Disorder (Sam Keddie thriller series Book 1)

by Paddy Magrane

  Eleanor, meanwhile, was only concerned with one person.

  ‘What about Aidan Stirling?’ she said, her voice strained with incredulity. ‘What the hell has happened to the fingerprints?’

  The news had moved on. A gunman breaking into a school in Vienna and killing thirteen pupils.

  Sam began to realise what had happened. The announcement today was no coincidence. Something both Governments had been working on for months had been hurried through. These negotiations would have been stalled when the riots broke out. But now, suddenly, everything was calm again. What had the Berbers been fobbed off with – besides subsidised electricity?

  Sam got up from the sofa and went to a desk in the corner of the room, firing up a MacBook. As he waited for the computer to warm up he looked at the photo hanging on the wall above him. Charles Scott with Eleanor on his shoulders. She must have been about five or six then.

  The screen settled and Sam opened the internet, typing ‘Berber girl murdered Marrakesh’ into Google.

  The top result was an Al Jazeera story. The teaser read ‘Man held on suspicion...’

  Eleanor had now joined Sam. She stood behind him, the weight of her expectation hanging in the air. Sam opened the story and read aloud.

  ‘The Moroccan authorities have arrested a suspect in the hunt for the murderer of a Berber girl, killed in Marrakesh on 9 September. The man, a Tunisian national – ’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ whispered Eleanor behind him, interrupting his reading. ‘They’ve nailed that man, haven’t they? The assassin who came after us.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Sam. He abandoned the rest of the article, resting his head on his arms on the desk.

  He could see it now. The fingerprints confirming Aidan’s guilt. Some hastily convened meetings between the Moroccan ambassador and Stirling. Perhaps the Moroccans had won some vital new concession from the British. All Sam could be sure of was that Stirling, faced with the prospect of his son being accused of murder, would have bent over backwards to please. So then all that was needed was a convenient scapegoat.

  It was as if their quest for the truth had been for nothing. A girl had died and her murderer was walking free. Sam and Eleanor had been hounded, nearly killed. All so that the inconvenient truth they’d uncovered could be twisted to achieve a political end.

  ‘I need a cigarette,’ said Eleanor.

  It was a full moon, the garden bathed in a ghostly light that cast long shadows across the lawn.

  They retreated to the shed. The small building creaked a greeting as they entered. Sam sat on an old wooden chair while Eleanor reached up to a top shelf for the cigarettes.

  Around them the walls were hung with rakes, shovels and forks, the work surfaces strewn with loose earth and pots of all sizes. Sam imagined the gardener in here, sheltering from storms, seeding his pots, sharpening tools.

  There was a musty, fungal smell to the space. Sam noticed that the timber to his side had a creeping patch of dark mould. The shed was slowly being consumed by the very land the gardener spent so much time keeping under control. Death and decay winning, yet again.

  Sam brushed the loose earth from the work surface, then accepted a cigarette from the proffered pack. Eleanor sat on a stool by him and lit up, passing the still flaming match to Sam.

  They smoked in silence for a few minutes. Sam noticed that Eleanor’s hand was shaking.

  ‘You OK?’

  Eleanor nodded rapidly, sucking hungrily on the cigarette. She was staring ahead through the open door of the shed at the soft, eerie shapes in the garden. Suddenly she froze.

  Sam, who’d been watching Eleanor, now followed her gaze out into the garden. At first he thought it was a trick of the light. But then he realised it wasn’t. A figure had emerged out of the grey haze, and was walking towards them.

  Chapter 82

  Sussex

  It was instantly obvious to Sam who the man was. Eleanor’s reaction was animal-like. She stood, pressing backwards against the flimsy rotten wall of the shed, as if cornered. This wasn’t about an intruder on her land, but something much more frightening.

  But, as he entered the shed, the man made his intent very clear.

  ‘I’m not here to hurt you.’

  ‘Then what the fuck are you doing here?’ said Eleanor, her voice struggling to register.

