FIVE DAYS AFTER his final visit to the prison, on a late afternoon in early December, Malcolm Manser got his driver Jez Knowlden to pull in at the Esso garage on Edgware Road and fill a gallon container with 4-star. They then drove to a pub in Notting Hill where Manser disappeared into the cellar with the manager and a member of the door staff. Twenty minutes later he returned to the S-type with a bin bag wrapped tightly with gaffer tape. He placed this on the back seat and instructed Knowlden to follow him up the main road while he did a little shopping.
He bought three disposable Bic lighters, a garden spade, and two large green plastic sacks for garden waste. He bought a black Maglite torch. He bought two steak-and-cheese subs from Sub City and gave one to Knowlden. They ate them while parked illegally on the main road, laughing at the people who went into the retro clothes shop to buy overpriced rags.
A call came through from Tim Chandos at New Scotland Yard. Sarah Hickman’s car had been found in Southwold. It wouldn’t be long before they picked her up.
‘Don’t pick her up,’ Manser said. ‘We’ll sort it. We’ll take it from here.’
* * *
Jez Knowlden was known as ‘Knocker’ to his friends because of a dirty fighting habit. He invariably got the first punch in, although it was more like a rap, as if he were knocking on a door. The blow would come from up high, directed down on to the bridge of the nose, which bled easily if hit right. Once a man was bleeding, the fight was over: they often had no stomach to continue. If you saw Knowlden eyeing the space between your eyes, step back and walk away because big pain was coming.
He had served in the first Iraq war as a driver for the Army. When he came back to the UK his ability behind the wheel brought him to the attention of the Secret Service, for whom he spent five years shuttling ambassadors, diplomats, ministers, and other VIPs through late-night London streets. He was the prime minister’s driver for his last six months of office. Driving was his life.
He was dishonourably discharged from MI6 for drug offences: off duty he was signing out cars with false papers to make overnight cocaine runs up to Edinburgh and Glasgow. He received a five-year suspended sentence, escaping prison thanks to the intervention of a number of high-ranking military and government staff. Nevertheless, he gravitated towards the criminal fraternity and used the cover of his new job – driving HGVs for a brewery – to continue trafficking between Scotland and the major cities south of the border. He ended up as a chauffeur again when he was being stopped by motorway police more times than he felt comfortable with, but this time it was for Big I Am villains trying to be something they weren’t: drug dealers, pimps, and gun sellers. He drove second-hand souped-up BMWs, Bentleys and Mercs, almost always in black or white. He was wiping down seats covered in come, coke, and Krug. The deals being negotiated in the badlands of south London were for three-and four-figure amounts. Skulls were being cracked for £150. He was taking orders from teenagers who wanted 50 Cent pumping on the car stereo all day and who thought class was an off-the-peg suit matched with Nike trainers and plenty of bling. The gold was so soft, it bent if you looked at it.
He almost crashed a car one night when his boss for the evening told him his shoes had cost more than Knowlden earned in a month. The guy went home with a bloody nose, and Knowlden was finished in the underworld.
In May 2003, Knowlden was back in HGVs, working for a removals firm specialising in trans-continental relocations. He and his mate, a fey student called Colin with a beard that looked like an accumulation of dust, had spent three hours hefting boxes filled with books and more crockery than could ever be used by a young couple, newly married or no, into a dilapidated pile of Charentaise stone situated in a blink-and-you-miss-it village fifteen miles north of Cognac. The job finished, they repaired to the town eager to quench their thirst with some of the famous spirit manufactured there and maybe bring a couple of bottles back for the gimps at HQ who were on less glamorous duties.
They hit the bars full steam, knowing they weren’t expected back before the following evening and could sleep off their inevitable shitstorm headaches in the wagon’s cabin on one of the open parking lots up in the industrial area of Chateaubernard before the long haul back up to Le Havre.
‘What’s this half-pint shit?’ Colin said, when they asked for their first beers. ‘I’ve been working like a bastard. My throat’s drier than a nun’s cunt.’
‘You have to specify that you want a large beer.’ The voice came to them from their left. They both turned: a guy wearing immaculate clothes, sunglasses. He had a bald head and a neatly trimmed full beard. He was looking down at the bar, at his glass of Ricard and jug of water. ‘The French … they’re a civilised lot over here. They think you want a beer, it’s something to wet your throat with while you chat about Camus or Sartre or Zidane. Une grande bière, s’il vous plaît.’
‘Grande bier, hey?’ Colin said, rubbing his pathetically coated chin. He made his order and a pretty waitress came back with a litre of Pelforth. It had been poured into something that resembled a glass bucket. The boy was overjoyed.
The stranger, Knowlden thought, really was wearing some beautifully cut gear – an Armani jacket, some kind of subtle designer T-shirt, moleskin trousers that were a kind of dark grey but were probably referred to as anthracite by the manufacturers, and leather boots that screamed pound signs. Next to him on a stool was a carefully folded nubuck leather jacket and a snazzy Merrell briefcase. Knowlden knew instinctively that he wanted to work for him. He was dedicated to him, a hundred per cent loyal, and they hadn’t even shared a conversation yet.
