Chapter 78
Dover, UK
It was Reni who acted first. He ran to the door, yanked it open and screamed for help. Then he ran back to Thorpe. The Minister had collapsed to his knees, hands still at his throat. Reni grabbed his scarf from a chair where he’d discarded it and tried to place it against the wound. But Thorpe released one hand and pushed him away.
Sam stood stock-still, paralysed by the horror unfurling before him. Behind Thorpe, Tapper stood equally motionless, still clutching the jagged piece of glass, its tip red with the Minister’s blood.
The room was filling behind Sam. A woman screamed. A man shouted out, ‘Christ!’
The police who’d been taking care of security stormed in. One rushed to Thorpe. The Minister fell backwards, his face a deathly white, hands slick with blood as they scrabbled for purchase at his throat, while Reni, utterly distraught, stood to his side.
The other officer halted just feet from Sam, pulled a handgun from a holster and aimed it at Tapper’s chest. ‘Drop it, Mr Tapper,’ he shouted. ‘Now!’
Tapper obliged, letting go of the jug handle, which dropped to the floor, landing as one piece on the carpet. The officer clutching the gun moved with speed to Tapper’s rear, holstered the weapon and then yanked the killer’s hands behind his back to cuff them.
Chapter 79
Dover, UK
The policeman by Thorpe’s side called for an ambulance on his phone, then screamed out: ‘First aid box, now!’
He knelt by the Minister, who appeared to have lost consciousness, pressing a hand down against the wound, but soon there was blood seeping between his fingers.
Thorpe’s coterie inched forward. A woman passed out, her body crumpling to the floor.
‘Stand back!’ shouted the policeman guarding Tapper.
A man in a black suit rushed into the room with a green box. The policeman with Thorpe yelled at him. ‘Open it! Get me a dressing.’
The man wrenched the box open, ripping open a package. He handed a dressing to the policeman, who held it hard against the Minister’s neck. But it was soon dyed red.
Sam’s paralysis had given way to horror, as the true nature of this rapidly changing event became clear to him. The meeting they’d engineered and he’d manipulated, and its shocking climax.
Minutes passed. Sam heard the sound of sirens gathering strength. Paramedics in green were soon rushing into the room, and he and Reni were pressed back against a wall while they went to work.
And then the flurry of activity seemed to still, and Sam knew what that meant.
Thorpe was dead.
Whatever Sam had expected, it was not this. He felt despair creep over him. He despised Thorpe with every fibre of his being, but he’d wanted justice, not another corpse.
More police arrived. Thorpe’s people were ushered out of the room. Then he and Reni were led out separately, out of the conference room and down the corridor to the hotel entrance.
The reception area pulsed silently with blue lights. Several police cars and an ambulance were parked chaotically outside.
They were placed in the back of a police car. They waited, too shocked to speak.
The two paramedics exited the hotel, carrying a stretcher. A sheet covered Thorpe’s face. Sam was reminded of Abel.
He thought of how Tapper’s simmering rage had built. He had cracked at the moment when Thorpe made it clear that he was willing to shaft him – to let Tapper take the rap for Abel’s murder.
Anger had done this. A sudden, deadly burst of anger.
Sam shuddered as he contemplated what they’d done. What he’d done. How he’d helped push Tapper to that tipping point.
They were driven away, taken to a police station, and separated. It was when he was alone in an interview room – yet another interview room – that he realised he had not conferred with Reni. Discussed what to say.
Sam shivered. He reached out and touched a radiator. It was boiling hot.
A bearded man entered the room. Flicked on the tape recorder by the side of the table. Introduced himself, recorded the time, then scratched his head. Sam suspected that nothing like this had ever happened in Dover.
‘Can you tell me what happened today?’ he said.
‘Sir Harry Tapper stabbed Adam Thorpe in the neck.’
‘That’s not in dispute. What we really want to know is how it happened, what precipitated the attack.’
‘Then I need to start at the beginning,’ said Sam.
