‘They showed me identification,’ said Pavkov. ‘Yes, I am certain.’
‘How did they know what happened?’
‘How should I know the answer to this?’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I told them I didn’t know what they were talking about.’
‘You are sure of this?’
‘Of course I am sure.’
Pavkov was lying. Cara had debriefed him on her encounter with the Serb. He was trying to pretend to the Iranians that there wasn’t a problem.
‘Try again,’ said the man. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘I’m telling you the truth,’ Pavkov replied. ‘The lady come, she ask if anything happened in the car park maybe half hour earlier, I tell her I don’t know what she’s talking about. She say someone complained because of the noise …’
‘Noise?’
‘Yes, maybe a neighbour or something? Then her boss shows up, another police, asks the same questions.’
‘Was he in uniform?’
‘What please?’
‘The boss. Was he dressed like cop? Like police officer?’
‘No.’
‘And you say he asks you same thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you lying, Zoltan?’
Tomkins thought it was obvious: if he told the Iranians the truth, he was a dead man.
‘I am not lying,’ the Serb replied. ‘I am not a liar, my friend.’
Tomkins heard a long, nervous exhalation of cigarette smoke, then the growl of a motorbike in the distance. Taking out one of the AirPods he realised he could hear the bike both in real time and on the Punto microphones. That meant it was close, moving east to west past Barnfield Place, doing no more than fifteen or twenty miles per hour.
‘Bike,’ said Vosse on comms. ‘Visual?’
‘Negative,’ Tomkins replied.
‘I’m here. I have line of sight to the Fiat.’
Tomkins hadn’t heard the BMW’s approach, hadn’t looked down at the tablet for ages. Sure enough, he could see the small pulsating icon of Vosse’s vehicle parked on the corner of Spindrift Avenue. Surely he was too close to Pavkov and the Iranian? Surely he would spook them?
‘What else?’ the Iranian asked.
Tomkins realised that he could no longer hear the motorbike. Either the rider had parked nearby or driven north towards the City.
‘Nothing else,’ Pavkov replied.
‘They follow you here?’
Tomkins felt his stomach somersault. The Iranians suspected that Zoltan had a tail. Maybe somebody in a first-floor window had seen the BMW pulling up outside. Maybe there was a stakeout position on Barnfield Place.
‘Nobody follow me,’ the Serb replied. ‘Why would they do this? They suspect nothing.’
‘Nothing.’
Tomkins couldn’t tell if the Iranian was making a statement or asking a question. The take quality on the microphones was extraordinarily clear, but trying to picture the faces of the two men in the Fiat, their moods and gestures, was like trying to move stars around in the night sky. Tomkins felt isolated and near-hopeless. If anything happened, he did not know what he was supposed to do. Stay where he was? Follow the Iranian bagman? He was waiting for somebody to tell him how to act. It didn’t make sense that Vosse hadn’t called for backup. Surely arresting the two men in the car was now the surest way of locating Kite?
‘They ask if something happened,’ Pavkov continued. ‘I tell them nothing happened. They don’t know you were there, in car park. They don’t know you pay me. I don’t tell them nothing.’
‘It’s OK, Zoltan. We believe you.’
‘What are you doing?’ Pavkov asked. He sounded unsettled. ‘You making a call?’
Just then, the burst of the motorbike roaring into life, much closer to the Fiat than before. The noise of the engine smothering the sound of movement inside the car, the microphones picking up the breathlessness of a short struggle, a stifled cry and a gulp for air. Tomkins knew that something was badly wrong. He heard the slamming of a car door then the deafening scream of the bike as it accelerated away from the Punto. Vosse was instantly on comms.
‘Jesus Christ …’
‘What happened?’ Tomkins asked.
The next thing he knew he was out of the Mondeo, sprinting. He saw Vosse ahead of him, holding his head in his hands as he stumbled back from the Fiat. Tomkins reached the passenger side and looked down into the car. Zoltan Pavkov was slumped in the driver’s seat, his head tipped back, his throat cut from ear to ear. Blood had sprayed onto the windscreen, black as tar in the darkness.
‘We get out of here,’ Vosse told him. ‘We disappear.’
21
‘Who’s the Yank in Churchill?’ Kite asked his mother in the hotel office five minutes after finishing his chores upstairs.
‘Mr Strawson?’ she replied. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’
Kite didn’t know how to respond: he never liked hearing his mother describing other men as ‘handsome’ or ‘good-looking’ – or ‘gorgeous’. When he was fourteen she had brought a boyfriend on holiday. They had stayed in a cheap hotel on Skye, just the three of them. Night after night, Kite had had to listen to them screwing in the next-door room.
‘Is he religious?’ he asked.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Got a Bible beside his bed. Unless you’ve started handing them out to guests?’
Cheryl shook her head. As always, she was doing several things at once: flicking through the reservations book while searching for a pen, grabbing a Consulate cigarette from a packet on the desk, adjusting her hair by tucking it behind her ears.
‘Not doing the Gideon Bible just yet,’ she said. ‘Is Paolo waiting for you in the bar?’
It was her way of saying that Kite should go back to work. He had given up waiting for his mother to ask him how the Easter term had gone or to enquire about his journey from Euston. Perhaps she would get around to it in the morning.
‘I’ll see if he’s there,’ Kite replied.
Killantringan was an eighteenth-century shooting lodge which had been converted into a hotel shortly after the end of the Second World War. The bar was located in one of two former drawing rooms and decorated in a style his grandmother had described as ‘shortbread tin chic’: the sofas and armchairs were upholstered in red and green tartans, the walls covered in reproduction oil paintings
