Hunter Hunted

by Jack Gatland

  ‘You think it could have been MI5? Or worse?’ Declan asked. Billy made a noncommittal face as he shrugged. ‘They’d be my first guesses. Or maybe it’s another agency. An external one, or someone private. Another country, Interpol perhaps?’

  ‘This is an old school friend,’ Declan muttered, omitting the recent change in developments. ‘I can’t believe she’s some kind of terrorist sleeper.’

  ‘She’s also a journalist who tried to take down ex-politicians, and was the first to contact you about Derek Salmon murdering Angela Martin,’ Billy replied. ‘She seemed remarkably well connected.’

  ‘Says the guy who had a breakfast meeting with a source who stated that Baker’s office was targeting us,’ Declan added. Billy nodded.

  ‘True,’ he replied. ‘But then I don’t trust my source as far as I can throw them. How much do you trust yours?’

  Declan went to reply but then stopped. Billy was right. How much did he know about Kendis, other than that she was having a bad time with Peter? Was that even true? Had Declan been an alibi for the night before?

  ‘Okay, let’s look at this,’ Declan continued. ‘Kendis is a terrorist. Let’s just say that for the moment. She’s being watched. Monroe has a dossier on her on his laptop when he’s attacked. Why does he have this and why does she want him killed?’

  Billy stretched. ‘No idea,’ he admitted. ‘But let’s be honest, he was never a fan of hers. I heard him shout Kendis bloody Taylor at you on multiple occasions.’

  ‘You think he might have been doing his own, off the books investigation?’ Declan looked over to the office.

  ‘Makes sense,’ Billy said. ‘As I said, this could be some kind of private security company’s dossier. There’s a watermark I can’t quite make out, but that could give us an idea. Monroe may have…’ he trailed off as he examined the screenshot.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘This could have been a private security file. That would explain why nobody has it.’

  ‘And you can get that off a photo on a screen?’

  Billy smiled. ‘I’ve done more with less,’ he said. ‘The watermark uses a particular font. That gives me a comparison search. Give me an hour. Let me see what I can work out.’

  Declan looked to his watch. It was almost lunchtime. ‘I should go back to the hospital, check up on Monroe and Anjli,’ he said.

  ‘Is she still guarding him?’ Billy was already typing on his laptop as he spoke.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Declan rose from the chair. Billy turned to face him.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Kendis is a terrorist,’ he said. ‘However, Monroe was looking at her file, so there’s a fair chance that she’s involved somehow. Be careful.’

  Declan nodded, very aware of the burner phone in his pocket. It was the second burner phone he’d had in as many days.

  He hoped it wouldn’t become a habit.

  By the time Declan arrived back at the ACCU unit at The Royal London Hospital, this time using the far easier entrance on Stepney Way, normality seemed to have returned, with the multitude of police that were there earlier now visible by their absence. Even Ch Supt Bradbury and his entourage were missing. Anjli was still there though, sitting on a chair in Monroe’s side room, alone, and seemingly asleep.

  She jerked awake when Declan walked into the room. He waved her back down and passed her a coffee he’d picked up downstairs.

  ‘Any change?’ he looked at Monroe, still unconscious as Anjli shook her head.

  ‘He’s in a coma,’ she replied. ‘Something about blood on the brain and pressure and hell, Declan, I’ve got no bloody clue what they were talking about. All I know is that he’s got a fifty fifty chance of dying right now.’

  ‘Why don’t you go home, freshen up?’ Declan asked. ‘I can take on guard duty for a while.’

  ‘You need to be finding his attacker,’ Anjli sipped at the coffee.

  ‘We’ll both find the attacker,’ Declan suggested. ‘Billy’s already in the laptop and Marcos is examining every inch of floor. Currently, our prime suspect is a single male who looks like me. Height and clothing wise, at least.’

  ‘So a badly dressed divorcee,’ Anjli forced a smile. ‘That could be anyone in London.’

