Target

by Simon Kernick

  She knew she was going to have to play this carefully. If she said the wrong thing, she was dead. 'My name's Tina Boyd, and I'm a police officer.'

  'And what were you doing on that street? You can't have known I'd be coming by, so you must have been there for a reason. What is it?'

  Tina knew there was no point lying. Not now. 'I was watching a property.'

  'Ah, the one belonging to our friend Mr Gentleman, I'll wager.'

  'That's right.'

  'Interesting.'

  'Look,' she said with as much confidence as she could muster, 'you may as well give yourself up. It's the best way.'

  The man let out a low chuckle, his lips hardly moving. 'Now why would I want to do that? You appear to be unarmed and in no position to threaten me, and any colleagues you might have don't appear to be – how shall I put it? – beating a path to your door.' He turned round in his seat and looked through the back window. 'Do they?'

  Again, Tina spoke with a confidence she didn't feel. 'My colleagues know where I am and they're on the way.'

  'Is that right? And is it them you were talking to on your mobile phone just now?'

  'Yes, so I really wouldn't do anything stupid. They'll throw away the key if anything happens to me.'

  'I think, my love, that they would throw away the key if they caught me anyway. I've already killed one person today.' Out of the corner of her eye she could see him regarding her, his thin lips forming a tight smile. 'Our mutual friend, Mr Gentleman. How long do you think I'll get for snuffing him out?'

  Tina stiffened. She thought of the photo of Gentleman's granddaughter on the mantelpiece.

  'He was a pain in the arse,' continued the man with the gun, enjoying her reaction, leaning forward now so his mouth was right next to her ear, stroking the gun against her belly. 'I'd like to have finished him off more slowly – it's always more . . . satisfying that way – but I didn't have the time.'

  He ran his lips across her earlobe, licking and nibbling it. 'Give me your phone,' he whispered gently. 'And don't hesitate or I'll kill you.'

  Tina's skin was crawling but she refused to allow herself to flinch or pull away. Prising one hand from the wheel, she took it out of her pocket and handed it over.

  As he flipped open the cover and began scrolling through the menu, Tina came to a halt behind stationary traffic at the next junction, and once again she thought about escape. It was a huge risk as this bastard definitely wasn't bluffing. But it was an even bigger one staying put, because she was pretty damn sure he wasn't going to let her live.

  'Ah, so you weren't talking to your colleagues when I arrived. You were talking to another of our mutual friends, Mr Fallon. Now, he really is a pain in the arse. Are you sure you're a police officer? You wouldn't be joshing me now, would you?' His tongue flicked out like a lizard's, wetting his lips.

  Then, without warning, he lunged forward, forcing the gun between her legs so that the end of the silencer was pushed hard against her groin. 'What's going on?' he demanded, his eyes boring into the side of her face. 'Tell me or I'll shoot you right here, right now.'

  'I'm moonlighting,' Tina answered with an unavoidable flinch, staring straight ahead, only vaguely aware of the world outside. 'Doing work for Fallon.'

  'Interesting. He really is very persistent.'

  As the traffic began to move again, he switched the phone off, snapped off the cover with his teeth, pulled out the SIM card and pocketed it, then opened the window and threw out the pieces.

  Tina cursed inwardly. This guy knew what he was doing, getting rid of the one item that could be used to trace her.

  He picked up the Nikon. 'Now, these photos you took. Did you send them to Mr Fallon?'

  'No,' she said firmly, hoping fervently that he hadn't been watching her car when she sent the photos on the laptop. She was just trying to stay alive now, hoping that if he didn't think she'd done that much to ID him he might let her go. It was a long shot, but when you've got a gun thrust between your legs, you tend to cling to long shots.

  The man with the gun deleted the photos from the Nikon with his free hand and casually tossed it out of the window.

  A bead of sweat ran down Tina's eyelid and into her eye. She blinked it away angrily. 'That camera cost me five hundred pounds,' she said coldly.

