Final Target

by E. V. Seymour

  ‘Checking to see where we are on the page.’

  I could have come back with a smart remark about chapters apart, but couldn’t be bothered. ‘For what it’s worth, I admit I saw McCallen a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She likes me.’ I braced myself for another blow but it didn’t happen.

  ‘She came to you?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘She disclosed classified information?’

  ‘She did not.’

  Titus leant his rear against the table, arms crossed. ‘So she looked you up for old time’s sake, is that it?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Your call.’

  He waved a finger in my face. ‘You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of your situation.’

  ‘Neither do you. Do your superiors know you’ve got me locked down here?’

  Titus tipped his head back and laughed. I thought the gesture staged. I couldn’t be at all certain that he wasn’t working a number of his own, perhaps to cover his seedy private life. If MI5 had a line on me, there would be another more senior player in the room, maybe two of them. ‘It’s all recorded and on camera,’ Titus assured me.

  I glanced up, spotted the screens at each corner, all switched off. I turned my attention to the light. Was that how they did things now? He was bluffing. ‘The time spent pumping me could be more usefully employed looking for McCallen,’ I snarled. ‘Why not start with Simone Fabron.’

  ‘Simone Fabron is not important. The men who occasionally grace her parties, now that’s a different matter.’ My mind flicked back to Zara’s husband, the Middle Eastern guy. Okay, maybe Titus had a point. The fact he hadn’t named Fabron as a drug smuggler made me reconsider Fabron’s position and China Hayes’s order to kill her. Had China been spinning me a line?

  ‘What were you doing in Berlin?’ Titus said.

  Either he’d been a busy boy or McCallen had confided in him. I was disappointed; I’d believed, foolishly perhaps, that I was the only one in her personal loop. Vanity, I was once told by the mentor who’d finally betrayed me, was man’s greatest enemy. ‘Visiting an old friend,’ I said.

  ‘Scoping your next target?’ Titus’s accompanying smile was nasty.

  ‘I’ve packed it in.’

  Titus leant forward, his breath sour. ‘A leopard never changes its spots.’

  ‘While you’re dishing out clichés, McCallen could be breathing her last.’

  ‘You really believe she’s alive?’

  ‘Have you found a body?’

  ‘We often don’t in our line of work. Similarities abound,’ he added smartly.

  ‘She’s not dead until you can prove it,’ I said, stubbornly. ‘She went missing in Cheltenham, not a black hole in the Middle East. She has to be somewhere.’

  He looked at me in a way I found difficult to fathom. I’m usually good at reading people, but, having been out of the game, I was out of practice.

  ‘She’d received threats,’ I said.

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘A dead man.’

  Again, the unfathomable look. Titus had a soundtrack running through his brain quite separate to the movie action in my own. That’s spooks for you.

  ‘Would you like to expand?’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s all she said.’

  He knew that I was lying. To my surprise, he didn’t push it. ‘Think you can find her?’

  I glanced down at the restraints, issued Titus a square look. ‘You want my help?’

  ‘From where I’m standing, you have no choice.’

  ‘There are always choices.’

  The muscles in his face flexed and he released a catch half submerged in the wall. The restraints snapped apart. I lifted my arms clear, rubbed my wrists, ran a tentative hand over my jaw and stayed seated.

  ‘Does this mean you believe me?’

  His lopsided face contorted into an approximation of a smile. ‘Jury’s out. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.’

  ‘What a chronic waste of resources. Am I free to go?’

  ‘You are.’

  I stood up. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘You’ve got forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Until what?’

  ‘Until you unearth a lead, or tell us where the body is.’

  My head spun. I had to warn Dwyer, interrogate Fabron and find McCallen. Titus pitched into my thoughts. ‘To make things easy, I’ll meet you on home turf.’

  ‘That’s very good of you.’

  His insect eyes locked onto mine, ‘Two days, Hex. 10.00 hours. St Mary’s and Matthew’s – I believe you’re familiar with the place.’

  Either McCallen had told him or he’d been tracking her movements, neither good from my perspective. ‘And if I don’t show?’

