Karen was screaming – ‘Fuck you!’ – and blasting indiscriminately. The Chechens were trying to return fire but still worried about hitting each other, trying not to get killed in the process.
And then, as Shelley and Susie reached the edge of the road, Karen’s mag emptied and she was firing dry.
A torch came on, highlighting Karen, who knelt with most of her face gone, snarling and pulling the trigger uselessly. Regrouping, the Chechens picked her out, pouring rounds into her.
Karen knelt in a mist of blood, her jerking body held upright by the bullets that tore into her, until at last she fell.
CHAPTER 63
SHELLEY AND SUSIE dashed into the car park of the burned-out Foxy Kittenz, using the blackened shell of the building as cover and heading towards the rear, past the charcoal-coloured brick-work to a walkway with the river ahead of them.
For a second Shelley dithered over which direction to take. They’d expect him to make for the car. Sorry, Lucy. Her beloved Mini was going to have to be sacrificed. ‘This way,’ he whispered harshly, pulling Susie in the opposite direction.
As they set off, he thought about the options open to the enemy. The Cherokee was no good to them, not without headlights. Unless they fancied piling into Lucy’s Mini, their only transportation was the black Transit. Plus they were in disarray. With no transport of his own, he had to hope that would be enough.
‘When was the last time you did any running?’ said Susie, sprinting at his side. He hadn’t done any for months. He’d taken it up after Frankie died, but it had never really been his thing and he was feeling it now. A burning in his chest. ‘Okay, then,’ she said, ‘slow down, take it easy, set a steady pace and keep to it. Come on.’
They slowed, Susie setting the pace. Then about fifty yards ahead he saw the station. Docklands Light Railway. Crossharbour. The line would take them back into town.
Moments later they’d climbed the stairs and stood getting their breath back. The platform towered over the road beneath, as though on a steel gantry, and Shelley peered through rain-streaked Perspex to keep an eye out for a vehicle below.
According to an information display, the next train, the last of the night, was just two minutes away.
Come on, he willed it. Come on.
Then – there it was. The black Transit below, approaching the station.
At the same time so was the train. It was rounding a final bend towards the end of the straight track, slowing before it entered the station. The only other passengers on the platform, two young men in suits, moved forward to greet it.
On the road below, the Transit stopped.
‘Here,’ said Shelley. He beckoned Susie to stay out of sight on the other side of a passenger lift and did the same himself, peeking around the edge to check on the vehicle below. Its doors opened. Men appeared. Shelley saw Dmitry gesticulating, sending two men up the stairs to the platform, where they stood, the train just seconds away from coming to a stop.
‘This way,’ he said. The two of them raced up the platform to get as far away from the steps as possible. Meanwhile the train stopped at last, humming and modern, doors gliding open, automated announcements and bright lights promising sanctuary.
They plunged inside, the sound of the Chechens pounding up the stairs ringing in their ears, and then right away crouched beneath the windows, ignoring the stares of the only two other people in the carriage.
In the reflection of a window opposite Shelley could see the Chechens on the platform. They wouldn’t board the train unless they were sure Shelley and Susie were on it, so they began to make their way along the platform, peering inside the carriages, shouting to one another in Russian.
Still crouched, Shelley threw a glance to his left and saw the two other passengers wearing puzzled expressions, their eyes going from Shelley and Susie to the approaching Chechens on the platform. He put a finger to his lips, willing them not to give away their position. In the reflection of the window, he saw one of the gangsters arrive, watched him peer inside and then, apparently satisfied, move away down towards the end.
The doors closed. There was no way they could board now, but even so, Shelley still didn’t want to be seen.
No such luck. ‘Hey!’ he heard, and looked up to see the Chechen towering over where he squatted, drumming at the window as the train began to move. The Chechen moved along with them for a few steps then relented as they gathered speed.
CHAPTER 64
SHELLEY AND SUSIE stood from their hiding place and took seats as far away from the other two passengers as possible.
‘What do we do now?’ said Susie, still breathing hard. They were the first words she’d spoken since the running tutorial back at Millharbour. She seemed cool but her eyes were a little wild.
‘We ride the train,’ he said. ‘Try and get you to safety. They’ve still got ten million. Maybe they’ll leave it there.’ He didn’t believe it for a second.
‘By the sounds of things, they wanted you,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘I’m just the cherry on top, a way of Dmitry being able to impress his bosses. He’s big on bosses is Dmitry. Besides, you saw them back there. That’s an organisation with a lot of housekeeping to do. Chances are they’ll just cut their losses.’
Who are you trying to kid?
‘Or maybe they’ll come after you and the other half of the money,’ said Susie, cutting right through his bullshit.
‘Something tells me that we’ll know soon enough,’ said Shelley. He stood as the train slowed to pull into the next station, South Quay, another smaller, gantry-type affair, not much more than a glorified bus stop.
‘They’ll be here, they’ll be waiting for us,’ he said. He dipped to check the platform as the train glided into the station with a descending whirr of electrics. They stood by the door, ready to make a move, but the platform was deserted. No sign of anyone, let alone their Mafia pals.
