissed through gritted teeth before leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, the thought of the money he’d earn from the book rights already softening the blow of losing the main character in the best story he’d had for years. ‘Corrigan,’ he repeated as he stared at the images on the TV, a slight grin spreading across his pale lips. ‘Rest assured I’ll be keeping a close eye on you, Detective Inspector Corrigan. A very close eye indeed.’

A KILLER WHO’LL NEVER STOP.

A DETECTIVE WHO’LL NEVER GIVE UP.

Click
here
to buy
Cold Killing

HE’S GOING TO SAVE HER.

WHETHER SHE LIKES IT OR NOT.

Click
here
to buy
The Keeper

HE SEES YOU WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPING …

Click
here
to buy
The Toy Taker

A quick thank you to all the team at Harper Collins – particularly Kate Elton – the Publisher, the entire sales team and also the marketing team, especially Hannah Gamon for all her hard and inventive work. A special note to my editor – Sarah Hodgson – who having been set a demanding task with
The Jackdaw
, did a fantastic job.

A big thank you to the Harper Collins team over in America, lead by Trish Daly, for all the hard work they put in on the last three books that were published over there. Much appreciated.

Here’s to the future.

LD

Luke Delaney joined the Metropolitan Police Service in the late 1980s and his first posting was to an inner city area of South East London notorious for high levels of crime and extreme violence. He later joined CID where he investigated murders ranging from those committed by fledgling serial killers to gangland assassinations.