  He looked like a gunman with the trigger cocked. ‘I have friends in Mossad who’d be most happy to make your acquaintance.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Without another word passing between us, Titus led me through a warren of empty corridors with digital locks and pin codes and finally ejected me out onto a back alley that discharged me into Pimlico. The night air felt good on my skin. Too late to get a Tube, I flagged down a cab and asked to be taken to Kings Cross. Back at the lock-up, I had an old campaign bed I’d once used for emergencies. Once I got the gas heater up and running, it wasn’t too bad, although I had to admit that I’d grown soft in the intervening months.

  At first light, around seven, I shook myself awake and headed off to Kings Cross station to take a shower in the public conveniences. Next, I bought a pay-as-you-go phone and contacted Daragh Dwyer.

  ‘Daragh, it’s Hex.’

  ‘Fuck me, thought you were dead. Nobody’s heard a squeak out of you for months. How have you been keeping?’

  With no time to explain, I said, ‘Can you talk?’

  He let out a rich fruity laugh, his voice smoked and cured from endless cigarettes. ‘Now what sort of a daft question is that? I can talk for Ireland, so I can.’

  ‘I meant, are you alone?’

  ‘Just the missus and me. What the problem? You sound tense.’

  ‘Your life is in danger.’

  ‘Jesus, Hex, my life’s been in danger since the day I was born.’

  ‘It’s a heads-up, Daragh, a credible threat.’

  I heard the sound of a match being struck, a set of lungs drawing on a cigarette. ‘Want to tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘Billy Squeeze.’

  Daragh, so garrulous, fell silent. I didn’t know whether Billy still commanded that level of respect from beyond the grave, or whether Daragh was privy to information that I didn’t have.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘I am that,’ he said.

  ‘You know about Chester and Faustino?’

  ‘To be sure. Bad business. You think I’m next, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘You need to watch your back.’

  ‘Are you up for a meet?’

  I hesitated. There was so much I needed to do, but Daragh Dwyer could yet shine a light on a dirty corner. ‘Stay where you are. It’s safer that way. I’ll come to you.’

  * * *

  Having moved to London as a young man, Daragh had never left his Kilburn roots. In common with other crime lords, his business was drugs and arms and associated mayhem, his fatal weakness cars, the more expensive the better. In his time he’d owned Astons and Ferraris, Bugattis and Bentleys. If you met him in a pub, you’d never suspect that the warm and generous Irishman buying a round of drinks was, in reality, a rattlesnake that protected his corner with a viciousness that battered the senses, and that he routinely had people flushed away.

  I walked the short distance from the Underground station to his home. Set back from the road, behind electronic gates and a security system that could rival that of GCHQ, was a large Gothic-looking pile – three floors and six bedrooms, over three and a half
thousand square feet of real estate in all.

  I pressed the keypad and spoke into the entry phone. Daragh emerged from the house, stocky frame caught in a shaft of raw morning sun. Dough-faced with a big moustache, he grinned and winked at me, rattling a set of keys in his hand and pointing to his latest toy.

  ‘Open the gates, Daragh,’ I shouted. But Daragh was gone, full craic, ‘A masterpiece of engineering and as solid on the road as …

  My eyes swivelled to the low-slung Pagani – silver, muscular and menacing. ‘Daragh, stop,’ I yelled as he bounded down the flight of wide stone steps from the front door to the driveway.

  ‘Hex, you’re a funny man, so you are.’

  All at once the air around me shrank and the light darkened, like seawater receding over sand and beach, sucked dry before the onslaught of a tsunami. A white flash and then noise so loud it eclipsed a one hundred gun salute, I was lifted bodily off my feet and thrown back against a car parked a metre away. My jacket torn, warm liquid trickled down my left arm, bicep burning. The smell of cooked and charred flesh invaded my nostrils. Deafened, my ears buzzed, then a high-pitched whine pierced my hearing followed by an inner noise like a weir in full roar. Half-blinded, I looked up through gritty eyes and saw the mangled gates, the silver car reduced to a blackened, crumpled, unidentifiable wreck. Grisly body parts lay scattered across the drive. A severed arm, wristwatch still attached, and a leg caught in the branches of a tree, the only identifiable remains of Daragh Dwyer. A stout, middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair stood outside the front door, both hands over her ears, her mouth wide open, her scream inaudible.

