the impact had pushed the target forward and prone – but there had been no blood. The target had not screamed, writhed, twitched, but had lain still. There had been a babble from the big speakers and crowds hurrying, coming from behind and surging away, and they’d seemed not to notice the target… maybe because there was no blood.
The art of what Robbie Cairns did was to go in fast, hard, and be gone. He had walked on past and his feet would have been no more than a yard from the head of the target. He had not looked down but had carried his bag in one hand and the rolled newspaper in the other. He had not understood why there was no blood, only two holes, regular shape of a 7.65 calibre round. He had kept walking and had left the man on the platform. There should have been blood. When he had waited, by the doorway into the chapel, he had concerned himself with the chance of blood arcing up if he did a close-range head shot and of the bubbles landing on his face and clothes. Right up to the time that he had seen the target, one of the last off the train and from one of the furthest carriages, it had tossed in his mind – a head shot or a spine shot? The man had walked easily, had seemed unaware. Decision taken: a spine shot. He hadn’t looked round him or checked for a tail, had passed the doorway as if swept along in the flow, as Robbie had been when he slotted in behind, five feet back, no more than six. He had held the bag away from the rolled newspaper, had done the trigger squeeze, and no one had reacted as the target had stumbled and sagged. It had been a long time before he had understood why the target was not dead and did not bleed. He had stopped by the window of a travel agent, beside the Costa and Algarve posters, and gazed back at the platform. He had not seen a felled corpse and had known what he must do.
In the travel agent’s, by the main entrance to the station, he had had to control his breathing, almost panted as if he had been running. Big, deep breaths, and it was the start of the day: a girl was free to hear his order. An air ticket from Munich to Zagreb, one way: he couldn’t get his head round where he would bug out to afterwards. He bought a ticket from Franz Josef Strauss to Pleso, and said he didn’t know what his plans were in the next few days. He paid cash for the ticket, which confused the girl, so he acted dumb and she did the transaction, but said next time he should use a credit card. Two items tracked a man: one was a credit card each time it was used, and the second was a mobile phone the whole time it was switched on.
He had gone back to the edge of the concourse and stood close to the big bookshop and near the stall that had more sorts of buns and bread rolls than he’d known of, and he had looked away up the platform to confirm again what he already knew. He had known where to look because the sign for the chapel was high and easy to see. Nothing there – well, an old woman pushing a trolley. He had sufficient elevation, on tiptoe, to note that there was no blood. There should have been – and scene-of-crime tape, a cordon, a sheet with feet sticking out from under it – but there was only an old woman. He had gone to the taxi rank.
The understanding hurt.
He had never worn a vest, or shot a man who had worn one. He had never seen one demonstrated. It hurt because now he could recall that his target had seemed broader in the body, more solid and substantial, but he hadn’t registered it. There was a Burger King at the entrance near to where the taxis waited. Outside it were big industrial rubbish bins, the sort that were hoisted by lorries and tipped. It was a fast movement. The Walther PPK went in with the silencer still screwed in place and the spare magazine. He couldn’t have cleaned it enough to remove DNA, but he thought the rubbish would go to the tip and, if he was lucky, be buried. He didn’t know of an alternative.
It was a new airport. Luxury. It had worked well – about all that had. A flight in ninety minutes to Zagreb. He couldn’t telephone Rotherhithe, the Albion Estate. Had no one to lean on. Robbie Cairns was pushed forward through Departures and towards the gate, was a driven man, pressured by failure. Almost, standing in the boarding queue, he had been about to congratulate himself on responding well to a second fuck-up, not recognising the bulk of a vest, but two women were in front of him, smartly clothed, smooth-skinned and smelling of scent, and he remembered.
Because the women who worked on that counter in the department store were close-knit and subject to small confidences, Melody knew a little of the supposedly secretive domestic life of her friend and colleague, Barbara. She had come off the bus – her diversion would make her late into central London – had waited at the entrance of Barbara’s block until a resident had emerged, then used the opportunity to slip inside and beat the self- locking system. She had climbed the stairs and knocked firmly on a second-floor door.
No answer.
While she had waited for someone to leave the building she had checked the postbox set into the wall beside her friend’s name. Without the key, she couldn’t get at the post, but could ascertain that the box had not been cleared the previous day… Not at work, not at the theatre, habits of reliability broken. So unlike her colleague to stand them up and waste a ticket for Les Miserables. The little she knew of Barbara’s life was the past – an old home, long left behind, old relationships long discarded, old parents and… There was no possibility that Barbara, from Fragrances, could make her salary stretch to a flat on the second floor of this block on Canada Water. Even the ‘downturn’ or the ‘crunch’ had not abseiled the prices of properties that far and that fast. She knocked again, harder, then put her finger on a bell and heard it ring behind the door.
Across the landing a baby had started to cry.
She tried there. The baby’s cry came closer and a door was unfastened, a chain removed. A woman accused Melody: ‘It’s taken me two hours to get him to sleep and my husband does nights and you’ve woken him, and-’
Melody said, ‘It’s my friend.’
‘Her across there?’
‘Didn’t come to work yesterday. No explanation. I’m sorry I woke your baby and your husband.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just not like her.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘She’s not there.’ The two women and the baby walked across the landing. Melody rapped at the door and the mother pressed the bell. There was an echo from the interior.
‘I didn’t hear her all yesterday. I’m sensitive to noise, my husband being on nights. He does the computers for one of the newspapers across the river. Has to be there all night, every night, but it’s work and it pays and he’s dead on his feet when he comes home and it’s a sod when he can’t sleep. I didn’t hear her, but he left yesterday morning.’
‘He?’
‘The boyfriend – it’s his place. She lives there and he visits, don’t know his name. He left yesterday morning and I heard the door, but I didn’t see her.’
Melody apologised. She went out of the block. She walked purposefully and skirted the bus station, where there was also the Underground, either of which would have taken her into central London, but she went on. She took the sharp left turn into Lower Road and reached the police station. Melody was not a woman who took lightly such a course of action, but she was anxious for her colleague and it irritated her that Barbara had never talked about her boyfriend.
She was sharp with the desk officer, to the point, and indicated that she wanted reassurance.
Retirement, and the decanter set with the crystal glasses, didn’t dull the awareness of an officer with thirty years in the Service. It was a complaint of Deirdre’s that when they took holidays, flew on budget lines, he had a persistent – near irritating – tendency to create biographies for their fellow travellers. More often than not, if the people he had stripped bare were staying at the same hotel – the Italian lakes or under the Swiss Matterhorn – she would find he had been pretty damn right in his assessments. Not that he ever received an apology for her criticism of his habit, or for the doubts expressed. But she wasn’t with him, and he could feel free.
They were up, they had climbed, they cruised.
She had taken him, hours before, to the early train. Driving there, he had called VBX, a privileged number, and spoken briefly to Alastair Watson. At the station, on the platform, she had asked triumphantly what he had forgotten. Damned if he’d known what he’d left behind. She had produced then, from a cavern of a handbag, his pen, the one from Pakistan and the Frontier, and they had chuckled, then hugged. She hadn’t waited for his train to arrive, saying the dogs would be needing their walk, just squeezed his hand, an apology for tenderness, and muttered something about ‘Take care of yourself and do nothing daft’, and gone. He had acquired the pen, manufactured in a back alley of the village of Darra Adam Khel, some thirty miles to the south of Peshawar, when he had supervised, with Solly Lieberman, the delivery of the Blowpipes, and had met young Gillot.
He had selected two passengers as being of interest; they would, like him, have made late bookings. The woman was across the aisle from him, in a gangway seat, as he was, and the man three rows in front of where he
