Bob the question. 'I have no idea.' He took another pull on his drink and as he put the pint down on the bar and gestured to Angela for a top-up, his mobile phone rang. Irritated, he pulled it out from his pocket but his expression changed as he saw who was calling.
'Delaney.'
'Jack, it's Kate.'
'I saw. What's up?'
'I need to talk to you.'
'What about?'
The large group at the bar started singing loudly. Kate said something on the other end of the line but Delaney couldn't catch it. 'Hang on, Kate, I'll take it outside.'
Angela watched him, puzzled, as he walked towards the exit. She picked up Delaney's unfinished pint. 'Does he want this or not?'
Bob grinned at her. 'I may be the fount of all wisdom, darling, but what I am not, is a psychic.'
'No, what you is, is an arsehole.'
Bob nodded with a self-satisfied grin and took a sip of his pint. Some things you couldn't argue with.
Jimmy Skinner liked coming to Soho for very different reasons to the prison officer from Bayfield Prison. Jimmy had two vices. One was Internet poker and the other was Scotch. Unlike Delaney, however, he didn't drink it like lemonade. He treated himself every now and again with a small glass when he had won a high stakes game. He never drank when he was playing. That way disaster lay. You played the odds, you trusted the maths. What you didn't do was get drunk and risk all on chance, on the vagaries of the turn of a card. Lady luck was for losers.
Soho had a couple of great places to shop for the whisky connoisseur. One was on Old Compton Street and the other was on Greek Street. Just down from a bookshop specialising in spanking magazines and one of the entrances to the Pillars of Hercules, which was why he was more than happy with where Derek Watters had suggested they meet.
He stepped out of the whisky shop, pleased with himself. In his carrier bag a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label. A blended whisky but at one hundred and sixty pounds it wasn't the kind of stuff you found on special offer in the alcohol aisle of Tesco's. It wasn't about the money for Jimmy Skinner, it was about the victory. And victory always deserved to be marked, in his opinion.
He looked up at the narrow, black clouds scudding across an already dark and crimson sky then suddenly down again as he heard the sound of an engine screaming in high revs and the concurrent sound of tyres screeching on tarmac. He looked up the street and the carrier bag in his right hand slid from his open fingers. The bottle inside it hit the pavement hard and smashed. But Jimmy Skinner didn't register it all. He was too busy shouting, straining his lungs in the face of the gusting wind.
'Look out!'
But for Derek Watters as he spun round to the sound of the tortured engine, it was too late. Far too late.
The jet-black Land Rover Discovery hit into him still accelerating. The bull bar on the front of it crushed his ribs, splintering them and piercing his heart before the front of his head smashed down onto the bonnet. He was thrown back into the street as the driver stamped on the brakes and then into reverse, the tyres biting and screaming once more. As Jimmy Skinner ran across the road the back of Derek Watters head slapped hard down on the road with the crunching sound of a coconut being cracked by a hammer.
The Land Rover roared backwards into Soho Square, then drove round the green and, accelerating once more, shot up Soho Street and out into the busy traffic of Oxford Street, oblivious to the blaring of horns and sudden screeching of brakes, and disappeared as it turned left heading towards Marble Arch. Skinner watched it go, trying to see the number plate, but it had been taped over. He knelt down and
