He looked up at me with a fearful expression in his eyes as I pointed the gun down at him, lifting up my balaclava so he, and he alone, could see my face.
‘Please,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve got money.’
‘This is for all your victims,’ I told him, leaning forward and firing a single round into his head.
That was when I heard the sirens, far too close and fast for the cops to have just been called. This wasn’t good, because it suggested that the set-up didn’t only involve me killing the wrong man. It meant I wasn’t supposed to get out of this place either.
I moved fast, checking the hallway to see that it was clear. The two bodyguards were still where they’d fallen. The first looked unconscious, while the second one was trying to crawl down the stairs. I was fairly certain no one else was going to want to take me on so I turned and ran back the way I’d come, locking the fire door behind me and running up onto the roof.
I raced along the rooftops, keeping low, conscious of the flashing blue lights of the police cars reflecting off the houses as they raced into the square. It sounded like there were at least three vehicles, but it would take them a few minutes to work out what was going on and start sealing off the streets. I’d originally planned to exit through my flat well before the police arrived, but now going out of the front door there, not much over thirty metres down the street from where the police were arriving, would be way too risky. And for all I knew, whoever had called the police (and my guess was that it was Lane herself) had given them the address I was staying in as well.
The light was on and the French windows still open onto the terrace right near the end of the building, and I ran towards them, clambering over roof terraces, hoping I couldn’t be seen from the street, not daring to look. Just like that, it began to rain. Hard. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the flashing lights of another emergency vehicle entering the square. It couldn’t have been much more than three minutes since the first shot had been fired and yet it was as if they’d been waiting round the corner, ready to pounce.
I reached the roof terrace of the house with the open windows and ran straight inside, descending a short flight of stairs into a large open living space. A round-faced man of about sixty in a linen dressing gown, with white hair and a large bald spot, sat on a long L-shaped sofa watching TV and stroking a very fat cat, while another equally fat cat was asleep next to him. The man stared at me, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and I put a finger to my lips to quieten him.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said, approaching him with the gun lowered a little, ‘but I need your help. Who else is here?’
He shook his head. ‘No one. I’m on my own.’
‘Good. Do you own a car?’
He nodded.
‘What kind, and where is it?’
‘It’s a silver Mercedes A-Class saloon. It’s parked right outside.’
My luck was in. ‘Get me the keys, and fast. The sooner you cooperate, the sooner I’m out of here.’
He got to his feet, much to the annoyance of the cat on his lap, and walked down some stairs into a spacious kitchen. He took a set of car keys off a key holder on the wall and handed them to me.
I told him to lie on his front on the floor. He started to protest and I had to tell him again that I wasn’t going to hurt him. ‘But I am going to tie your hands behind your back so you don’t raise the alarm.’
Gingerly, he got down on his knees, but time was of the essence so I gave him a hard shove, forced him down onto his front, took a pair of the restraints that Lane had supplied from the backpack, and bound his wrists. ‘Right, stay there. Do not move for fifteen minutes. Then you can go and get help.’
He said he understood and I left him in there, went out the front door of his flat, and hurried down the communal staircase, putting my balaclava, the pistol I’d picked up from the bodyguard, and the suppressor into the backpack, and shoving my own pistol into the back of my jeans, knowing that if it came to it, I’d put a bullet in my own head rather than go back to prison.
But it didn’t come to that. I didn’t see anyone on the stairs, and as I came out of the front door, a good fifty metres away from where I’d pulled the trigger on Kalaman, I saw that the cluster of police cars, four in all, were parked up at the brothel entrance. A handful of people were on the street looking towards where the action was, but nobody noticed me as I walked over to where the Mercedes was parked and pressed the key fob to unlock it.
I climbed inside, threw the backpack on the passenger seat, drove slowly out of the parking spot and, knowing that any sense of urgency would look suspicious, followed the one-way system round the other side of the square and away from the scene of the crime, even pausing to let an armed response car with lights flashing come through.
Then I turned onto the Bayswater Road heading north and, as soon as there was a gap in the traffic behind me, I threw the burner phone Lane had
