Siege

Eight

16.05

THE MAN CALLED Scope heard it in the cramped flat he’d been renting for the past month. A faint but distinctive boom. It was a sound that would always remind him of heat and death. He ignored it. After all, he was in the middle of a big, sprawling city where the unnatural noises of constant human activity were always coming at him from one direction or the other. He guessed it was probably just a crane dropping its load on one of the many building sites that dotted this surprisingly drab part of west London. It was all a far cry from the peace and tranquillity of home – a place he hadn’t seen in far too long.

Thankfully, he was almost done here. One last job and then he would be gone.

He finished dressing and looked at himself in the mirror. The face that stared back at him was lined and gaunt, with hollow cheekbones and skin that was dark and weather-beaten from the sun. He’d been handsome once, or so he’d been told by more than one woman who wasn’t his mother. But no longer. He’d lost a lot of weight this past year. Now he bore the haunted look of a man who’d seen and done far too much and there was a hardness in his flint-grey eyes that was impossible to disguise.

Still, he was going to have to try.

He produced a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from the breast pocket of his cheap black suit – the type a mid-ranking hotel manager would wear – and put them on, adopting a polite, almost obsequious expression. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said, addressing the mirror with a respectful, customer-oriented smile. ‘May I have a word? It’s about a small discrepancy on your latest bill.’

Not perfect, but it would have to do.

Turning away, he picked up the tools he was going to need from the pockmarked coffee table, all small and easily concealable, and secreted them about his person. Finally, he slipped the hotel nametag introducing him as ‘Mr Cotelli, Manager’ into his breast pocket and headed for the front door of the rental flat.

A woman’s scream from somewhere down the hall outside stopped him as he turned the handle.

More memories tore across his vision. Recent ones. The converted farmhouse at the end of the track. The naked girl tied to the bed, bleeding. The boyfriend with his long, tangled hair and sunken, cokehead cheeks. On his knees, narrow eyes focused on the barrel of the pistol. The interrogation. The answers. The pleading.

Then the thunderous blast of the gun around the filthy room and the bullet blowing the boy’s brains all over the bare wall. And the girl’s desperate screams starting all over again, because she was convinced that Scope was going to kill her next.

He shivered, waiting for the memory to pass, surprised by the strength of the guilt he felt.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he said aloud to himself. ‘It’s nearly over.’

He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. A man’s drunken shouting had replaced the scream. It was coming from the flat at the end. In the time he’d been here, the guy and his old lady had been constantly yelling and shrieking at each other, and more than once he’d considered going round there and telling – or getting – them to shut the hell up. But he’d always resisted. There was no point drawing attention to himself, which was why he’d chosen a dump like this in the first place, and thankfully he wasn’t going to have to put up with it for much longer.

Holding this particular thought at the front of his mind, he made his way down to the street and, conscious of the wail of sirens starting up from pretty much every direction, hailed the first passing cab and asked the driver to take him to the Stanhope Hotel.