A Good Day To Die

by Simon Kernick

  The smaller circles represented Thadeus Holdings’ various subsidiaries. They included a data-processing company; a software house specializing in the construction of anti-virus firewalls; and a total of four outfits with the word ‘Security’ in the title: Thadeus Security Solutions; Winners Security; Timeline Security (Europe) Ltd; and Thadeus Security Products Ltd.

  Emma clicked on the subsidiary companies in turn and got a brief rundown of what each one did. The work of those involved in software and data processing was pretty much self-explanatory, but it was the security companies that caught my attention. As well as providing bodyguards and general security for companies operating in countries considered dangerous, much of Thadeus Holdings’ business revolved round manufacturing and selling hi-tech electronic surveillance equipment to a wide variety of businesses, governments and individuals around the world, and the consultancy required for their effective implementation.

  ‘This is interesting,’ I said, leaning over Emma’s shoulder and pointing at a picture of one of the company’s products. It was a microchip-sized personal tracking device, barely a centimetre long, which allowed a third party to keep track of where the wearer was. It was, the blurb said, an innovative device specifically designed for parents wanting to keep tabs on the whereabouts of young children.

  ‘What’s interesting about it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been wondering how the two shooters who took out Pope found us in the cinema. I was keeping a very close eye on everyone and everything when we were walking through Soho, and if they’d been following us, I’d have spotted them. But I didn’t.’

  ‘But if Pope had been wearing one, surely that means he must have been expecting them.’

  I nodded. ‘He was.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I was asking him a question – we were inside the cinema and I had my back to the door – when this big smile spread across his face. He must have seen them coming in, because until then he’d been as nervous as hell.’

  ‘So he thought they were going to kill you?’

  I nodded, noticing that much of the tension had left her and a spark of excitement had appeared in her eyes. It reminded me of how I used to feel when I was working on a particularly interesting case. The thrill of the pursuit. It doesn’t come along very often, but when it does, you know about it.

  ‘But what do these people have to do with Malik or Khan?’ she continued. ‘Or Tyndall, for that matter?’

  ‘God knows,’ I said, re-examining the business card. ‘Can you look up the name Theo Morris? It doesn’t give a job title here and I want to see what he does for them.’

  She tapped his name into the website’s internal search engine and came up with a match. As soon as she hit that, an unsmiling photograph appeared of a middle-aged man with a mop of curly black hair and a thick moustache. It was the same man as the one on the card. Next to the photo his name appeared in black print, along with the fact that he was Head of Operations for Thadeus Holdings. A short biography beneath stated that he’d joined the company in 1983, was married with two children, and was responsible for the management of all Thadeus Holdings’ UK offices.

  We both looked at each other, wondering what this told us. It didn’t seem much. I thought about phoning the number on the back of the card, but decided against it. It was almost certainly Morris’s mobile, and I didn’t want to speak to him just yet.

  ‘Let’s have a look at the company history,’ I suggested. ‘See what that throws up.’

  Emma went back to the home page and pressed the Company History icon on the far left of the screen. A couple of seconds later a beaming photo of a jowly, fifty-something businessman with a big smile and thinning, straw-coloured hair appeared. This, according to the byline, was Eric Thadeus: the founder, chairman and chief executive of Thadeus Holdings. A potted history of the company followed.

  It had been founded in 1978 by Thadeus, an electronics engineer who’d started out developing commercial bug-sweeping devices, and had grown rapidly, thanks to the sophistication of the products and Thadeus’s supposed management skills. It was now a market leader in the provision of the whole package of security services.

  Emma worked her way through the rest of the site while I got up and stood watching and smoking my tenth cigarette of the day, but there was nothing else of interest. According to the company blurb, Thadeus Holdings was a highly reputable, environmentally aware, dynamic organization who treated their employees with dignity and care, and who only used recycled paper in their head office. Very nice, and very above board. Except that their Head of Operations’ business card and private phone number were in the wallet of a man who’d tried to kill me less than two hours previously.

  Emma finally pulled out of the site, and clicked on some of the other Thadeus hits that her search had initially brought up, but there was nothing of any interest, and after another twenty minutes she gave up and went offline. ‘If Morris is involved, then we’re not going to find it out from here,’ she said with a sigh, the excitement in her eyes having faded as it became clear that, as with most things in life, there were going to be no easy answers.

  I knew how she felt. I was beginning to feel the same way myself. The leads were drying up, just as they had done for everyone else working this case.

  ‘Did you find anything else useful on Pope or Jason Khan?’ I asked hopefully.

  She shook her head, lighting a cigarette. ‘Nothing that I didn’t already know. I haven’t managed to get anything on those numbers you gave me from Pope’s phone yet, but I expect I’ll hear something in the next couple of days, although I’m not going to chase them up. Not after this. I spoke to a couple of contacts about Jason Khan, but they didn’t have anything new. It seems he was on the lower rungs of Tyndall’s organization.’

  ‘Yet he was able, with one phone call, to lure an experienced police officer out of his house late at night and on his own, to a place where he was unprotected and vulnerable.’ I sat back down on the stool, facing her. ‘We’re missing something here. We’ve got to be.’

