Authors: Michael Kerr
“
WHAT
the fuck are you doing here?” Tom asked, looking up as Matt lumbered into his office at eight-thirty the following morning.
“We need to talk,” Matt replied, taking a seat and tossing the walking cane he had opted to use instead of crutches onto Tom’s desk.
“You could have given me a bell. You should be taking it easy.”
“I’m fine, Tom. Stop treating me like a bloody invalid.”
Tom went over to the small table in the corner and poured them both coffees. “You are a bloody invalid, he said. “What’s so important?”
“I talked to Beth Holder last night. She’ll be contacting you.”
“About what?”
“She reckons that Penny Page will almost certainly be hit if she isn’t moved again, and I agree with her. Whoever is taking blood money off Santini will have told him where she’s stashed. And that she’s recovering. You need to relocate her, now, Tom. Every minute she’s in that clinic could be her last.”
“I’ll run it past McClane.”
“Impress on him that it needs to be done on the QT, without a paper trail. And I think you should arrange for a team from outside the Met to handle the move and look after her.”
As Tom imagined the cost and resources, his phone trilled. He picked up.
“Bartlett.”
“It’s Beth Holder, Tom.”
“A two-pronged attack, eh?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve got Barnes perched on a chair in front of me, telling me to move the Page woman. I believe you two had a tête-à-tête last night and made a few decisions.”
“We came up with some ideas. The man you are looking for attempted to kill Penny. He can’t afford to let her live. I believe he’ll try again, sooner rather than later. And Matt should move out of his place. He’s also a prime target.”
“Anything else, Beth?”
“I’ll drop by. I have a profile of sorts, based on available data.”
“Good. But hold off until later. I’ll be out and about till late afternoon. Will you be in town, then?”
“Yes, until about five-thirty.”
“I’ll drop by your office and pick it up. Okay?”
“Fine.”
You want a word with Matt?”
There was a pause. “No. I think we covered everything.”
“She’s at the Whitfield Clinic in Wood Green. Room 203. There’s one armed officer protecting her. She can identify the hitman. They think it’s secure. She’s a soft target.”
“Understood,” Tiny said, and then racked the phone.
Frank inspected his freshly manicured fingernails and waited.
“We know where the woman is, boss,” Tiny said. “What do you want I should do about it?”
“Get a message to the shooter and give him the details. He’ll do the rest.”
Tiny smiled. The light sparked off his gold caps. He called the answering service number they had and left a message.
* * *
Gus Devane made a good living from his small office in Hackney. He relayed messages and held mail for collection, or redirected it. A lot of people had very private business that they wished to conduct without their true identity or address being known. Nine tenths of it was of a sexual nature: Mostly married men, who contacted post office box numbers in stroke mags and needed to give an address for a reply. They didn’t all feel comfortable using sites on the Net. Gus was not inquisitive. It was strictly cash up front for his confidential service. His wife, Marsha, worked alongside him on an 0800 line, talking dirty to sad prats who got off as she moaned theatrically and played along with their fantasies. It was a nice little earner. Marsha had a husky come-to-bed voice, courtesy of the forty Superkings she got through each day. She told punters that she was nineteen, had breasts like melons, and looked like Carrie Underwood. In reality, she was fifty-nine, dumpy and plain. A greying version of Pauline Quirk.
The red light flashed on one of the units that received messages very infrequently. Gus looked up the cell phone number of the customer who paid handsomely for exclusive use of the line. Rang it.
“Yes?”
“You got a message.” Gus said.
“Thanks.” Gary ended the call, then tapped in his personal security code to access the system, listened to the three word message, ‘Contact Mr. S’, and erased it.
Ten minutes later, he climbed out of his car and phoned Rocco’s from a call box. He was put through to Frank’s office, and Tiny spoke to him on a secure line.
“The skirt’s at the Whitfield Clinic in Wood Green. Room 203. And she can finger you. There’s one pig watchin’ her back.”
“Okay. I’ll deal with it,” Gary said, wiping the receiver before putting it back in its cradle. There was now a pressure within. The woman would have no doubt given the plods a very detailed description of him. No sweat. The only danger would be if she was ever in a position to formally identify him. She had to go. The stupid fucking bitch had used up all her luck surviving what he had been sure was a fatal head shot. There would be no second miracle. Her good fortune reminded him of some soldier in Afghanistan. The guy had taken three bullets to the head. They all hit his helmet, and he suffered no more than a severe headache. Not all British army issue was crap.