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘When they called me yesterday, when Monroe was found missing in Birmingham, I thought he was dead for sure,’ she eventually said. ‘When Billy and me, when we drove to Beachampton, I was already writing his eulogy out in my head. And then he was fine.’

  She looked at the bed.

  ‘He wasn’t supposed to do this,’ she muttered.

  ‘He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?’ Declan asked. ‘I mean, I knew him all my life thanks to dad, but you…’

  ‘He met me when I was in Hendon,’ Anjli whispered. ‘Like a thousand years ago. I didn’t remember it at all, but he reminded me of this when he took me in.’ She took another sip. ‘After Mile End, I thought I was gone for good. I mean, I know I worked for DCI Ford and she was crooked as shit, but she played the game, you know? By the book.’

  Declan took a sip from his own coffee. ‘I don’t want to ask, but Monroe never told me why you ended up in the Last Chance Saloon.’ He tried to plan his words carefully. ‘Was it The Twins?’

  Anjli froze as the coffee cup moved towards her mouth. The previous day, she’d finally admitted to Declan that she was in debt to Johnny and Jackie Lucas, the ‘Twins’ of East London, and in doing so had passed on information on Declan to them. Unlike DCI Ford though, who Declan had learned was in their thrall because of gambling addictions, Anjli had needed help with her mother’s breast cancer treatment. That she had offered to resign because of this had stopped Declan reporting her. There was more mileage in keeping her as a double agent.

  ‘Mariella Hudson,’ she replied. ‘Married woman, two kids, prick of a husband. He’d been beating on her, but he worked for some mechanic who knew The Twins, so we weren’t allowed to do anything. Orders from on high and all that.’

  ‘Ford?’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, one day Mariella turns up in hospital. Fell down the stairs, she says. But they live in a ground-floor flat. I sniff around.’

  ‘Bet that went down well.’

  ‘That wasn’t what did it,’ Anjli actually chuckled at this. ‘I found out that she’d been beaten half to death by the prick for burning his sausages. His sausages, for god’s sake. So I popped over and kicked the living shit out of him. Claimed I was taking him in but he resisted arrest, and I broke his collarbone in two places.’

  ‘And that’s why they kicked you out?’

  ‘That’s why they kicked me out,’ Anjli nodded. ‘God, Ford was livid. She wanted me gone. Fired. Out. The Twins were getting shit, so she was getting shit. Anyway, it goes up the chain and then a week later I get a call from Monroe. We meet, he reminds me we met at Hendon and he asks me why I did what I did. I answered honestly.’

  She looked to the bed, a faint half smile on her face.

  ‘Next day he requested my transfer. Best boss I’ve ever had,’ she said. ‘He gives me space, you know? He allows me to make my own mistakes. And in doing that, I make my own successes.’

  Declan nodded. ‘Yeah, he’s good at that,’ he replied. Sighing, he leaned back in his chair.

  ‘He’d better get better soon,’ he muttered. ‘This is going to be a sod of a case to solve without a witness.’

  ‘You think Kendis was involved?’ Anjli asked, warily watching Declan. He shook his head.

  ‘If she was, she wasn’t there to see it,’ he admitted. ‘She… She was with me.’

  ‘Until when, though?’ Anjli was already running the incident’s timing through her head. ‘I mean, if he—‘

  ‘All night,’ Declan interrupted. ‘She was with me all night.’

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

  ‘Isn’t she married?’ Anjli eventually asked. Declan nodded again.

  ‘It was an accident,’
he sighed. ‘We were drunk.’

  Anjli considered this. ‘We were, or you were?’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘We implies that both of you had been drinking. But if she was more sober, then she could have let you drink until you passed out, and then left you. Unless you remember the entire night?’

  Declan shook his head. ‘No.’

  Then he shook his head again, more vehemently.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I get it,’ Anjli steepled her fingers in front of her chin as she continued. ‘You don’t want to think this. But why did Monroe have her file on his laptop?’

