Justina burst into tears and followed them outside, holding tight to Orestes’ hand until they loaded him into the bus.
Kaine eased towards the door, wondering whether he could use the emotional scene as a distraction to slip away, but decided against it. An overhasty disappearance would definitely raise some interest.
Justina stood on the pavement until the ambulance left before returning to the Bistro. As she reached Kaine, she paused, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Thank you, Mr Abernathy. Thank you so much for helping.”
“That’s okay, I was just passing. And … you know. Well, I’m sorry it happened.”
She wiped her eyes with a tissue and blew her nose. Blackstone stepped in front of her before she could move away. Justina gasped and threw her hands up to her face as though expecting a blow.
Kaine tensed. The woman was terrified, and it seemed more longstanding than the recent crisis. Orestes didn’t seem the type to hit a woman, so what was she afraid of?
“Mrs Constantine,” Blackstone said, softening his tone a fraction, “I understand how upsetting this must be for you, but I have a few questions before you go.”
She turned pleading eyes towards Kaine and shook her head. “I need to be with my children.”
“Mrs Constantine, you aren’t being at all helpful here. What did you see?”
“Nothing. I saw nothing. I was in the kitchen and heard the window smash and my babies crying. Then … then I saw the blood. That is all I know.”
“Any security cameras on the premises?”
Again, she shook her head. “No. Why would we need such things. We are a small business only. There’s no money for cameras.”
Blackstone scratched the side of his nose with the blunt end of his pencil. “That’s a pity. Not giving us much to work with here, madam. Are you sure you don’t know who could have done this?”
“Why don’t you listen? I am telling you, no!” Justina shouted, her voice cracking. “Let me go to my babies.”
Blackstone hesitated, but before Kaine could intervene, he stood aside and allowed Justina to rush into the kitchen.
“I’ll have one of my colleagues call back in the morning,” Blackstone shouted after her. “When you’ve had a chance to recover a little.”
Kaine forced his jaw muscles to relax before his new tooth cracked under the strain. He’d just witnessed the single most insensitive interview since the ‘resistance to interrogation’ module of the SBS boot camp. All Blackstone needed was a pair of thumbscrews and he’d be up there on top of the list with the worst of the instructors. Uncle Cuddles excluded.
Blackstone sneered and ran his appraising eyes over Kaine, head to toe and back again.
“Now, sir. And who might you be, then?”
For the first time since his arrival, the inspector’s pencil touched his notepad.
Crap. Here we go.
Chapter 11
Friday 23rd October—Early Evening
Bistro Mykonos, London
“Vincent Abernathy,” Kaine answered. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Inspector Blackstone.”
The Inspector edged closer to Kaine. If he was trying to intimidate, the attempt failed miserably. He’d seen more intimidating hamsters.
“Just passing through are you, sir?”
Kaine stared at the policeman. “Something like that, Inspector. I was hungry and looking for some decent grub. Haven’t had Greek food for a while.”
“Do you have any identification? A driver’s licence?”
“I do indeed,” Kaine answered, but made no move to show it.
He wanted to slap the supercilious expression from the man’s chubby face, but that would, no doubt, be counterproductive and certainly wouldn’t do anything to help the Constantines.
“Well?” Blackstone asked, an angry edge to his voice.
“Sorry?”
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“Your driver’s licence. Are you being deliberately obtuse?”
“Ah, yes,” Kaine said, lifting his chin as though finally understanding Blackstone’s intention. “Sorry, it might appear that way.”
“What?”
“It might appear that I’m being deliberately obtuse.”
It’s a pastime of mine when I meet officious, bullying clots.
Kaine shrugged and added what he hoped was an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I’m a little hard of hearing. Was yours a rhetorical question? I’m not sure. You’ll have to speak up a little.”
“Huh?”
“I said,” Kaine shouted, touching a finger to his ear, “I’m a little—”
“Yes, yes, okay. I did hear you.”
For the first time since leaving France, Kaine was having fun, albeit at the expense of an idiot.
“If I heard you correctly, Inspector,” he said, “you asked whether I had a driver’s licence, and I said I did. You didn’t actually say you wanted to see it.”
Blackstone scowled and shook his head. He clearly wasn’t expecting a discussion on semantics.
“Where is it?”
“What, my driver’s licence?”
“Yes, your bloody licence!”
“Inspector Blackstone. There really is no need for that sort of language. You’re scaring me. I get flustered when I’m scared and my hearing … sorry. The licence is in my wallet,” Kaine answered quietly, keeping his eyes open wide and his expression innocent.
“Well, get it out, man. Show me!”
Blackstone’s face and neck turned a deep shade of puce and darkened with each beat of his heart. A vein distended on his temple, threatening to pop.
Without rushing, and patting each pocket in turn before he found it, Kaine took out his wallet and removed the realistic-looking driver’s licence. It should be realistic, the darned thing cost enough to pass the most serious scrutiny.
“And while I’m at it, please … take this.”
He dug a business card out of the wallet and handed it to Blackstone. It contained details of an office with a Derby address and a phone number that would redirect the calls to Lara via a military satellite. Lara would, of course, take a message and immediately ignore it.
