II

I reached the spiral staircase and began climbing it several steps at a time, the soles of my shoes clanging against the steps. From somewhere far above me, there was a further clatter of noise – was the shooter coming down? I plunged my hand into my trouser pocket and wrapped my fist around my car keys, the only weapon I had with me. How the hell had he brought a rifle into St Paul’s? I kept climbing. The noises were fading, and my dizziness was increasing. Some long-buried memory told me there were 259 of the things, but I resisted the urge to count them and pushed upwards, upwards, trying not to think about what had just happened, regulating my breathing and concentrating on the task at hand: get to the top; find the sniper.

I reached the Whispering Gallery, but there was nobody there, not even a Redcap. I glanced down and saw that several of them were heading for the staircase, against the flow of the crowd. I looked around frantically. Had the sniper gone back down another way? Would he shoot again? And then I registered movement in my peripheral vision. It had come from the far end of the gallery: a slim figure, bearded and dressed in black. He had a case strapped to his back, no doubt containing the dismantled rifle. He was heading towards a doorway that led to the next flight of stairs.

I resisted the temptation to stop for breath and ran after him, willing my feet to move faster, using my arms to hoist myself along the narrow iron banister and ignoring the rising heat in my chest, until finally I came out of the staircase and felt the freshness of the morning air on my face. I was at the base of the dome now, the Stone Gallery. My trousers fluttered in and out as the wind whipped against them, and I could feel my cheeks beginning to do the same. Voices echoed in my ears, and they were getting louder: the Redcaps would be here soon. I realized I had to get to him before they did – who knew what he might say if he was taken into custody? If he told anyone I had been his target it wouldn’t take long for them to start speculating why, and having just cleared my name that was the last thing I wanted.

I reached out for a moulding on the wall, and began edging my way around the gallery as quickly as I could. Without meaning to, I caught a glimpse of the Thames far below, a glittering snake swaying in the mid-morning sunshine. I forced my eyes away and continued my journey around the platform.

The dome of the cathedral had been covered in scaffolding for years – structural damage from the war – but all of it had been taken down a few months ago. Or most of it had: as I turned the corner, I saw that there was a ladder lying on the ground, and what looked like a small pile of workmen’s tools. Was this what the sniper had come up here for, something hidden in this mess?

Finally, I saw him. He had climbed onto the balustrade, seemingly oblivious to the wind and the height. He was sitting astride a climbing rope, which he had tied around the balustrade, and was now busy looping it around one of his thighs. He glanced up at me, then went back to his task, bringing the rope across his midriff and over one shoulder. I was just a few yards away, and pushed myself to get closer. If he was going to do what I thought… He brought the rope around one of his wrists, and took hold of it with both hands, one above and one below. He pushed himself back and started to fall.

It was now or never.

I surged forward and jumped blindly. He’d gone further than I’d thought, so that for a few moments I thought I’d mistimed it, but then came the crump of contact as I smacked into his back. I immediately clasped my arms around his torso, gripping as hard as I could and hoping to Christ that the rope was tethered tightly enough and could take the load of two men. The sniper started shaking his shoulders in an attempt to dislodge me, and as the ground approached two conflicting urges were passing through my brain – the physical one, saying ‘let go, you madman’ and the other one, saying ‘if you let go you will die, if you let go you will die…’

I managed to hold on and we landed with a crash, the two of us a heap of limbs and bones. My whole body felt numb from the jolt of the impact, but I seemed to be uninjured. I was still trying to regain my bearings when I saw that the sniper had already let go of the rope and was off and running. It took me a few seconds to get to my feet and begin pursuit.

And he was fast, bloody fast, spurting down the narrow road, weaving his way around dustbins and lamp-posts. There was no traffic about, and he rushed across the pavement and darted down a grass-patched alley. I hurtled into it after him, my breathing coming heavily, half my brain still catching up from the fall. There was a thickening burr of noise, but it wasn’t until I made it to the corner of Cannon Street that I saw the crush of people. Two massive placards bobbed above the crowd, reading ‘PEACE AND SOCIALISM’ and ‘ALL OUT MAY DAY – SMASH THE WHITE PAPER’. The latter slogan was also being chanted by members of the column, the words echoing off the buildings.