Susie went to disembark but Shelley stopped her. ‘No point in getting out if they’re not here,’ he said. He scanned up and down the empty platform, prepared for their pursuers to spring a surprise.
But none came. The doors closed. A soothing voice informed them that the next station was Heron Quays and that this service would terminate at Bank, which was central London. If they could reach Bank then surely they were home and dry.
The train was pulling away as Shelley and Susie resumed their seats. ‘You think they should have been here?’ she asked.
‘Yup,’ said Shelley thoughtfully. ‘They could have made it from Crossharbour to here in time. By my reckoning there should have been a welcome party. I don’t know why – maybe something held them up.’
But what? What?
He tried Drake’s number. No reply. Maybe zonked from the booze and pills. He tried Bennett. Again no reply. Which was a bit more puzzling.
And then his phone went. He raised it to his ear. ‘Hello, Dmitry,’ he said.
‘Shelley, my old friend,’ replied Dmitry, breezy as ever.
‘You double-cross and then plan to torture all your old friends, do you?’
Dmitry chuckled. ‘Well, you saw what I did to my wife and my father-in-law.’
‘True.’ Shelley paused. ‘Look, mate, you can stop this, you know. You’ve got your ten million. Your bosses are gonna love you for that. Ten million and no heat from the cops. Come on, that’s a good day’s work.’
‘Oh, Captain,’ said Dmitry regretfully, ‘the problem is that I promised them twenty million, plus you, and the annihilation of the Regan family. One and a half of those promises is not enough. I’d like to be able to deliver them all.’
‘Really? At the risk of more bodies?’
‘Even at the risk of more bodies, Captain.’
‘Because it’s not going to come easily,’ said Shelley, ‘you know that, don’t you? You know who I am and what I’m capable of. You know there’s no way in the world I’ll let you take me alive, and when I go I’ll take as many of you l
ot with me as I can. Maybe even you, Dmitry. And I promise you this, you’re not going to get the rest of the money.’
‘Oh, I’ll get it, Captain,’ purred Dmitry.
‘Don’t be an arse.’
‘By the way, I’ve been meaning to say, I’m most disappointed in you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘You lied to me.’
‘Go on,’ said Shelley.
‘The woman at the health spa. She was not an incompetent buffoon, was she? She was not working close protection for Mrs Drake.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Oh, I think you do, Captain.’
The line went dead.
CHAPTER 65
SHELLEY LOWERED HIS phone, wondering just how much Dmitry knew about Lucy – if anything. Could be a bluff. On the other hand, the Chechen had sounded distinctly unfazed.
‘I wish I could have done it myself,’ said Susie beside him, dragging him from his thoughts.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Karen. I wish I could have killed her myself.’
Shelley sighed, pulled off his cap and ran a hand through damp hair. ‘No you don’t,’ he said, feeling very tired all of a sudden.
‘She killed Emma. Or maybe I should say that she forced Emma to kill herself. She did that and then she uploaded film of it to the Internet. And then, you know what she did, Shelley? She sat there gloating about it. Taunting me about it. “From one muvva to anuvva.”’
As the train wound its way through Canary Wharf she opened up, telling Shelley everything Karen had told her in her cell. And when she’d finished they were both silent for a long time.
That was it, he thought, his suspicions confirmed. When Emma had rung him that night it was to tell him about Karen. Everything else: the means of suicide, the single bullet, the body being moved. It all made sense now.
‘Say something, David,’ she prompted, her voice soft.
‘I dunno,’ he started, ‘I dunno what to say.’
‘She was going to get to you next.’
‘That’s why she called me.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Guy said that you were gutted that Emma had called me and not you. But that was why, wasn’t it? Not because she turned to me for support, a final cry for help. Just because she needed to tell me about Karen.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
Maybe Susie would feel better knowing that, but he doubted it. He wanted to tell her that he’d started off needing to know the truth himself, but it was no consolation now that he did. It didn’t bring Emma back. If anything it made it worse, knowing that she might have found her way out of the hole she was in, given time that Karen took from her.
They fell back into silence. Eventually she said, ‘I’m sorry, Shelley.’
‘You’ve got no reason to be sorry.’
‘I do. For what happened all those years ago.’
He knew exactly what she meant. ‘It wasn’t just you. It was me too.’
‘Was it?’
‘You know it was.’
‘Could anything have happened between us?’ she asked.
‘No, Susie,’ said Shelley. ‘I love Lucy.’
‘It broke Emma’s heart that you left.’
‘But I did have to go,’ he told her.
‘I know,’ she said, adding, ‘I met Lucy.’
‘Of course.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ Susie said. ‘Beautiful and tough and clever. What on earth do you see in her?’
He chuckled, but the laughter died in his throat as it hit him why the Chechens hadn’t met them at the DLR station at South Quay. Why Dmitry was so fucking calm.
They were going after Lucy.
CHAPTER 66
LYING IN HER bed at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Lucy Shelley awoke with a start, instantly needing to use the toilet.
‘Oh, bollocks,’ she muttered. Even on a good day, the last thing she wanted to do was get up at three in the morning for a wee.
