Just before five a.m. I pulled into an abandoned car park in the shadow of Battersea Power Station.
DCI Flashman’s MIT from New Scotland Yard was already there: four detectives who were pumped up and anxious to begin, talking in low urgent voices, gulping down scalding coffee, their breath making steam in the freezing air, the engines of their two BMW X5s running and ready to go, stamping their feet as if they were chilled to the bone, as if they had been waiting for this moment all night long, as if they had been waiting for this moment all their lives.
The sun would not rise for another three hours and the great chimneys of Battersea Power Station rose into the sky above us lit by nothing but misty moonlight.
‘The search team did a three-mile diameter of the meat market,’ Flashman told me. ‘After forty-eight hours they found this in a skip at the top of John Street, up near the Angel.’
He gave me his phone and I scrolled through a dozen photographs of a samurai sword that had been bagged and double-tagged. The long curved blade of the sword was soaked in blood and it splattered the inside of the evidence bag.
I handed Flashman back his phone.
‘You got prints and serology yet?’ I asked.
Forensics should tell us the sword had been touched by Goran Gvozden and the serology analysis should tell us the blood had come out of Lenny Lane.
‘Not yet,’ Flashman said. ‘But this is enough.’
He was right. This was enough.
There is a great central mystery to a policeman’s life and it is this: you never know what is waiting for you beyond the next door that you force open. You can’t know and there is no way that you will ever know, and that uncertainty winds you tight in those last minutes before you go in, and your heart bangs and your blood pumps and you fight to control your runaway breath.
And – more than anything – you want to go on living.
‘Ready?’ Flashman said.
Outside the Double G dojo we were crouching down behind anything we could find. Armed officers with Heckler & Koch assault rifles had their backs against large green recycling bins. Uniformed officers huddled behind a discarded Christmas tree. Detectives in good suits were on their knees behind a big black council grit bin. And all eyes were on the tall, fair-haired leader of the MIT from Scotland Yard.
‘Go!’ Flashman yelled.
At his command a uniformed officer holding a bright red battering ram walked up the steps of the Double G dojo and swung it at the door. The battering ram he was holding was a heavily marked, ten-year-old Enforcer – also known as the big red key, the donker, the Nigel and the bosher. It is two feet long, weighs 16 kg and it sprung the door of the Double G open as if it were made of wet cardboard.
The officer stepped back and we ran inside, everyone screaming to put the fear of God into whoever was waiting for us, running down the steps where the students had all bowed to their teacher and across the mats of the darkened, deserted dojo.
A light came on in the office. Goran Gvozden appeared in boxer shorts and T-shirt, carrying a baseball bat. He thought he was being burgled.
Assault rifles were levelled at the centre of his chest.
‘PUT IT DOWN! PUT IT DOWN! PUT IT DOWN!’
He tossed aside the bat and came down the stairs to meet us in the middle of the dojo. A detective stepped behind him and lifted his arms behind his back prior to cuffing him. Goran Gvozden pulled his hands away, shaking his head with bewilderment.
DCI Flashman brushed past me.
‘Goran Gvozden, I am arresting you for the murder of Leonard Lane.’ Flashman said.
‘What?’ The big Serb turned and pushed the detective in the chest, just hard enough to make him step back. ‘No!’
‘Goran,’ I said. ‘Don’t fight them.’
‘You do not have to say anything,’ Flashman continued, ‘but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.’
‘Daddy?’
The boy was in the doorway of the office, still in his pyjamas, and when someone turned on the lights of the dojo, he blinked behind his glasses as if the sudden glare was blinding. A smiling young Family Liaison Officer walked up the stairs and crouched beside the child, taking his hand. The FLO would take care of the boy’s needs – or at least hand him over to the custody of social services.
At the sight of his son being taken into the care of strangers, Goran Gvozden went berserk.
‘Nenad!’
He was turning away from Flashman and from the rest of us and making for his son.
The detective who had tried to cuff him before tried it again and this time Gvozden slammed his elbow into the detective’s face. The uniformed officers with batons drawn piled onto him, the blows coming down as he fought back, taking on four or five of them, no room for fancy kicks, just taking them out with his knees, elbows and the great broad expanse of his forehead.
The armed officers were screaming. Nenad was crying. And I knew I was shouting Goran Gvozden’s name but I could not hear myself among the furious din.
And then an armed officer from SCO19 with his Glock 17 drawn barged me out of the way and I looked at the black flat-nosed Glock semi-automatic pointing at the head of Goran Gvozden and I could see the finger of the officer on the trigger and I knew there was no safety catch on the Glock and seventeen rounds inside and there was nothing to stop the big Serb dying here today.
But then a young female officer struck Gvozden from behind with her baton and he went down on his knees and a detective from Scotland Yard began to cuff the Serb’s wrists behind his back, and it would have been all right if the detective had been quicker, if the mad adrenalin rush of the morning hadn’t made his hands shake so badly, because suddenly Goran Gvozden was getting off his knees, roaring an oath in Serbian, and a young uniformed officer stepped forward, placed a Taser X2 against Goran Gvozden’s heart and fired at point blank range.
As the 50,000 volts entered his chest I saw the light go out of his eyes and I heard a child screaming for his father, a sound of loss and terror and animal grief, a sound that I knew I would remember for the rest of my life, a sound that was louder than bombs.