  ‘He knew Malik from the past,’ she said, retreating a little in her seat, as if she was trying to put some distance between us. ‘Malik arrested him a couple of times when he was with Islington CID.’

  ‘Really? The name Jason Khan doesn’t ring any bells with me.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because it wasn’t his real one. He changed his last name when he converted to Islam. My source said he made the conversion to get out of a prison sentence for mugging an old lady. Apparently the judge felt that his finding religion demonstrated an urge to reform. Not that it seems to have worked.’

  ‘It usually doesn’t. What was his real name?’

  ‘Jason Delly.’

  I made a surprised noise that was halfway between a laugh and a snort.

  ‘You remember him, then?’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember him all right. The whole family were thugs. His mum once whacked me with a frozen leg of lamb when I tried to arrest her for shoplifting. It almost broke my arm.’

  Emma smiled. ‘Really?’

  I nodded ruefully. ‘Really. Jason Delly was a real piece of work as well, probably the worst of them all. I nicked him when he was about fifteen for attacking one of his schoolteachers. She was six months pregnant at the time. He broke her jaw and two of her fingers, and then kept kicking her while she was on the ground. The little bastard grinned the whole way through the interview. He still kept grinning when we told him she might lose her baby. I can’t imagine any decent person wanting to even be in the same room as a piece of dirt like him. Whatever he said on the phone that night to Malik must have been dynamite to have got him down there.’

  ‘God, what a bastard. Did she lose the baby?’

  ‘No, but she never went back to teaching.’

  ‘You know, the more I see of this case, the more I regret ever getting involved in it.’ She stood up and stretched, moving away from the desk with her back to me. ‘It’s
introduced me to a part of life I wish I’d never seen, and to people I wish I’d never come across.’

  The sadness in her voice betrayed her privileged background. This was a girl who’d obviously been shielded for much of her life from the realities the rest of us have to face, and was finding those realities difficult to take. It made me wonder what on earth she was doing working as a reporter on what was effectively little more than a provincial newspaper. And why on earth such an educated, well-brought-up girl felt the need to keep a handgun in the house.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked, noticing me watching her.

  It was a good question. ‘I think I’m going to pay a visit to Jamie Delly, Jason’s youngest brother. I want to see if he can throw any light on what Jason was up to in the last few weeks of his life.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit dangerous?’

  ‘Jamie won’t recognize me. The last time I saw him was years back and he was just a kid then. I know this is a bit of a liberty, but do you think you might be able to get me an address for him? I’ll let you know anything I find out.’

  She gave me an oddly intense look then, as if she was examining some interesting new insect under a microscope. ‘I don’t know how you can be so confident. You’ve shot someone, you’ve seen two men die right in front of your eyes, and you’ve almost been shot yourself. And yet you’re already thinking about the next step. And for some reason I still want to help you, even though my inner voice tells me to run a mile.’

  ‘That’s because we both want the same thing – to solve a double murder that looks like it’s been covered up, and to get back at the people who’ve been trying to bully and threaten us both. I haven’t done you any harm. They have.’

  She flicked at a loose strand of hair. ‘I’ll see if I can help, and I’ll keep your secret. But remember, I’m not going to risk my career or my life to help you. If someone comes asking, I’m not going to lie. You understand that, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  She didn’t say anything else, but remained standing where she was, which I took to be a hint that it was time for me to go.

  I stood up. Above me the rain continued to batter the skylight, harder now. ‘Thanks for all your help,’ I said.

  She surprised me then by offering me a lift to wherever it was I was staying.

  ‘Forget it,’ I answered. ‘You’ve done enough for me today.’

  ‘You can’t walk back in this. How far are you from here?’

  ‘Not that far. Up near Paddington.’

  ‘It’s still too far to walk. Come on, I’ll drive you there.’ She didn’t sound thrilled at the prospect, but acted as if she was performing some necessary duty. It must have been her breeding.

  ‘You’re not worried about them coming back?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘As you said, they wanted to scare me. They’ve succeeded there, so I’m probably safe for a bit now. Come on, let’s go.’

  There’s no point looking a gift-horse in the mouth, as my mother would have said, so I followed her out of the room, thinking it was a pity she hadn’t asked me to stay.

  We talked a little more about the case on the short drive to the hotel, and Emma seemed a lot calmer as she tried to put the evening’s events behind her. She might have been closeted from some of the harsher things that life had to offer, but she was a tough girl underneath. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I genuinely did trust her to keep her word and not reveal my true identity. I’m a cynic – made, not born – and throughout my adult life I’ve tended to see the worst in everyone. It’s almost certainly why I’ve never married or had kids, and it’s probably why I ended up circumventing the very law I was meant to have upheld in the first place, and why I graduated to putting bullets into villains in return for financial reward. But even taking all that into account, I still felt safe knowing that Emma knew who I was. In truth, I’d developed a real soft spot for her. Which was why I should have thought of her rather than myself, and not put her straight into the path of danger. But things always look simple with hindsight, don’t they?

