The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) (18 page)

Eddie had come to him for his help.

Milton was going to find out what had happened to him.

ALEX HICKS was parked up in Russell Square, watching the comings and goings around the taximan’s shelter. He had taken the family car. He knew that John Milton had seen his Range Rover and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. The Ford Mondeo was aging. It had a dented bumper after a driver who had been looking at his phone had rear-ended his wife as she was driving home from the supermarket. It hadn’t been washed for weeks, and the inside was littered with the bright plastic toys that occasionally distracted his boys enough to keep them occupied during the journeys to and from the nursery. Hicks was parked between two similar cars, close enough to the shelter that he could observe it, but not so close that it would be obvious that he was watching it. Hicks knew enough about John Milton to know that he had to be very, very careful.

In truth, he wasn’t sure why he was here. The general certainly hadn’t sent him. He still hadn’t decided one way or another what he was going to do. But he had been unable to sleep following the night that had led to the death of Eddie Fabian, and he knew that it was his guilt and shame that had been keeping him awake. He knew that he had to do something to pull himself out of the mess that he had engineered for himself. The motives for his involvement with the general were irrelevant. The cancer was a useful excuse for the abandonment of his morals, but the planned murder of Eddie Fabian had been the moment that he had known that it would never be enough. The fact that Fabian had been killed by someone else did not absolve him of his shame. The fact remained: they would have killed him. He had been given the order, and he would have been expected to pull the trigger.

Hicks was there for an hour before he saw Milton. Black cabs came and went, the brightness of the shelter’s interior briefly visible in the gloom of the square as the door opened and closed. It was cold and wet, and the drivers hurried inside and back to their vehicles, with newspapers serving as makeshift umbrellas to shelter them from the rain. Hicks watched as Milton arrived. He approached on the other side of the square, stepping out between two parked cars and crossing the road. He didn’t hurry; he seemed oblivious to the rain. Hicks was too far away to get a good look at him, and he was silhouetted by the light that fell down from a streetlamp, but he knew from his bearing and his posture that it was the same man that he had seen the last time he was here, and at the church. The man he had recognised from years before.

John Milton.

Number One.

He waited longer. A woman, who he guessed must have been working the earlier shift, eventually left and stepped into a car that had arrived to collect her. There were three cabs parked alongside the shelter, and Hicks waited for another ten minutes until all three of them had been driven away.

He got out of the car, shut and locked the door, and jogged across the street.

MILTON TOOK the opportunity to clear away the dirty plates and mugs and wipe the tables down. He was tired, and there were hours to go before he would be finished for the night. He listened to the news on Radio 4 and was thinking about changing the channel to 6 Music when the door opened and someone came inside.

Milton was halfway to the kitchen and laden down. “Just a minute.”

“Milton?”

The man said it and stopped. Milton paused, frowning. He hadn’t used his real name for anything ever since he had returned to London. He put the plates in the sink and turned. It was the man he had seen at the funeral. One of the two men who had been watching from the Range Rover.

Milton put the plates on the counter. There was a knife on the chopping board. Milton rested his fingertips against the handle. “Who are you?”

“Hicks.”

Milton paused.

“Alex Hicks. I was in the Regiment. Do you remember, sir?”

Milton felt a coldness, a prickling on the back of his neck. The name was familiar. And he had known that he had recognised the man.

“They recruited me to Group Fifteen, sir. Three years ago. You were Number One. You tested me.”

“I tested a lot of people.”

“You said I wasn’t suitable. They sent me back to the army.”

Milton had been drinking heavily then. He had held it together during operations, but he had cut loose between them, and his recollections of those years were cloudy and marked with regular blackouts. But he
did
remember Hicks. The soldier had been young and keen, but there had been a streak of empathy that ran right through the middle of him. He was a superb soldier—anyone who was recruited to the Group was the best of the best—but there was a fundamental quality of decency that Milton had detected immediately. It was that which had disqualified him. It might have been possible to scrub it out of him, to turn him into the next cold-hearted assassin to serve in the Group. But perhaps the quality would prove to be stubborn and difficult to remove, and perhaps it would lead to a moment of hesitation when delay might mean death. Those were good reasons for rejection, certainly, but Milton remembered something else about his reaction, too. There was something in Hicks that he had once thought that he himself had possessed: decency. Milton had been reluctant to try to scrub that virtue away, and he had sent Hicks back to the Regiment rather than try.