He waited until dark, and then satisfied himself that there was no police presence on the avenue at the rear of the compact, four-storey Victorian clinic. Parking the car three streets away, he walked in. A quick glance both ways to ensure the coast was clear, then over the six-foot-high wall, to hunker down behind a screen of rhododendron bushes and let his eyes adjust to the deeper gloom. Twenty minutes passed. There was no sign of any cops in the grounds.
He moved fast across a large lawn, tree to tree, until he was standing with his back against cold brickwork. To his left, less than twenty feet away were stairs that he assumed led down to a basement. He went over to them, descended and forced a window to gain entry.
He was now in full killing mode, his senses heightened as he made his way through an underground network of passages with store rooms off them piled high with outmoded equipment, bedsteads, mattresses and furniture. It smelled of damp, and the whitewash on the walls was flaking from the crumbling brickwork beneath it.
A flight of stone steps led him up to a locked door fitted with a cheap lock that took all of ten seconds to disengage with the blade of a knife. At the end of the narrow corridor was a stairwell. He went up to the second floor and looked through the wire mesh reinforced glass of a porthole window. The corridor was brightly illuminated by concealed fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Opposite him was a robin’s egg-blue door with 209 stencilled on it in black lettering. He smiled. There was no movement. Staffing levels would be minimal at night. Maybe one nurse per floor, maximum. And there was no sign of a cop.
With the silenced Glock held two-handed, he exited the stairwell and made his way along the vinyl-floored corridor. His rubber-soled trainers squeaked on the highly polished surface, sounding loud in the crowding silence. No matter. Anyone who had the misfortune to appear now would be shot dead.
207...205...Yes, 203. Would the cop be inside? There was no empty chair outside the door, which would have suggested that her guardian had gone for a leak or to rustle up a coffee. Maybe the door was locked from the inside. Suck it and see.
The door was not locked. He opened it silently. Crouched low and moved to his left, searching for a target in the gloom. Nothing. The en suite bathroom door was open, and that was also clear. There were no sheets on the bed. The fucking room was empty. Out. Into the next room. Heart rate increased with the building tension. He closed the door behind him. No cop here either, but a woman in the bed. Santini’s dumb muscle must have given him the wrong room number, but all’s well that ends well.
Penny woke up with a start. She was bathed in sweat. Consciousness brought back the crushing loss with renewed force as she reached out to touch Jerry, even as she realised he was not lying next to her and never would be again. They had made plans; looked forward to the new role they had as parents. They had been euphoric at being a family. Raising Michael to the best of their ability was to have been a joy-filled, lifelong adventure. She began to cry for the thousandth time. Now, the responsibility for their son’s future was all on her shoulders. He would grow up never knowing the kind, gentle man who had been his father. Life was so fucking cruel. She was past denial, accepting that Jerry was gone forever, and yet on some level still expected him to be there. It was as if he were the phantom pains of an amputated limb that, though missing, could still be felt. She would have to adjust for Michael’s sake, but knew that she would never truly recover. Nothing could ever fill the aching, bottomless chasm of a wound that only Jerry’s presence would heal. It would have been better if she had died with him. To have survived without him was a fate worse than the death she had somehow cheated. The incident had taken away the point to it all. To have to carry on was an overwhelming, daunting challenge, and she determined to never again make plans for a tomorrow that could not be guaranteed; plans that could so easily dry up and blow away like straw in the wind.
A noise. She listened and turned towards the door.
He levelled the gun at her face as she raised her head up off the pillow. His hands froze. Her skin was lined and ashen, eyes milky with cataracts, hair thin, lifeless looking and yellow-white. Her lips were purple, sunk back against toothless gums.
“Who are you?” a reedy, slushy voice.
“Your salvation, old woman,” he said, regaining his composure.
A dull clap reverberated around the room as the bullet was expelled from the silencer and punched a perfectly round hole the size of a one pence piece in her forehead.
Nancy Worthington was eighty-three, terminally ill with cancer, and would have died within the next few days, had her departure date not been brought forward by the few grams of hot lead that took out the back of her skull in a bloody cloud of brain tissue and bone fragments.
He watched as one of the old girl’s gnarled hands came up off the light green counterpane. The gnarled fingers twitched as though she was waving at him, and then the hand dropped back down and only stillness and the sharp smell of cordite filled the air.
