Wolfe kept it pressed in Kent’s cheek. ‘Or what? You’ll pull the trigger? I don’t think you’ve got the balls, son. Cos I’m looking in your eyes and I can tell you won’t do it.’
I swallowed, conscious of a bead of sweat running down into the corner of my eye, forcing me to blink.
That was when I felt something cold against the back of my head. ‘I think it’d be better if you dropped yours, Sean,’ said Tommy. ‘I’m sorry, mate, but it’s better this way.’
I hadn’t expected this from Tommy, but maybe I should have done. After all, his first loyalty was always going to be the crew. Even so, I still felt a sense of relief as I lowered the shotgun, which lasted as long as it took Wolfe to jerk it from my hand, turn it round, and shove the barrel between my legs while at the same time placing the pistol right between my eyes. For the first time in my life I was on the wrong end of three different firearms.
‘Cover Kent,’ Wolfe snapped at Tommy. ‘And put that gag on him. Tie his hands behind his back too. I don’t want that bastard moving an inch.’ Then he turned to me, his face a screwed-up ball of pure hate.
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t, because I knew with absolute certainty that the man holding the gun against my head was the cold-blooded murderer who’d shot my brother all those years before, and that now it was my turn. I’ve been close to getting killed before. Jesus, I’d been close enough earlier that day. But not like this. I could feel the coldness of the barrel pressing into my skin, and see the dark contempt in Wolfe’s good eye. I couldn’t even repeat the trick I’d used earlier and swat the gun away, not when there were three of them trained on me.
Wolfe clicked off the Sig’s safety catch, his lips curling upwards in a sadistic sneer, and I saw his index finger tightening on the trigger. ‘Not so nice now, is it, Seany boy? Having someone point a piece at you.’
I swallowed hard, my heart hammering in my chest, as possibly the last ten seconds of my life ebbed away, and wondered whether John had experienced the gut-wrenching terror I was feeling now as I sat there waiting to die, knowing there was nothing I could do to prevent the bullet from coming. I was helpless, and everyone in that stinking van knew it.
‘Don’t do it, Ty,’ I heard Tommy say. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, holding a small snub-nosed revolver against Kent’s neck while he put the tape over his mouth. ‘We’re all pretty emotional after what happened. Sean shouldn’t have done what he did, no question, but we’ve all done stupid things in the heat of the moment, and we don’t want any more complications right now, do we? So come on. Let’s all put the guns down, get to the rendezvous and sort it out there.’
‘What do you reckon, Clarence?’ said Wolfe, not taking his eyes off me.
‘Blow his fucking head off. He’s a liability, and we don’t need him no more.’
The minibus fell silent. It was decision time. Life or death.
Wolfe nodded slowly as if he’d come to a decision. ‘The next time you point a gun at me,’ he said, speaking slowly and carefully enunciating every word, ‘I will kill you without a second’s thought. Do you understand that?’ Pause. ‘Do you?’
‘Yeah,’ I answered, experiencing a sense of relief so powerful I almost vomited.
‘Good,’ he said, removing the gun and replacing it in his waistband before taking the shotgun out from between my legs.
Then, without warning, he slammed the butt into my face and my whole world exploded in searing pain.
Twenty-seven
Tina dragged hard on her cigarette and wished she could have a drink. It was now ten to ten, more than an hour since she’d written off her Focus, and the gentrified quiet of Doughty Street where she was standing now had been transformed into a major crime scene. Police vehicles blocked access at both ends while SOCO swarmed over the three vehicles — the ambulance, the patrol car and the Bedford van — which were all that remained of the audacious operation to spring Andrew Kent from custody.
Details of what exactly had happened were still sketchy, but according to all the eyewitnesses, most of whom were police officers, it had been a well-planned and professional assault involving four men, most or all of whom had been armed. They’d been ruthless too, shooting one of the officers guarding Kent when he attempted to intervene. Twenty-seven-year-old Gary Hancock was currently in intensive care at University College Hospital, the same place Kent had been on his way to, and his condition was unknown. Tina knew him to say hello to and remembered that he was a nice guy who’d recently got engaged to a WPC based out of Camden nick.
And now the perpetrators had disappeared into thin air. A burnt-out car, thought to have been their getaway vehicle, had been found up in Islington, and a full-scale manhunt involving helicopters and strategically placed roadblocks at points all over north London was now under way. But they no longer knew what car they had to look for, and Tina knew from experience that, with this much time gone, it was highly unlikely they’d get a result that day.
The thought angered her. The gunmen had tried to kill her, and had almost succeeded too. If she and Grier hadn’t ducked at the right time it could have been them in intensive care like Gary Hancock. Or worse.
She’d get them, though. She swore it to herself. And Kent. Although for the first time, she wondered if he was still alive. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to break him out. It was possible, of course, that he’d faked his poisoning, knowing that he was going to be rescued, but she didn’t buy it. He’d said to her that he’d tell her everything when she got him to a hospital, but everything about what? He had to be the Night Creeper, there was still too much evidence against him to suggest otherwise. And yet. . and yet there was a gap in this jigsaw puzzle. Something missing.
Tina took another drag on her cigarette, determined to find out what it was, even it meant working solidly for the next week.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Grier giving his statement to two detectives from Scotland Yard’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency who didn’t look any older than he did, and doubtless telling them what a reckless fool his boss was. It was funny how, at the age of only thirty-one, Tina saw herself as a veteran when it wasn’t really that long ago — five, perhaps six years — that she was a wet-behind-the-ears DC like Grier, a graduate herself with all these big ideas, and more than her fair share of ideals (even though she never liked to admit it). She hadn’t supported the death penalty in those days either. How life had changed, and not for the better. She’d been through so much that sometimes the thought of all the terrible things that had happened both to her and to the people close to her made her want to lock herself away from the whole world, shut her eyes, and never wake up.
And then there were the other times, when she was filled with a terrible homicidal rage that made her kick the wall of her bedroom, smash crockery, scream at the top of her voice, as she imagined herself beating thugs into submission, or torturing the man she held responsible for so much of the wreckage of her life, a short, balding businessman called Paul Wise. The man she desperately wanted to bring down — to kill, if she was honest with herself — and the one person against whom she was utterly powerless.
Tina knew she was beginning to deteriorate mentally. Her neighbours on both sides tended to give her a wide berth these days whereas once they’d exchanged pleasantries, and one of them — she didn’t know which — had even called the police when a night of red wine and tequila slammers in the front room had led to her methodically smashing every mirror in the flat. It was the one in the hallway that had caused the problem. It was a two-foot-by-four-foot in pine trimming from Ikea that faced the bedroom, and she’d taken it out with a chair. It had made such an explosive noise that she’d jumped back with fright, tripped over and hit her bookcase. She’d lain there, confused yet strangely sated, as half a dozen paperbacks and an old hardback Jackie Collins she’d bought as a teenager landed one after another on her head. She’d somehow convinced the two uniforms who turned up that it was all a fuss about nothing, and, recognizing who she was, they’d let her off with a friendly word of warning.
She’d given up the booze after that (at least for a couple of weeks), but the moods hadn’t gone away, and it had crossed her mind more than once to ask at work to be referred to a psychiatrist, or simply take a period of absence for stress, but she’d rejected both alternatives. The job was the only thing that gave her life a semblance of balance and, in spite of everything, she was still damn good at it.
But now she’d gone and messed things up by taking a dramatic risk, not only with her own life, which she could accept, but with Grier’s as well. He’d hardly spoken to her since, and she could understand why. Her
