Revenger

66

Carver headed south, towards the river, moving fast to keep himself warm. Along the way he called Grantham. The phone was answered with a tired, irritable, ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Carver.’

Suddenly Grantham was wide awake. ‘Where are you?’

‘London. I had that drink tonight. The one I told you about.’

‘Yes.’

‘So now you know what happened.’

‘Yes. What do you plan to do about it?’

‘I’d hoped to find out who set everything up. But they’re cleaning up the trail. There was a man called Cropper, ran a strip joint, Soho Gold. He was definitely involved in it, but I don’t know how exactly, owing to the fact he just happened to die of a sudden heart attack minutes before I could get to him. He needs a seriously thorough post-mortem, to see what actually killed him.’

‘I’ll look into it. Meanwhile, you realize the entire Metropolitan Police force is after you?’

‘Yeah, I’d gathered.’

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘I’ve got an idea, but I need a place to hang out, just for a few hours… just long enough to work a few things out and get a couple of hours’ rest. I was wondering about that flat you had in Lambeth. The one I used before. Is anyone in it?’

‘Not at the moment. But it’s locked. You’ll never get in.’

‘Yes I will. I never gave you back the keys.’

Grantham managed a dry, exhausted chuckle. ‘Come to think of it, you didn’t.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be gone in the morning; eight or nine at the latest.’

‘When you say gone…’

‘I mean really gone. For good… I don’t have much of a choice.’

‘With a supermarket full of dead bodies, no, you don’t.’

‘So, anyway… it’s been, ah…’

‘Yes, it has. Goodbye, Carver.’

The line went dead. There was no point in long-drawn-out farewells. Carver understood that Grantham was a practical man. He was helping him get away because it suited him to do so. After that he was cutting him loose. That was fair enough. They were both in the same business. They both understood that you couldn’t have real friends. You just had some contacts that you disliked less than the rest of them. So there were no hard feelings. Feelings didn’t come into it.

Carver kept walking. He stopped at a number of cash machines along the way, using a series of different cards to draw more than one thousand five hundred pounds in total. On every occasion he kept his head tilted away from the CCTV camera monitoring the machine. At one point he came within one hundred metres of the Agar Street police station, several of whose officers were still combing the area near the café in Berwick Street, looking for him. On the corner of Trafalgar Square and Northumberland Avenue he went into a Tesco twenty-four-hour store and bought coffee, porridge oats, milk, nuts and raisins. Along with the chocolate he’d bought in the Lion Market earlier, that was enough basic nutrition to keep him going all day. To this he added a razor, shaving foam and a packet of dark-blonde hair-colouring mousse.

Something had been bothering Carver: an element of his appearance he’d forgotten to deal with. At the checkout he asked for an extra plastic bag, and when he got out on the pavement, he stuck his satchel in it. A delivery van pulled up right by him. The driver had a bundle of early-edition morning papers next to him on the front seat. As he carried them into the store, Carver caught a fleeting glimpse of a single front page, but he saw enough to know he was on it. Thank God for short winter days, the darkness that still afforded him some protection, and the deep shadows cast by the tramp’s floppy hat.

When he reached the Embankment he walked across the Thames on the Hungerford footbridge. Even in these bad times the view past the South Bank complex and the Tate Modern gallery, across the bend in the river towards the City and St Paul’s on the far side, was still magnificent. The cathedral’s dome was a comforting reminder that some things remained as symbols of solidity and permanence long after all the people who tried to tear civilization down had departed.

He walked past the rundown, half-empty terrace of restaurants and shops that ran alongside the Festival Hall and past Waterloo Station, heading for the flat he and Grantham had discussed: a grubby, decrepit apartment that was used as an occasional safe house in a development halfway between the station and the Imperial War Museum. It was about as welcoming as a prison cell, and rather less tastefully decorated, but Carver had a few good memories of the place.

Once inside, Carver went into the bathroom, covered his head with mousse and — thanking God that the flat was not equipped with any surveillance cameras — put a plastic bath cap on his head to keep the colourant in place. He fixed himself a cup of instant coffee — a poor substitute for the espresso he’d had to leave behind at the café. Then he cooked up the milk and porridge oats, pouring a large helping of raisins and nuts into the mix and stirring it all together. He ate it all straight from the pan, finished the coffee and then went back to the bathroom and rinsed the gunk out of his hair. There was a single thin, dirty towel hanging on a rail by the bath. Carver rubbed it over his head a few times and then waited for his own body-heat to finish the job, scuffing his fingers through his short-cropped hair a few times, just to hurry everything along.

He looked in the bathroom mirror. His hair was several shades lighter; not blond exactly, so much as a pale, nondescript, mousey brown. The kind of colour a witness would find difficult to describe.

Next he shaved his temples and forehead, giving himself a receding hairline, which he emphasized by shaving a large bald spot on the crown of his head and then chopping at the remaining hair around it to make it look thin and uneven. He looked in the mirror, slumping his shoulders, letting his stomach muscles relax into a little pot belly, slackening his facial expression and drooping his lips. He practised a weedy, nasal London accent, channelling the sound of David Beckham in one of his early interviews. The man who now greeted him in the mirror was no one’s idea of a trained killer, capable of taking on a mob single-handed. He was a loser, an invisible man, of no interest whatever to males or females alike.

So that was one job done. Now to get on with the rest.

The flat where Carver was doing his best to make himself untraceable was less than half a mile from the Kennington nick where the police were still working to trace him. Keane had gone home to get some rest, leaving Walcott in charge. So he was the one who got the call from forensics regarding the brown suede jacket, found in Berwick Street.

‘There was gunshot residue on both sleeves, and blood spatter, too. We’re just collecting DNA to see if it matches any we get from the bodies out on Netherton Street or in the supermarket.’

‘So this was the shooter, then?’

‘Most probably. It’s like Cinderella’s slipper. Find the man who fits this jacket and you’ve got your killer.’