Private London

Chapter 26

It took me a moment or two to realise that someone had slid their hand into my own and was squeezing it.

Sympathetically. As a friend would. I turned round, a little dazed, shaking my head as if to clear my brain from the dark thoughts that were dancing around inside it.

‘Who is she?’ asked Alison Chambers.

‘She’s my god-daughter,’ I said.

‘I didn’t know you had a god-daughter.’

‘I don’t. Not really. “Godfather” was kind of a nickname she had for me. I was an unofficial godparent – a guardian angel, she would call me. Teasing me.’ I shook my head again. ‘Some guardian angel.’

‘So who is she?’

‘Her name’s Chloe, Alison. Chloe Smith.’

‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘You remember my best man at the wedding?’

‘The wedding I wasn’t invited to!’ she said pointedly

I nodded, thinking back. It was a year before the Second Gulf War. May the twenty-first 2002. Richard Smith had just made captain and I was getting married. A double celebration.

I remembered looking over my shoulder at the people who had filled every seat in the room. Some more had had to stand at the back. Admittedly it wasn’t a large room. On one side, dotted among the civilians, a number of men and women in the full-dress rig of the RMP and on the other side of the divide, and likewise among the civilians there, the blue serge uniforms of the capital city’s finest.

There was a bit of a low murmur and I turned back to face the serious-looking minister who was giving me an unimpressed look.

‘And do you, Daniel Edward Carter, take Kirsty Fiona Webb to be your lawful wedded wife?’ he said.

I looked across at the woman standing next to me. Her jet-black hair cut in a bob that would have put Louise Brooks to shame. Her brilliant green eyes sparkling, her Cupid’s-bow lips painted a dark red, the 1920s gown she was wearing a miracle of lace and white satin hugging her toned body like a second skin. Cliche, I know, but she had never looked more beautiful to me. If I was Eric Clapton I could have written a song about it. But I wasn’t. I was Sergeant Dan Carter of the Royal Military Police and I was about to marry the girl of my dreams – Police Constable Kirsty Webb of the Metropolitan Police.

‘I do,’ I said and beamed at her.

It wasn’t, on reflection, the best of times for my mobile phone to ring. The shrill retro sound of an old telephone bouncing off the walls.

‘Sorry, I thought I’d turned it off,’ I mumbled as I fumbled the phone out of my pocket. But Kirsty was too quick for me and grabbed the phone out of my hand like a heron spearing a trout. She looked at the phone, turned it off, threw it to the side and slapped me hard across the face.

Behind me I could hear my best man fighting hard to suppress a laugh. But Kirsty fixed him with a basilisk stare and any thought of laughter disappeared like a candle flame snuffed out in a high wind. She turned back to her uncle, the minister.

‘Get on with it, then,’ she said.

The minister, Reverend Crake, cleared his throat and then smiled at her. ‘And do you. Kirsty Fiona Webb, take Daniel Edward Carter as your lawful wedded husband?’

She waited long enough to twist the hook and then nodded. ‘I do,’ she said.

It hadn’t been the best omen for our marriage.

I remembered Richard Smith’s amused, laughing eyes that day. And then I looked down at his daughter’s eyes nine years later. Closed now. Machinery keeping her alive.

I’d find the sons of bitches who’d done this to my beautiful god-daughter and make them pay, I swore to myself.

Or I’d die trying.