A Good day to die

35

I was in a darkened room, lying on my back on a single bed. The bed smelled clean. My jacket and shoes had been removed and a light duvet covered me. I tried to sit up, but the effort made me dizzy and I lay back down again. I felt my head. It had been expertly bandaged, but I didn't think I was in a hospital. There were no monitors beside the bed, no wires or drips, nothing like that. Just a plastic chair, which my jacket was neatly folded over, and a second wooden chair near the door. I looked at my watch. Ten past three in the morning. The curtains weren't pulled and outside the night was dark. I wondered where I was, and whether whoever had picked me up on the street earlier had seen the gun I was carrying, or informed the police.

I lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, trying to come to terms with my predicament. Who'd known that I was going to see Andrea Bloom? Emma had; so had Jamie Delly. I'd asked Emma not to say anything to Barron, but it was possible she'd let slip something. It was also possible that someone was bugging her phone. Theo Morris of Thadeus Holdings? Nicholas Tyndall? The list of suspects was still too long, but it was narrowing. Unfortunately, so were my options.

There was movement on the other side of the door and it opened. A slightly built black man in his sixties came in. He had a kindly face and I knew straight away that he wasn't going to give me trouble.

He smiled when he saw I was awake. 'I've got something for you,' he said in a quiet voice. The accent was West African. I'd worked with a Nigerian guy back in the late Eighties and he'd sounded very similar.

As he approached the bed, I saw that he was holding a small, horn-shaped flask made of some kind of wood. It had a metal lid on it, and looked old. With surprising strength, he lifted me up by the back of the head and propped me against the pillow. 'Drink this,' he whispered and placed the flask to my mouth, removing the lid.

I was thirsty and my mouth was dry, so I did as he said. The taste was unfamiliar but not unpleasant. Vaguely salty, like weak Bovril, but with an underlying sweetness as well. I glugged the whole lot down, and he removed the flask.

He stood there watching me for a few seconds. 'Do you start to feel better?' he asked at last.

I sat up further in the bed. 'Do you know what? I think I do.' And I did. The thickness in my head was dissipating fast and I suddenly felt far more alert. 'What is that stuff?'

'Medicine,' he said.

'It's a lot more effective than paracetamol. You ought to market it to the drugs companies.'

He continued to smile. 'Are you ready to get up? There is someone who would like to see you. He is in one of the other rooms.'

'Who is it?' I asked, slipping out of the bed and grabbing my shoes, but he ignored the question and opened the door, waiting while I pulled them on.

'Your jacket and gun will be safe in here,' he said, and beckoned me to follow.

Intrigued, and feeling better and better as the medicine or whatever the hell it was kicked in, I stood up and followed him out of the room, the dizziness slipping effortlessly away.

We were in a long corridor with expensive parquet flooring and doors to the left. To my right, a single long window offered a panoramic view of the blue darkness and occasional lights of the sleeping city at night. In the near distance were two tower blocks, surrounded by a carpet of low-rise buildings. I guessed that we were at least six floors above the ground ourselves. I tried to get my bearings, but I didn't recognize the view. I was somewhere in London, but that was about all I could tell you.

I walked along the corridor behind my new friend to another door. He knocked slowly three times, as if it was some sort of signal, and the door was opened by a tall, grim-faced black man who wore sunglasses even though the room behind him was only dimly lit. The man stood to one side, out of view, and my guide turned and beckoned me to follow him inside. I knew then, of course, who I was going to see and I wasn't sure whether I should have been thankful or petrified. Probably the latter, but I followed him into the room anyway, figuring that I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.

The room was huge, with windows on three sides, although black drapes had been pulled down to shut out the city's light. Candles on ornate holders of varying sizes had been lit all round the room, bathing it in a flickering glow. Shadows ran and jumped across the walls, from which strange, tribal masks and the heads of exotic animals stared out menacingly at all those who entered. Low futon-style sofas and large patterned cushions were scattered about the room, and at the far end, sitting on a low wicker chair with a high back like a throne, was a well-built and handsome black man somewhere in his early thirties, drinking what looked like a coffee and smoking a cigarette. Sitting like grim guardians on either side of the chair were two dolls, much larger than but very similar to the one that had been left on Emma's bed, which told me something I already knew.

The man in the chair smiled and motioned to one of the sofas next to him. At the same time, my guide left the room, shutting the door behind him, while the man in the sunglasses melted effortlessly into the shadows somewhere to my right.

I walked over to the sofa and slowly sat down on it. The man in the chair waited until I'd got myself comfortable before speaking.

'I'm going to assume you know who I am,' he announced in a pleasantly resonant North London accent.

'I think I can take a guess,' I answered, reaching into my shirt pocket for my cigarettes. They weren't there.