He marched out of the room and along the corridor until he came to the nurses’ station. He was pissed, and had no intention of looking in any more rooms for his intended target. Maybe she was in 103, or 303.
The nurse looked up at hearing his footsteps. Watched him stride up to the desk, stiffening with fright at the sight of the gun he was pointing at her.
Leaning forward, he jammed the still warm muzzle of the silencer into her left cheek. “Penny Page,” he said. “What room is the bitch in?”
Nurse Maureen O’Brien looked into the young man’s eyes and saw her own death in the liquid pitch stare.
“They m...moved her. Took her away at f...four this afternoon,” she stammered.
“Where to?”
“I...I don’t know. I wasn’t on duty. Please believe me.”
“I do,” he said, smiling as he pulled the trigger.
Maureen shot back out of her chair, hit the wall and sprawled on the floor in a tangled heap. He leaned forward over the counter and put another round through her right eye. There would be no more cock-ups. No more witnesses. No more fucking problems to deal with.
Making his way back down the stairwell, he could hardly contain his burgeoning anger. Santini had given him out of date information, which had occasioned him taking an unnecessary risk. The wop lowlife was trying his patience. Didn’t realise who he was fucking with.
Back at the flat, after replacing the gun in the hidey-hole behind the drier in the laundry room, he showered, dressed in fresh clothes, then went out again, on foot this time, to walk off his rage and consider what action to take.
TINY
picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he said.
“You fed me shit, you no-good overgrown nigger. Put Santini on. I don’t want to speak to his hired help.”
Tiny’s face set like stone. But he made no reply. “It’s for you, boss,” he said, turning to Frank and holding out the receiver, which looked like a kid’s toy in his shovel-sized hand. “It’s the honkey hitter.”
“Santini,” Frank said. “What’s your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem. You do, you wop bastard. Your lackey sent me on a fool’s errand. Was that a mistake? Or were you trying to set me up?”
“You’ve got a bad mouth on you,” Frank hissed. “We were given that information by a reliable source.”
“Believe me, it was
not
reliable. The woman was moved at four o’clock this afternoon. I need you to find out where she is. I think you owe me that much.”
“I don’t owe you the time of day, son. I pay you well for your services, end of story. If you’d done the bitch properly at the scene, you wouldn’t have a problem now.”
“Don’t make the mistake of getting on the wrong side of me, Santini.”
Frank almost choked. “Do you realise who you’re talkin’ to?”
“Yeah. An over-the-hill two-bit gangster who thinks he’s London’s answer to Al Capone, and runs a sloppy outfit. I want the woman’s present location within two hours. I’ll call you back. And be smart, Santini. Don’t make an enemy of me. You really wouldn’t want me on your case.”
As a surge of blood darkened Frank’s face, the line went dead.
Tiny side-stepped to let the phone fly past his head and smash to pieces against the far wall. Frank went to the bar and poured himself a very large Jack Daniel’s.
“What’s wrong, boss?” Tiny asked. He had rarely seen Frank so enraged.
“The filth has moved the Page woman. That’s what’s wrong. Now we’ve got a pissed-off psycho with an attitude, who wants to know where she is.”
“So what do we do?”
“You take Eddie and go see Pender. Find out where she’s stashed, and phone me within two hours. And hurt Pender, Tiny.”
“How hurt do you want him, boss?”
“Not so much that he’s of no further use. He needs to be able to work for us.”
Tiny nodded and left the office to go and find Eddie downstairs in the casino.
“We got a job,” Tiny said to Eddie. “Get Ray Lansky to bring the car round to the front.”
Thirty minutes later they were parked three doors up from the cop’s house. Tiny used a pre-paid mobile to phone him.
“Hello.”
“Hello back, Vic, it’s Tiny. Come outside, now. We need to talk, man.”
“But
¯”
“Just do it, Vic. I’m waitin’.”
Vic hung up. Went out into the hall, kicked off his slippers, put on his shoes and pulled on a windbreaker over his short sleeved shirt. His wife and daughter were in bed, asleep he hoped.
“Get in,” Eddie said, already standing outside the car with the rear nearside door held open as Vic walked slowly towards him.
Vic obeyed. Climbed in next to Tiny. Eddie got in and shut the door, sandwiching him between the two goons.
“Something wrong?” Vic asked.
