A Good day to die

17

I woke up the next morning with a sore head. It was difficult to tell whether it was courtesy of the whacks on it I'd received the previous morning, or the six pints of Pride I'd consumed on what was pretty much an empty stomach the previous night. Either way, I knew I needed some sustenance. I lay where I was for a while, my feet sticking out the end of the bed, mulling over whether it was worth going back to sleep for a few minutes or not, but the sound of kids running about and shouting in the corridor and the banging of doors coming from the floor below convinced me that it wasn't. I leaned over and picked up my watch from the floor. Five to nine. Late, for me.

I rose from my pit and showered and dressed, before heading into the big wide world. The weather outside was cold, grey and wet, and not unexpected for the time of year, but I didn't fancy spending very long in it, not now my blood had thinned from my time in the tropics. I found a newsagent's, bought the Sunday Times, Independent and News of the World, then ducked into an Italian cafe a couple of doors down and ordered a chicken-salad ciabatta with orange juice and coffee.

I ate in a booth next to the window while I read the papers. There wasn't a lot of interest: more violence in the Middle East; further warnings of the threat of Al Qaeda suicide bombers in London; a big article in the Sunday Times about pensions, the gist of which was that anyone retiring in twenty years wasn't going to have one. Which might have been true, but who wants to read about it over their cornflakes on their day of rest?

Only in the News of the World did I find any mention of my kidnapping and subsequent escape the previous day, and even that was very indirect. Under the headline DOG SLAIN DEFENDING MASTER on page five, there was a short piece describing how 'brave Alsatian' Tex and his owner, Ralph Hatcher, fifty-four, had stumbled across a suspected drug deal gone wrong while walking in woodland in Hertfordshire. The two of them had then been savagely attacked by several of the thugs involved, and Tex had died defending his master. Mr Hatcher had received facial injuries but had been discharged from hospital after treatment. And that was it, really. There was a photograph of a dog who may or may not have been Tex (it was hard to tell) staring at the camera with his tongue lolling out, but no photo of Hatcher. Obviously he wasn't interesting enough.

When I'd finished the ciabatta, I lit my first cigarette of the morning and smoked it all the way down to the butt. Did it taste good? Sure it did. Good enough for me not to feel guilty about it, anyway. I thought about phoning Emma, but it was still pretty early and I knew she wouldn't have anything for me yet. She'd probably still be in bed, and good luck to her. If you couldn't rest on a Sunday, when could you?

Instead, I ordered myself another coffee, lit cigarette number two and thought about my position. Emma Neilson had an inside link to the investigation of Malik's murder, and her information about the unnamed gangster was probably accurate. This guy clearly had a lot of resources at his disposal, including at least one copper working on the case, as well as the ability and ruthlessness to have a number of people killed. Obviously, I was going to have to find out who he was, but what then? He was a big player, which meant he was going to have serious protection. I remember once visiting the home of a major North London crime lord, Stefan Holtz, to question him in connection with the shooting of a business rival, and having to go through two sets of wrought-iron gates topped with barbed wire and a metal detector at the front door, and past at least ten moody-looking blokes in suits and half a dozen CCTV cameras before we finally got face to face with him in his office at the back of the house. Even then he sat ten feet away from us and four of his men remained in the room. People like that had enemies, and they weren't stupid. They took precautions. I was up against someone similar, someone I didn't even know, and all I had was a.45 revolver and six bullets. It didn't have the makings of a fair fight.

But that, of course, was the challenge.