Sam told the police officer what he’d told Reni when he first interviewed him, bringing the story up to date with what had happened since he’d returned to the UK.
The bearded man sat utterly still, his coffee undrunk on the table.
Finally, Sam finished.
‘Fuck me,’ said the policeman. ‘That’s a tale and a half.’
The one aspect of the story Sam had been tempted to omit was the envelope drops he’d orchestrated at Tapper’s house, which had clearly contributed to the moment when he cracked. But Sam concluded that Tapper would without doubt talk about them. In fact, he fully anticipated being questioned again about what he’d done. When that moment came, Sam would say that taunts alone had not goaded Tapper to murder. The man had other demons.
‘Interview with Sam Keddie terminated,’ said the police officer, before giving the time.
He switched off the tape recorder.
‘Don’t you have any questions?’
The policeman shook his head, then exited the room in a flash, as if he couldn’t get away from Sam fast enough.
The door shut. Sam took a sip of water from a plastic cup. He stared at the mug the policeman had left, its handle suddenly pregnant with dark potential.
Chapter 80
Dover, UK
Sam woke with a jolt from a deep sleep. He’d dropped off, overwhelming fatigue replacing the incessant shivering. He lifted his head from his folded arms.
The police officer had returned, accompanied by a shorter man clad in a double-breasted pinstripe suit that hugged his rotund physique. His face was smooth and cleanly shaven, thick grey hair neatly parted. He clutched a battered leather Gladstone briefcase.
The new visitor extended a hand. ‘Strickland,’ he said, with a plummy accent. ‘I work for the government. I’m a lawyer.’
Sam shook the proffered hand.
Strickland nodded at the police officer, who left the room. The lawyer lowered his bag to the floor, removed his jacket and carefully draped it over the chair. Sam noticed a cerise-coloured silk lining. The lawyer sat, his hands clasped on the table’s surface. He glanced briefly at the recording device, as if satisfying himself that it was switched off.
‘That’s quite a story you and Signor Reni have told the police.’
‘All true,’ said Sam, already mistrustful of Strickland.
The lawyer smiled broadly, disengaging his hands to place them palm-down on the table. ‘Breathe a word of it outside this room and my department will be all over you like the Spanish flu.’
Sam felt the lawyer’s eyes hard on him. The man then reached inside his Gladstone and pulled out a sheaf of papers.
‘This is the Official Secrets Act.’
‘I refuse to sign it.’
Strickland chuckled. ‘Ah, bless. You don’t actually “sign” anything. It’s a law, not a contract. Once you’re privy to information covered by the act – which you are, trust me – you are bound by law not to pass on that information to others, regardless.’
‘You can’t threaten me.’
‘You’re right. So let’s put it another way. Your friend has already been sent packing back to Sicily, where his superiors are none too impressed by his extra-curricular activities, I can tell you. I doubt he’ll be in employment for long. As for his pension, well, he can kiss goodbye to that too. The thing is, Mr Keddie, you haven’t got a jot of proof. And your one witness, Ms Idris, will soon be deported directly from Sicily.’ He patted his neat hair down. ‘To be hon
est, it’s a blessing. I would fillet her in court.’
Sam was stunned. ‘What about Tapper?’
Strickland smirked. ‘It’s hardly in Tapper’s interest to start bleating on about this. He’s already in deep doo-doo. Besides, as I said before, you’ve got no proof.’
Strickland sighed, as if a dark cloud had drifted over a sunny picnic. ‘Sadly, what we can’t snuff out is speculation about why this happened. So we’re telling everyone that Tapper was unhinged. That he was obsessive, infatuated with Thorpe.’
‘So you’ll crucify Tapper to ensure Thorpe’s reputation – and that of the Government – is untainted.’
‘Your words, not mine.’
The lawyer studied Sam for a moment longer, as if drinking in his defeat, then got up. He picked up the papers. ‘I take it you’ve decided not to read this?’
Sam refused to acknowledge the question.