  I got her to drop me off opposite Hyde Park on the Bayswater Road. She’d wanted to take me right to my door, but soft spot or not, I didn’t want to give too much away.

  ‘I’ll be fine here, honestly,’ I said. I got out of the car, thanked her, and said I’d speak to her the next day.

  I watched as she pulled away from the kerb and drove off in the direction of Marble Arch, then turned and walked back to my hotel through the rain. And as I walked, something bugged me. Something I’d missed. I racked my brains all the way back, hardly noticing that I was getting soaked to the skin.

  It was only when I was halfway up the stairs to my room that I realized what it was.

  When I’d been in the cinema questioning Pope with my back to the door, and his face had broken into that irritating and ultimately futile smile just before he’d been shot, both Blondie and his friend had had ample opportunity to shoot me. It wasn’t as if they weren’t good at finding their target. Not one of their bullets had missed Pope. They could have taken me out if they’d wanted to. And yet they hadn’t. They’d let me live, and had only tried to deal with me when I’d chased after them and they’d had no choice.

  In the aftermath, that fact had slipped my mind. Now it was back there with a vengeance.

  But what did it mean?

  What did any of it mean?

  I yawned, let myself into my room, and locked the door behind me. Whatever it was it could wait until tomorrow.

  24

  Jason Khan’s brother, Jamie Delly, had never known his dad. I don’t suppose his mum had, either. He was eight years old when he’d first been nicked, after making a valiant effort to burn down his primary school. Since the age of criminal responsibility in the UK is ten, he’d been let off with a warning, which when you’re a kid like Delly is the same as a letter of encouragement, and over the next six years he’d been arrested on numerous occasions for offences which ranged from the minor, like shoplifting and possession of dope, to the potentially far more serious, like knife point muggings and aggravated burglary. He’d been fourteen when I’d left the force, and even then I hadn’t seen him in close to a year. He’d be seventeen now, and doubtless making a mess of his life. Like his three brothers, he was a nasty little bastard, but I felt that he’d also be the easiest to talk to. He was the youngest and the smallest of the Delly boys, and he hadn’t been the brightest of sparks either, with nothing like the animal cunning of, say, Jason. Or indeed Bryan or Kyle, the other two. If he knew something, I’d get it out of him. I also thought he’d be the least likely to recognize me. But I put my glasses back on, just in case.

  On that Monday morning the rain had stopped and the sun was shining. My head still ached, but a lot less than it had done the previous day, and the lump from Saturday’s blow in the café had shrunk considerably. I rose at eight o’clock, dressed in fresh clothes and got something to eat from the Italian place round the corner. I took the paper with me and was surprised to see that the shootings in Soho weren’t the top story. In fact, they only got a small initial mention in the bottom left-hand corner of the front page, supplanted by another Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem, plus something about GM crops, and I had to turn to page three to get the full report. There was a photo of the street in which I’d gunned down the assassin. It had been sealed off with scene-of-crime tape and a uniformed copper was standing in the background. Aside from that there were a few sentences describing how three men had been shot dead in a gunfight, part of which had taken place in an adult cinema. None of them had so far been formally identified by the police.

  And that, pretty much, was it. Twenty years ago, an incident like that would have been front-page news. Now it was just one more shooting. For a country with some of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, Britain has a remarkably high incidence of gun crime, and it always amazes me that by and large the police remain unarmed.
/>   I’d finished breakfast and was on my way to collect my new business cards when Emma phoned. Our conversation was short and formal, but at least not awkward. Clearly, she was still prepared to work with me in the cold light of day. She gave me Jamie’s last known address in Islington, on an estate east of the Essex Road, in the direction of Hoxton. I recognized it as a place I’d visited before on police business, and I told Emma I’d let her know how things went.

  ‘Careful, Dennis,’ she told me, and I felt mildly touched at the way she used my first name. No one had called me that for a long time.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I told her. ‘I have a knack for surviving. How about you? You haven’t had any more unwanted deliveries?’

  ‘No, everything’s fine. They’re replacing the window this afternoon.’

  ‘Well, you be careful too. We’ll talk later.’

  I hung up and looked at my watch. Nine thirty-five a.m. I didn’t suppose a lazy no-hoper like Jamie would be out of bed yet, which made it the perfect time to visit.

  The estate he lived on consisted of a series of L-shaped grey-brick buildings five storeys high, arranged in a loose square, with each one connected to the other by a covered passageway built at the level of the third storey, giving the whole thing the appearance of a giant puzzle. As with most London council estates, there was a map at the entrance to give the visitor some idea how to find his way around. Jamie lived in Block D, which according to the map was on the left-hand side.

  A twenty-yard-long tunnel carved out of the block in front of me led into the interior of the estate, and as I walked through it, I wondered what the designers of these places were thinking about when they made their plans. They were a criminal’s paradise. Built like fortresses, they could be defended with ease by the local youths against the encroachments of the police during street disturbances, and the profusion of passageways offered all kinds of ambush sites and escape routes for even the slowest and noisiest of muggers.