olive thanks to the tanning agent, coloured contact lenses had turned his eyes from grey to dark brown, and his hair was far longer and darker than usual. To counteract the facial recognition software available to the security forces, he’d also changed the shape of his face. His nose was bigger and more crooked, thanks to the highlighted putty base that had been added to it; padding had pushed his cheeks out, making them look fatter; and a prominent, raised birthmark the size of a fifty-pence piece had appeared on his upper cheek just below the left eye. If any witnesses were asked to describe him later, it would be the birthmark they remembered.
Success, he knew, could only come through intensive planning. They’d planned this whole thing down to the last detail, and Dragon was experiencing a heady mixture of confidence and excitement that was all too rare these days as he got out of the van and joined the thin but steady stream of shoppers heading into retail nirvana.
Four
NOTHING EVER PREPARES you for it. The moment the consultant walks into the room and closes the door quietly behind him, and you see that look on his face. The grim resignation as he prepares to give you the news you’ve been waiting for, ever since he did the tests. And you know the news is bad. It’s as if it’s stalked, uninvited, into the room with him.
You pray to God Almighty. Just as you have done every night these past two weeks. Even though you haven’t believed in years. Because before you’ve never had to think about death. It’s always been an abstract, distant thing. Something that happens to other people. And it’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair, for Christ’s sake. You’re forty-five. Young, almost. You haven’t smoked in years; you probably drink too much, but no worse than anyone else you know; you eat OK – too many ready meals, sure, but then who doesn’t these days? – and you’re definitely not overweight. If anything, you’re too thin. You still go to the gym at least once, sometimes twice, occasionally even three times per week. You’re fit. You’re healthy.
But you’re not. Because the consultant’s face is still grim. He takes the deep breath, steadies himself, and—
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do, Mr Dalston. Your particular cancer is inoperable.’
Strangely, you don’t react. You just sit there, and now that the words have been spoken, you feel a sense of bleak calm. There is, at least, no more suspense.
The consultant, a dapper little Asian man called Mr Farouk who always wears brightly coloured bow ties, starts talking about chemotherapy and the opportunity it provides to prolong life, but you’re not really listening. You only ask one question. The obvious one. The one we’d all ask straight away.
‘How long?’
With chemotherapy, as long as two years, although Mr Farouk is quick to point out there are no guarantees, and that it might be considerably shorter. Possibly a year. But again, no guarantees.
‘And without chemotherapy?’
He answers immediately. ‘In my opinion, an absolute maximum of six months.’
‘And there’s no hope?’ You have to ask, even though you know that Mr Farouk is one of the UK’s foremost cancer experts, a man whose opinion you have paid serious money for, precisely because his word can be trusted. It’s the survival instinct in you. Looking for that tiny chink of light.
‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m afraid not.’
And that’s it. The death sentence has been passed.
In the end, Martin Dalston had decided against chemotherapy. He didn’t see the point, mainly because the end result was always going to be the same. It felt too much like prolonging the agony. When he’d told his ex-wife and their son, who at seventeen was old enough to understand the consequences of his decision, they’d both tried to persuade him to reconsider. ‘You never know, they might find a cure in that time,’ had been Sue’s rather optimistic argument. But Martin had read up enough about advanced liver cancer to know that that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. He wanted to enjoy his last days, he told them, even though the words had sounded empty as soon as he’d spoken them. Sue had been remarried for two years, so those last days weren’t really going to involve her, and though she’d been very sympathetic, Martin had the feeling she wouldn’t spend too long mourning his passing.
Robert was different. Until he’d become a teenager, he and his father had been very close. They’d grown apart as the marriage had descended into its death spiral, with Robert regularly siding with his mother in their arguments, or ignoring both of them, and at times it had felt to Martin like he’d been at war with both his wife and son, while all the time trying to keep his business afloat. But the news of his cancer had brought them back together. They’d taken a week out to go to Spain, a fishing trip to the Ebro river, where they’d bonded over good food, good wine and good conversation. The break had been so successful that Martin had even started looking into the two of them doing a three-week road trip in Australia, taking in the Barrier Reef, the Outback and the Great Ocean Road.
And then the sickness had started: the intense bouts of abdominal pain; the chronic tiredness; the nausea; and, finally, the steadily accelerating weight loss. Martin knew he was fading. Given his views on treatment, he had only two alternatives. One: let the cancer take him at its own pace, with Robert there by his side helplessly watching him as he deteriorated. Or two: end matters himself.
Martin had never been a particularly brave man. He’d always avoided confrontation and, if truth be told, he’d avoided hard decisions too. But perhaps, he thought as he walked into the lobby of the Stanhope Hotel that afternoon, there was an inner steel in him after all. Because today was going to be the last day of his life and he felt remarkably calm about it.
He’d booked room 315 four days earlier. At first the receptionist had told him that the hotel couldn’t guarantee a particular room, but then he’d explained that he wanted it because he and his wife had stayed there on the night of their wedding, and wanted to stay in it again for their twentieth anniversary.
Sadly, none of this was true. Martin had never stayed in the Stanhope with Sue. But even after all these years room 315 held hugely important memories, and it was ironic that the thing he was most worried about as he approached the desk was that the hotel had accidentally hired it to someone else.
But they hadn’t, and because it was after two p.m., it was ready for him.
The pretty young receptionist smiled and wished him a pleasant stay in lightly accented English, and he thanked her with a smile of his own, and said he would, before heading for the lifts, hoping she wouldn’t notice the fact that he’d brought very little luggage.
For the first time, he felt guilty about doing what he was about to do in a public place like a hotel room, where his body would inevitably be discovered by an unfortunate member of staff. He could, he supposed, have done it in the poky little flat he called home, but somehow that seemed far too much like a lonely end. There was, he had to admit, something comforting about having other people near him when he went, even if they were strangers.
When he got to the door to 315, he stopped as the memories came flooding back. Memories of the only time he’d truly been in love – indeed, truly happy – and he felt an intense wave of emotion wash over him. This had been their place. Thousands of people had stayed in the room in the twenty-two years since, but it would always be their place. He thought of her now, all those thousands of miles away, and wondered if she was even still alive. In the past few weeks he’d seriously considered making contact to let her know what had happened to him, but in the end he’d held back. There was too much scope for disappointment. Carrie Wilson was the past, and it was far better simply to have her as a lingering, beautiful memory.
He opened the door and stepped inside, ready to relive it all again for the very last time.
Five
THE RENDEZVOUS WAS an empty warehouse on the sprawling Park Royal industrial estate just north of the A40 that had been hired on a three-month lease by an untraceable offshore company registered in the United Arab Emirates.