  'If you hadn't been snooping around in other people's business, you wouldn't have lost it.'

  She wiped her forehead, feeling a desperate urge for a cigarette. 'Do you mind if I smoke?'

  'You've a gun pressed into your cunt and you're thinking about your next cigarette?' He chuckled again. 'You've got spirit, my love. I like that. Go on then.'

  Tina reached down and pulled the pack and the lighter from where they were nestled in the cup holder. 'Do you want one?'

  'No thanks. I prefer more enjoyable vices.'

  He slipped the gun out from between her legs and rubbed it gently up and down her thighs, never taking his eyes off her.

  Ignoring his gaze, Tina lit a cigarette and took a long drag, knowing that it was essential she keep talking to him. It was always more difficult to kill someone when you'd established a connection with them, although this guy sounded like he might well be the exception to the rule.

  'Have you noticed something?' she asked him.

  'What?' He sounded interested.

  'I haven't looked at you once. I haven't seen your face.'

  'You took those photos of me, didn't you?'

  'From a distance, and with you wearing sunglasses and a cap. I can't describe you. Also, I've got no incentive to go to the police. I got Fallon to call Gentleman to try to panic him, so if you've killed him, then that's my fault. In other words, I'm going to keep quiet. So, rather than kill me and open up a whole world of shit, you might as well let me go. I'll get out of the car and I won't say another word to anyone. I promise.'

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw his smile widen a little.

  'Thanks for the advice,' he said, 'but it's OK.' He leaned forward again, running his nose softly up her neck. Sniffing. 'I'm quite enjoying the company.'

  'What are you going to do to me?' she asked, trying hard to keep her voice even, more frightened than she'd been in years. Perhaps ever.

  'Why, I'd have thought that was obvious,' he said quietly. Then he grabbed her by the chin, jerking her face round so she was looking directly into his pale face, even though they were travelling at close to thirty miles an hour. 'I'm going to kill you.'

  Twenty-nine

  It had just turned four o'clock when I finally found an internet café on a side street near Bloomsbury in the heart of the West End, and signed into my email account. The day was sunny, the streets were crowded, and I was hot and bothered, having been trooping round for much of the afternoon buying clothes and provisions and then looking for somewhere to check my mail, all the time waiting for news about what Tina was up to, because it was clear she was up to something.

  I clicked open her email, saw the message, and downloaded the photos.

  The first one stopped me dead. It was him. The strange-looking Irish kidnapper. I could only assume Tina had taken this photo outside John Gentleman's place. Seeing his face now made me go cold, bringing back black, terrible memories that I knew were going to stay with me for the rest of my days. I scrolled through more of the photos, finding it difficult to believe that this man had abducted Jenny and murdered Ramon in cold blood. He looked so much more ordinary in a cap and sunglasses.

  I wear a four-gigabyte memory stick round my neck which contains my most up-to-date drafts of Conspiracy as well as my book on Maxwell, and I copied all the photos on to it. I'm not the kind of person to rely too heavily on technology, though, so before I deleted them on the PC I printed them off in colour on one of the café's printers, paid the blank-eyed man at the desk, and headed out.

  Now that the Irishman had finally come out into the open, I was itching for an update from Tina. In our last conversation she'd said she'd call in an hour, but that
was an hour and twenty minutes ago, so I figured I could get away with hassling her.

  Her phone was switched off. I waited five minutes, then tried again. Same message. I remembered only too well what this man was capable of – how he'd managed to conceal himself in my flat, listening to Ramon and I talking before striking silently and coldly in the space of seconds. If Tina had been taking photos of him, she'd have had to get close. Maybe too close.

  I walked the streets of the West End for a while, trying her number, always in vain, waiting for a call that I had an ominous feeling was not going to come.

  And it didn't.

  My car was parked near Belsize Park Tube station and I took the Northern Line to get it. By the time I arrived, I had a plan. It was a fairly basic one, as most of mine tended to be, but it would have to do.

