In the next few days I went through the names in Lloyd’s diary. I got him to tell me who they all were and each one of them checked out the way he had said they would. Other MPs, colleagues at both the lobby company and the Holdings firm as well as a couple of old friends and his brother. Harvey turned out to be Harvey Lawrence, Lloyd’s only partner in the Buckner Group. I called him and pretended to be a potential investor. He seemed very pleased to hear from me and didn’t even ask where I’d got hold of his name. I arranged to meet him in two days’ time which would give me a chance to set up a meeting with Charlotte Morgan’s accountant first.
But I never got the chance to meet either of them.
I wanted to talk to Dominic’s other friends, the other kids on his patch. One of them must have seen him go off with the man in the hat that night. Andy phoned to tell me that the police had found Emma but she hadn’t seen Dominic since the night before he was killed. I wanted to speak to the kid I’d seen Dominic with the night I’d had the run-in with Rollo. I was pretty sure I’d recognize him. I’d seen him and Dominic talking; they looked like friends. I set myself up in a pub this time, on the Pentonville Road itself, which was not as near as the cafe was but close enough that I could still tell if there was anyone standing about for business without having to get my zoom out and make a show of myself. The pub was dark and smoky and smelled of piss. It had a smallish stage which was occupied by a bored stream of readers’ wives style strippers. The pub’s clientele was made up exclusively of men but I wasn’t the only one not bothering to pay attention.
The spot across the street was completely empty for the first day that I sat there watching it. I guessed this was due to what happened to Dominic, which the other kids would have heard about and felt that the best way to protect themselves was to go and stand on a different corner. They would always come back though; knowing that they would lose regular custom, their pimps would have told them they had to. Another possible reason for their absence was that the police had steamed in with pictures of Dominic and scared them all off. In that case they would still return, but it might take longer. Fear of the police was stronger in boy junkies than fear of serial killers. I sat in the pub all of that day and for most of the evening.
During the morning of the second day, a couple of lads showed up. I was glad. I didn’t want to go traipsing all over Dalston and out to Stoke Newington to find the place they’d decamped to. I waited in the pub. When the number had risen to four by midday I took a stroll past to see if any of them was the boy I had seen with Dominic. No luck. I thought about asking them anyway but decided against. The word might get round and the place would be dead again. I went back to the pub.
It was difficult to see but by late afternoon I thought the boy had arrived. I put my bag over my shoulder again and walked out on to the street. I walked past the twenty-four-hour store and crossed over the road. I passed the Thameslink station and walked up towards the derelict kebab shop where the boys were waiting for pick-ups. There were three of them, standing together in tight jeans and bomber jackets. They looked just like any three teenagers, hanging out, trying to be cool, either chewing gum or smoking. Other people walked by, most not noticing them. A young girl checked one of them out. An old lady’s face drew up into a frown when one of the kids spat on the pavement, not seeing her, forcing her to make a small diversion in her path.
When I was twenty feet or so away from them, I could tell that the boy was not there. None of them was him. I was disappointed but this time I did decide to speak to the others anyway as I was quite confident that I could do it without spooking them. I approached the nearest one, but spoke so that all of them could hear me.
‘Listen, guys,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to get you all nervous. I’m not the Bill or anything. I was just wondering if any of you knew that kid Mikey. He used to work from here.’
The three of them looked suspicious but not overly worried or defensive. The one nearest said, ‘No, mate. Never knew him. Heard of him though. You sure you’re not Bill?’
‘I’m positive.’
‘What are you then?’
I never got a chance to answer. I was stood facing towards the Cross, and I was about to speak when another boy walked around the corner towards us. He was black, about fourteen years old, and he was dressed in a bright orange puffa jacket and a blue cap which he had on backwards. The boy’s face was bruised some, the damage hidden to a large degree by the natural colour of his skin, but evident nevertheless. He was walking with his hands in his pockets, his face a sullen mask of worry, and as he approached us one of the boys I was talking to looked up in a way which told me that he knew him. He nodded slightly and the black boy nodded back. I thought the black boy was going to say something, to make some sort of greeting but he didn’t. He slowed down suddenly and came to a stop.
