by Ian Rankin
The D-Man always kept his distance, which interested Hoffer. Often, it would be simpler just to walk up to the victim and use a pistol. But the D-Man used sniper rifles and kept his distance. These facts told Hoffer a lot. They told him that the D-Man was a real pro, not just some hoodlum. He was skilled, a marksman. He gave himself a challenge with every hit. But he was also squeamish the way hoodlums seldom were. He didn’t like to get too close to the gore. He kept well away from the pain.
A single shot to the heart: it was a marksman’s skill all right, hitting dead center every time.
He’d planted a bomb in Hampstead too, though he hadn’t needed one. The police had thought they were dealing with an IRA device, until they linked it to the assassination. Then Hoffer had come along and he’d been able to tell them quite a lot about the Demolition Man. Few people knew as much as Hoffer did about the D-Man.
But Hoffer didn’t know nearly enough.
He took another cab back to the hotel, and got the driver to give him half a dozen blank receipts, tipping him generously as reward. He’d fill the receipts in himself and hand them to his client as proof of expenses.
“Anything else you want, guv?” said the driver. “An escort?
Bit of grass? You name it.”
Nostrils twitching, Hoffer leaned forward in his seat.
“Get me interested,” he said.
SIX
Mark Wesley was dead.
It was a shame, since it meant I’d have to close a couple of bank accounts and get rid of a bunch of expensive counterfeit identity cards and an even more expensive counterfeit passport with some beautifully crafted visas in it.
More drastic still, it was the only other identity I had in the UK, which meant that from now on I’d have to be me. I could always arrange to create another identity, but it took time and money.
I’d spent a long time not being me. It would take a while to get used to the name again: Michael Weston. The first thing I did was rent a car and get out of London. I rented from one of the big companies, and told them it might be a one-way rental. They explained that one-way rentals are more expensive, but since I was guaranteeing it with a credit card they didn’t seem to mind.
It was a nice car, a red Escort XR3i with only six hundred miles on the clock. I drove to a shopping complex just off the North Circular Road and bought, among other things, a hat.
Then I headed north. I didn’t phone ahead. I didn’t want Max expecting me.
I’d spent a lot of time thinking, and I kept coming up with the same answer: someone had tipped off the police, someone who had wanted me caught. There were only two possibilities: Max, or my employer. I never like to know who I’m working for, just as I never like to know anything about the person I’m being paid to kill. I don’t want to be involved, I just want the money.
The work I get comes from a variety of middlemen: a couple in the U.S.A., one in Germany, one in Hong Kong, and Max in England. It was Max who’d contacted me with the job I’d just done. He was the only other person apart from my employer who knew the details of the job.
Like I say, I’d given it a lot of thought, and still it came down to Max or my employer. This still left the question of why. Why would Max want me arrested? Was the money suddenly not enough to salve his conscience? He could get out anytime he wanted to, but maybe he didn’t realize that. If he wanted out, but thought I wouldn’t like such an idea, maybe he also thought I’d want to kill him. Was he just getting his retaliation in first?
Then there was my employer. Maybe he or she had got cold feet at the very last, and phoned for the cops. This seemed the more likely answer, though there was one other consideration: what if the whole thing had been a trap from the start? I was sure I could come up with other theories, but they all led in the same direction: I was going to have to talk to Max. Then maybe I’d have to find out who my employer was, and ask them a few questions, too.
It bothered me. I hate to get involved. I hate to know. But this time there might be no other way. I might have to find out why I’d been paid to assassinate Eleanor Ricks. I’d seen the papers and the news. It was in my favor that the authorities were baffled. They still didn’t know who my target had been. But I knew, right down to her name and the details of her dress. The diplomat had been there by pure chance, though not the politician. Whoever had known Eleanor Ricks would be coming out of the hotel at six knew her very well. So they almost certainly also knew the politician would be with her. Was I scaring off the politician? Was I sending a message?
Maybe you begin to see why I don’t like getting involved.
I didn’t rush my journey. I wanted my arrival to surprise Max.
If I turned up straightaway, he would probably be less surprised.
But I broke my journey quite near him in Yorkshire, so I could walk in on him early the following morning. Max was a careful man, but he didn’t go armed to the breakfast table. He was also surrounded by fields and hills. No one would hear a shot, no one would hear a burial.
No one except Belinda.
I booked into a small hotel, wearing my cap at the reception desk. Then I went out and had a haircut, quite a severe one.
“You sure about this?” the barber asked.
“I’m sure,” I said. “It’s for the summer. Gets too hot otherwise.”
“True enough,” he said, picking up the scissors.
I wore the cap again on my way back to my room, then washed my hair and used some of the dye I’d bought on it, turning it from dark brown to inky black. I looked at my eyebrows too, but reckoned I could get away with not dyeing them. The cropped hair didn’t take long to dry. The cut on my forehead was healing quickly, though there was still bruising around the scab.