“Yeah, you,” Tiny said, folding Vic in half with a punch to the stomach that forced the air and a loud wail of pain from him. “You made us look like fuckin’ amateurs. We told a certain party that the Page woman was where you said she’d be. And guess what, assehole? The bird had flown.”
“I...I don’t understand,” Vic wheezed, still bent over double with his head almost wedged between the front seats.
Eddie grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him back up straight.
“All you need to understand is that Mr Santini wants to know where she is, and within the hour.”
“There was no plan to move her,” Vic whined. “I wasn’t told.”
“So you’d better make some calls, and find out where the cunt is,” Tiny said. He then began to hit Vic repeatedly in the stomach and ribs with short, measured, powerful jabs of his hard fist.
When Vic slumped forward again, Eddie took over and worked on the cop’s left kidney and spine. The assault was over in less than thirty seconds. Eddie climbed out of the car, dragging Vic behind him, to dump him face down on the street.
Vic felt his cheekbone fracture and heard Tiny’s voice boom from the open door. “Call us,” he said. “If we don’t hear from you, we come back, and you really don’t want to put us to that trouble, man.”
Eddie got back into the car and nodded to Ray Lansky, who drove off, eager to be back at the club, where he could find some privacy to phone Tom Bartlett and report what had happened, and that Pender was the leak.
Vic had not cried for a long time. The tears he shed were not as a result of the exhaust fumes that burned his eyes as the car left the scene, nor the terrible pain that the beating had left him in. They were induced by his not knowing what to do, and out of fear for his wife’s and daughter’s safety. Panic was setting in, chilling his marrow.
Pushing himself up on to his hands and knees, Vic threw-up in the gutter, then climbed to his feet and staggered back along the pavement to the house, hunched over, his arms wrapped around his aching, bruised body.
It took time to stop shaking enough to use the phone. He waited until he had regained a little composure. His cheek was pulsating, but he could open and close his jaws. He phoned the incident room and asked for Tom.
“He’s called it a night, guv. Went home about an hour ago,” DS Pete Deakin said. “Anything I can help you with?”
“It was nothing specific,” Vic said. “Any breaks yet?”
“No.”
“How’s the Page woman?”
“Still on ice at the clinic we moved her to. Why, was there something in particular
¯
?”
“No. I just got to thinking about how lucky and unlucky she’d been. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, guv.”
Vic went through to the kitchen and poured himself a large brandy. What the fuck was going on? Bartlett had moved the woman again. Even his DS didn’t know where to. Or did he? Was this wheels within wheels? He felt as though he was being locked out. Tom Bartlett knew that the location of the safe house in Finchley had been given up by someone on the inside. But he was a DI for Christ’s sake. Surely he was above suspicion. There seemed no way out of the shit he was in. He couldn’t very well give Bartlett a bell at home and ask where the cow was. And time was a commodity he was rapidly running short of. The predicament called for immediate action. Trouble being, he hadn’t the faintest idea what action to take.
There was a low, long rumble of thunder. Summer rain pattered against the window, and sheet lightning had seconds earlier penetrated the thin cotton curtains and lit the room in a photoflash of light.
Penny got up and leaned over the cot. Michael was fast asleep, blissfully unaware of all that was happening; of the events that had already reshaped the future he would grow up in. She went across to the window. Her protectors had told her to keep away from it. But with no light on, she felt safe to pull one of the curtains back a couple of inches and look out. The city was a blurry abstract wash of yellow, orange and white lights through the veins of rain that forged passage down the grimy window of the third floor flat.
She was in a rundown Georgian terrace property in Paddington. The flat was small and clean; the furniture tired and cheap. It was basic, comprising of one bedroom, a living room/kitchen, and a bathroom with a lidless toilet, cracked hand basin, and a shower stall with several tiles missing from one wall. There was an underlying smell of nicotine, fried food and sweat, which seemed to have been absorbed into the very fabric of the building and was leaching back out to taint the stale air.
An armed officer was in the flat with her at all times. And any movement in or out was arranged by radio. Other police were nearby, monitoring the comings and goings of other tenants. Her life was on hold at the worst possible time. Within these depressing surroundings she was cut off from even her parents and other family members, who it was considered too dangerous to allow her contact with.
The big bear of a cop, Bartlett, had explained to her that the organisation that had hired the killer would in all probability make a further attempt on her life if they could ascertain her whereabouts.
