‘Are you having me shadowed?’
‘Not me. I don’t have the personnel. Why?’
‘No reason. Must be getting paranoid.’ He rang off feeling mildly embarrassed. This job was already starting to get to him.
The street in Clapham where Pike had been staying was quiet, with only an occasional vehicle and a scattering of pedestrians. Harry found a space and climbed out of the car. As he approached the house, he passed a woman putting out a pile of bound newspapers on the front step. It was the same woman he’d seen looking over the fence at the rear while waiting for Pike to emerge. She looked the confrontational kind, and he wasn’t disappointed.
‘I saw you earlier,’ she said, brushing back a stray lock of hair. ‘You were out back with that chap. You know we’ve got Neighbourhood Watch in the street?’ She blinked furiously and he wondered at the fragile state of mind which allowed her to face a total stranger like this.
‘Glad to hear it,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Do you have a bin collection, too?’
‘Of course, we do,’ she muttered. ‘Cheeky bugger. You think we’re a third world country or something?’
Mad, he thought. Beyond seeing danger. ‘When do they come? The bin men?’
‘Tomorrow.’ She moved back to her front door. ‘It’s papers today. School collection. I should call the police!’
He thanked her and smiled, which finally seemed to unnerve her, and she disappeared inside, slamming the door.
He walked up the steps to Pike’s house and pressed the cleanest button.
‘Yeah?’ A male smoker’s voice, dry as sandpaper.
‘Tenant come to see the empty flat on three. The agent’s parking his car.’
A buzzer sounded and Harry pushed the door, thankful for people who probably didn’t even know there was a Neighbourhood Watch. He climbed the stairs and stopped outside No. 11. It was still open.
He stepped inside and saw that the scavengers had beaten him to it. The coffee table had gone, the magazines and newspapers tossed on the floor, and the blankets had been turned inside out. He opened the overhead cupboard. No bottle of wine.
He checked the window, which overlooked a corner of the rear garden. It explained why Pike had been surprised to see him. What it didn’t explain was why he’d come out armed and ready for a fight.
The place was clean, he already knew that, but he had another look, anyway. Then he closed the door and went back downstairs. Turned right at the bottom and walked down a short passageway to a rear door, and out to the service alley. Two bins were out ready for collection. They contained standard household rubbish: bottles, pre- packed food bags, supermarket packaging and other discards. Nothing indicating a bachelor lifestyle in hiding. Alongside them were two plastic bags, one secured with a wire tie. He opened the first one, which contained vegetable peelings, a hair conditioner bottle, coffee grounds and a craft magazine. Quilting and sewing. Definitely not Pike’s rubbish, then, unless he had a secret hobby. And he was no cook; he’d preferred his food ready made and full of fat.
The second bag held a scrunched kitchen roll, an old T-shirt with a torn sleeve, an empty milk carton and two crushed beer cans. . and three flattened pizza cartons.
And down at the bottom, a torn ticket stub from Eurostar, Brussels to London.
He thought about letting Ballatyne put his people on to it, but that would take too long. He rang Rik Ferris and read out the ticket number. ‘Find out who it was issued to and where from, can you?’
‘Thank God for that,’ breathed Rik. ‘I’m going stir crazy, my shoulder’s itching and my mum’s driving me nuts with all the phone calls. I was just about to go out and stab some car tyres.’
SIX
‘You want a tab?’ Sergeant Wallace held out a cigarette packet to Corporal Pike, who was huddled in the rear seat of their unmarked Vauxhall Vectra, staring out of the window. They were on the A12 heading north-east and had just got police clearance to filter through a two-lane accident. The delay meant other traffic was getting through in bursts, and they were surrounded by open road.
‘I don’t smoke.’ It was the first thing Pike had said since leaving the hospital, in spite of Wallace and his colleague’s attempts to start up a conversation. Neither of them enjoyed taking in men who’d gone AWOL; their stories were usually far from straightforward, and certainly too complex for snap judgements, even by hardened military policemen. But they tried to keep things civil.
‘You saw the Green Slime off,’ said Collins, using the derogatory term for members of the Intelligence Corps. ‘Tate, I mean. Put a right dent in his day.’ He grinned in the rear-view mirror, received a look of contempt in return. He shrugged. ‘Please yourself.’
‘What makes you think he’s Intelligence?’ said Wallace, snapping his lighter and drawing in a lungful of smoke.
Collins looked surprised. ‘What makes you think he’s not?’
‘You didn’t see him use the Taser.’ Wallace spoke quietly, although there was little chance their prisoner couldn’t hear what he was saying. ‘Faced with a bayonet sharp enough to cut my old lady’s rock cake, he left it to the last second, then bam. If he was really I–Corps he would’ve got sliced and diced. Or panicked and shot the poor bastard.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t know what he is, but it’s not army intelligence.’
Collins sniffed and checked his rear-view mirror as they passed a junction. Pike was lolling against the side window, eyes closed. The road behind was clear. Then a silver-grey Mercedes estate joined the carriageway and slid up fast on the outside lane. Two up, he noted automatically. Business types, probably, lucky gits. Nice car with lots of muscle. Better than this heap of overdriven crap they were forced to use.
The Mercedes drew level with them and slowed.
Collins glanced across, expecting to see the car cruise by, but the bonnet was now close alongside, keeping pace. He felt a jolt of alarm when the rear nearside passenger window slid down and he saw a face appear. ‘Hey, what the fuck’s this idiot playing at?’
‘Who?’ Wallace was fiddling with the radio. He looked round, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette.
The first bang was shocking in its intensity, and Collins felt the back of his head showered with glass fragments. He ducked instinctively and felt the car wobble as his grip faltered. Wallace shouted something, but the words were lost in the sudden roar of road noise coming through the shattered rear door window and the increase in engine noise as Collins automatically hit the accelerator.
Then Collins saw the blood. It was sprayed across the mirror, on the roof and even across the side of Wallace’s face. And something warm was trickling down the back of his neck.
‘Pike! You OK?’
But Pike was slumped back, the side of his face gone and his one good eye staring up at the roof.
Another two bangs very close. A car horn blared loudly and Collins realized it was him; he’d hit the button with a reflex action. Then the Mercedes surged away, leaving them behind, and Collins was fighting to hold on to the steering wheel as the shredded offside tyres began a terrifying
Seconds later, before Collins could slow down, the steering wheel was ripped from his grasp and the car began a lazy, unstoppable spin and roll, and everything blurred into in a sickening whirlwind of broken glass, gravel, ripped metal and the sickly smell of blood and spilled diesel.
‘Felicity calls you my International Man of Mystery.’ Jean Fleming helped Harry take off his jacket and hung it up. A tall and willowy redhead who ran an upmarket flower business just down the road from her Fulham flat, she accepted Harry’s unexplained absences with equanimity and never asked about where he had been. As the widow of an army officer killed in Iraq, she knew that questions rarely brought a true answer and never true peace of mind. She possessed an irreverent sense of humour and a throaty laugh which made Harry’s toes curl. Felicity was her
