Revenger

69

Shortly after seven o’clock Robbie Bell, who had already been up for over an hour, received a call from Hartley Crewson: ‘I presume you’ve seen the police pictures of the Second Man suspect.’

‘Of course,’ Bell replied. ‘And so will everybody who was in that restaurant last night. I can’t believe the police don’t know that he was sitting at dinner with Mark Adams.’

‘Well, we’ve had one stroke of luck. None of the blogs have picked up on it. There’s not even a grainy photo on Twitter.’

‘Then we need to make the first move. We have to be proactive, contact the police ourselves and then go public as soon as possible.’

‘Agreed. Get on to Adams immediately. Explain the situation. Tell him what has to be done, and then do it fast. You have to call the police before they call you.’

‘What’s your view on Sam himself? It sounds like you want him caught.’

‘Absolutely. I was thinking about it overnight. The fact is, we didn’t have any connection with him, and it was pure bad luck he turned up at your dinner table. The sooner he’s in a police cell, the sooner the facts can be independently verified.’

‘So you’re not planning anything more, ah… drastic, then?’

‘Good Lord, no!’ Crewson exclaimed. ‘What kind of man do you think I am? The last thing we want is for the public to discover that the prime suspect for the Second Man had dinner with Adams, only for him to turn up dead somewhere. Everyone would immediately blame us. Hell, no… I don’t want to harm a hair on that man’s head.’

Bell gave himself two minutes to fix a cappuccino before he called Adams. But before the milk had even stopped frothing, Adams was on the line to him.

‘What are we going to do?’ he asked.

Bell did not need to be told what his boss was referring to. ‘Go to the police immediately. Nip any hint of a conspiracy theory in the bud. Just think what it will look like: you having dinner with the Second Man, cracking open bottles of vintage Bordeaux… Well, it looks like a celebration, doesn’t it?’

Adams sounded perturbed. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Robbie, but there are just a couple of problems. For one thing, we don’t know for sure that Sam really was the Second Man. He might just bear an unfortunate resemblance to the real one. And then there’s the whole issue of me, an ex-Para, grassing up another old soldier. All those white working-class males you keep telling me we need to get voting for us won’t take kindly to that at all. From what I can see, there are plenty of people who think he was a hero for standing up to the rioters. If a load of them got killed, too bad; they were asking for it. That’s quite a common view, and I have to say I have some sympathy for it.’

‘Fine, then say so at the appropriate time. But right now we can’t afford to be standing up for him. “Let the courts decide” — that has to be our motto.’

‘I tell you what, though,’ mused Adams, conceding defeat. ‘That Alexandra Vermulen was a stunner. I’ll miss the chance of working with her, I must say.’

‘Maybe you can bring her in when you’re the next Prime Minister… which you won’t be unless I make the call. So, are we agreed?’

‘Yes, I can see you’re right. Make the call.’

Walcott was filling Keane in on the developments of the past few hours while she stood opposite him, chewing on a piece of toast. Once she was up to speed, he could head home for a very badly needed rest, but he’d saved the big news till last. ‘We got a tip-off, a waiter who works at—’

‘Hold on…’ Keane held up a hand. The phone had started ringing halfway through Walcott’s last sentence. She answered it and was astounded to hear Robbie Bell, Mark Adams’s campaign manager, telling her that his boss had been joined at dinner last night by a man introduced to him as ‘Sam’ who had looked exactly like the Second Man picture released by the police.

‘What was he doing at Mr Adams’s table?’ Keane asked.

‘He was invited as the partner of a political consultant from America, with whom Mr Adams was discussing the possibility of raising his profile as an internationally respected statesman on that side of the Atlantic.’

‘So who was this “political consultant”, then?’

‘Her name is Alexandra Vermulen, and she’s currently staying at the Hyde Park Palace Hotel. To the best of my knowledge, the man you want is there with her.’

‘That was Mark Adams’s campaign manager,’ Keane told Walcott a few seconds later. ‘Apparently he had dinner with our suspect last night.’

To her surprise, Walcott did not seem fazed by that extraordinary information. ‘I know. There was a witness. But how come Adams is coming straight to us before we’ve even tried to contact him? Suggests he didn’t have anything to do with the riot.’

‘Or he knows we’re going to find out about the dinner anyway, but this’ll make him look good.’

There was a forced, fake cough from behind Keane’s left ear. She turned to find a uniformed WPC holding out a piece of A4 paper on which a grainy photograph had been printed.

‘What’s that?’ Keane asked.

‘It came in a few minutes ago with a covering note that said this was a picture of the Second Man, taken shortly before four a.m.’ The WPC handed the piece of paper to Keane and went on: ‘As you can see, he’s entering a building. And you’re not going to believe it, ma’am, but it’s less than half a mile from here.’

‘Do we know who sent it?’

‘No, it was an email attachment from a Hotmail account. The sender’s name was just a jumble of numbers and names.’

‘Get the tech people to trace who it belongs to and where it was sent from. Tell them it’s their top priority.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Keane got straight on to her boss, Commander Stamford, to discuss the best way to handle the situation. There was absolutely no time to waste. Both leads had to be followed up as soon as possible. The suspect was presumed to be carrying the weapon taken from the armed officer at St Thomas’ Hospital. Since there was a possibility that he could be at either the hotel or the apartment block, both operations would require support from SCO19, the Met’s Specialist Firearms Command, the London equivalent to an American SWAT unit.

Still, they had to exercise extreme caution. As Stamford pointed out, ‘Wherever he is, there are going to be people about. So we can’t just go charging after him, guns blazing. We don’t want another slaughter on our hands.’

Keane was landed with the task of organizing a mission that was fast, heavily armed and, if necessary, violent, whilst making sure that the full requirements of health and safety, in terms of both the public and police personnel, were fully observed. And she still hadn’t managed to finish her toast.

Celina Novak didn’t give a damn about anybody’s safety apart from her own. If the completion of a mission involved collateral damage, so be it. As she set herself in the optimum position to take the shot when the moment came, she did not care how many bullets hit the wrong people, just so long as one of them took out Samuel Carver.

And when he was dealt with she would turn her attention to her dear friend and former comrade, Alexandra.

Robbie Bell hammered out a press release. It was headlined, ‘Mark Adams MP, Leader of the United People’s Party, Leads Police to Second Man Suspect.’

Beneath that the text read,

At approximately 7.30 a.m. this morning, a member of Mark Adams’s staff contacted the Metropolitan Police on his behalf to provide information as to the possible identity and whereabouts of the so-called Second Man suspect in the Lion Market Massacre.

Mr Adams believes that he encountered the suspect shortly after his triumphant and mould-breaking speech at the O2 Arena last night.

He will be giving a press conference at 10.00 a.m. at the headquarters of the United People’s Party, Shepherd’s Bush Road, London W6. Accredited media only.

He emailed the release to his entire address book, tweeted it, made it the morning’s status update on the party’s Facebook page and his own, and blogged it on the party’s official website.

Ten minutes later he was frantically calling every staff member who wasn’t already in work to get their arses into the office immediately, or the next thing they’d get from him would be their P45. The party office had a conference room with a lectern and UPP backdrop at one end that was perfectly adequate for most media briefings. But this was different.

‘I think we may have to find somewhere bigger for your press call,’ Bell told Mark Adams. ‘Like the Hammersmith Apollo.’