“I don’t do that any more,” Milton said.

Hicks glanced around the shelter. “I can see that.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“It was, sir.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Call you what?”

“Sir. Don’t call me sir. This isn’t the army. And,” he repeated, “
I don’t do that any more.
”

“Sorry. Old habits.”

Milton watched him warily, picking up another dirty plate from the table. “What do you want?”

“It’s about Eddie Fabian.”

Milton looked at Hicks and saw that he was nervous. Milton left his fingers on the handle of the knife, his index finger tracing across the raised rivets. “What about him?”

“I saw you. With Eddie, in here. The night he died. I want to talk to you about it.”

Milton left the knife on the chopping board. He went to the door and locked it, flipping over the OPEN sign so that it now read CLOSED.

“Sit down,” Milton said, indicating one of the empty benches.

Hicks did as he was told; Milton stayed on his feet.

“Have you been watching me?” Milton asked.

“Just tonight.”

“Why are you here?”

Hicks shook his head. “Because of what happened to Eddie. He didn’t top himself. None of what they’re saying about it is true.”

“So you better tell me.”

Hicks put his hands in the middle of the table and started to clasp and unclasp them. Milton didn’t think he was aware that he was doing it; he was so nervous that he was unaware of the impression he was making.

“How much did Eddie tell you?” Hicks asked.

“About?”

“The things that happened to him when he was a boy.”

“Enough. Is it true?”

Hicks nodded. “Yes.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told you about Leo Isaacs? The MP?”

“He mentioned him.”

“There was a story a while ago. He got into trouble with another man on Hampstead Heath.”

“I know,” Milton said. “I read about it. The case collapsed. The witness changed his story.”

“That’s right,” Hicks said. “Right before the trial. Why would someone do something like that?”

“Nerves?”

Hicks shook his head. “No, not that. Why would the witness end up dead not six months after the trial collapsed? He was fit and well and he just dropped dead. Funny, right?”

“You’re going to tell me what happened?”

“Leo Isaacs has been
protected
. The court case wasn’t even the worst thing that was suppressed. What Isaacs did with Eddie and the other boys, all the other men who were implicated, they’ve all been protected. Rape. Abuse. Murder. Those men have been looked after.”

“By who?”

Hicks didn’t answer. Instead, he stared down at the table and clasped his hands so tight that they went white.

“Hicks?”

“This isn’t easy. He’s… the man doing it… he’s frightening, Milton. I don’t care about myself, but I have kids. Two boys. My wife is sick. They need me. If he knew I was here—if he knew that I was going to grass him up—he’d kill them, kill my wife, and he’d make me watch him do it. I’m not kidding. He’s bad news.”

“Who, Hicks? Who is?”

Hicks swallowed, his grimace suggesting that his throat was dry. Milton got up and fetched him a glass of water from the kitchen. He was finding the whole experience unsettling. Hicks might have been bounced out of the Group, but he had been nominated for selection. That meant that he was a hard man, a special forces soldier who would have killed before, and probably more than once. Yet here he was, sitting before him with the blood leeched out of his face, a nervous wreck.

Hicks took a drink and, when he rested the glass on the table, it rattled. His hand was shaking.

“Who is it, Hicks?”

“General Higgins. Richard Higgins. You know him?”

“Yes,” Milton said. “He was Director when I was in the Regiment.”

Milton had only been a trooper then, and so his experience of Higgins was negligible, but he remembered him. He had a reputation for brilliance, together with an irascible temper that had made him feared as much as respected among the men.

