Private London

Chapter 115

I stood by the window, watching Alison Chambers walk to her car once more.

A week had passed. She still swung her hips, still flipped the bird at me over her shoulder as she got into the driver’s seat. Nothing had changed, it seemed, but everything had.

Like I say, some cases you win, some you lose – and some you win but it doesn’t feel like it.

I had killed a woman and that wasn’t something you just shake off like the rain from your hair.

I remembered the noise, the shouting, the mayhem. At the time I had let it wash past me. But it still visited me in my dreams at night. I knew how that worked, though. In time it would pass. My hands might have been bloody but my conscience was clean. I had done the job I had been paid to do.

When I hadn’t made contact as agreed, Sam had called the contact in the USAF based at HMS Warrior a mile away that Jack Morgan had given us and had come in ahead of them. They weren’t far behind him. The Palestinians took two more casualties before they were overrun. Score three for democracy, nil for terrorism, I figured. Only, like I say, it didn’t feel like that.

Men in black suits arrived. In the old days they would have been CIA and MI5. Nowadays it was Homeland Security for the US of A and some unknown quasi-military unit sanctioned by the Home Office for us. Either way, it was like a Mafia clean-up crew sent in to eradicate evidence, dispose of the bodies.

The professor and the remaining members of her team who were still alive – including Ashleigh Roughton, the CUL rugby captain – were spirited away. Turned out that Roughton thought the professor was in love with him as well.

As far as the suits were concerned – officially, we were never there. Del Rio and I left to settle matters with Brendan Ferres. Harlan Shapiro was taken to be reunited with his daughter and they were booked on a hastily scheduled jet to fly them straight back to the States first thing in the morning.

I never saw either of them again.

Part of me felt that Hannah should have stayed behind to face some sort of music for the sequence of events that she had set in motion. Mostly, though, I felt glad that it was all over. Hannah and her father were back under the watchful eye of Jack Morgan. They were his concern now.

I turned and looked at Bogart and Bacall. Marlowe looked like he was judging me, as ever. I didn’t care. It was Friday evening, I had the weekend ahead of me and once again Dan Carter had a date lined up. I smiled at Bacall. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’