  Sam knew that the tall man before them, a figure dressed in combat jacket, jeans and trainers, was the same man who’d so terrified Eleanor in the apartment in Downing Street. One of their pursuers, a man who’d only recently been trying to hunt and kill them. And now, despite his words, he had them trapped. Sam’s hand reached across the work surface for something to attack with, gripping a piece of broken clay pot.

  ‘Put it down,’ snapped the man. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘How dare you come here,’ hissed Eleanor, a small trace of her steeliness beneath the fear.

  The man leaned against the open doorway, dismissing her anger with a wave of a hand.

  ‘You can get all angry and righteous, or you can listen,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to hear anything from you,’ she snapped.

  ‘You’ll want to hear this,’ the man replied. ‘It’s about something we both want.’ His face was lit from the side by the moonlight, giving his features a hard, etched quality. ‘Stirling’s head on a plate.’

  Chapter 83

  M25, east of London

  It was nearly midnight.

  The car sped along the motorway, Sam sitting in silence in the passenger seat, the tall man at the wheel.

  Sam cast his mind back to the events in the garden an hour or so before, the extraordinary revelations that had persuaded him to join their former enemy for one last assault on Philip Stirling.

  ‘Sit down,’ he’d said. ‘You’re making me tense.’

  They sat. A slight breeze wafted into the shed, bringing with it a hint of the man’s body odour.

  ‘I won’t tell you my name,’ he said, his plummy enunciation suggesting he was an officer, despite the scruffy appearance. ‘That won’t be necessary. All you need to know is that I was a soldier, and I was approached by Stirling to do a rather unusual job.’

  He winced at the mention of the PM’s name. ‘It’s the kind of thing any sentient person would have run a mile from, but Stirling had a hold over me, and the pay was generous. So I accepted.’ He sighed at the memory.

  Sam nodded. I’m listening, the look said, even though the rest of his body wanted to run screaming from the shed.

  ‘The Prime Minister asked me to set up a small protection team around Aidan Stirling.’

  The man scratched his scalp. Sam imagined that, ordinarily, a former officer would have been immaculately turned out. Such a drop in personal standards was anathema to someone like him. His appearance was clearly a necessity.

  ‘As you can imagine, this was to be a quiet set-up,’ the man continued. ‘There would have been far too many questions asked if the press found out Aidan was getting his own protection, even if it was paid for out of the Stirlings’ own pocket.’

  ‘Like why he even needed protection in the first place?’ said Sam.

  The man’s face darkened. ‘Quite. Anyway, I should have seen the warning signs at the beginning. We were not there to protect Aidan from others, but from himself, which made things bloody complicated.’

  It was clear that the Stirlings had seen the time bomb ticking away in their son. Which begged the question: just how violent had he already been?

  ‘At first it was just about pulling Aidan out of troublesome spots,’ the man said. ‘He had a habit of cornering girls in nightclubs, getting a little rough with them.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Sam. ‘If he was like this, why had no one ever spoken to the police – or the press for that matter?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Aidan, through no particular skill on his part, seemed to choose the ideal victims. Thick tarts who’d barely recognise a member of the Cab
inet, let alone the PM’s son. If any had talked to the police, we never heard about it. And as I said, thanks to us, he failed to cause any real harm. Until Morocco, that is.’

  Sam cast a glance at Eleanor, her face glowing in the moonlight. She looked his way, her eyes wide with an acknowledgement of what they’d just heard.

  ‘So,’ said Sam, clearing his throat to stop the tremble he could feel developing, ‘what happened in Marrakesh?’

  The man sucked his teeth. ‘I was out there with the delegation, ostensibly to talk about the security implications of the project – making sure the plant had sufficient protection, that sort of thing. It was a front of course. I was really there to keep an eye on Stirling junior. Most of the time, that wasn’t necessary, as he was with his mother, sightseeing and shopping. To be honest, I didn’t foresee much trouble. This wasn’t a night out in Newcastle. But then Charlotte had to join Stirling at a few functions and she let the little bugger off the leash. That was when the trouble started.’