  I'd picked up an A to Z some time earlier, and now I drove across north London through the choking rush-hour traffic until I came to a quiet rundown street of cheap 1960s housing. I've got a good memory for facts and figures and I remembered John Gentleman's address from when I'd been round to see him at the apartment block on the night Jenny was kidnapped. Since Tina's last known location was outside Gentleman's flat, I figured it was as good a place as any to start looking for her. Risky perhaps, but I was running low on options.

  But as I drove under a railway bridge, hoping to see Gentleman's building come up on the right, I was forced to come to a stop. Ahead of me, police vans were parked on both sides of the road and lines of bright yellow scene-of-crime tape ran across it with a sign below saying POLICE NOTICE: ROAD CLOSED. A cluster of onlookers had gathered round the outside of the cordoned-off area, looking excited, while a group of men and women in top-to-toe white suits were trooping in and out of a clapped-out building with sludge-grey paintwork.

  I knew without checking the number that this had to be Gentleman's place. And, like everyone else, I've seen enough crime programmes on the TV to know that the presence of this many police, particularly the ones in white suits, means that something extremely serious has taken place. Like murder.

  As I sat staring at the scene, trying to take it all in, a uniformed cop approached the car, waving at me to back up. Heeding his instructions, I turned round and found a parking spot further back the other way before returning on foot, looking round for any sign of Tina.

  I tried her number again. Still off.

  'Do you know what's happened here?' I asked a couple of overdressed old ladies who were tutting and shaking their heads as they watched the police at work.

  'Murder,' growled one. 'Some poor sod killed in his own home.'

  'Just keeps getting worse,' said the other, continuing to shake her head. 'You wonder when it's all going to stop.'

  'They should hang 'em,' said the first lady. 'Bring back the death penalty. That'd sort it out.'

  I thanked them and walked round the scene-of-crime tape and through the onlookers to the other side of the street. But still I couldn't see Tina. I went to the top of the road, checked the parked cars. They were all empty.

  Where the hell was she?

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly six p.m. More than three hours since we'd last spoken; two since the time she'd told me she'd ring. The sun's rays were weakening as evening began to draw in, and I got a leaden feeling in my gut.

  Maybe I should have gone to the police there and then. In hindsight, it would have been the best move. But what stopped me once again was the fear that they wouldn't believe me, particularly my story about Ramon, and that I'd end up a suspect, even if I showed them the photos I had.

  Instead, I decided to turn to the one man I'd avoided throughout all this. The subject of my book Enforcer, and my last resort.

  Maxwell.

  Thirty

  Five years earlier, not long after Mike Bolt had joined the National Crime Squad, the organization that became SOCA, he'd found himself involved in a case that had ended up having a lasting impact on him.

  It started when a three-man gang of Jamaican thugs based in Dalston took to holding up drug dealers at gunpoint and relieving them of their product and their money. These men were extremely violent and, on the one occasion they did meet resistance, they shot the dealer dead and seriously wounded his bodyguard, sending out an ominous message to all those who might defy them. In fact, so successful did they become that for a short while the supply of crack and heroin in the borough plummeted as the other dealers moved out to safer areas. The gang's luck, however, was always going to run out, and when they robbed two crackhouses belonging to Nicholas Tyndall, a high-level gangster in neighbouring Islington, getting away with tens of thousands in cash and drugs, it finally did.

  Tyndall was not the type of man to let such blatant disrespect go unpunished. Because he had a great deal more power and influence than the dealers the Jamaicans had robbed in the past, it hadn't taken him long to identify them. Incredibly, it seemed they weren't even making much of an effort to hide their crimes, clearly thinking they were above retribution.

  This changed when one of their number, Ralvin Menendez, was found dead on waste ground near his home, a bullet in his head and his severed penis and testicles stuffed into his mouth. A week later, a second member of the gang, Julius Barron, was discovered at home dead in bed, in exactly the same condition.

  The two men's deaths generated only minimal publicity. Drug-related murders within the black community were common, and even though these killings were particularly brutal, there was still little that set them apart from the many others that occurred that year in London.