The lawyer shrugged, returned the papers to his Gladstone, slipped on his jacket and moved to the door.
Chapter 81
North London – two days later
Sam sat at his desk, running through his voicemail messages. There were three from an irritated Emery, asking him where he was and to get in touch, a handful from an increasingly anxious-sounding Susan, and the rest were clients who wanted to know when he was returning. If he wanted to stay in business, he needed to call them back. Reassure them. But he’d been putting it off. Putting everything off.
He had been drifting for the past two days. Moving from one room to another, trying to anchor himself. But the house was no longer a home. It was a tomb. A tomb constructed of memories. The perfume bottle on the dressing table, the photo of Rome in the hallway, the wardrobe full of clothes, the half-read novel by the bed. Eleanor was everywhere, but nowhere.
Sam couldn’t sleep. If he did manage to drift off, he’d soon be wrenched awake by a nightmare. One particularly horrible dream began with Thorpe’s murder, the Minister slowly dropping to the ground, before the blood from his neck became a sea of red in which thousands of immigrants were drowning. While he strongly believed that dreams had revealing content, Sam also knew that there were occasions when the unconscious needed emptying, like an overflowing bin full of rotting refuse. And then the dream was simply what it was. In his case, a replaying of two terrifying and interconnected scenes.
Much more significant was the nightmare that involved Eleanor. In it, she appeared recovered, but still weak and inactive. She sat in an armchair in their living room downstairs. Home, safe and alive. But in the middle of the room, Sam was building a wall between them. Methodically slapping on mortar and laying bricks down. Eleanor quietly pleaded with him, but Sam wouldn’t listen. He slowly shut her out, till the last brick was slotted in beneath the ceiling.
If he ever managed to stop thinking about Eleanor, it was because he was haunted by another thought – a dark, disturbing vision of hell that wormed its way around his head, slowly corrupting every last corner of his mind. A vision he suspected was all too real.
He tried calling Reni. Left messages. But the Sicilian never returned his calls.
And he surfed the net for any new developments. It was an ongoing investigation, so beyond the tributes to Thorpe, there was nothing about Tapper on the main news sites. But away from them, it was clear the Government had started going to work on him. The more Sam dug, the more he found stories about Tapper’s secret life, the rent boys and gay clubs. ‘Former lovers’ had suddenly emerged to speak of his violent tastes. The drip-fed insinuation that he was a psychopath had begun.
*
The doorbell rang. Sam leaned back in his chair and looked out of the front window. To his huge surprise, it was the smug lawyer, Strickland. What the hell did he want?
Sam opened the front door.
‘Not disturbing you, I hope,’ said Strickland.
‘Even if you were, I doubt you’d give a shit.’
‘Listen,’ he said, his conceit tempered compared to their last meeting. ‘I need you to come with me.’
‘We’ve had the chat,’ said Sam wearily. ‘I understand the score.’
The lawyer looked sheepish. ‘That’s just it. I don’t think you do. Things have changed somewhat.’
‘What the hell’s that got to do with me? You said, quite categorically, that I needed to keep my mouth shut. I get it. Now, if you please, I’ve got work to do.’
Sam began to close the door but Strickland stuck his hand out and pushed against it. Sam relented, pulling the door back open. The lawyer sighed. He seemed defeated and, Sam sensed, not a little humiliated. ‘Can you spare an hour or so? Please. It’s something that cannot be discussed on your doorstep – or indeed in your house. You’ll understand why when you get there.’
‘Where?’
Strickland looked pained. Sam was relishing the lawyer’s discomfort and would gladly have let him squirm for longer. But he was also curious as to what had brought about the U-turn. And besides, the alternative was grovelling to clients or fending off images of Eleanor and Thorpe.
‘I’ll get my coat.’
The journey passed in silence, Strickland studiously avoiding eye contact as he stared out of the window at the Euston and Marylebone Roads. Ahead of them, the driver was equally taciturn.