He came to a stop because of me.
Given warning, a second or two to get a hold of himself, the kid might just have bluffed it out and said hi to his mates and kept walking. But the surprise at seeing me was instant and as his gaze automatically locked into mine, his expression gave him away. He was afraid that I was there looking for him. Even then he could have shaken it off, if it were not for the fact that he could tell I had seen it. Seen his surprise. I stared into his eyes, trying to place him. I could feel recognition cogs wheeling into place and I knew that I’d have him in a matter of seconds.
Then I did have him.
The boy looked away from me and turned around immediately. He began to walk.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. He turned round very briefly but didn’t stop. ‘Excuse me,’ I said again.
He was off.
How he wasn’t killed by a cab accelerating away from the lights up towards the Angel I will never know. The shock and terror on the driver’s face as he swerved straight into the goods van in the other lane was like a Munch sketch in motion. I ignored the havoc and the car horns and followed the kid over the road, keeping sight of his orange jacket as he ran and jostled through the crowd of pedestrians going to and from King’s Cross. He ran towards the station and I just about kept up with him, fifteen or twenty yards behind him as he burned past the Standard vendors and the winos and the bus queues and the suits standing in line by the taxi rank. I ran after him, hampered by my hold-all which thudded against my hip with every second stride I took. I lost him as he turned right and ran up towards the Pancras Road.
Why the fuck was he running from me? I saw his face, nervous in the gym, just before he started sparring. Holding his coat. And earlier, just stood there, after I’d come out of the weights room. He’d come looking for me too, it must have been him Alberto saw in the cafe. Why was he … I thought of his bruises. Sal would never have let that happen to him in her gym. No way. Where did he get them? Why did I make him so terrified? No point worrying. He was running. He’d seen me and he was running.
I was on to him again as soon as I’d turned the way he had. He cut a right down a small road behind King’s Cross station itself. I cut an earlier right and managed to beat him to the end, seeing him run out up ahead of me. He turned left and kept running and I followed, my side breaking as my ribs pulled apart where the cracks were beginning to knit. I pounded on, knowing that if he kept his pace up I was going to lose him. A boxing gym? He should have been at Crystal frigging Palace.
He took another right and I had an idea as to where he might be going. Again there was an earlier right, an old, cobbled mechanic’s yard, and I took it, stopping myself before I flew out of the end of it. I held on to the wall and peered around the corner, just catching sight of a blur of orange as it came out ahead of me. I ducked back in and then heard the sound of his feet coming to a stop. Then there was the scuff sound of a quick sprint which stopped again, abruptly.
I pushed my ribs into my side and tried not to let my lungs pull in so much of the air it so desperately needed. Each breath was the ghost of the size tens I’d received at York Way. I left it a second and looked round the corner again, still breathing heavily. The kid was nowhere. I jogged up the street, up to the cast-iron fence-cum-wall at the top of it. I looked left and right but couldn’t see the kid in either direction. I looked at the wall again and jumped up on to it, holding myself steady as I peered over the top.
The area I was looking into was land owned by British Rail. It was big, perhaps as big as two football pitches. I’d read somewhere that the land had been offered as part of a sweetener deal for companies interested in buying into the network when it was privatized. The land was central, perfect for high-rent office blocks and designer security homes. This hadn’t happened yet though. The land was derelict, patched with the remains of abandoned fires lit by kids or the homeless, out for fun or heat. I could see rusting shopping trolleys and a punctured football, pieces of old carpet and a scorched three-piece suite.
And I could see a young boy in an orange puffa running directly away from where I was perched. He was running more slowly than he had been before, his head moving left and right as he looked around for me. As he moved his head and shoulders all the way round to take a look behind him, I dropped back out of sight.
