A Good day to die

8

The wind hit me with an icy slap as I stepped out of the Terminal Three building at Heathrow, hopelessly underdressed in a light jacket and shirt. It was seven o'clock on a bitter Friday night in early December, and a few yards away, beyond the panels sheltering the entrance from the worst of what nature had to offer, a driving rain fell through the darkness amidst the crawling traffic.

England in winter. What the hell had I been thinking of, coming back here? On the plane over, I'd found it difficult to keep a lid on my excitement at the prospect of returning home after such a long time away, even though my business here was hardly pleasure. Now, however, the enthusiasm was dropping as fast as my body heat as I stood outside in temperatures hovering only just above freezing, looking every inch the ill-prepared foreign tourist. I needed to get into the warmth, and fast. An announcement in the terminal had informed everyone that the Heathrow Express to London was currently out of service due to an incident at Hounslow, which probably meant some selfish bastard had jumped under a train, so I joined the queue of shivering, bedraggled travellers at the taxi rank, feeling vaguely paranoid that I might run into someone who knew me from the past, but confident that my disguise was working. No one had questioned me at immigration. I'd given the guy my passport, held in the name of Mr Marcus Kane; he'd taken one brief look at it and me, and that had been that. Not even a second glance. I was back.

It took ten minutes before my turn came, and I was fading fast as I got into the back of the black cab and asked the driver to take me to Paddington. He pulled away without saying anything and headed for the M4, jostling for position on the overcrowded Heathrow sliproad.

The traffic was as horrific as the weather. All three lanes heading into London were moving at no more than ten miles per hour, with plenty of stopping and starting, with the occasional angry honk of frustration drifting through the wind and rain. It was the same going the other way, maybe even worse, since the bulk of the vehicles were escaping the city, not entering it. I'd forgotten how overcrowded the south-east of England was. In the Philippines, outside the maelstrom of Manila and southern Luzon, the pace is slow, and what roads there are are generally empty. Here, it's as if the whole population's on the move, fighting each other for that most precious of commodities: space. We hadn't gone two miles before I decided that, whatever happened here, I'd be heading back to the Philippines afterwards. I'd needed to come back, if only to see what I was missing; but having seen it, I was quickly realizing that it wasn't a lot.

The cab driver was like a lot of cab drivers. Having broken the ice by asking me where I'd come from and got an answer (I told him Singapore, hoping it sounded boring enough that he wouldn't want to ask anything more about it), he took my answer as an invitation to talk, and quickly regaled me with his views on immigration (too much), taxes (too high) and crime (rampant). This last bit interested me a little, because I hadn't heard much recently about crime levels in the UK. I got the big stories, but not the overall picture. The driver told me it had gone through the roof since Labour had been returned to power, especially crimes of violence. 'I'll tell you, mate, you're twice as likely to get mugged in London than New York these days. Probably more. If you ain't been here for a while, you want to watch yourself, I'm telling you.'

I told him I would, and allowed myself a little smile. It wasn't that I didn't believe him, but where crime was concerned I remember the cab drivers saying exactly the same thing in the Seventies, the Eighties and the Nineties. They said it in Manila too. Maybe crime was rampant, but who could honestly remember a time when it wasn't?

Eventually our crawling, rain-splattered progress sapped even the cabbie's strength, and he lapsed into a bored silence while I stared out of the window and into the dark, wondering how I was going to get my investigation started. It wasn't as if I was a police officer any more, so I had no resources I could call upon for help. But I did have several key advantages. I knew who I was looking for, and I wasn't working within the constraints of the law. One thing that had always bugged me when I'd been a copper was knowing that the bad guys consistently had the upper hand. We not only had to find them, but we also had to gather huge amounts of evidence to bolster our case, even when we knew damn well that they were guilty. As often as not — particularly when a criminal knew what he was doing — those huge amounts of evidence simply weren't available, and our suspect walked free. Slippery Billy West was a case in point.