“Higgins has been blackmailing Isaacs and the others for twenty years. He calls it protection, of course, or ‘reputation management’ when he’s had a drink and he thinks he’s funny. They pay him every month and he makes sure that the stories stay buried. It’s ridiculous. They think he’s got their best interests at heart. Most of the time, they’re paying him to keep quiet about what he knows. To sit on the evidence. It’s extortion.”

“What does he have on them?”

“Proof that what Eddie Fabian said is true. Photos.”

“Have you seen them?”

“No,” Hicks admitted. “But I know he has it. His brother was senior in the Metropolitan Police. Diplomatic protection squad. The men at those parties, they were as discreet as you would expect them to be, but it’s difficult to hide secrets from the man who’s been assigned to protect you. They must have found out about the apartment. The men who used it must have thought that it was secret; if they’d changed their location, maybe none of this would ever have come out. But they didn’t, and they put themselves into a bad place. I don’t know how long it went on for, but they’ve got cast-iron proof. There were men from the military, the civil service, the government, the police—everywhere. Very senior. If this came out, it would cause enormous damage.”

“Where are the photos?”

“Hatton Garden.”

“What—a vault?”

“Safe deposit box.”

Milton nodded. “And Higgins knew that Eddie was going to accuse Isaacs?”

“Of course he did,” Hicks said. “Higgins knows
everything
. Fabian ambushed Isaacs and Isaacs told Higgins.”

“Yes,” Milton said. “Eddie told me.”

“And Isaacs went straight to Higgins. The slightest suggestion that his story is coming out, he’s all over the place, on the phone, telling Higgins what he has to do. Of course, from Higgins’s perspective, Isaacs and the others need to be looked after. The last thing he wants is for the story to break. If that happens, they go to prison, he loses all his leverage, they stop paying him. Maybe
he
goes to prison for suppressing the evidence. So when Isaacs called about Eddie, Higgins took it very seriously.”

Milton pulled up one of the spare chairs and sat down. “Go on.”

“We put observation in right away. Fabian was followed. The night he died, we broke into his house.”

“We?”

“Me. I did. Higgins ordered me to do it.” He shuffled on the bench. “I tried to warn Eddie off. Told him what he was doing was dangerous, he needed to leave it, but it didn’t work. He went straight out, stopped and bought a bottle of booze, and then came here to see you.”

“You followed him?”

“Me and the others.”

“Two cars.”

“You saw?”

Milton nodded. “A Range Rover and a Maserati. You pulled out just after he left.”

“I was in the Range Rover. That’s mine. Higgins had decided to get rid of him. He wanted us to do it here.” Hicks gestured around the inside of the shelter. “You too. It was quiet, late at night. You wouldn’t have seen us coming. But you were lucky. We were out of the car and on the way over here when Eddie left. Higgins called it off.”

“And then you killed him afterwards.”

Hicks shook his head and there was certainty in his voice. “No,” he said. “We didn’t. We followed him all the way to Littleworth. Just outside it. We had no idea what he was doing. He drove out of London and headed west. He kept going. Higgins wanted to stop him, wait for him to be somewhere quiet then pull him over and top him, but I put him off. I said it was too public, we would be seen, whatever I could think of.” He was trying hard to absolve himself, Milton could see. He didn’t want Milton’s judgment, but it was too late for that. “He stayed on the motorway and didn’t give us the chance. But then he did turn off. He drove into the middle of nowhere—we had no clue what he was doing—then he pulled into the driveway of a house. We went past. There was another car there. We drove by. Eddie was out of the car, waiting for another man.”

“You see who it was?”

“No. Too dark.”

“And then?”

“So we kept driving. I parked and got out once it was safe. Came back on foot. The other car came by first, a Jeep, and then I got to the house. The gates were open. Eddie was dead inside the cab. The engine was still running.”

Hicks shuffled uncomfortably.

“You must have more to go on than that,” Milton said.

“I do. I got the registration.”

“And?”

Hicks looked up. “That’s the thing. I ran the registration with the DVLA. It’s Frankie Fabian’s car.”

Milton frowned. “What?”