  Declan couldn’t answer the question. Silently, he looked back to Monroe, the tubes and wires in his arms making him look like some kind of bed-ridden cyborg.

  ‘Don’t make me choose,’ he said as his phone buzzed. Pulling it out, he glanced at the name on the screen.

  ‘It’s Jess,’ he said as he rose to take the call. ‘Back in a minute.’

  Walking into the central area of the ACCU, Declan answered the phone call as he walked to the exit at the end, away from the main entrance to Ward 4F and through a pair of heavy, grey double doors that led into a junction corridor and a stairway. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘We saw you on the news, dad,’ Jessica Walsh’s excited voice spoke down the line. ‘People at school think you’re a rockstar right now.’

  ‘And that’s why you phoned me?’ Declan almost laughed at this. ‘To tell me I’m suddenly your cool dad?’

  ‘I didn’t go that far,’ Jess laughed. ‘But I wanted to call because I saw about Mister Monroe. Is he okay?’

  Declan looked through the windows in the doors, back into the ACCU. ‘Not really, but he’s a fighter,’ he said. ‘He’ll be okay. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Was it because of the book?’ Jess continued. She’d been helping Declan try to solve the murder of his father, her grandfather, and in the process she had not only worked on Declan’s crime board, but had also read Patrick Walsh’s likely edited memoirs.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Declan replied. ‘But as soon as I know, I’ll come back to you. Love you.’

  Disconnecting the call, Declan thought for a moment, standing alone in a hospital stairwell. Could this have been The Twins? Could The Seven Sisters have pushed for revenge? More importantly, was there someone else from Monroe’s past, someone who was in Patrick’s book that could have arrived late in the evening and taken down the already tired and battered DCI?

  There was a vibration in his pocket, and Declan pulled out the other phone, the one he’d gained from Kendis earlier. It had received a single message.

  Brompton Cemetery N entrance 3pm. Don’t drive. Avoid CCTV. Don’t be recognised.

  Declan stared at the message in confusion. He could understand Kendis being annoyed at him for stepping out that morning without saying goodbye, but this was becoming more and more suspicious by the second.

  Putting the phone back into his pocket, he forced a smile before re-entering Ward 4F. He could spend a little more time with Monroe before he started playing spies with his possible-terrorist, newspaper journalist mistress. Anjli, however, was already grabbing her coat.

  ‘Everything okay?’ she asked. Declan forced a smile.

  ‘She saw me on the news,’ he replied. ‘Suddenly I’m the cool one.’

  Anjli shook her head. ‘It’s hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago we were bringing down crime syndicates,’ she laughed. The laughter stopped though when she stared back into the side room, and the unconscious Alexander Monroe.

  ‘You sure you can stay?’ she asked. ‘It’s just that I could do with a shower.’

  Declan nodded. ‘If I need to go anywhere, I’ll call a uniform in,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch you later.’

  As Anjli walked out of the ward, Declan wandered into the side room, sitting beside the unconscious Monroe. His head was bandaged, most likely from when it had been slammed through the glass, and a wicked looking black eye was already forming around his left orbital bone. Declan couldn’t help it; he laughed.

  ‘You’ve never looked more Glaswegian, boss,’ he said as he picked up his lukewarm coffee from the floor beside the chair and sipped at it.

  He would deal with Kendis later.

  4

  Walking the Dead

  Declan had taken the message that Kendis had sent him to heart; he understood why she didn’t want him to use the Audi as it would have had a tracker installed in it, as per all police cars. Which meant that if he’d driven to Brompton, there would have been a record of the journey. What he couldn’t understand was why she needed to have Declan do this off the grid, avoiding CCTV and in disguise. He guessed that this was possibly to do with ensuring that Peter didn’t find out somehow, although he didn’t know how that could ever happen, and he dutifully waited in the ward room with Monroe until two pm, called in a uniform to take over his shift and made his way out of the Royal London Hospital through the basement exit, passing through the staff changing rooms and the locker areas; doctors and nurses needed a place to change out of dirty scrubs, after all. Here he acquired a pair of cheap looking aviator glasses and a baseball cap for some American team out of open lockers as he passed through; he felt bad for taking them, but had ensured he took nothing that looked expensive. Eventually, stopping at his car and swapping his coat, jacket and tie for a pale grey hoodie and a black bomber jacket that he’d found on the back seat when he’d inherited the car on his first day, adding the baseball cap and the stolen sunglasses, now covering the top half of his face.