I unpacked my bag. I’d bought some new clothes at the shopping center and ditched the ones I’d worn for the hit. This wasn’t a special precaution: I always wear cheap clothes on a hit, then discard them afterward. If you’ve used a gun, forensic scientists will find traces of the primer compound on your hands and clothes. Incredible, isn’t it? When I tell Max these things, he doesn’t believe me. He says they make it all up to scare people off using guns. Maybe he’s got a point. In the bag I also had my standby, a .357 Magnum, not bought from Max this time but from a friend in France. It was a Colt copy, and not a very good one. On the firing range, it seemed to want to aim everywhere but at the bull. Its saving grace was that, like all revolvers, it scared people. That was its job. I didn’t think it would scare Max; nevertheless, I wanted him to know I was armed.
There wasn’t much else in the bag except for a manila envelope, a few bottles of fine white powder, some larger bottles of sterilized water, and a couple of packs of disposable syringes. I always kept them in the bag, ever since a hotel maid had spotted them in my bathroom and informed the manager that I was dealing heroin from my room. Poor girl, she’d been so embarrassed afterward. But I’d left her a tip anyway.
I lay on my bed for a while, running one finger through what was left of my hair and stroking the cat with the other. The cat belonged to the hotel. I’d seen it in the lobby on arrival and made a clicking noise to attract it.
“Don’t bother,” the receptionist had said. “Geronimo’s very timid.”
Maybe, but I have a way with animals. Geronimo had padded meekly to my room unsummoned, and had meowed at the door until I let him in, after which he’d twined himself round my legs a few times, then rubbed his jaw along my proffered knuckles, leaving his scent on me. I didn’t have anything for him to eat, but he forgave me. So we lay, the pair of us, our eyes closed, somewhere between thought and nothingness, until I went down to the bar for some supper.
Back in my room, having drunk an indifferent half-bottle of Montrachet, I opened the manila envelope. This contained all the details of the hit, everything my employer had wanted me to know about Eleanor Ricks. I’m not a forensic scientist or a descendant of Sherlock Holmes, but I could tell the stapled sheets of paper had been word-processed.
The print quality was good, and the printing itself nice and regular. The paper was heavy and had a watermark. There was no handwriting anywhere; even the envelope had been typed. All it said was PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL.
I read through the information again, searching for clues to my employer’s identity. There was a photo of the target, too. It was a head-and-shoulders shot. She was smiling, her head tipped to one side so the hair fell and rested on her shoulder. It looked to me like a professional job, a publicity shot. For a start, it was black and white, and how many people use monochrome film these days? Plus it was obviously posed, definitely not a snapshot.
Who would have access to publicity shots? The photographer of course, plus the model. The model’s employers, and probably members of her immediate family . . . plus fans, the housekeeper, and anyone who happened to snatch one off a desk.
I wasn’t exactly narrowing things down.
I’ve said I don’t like knowing about my targets, but my employer this time had sent me a lot of information, much of it ex-traneous. The amount of background they knew, they had to be close to the target. I mean, this wasn’t the sort of stuff you could glean from press cuttings alone. They had to have known her pretty damned well. Either that or they’d been extremely thorough in their research.
None of which explained how they’d known the sorts of colors she’d be wearing on the day. I was back to family and the people she worked with. I had the idea I was going to have to go back to London and do some digging . . . but that would all depend on what Max had to say.
I settled my bill that night, since in the morning I intended starting off before breakfast. But the manageress wouldn’t hear of this, and was up at six to cook me bacon and scrambled eggs and boil some tea. She even sat with me as I ate, though I’d have pre-ferred to be alone.
“Long drive ahead of you?”
“Not really. Just a busy day.”
“I know all about that, sweetie.”
I smiled, but doubted this. As I left, Geronimo came out to the car with me, but then caught the scent of something better and trotted away. There was a heavy dew on the car, and the morning was raw, with clouds low and thick in the valleys and the roads wet. But the XR3i started at the first turn of the ignition. I had the .357 on the passenger seat, covered with the local free paper which I’d picked up in the bar last night. As I drove off, I knew I had a long walk ahead.
Max’s house sat in nine acres of moorland, the monotony broken only by the drystone dykes which divided the land into unused enclosures. The dykes had been built to give local employment during the hardest years of the 1920s. They were never intended to be put to any use. Max used those nearest his house as firing ranges, and had converted a long Dutch-style barn into an indoor range. The rest of the farm buildings had either been knocked down or left to fall in their own good time. Piles of rocks dotted what had been the farmyard. Max had graded them into large, middling, and small, for no good reason that I could see. But then he was always methodical, even with debris.
I stopped the car about a mile from the house and left it on the grass shoulder, then climbed over one of the walls and started walking. The grass was wet underfoot, and I wished I’d bought some boots. But better this than driving up to the house. You could hear a car from hundreds of yards away. Though I could see the house, I knew the kitchen faced onto the interior farmyard, not out over the moors. I counted fewer than a dozen trees in the whole expanse, and wondered how Bel could live here.
I’d pushed the Magnum into my trouser waistband, but the ground was so uneven I transferred it to my jacket pocket. I kept a hand on it as I walked. I’d noticed in the car that brown spots of rust were appearing on the barrel. That was the problem with a cheap gun, it wasn’t worth the maintenance.