  ‘One afternoon, I watched him go into a shop and start talking to the girl serving him. Even from across the road, I could see she was interested. She was making eye contact, flirting, that sort of thing. The thing is, Aidan Stirling could be quite charming, perhaps even more so to someone whose first language wasn’t English.’ The man chuckled at his own quip. ‘Anyhow, they must have made an arrangement to meet that evening.’

  ‘When he stabbed her.’

  The man nodded. ‘It happened, as I’m sure you now know, near the restaurant where the British and Moroccan officials met that night. I was at the function and the area was crawling with local secret service and police, there to protect the Moroccan Prime Minister and Stirling. None of us expected him to slip out. But late in the evening, Stirling approached me, looking all flustered. Told me I had to find Aidan. And suddenly Charles Scott was there too, asking what the matter was.’

  ‘Stirling tried to fob him off but Scott knew something was up. In the end Stirling concluded that two were better than one and Scott and I set off into the medina.’

  ‘Now you’ve been out there,’ the man said, ‘it’s a bloody warren. We moved methodically through the alleyways, hoping that he wouldn’t have gone far. Of course it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Every now and then we’d regroup and then move on to another section. In the end we were about to give up when Scott called me on my mobile and told me to get to this address north of the restaurant. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings, but then I found the place.’

  The man looked shaken and Sam realised that, despite his involvement in a great deal of violent acts – attempts on their life, and the murder of Jane Vyner – this event still shocked him. Perhaps it was the significance of the act, and what it then unleashed.

  ‘I found Scott with Aidan in an old warehouse. Aidan was pacing the room, talking to himself, clearly agitated. Scott was trying to calm him down but the boy seemed to be in a world of his own. On the floor against a wall was the girl I’d seen that afternoon, dead as a dodo. Aidan was holding the knife in his hand. The blade was covered in blood.

  ‘Oh God,’ Eleanor gasped, her face clasped in her hands. She was clearly as upset by the murder as by her father’s painful involvement – and what it had done to him.

  The man was still speaking, oblivious to Eleanor’s grief. ‘Scott had given Aidan the knife that very afternoon. It was an antique he’d picked up in Marrakesh. It was clear to me at that point that there was only one thing to do. There was way too much at stake. So there and then, we decided it had to be covered up. We told Aidan to drop the blade and the three of us walked away.’

  Sam thought of Scott and his enormous burden of guilt. ‘Something happened,’ he had said during that session. ‘Something I cannot talk about. And I did nothing to stop it.’ He repeated the phrase in his head. Its obvious meaning was that Scott hadn’t been able to stop Aidan killing. But of course that was a given. How could he have stopped him when he wasn’t with him? What now struck Sam was that Scott was talking about something else – that he hadn’t stopped what happened next, the cover-up. Why? A deep political allegiance and friendship with Stirling? Realpolitik? He remembered Stirling’s venomous little phrase about Scott at the funeral. ‘Dear Charles. Like all of us, full of flaws.’

  Sam saw Eleanor’s eyes moving from side to side as if she too were dwelling on her father’s motivations.

  ‘So when one of your men saw Charles Scott at my house,’ said Sam quickly, desperate to interrupt the thought process in Eleanor’s head, ‘you became concerned. That, perhaps, he’d told me.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And then he killed himself.’

  ‘He was in a right state. Of course Aidan had wielded the knife, but he felt hugely responsible for giving him the blade, and guilty about his part in the cover-up.’

  Sam remembered the description of Scott at the hotel in the Lakes, a broken, ranting man.

  Eleanor looked up, her cheeks tear-streaked.

  ‘And then,’ continued the man, ‘you refused to play ball. Hardly surprising. But we had to find out what you knew.’

  ‘The irony is, I knew nothing. But your actions made me bloody curious.’

  ‘After that,’ said the man, ignoring Sam’s last comment, ‘it was about clearing up a mess. Translating Stirling’s less than clear-cut instructions into meaningful action.’

  The man looked embittered, as if he had a foul taste in his mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam, ‘but if you want Stirling’s head on a plate, why don’t you use this to nail him?’