She lay there for a while, thinking that the urge might just disappear. Why did she always do that? It wasn’t going to.
Okay, she decided, there was no point in denying it. She had to get out of bed, whether she liked it or not.
Christ, it was hard enough at the best of times. Like at home, where it was relatively warm and she hadn’t just been shot – well, most days at least – but here, this was going to hurt. She braced herself for the pain and the cold and then moved one leg out of bed. She’d always had the impression that hospitals were supposed to be warm places, overheated almost, but this one certainly wasn’t, and she was very glad now that she wore a pair of pyjama bottoms over her bandages. She thought fondly of Shelley, who’d gone home and made up a bag for her before he came hurtling round to the hospital. She wondered what he was up to. Whether the exchange had gone well. Hoped he was okay.
Her bare feet touched the cold floor of her hospital room. ‘Ouch, ouch,’ she gasped. All those years in hostile environments and here she was, defeated by a cold floor. She tiptoed across the room to the toilet. ‘En suite bathroom,’ she’d scoffed earlier.
‘We do that for all our gunshot wound cases who have their own private guard,’ a doctor had told her drily.
‘Remind me to get shot more often,’ Lucy had replied, unsure if she was flirting or not. Probably not, on balance.
Close to her ‘en suite bathroom’ was the door to her room, beneath it a sliver of light from the corridor outside. Her guard was a guy called Trevor. She’d struck up quite a relationship with him in the few hours she had been there and saw no reason not to peek outside and say hello now. She was, after all, wearing pyjamas.
When she did manage to hobble over to look, however, his seat was empty. Just a copy of that day’s Daily Mirror, but no sign of Trevor. Opposite was the men’s toilet. Must be in there, she decided. She cast a glance up and down the corridor. The lights were slightly dimmed and there wasn’t a soul to be seen, the only sound a far-off moaning of some poor soul needing attention.
She stood there for a moment, maybe half hoping Trevor might reappear. But he didn’t, and it was cold, and she needed a wee, so Laters, Trevor.
She hobbled back into her room and closed the door gently. Then she turned to the bathroom, letting herself in. The light flickered on.
Still bleary, it took her a second or so to work out what was obscuring her view of the white porcelain of the loo that she really rather desperately needed to use.
It was a man. He wore leather gloves and a black denim jacket. He held a pistol fitted with a suppressor, and it was pointed at her.
CHAPTER 67
SHELLEY HAD TAKEN the opportunity to try Lucy’s mobile before the DLR train went underground, but it was off. Of course it was off, she was in the bloody hospital; there was no other way of contacting her unless he intended to ring the switchboard, who would want to know why he planned to wake his wife in the middle of the night, and might not like it when he told them that armed Chechens were on their way to kidnap her.
If, of course, they even were.
Because why would Dmitry even consider Lucy a target? He didn’t know she was Shelley’s wife. Johnson was dead when all that kicked off. When Shelley spoke to Dmitry in the hospital, the Chechen was none the wiser.
Which meant that he had learned something in the meantime. In other words, from somebody other than Johnson.
And that was when it struck him, the thing that had been bugging him. The smoothness of the operation. The fact that Dmitry had always seemed to be one step ahead of him.
They had an inside man.
Not Johnson. They had another inside man.
‘Come on.’ Susie’s voice yanked him from his thoughts. By now they were at Bank, which was surprisingly busy for the hour. Late-night drinkers and clubbers gave it a boisterous, raucous air.
Shelley and Susie hustled onwards, taking the tunnels towards the Central line where they boarded another train. This o
ne was busier, full of even more exuberant youngsters: drunk and shouting and laughing way too loudly. Shelley and Susie kept their heads down and were delivered to Holborn, where they disembarked.
And then Shelley saw him: a tall guy with that look of Chechen danger that made it 100 per cent certain he wasn’t a clubber. How long had he been on their tail? Shelley wasn’t sure. Neither could he be certain if he was one of the same men present at the exchange in Millharbour.
They were closer to the centre of the city now, and there were more revellers on the trains, so that when Shelley looked back he could no longer see the guy following. For a moment he wondered if it was just his imagination, or perhaps they had lost him.
But when he next checked he saw another face – and this one he recognised.
It was the inside man. The traitor. It was Gurney. He was the one who knew enough to feed the Chechens with information. And of course he must have informed them about Lucy.
Gurney, you fucking rat, thought Shelley. The ex-Para was some way back, using as cover a throng of partygoers hap-hazardly making their way along the tunnel. He had risked a look just as Shelley glanced back and the two men had seen one another. The game was up. The mole was out in the open. For a second it looked as though Gurney would try to hide his face, but he knew he’d been seen. Instead, as their eyes met across the noisy crowd of people, a grin appeared, and it was as though the mask that Gurney wore, which had only occasionally slipped before, was finally discarded for good.
‘We’re being followed,’ he told Susie urgently. ‘You have to speed up. Use the crowd, thread in and out, shove a few of this lot if necessary. We need to build up a lead.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Where are we going?’ Her voice trembled despite the attempt at calm.
‘Piccadilly line for the hospital,’ he replied, thinking, Stay with me, Susie. Stay with me.
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