Revenger

64

Carver had hit a brick wall. Now he needed a Plan B. He also needed a coffee to keep him awake and alert. There didn’t look to be anything open on the street except clubs and sex joints, but he found a Turkish café a few hundred metres away near the Berwick Street market. As he walked in he realized that the only other customers were the couple he’d met outside Soho Gold. Christ, he thought, giving them an embarrassed nod of acknowledgement, they must think I’m stalking them. He went up to the bar and ordered a double espresso and a glass of still water, no ice. The waiter behind the counter looked at him strangely and seemed nervous as he served him. No sooner had Carver paid him than he vanished into a back room, hurrying away as though to an unmissable appointment, like the White Rabbit in a grubby, neon-lit wonderland.

Carver took his coffee and water to a scuffed, dirty table and sat down on a rickety chair. He drank some coffee and sat for a minute or two, considering where to start. There were a number of issues to sort out. Was he going to keep trying to get to the bottom of the riot? Maybe he should go public with the stuff on the head cam: stick it on YouTube, or just give it to the cops. There was enough on that to make anyone realize that there had been some kind of conspiracy. Once that ball got rolling, with all the media chasing after it just as hard as the authorities, it wouldn’t stop until the whole truth came out. But his face was on that tape, too. He had to edit it… but where?

He needed somewhere to spend the night. It wasn’t just the camera footage. He’d already got an idea about how he was getting out of the country, but it would take time to put together. But first, before anything else, he needed information. He had to know how far the police had got, how close they were on his trail. Carver got out the iPad and waited for it to come to life. Then he opened Safari and went to the BBC website to check out the news.

And now he knew why the man behind the counter couldn’t wait to get away from him.

His picture was on the homepage of bbc.co.uk, beneath the headline: ‘Lion Market “Second Man” — Police Issue Picture of Suspect’. It was a photofit, but there was no mistaking the resemblance. And when Carver opened up the story the copy spoke of the suspect, ‘wearing dark-blue jeans and a long brown suede jacket, over a black waistcoat’.

A police spokesman was quoted: ‘This man is very dangerous. Members of the public should on no account approach him, but should call the Metropolitan Police at the first opportunity.’

It didn’t take a genius to work out that that was exactly what the waiter had just done. Carver tried to work out how long he’d spent sitting at his table before he’d logged on to the site. Five minutes? Could be ten, even? He thought about where the nearest twenty-four-hour police station was: somewhere off the Strand, if he remembered correctly. It wouldn’t take them long to get to Berwick Street, not in the early hours of the morning. Carver got up and walked towards the door. The Golden Girl glanced at him.

‘Just nipping out for a quick smoke,’ he said.

As soon as he was out of sight of the café Carver looked for the first large rubbish bin he could find. It was full to the brim and surrounded by discarded boxes and bulging garbage bags, but it would have to do. He emptied the pockets of his jacket and then dumped it in the bin, pushing it down as far as it would go before walking on up the road. At the corner he turned left, towards Carnaby Street, and started running hard. He could hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. He couldn’t afford to slow down.

Keane and Walcott were at the hospital, and none of the news was good. The armed officer who had been assigned to guard the intensive care unit had been found halfway up a staircase, trussed up like a dirty judge in an S & M dungeon. His G36 rifle was lying in pieces on the landing. His pistol was missing. And though the officer had tried his best not to admit it, the man who had done this to him had been unarmed. ‘Had’ was the operative word. Keane had to assume that the Second Man was now armed with a fully loaded Glock.

Both the officer and the ward sister confirmed that the man, who conformed exactly to the descriptions given by the Panus, had identified himself as a Ministry of Defence official called Andy Jenkins. Keane assumed that in this context ‘Ministry of Defence’ had the same relationship to the man’s real job — if he was genuine — as the Home Office IDs carried by MI5 agents, and the Foreign Office status of MI6. So now she had a dead ex-Marine and someone who either was or was posing as some kind of military intelligence operative. That was, at least, consistent with the genuinely terrifying skill set he had demonstrated over the past few hours, and it raised the even scarier prospect that there was government involvement in the evening’s events.

Keane prayed for anything but that. She’d seen enough in her job to rid her of most of her illusions, but she’d never thought that someone in power would be crazy enough to start riots in which tens of people were killed. Worse still, she could see no way in which she could follow that line of investigation without causing serious, even terminal, damage to her career.

The one person who might be able to shed some light on all this was the patient known as ‘Curtis’. Keane had recently received a call informing her that he was in fact an undercover police officer: real name and rank Detective Sergeant Kevin Mallinson. The ward sister revealed that he had been rendered unconscious by an extremely strong dose of a painkiller called fentanyl. Luckily, however, doctors had been able to revive him easily enough.

‘Good. Then I need to speak to him. Now.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ the sister replied. ‘And don’t give me a speech about dead children, or national security. I’ve already fallen for it once tonight, and it won’t make any difference. You still can’t talk to the patient.’

‘Why not?’ asked Keane, with barely suppressed irritation.

‘Because one of the side-effects of fentanyl is aphasia. Or to put it another way, you can ask your man all the questions you like. But he won’t reply. You see, he’s lost the power of speech.’

Jesus wept: was nothing going to go right tonight?

Keane’s phone rang. She ignored the glare of disapproval in the ward sister’s eyes and answered. It was Walcott. ‘The suspect’s been spotted.’

‘When, where?’ Keane asked, feeling her spirits rise. Maybe it wasn’t all lost, after all.

‘An all-night caff in Brewer Street. The owner called the helpline saying that he’d just had a customer come in who looked exactly like the photofit. Two units from Agar Street nick were immediately dispatched there, but the suspect had legged it. He must have been spooked because he went outside, saying he was going for a quick fag, and never came back.’

Keane’s spirits sank as fast as they’d surged. ‘Did we get anything — anything at all?’

‘Yeah, a little. A suede jacket was found in a dumpster just down the road. It resembled the one described by the Panus, and the people in the caff confirmed that the man they’d seen had been wearing it. It’s been sent to forensics for immediate examination. I told them to drop everything else and get straight on it. Hope that was the right call.’

‘Completely — a live suspect has to be a greater priority than dead victims.’

‘And there was one more thing,’ Walcott went on. ‘There were two other customers in the caff: a dancer from that strip joint Soho Gold and one of her customers. They said that they’d seen the man outside the club just a few minutes before he turned up in the caff. Seems like the bloke who runs the club, name of Danny Cropper, died about an hour ago. He had a sudden, fatal heart attack, right out of the blue. Then our man turns up and looks disturbed when he hears the news of Cropper’s death. The stripper thought they must have been friends or something.’

‘So he comes here waving an MOD pass under people’s noses. He incapacitates one of our men. He interrogates another officer before incapacitating him, too. Then he goes straight to the club, presumably looking for Cropper, and discovers that he’s just had a fatal heart attack. What the hell is going on?’

‘I don’t know, ma’am, but there’s something else. I’ve started looking into Cropper, and guess what he used to do for a living…’

‘Please don’t tell me that he was in the Royal Marines.’

‘Close. He was a warrant officer in the Parachute Regiment.’