'Please, have one of these,' said Nicholas Tyndall, removing a pack of Marlboro Lights from the pocket of his own shirt — a black silk number — and lighting one for me. 'You might want to know why I had you brought here,' he suggested.

I said it wouldn't be a bad idea.

'You were in a bad way when my men picked you up. If we'd left you there, you would have been picked up by God knows who, and that may not have been such a good thing.' He paused for a moment while he took a drag on his cigarette, watching me with a playful expression. This was a man who oozed natural charisma. And menace, too. There was real menace emanating from where he was sitting. You knew that if you crossed this man, you were in a lot of trouble. Although maybe I was stating the obvious since any man who sits in a cavernous candlelit room surrounded by voodoo-like ornaments is going to be someone you'll want to stay on the right side of.

'As I heard it,' he continued, 'you'd just left a house containing a lot of dead bodies. People — innocent, I understand — who'd been murdered very recently. Their throats slit. Their heads bashed in.'

Not for the first time that day, I could hear my heart thumping. I cursed the fact that I'd left my gun in the other room.

'If the police had seen you lying on the pavement, they would have taken you in. Perhaps connected you to that house. Perhaps even connected you to other things. Who knows?'

Our eyes met and I held his gaze. There was something very unnerving in it. I felt that if you kept looking, you'd unearth grim secrets that you'd far rather not see. Behind him, the flickering shadows partly illuminated a tapestry of a man with a scythe in one hand and what looked like a sack of bones in the other.

'What do you want with me?' I asked at last, not at all sure I wanted to hear the answer.

'You've been observed asking questions,' he said, emphasizing the word 'observed'. 'Questions about the shooting of Asif Malik and Jason Khan. In fact, yesterday you threatened two of my men with a gun when you went round to visit Khan's brother, Jamie.'

'I didn't threaten them. I asked them to leave the premises.'

He smiled. 'No matter. They weren't being careful enough, and they were caught out. They'll learn their lesson. The fact is, Mr Kane… That is your name, isn't it?' There was a hint of laughter in his eyes when he said this, as if he knew damn well it wasn't. But I didn't rise to the bait.

'Well, the fact is, Mr Kane, the shooting of Messrs Malik and Khan has caused me a great deal of trouble. A lot of people — your friend Miss Neilson of the North London Echo included — seem to think that I had something to do with it. Since you've been asking questions in an unofficial capacity, and working, so far as I can see, a lot harder than the police, you must have your own ideas about who's responsible. Do you think it's something to do with me?'

'No,' I said, 'I don't.'

He took a deep breath that seemed to make him grow larger in the room, and his expression suddenly became very serious. 'Good, and by saying that you've answered your own question. The reason I had you brought here is because this whole thing is nothing — I repeat, nothing — to do with me. Jason Khan did some work for some people who know some other people who do some work for me, but I never met him when he was alive and consequently had no interest in seeing him dead. As for Malik, he was no danger to me. He had been involved in investigating my business affairs in the past, but as far as I'm aware that all ceased when he joined the National Crime Squad some months ago. And why would I want to kill a police officer, especially one who was such a high-profile target as Malik was? It would just put undue pressure on my business affairs, which is something I obviously don't want. I'm not interested in making enemies of the law, Mr Kane, but it seems that I have done, and that's why the focus of this police investigation is aimed at my associates and me, which is a state of affairs that I do not want to continue. The trouble is, everyone thinks I did it, which suits the true perpetrators of the crime just fine. However, if they could be uncovered, then the pressure on me would ease, would it not?'

'I guess it would,' I said, finishing my cigarette and stubbing it out in a cast-iron ashtray shaped like a hand, which was resting on the side of the sofa.

'And this is why I want to hire your services.'

For a moment, I was taken aback, but then it struck me that it seemed a logical request.

'How close are you to identifying the perpetrators?' he asked.

'I'm getting there.' I thought about the missing-girl lead I'd got from Dr Cheney. 'I've got something I want to follow up tomorrow, which may well get me a lot closer.'

'I see you carry a gun. A high-calibre one, too. But it only contains two bullets. Have you got any more?'

I told him I didn't.

'There are some dangerous adversaries out there. I can supply you with another gun, and some ammunition, plus a flak jacket. They may go some way to helping you survive.'

'I could do with some transport as well,' I said, thinking that a car might come in useful in the days ahead.

Tyndall nodded. 'That can be arranged. I'll also pay you five thousand cash. Another five if you unmask the people involved in killing Malik and Khan and gather the evidence needed to get the law off my back. Does that sound fair to you?'

I could have told him that I didn't work for anyone, that I was my own man, but in this game you've got to be a realist. Like I said, he was the sort of bloke it was best to stay on the right side of, and it wasn't going to make a great deal of difference to my investigation whether he was paying me or not. At least with him as my employer, I had someone backing me up.