For her son’s sake, Penny allowed herself to be stage-managed. She thought that the bedroom of the flat was like a cocoon, in which she spent the greater part of her time. She did not have the fortitude to be sociable or communicative with the officers who she considered as little more than gaolers. The hell that she now found herself in would have been unendurable, had it not been for Michael. Her baby gave her focus, and a reason to withstand the intolerable plight she was in. Without his need for her, she would have almost certainly found a way to end it all and save those that wished to kill her the trouble.
Staff nurse Veronica Tate made ready to leave her office on the ground floor and begin her rounds. She changed from her outdoor shoes into comfortable moccasins, tuned her portable radio to the World Service, and placed a copy of Josephine Cox’s latest novel open, face down on the desktop. Nights to Veronica were almost a holiday, giving her the time to recharge her batteries. It was a pleasant change from the grinding day routine of the clinic: respite from the hectic demands of both staff and patients.
Filling and switching on the kettle, Veronica went out into the corridor and headed for the stairs. She made a point of seeing each of the three nurses on duty at irregular intervals throughout the night. No one slept when she was at the helm.
“All quiet?” Veronica asked nurse Natalie Callard on the first floor.
“So far, so good,” Natalie replied.
“How’s the old goat in 106?”
“Sleeping like a baby.”
The old goat in question was one Lewis King, an ageing actor of the lovey variety, who spouted Shakespeare endlessly, though had not trodden the boards for at least a Decade. He was a terminal case, and although they would not be too sad to be rid of him, they hoped he would not turn up his toes on their watch. It made for a lot of paperwork.
“Okay, I’ll see you later,” Veronica said.
“Did you hear those popping sounds?” Natalie asked.
“No. What kind of popping sounds?”
“It sounded a little bit like light bulbs exploding.”
Veronica shook her head. “Probably just air in the pipes.”
As she pushed through the swing doors to the second floor, Veronica was met by a sulphurous smell that reminded her of the fumes left in the air after a firework display.
Maureen O’Brien was not at her desk, or to be seen on the corridor. Maybe she had gone for a pee, or was with a restless patient. She would wait.
Moving behind the counter, it took a few numbing seconds for Veronica to assimilate and react to the sight that met her. Maureen was lying in a pool of blood, and more of it spattered the wall behind her in spotted lines that looked as if a loaded paint brush had been whipped through the air to create them. She studied the body. The young nurse’s right eye was a crimson crater; the left was wide open and stared up towards the ceiling.
Veronica snapped free from invisible constraint and went to the body; to feel for a pulse that she knew would not be present. She then rushed back downstairs to her office to call the clinic’s director, before ringing the police. The soles of her moccasins were tacky on the vinyl, and left pillar box red footprints in her wake.
Tom looked at the display on the radio alarm as he picked up the phone from his bedside table. It glowed: 1.06 AM.
“This had better be good,” he said into the mouthpiece, before the caller could speak.
“It’s Pete Deakin, boss,” the DS said. “The Whitfield Clinic got hit. A nurse and an elderly female patient were shot. Both dead.”
“Fuck!”
Pete continued undaunted. “Uniforms are at the scene. What do you want me to do? I’ve jacked up a forensic team and contacted the duty pathologist.”
“Get over there. I’m on my way.”
What about the Page woman, boss?”
“I moved her, Pete. I’ll explain when I get there,” Tom said before hanging up.
“What is it, Tom?” his wife asked as he dressed in the dark.
“Just work, love,” he replied.
Jean Bartlett turned on the bedside lamp. “You got time for a coffee?”
“Yeah, instant, and not too hot.”
Jean got up, pulled a dressing gown on over her nightdress. Went downstairs and put the kettle on.
Tom counted his blessings. Matt and Beth Holder had convinced him that Penny Page had to be moved. If he hadn’t gone along with it, then the only person who could identify the killer with any certainty – apart from Matt, who only got a fleeting glance – would now be dead. Whoever was on the inside had attempted to sell them out…again.
As Tom joined Jean in the kitchen and picked up his mobile to phone Matt, it rang.
“Bartlett.”
“It’s Nick, boss. I just got back from driving two of Santini’s gorillas to Vic Pender’s house. He’s your man. They roughed him up a bit and told him to find out where you’d moved the woman to. He thought she was still at the clinic.”
“Ace, Nick. What do you expect will happen when he can’t come through for them?”