They stayed on at that one bar all night and drank litre vases of Affligem as well as pastis and Meukaw cognac. It was a good bar, and the waitress flirted, and they could order entrecôte and frites and salade verte after nine, which was unheard of in any London boozer they knew. The stranger introduced himself but never once took off his sunglasses. It didn’t look pretentious on him, somehow, Knowlden decided. And there was something else he noticed. No matter how much they drank, the stranger remained in control, like Knowlden himself. He liked that. It was reassuring. This was not a man to go off half-cocked. He would not render himself vulnerable by getting into a rage.
Colin, on the other hand, was bladdered. He was leaning over the bar, his jeans slowly travelling south while he attempted to ask the barmaid to marry him. Knowlden and Manser talked. Manser was impressed by Knowlden’s career. Knowlden liked how Manser didn’t brag about his position in the world. He had a few fingers in a few pies and he was making headway; that was all he said, although Knowlden knew it was more than that, and he knew that Manser knew he knew that.
By the end of the night, with Colin slumped against the bar and the barmaid singing to him, Knowlden and Manser were finishing each other’s sentences.
‘I could do with …’ Manser began.
‘… a driver like me,’ Knowlden completed.
‘Actually, I was going to say “a piss”.’
They got on. There was chemistry. Drinks finished, as Knowlden carried Colin off to the wagon, there had been a handshake, a swapping of email addresses and mobile numbers, a nod, a look, an understanding. Two months later, Knowlden had again handed in his notice on the long vehicles and accepted Manser’s offer of work. Chauffeur, bodyguard, right-hand man.
‘I need someone I can trust,’ Manser had told him. ‘Someone who isn’t squeamish. Who accepts that different people have different needs and doesn’t make judgements.’
‘You could be diddling your grandmother with merguez sausages and I wouldn’t double take,’ Knowlden said. But he did, when Manser told him what he was into.
A long pause. The sense of a line being crossed.
‘I’d take a bullet for you,’ Knowlden said.
‘How about a merguez sausage?’
He didn’t want to expose Knowlden to this kind of nasty shit so soon, but he needed some help. Gyorsi, when explaining his plan, was adamant that he would not fight what must come to him, the disfigurement that was necessary if he was to return to his public, but Manser knew what the body was capable of when it was taken into realms it ought never to experience. Instinct took over.
In the end, though, Knowlden was unfazed. They had spoken about his experiences in Iraq in 1991, specifically about the friendly-fire deaths he had witnessed when an A-10 accidentally dropped its payload on a pair of light armoured vehicles fifty miles south of the burning Burqan oil fields in southern Kuwait, a day after the commencement of Desert Storm. Three of the four crew members were obliterated, six smoking boots the only indicator of how many grunts had been travelling. The other crew member had survived, somehow protected from the fireflash that liquified his colleagues, but he had been mortally wounded by shrapnel. A burning piece of metal had carved through his stomach, cauterising the wound as it went. He was sitting on the desert floor looking through the massive hole in his torso, his stomach burning in the sand a few feet away like something fallen off a barbecue, when Knowlden got to him.
‘He watched me pull out my pistol and he was asking me, in this calm voice, not to do it. He could see that he was going to die, he wasn’t going to see the sun set or place his head on a pillow, or a woman’s breast, ever again. I just sat with him and waited for the shock to hit him, and then he didn’t even know who I was or where we were or what had happened to him. He watched me shoot him between the eyes and by then I don’t think he even knew what the gun was.’
Twilight was approaching when they turned the S-Type on to the gravel lay-by edging the forest. In this flagging light, the evergreens of the forest – the moss coating the bark, the creepers, the ferns – appeared to be staining the sky immediately above. They walked without conversing, as if the discussion they had just had in the car had exhausted all topics for a time, made them redundant. They moved swiftly, following Manser’s compass and his acquaintance with the trees. Darkness moved into the gaps around them like something being absorbed. Apart from their boots in the mulch of dead leaves and rotten sticks on the forest floor, the sounds of their breathing, the occasional clatter of wings in the heights and the chitter of insects coming to life under shadow, there was little noise. Until, fifteen minutes deep into the forest, they heard tinny music coming from a cheap radio.
The crumbled edifice of the old building announced itself; candles were dotted around the small clearing, yellowing the sterile layout and making it seem almost welcoming. Gyorsi Salavaria was kneeling, naked, in front of a broken shard of mirror, shaving, his old radio sitting next to him in the grass. The Chordettes singing ‘Mr Sandman’.
‘Are you ready for this, Gyorsi?’ Manser called. He placed the rucksack on the floor and removed the plastic can of petrol, began unscrewing the cap.
‘Yes, Malcolm … are you?’
Knowlden stepped forwards and held Manser down.
Manser struggled, but Jez’s arms were like branches from an oak tree. ‘What is this?’ he whined. ‘Gyorsi? Jez?’
When the fire was lit, the roar of it was grand enough to drown out any screaming.