After leaving a couple of seconds I pulled myself up again, this time getting a better hold so that I could duck down without coming off the wall completely. I looked over. I could see the boy jogging towards an old caravan, still looking all around him. The van was a hundred yards away. It was old and knackered, resting on six piles of bricks. I watched as the boy approached the van, reached up and knocked on the door. He pulled the door open. I ducked down again, knowing that he’d have one last look behind before stepping into the van. I came up to see the door closing. I took out my camera and zoomed in. I tried to see through the stained plastic windows but they were covered by brown curtains. I couldn’t make out any movement behind them.
I focused on the door and was surprised when, after five minutes, it was thrown open. I caught a pair of hands, pushing the same boy out of the van on to the concrete. The door of the van shut and the boy got up. He held his knee where he’d fallen on it and then put his hand up to his face. Through the lens I could see that his nose was bleeding. The kid then hobbled off, one hand on his damaged knee, the other palm down, trying to staunch the flow of blood from his nose, wiping some on to the sleeve of his coat and then trying to wipe that off with his hand.
The boy walked off at a right angle to where I was sitting, towards a derelict building protected by wire meshing. He could probably get through there on to the street. It may even be where he slept. I looked up from the viewfinder and then put the camera back in my bag, still watching to make sure no one came out of the van.
I had it now. The gym. He wasn’t scared of fighting. That wasn’t why that doubt had come into his face when he saw me there. This kid looked like he got into fights quite often, and never came out of them too well. No. He was frightened of me. He was frightened of the picture that he’d seen me showing to Sal; it had been lying on the table in the weights room. He must have seen it. He was frightened because he knew the man in the picture and even more frightened of what might happen to him if he told me who the man was. I got the impression, thinking about it, that what frightened him most of all was that he really did want to tell me. He was terrified that that was exactly what he was going to do. That would have been fine if nothing could link me to him, but when he’d seen me on the corner with his colleagues he was sure he was in big trouble. If they knew he’d been looking for me, to tell me who the man in the picture was, they’d tell the man and he’d be as good as dead.
But now he had told me. I knew who was in there.
I jogged towards the van, trying to keep in line with the corner, away from the window. I thought about calling Ken Clay, but I wanted this guy for myself. I studied the curtains of the van but they didn’t move. When I’d covered the distance from the wall I stood at the corner of the van and thought how to do it. From inside I could hear the sound of an efficient boom box tuned in to Radio One. Mark Radcliffe was assuring his listeners that he was very sorry indeed that his show was over for another day. I was glad of the noise; it would be a distraction. I waited until the next DJ had come on and assured his listeners of how glad he was to be with them for the next two hours. Still, I waited. Then the DJ announced that the next track would be a huge house-jungle crossover smash and was bound to break into the charts on Sunday. I wasn’t ready to give an opinion on his prophetic statement but there was one thing I did know. The track was loud. I set my bag down on the ground beside me.
I walked round to the side of the caravan, where the door was, keeping my head below the level of the windows. I stood outside the door and reached for the handle. The kid had knocked but opened the door straight after he’d done so. It hadn’t been locked. Was it now? I was about to find out. I pulled the handle.
I was inside the van. He was on the left, lying on a bed. He was propped up on some cushions and was just putting a beer down next to a half-empty litre bottle of cheap vodka on a small, built-in table to the right of the bed. At the foot of the bed, nearer to me than him, was a sawn-off shotgun, presumably the same one he had aimed at my head only a few days previously. In the split second before all hell let loose our eyes met.
He wasn’t wearing a baseball hat now, and it was then that I realized what a perfect disguise his hat had been, why nobody had recognized him from the picture I’d been showing round; why he could know Rollo but Rollo didn’t recognize him. The man was balding, with long, black greasy strands of hair hanging down from the sides of his head and down over his shoulders. On the top of his head, running down from the centre, and making a sharp turn to the left just above the brow, was a scar which dominated not only his head but his whole face. It was like a brand, the scar tissue old but still livid, something your eyes could not avoid, something which seemed to define him. I didn’t know the cause of the scar, whether it was surgical, accidental or given to him on purpose, but I did know that with a hat on he was a different person. His hat was lying on the bed next to him.
