put his fingers to Derek Watters's carotid artery on the side of his neck, though it was a movement made more by instinct than expectation. But, surprisingly, the prison officer had one last breath in him. As his eyes clouded over he looked at the tall, thin, bone-faced policeman kneeling beside him and sighed more than spoke: 'Murder.'
Then his eyes froze, motionless, and Derek Watters, forty-one years old, who never got to serve his country by bearing arms, died on a chill, wet street in a city that had a heart as cold as a solar system where the sun had died out many millennia ago.
Delaney sat behind the wheel of his car taking a moment to collect his thoughts. Adjusting the rearview mirror he looked at himself. He didn't know what had got Kate Walker so agitated, she wouldn't tell him on the telephone, just told him to meet her at the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead. He knew it well enough, it was just up the road from his new house. What he didn't know was what had got her so rattled; he could hear it in her voice, the thinnest form of politeness covering someone close to breaking point. It had something to do with what happened in the hospital car park that morning, he'd bet his life on it. Whatever it was that had gone down, the clear fact was that Kate needed his help. She didn't say it in so many words, but it was expressed in her barely restrained emotion. She needed his help. And that was the one thing Jack Delaney couldn't walk away from.
He'd put the mirror back in position, switched the engine on and slipped the gearstick into first, when his phone rang. He angrily slipped the gear back into neutral, glanced at the cover of his phone and snapped it open.
'Make it quick.'
'Jack. It's Jimmy Skinner.'
Kate Walker sat at the long wooden bar in the Holly Bush. Comforted on the one hand to be surrounded in the warmth and hubbub of familiar faces and voices of the early-evening crowd, and yet starting every time the front door opened. She wanted it to be Delaney coming through that door but was terrified of the notion that it would be Paul Archer walking in instead. She didn't know what made her suggest this pub to Delaney. She wasn't thinking straight. Hadn't been since she had woken up this morning to find that man in her bed. She took a sip at her Bloody Mary. Cautiously. She had no intentions of getting hammered again tonight; besides, she was pregnant. God knows what she was going to do about that. And maybe she hadn't been raped. Maybe she was blowing things all out of proportion. She certainly had drunk a lot last night, maybe they had gone back to her flat, got paralytic and just passed out in bed. But if that was the case, why couldn't she remember any of it?
She looked at her watch again. Where the bloody hell was Jack Delaney? It had taken all her nerve to call him in the first place and if he stood her up now, leaving her alone at the bar like a jilted teenager, she would kill him. She downed her Bloody Mary and gestured at the barman for another. After all, two wouldn't hurt. Would they?
The ambulance pulled away from the kerb and drove slowly down Greek Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. It had no need for sirens and lights. The police cars that had cordoned off the area, blocking traffic from Soho Square, Bateman Street and Manette Street, pulled away too. Nothing to see here either. Not any more, at least. Delaney leaned back against the painted glass of the porno bookshop and put a cigarette in his mouth. He held the packet out to Skinner who shook his head then lit the cigarette with a lazy scrape of a match.
He inhaled deeply and looked up at the night sky. It was like a carmine canvas that an artist had dragged thick, soot-stained fingers across. Like the black fingers of blood that had crept along the cobbles where Derek Watters had been murdered. He exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked back at his colleague.
'Definitely not an accident?'
Jimmy Skinner shook his head.
'Professional hit?'