I had no doubt that Les Pope would also be a very difficult individual to pin down, from a copper's point of view, because as a lawyer he'd know how to work the system. With me, though, things would be different. I wasn't afraid to hurt him if he didn't help me. I might well hurt him, even if he did. But I had to be careful. Locating him wouldn't be hard, but it was important I played things just right. I wanted to find out who else was involved in Malik's murder without alerting anyone to what I was doing, and without getting Tomboy in trouble. It wouldn't be easy. But then I'd known that when I decided to come back.

The journey to Paddington took the best part of an hour and cost me almost sixty quid. Sixty quid would have got me from Manila to Malaysia and back again with a Filipino cab driver. It made me wonder what had happened to the low inflation they've been banging on about for so long.

I got the driver to drop me at the station, just in case my face ever appeared on TV and he remembered me, and paid him using three twenties. I then stood by his window waiting for the one pound twenty change, thinking there was no way I was going to tip him for a service that had cost so much, even though the bastard was giving me a look that said one pound twenty was the least he expected for so kindly transporting me from A to B. He continued to give me the look until I told him that I'd start charging for my own wasted time unless he hurried up. Reluctantly, he fished the coins out of his pocket and slapped them into my open hand. 'Tight ass,' I heard the cheeky bastard mutter.

I felt like saying something in return — after all, too many people get away with too much in this life — but decided that not drawing any attention to myself was probably the best option. I turned away, heading in the direction of Lancaster Gate.

I'd had a girlfriend round here once, back in the late Eighties, not long after I'd come out of uniform. Liz, her name had been, and she'd been a part-time model; a real beauty who ordinarily would have been way out of my league, but a sweet person with it. We'd met after she got mugged and sexually assaulted while going to visit a friend on my home patch of Islington, and I was assigned the case. The relationship then hadn't exactly started in the best of circumstances, but something between us had evidently clicked, and after I'd been to her flat on a couple of occasions to update her on the case's progress, we'd begun an affair. Or sort of affair, anyway, since one side-effect of the assault was that she felt unable to have sex with a man. Instead, she just wanted to be held and kissed, and for a while that suited me fine. I could think of a lot worse ways of spending my time than cuddling up to a beautiful woman in a nice apartment with a good bottle of wine, but eventually — inevitably, I suppose — I got frustrated. She was seeing a psychiatrist and told me that she was on the mend — we even tried it one night, but at the crucial moment she broke down in tears and pushed me away — and a few days after that, I said that maybe it would be best if we went our separate ways. She begged me to give it a little more time, but I was young and I was selfish and in the end that's a fatal combination. I met up with her once after that, to tell her that we were winding down on the case in the absence of any leads. She took the news stoically enough and told me that she was leaving London. I never saw her again, and it was only now, for the first time in years, that I thought about her. I wondered briefly as I crossed Praed Street what had happened to her, and whether she'd put the past behind her and got the kids she'd always said she wanted, or whether her life was still crippled by the after-effects of that one night. My heart hoped it was the former, but my head was convinced otherwise. She'd been that sort of girl, and I've always been that sort of pessimist.

I found accommodation in Norfolk Square, a quiet area of fading Georgian townhouses, the majority of which had been transformed into hotels of varying quality, situated a short walk from the station. I chose one of the cheaper-looking ones and went inside.

The man behind the desk, who was either Turkish or Arabic and who showed a comforting lack of interest in me, wanted twenty-five pounds per night up front. I said I wanted a room for a week and asked what discount that entitled me to. Eventually, after carrying out some silent calculations on a slip of paper in front of him, he grunted that it would cost me a hundred and twenty if I paid him straight away. I didn't bother going to take a look at the room first. I had no doubt that it would be none too pretty, but then I wasn't planning to spend much time in it, so I counted out the money and placed it in his outstretched hand. He pulled a key from one of the hooks behind him and handed it to me. And that was that. It made me think that most people tend to talk too much, and that there was something to be said for brusqueness.

