Severed

31

When I step out of the pub pretty much exactly forty-five minutes later, having eaten a high-quality chilli con carne with garlic bread and a mixed leaf salad, washed down with a pint of orange juice and lemonade, Lucas is just pulling up in his BMW.

I jump inside.

'You've been in the pub?' says Lucas, his tone incredulous. He's wearing a black sweater and dark jeans, along with a pair of leather gloves. With his chiselled good looks, he reminds me a little of the Milk Tray man.

'Don't worry,' I answer, 'I haven't been drinking.'

'But in that shirt? The thing's in pieces. Here, I've brought you this.'

He reaches down and produces a sweater similar to the one he's wearing, and a navy Foster's baseball cap. I put them both on as he pulls away and thank him once again for coming. He tells me that that's what friends are for, although I think he's gone well above and beyond the call of duty on that particular score.

I give him Eddie Cosick's address, and he feeds it into the car's GPS system.

'Did you find out anything about him?' I ask.

'A little. Like a lot of these guys he tries to keep a low profile, but I talked to a police contact, and it seems he's got his fingers in a lot of very illegal pies, not just people trafficking and prostitution. There's heroin and arms smuggling as well. And if you cross him, you pay for it. Last year, one of his people stole some money from the organization. The story goes they fed the guy feet first through an industrial mincer. Turned him into sausage meat.'

I think about my chilli con carne. It's not a pleasant thought.

'But there's nothing that might suggest what's in that case I was delivering?'

He shakes his head. 'Everything I found out about him is supposition. Cosick doesn't get close to the coalface, and he's got no convictions. I can't get hold of a photo of him either.'

'It's all right,' I say, 'I know what he looks like.' Although I wonder if I actually do, since I've only got Alannah's word for that. 'What about the guns?' I ask after a pause.

'We've got a slight problem there,' Lucas tells me. 'I've brought them with me, but they're not loaded. I thought I had bullets somewhere, but I don't, and the ones that were in there originally are rusted to shit. We'll look the part, but we'd better hope that no-one tries to call our bluff.'

'It's the way I want it anyway,' I answer. 'I don't want to have to shoot anyone else.'

Although, I have to admit, I'd feel a lot better knowing I had a fully functioning weapon if the bullets do start flying. My gut feeling is they won't. We're going to the guy's house, after all, and no-one wants their humble abode turned into a shooting gallery. But if nothing else, the experiences I've had today have taught me that you should never, ever bet against things going wrong.

'So, what's the plan?' Lucas asks.

'We go in nice and quiet, guns drawn, round up Cosick and any security he's got, secure them, and then I ask the questions.'

'That's it? Jesus, Tyler, you like to keep it simple, don't you?'

'Can you think of something better?'

'Not off the top of my head,' he admits, 'but then you didn't ask me to come up with anything, did you? And if Eddie Cosick is the guy who's behind Leah and Snowy's killings, and if he's the one who set you up, what are you going to do about it?'

'I'm going to ask him why.'

He doesn't try to argue. 'OK. Then what?'

'I'm going to make sure I'm in possession of all the evidence against me.'

'OK. Let's say Cosick tells you why, and gives you all the evidence he's got linking you to the murder. What do you do then?'

'I get him to tell me where the briefcase is. We know it contains something extremely valuable to him, so I'm sure he's still going to be in possession of it. I take it off him-'

'He's not going to want to give it up.'

'He'll give it up with a gun against his head. Then I'll hide it somewhere, and since it's something that's obviously incriminating to him, I'll put an anonymous call in to the cops. And then that'll be it. Job done.'

Lucas nods, not looking too sure, and we fall silent as we drive through Kilburn and down into Paddington before passing into the fashionable enclaves of Kensington and Notting Hill. The streets here are wide and brightly lit, and crowded with the young and the loaded who've come to play among the pavement cafes and wine bars, and enjoy this last, balmy burst of summer.

The atmosphere on the streets may be easygoing and vibrant, but in the car we're both tense as we prepare for the coming operation. We're going into the unknown. All we can predict for certain is that it's going to be dangerous. An attacking military force should always have a numerical superiority over the force it's attacking, but with only two of us involved, that's almost certainly not going to be the case. If anything, we're going to be outnumbered, so the scope for things to go wrong is immense.

When Lucas picked me up, he was making jokes and seemed fairly laid back, but as we get nearer to our destination I see that this was nothing more than an act. He chain-smokes cigarettes in short, angry drags, and sweat glistens on his forehead. I'm glad he's with me, but his presence emphasizes my own selfishness in involving him in someone else's battle. I know he doesn't want to be here, and I can't blame him. His army days were a long, long time ago, and since then he's grown to enjoy the good life of decent money and easy work. An op like this is going to be a major shock to his system and he's had very little time to prepare himself.

I want to tell him that everything's going to be fine, but I don't want to make it sound like I doubt his mental strength. Instead, I think about Eddie Cosick and what he has against me. Maybe I've crossed him somehow without knowing it. Maybe Leah was his mistress, and he found out I'd slept with her and wanted to get his revenge.

For a split second, I think I may be on to something here. But then I realize that it leaves too many unanswered questions. The first and most obvious is how on earth would he have found out? And why would he have gone to such elaborate lengths to set me up, leaving me very much alive in the process? It would have been vastly easier simply to send someone round to the showroom and blow my head off. Job done, honour restored. There's no way he would have decided that as part of his revenge I should be made to go and pick up a briefcase containing something so valuable to him that he's willing to pay a hundred and fifty grand for it.

No, there's some other reason he's using me. I just can't see what it is.

And I've got to admit that I'm nervous too. It's not just that Cosick may not supply the answers I need; this time, I may not even get out of there alive. Since waking up this morning, I've ridden my luck. I could have been the first out of the kitchen door back at the house where I picked up the case and taken Sellman's bullet, but I wasn't. I could have been arrested afterwards, but somehow I managed to escape. If I hadn't taken the flick knife from Dracula in the brothel… In all these things, the dice have rolled my way. At some point, and probability tells me it'll be soon, this luck is going to stop.

And you know what? I really don't want to die. Today's been a strange day. In most ways it's been awful. But I've felt something I haven't felt since the best of my army days. I've felt alive. I've been thrown into conflict after conflict, found myself alone in the middle of a minefield, and walked right through it. In other words, I have survived. And now I want to make it to the other side so that I can turn round and say, 'I've won.'

But I'm terrified that it's not going to happen.