Forty minutes later, on a side street off Edgware Road, the car came to a halt by a barrier manned by four policemen wearing black protective vests and clutching sub-machine guns. The driver flashed a card at the men and the barrier lifted. The vehicle dropped down a ramp into a subterranean car park. Sam caught a brief glimpse of a 60s tower block above them, before it disappeared from view.
Strickland and Sam were dropped by a set of doors. Two more identically dressed and armed police officers stood guard. Strickland nodded to the men and one punched a code into a keypad.
Sam had seen no signage at ground level. And when he factored in Strickland’s guarded words and the heavily armed police presence, he felt a mounting tension. What the hell was this place?
Swing doors opened inward. Inside, for the third time in less than a week, Sam was subjected to an airport-style X-ray of his belongings and a body search. Strickland was enduring his own across the room, and gave Sam a defeated look.
They moved down a broad, faceless corridor. At the end, Strickland presented his face at a glass panel and a heavy metal door was opened by another officer. Ten more metres of grey corridor followed, strip lighting overhead, with no doors or windows. After another door was opened, they moved into a large seating area. It was like a doctor’s waiting room. There were well-thumbed magazines to leaf through and some faded prints of Constable paintings on the wall. But apart from a Perspex dome in the ceiling, there was no natural light. The police officer who’d let them in remained positioned by the door.
Sam felt like he’d entered a secret chamber below the city. His stomach somersaulted with anxiety, though he sensed from Strickland’s conspicuous daytime visit to his house and the amount of police around that he wasn’t in any danger.
They sat on chairs upholstered with grey material punctured by cigarette burns. The walls were a shade of the same colour. Sam was struck by the total absence of information about the building they were in. No signage, flyers or posters. It was as if they were sitting in a vacuum.
He felt that familiar tightening of his throat, the gathering tension that came with being in a tight space and feeling highly stressed.
Moments later, another door opened and a short, strong-looking female officer nodded to Strickland.
They followed the woman into a corridor. Just inside on the left were some metal shelves stacked with a selection of rugs in different colours, and copies of the Bible and Koran. Ahead, he counted sixteen doors, regularly spaced along both sides of the corridor. Each was blue with a small window in its upper section.
Sam noticed that the female officer’s belt contained a small armoury – cuffs, a baton and a can of what he imagined was CS gas. Another officer, a si
milarly beefy male, was positioned at the far end of the corridor.
The woman stopped by the fourth door on the left, looked through the window and, satisfied by what she’d seen inside, punched a code into a pad on the wall. The lock went slack and she pulled the door open.
She and Strickland then stepped back and the lawyer gestured for Sam to enter the cell.
Sam felt terror flood through him, like he’d been conned into being rendered. That he’d be taken from this anonymous chamber beneath London and dragged under cover of night on to a private jet and sent to a prison in some far-flung corner of the planet where his dark knowledge would be punished with beatings and torture.
But there was nothing coercive about the gesture. And when Sam looked into the cell and saw who was inside, he understood.
There, sitting on a low-slung bed, was Sir Harry Tapper.
Chapter 82
Edgware Road, London
‘The door stays open,’ said the female officer.
Sam watched her walk away, as if she’d been told to give them some distance, leaving Strickland at the door. Sam inched into the cell.
The walls were a cheery yellow and there was another Perspex dome overhead bringing a trace of natural light into the cell. Opposite the bed – the mattress covered in easy-to-clean blue plastic – was a solid-looking desk made of timber, its edges and corners rounded and smooth. On its surface, a wooden bowl overflowing with fresh fruit, and a manila file. Above the desk, well out of reach, was a wall-mounted television, and in the corner of the room by the bed, a small basin.
Sam stood against the wall, aware that, when he last saw Tapper, he’d just plunged a piece of glass into Adam Thorpe’s neck. And, given how Sam had tormented Tapper, he hardly imagined the man felt warmly towards him. But there was also a repulsion, a deep hatred that went to his core, for the man who’d orchestrated the attack on Eleanor.
Denial (Sam Keddie Thriller Book 2) Page 26