Of course. The May Day march. It had turned violent last year, when it had been about Powell and immigration. This time Wilson and Castle seemed to be the villains, their crime being to propose trade union legislation. I caught the tinny strain of a loudhailer from somewhere in the direction of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and then there was the wail of a police siren seemingly very close by, and a clump of the column began moving off at a faster pace. The group behind were momentarily caught off guard, and I squeezed past a man in a checked shirt and jeans and squinted up Ludgate Hill, searching for a glimpse of the sniper. A sea of heads stretched into the distance. I looked for any unusual movement within it, for anyone running. Nothing. I turned and saw police and security staff massing around the entrance of the cathedral. Some of the Redcaps had seen me and were heading in my direction. I ducked back into the crowd and checked down Cannon Street again. Still nothing. Where the hell had he gone?

Then I saw him: a dark figure running up Ludgate Hill to Farringdon Street. Was he heading for the station? I pushed forward and began chasing him, calling out as I did in the hope that someone might stop him, but my throat wasn’t working properly, and neither were my legs, and by the time I’d reached the end of the street he had already vanished. If he got on the Tube and I wasn’t there with him, that would be it.

The drumming in my head and throbbing in my chest were telling me to stop to take some rest, but I forced myself to keep going and even made up enough ground to see him heading into the station entrance. I reached it less than thirty seconds later, and raced into the booking hall. He’d vanished again. And now I had to make a decision: under- or over-ground? The Underground seemed the better bet, as trains left much more frequently. There was a queue at the ticket office, but a quick glance told me my man wasn’t in it. I couldn’t see any inspectors and I guessed he had jumped over the barrier, so I did the same, pushing past people to try to catch sight of him.

As if by telepathy, he looked back at me the moment I spotted him. He was already on the footbridge, and I made my way towards him, keeping my eyes fixed on the rifle casing on his back. Behind him, a field of grey sky spread across the glass roof.

I reached the bridge and saw that he had ducked to the right, heading for the eastbound platform. I followed, shouting: ‘Police! Stop that man!’ This time the tactic worked. People stopped and turned to see who I meant, and the sniper slowed to avoid the attention. But he was confused, and an old lady with a bag of shopping bumped into him. There was a group of people coming across the bridge, and I noticed that they were carrying banners: reinforcements for the march, I guessed, or perhaps they’d had enough and were going home, but there was a crush and we were both finding it hard to get through. If only I could get a few steps closer to him…

A train started rumbling into one of the platforms below, and I looked down. It was the eastbound. I called out ‘Police!’ louder, pushing my way through until I reached the staircase, but it was like swimming in mud. The train grated to a halt and as I reached the foot of the stairs the doors juddered open and a crowd of people moved forward and into it. I couldn’t see the sniper, but I had to gamble that he would get on board. My feet hammered down the platform and made it through the doors as they were closing.

I took a second to recover my breath again, my chest heaving, and then looked around. I saw him at once. He was in the next compartment, just a few yards away from me. He was standing there quite casually, partly obscured by a woman reading a paperback. I pushed the doors apart and stepped into the compartment. He looked up, and a smile broke out across his face, almost a leer. His right hand was thrust into his jacket pocket, and I could make out the outline of what looked like the barrel of a pistol. Just inches away, a man wearing a fisherman’s sweater, canvas trousers and boots was seated next to a young boy, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, who was dressed almost identically in miniature. The boy’s head was directly in the line of fire. The sniper raised his eyebrows at me and I nodded to show that I understood: not a step nearer.