Halfway across the first field, I stopped dead. I didn’t know if I was ready for this. It was a long time since I’d used a handgun, even as a means of threat. Besides, if Max didn’t have anything to do with it, I had a favor to ask of him . . . and of Bel.
Max no longer kept a dog. He thought animals belonged in the wild. There were no pets at all on the farm, though Bel was soppy about cats and dogs and horses. Everything was quiet as I clambered over the last wall onto the track. If Max kept to his regular schedule, he’d be in the kitchen just now, probably eating something macrobiotic. He was on a weird diet which he swore was keeping the cancer at bay. I walked around the side of the house and peered round the wall. The farmyard was silent. I could see Max’s Volvo station wagon parked in the barn, and behind it one of the human-shaped targets belonging to the indoor range. I took the Magnum from my pocket and walked to the kitchen door, turning the handle.
The kitchen had been gutted and redone about a year ago. It was all gleaming white tile and white appliances. Kept fanatically clean, it reminded me more of a hospital lab than a kitchen. And at its center, seated at a foldaway table, was Max. He was already dressed and had strapped his mask across his maimed cheek and jaw. He was trying to eat something brown and sludgy with a tea-spoon, and listening to the Today program on Radio Four.
“I wondered when you’d get here,” he said, not looking up.
He had one hand on his bowl, the other holding his spoon. He was showing me both hands so I wouldn’t get nervous. I wasn’t aiming the gun. It was hanging almost casually from my hand.
“Want some breakfast?”
“You don’t sound surprised to see me, Max.”
Now he looked up at me. “That’s some serious haircut, boy.
Of course I’m not surprised. I heard what happened. They said the police were on the scene just too late to stop the shooting. I knew what you’d think.”
“What would I think, Max?” I leaned against the sink, keeping my distance.
“Do you want some breakfast?”
“I’ve had some, thanks.”
“Tea?”
“All right.” He got up to fetch a mug from the rack. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“That’s because it’s a stupid question. I was waiting for you to come up with a cleverer one.” He shuffled back to the table with the mug. “Sit down, why don’t you? And put away that bloody awful revolver. It embarrasses me having to look at it. Bloody cheap Asian copy, you’d probably miss me even at six feet. How far out of alignment is it?”
“About half an inch at twenty yards.”
Max wrinkled his nose. “And it’s rusting. If you tried popping me with that, I’d more likely die of shame than anything.”
I smiled, but didn’t put the gun away. Max sighed.
“If not for me, then for Bel.”
“Where is she?”
“Sound asleep in her bed, lazy sow. Here, do you want this tea?”
I took the mug from the table and placed it on the draining board, leaning against the sink again.
“So,” said Max, “someone knew you were doing the hit, and they tipped off the police. Stands to reason it must have been me or whoever was paying you in the first place.” I nodded. He looked up at me again. “Well, it wasn’t me. I don’t blame you for being cagey, but it wasn’t. So all I can do is tell you how the job came about. A man phoned me, a greaseball called Scotty Shattuck. Do you know him?” I shook my head. “He was regular army, but got a fright or something in the Falklands. Collected a few ears as souvenirs, and when the army found out they dumped him back into society. He’s tried his hand at mercenary work since, trained some of the fighters in Sarajevo. He doesn’t have much of a rep, spends more time bouncing for nightclubs than doing short-arms practice.”
“Where does he live?”
“Don’t rush me, Mark. Shattuck said he had a client who was interested in having a job done. What he meant was someone had slipped him a few quid to find an assassin.”
“Why didn’t he just take the job himself ?”
“Maybe he pitched for it but the client knew his rep. Anyway, I said I’d need a few details, and we met in Leeds. He handed over a sealed env
elope, giving me the general info I gave to you when I phoned you.”
“How much did he know about the hit?”
Max shrugged. “The envelopes weren’t tampered with, but he could always have torn open the original envelopes, read the info for himself, and put it in a fresh envelope after.”
“Would he be curious enough to do that?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Shattuck would like to play with the big boys. He seemed to think I was some sort of pimp with a stable of snipers, asked if I’d give him a trial. I told him to behave.
And he did behave, too, except when payment time came.”
“Yes?”
“At our final meet, again in Leeds, he handed over the case.
The final details were there, but the cash was short. Two hundred short. He said it was his cut. I told him that was fine by me, but the person the money was going to wouldn’t be pleased. I asked him if two hundred was worth having to look over his shoulder the rest of his life and not go near windows.”
I grinned. “What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything, he just sort of twitched and sweated.
Then he took the money out of his pocket and handed it over.”
Talking was thirsty work for Max. He had a straw in his mug of tea and took a long suck on it.
“So where can I find him, Max?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, you must know.”
“I never needed to know. It was always him that contacted me.”
I raised the gun ever so slightly. “Max,” I said. I didn’t bother saying anything else. I was too busy looking at the kitchen doorway, the one leading to the hall and the rest of the house. Bel was standing there. She was wearing a short nightdress, showing very nice legs.
She was also pointing a shotgun at me.
“I know how to use it, Mark. Put away the gun.”
I didn’t move. “Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “If you’re going to be working for me, my name’s not Mark Wesley anymore. It’s Michael Weston.”