“In your line of work,” Kaine added, “you can’t have too much personal insurance. If you don’t mind my saying, the company I represent is currently offering a very special Whole Life Insurance package targeted specifically at members of the uniformed services. If you like, I could arrange a visit to your station?” He leaned closer, lowering his volume to a conspiratorial level. “I, um, offer a significant discount to people who introduce me to new clients.”
Kaine didn’t mention renting the room across the road. Some things, the buffoon didn’t need to know.
“Not a chance,” Blackstone said, his colour restored to its original shade of sun-ripened tomato, “police officers are all fully covered.”
He took the card and put it, unread, into the same pocket the notebook came from. Somewhere between Kaine showing the licence and Blackstone tucking away the business card, he’d resumed the air of a bored official at the tail end of a long shift. He didn’t actually yawn, but he did keep scribbling notes into his pad and barely spared the time to look up, which suited Kaine well enough.
Kaine kept his back to the street, but monitored the actions of Blackstone’s partner through the reflection in the mirror on the far wall of the dining room. The constable, a twenty-something man with a pale complexion and narrow shoulders, asked a few questions of the remaining crowd, but didn’t spend long with any individual. Apparently, no one had anything interesting to report.
“Did you see what happened, Mr Abernally?”
“Abernathy, Vincent Abernathy,’ Kaine corrected and, ever so helpfully, spelled it out for him. “You’ll find it on my business card.”
Blackstone made great play of correcting his notes.
“Thank you, sir. So, did you see what happened?”
Kaine shook his head and sho
wed his apologetic face. “’Fraid not, Sergeant—”
“Inspector.”
“Oh, Inspector, right, sorry. I actually saw nothing,” Kaine answered truthfully. “I was on the opposite side of the road, coming up from the Tube.”
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of Bowling Street Station. “I’d just passed the Co-op when I heard a tremendous crash. Then I saw the damage and rushed in to see if I could help.”
“Very public spirited of you, Mr Abernathy.”
“Thank you, Inspector,” Kaine said, smiling sadly. “When I heard Mrs Constantine and those little girls screaming, it tore my heart out.” More truth. “Wasn’t able to do much, but I always try to help wherever possible. I took a first aider course a few years ago. This is the first time I’ve ever had to use it out of the St John Ambulance classroom.” And again, he was back to the lies. How easy it was to slip between fact and fantasy.
Enough, Ryan. Don’t volunteer too much information.
He coughed in embarrassment, covering his mouth with his hand while doing so.
Blackstone grunted. “What did you see when you arrived? What did you do?”
Kaine reprised his actions from the time he entered the Bistro, until Blackstone’s arrival. He left nothing out. Blackstone took precious few notes.
“I expect you’ll find plenty of CCTV images of the attack,” Kaine said after wrapping up his story. “This is London after all, second only to Beijing as the surveillance capital of the world—according to last week’s Sunday Times.”
Blackstone shook his head a little too quickly. “Doubt it. Not with all this building work going on. Most of these businesses have shut down. I reckon whoever did this will have gotten clean away by now.”
Kaine failed to mention the motorbike he heard roar away immediately after the window exploded. He had his own resources and didn’t want the police getting to the biker first. Although, given the Inspector’s lacklustre approach to criminal investigation, that didn’t look likely.
Blackstone flipped his pad shut, apparently satisfied with Kaine’s version of events.
“Well, thank you, Mr Abernathy. That will be all for the time being. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”
“I suppose the forensics team are on their way?”
The Inspector snorted.
“Have I said something amusing, Inspector?”
“Forensics? For vandalism?” he scoffed. “You’ve been watching too much American TV, sir.”
Kaine’s face warmed and he took a moment to control his breathing before pointed to the bloodstained table. “Two young girls were sitting right there. If their father hadn’t been in the way they could have been seriously hurt. Why don’t you check the breezeblock for prints, DNA, any—”
Blackstone sighed. “From part-time first aider to crime scene analyst?” he asked. “God save us from amateurs. Thank you for your concern, Mr Abernathy, but we know how to investigate a crime. Leave it with us, sir. There’s a good fellow.”
Blackstone took Kaine by the upper arm and edged him towards the door. If he didn’t already want to leave, Kaine might have ripped the man’s arm from its socket and beaten him over the head with it.
“When can I expect your call, Inspector?” Kaine asked on his way through the door. “I’m only in town for a couple of days, but would happily extend my stay if you’d like to make that appointment.”
He added a wink and tapped the side of his nose.
“Please move along now, Mr Abernathy. You’ll find a burger bar and a chippy further down the road.”
Arrogant prick.
Blackstone called to his subordinate. “Constable Callow!”
Kaine avoided reacting to the youngster’s unfortunate, if apt, surname.
“Please direct this Good Samaritan to the nearest restaurant. Apparently he’s hungry. And Mr Abernathy,” Blackstone leaned closer, allowing Kaine a full blast of his tobacco breath. “Mind how you go, there’s a good chap.”
Kaine touched his forehead at Blackstone, smiled at the callow youth, and made a hurried but circuitous return route to his digs.