  The man laughed. ‘You’ll have noticed my timing tonight. I wanted you to see the news, to understand where that Moroccan announcement leaves us all. The evidence you gathered,’ and here he glanced briefly at Eleanor with what Sam felt was a grudging look of respect, ‘is now useless. Destroyed by the Moroccans. Who’s going to believe me?’

  ‘But surely –’

  ‘It’s like I said, even before this got complicated, Stirling had a certain hold over me. Events in my past that are best kept under wraps. But after Morocco, he and I both knew we were even. But then I went into the apartment and the tables turned. No one’s pressing charges, but Stirling’s still fucked me over. Dropped me like a hot potato. Stopped paying me – and my men. And he knows I won’t complain, or use what I know. After all, there’s now no proof. Whereas a number of police officers will swear they saw me in the apartment.’

  The man’s face tightened. ‘I was only doing what he’d asked me to do.’

  ‘So what do you want from us?’ asked Sam.

  The man raised a hand, the finger pointing at Sam. ‘Your professional skills.’

  *

  The car had crossed the Dartford Bridge and taken a turning for Rainham. To the left, a power station, from which a trail of huge pylons snaked its way towards London, glowed in the night, lit up by hundreds of small lights. Two cooling towers sent steam into the night sky, the vapour soon evaporating.

  Sam twisted in his seat, all too aware of what to expect when they reached the address. He missed Eleanor by his side. The strength she gave him. But the man had told her flatly that she was not needed. Sam watched her face rail against the order, then subside in compliance, some inner sense that resistance against the cold soldier was pointless. As they were about to leave, she clung to Sam hard.

  Their destination was in a cul-de-sac, the first finished group of houses on an estate that was still being built. Elsewhere, the wooden skeletons of new homes rose out of muddy fields. About eight red-brick houses were clustered around a loop of tarmac. Apart from one property, there were no lights on, no cars parked in driveways.

  The car stopped outside a house where a faint glow could be seen behind a drawn curtain. Another vehicle, a battered old transit van, was parked in the street in front of the property.

  The tall man unlocked the front door and walked in, followed by Sam. The house smelt of fresh paint and
new carpets and, lingering below, the salt and spice whiff of Chinese food. He followed the man to the rear of the property, the light and food smell getting stronger.

  In the kitchen, a small camping lamp – the hiss of gas audible – was lit on the kitchen table. Its surface was strewn with tin-foil cartons. Seated at the table were two men, both of whom Sam recognised with a sickening jolt – the short bald man who’d visited him in Stoke Newington, and the narrow-eyed man who’d chased him through the cemetery and killed Jane Vyner.

  The two men glanced briefly in Sam’s direction, then looked away with the dispassion of cold professionals.

  ‘Everything OK?’ asked the tall man.

  The two men nodded.

  The tall man then turned and moved past Sam, gesturing for him to follow. They climbed the stairs. When they reached the first floor, he opened a door and stood waiting for Sam.

  Sam knew what to expect, but couldn’t help but feel a jolt of surprise, like he’d placed his hand on an electric fence and a pulse had shot through his system.

  Lying fast asleep on a mattress on the floor, the dark room around him decorated and carpeted but otherwise as blank as a monastic cell, was Aidan Stirling.

  Chapter 84

  Rainham, east of London

  It was a denial of everything his profession stood for. He wasn’t providing therapy to a willing client, nor was he offering unconditional positive regard. The young man seated on the mattress before him was a prisoner and Sam had very strong, prejudiced feelings about him.

  But Aidan Stirling wasn’t his client. And Sam wasn’t here as a therapist. Some of that knowledge would come in useful, but he was also tapping other skills – the very existence of which made him nauseous to the core.

  It was over eight hours since Aidan Stirling had been abducted from a psychiatric hospital in Surrey. Sam overheard the narrow-eyed man describe the job as ‘a piece of cake’. Sam had the impression that these men had conducted a number of extractions before, ones fraught with far more danger than the hospital could ever have presented.