  This all changed a month later when a third robber, Clyde Jones, met the same fate as his cohorts. Because when the killer turned up at his flat, breaking in through a window, Jones wasn't in there alone. Also present was his twelve-year-old niece Leticia, whom he was looking after for the night. No one knows for sure the exact sequence of events but it seems likely that Leticia came out of her bedroom and disturbed the killer as he was in the process of castrating her already dead uncle. If she screamed, no one reported hearing her. It was unlikely she got the chance. She was shot once in the head from a distance of about ten feet, and then twice more in the heart at point-blank range, so it was clear that the killer had deliberately finished her off.

  In the ensuing public outcry, the National Crime Squad was called in to find the killer. Bolt had been part of the investigating team, and he remembered all too vividly visiting the Jones flat, a cramped, untidy place on the sixth floor of a tower block whose only views were of other tower blocks. There was a huge bloodstain on the living room sofa where Jones himself had died, and a smaller one on the threadbare carpet outside the bedroom where Leticia had breathed her last. Bolt had thought it such a cold, lonely place for a child to die. He'd been a police officer long enough to know how hard and unjust the world could be, but even so he'd been affected by what he'd seen, and he'd sworn then and there that he'd do everything in his power to find the person responsible.

  With a reward of £50,000 on offer, the name of Nicholas Tyndall had quickly come up and the NCS had subsequently bugged his palatial Islington home. Listening in, they heard Tyndall refer repeatedly to someone he called Hook as the hitman he'd used for the murders of all three of the Jamaicans. It sounded like Tyndall was extremely annoyed that Hook had killed a civilian, and was even thinking about holding back on the balance of his payment because of the heat Leticia Jones's murder was generating. No one knows whether or not he did because shortly afterwards Tyndall ordered a professional bug sweep of his property which turned up all the listening devices. Incredibly, even with Tyndall's taped admissions, the CPS had somehow concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to charge him with anything.

  Instead, NCS efforts were channelled into locating the mysterious man called Hook, and Bolt's team was given the task of finding out his real name. It took a hell of a lot of digging but eventually they identified him as one Michael James Killen, a thirty-seven-year-old former IRA gunman who was suspe
cted of killing as many as eighteen people in a career spanning almost two decades. Having been released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement from the Maze prison in 1999, where he'd been serving a life sentence for the murder of two RUC officers and a British soldier, he'd headed to the UK and become a gun for hire within the burgeoning London underworld, where reliable killers were always in demand.

  Hook was spoken of with a quiet awe by those few in the criminal fraternity prepared to talk about him. It wasn't just that he was brutally efficient, with a breezeblock for a heart and a reputation for taking on any job and getting it done. There was also an air of real mystery about him. The son of wealthy Belfast accountants (father Catholic, mother Protestant), he was hardly your typical IRA gunman, and was remembered in the movement as someone who was more interested in the thrill of violence than furthering the cause of Irish unification. At one time he'd apparently been a good-looking man, but in 1991 he'd suffered extensive shrapnel injuries to his face and body when a bomb an IRA colleague had been working on exploded. He'd also lost two fingers on his left hand, hence the nickname: Hook.

  Although he'd been arrested once by Met officers, in early 2001 on suspicion of murder, Hook had somehow avoided getting charged. Since then he'd kept an extremely low profile, and it was known that he'd resorted to plastic surgery on a number of occasions in order to change his appearance. So determined was he in this that hardly any of the people Bolt's team spoke to could physically describe him adequately (let alone say where he might be found). Those few who did attempt it came up with wildly different versions, none of which bore much resemblance to the badly scarred young man with the skin graft on his chin who appeared in the police mugshot taken when he was arrested in 2001.

  Armed with all this information, the authorities had put out an all-ports alert for Hook and had every police force in the UK looking for him. But as the days turned into weeks, it became clear that he'd slipped the net, and eventually the public outcry died down as other heinous crimes vied for their attention.