By the time he’d reached his rooming house, after a fifteen minute contemplation, he still couldn’t figure out Blackstone’s game. The cop had given off a strange vibe. Either the man genuinely didn’t care about the attack on the Bistro, or he was doing a damn good job of hiding the fact that he did.
No doubt about it, Inspector Blackstone deserved some of Lara’s investigative time.
Chapter 12
Friday 23rd October—Evening
Bowling Road, London
Kaine opened the front door quietly and closed it even more so. He didn’t want another encounter with the malodorous Mrs O’Halloran. Luckily, he made it past her door and up the stairs to his room unmolested.
The room looked undisturbed, and the camcorder he’d propped, apparently carelessly, on the windowsill with its lens pointing through the part-open window hadn’t moved. The red light showed it still recorded the scene across the road.
Before leaving for his meal, he’d gambled that Mrs O’Halloran wouldn’t search his room and discover his surveillance rig. A risk worth taking given what had transpired at the Bistro. Ideally, he’d have attached the camera to its tripod stand, but if the landlady had entered the room in his absence, his cover would have been shot. In its current state, he could have explained it away as an accidental recording. On a tripod stand, not so much.
Kaine hung his dripping coat on the hook behind the door and crossed the room. He hit ‘stop record’, ‘reset’, and ‘play’, but didn’t bother with fast forward. The attack had taken place within minutes of his vacating the room and he didn’t want to miss anything first time around.
The tiny image on the view screen was canted at a forty-five degree angle and looked like something they’d show in a ’60s arthouse retrospective, or at a modern-day Cannes Film Festival. He couldn’t make out anything until the Bistro window caved in and the headlights of a motorcycle lit the scene and left the shot in the correct direction—heading away from the camera.
Excellent. Just what he was looking for.
A rear view of the bike speeding away would give him access to the number plate. If the vandal was an amateur and hadn’t swapped the plates, it would make his job easier and save him spending days on surveillance.
Throughout his time in the SBS, Kaine always preferred the active approach. Attack rather than defence. Or in the words of a former commanding officer, “Go on the offensive before the enemy even knows you’re in his stadium.”
Despite his fall from grace, Major Graham Valence had possessed a fine military mind. Shame it turned out to be a greedy one, too.
Kaine paused the shot at what he thought was the optimal place to show the motorbike’s arse end. He retrieved the cable from the camera bag and plugged the recorder into the back of the room’s TV using the yellow RCA connection. The elderly set only had a SCART socket, which left the cable’s HDMI connector redundant.
The TV took a few minutes to warm up, and the results were disappointing. The still frame showed the bike well enough—an old black Kawasaki Z750, if he wasn’t mistaken—but the picture was too small to make out the number plate. Zooming in with the camera resulted in a pixilated image, impossible to read. Poor light and bad weather conditions had conspired to render the picture useless in its present state.
Damn it to hell.
Kaine tried changing the colour contrast and the brightness, but nothing cleared the image enough to make the plate legible. Time to bring out the big guns.
He unplugged the camera from the TV and connected it to his laptop. After cutting thirty seconds from either side of the window shattering, he converted it to an MP3 file and emailed it to the secure storage Sabrina had allocated them in the cloud. Kaine trusted her with stuff he knew little about. If Sabrina told him their cloud storage was as secure and unbreakable as anything on the planet, he w
asn’t going to argue with her.
Now for the nice part.
He dialled and a clean-shaven former sailor answered instead of Lara.
“Hi, Rollo. How are things?”
“Evening, Captain. Thank feck you called. The Doc’s been climbing the walls. We thought you’d been taken. Been watching the TV and online news expecting to hear that the notorious Ryan Kaine’s been captured. You shouldn’t have acted on that text message. Wanton disregard for proper procedures …”
Kaine let his old mate rattle on for a few more seconds. Having someone else worry about him warmed his tired heart.
Eventually, Rollo ran out of steam and the line fell silent.
“If you’ve quite finished verbally attacking a superior officer, Sergeant Rollason, perhaps you’d allow me to get a word in?”
Rollo coughed. “Ah, sorry, Captain, but you had us worried.”
“Yes, I gathered that, but as you can hear, I’m free and clear and in need of some technical assistance. Where’s the Doc?”
“In the shower. Just a sec, I’ll give her a shout.”
“No, don’t disturb—”
The muffled scratching of cloth swiped over a mouthpiece followed by an even more muffled shout of, “Doc, it’s the Captain. He’s okay,” told him he was too late.
“One moment, Captain. She’s on her way.”
“You didn’t have to disturb her. You could have passed along a message.”
“Kidding aren’t you? She’d have killed me … Hang on, here she is.”
“Ryan?” Lara said.
He smiled at the sound of her breathless voice.
“Yep, it’s me.”
“Why didn’t you call earlier? I’ve been worried sick. That message from Texter—”
“Yes, I know. Rollo told me. Listen, I apologise for missing my last call time, but something came up. Can you put me on speaker. Rollo needs to hear this, too.”
Ryan Kaine: On the Defensive: Book Three in the Ryan Kaine Action Thriller Series Page 11