  I looked around. People with frightened faces ran towards me in slow motion. Some ran away. I couldn’t hear a thing, but I can lip-read, and a young guy crouched down and asked if I was all right, if I was hurt. I shook my head, made to get up. Pain screeched through my arm. He pushed me back down, told me to take it easy and stay where I was. Someone else mouthed, ‘Call the police. Get an ambulance.’ Another guy, wearing a bobble hat, stood as close as he could to the carnage. He held a mobile phone high in his hand and took pictures. I imagined Daragh’s mortal remains uploaded and posted on YouTube.

  I shook off my young Samaritan, staggered to my feet, pushed my way through a gathering crowd, knocked the phone out of bobble-hat man’s hand and stamped on it once. Before he could react, I stumbled away and broke into a run before the cops turned up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘How did it happen?’

  I lay on a couch in a cramped room off a poky street off the Grays Inn Road. The instruments and operating facilities inside could be found in any doctor’s surgery, but with a little added extra. For the right price, bullets could be extracted, stitches inserted, knife wounds cleaned, no questions asked.

  Dr Jeremy Mason, or plain old Mr Mason to the outside world, was a real gentleman of the old school with a calm and kind bedside manner. He had the expertise of a brain surgeon, the temperament of a hostage negotiator and the disposition of a habitual drug user. Struck off many years before, he was the gangster’s friend. Not only could he stick men back together again, Humpty Dumpty style, he was a sound source of information. None of it came cheap, but he’d once saved my life and any investment in ‘Mace’, as he was known, was worth it.

  I flinched. My pain threshold is high, but my leather jacket, which I’d had for years, lay in tatters like a dead animal on the floor. When Mace had peeled it off I thought he was flaying me alive.

  ‘A bomb,’ I said, and before Mace could respond, I added: ‘Not mine.’ My voice sounded strange. I still had trouble hearing.

  ‘Meant for you?’

  ‘For Daragh Dwyer.’

  Mace peered at me once through hairy eyebrows and said nothing more. He was used to such events, I guess. He expertly cleaned up the wound, which now hurt like fuck.

  ‘Someone had it in for China a few days ago,’ I said speculatively. ‘Heard anything about it on the grapevine?’

  ‘Not a word.’ Mace sprayed the raw wound with God knew what. My eyes watered.

  I tried to come at things from a different angle. I’d often thought that visiting Mace was a bit like a trip to the barber’s. Pitch the conversation right, along the lines of ‘What did you think of the match last night?’ and all kinds of stuff got disclosed. ‘Remember Lester Marriott?’ I asked.

  Mace’s patrician features cracked into a smile. ‘I’ve stuck so many bits of him together he should be called the bionic man. Isn’t he down for a stretch?’

  I repeated China Hayes’s statement, parrot-fashion. ‘Belmarsh – twenty years,’

  ‘Main or HSU?’

  ‘HSU, I reckon. He’s got to be a Category A.’ I pictured the grim, windowless building. Steel doors. Fingerprint recognition. CCTV. Body scans. Four officers to every prisoner. Marriot and me had been cast from the same furnace, smelted in the same fire. Shit, it could be me banged up in there.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Mace said. ‘Didn’t he have a brother in the game?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Darren Marriott. Petty crook and foot soldier.’ And once upon a time, he’d worked for Billy Squeeze. Now I came to think of it, it surprised me that China had made no reference to him. Perhaps he was too distracted by the thought of imminent death.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ Mace said in his fruity accent. ‘Also suspected of being a nark. Off the record, you understand, old boy?’ he said, bandaging my arm.

  I tapped the side of my nose with the index finger on my good hand. ‘Of course. Any idea where I can find him, doc?’

  ‘Pentonville.’