I hauled my case up two flights of very steep, narrow stairs to my room, and wasn't surprised to discover that it was small, bare, and not very warm either. The paintwork, done in a long-ago off-white, was dirty, nicotine-stained, and full of bumps where the roller had gone straight over the original wallpaper, and there were ancient cobwebs fluttering in each corner of the ceiling. From outside came the rhythmic clatter of a train entering Paddington station; the wooden window-frame rattling in unison. It might have worked out at less than twenty quid a night, but I didn't feel like I was getting good value for money, especially when I reminded myself of the fact that our place on the beach in the Philippines worked out at nearer ten. And you got breakfast and use of the pool there as well.

But by this point I was too tired and jetlagged to care. My journey, which had begun that morning in Manila, had taken me across eight time zones, and although it was now eight thirty in the evening in London, it was actually four thirty the following morning for me and I badly needed to sleep.

I chucked the case on the bed, switched on the radiator and slowly unpacked while I waited for the room to heat up. As I did so, I tried to shut out the distinct feeling of anticlimax that had been slowly enveloping me ever since I'd been stuck in the taxi on the M4. For years this city had been my home. I'd worked, played and lived in it; had killed and made love here; seen much of the good but more of the bad. But always I'd felt that I belonged; that the city was a part of me. But tonight it was different. Tonight I felt like a stranger visiting for the first time. There was none of the familiarity I'd been expecting, no explosion of memories as the taxi crossed the boundaries and the familiar buildings sprang up like monoliths on either side of the road. Only the odd, unsettling sensation that my time here was something from another, barely remembered life.

I decided to have a shower and clean up a bit, then hit the sack and start everything tomorrow when I was more refreshed and less depressed. The city, I knew, would look a lot better in the morning.

I was halfway out of my clothes and waiting for the dilapidated shower unit to hit a temperature that neither burned strips off my back nor froze my balls off, when my mobile phone rang.

I strode into the bedroom, and pulled it out of the pocket of my jacket. I'd bought it the previous day in Manila, and only one person was aware of the number: Tomboy Darke. But as soon as I looked at the screen and saw that there was no incoming number showing, I knew it wasn't going to be him.

I pressed the Call Receive button and put the phone to my ear.

'Mr Kane, good evening.' The words were delivered slowly and with authority in an accent that was unmistakably middle-class London, and north of the river if memory served me right.

'Sorry, I think you've got the wrong number. I don't know a Mr Kane.'

'Really?' he said. 'Somehow I believe you do. My name's Pope. I think we should meet up. I've got a feeling we've got a lot to talk about. Don't you?'

'Let's make it tomorrow morning,' I said, pissed off that the element of surprise was gone, and way too tired to see him now. Tomboy must have talked, but why? Surely he'd have known he was putting me in potential danger.

'I'd prefer tonight. I don't want you to have to hurry tomorrow for the plane you've got to catch.'

'Which one's that?'

'The one taking you back to where you belong.'

I didn't bother rising to the bait. 'Well, tomorrow it's going to have to be. Take it or leave it.'

'In that case, I'll take it. There's a cafe in Islington, off the Pentonville Road. It's called the Lantern. Meet me there at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. I'll be sitting at the corner table on your left as you go in, next to the window.'

'What do you look like?'

'You'll know who I am,' he said, and rang off.

I stood there for a moment, still holding the phone while I thought things through. It seemed that Tomboy hadn't given Pope my real name, but what if he'd described me? I couldn't believe that the bastard — someone I'd known for years, someone I had to admit that I trusted — had blown my cover. Maybe he was frightened I'd hurt Pope and cut off what was obviously turning into quite a lucrative little sideline. Or maybe I was being cynical, and he was just looking out for me. By telling Pope what I intended, he might just be trying to get things straightened out before they went too far, and get me back on the plane to Manila without anyone coming to any harm.

Either way, though, he'd betrayed me, and I couldn't forget that. It's funny how people you think you know can react when the going gets a little tough. I tried his number, but it was early in the morning and he wasn't answering. I didn't leave a message, but instead tried the lodge in the hope that someone on night duty might pick up. But no one did, and eventually I hung up, hoping that the start I was having wasn't the shape of things to come.