Revenger

95

Through all this time Carver was driving south, first through South London, then the prosperous towns of north-east Surrey, and finally into the Sussex countryside. From time to time there would be a thump from the boot as Grantham tried to make his presence felt, but by and large he was undisturbed.

Carver’s main priority was just holding himself together until he reached his destination. Images of Alix’s mutilated body kept flashing, unbidden, into his mind. Great waves of emotion were rising up inside of him, tearing at his guts, ripping the breath from his lungs and filling his eyes with tears. The slightest thing could set him off: a pretty blonde on the street who just for a fraction of a second reminded him of Alix; a model on a billboard whose smile was a little like hers; a half-heard song from a passing car window. He needed to regain control of his thoughts and emotions, so he made a conscious effort to process the events that had brought him to this particular point. If he could look at the facts objectively, no matter how disturbing they were, perhaps he could come to terms with them.

In trying to save six people from violent attack, he had condemned far more people to death. By refusing to kill a helpless woman who was his enemy, he had condemned the woman he loved. Maybe this was karma: some kind of payback for all the violence and death he had doled out over the years.

Looking back, it seemed to Carver that, for as long as he could remember, he’d spent too much time doing things in which no man with any conscience could possibly take any pleasure. He’d done a lot of harm to an awful lot of people. Of course, it was satisfying to know that the vast majority of them had deserved it. He’d tried to make the world a marginally better or safer place, even if there was always someone else coming down the line determined to make it worse again. And it had been exciting sometimes. Carver was like anyone else who made their living doing something dangerous: he never felt more alive than when he was risking death.

He’d been lucky, too, he couldn’t deny it. He’d put himself in harm’s way time and again, yet somehow the Reaper had never come calling. He’d made a lot of money without ever having to work a regular week, spend all day in an office or grovel to a boss. On balance, as lives went, it hadn’t been a total waste of time.

He wondered, too, about the future. What would happen when a police officer, searching through Trent Peck’s flat, came across the discarded windcheater? Carver was reasonably sure that they would find the head cam. But how long would it take for anyone to work out what it was, still less examine its contents? And then what? The material that first Random and then he had recorded would answer any questions anyone might have about how and why the riot had occurred and what had led to the supermarket massacre. But it would take police officers of extraordinarily strong, incorruptible character to act upon the information revealed in the interrogations of Bakunin and Grantham.

If they decided that the two confessions had been extracted under duress, then the whole thing could be buried and no one would ever know what had really happened. On the other hand, if they had the courage to do their jobs properly, investigate in full and make the findings of their investigations public, the government was doomed. Cameron Young would end up in jail and the Prime Minister would be lucky not to join him. He would, at the very least, suffer lifelong disgrace. But then, inevitably, Mark Adams would triumph at the next election, and Britain would discover, once and for all, whether he was their saviour or their tyrant.

What was for the best? Carver was grateful that it was not his decision to make. He had found out what he wanted to know. He had put the information out there. From now on, it was someone else’s problem.

He passed a road sign that read, ‘Shoreham 6’. Not long now.

At Kennington police station, Keane was trying to make sense of the information she had just been given. She went on her computer and called Shoreham-by-Sea up on a map. She looked at the screen for less than ten seconds.

And then the penny dropped and she realized precisely why the Second Man was meeting Kevin Cripps at that particular seaside town.