This was my first chance to examine the sniper at close quarters. He was a youngish man, in his mid to late twenties, wearing a black suit with a dog collar – so that was how he had managed to get into the cathedral. He was of average height, but well built: unsurprisingly, considering the acrobatics he’d just pulled off. He had a wolfish look about him: a long handsome face, olive skin, thick shoulder-length hair, greasy with pomade or something similar, and a wild beard. The Christ-meets-Guevara look. No doubt it went down well with female revolutionaries, but he looked fake to me, like a fashion photograph. Despite the fixed smile he was sweating profusely, and I didn’t think it was entirely due to physical exertion – every couple of seconds the muscles in his jaw twitched. Was he injured somewhere? Got it: his jacket was torn just below the left shoulder, a sliver of half-dried blood just visible against the dark fabric. Probably where the rope had burned him – I wondered how his hands felt.

I looked around the carriage, and saw that most of the passengers were clutching banners or sheets daubed with slogans. They weren’t the students and flower children you typically saw on protests, but labourers and factory hands. A man in a boiler suit and boots caught my glance, and stared at my suit with open aggression.

‘Been on the march, ’ave you?’

I shook my head, and looked intently at the sniper.

‘’Ark at ’im!’ the man announced to the carriage. ‘’Is Lordship ’ere don’t want nothing to do with the likes of us.’

‘I’ve been at a funeral,’ I said coldly. The man went quiet and started looking at the toothpaste advertisements.

The sniper smiled softly to himself. If he were to show his gun, panic would ensue and it would probably be to his disadvantage: the train would be stopped, transport police would board. But he knew I would try to avoid him taking that route, so as long as he kept his threat discreet he had the upper hand. Perhaps I could pull the emergency cord – that would flush the bastard out. I thought better of it. The gun could end up going off. On the other hand, if it were an automatic it wouldn’t be able to cycle in his pocket, meaning that for the moment it would be a one-shot gun. I put it out of my mind: I had no idea whether it was an automatic or not, and one shot was too much to risk anyway.

I turned my attention to his intended targets. The man had a ruddy face, calloused hands and a broken nose: a docker, I thought. The boy, no doubt his son, looked like he’d already spent a few years on the docks himself. He was skinny, gangly-legged, with sunken cheeks and a glazed look in his eyes. At his age I had been wearing a tweed jacket and tie at boarding school. Father had been in Singapore then, and I’d never worn long sleeves before, let alone a jacket or tie, but I had soon got used to it…

I wondered what they were doing on the Underground. Perhaps the boy had been too weak to make it through the march? Then I noticed that the father was wheezing every few seconds. It wasn’t that he was looking after the son, but the other way round.

The fluorescent lighting panels in the ceiling started flickering – and then, just like that, they went out, and we were plunged into darkness. The train screeched to a halt, and there was a collective gasp from the passengers, followed immediately by groans of frustration and anger and the murmuring of voices. Someone near me swooned and a few people lunged forward to help them – Blitz spirit and all that. I didn’t have time to be chivalrous because the sniper might try to do something. He couldn’t open the doors, but he could move between the carriages.

I made to step forward, but as I did the lights flickered back on. The train started moving again and the carriage returned to normal. Someone gave the woman who had fainted a thermos flask and she took a drink from it, gulping it down.

I turned my attention back to the sniper. He didn’t look Russian, I realized. There was something about the way he was staring at me – he was enjoying it. There was also a bravado about him, and I put him down as a southern European. His enjoyment sent a fresh wave of anger through me. I had given Moscow more than two decades of my life, and now they had sent this thug to shoot me down like a dog. If he were taken in for questioning, he might reveal I had been his target, so I needed to kill him, and soon.

But first I wanted some answers.

The clacking of the train began to slow. The boy squinted up at the Tube map on the wall of the carriage, talking to his father. It looked like the incident with the lights had scared him, and they wanted to get off at the next stop. They started to busy themselves – they had a hold-all with them, presumably for drinks and sandwiches.

