Certainly better than the officially sanctioned Taser she used to carry when on duty.
The Taser was fine in its way. You could use it from fifteen feet away. You fired its two darts on the end of their fifteen feet wires and pumped 50,000 volts into your antagonist. Screwed up their neuromuscular system – for the next fifteen minutes the person on the receiving end was useless.
But it was a one-shot weapon and came under firearm regulations, so she was no longer allowed to use one after being stripped of her firearm privileges.
Her dirty little secret didn’t have wires. The XR5000 Nova Stun Gun was powered by a nine-volt cadmium rechargeable battery – the kind used in transistor radios. It produced, through two brass studs, a sawtooth 47,000 volts in around one and a half seconds at up to twenty cycles per second. Didn’t burn, bruise or damage tissue. Just incapacitated somebody within three seconds.
Four men. She wasn’t sure it could recharge in time for four men. She swept it from her pocket and pointed it at the leering, grey-faced man. At least she’d get him.
Tingley phoned Watts.
‘I’ve crossed the line too.’
‘I didn’t know you had a line.’
Tingley was silent.
‘Sorry, that came out wrong.’
‘I know where they are.’
‘And Charlie Laker?’
‘Him next.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
Tingley looked out of the flat’s window at the Ravenscourt Park below. A Polish neighbourhood since the Second World War. Now the hidey-hole for Serbian gangsters.
Kadire had talked.
‘I’m already here.’
Tingley had meant it when he said the Balkan gang couldn’t be stopped. But maybe they could be stopped from coming to Brighton.
He watched a car draw up. A big man got out of the front passenger side and scanned the street. The back doors opened and the other men got out on either side. Both were lean, wiry. One of the men scanned the street whilst the other moved to the door of the apartment block and was lost from view. The car drove away.
Tingley moved away from the window and went to stand beside the door. He heard the ping of the lift down the corridor, then nothing until the key in the lock. He hefted the Sig Sauer Hathaway had given him.
The two bodyguards came in first. They scanned the room but weren’t really expecting anybody to be here – Tingley had made sure he’d replaced the couple of security indicators on the door. They had no reason to suspect anyone was in the room.
They didn’t look behind the door. When the man they were escorting was halfway in the room, Tingley slammed the door into him. He shot the two bodyguards, the first in the back and the back of the head, the second, as he turned, in the chest and the side of the head. Perfect double taps.
The bullets made ‘phtt’ sounds because of the silencer. Tingley swung back the door and kicked the man trying to get up from the floor in the side of the head. He grabbed his feet and dragged him into the room, swung him over and dropped on to his back, swiping the door closed with his left hand. He grabbed the man’s head and pulled back.
‘I want names or I’ll break your back as well as your nose,’ he said, bearing down with his knees. ‘All the way back to the slum you came from.’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ the man said between gritted teeth.
Tingley grabbed his hair.
‘All the way back.’
TWENTY-FIVE
‘ You did well, Sarah.’
Karen Hewitt dropped her hand on Gilchrist’s shoulder and left it there for a moment. Gilchrist stared at the ground between her trainers. She wanted to vomit.
‘How’s the girl?’ she said, gulping down air.
‘The girl?’ Hewitt said. ‘Oh – she’ll be fine.’
Gilchrist was being debriefed in one of the station’s ground-floor interview rooms. There was hot coffee on the table in the centre of the room, but even in her state she knew better than to drink it. The coffee in this place spawned as many jokes as microbes, if the jokes were to be believed.
She smiled at the thought. Tried to smile. She was flashing back to the beach. And still trying to figure out how she had missed the man she now knew was Radislav with her electric charge.
He had moved so quickly, knocking her arm to one side as he bowled into her. The charge had gone into the man to his right as she fell.
She had scrambled away from Radislav, twisting his arm to get his hand off her throat. She still clutched the volt gun as the other two stopped in their tracks, watching their friend writhe and judder on the shingle beach.
She looked down at the grey-faced man, who was scrambling to his feet with difficulty, his attempt to propel himself up with his left arm failing because his hand was sinking into the shingle.
She stood at bay, her arm extended with the volt gun pointing at each man in turn. From the corner of her eye she saw uniformed police making a slow progress towards them. Radislav saw them too. With an almost pantomime snarl he set off down the beach towards the West Pier, followed by the other two men.
Gilchrist’s legs were shaking by the time the uniforms arrived. Her volt gun was back in her pocket. Radislav and his two cohorts were too far away to chase. She abruptly sat down.
Charlie Laker had followed Hathaway to France or was already there. This much Watts surmised. He met Tingley on the Old Steine and drove them down to Newhaven.
‘I’m not quite sure why we’re doing this,’ he said. ‘How far are we willing to go in support of a gangster?’
‘It’s relative, isn’t it?’ Tingley said as they waited in the line of cars to board the ferry.
‘Are you willing to kill?’ Watts said. ‘Did you kill Kadire?’
‘I called the police to take care of him,’ he said.
‘And from now on?’
‘We’ll see what happens.’
They took the overnight ferry. The only time either had crossed to Dieppe before had been on a hovercraft that had done the journey in a bouncy two hours. This was a ferry brought up from Sicily.
The crew and stewards were Italian. They spoke little English or, indeed, French. It was a four-hour journey that turned into six because the captain, more used to the calmer waters of the Med, deemed the sea too rough to get into port without the help of tugs.
It took an hour for the tugs to arrive, another hour for them to haul the boat in backwards to its dock.
Tingley and Watts were only partly aware of this. They’d bought a bottle of duty-free brandy when the boat first left Newhaven. They’d laid on the narrow beds in the narrow cabin and sipped the brandy until around midnight. Conversation had been muted.
Both had dozed off, fully clothed, lying on their backs, lulled by the sea. They woke at four and went upstairs, expecting the boat to be docking. They waited aft by a big window, watching the lights of Dieppe as the tugs manoeuvred them into port.
They went down to the car deck, huge trucks dwarfing them on every side. Off the boat they drove around town looking for somewhere to get coffee and croissants.
The sky was drab, shedding reluctant light on sodden streets. They parked outside a neon-lit worker’s cafe on the other side of the harbour and sat peering out of the rain-streaked windows at the deserted
