Without another word passing between us, Titus led me through a warren of empty corridors with digital locks and pin codes and finally ejected me out onto a back alley that discharged me into Pimlico. The night air felt good on my skin. Too late to get a Tube, I flagged down a cab and asked to be taken to Kings Cross. Back at the lock-up, I had an old campaign bed I’d once used for emergencies. Once I got the gas heater up and running, it wasn’t too bad, although I had to admit that I’d grown soft in the intervening months.
At first light, around seven, I shook myself awake and headed off to Kings Cross station to take a shower in the public conveniences. Next, I bought a pay-as-you-go phone and contacted Daragh Dwyer.
‘Daragh, it’s Hex.’
‘Fuck me, thought you were dead. Nobody’s heard a squeak out of you for months. How have you been keeping?’
With no time to explain, I said, ‘Can you talk?’
He let out a rich fruity laugh, his voice smoked and cured from endless cigarettes. ‘Now what sort of a daft question is that? I can talk for Ireland, so I can.’
‘I meant, are you alone?’
‘Just the missus and me. What the problem? You sound tense.’
‘Your life is in danger.’
‘Jesus, Hex, my life’s been in danger since the day I was born.’
‘It’s a heads-up, Daragh, a credible threat.’
I heard the sound of a match being struck, a set of lungs drawing on a cigarette. ‘Want to tell me what this is all about?’
‘Billy Squeeze.’
Daragh, so garrulous, fell silent. I didn’t know whether Billy still commanded that level of respect from beyond the grave, or whether Daragh was privy to information that I didn’t have.
‘Are you still there?’
‘I am that,’ he said.
‘You know about Chester and Faustino?’
‘To be sure. Bad business. You think I’m next, is that what you’re saying?’
‘You need to watch your back.’
‘Are you up for a meet?’
I hesitated. There was so much I needed to do, but Daragh Dwyer could yet shine a light on a dirty corner. ‘Stay where you are. It’s safer that way. I’ll come to you.’
* * *
Having moved to London as a young man, Daragh had never left his Kilburn roots. In common with other crime lords, his business was drugs and arms and associated mayhem, his fatal weakness cars, the more expensive the better. In his time he’d owned Astons and Ferraris, Bugattis and Bentleys. If you met him in a pub, you’d never suspect that the warm and generous Irishman buying a round of drinks was, in reality, a rattlesnake that protected his corner with a viciousness that battered the senses, and that he routinely had people flushed away.
I walked the short distance from the Underground station to his home. Set back from the road, behind electronic gates and a security system that could rival that of GCHQ, was a large Gothic-looking pile – three floors and six bedrooms, over three and a half thousand square feet of real estate in all.
I pressed the keypad and spoke into the entry phone. Daragh emerged from the house, stocky frame caught in a shaft of raw morning sun. Dough-faced with a big moustache, he grinned and winked at me, rattling a set of keys in his hand and pointing to his latest toy.
‘Open the gates, Daragh,’ I shouted. But Daragh was gone, full craic, ‘A masterpiece of engineering and as solid on the road as …
My eyes swivelled to the low-slung Pagani – silver, muscular and menacing. ‘Daragh, stop,’ I yelled as he bounded down the flight of wide stone steps from the front door to the driveway.
‘Hex, you’re a funny man, so you are.’
All at once the air around me shrank and the light darkened, like seawater receding over sand and beach, sucked dry before the onslaught of a tsunami. A white flash and then noise so loud it eclipsed a one hundred gun salute, I was lifted bodily off my feet and thrown back against a car parked a metre away. My jacket torn, warm liquid trickled down my left arm, bicep burning. The smell of cooked and charred flesh invaded my nostrils. Deafened, my ears buzzed, then a high-pitched whine pierced my hearing followed by an inner noise like a weir in full roar. Half-blinded, I looked up through gritty eyes and saw the mangled gates, the silver car reduced to a blackened, crumpled, unidentifiable wreck. Grisly body parts lay scattered across the drive. A severed arm, wristwatch still attached, and a leg caught in the branches of a tree, the only identifiable remains of Daragh Dwyer. A stout, middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair stood outside the front door, both hands over her ears, her mouth wide open, her scream inaudible.
I looked around. People with frightened faces ran towards me in slow motion. Some ran away. I couldn’t hear a thing, but I can lip-read, and a young guy crouched down and asked if I was all right, if I was hurt. I shook my head, made to get up. Pain screeched through my arm. He pushed me back down, told me to take it easy and stay where I was. Someone else mouthed, ‘Call the police. Get an ambulance.’ Another guy, wearing a bobble hat, stood as close as he could to the carnage. He held a mobile phone high in his hand and took pictures. I imagined Daragh’s mortal remains uploaded and posted on YouTube.
I shook off my young Samaritan, staggered to my feet, pushed my way through a gathering crowd, knocked the phone out of bobble-hat man’s hand and stamped on it once. Before he could react, I stumbled away and broke into a run before the cops turned up.