‘I can understand.’
She was too polite to contradict him.
‘But,’ the inspector sighed, ‘there have been lots of killings, and doubtless there will be lots more. Even if you finally get him, if you bring Matias Gori to justice, will it have been worth it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Despite the death of your friends?’
‘The point is that they shouldn’t have had to die; just like those poor people in Ishaqi shouldn’t have had to die.’ She looked at him with a fierceness in her eyes that had been absent before. ‘If this was a decent country, something would have been done about Gori long before now. We wouldn’t even have needed to get involved — if the police had done their job properly.’
She waited for a response, but Carlyle said nothing.
‘But no one wanted to know,’ Hartson continued, ‘so we decided to take up the fight. All we wanted to do was bring one man — one murderer — to justice. We thought that was surely achievable — a small victory for decency. You’re right, many people get away with terrible things, but that’s no reason to give up. If everyone took your point of view, Inspector, the world would be an even worse place than it is now.’
Chastened, Carlyle held up a hand. ‘I didn’t say it was my point of view-’ But it was too late. Hoisting her bag on to her shoulder, she was already slaloming through the small knots of supplicants in the waiting room, and had almost reached the door by the time his words had got out.
After she had left, the inspector went through what they had. It was probably not enough to get Hartson police protection and certainly not enough to arrest Gori. But at least now Carlyle should be able to persuade Carole Simpson to let him see this thing through. He hoped so, at any rate. The Commander’s husband might still be making the news, but she remained at work. He rang her office and left a message with her PA, who promised to get Simpson to call him back as quickly as possible.
Ending the call, Carlyle looked around. What to do next? Scratching his head, he finally reached a decision; he would break his duck for the week and finally work up a sweat at Jubilee Hall.
THIRTY-THREE
Matias Gori stood in the shadows of the doorway of the long-since closed Zimbabwean High Commission, underneath a faded poster advertising trips to the Victoria Falls, and watched Monica Hartson as she walked down the front steps of Charing Cross police station and headed for the Strand. It was approaching rush-hour and the streets were crowded, so her progress was slow and Gori was able to stay close, no more than five or six yards behind her, without any danger of being detected.
Hartson then crossed the Strand, picked up a free newspaper and ducked inside Charing Cross train station. Dropping a little further behind, Gori watched her buy a coffee before heading down into the Tube. Realising that he didn’t have a ticket, he followed her down the escalator and jogged over to the nearest machine. Grabbing a handful of change from his jacket pocket, he pushed in front of a group of Chinese tourists and dropped enough coins in the slot to get a standard single. He rushed through the barriers just in time to see the top of Hartson’s head disappearing down another escalator, heading for the Northern Line. Skipping down into the bowels of the Tube station, he watched her turn right at the bottom of the escalator, stepping on to the platform for trains heading north. Slowly, he counted to five and followed.
The platform was full, but not packed, with sweaty, tired and frustrated-looking travellers. A voice on the tannoy was apologising about interruptions to the service, caused by signalling problems, and the electronic board was signalling a four-minute wait for the next train. Faced with a sea of blank faces, Gori made his way carefully down the platform, always moving, never making eye contact. He found her about three-quarters of the way along, standing just behind the yellow line, sipping her coffee and staring at a poster advertising Errazuriz Chardonnay. The board now showed two minutes until the next train. Over the tannoy came an announcement about planned engineering works on the Circle Line. Keeping out of her line of vision, Gori walked past Hartson, to the end of the platform, placing himself behind a pair of women intently studying a copy of the A-Z.
The next train was due. Gori walked cautiously back along the platform until he was standing about two feet behind Hartson and slightly to her left, on the opposite side of her from where the train would arrive. He could hear it now steadily getting closer, until there was a sudden blast of air and the harsh clatter of metal on metal as it emerged from the tunnel. As she looked up, Gori stepped forward. The train was halfway into the station now and he could see the driver yawning in his cab. Leaning forward, he gave her a firm shove in the small of the back as he walked past. Without making a sound, she involuntarily stepped over the yellow line and off the edge of the platform, disappearing under the front wheels with the gentlest of thuds.
It all happened so quickly. No one on the platform seemed to notice. Not breaking his stride, Gori thought he caught a whiff of burning meat, as if you were passing a kebab shop, but quickly dismissed the idea. Doubtless it was just his imagination.
By the time it came to a halt the train was fully inside the station. The doors opened as normal and he heard the usual recorded message: Let passengers off the train first, please! Keeping a bored, vaguely annoyed look on his face, he allowed himself to be swallowed up by the disembarking travellers heading for the exit. Somewhere behind him an alarm sounded. This being London, however, no one paid it any heed. Everyone kept shuffling forward. A couple of Tube workers in luminous orange jackets appeared on the platform, their walkie-talkie radios cracking with static. Gori watched as they passed to his left, fighting their way through the crowd towards the driver.
It took maybe another minute for Gori to get off the platform and move into a tunnel that connected the different underground lines. Finally, the crowd began to thin and he was able to resume a normal walking pace. At the bottom of a set of escalators, he checked a copy of the Tube map and came to a decision as to where he wanted to go next. As luck would have it, he reached the Bakerloo Line just in time to jump on a train for Willesden Junction.
Barely ten minutes later, Matias stepped out of Edgware Road station. The sun was still strong and he felt thirsty. Ignoring the man selling the Big Issue outside the station entrance, he turned right, heading north. Entering the first pub he came to, he ordered a bottle of Heineken Export. When it arrived, he drank more than half of it in one go. It tasted good.
THIRTY-FOUR
Who the fuck played darts, these days? Dominic Silver stood at the bar in the Endurance, watching Michael Hagger throw a trio of arrows towards random parts of the board, before sucking the head off his pint of fake German lager. Aside from Hagger’s darts companion, Silver counted seven other men in the bar, plus the bartender. They were exactly the type of men you might expect to find in a bar in the middle of the afternoon on a working day: slackers and rejects of various descriptions. Everyone was busy minding his own business; no one was going to cause any trouble.
After managing to stay below the radar for longer than anyone imagined possible, Michael Hagger had finally reverted to type and turned up in a place where he was likely to find himself in the most amount of trouble in the shortest amount of time. The Endurance was located on Berwick Street, at the top end of the fruit and vegetable market. The pub was popular with an eclectic mix of media professionals, stallholders and the occasional hooker working in one of the walk-up brothels on the opposite side of the street. It was one of Hagger’s favourite haunts, so Silver had made sure it was checked regularly as the hunt for him continued. When Hagger had turned up and settled in for a session, word had got back to Silver within the hour. Less than forty minutes later, his ‘assistant’, the ex-paratrooper Gideon Spanner, had parked the Range Rover outside, and they walked in.
Dominic took a sip from his glass of house rose and winced. It was a long way short of the Etienne de Loury Sancerre he kept at home, and he now wished that he’d stuck to mineral water. No matter.
He turned to Gideon: ‘Bring him over.’