He came forward towards the gun but I beat him to it. I was turning it on him when he took hold of the barrel with both of his hands and forced me back. For a split second the gun was pointing straight into his chest but I didn’t pull the trigger. His momentum had taken him up into a standing position on the bed and it forced me backwards as he came off it and on to me. I backed into something, hard, and the gun went off, blowing a hole in the ceiling of the van and sending down a shower of debris. I pulled the trigger again, deliberately this time, blowing out one of the plastic windows. Knowing the gun was empty he released a hand from it and went for a straight right but I managed to get my head out of the way of his fist and it smacked into the plywood behind me. I got the butt of the gun into the side of his face. It straightened him up and before he could swing again I jabbed the end of the gun full into his face with as much of my weight behind it as I could get. It sent him the two feet towards the bed and he tripped backwards, thanks more to the contact with the bed than to what I’d done to him.
His face was pulsing blood. I wasn’t sure how much he could see. He should have taken the count then but he didn’t. He came up at me but before he could get to his feet I used the gun again. He went back further this time and his hand went for the nearest of the two bottles by the side of the bed which, to my relief, was the one that held the Becks. His fingers curled around the green glass and with one last effort he threw it with all his force, coming in after it, screaming like a stuck pig. I was showered with beer but the bottle missed me. I stepped to the side and the man missed me too; he crashed into the plywood which his fist had gone into. I used the gun again. He put his hands out to keep himself upright. I hit him again. Even then there was something left in him. It was like trying to fell a tree. I used the gun again and then one more time and then he didn’t have anything left. I stood back from him and he slid down the wall of the van, settling on to the floor as gently as a lift in a four-star hotel.
The Spice Girls. I’ll never forget that it was the Spice Girls which was all I could hear. I reached over and turned the sound off. I wanted it off because something else was trying to make me hear it. Or see it. I’d expected feelings of relief, even euphoria at finding the man who was now unconscious at my feet but all of a sudden it seemed trivial. There was something else, something bigger. My eyes went towards the unit at the top of the bed. My thoughts were racing ahead of me. The bottle. As he’d gone for the Becks bottle he’d knocked the litre bottle of vodka on to its side. It was still there. Even as he had done so it had started to come to me, though I didn’t know what it was. Now I stared at the bottle. I got an uncomfortable feeling. I felt a racing in my stomach to match that in my head. There was a picture, a picture that I’d missed, something I’d seen but which hadn’t registered. A bottle. A hand, the way it held… The vodka in the litre bottle swayed slightly, looking for equilibrium. It looked gentle, unconcerned. I stared at it.
I saw a man holding a bottle, holding it in a way which at the time had called out to me but I had failed to hear it. His hand on the bottle. Certain, calm, smiling. Holding it like … like he had some sort of affinity with it. I saw a bottle rammed into a young boy’s throat. Other bottles. The pictures were becoming sharper. A boy, a truck driver. I felt the horror that comes from realization and the need to act, now, not wait another second, act before it all went out of focus. I didn’t know how I knew what I did but I did know. I was certain. I knew. I could see it. It was the way he had held that bottle. I’d sat across from him as he smiled at me, and I’d been struck by it at the time but not struck hard enough. But now I knew what I knew and suddenly I knew how I could prove it. All of the inconsistencies, all of the elements which I couldn’t fit into my scenario of what had happened to Edward, all suddenly made sense. Why I wasn’t killed at York Way, why the killer didn’t care about the video, why Teddy was preoccupied, how Dominic had become involved. The knowledge that had just come to me slid into the events easy as Cinderella’s left foot. I snapped my eyes away from the vodka bottle and looked quickly round the caravan.
The man was lying on his side, curled up like he was asleep. Now I knew why he hadn’t killed me; it was because he had never killed anyone. Not him. I searched for his mobile. I knew he’d have one, he was a pimp, wasn’t he, at the very least? I tore the place apart until I finally found it in the pocket of a black leather jacket and used it to call Andy Gold. He wasn’t there so I asked for Ken Clay. He came on the line and I told him that I was in a caravan on old BR land behind King’s Cross.