  He felt a buzzing in his pocket and pulled out his phone; it was a message from Billy. Apparently the fonts on the watermarked file matched ones used by private security companies Hamilton Securities, Dowson and Rattlestone. Firing off a reply of thanks, he left his phone in the car's boot, locking the vehicle before he made his way out of the car park and north to Whitechapel Underground station.

  Once there, and paying for a Travelcard by cash from the machine, Declan found he was warming to this spy nonsense. He didn’t look up at any cameras, keeping his head and cap down and his hands in his pockets. He could have been anyone. He was everyone.

  It took over thirty minutes to get to Earls Court, and from there it was a half-mile walk down to Brompton Cemetery, arriving just shy of three pm. Stopping at the North entrance, he took a moment to look around, pulling the hoodie up around his neck. Kendis wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  Declan had never been to Brompton Cemetery before; it was very much a Chelsea place. Even both the founder and the first manager of Chelsea Football Club were buried here, among a multitude of equally famous people. Declan didn’t know who, and the sign beside him didn’t give any more light on the situation, instead informing him only that Brompton Cemetery was the burial home for over two hundred thousand people, with over thirty-five thousand gravestones and monuments held within. Doing the maths here, Declan already knew that there were therefore a lot of unmarked graves within the walls. Tens of thousands of unmarked graves, most likely common people who’d been buried on top of each other, the coffins piled high, their names never shown.

  He didn’t know why, but the simple thought of this, to be buried in an unmarked grave terrified him.

  As he idly read about a volunteer organisation called the Friends of Brompton Cemetery, there was a buzz in his pocket. Pulling out the burner phone, he read the message that had just arrived.

  Passing you in a moment. Count to twenty then follow.

  Looking up, Declan saw Kendis walking towards him from the left, most likely from West Brompton station. If she recognised him she gave no sign, strolling casually past Declan and through the narrow, high arch of the stone gatehouse that provided entrance to the cemetery. Declan placed the phone back into his pocket and slowly counted to twenty. He’d reached fifteen before he decided that he’d had enough. There was nobody following her, and he was tiring of the cloak and dagger games. Heading through the
arch himself, he found himself in the cemetery itself; a long, south-facing, tree-lined tarmac avenue was laid out in front of him, with mausoleums and gravestones on either side. There were paths off to the east and west, likely to other areas of the cemetery, but his target was continuing down the primary route, and so Declan started following, speeding up his pace to catch up with Kendis.

  He knew from the map at the entrance that this was The Avenue, and led to a more public area known as The Grand Circle, but he didn’t expect Kendis to stay in the public areas. And when they reached the first crossroads, she turned left, heading eastwards towards the older graves. Declan hurried to catch up with her, and caught up with her beside a tall, broken down mausoleum on the right-hand side of the path.

  ‘You look stupid,’ she said as a hello. Taking off the aviator glasses, Declan shrugged.

  ‘You made a point about not looking recognisable,’ he replied. ‘Can you honestly say you would have picked me out if I hadn’t been meeting you?’

  ‘Fair point,’ Kendis glanced around to ensure that they were alone. ‘I needed to speak to you, and it had to be somewhere private.’

  ‘A cemetery was your first choice? Not really a place for a political reporter to hang out.’

  Kendis looked around the cemetery. ’Don’t belittle the dead,’ she smiled. ‘Some of Westminster’s biggest and brightest have plots here.’ She showed a square, stone mausoleum across the path, about fifty yards away and under an overhanging tree branch. ‘That’s the one for the Gladwells. Over there is the Harrison family.’