The boy helped his father up and they moved to a spot in front of the door. The sniper took a step back, but kept his aim fixed on the boy, at his midriff. I glanced at his face: he was watching me watching them. In some situations I might have tried to rush him, counting on the fact that he would hesitate before killing an innocent child. But this was not such a situation: this man had just killed the head of the Service in a very public place, and would stop at nothing to get away from me. The boy was expendable to him, and I had to act with that in mind.

We came into Barbican, and the doors opened. People rushed forward to get off the train. I made to move, but the sniper was fixing me with a frantic gaze, his nostrils flaring. The father and boy were oblivious to the danger, and were not moving. Had they simply got up a stop early to prepare? No, the father was leaning down to adjust the hold-all – it wasn’t entirely closed.

He stood up, and as the boy held out his arm to help him off the train, the sniper made his move. He leapt onto the platform and took the boy under his arm, then started running, dragging the startled boy with him. There was a shout from the father, from others on the platform. For a moment, I froze. Then I jumped forward, too, but the doors were already closing. I squeezed through and onto the platform, but the two of them had disappeared among the passengers emptying from the other carriages, and I pushed past people, furious with myself for reacting so slowly. A mother was trying to get her pram off before the doors closed and people were helping her, blocking off the entire width of the platform. By the time she had made it out I had lost several valuable seconds. I looked up the platform. There they were, at the far end of it, the sniper running towards the tunnel we had just come through, the boy’s head cuffed under his arm.

I followed, but then the sniper did an extraordinary thing – he let go of the boy and ran down a ramp at the end of the platform and into the tunnel. For a moment I thought it was suicide, but then I remembered that there was some space next to the tracks for the Underground staff to use. As I reached the end of the platform, I could see that he was running down it. The boy was standing there, frozen in shock. I told him not to worry, to stay where he was and his father would reach him soon, and then ploughed down the wooden ramp and into the tunnel, following the sound of echoing footsteps ahead.

I had been running for only a few seconds when I stopped. The bastard had disappeared again! Up ahead, I could see the tunnel curving away towards Farringdon, but he couldn’t possibly have reached the bend already. Was he hiding somewhere in the tunnel, waiting for me? I peered into the darkness, but all I could see were occasional pillars and columns at the side, and the faint glimmer of the tracks running down the middle.

Then I heard footsteps again. They were distant, but recognizably the same rhythm. He was running down a tunnel, but it wasn’t this one: he was parallel with me. I ran back a few yards and searched the walls. There it was: another train tunnel leading off to the left, the entrance a dark chasm. I jumped over a fence at waist height and started running down the tunnel. The sound of footsteps became louder. There was hardly any light at all here, and the walls felt clammier, the air staler. The tunnel was clearly disused, but where did it lead? I put the question out of my mind and kept running, peering ahead to see where the sniper was heading. But now I couldn’t distinguish any movement or sounds apart from my own breathing and the crunch of my shoes on the gravel. Had he taken another tunnel?

I registered the glint of metal a fraction of a moment before he kicked. I tried to move but I had no chance, and he caught me full square in the stomach, sending me flying to the ground. I couldn’t see straight but I knew I had to keep moving whatever happened because the glint was the gun and he intended to shoot me at close range. I rolled into the wall, scratching myself against something, and screamed as loudly as I could, hoping to distract him even fractionally, because a fraction could make all the difference.

This tactic seemed to work, because he fired blindly. The shot nearly deafened me and sent a great scatter of dust and debris and Christ knows what into my eyes, but I was alive, and I had a sliver of time on my side. He was still dealing with the recoil when I grabbed his wrist. I had to get the gun away from him, because I might not be so lucky a second time and now we were very close to each other and it was very dangerous, so I didn’t scream because I didn’t want to panic him. I wanted him alive a little longer – I needed to know who he was and why he had been told to kill me, so I kept the pressure on his wrist and fended away his other arm as he tried to punch me, and eventually it was too much for him and he jerked free. The gun fell to the ground and I tried to follow its trajectory but it spun into the darkness, and the sniper stumbled away and the chase was on again, only now I was closer, and my blood was up, and I felt I could get him.