’If you want the man in the hat,’ I said, ‘you better get here soon. He’s unconscious but I don’t know how long he’ll be out.’
‘Stay there,’ Clay said. ‘Don’t fucking leave him.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Just get here.’
I was in a hurry. It wasn’t a logical hurry, but it was speeding through me so fast I had to go with it.
‘Just get here,’ I said.
I could hear his protestations as I looked for the button to turn the thing off. I put the phone on the bed and took out my wallet. Andy Gold had given me a card which his bleeper company had issued and which had his number on it. I called it and told the woman the message I would like to leave. She wanted me to read it back to her.
‘Just send the fucking thing!’
I dropped the phone and pushed open the door of the caravan. I grabbed my bag and ran to my car. There was a face in front of my eyes and as I ran I felt that I was running straight into it, my fists clenched, and I was about to smash a big hole in the confident smile that played on its broad lips.
I didn’t feel the pain in my ribs any more.
When I got to Andy Gold’s flat in Camden I double-parked and jumped out. He was already there, just getting out of his Astra. He locked it, and walked towards me, digging his flat keys out of his pocket. He looked puzzled.
‘You’ve got the video?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s inside. I never got round to taking it back. But I already gave you the picture.’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘quickly. I need to see it.’
We went inside. I asked Andy to find the place on the tape where he’d found Teddy, and the man in the hat. It didn’t take him long.
‘I already went through this about…’
I took the remote from him and hit the fast-forward button. I went back and forward over the next section of tape, going fast, and then slowing the tape right down. I couldn’t see anything, but maybe it was because the door of the shop kept closing. I asked Andy to do the same thing with the other tape, the one from the concourse, which had shown Teddy and the man but had been useless due to the man’s baseball cap. Again I hit the forward button, but this time the slow-mo. Andy sat beside me, not particularly engrossed in the screen, not knowing what to look for. The crowd of people inched past like a wave of zombies. Slowly. Slowly. My eyes flicked around them. I watched for five minutes, until I was almost ready to give up. Suddenly it didn’t seem so obvious to me. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I had left the real villain lying unconscious in a caravan behind King’s Cross. Andy started to fidget. Once again he told me that the tape was useless, you couldn’t see enough of him. He wanted to know why I was looking at the time after Teddy and the man had gone by. He made a crack about wasting police time.
And then I saw him.
I hit pause on the remote and a hundred people stopped still. I looked at him, just catching the front of his face as he walked into the frame. No hat. Not a clear picture but a definite one. I stared at him. I’d stopped him, just like he’d stopped at least three people. The fuzzy V-hold on the screen made him shake like a fly caught in a web.
I put my finger on the screen. It took Andy a second to recognize him and another to realize why I was pointing him out. His breath stopped, as his mind processed the myriad objections to what my finger was telling him. He didn’t say anything. He moved closer to the tiny shivering face in the top left corner of the screen. I could see him scouring his mind for a reason, a reason why it couldn’t be him. Another second passed. Then Andy’s eyes moved away from the screen and into space.
Suddenly, he made a grab for the telephone.
When I got to the airport it was busier than the last time I’d been there but it still wasn’t crowded. I stood amongst the sparsely filled tables of the Pavilion Bar looking at a tall, slim figure who was chopping lemons at the bar. Alex Mitchell had his back to me but he must have felt my eyes on him because he stopped what he was doing and turned round to face me. He smiled but his smile disappeared immediately when he saw that I wasn’t smiling. His face turned to chalk. Almost immediately he moved along the bar and turned to walk away but stopped when he saw Andy Gold blocking his exit. He backed up and hurried to the other end of the bar only to find an airport cop, complete with automatic rifle, standing square on to him, blocking his path that way too. It was then that he looked past me and saw the other six airport cops, all of whom Andy Gold had briefed, surrounding his bar.
Alex Mitchell should have given up then. But he didn’t. He raised the knife he was still carrying high above his head and ran straight at the nearest cop. The bullet hit him almost exactly in the middle of his forehead.