'Yeah, it sounds fair. I'll take the job, but I want you to call the dogs off Emma Neilson. No more voodoo dolls through her letterbox or threats in the street.'

'I don't like upsetting women,' said Tyndall, sounding like he meant it, 'but that girl has caused me no end of problems. If you can get her to stop writing libellous articles, I'll leave her be.'

'You've got my word,' I told him. 'She's heading out of town tomorrow and she won't be back for a while. By the time she returns, this'll all be over.'

'You think so?'

'I'm sure of it.'

Tyndall leaned back in his seat, making himself comfortable. 'I hear you've also had a lot of trouble from people who want you out of the way.'

'You could say that.'

'I think I might have alleviated it somewhat.'

I raised my eyebrows. 'What do you mean?'

He smiled, and this time it was the smile of a predator. Then he leaned down and picked something up from behind the chair. It was the transparent mask worn by the killer of Andrea Bloom and her housemates, complete with black, protruding mouthpiece for breathing. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it was still attached to the killer's head — the exposed white neckbone jutting out from underneath the plastic.

Tyndall held the head by the neckbone and with his other hand removed the mask. Blondie — my nemesis since I'd arrived here four days ago (Jesus, was it only four days?) — stared dully across the room at me, his mouth slightly open, his face splattered with blood where they'd severed the head. Tyndall relinquished his grip on the bone and held the head up by its hair.

'When people fuck around with me,' he said, 'I fuck them around one hell of a lot worse. Do you understand what I'm saying?'

I looked at him, then at the head, then back at him. 'I think I'm beginning to get the picture.'

'Good.' He returned the head to the floor, out of sight. 'Before he died, this dog told us that he'd received his orders to go to the house tonight from a man called Theo Morris, who was apparently his employer. Does this man's name mean anything to you?'

'It does. He works for a company called Thadeus Holdings.' I motioned in the direction of where he'd put the head. 'Did he say why he didn't try to kill me tonight?'

Tyndall seemed surprised by that. 'I thought he did try to kill you.'

I shook my head. 'He tried to beat me up a bit and knock me out, then he deliberately dropped the murder weapon next to me. I'm assuming he wanted me and it found by the police at the scene so I could be set up for the killings.'

Tyndall shrugged. 'I don't know anything about that.'

'I'll find out,' I said. 'I'm going to be questioning Theo Morris in the next couple of days. I'd appreciate a clear run at him.' There was a heartbeat's pause while we looked at each other. 'In other words, I don't need any help.'

'All right. However, I expect to hear from you every day with progress on how you're doing. What's your phone number?'

I told him. He nodded but made no effort to write it down.

'When you leave here tonight you'll be supplied with an encrypted email address. Send your progress reports to that address. If we need to get hold of you, we will. Now, how are you feeling?'

'Good,' I said, touching my head. 'Surprisingly good. What kind of medicine did your friend give me downstairs?'

Tyndall's smile was amused this time. 'Have you ever heard of Muti, Mr Kane? It's a form of African medicine, and those who follow it believe that if you remove the body parts of a person as they die, those parts can be used to make some very potent medicine. When taken, they can give the recipient untold strength. Particularly when the body parts belong to a fallen enemy.' The smile grew wider and I looked away, hoping he was joking. 'Claude, can you show Mr Kane out? And make sure we get a car brought round. One that can't be traced.'

Tyndall stood up. So did I, but with a little less conviction than I'd displayed when I'd got out of bed a few minutes earlier. 'You'll have to excuse me,' he said. 'I'm a little tired tonight. It was good to meet you.'

He put out a hand — the one that had been holding Blondie's head by the neckbone — and because I was still wearing my gloves, I reluctantly shook it.

'I wish I could say the same,' I answered, turning round and following the guy with the sunglasses out of there. I was led back along the corridor, past the room I'd been in and round the corner to a lift. There, the man who'd given me the medicine appeared, and with his customary smile placed a silk blindfold over my eyes. I was taken down to the ground floor, where I was kept standing in silence for a few minutes. Finally I was ushered through a door and out onto the street. A car pulled up and I was helped into the front passenger seat and informed not to remove the blindfold until I was told. Then the car pulled away.

Ten minutes later, permission was given. I took the blindfold off and opened my eyes. I was being driven by a young white man I didn't recognize along the Euston Road past St Pancras Station.

'Where do you want dropping off?' he asked.

I told him Paddington, and he continued driving in silence through the bare night streets before pulling up outside the station fifteen minutes later.

'It's all yours,' he said, getting out of the car and leaving the engine running. 'There's a holdall in the boot with all the stuff you've been promised.' He shut the door and walked round the back, jumping into another vehicle that had stopped behind us.

I clambered across into the driver's seat and watched as they pulled away, turned left and disappeared from sight, leaving me wondering whether the whole night had been some strange and terrible dream.