There were no lights, but my vision was adjusting and the tracks had a dull sheen to them. I didn’t dare move into the centre of the tunnel – I didn’t trust the sniper enough to know whether or not a train could come whistling down here and carry us both off to Never-never-land – but the walkway was becoming narrower. There was the sound of dripping water close by, but I could still make out the faint echo of his footsteps ahead of me, and I focussed on them.

I had been running for about five minutes when the darkness began to lift fractionally. Soon, I was entering a cavernous space, which I guessed had been some kind of goods depot. There were small trolleys and wagons filled with sacks, but everything smelled dank and part of one wall had fallen away. As I came through, I saw the sniper at the far end, racing up a cobbled ramp. I reached it a few seconds later and as I did I realized where we were: Smithfield Market. He must have taken a tunnel that had been used to transport the meat here. The familiar open space of black and green ironmongery rose in front of me, almost like a cathedral itself, and the vista of the city’s life returned as I glimpsed white-coated butchers through the archways and pillars.

It was icily cold here, and I realized we had come out at an alcove away from the main body of the market – some sort of storage area. Frozen carcasses lay slapped on top of one another in metal trolleys, glowing under the neon lamps. The sniper was bounding ahead of me, but he seemed to be flagging now. He crashed into one of the carts, sending the contents flying, and I slipped on a carpet of livers and entrails. He took the opportunity and grabbed me, dragging me through the slops and the sawdust. In the distance, a butcher shouted out his last prices. But that was another world away.

The sniper kicked me several times, and then began to choke me, his hands sticky and warm. I started seeing double, Christ and Che swaying above me, and I knew that I had only a couple of seconds left before I blacked out. I had to get him away from my throat. I lunged desperately with my left arm, and caught him on the ear. His grip loosened for a fraction of a moment and I used the momentum to topple him and reverse the hold, so that I now had my hands clasped round his throat. He kicked beneath me, but I was in a strong position now and I kept pressing down. He was trying to grab something with his arm, and I realized we had moved closer to one of the metal trolleys. My eye caught sight of an object on the lowest shelf: an electric saw. I placed my knee over the man’s throat and reached out for the saw with my left hand. I flicked it on. The whine had an immediate effect on him, and the sweat started pouring off his face like a waterfall. I screamed at him to tell me who had sent him and why, loosening my grip the tiniest of a fraction for his response. After a few moments, he began repeating the same words over and over. I leaned down to catch them.

‘La prego non mi uccida…’ he said, and his face was creased with pain. ‘Madonna mia, non mi uccida, non mi uccida…’

He wasn’t getting any further than that, so I slapped him, hard, and screamed at him again, but he couldn’t hear over the sound of the saw, so I switched it off and tried once more, directly into his face this time, but his jaw muscles suddenly tightened and then went slack and as I watched the fluid dribble from his mouth, I realized he’d bitten into a pill and I’d failed. His eyes froze. He was gone.

*

I searched his pockets, but found nothing in them. Dazed, I staggered out of the alcove and through the market until I came to the front gates, where there was a call box. I dialled the emergency contact number, waited for the pips and then thrust sixpence in the slot. Nobody picked up. The sweat started to cool on me, and I began to shiver. I tried the number again, and then the second number, but there was nothing, no answer, nobody home.

After a while I gave up and called the office instead, telling them to send a squad down and to look for the man in the storage area with a rifle strapped to his back. I left the booth and stepped into West Smithfield. It had begun to drizzle, and a newspaper vendor across the way was dismantling his stand. I looked up for the familiar sight, but it wasn’t there. Panicking, I ran down King Edward Street, desperately searching the skyline. It wasn’t until I’d reached the end of the road that I saw it: the dome hovering above the city, just as it had always done. For a moment, I’d thought it had disappeared.