He ignored Studley’s advice and bypassed the medical teams. If anyone started shining pen torches in his eyes or testing his blood, they’d quickly realise he was on opioids. Besides, if he had been infected by Lang, he would soon know about it.
At the door, he gave his details to an officer with a clipboard. The officer handed him a card and told him to get in touch if he developed any symptoms. Sweating, fever, stomach cramps, nausea, dilated pupils, muscle aches.
Congratulations, he thought. You’ve just described a textbook opioid withdrawal.
He left the ballroom soon after eleven o’clock. Bowman paced down a maze of backstreets, turned left past Bond Street Tube station and continued west along Oxford Street towards Marble Arch. After maybe five hundred metres he turned right again and cut north until he hit the hotel.
The Gold Star Lodge was no one’s idea of luxury. The brickwork was crumbling, the windows were filthy. Bird shit and chewing gum spackled the pavement outside. It had been chosen purely on the basis of its availability, budget and proximity to the principal’s hotel. Bowman assumed the second of these was the deciding factor. But, at that moment, he didn’t care. He just needed to get out of his clothes, clean up and source some more pills. Fast.
He took the lift to the sixth floor, slipped into his room and hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door handle. He found his washbag next to the sink in the grotty bathroom and fished out a tobacco tin hidden in a secret compartment at the bottom of the bag. He took out a spare SIM card and paperclip from the tin, teased out his phone’s SIM card holder with the bent clip, replaced it with the spare SIM. Then he powered up, tapped in his passcode and opened the secure messaging app. The most secure app on the market. Military-grade encryption. The Regiment used the same one, for covert comms on ops.
He dialled the only number stored in the contacts list. The person on the other end picked up on the third ring.
‘I was wondering when you’d call,’ the throaty voice said.
Lenny Scavell, his dealer.
Bowman preferred to buy the opioids through Carter Grant, his brother-in-law, and one of Freddie Lang’s most trusted lieutenants. Which was a pain in the arse, involving frequent trips up to Roomers, a club in east London owned by the Langs, to meet with Lenny Scavell. Lenny was a long-time associate of the Lang twins. A risky set-up. But safer than buying stuff on the streets in Hereford, he figured.
Bowman said, ‘I need a score. The usual.’
Scavell hack-coughed. ‘When?’
‘Tonight, mate. Soon as.’ He added, ‘I’m in town.’
There was a long pause. Bowman could hear dance music thumping in the background, voices. Several of them. Scavell said, ‘Tonight ain’t good. You seen all this stuff on the news? Some terror attack at the royal wedding or something. Fucking madness.’
Bowman said, ‘I can’t wait until tomorrow, Lenny.’
‘Tough shit. I ain’t going anywhere tonight. Not with all that chaos. Come down the club.’
‘I can’t.’
He didn’t want to be seen anywhere near the Langs’ club right now. Not for a long time, not after what had happened to Freddie.
A long sigh whispered down the line.
‘Where are you?’ Scavell asked.
Bowman gave the address of the hotel.
Scavell paused again. ‘Wait there. I’ll call you back in a minute.’
He hung up. Two minutes later, Bowman’s phone trilled again.
Scavell said, ‘One of my boys will sort you out. But it’ll cost double. Consider it a delivery charge.’
‘Fine.’ Bowman wasn’t in the mood to argue. ‘When can your man get here?’
‘Two o’clock. Earliest he can do.’
Bowman glanced at his G-Shock. Half eleven. Two-and-a-half hours until Lenny’s man would arrive with the goods. A long time to wait. But no choice.
‘There’s a car park around the corner from the hotel,’ he said. ‘Opposite a Vietnamese takeaway. Tell your man I’ll meet him there.’
Scavell gave him a description of his associate’s car. Then Bowman killed the call, ejected the spare SIM card from his phone and replaced it with his regular SIM. He stashed the other SIM in the secret compartment in his washbag, threw off his suit, showered and changed into his off-duty gear. Dark jeans, plain T-shirt, Timberland boots. He dropped into the frayed armchair, scooped up the remote and flicked through the channels on the TV.
A small army of reporters had camped out in front of a police cordon outside the Greybourn Hotel. No one knew about the poisoning yet, it seemed. There were unconfirmed reports of a terrorist attack, the reporter said. She seemed very keen to reassure viewers that the royal family was believed to be safe. Police lights pulsed in the background.
Bowman’s mind drifted back to the night his world collapsed. It always did, in the end. He could never escape that gruesome memory. Christ knows, he had tried. Fifteen years had passed since that evening, but the images were so vivid it sometimes felt as if it had happened yesterday. He would be sitting in the pub, or walking down the street in Hereford, and suddenly he would see his young family dead on the kitchen floor. A momentary snapshot. Like a subliminal message spliced into a film reel. He would see his wife, Amy, her beautiful face ruined by the smile the gangsters had drawn on it with the tip of a kitchen knife. His little girl, Sophie, wearing her favourite princess dress. A sleepy look in her eyes, as