  I suppressed a smile. The best place for finding out the word on the street was inside a prison.

  * * *

  There were all sorts of rules governing prison visits. You couldn’t simply pitch up and ask to see an inmate. Most prisoners were allowed two visits a week as long as they behaved themselves, two a month for serious offenders, but they had to book the visit from the inside twenty-four hours in advance, and the designated visitor had to jump through all kinds of security hoops to prove identity, relationship to the inmate and confirm the date and time of the visit. With Titus’s deadline looming, I didn’t have enough man hours left for bureaucracy.

  Back on my feet by noon, I took my walking-wounded self to a burger bar where I demolished a cheeseburger with fries and coffee that tasted sour. Next, I collected another jacket and a roll of notes, and headed out to Tufnell Park. It was a gamble. Having had my head almost blown off that morning, I wasn’t due for another slice of luck that year, never mind that day.

  My destination was a three-storey house between a butcher’s and a newsagent’s. There was a strong possibility that the occupant would be at work, out sunning himself in foreign climes or cutting slimy deals with a crook that wanted favours. He could also simply be at home and would answer the door, take one look and slam it in my face. In the old days I’d turned up armed, and this usually gained me entry to most places. This time, persuasive words and hard cash were the only weapons in my armoury.

  The property had received a fresh coat of paint in my absence, the front door a fashionable light aquamarine to match the French Riviera shutters. Very Farrow and Ball. I reckoned the whole lot was worth at least £500k, not bad for a screw. A security camera, positioned high and sensitive to movement, swivelled in my direction. I looked up and grinned, then, using the chrome knocker, battered on the door as though I was a member of a firearms team. A dog barked. Sounded big. I listened to the heavy lumber of footsteps and imagined the occupant staring through the fish-eye lens. More heavy tread, followed by a minor scuffle and the noise of a reluctant dog manhandled into a room.

  The front door swung open. Barry Wall, six feet six, loomed over me. Even in his prison officer’s uniform, his physique looked like a geometric diagram, a series of large concentric circles with an isosceles triangle for a head. Tiny dark eyes squinted out from behind a mound of flesh and above a Cupid mouth. Hi
s dark, receding hair looked as though it had been drawn on in black biro. He wheezed hello and let me in.

  Usually people freeze when they recognise my face. Perhaps elective retirement had softened my hard edges, maybe word had got round that I was out of the game, or possibly Wall’s newfound wealth had given him false confidence. As I followed him down the hall, throaty snarls vibrated from the other side of a door combined with the noise of paws wood. I don’t know why Wall kept a dog. He only had to fall on a man to kill him.

  ‘What you got in there?’ I said.

  ‘A Ridgeback. Her name’s Helga. She doesn’t like men.’

  Predictably, we finished up in the kitchen.

  ‘Just eating,’ he said, indicating a half-eaten mound of fried food.

  No shit, I thought. ‘You carry on.’ I drew up a chair.

  ‘Tea in the pot, if you want it,’ he muttered in between chews.

  ‘I’m good, thanks.’

  He looked at me with his piggy, watery eyes. I came straight to the point and counted out two thousand pounds. Wall popped a piece of sausage into his mouth, imperturbable.

  ‘I need a visit.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Darren Marriott.’

  He didn’t say no and he didn’t ask why. ‘When?’

  ‘This afternoon.’ I wanted to be on a train back to Cheltenham that evening.

  Wall shook his head. A trickle of grease slid down his chin. He started to count off on his dainty little fingers all the reasons it would not be possible at such short notice. I waited for him to finish his wheezy monologue.

  ‘That’s why I’m paying you – to make sure it is possible.’

  He rolled a fold of skin in his forehead. I imagine this was his way of raising his eyebrows. Trouble was, they were obscured by flesh.

  ‘Would more cash work for you?’ I said.

  Wall chewed some more, took a swig of tea from a mug that said ‘Every Dog Has Its Day’ and said, ‘Five.’

  I snorted. ‘Five thousand?’

  ‘That’s my price.’ He shoved a piece of bread between his porcine lips as though it was the end of the subject.