A Good Day To Die Read online

  I ate in a booth next to the window while I read the papers. There wasn’t a lot of interest: more violence in the Middle East; further warnings of the threat of Al Qaeda suicide bombers in London; a big article in the Sunday Times about pensions, the gist of which was that anyone retiring in twenty years wasn’t going to have one. Which might have been true, but who wants to read about it over their cornflakes on their day of rest?

  Only in the News of the World did I find any mention of my kidnapping and subsequent escape the previous day, and even that was very indirect. Under the headline DOG SLAIN DEFENDING MASTER on page five, there was a short piece describing how ‘brave Alsatian’ Tex and his owner, Ralph Hatcher, fifty-four, had stumbled across a suspected drug deal gone wrong while walking in woodland in Hertfordshire. The two of them had then been savagely attacked by several of the thugs involved, and Tex had died defending his master. Mr Hatcher had received facial injuries but had been discharged from hospital after treatment. And that was it, really. There was a photograph of a dog who may or may not have been Tex (it was hard to tell) staring at the camera with his tongue lolling out, but no photo of Hatcher. Obviously he wasn’t interesting enough.

  When I’d finished the ciabatta, I lit my first cigarette of the morning and smoked it all the way down to the butt. Did it taste good? Sure it did. Good enough for me not to feel guilty about it, anyway. I thought about phoning Emma, but it was still pretty early and I knew she wouldn’t have anything for me yet. She’d probably still be in bed, and good luck to her. If you couldn’t rest on a Sunday, when could you?

  Instead, I ordered myself another coffee, lit cigarette number two and thought about my position. Emma Neilson had an inside link to the investigation of Malik’s murder, and her information about the unnamed gangster was probably accurate. This guy clearly had a lot of resources at his disposal, including at least one copper working on the case, as well as the ability and ruthlessness to have a number of people killed. Obviously, I was going to have to find out who he was, but what then? He was a big player, which meant he was going to have serious protection. I remember once visiting the home of a major North London crime lord, Stefan Holtz, to question him in connection with the shooting of a business rival, and having to go through two sets of wrought-iron gates topped with barbed wire and a metal detector at the front door, and past at least ten moody-looking blokes in suits and half a dozen CCTV cameras before we finally got face to face with him in his office at the back of the house. Even then he sat ten feet away from us and four of his men remained in the room. People like that had enemies, and they weren’t stupid. They took precautions. I was up against someone similar, someone I didn’t even know, and all I had was a .45 revolver and six bullets. It didn’t have the makings of a fair fight.

  But that, of course, was the challenge.

  18

  The phone call finally came at half two in the afternoon while I was eating a lunch of fish soup with aioli mayonnaise in a small French place down in the West End on Goodge Street. I hadn’t felt like heading back to the hotel after breakfast, and since there was a pause in the rain I’d started walking in the direction of the Thames, taking the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the sights and sounds of the city I’d left behind.

  I put down my wine glass and pulled the phone from my pocket, wondering whether it was going to be Blondie, the man who’d claimed to be Les Pope, re-establishing contact. I hadn’t heard from him in close to twenty-four hours, so was expecting to receive another of his threats at some point, now that it was obvious I’d missed my plane.

  But this time a number was scrolling across the screen, so given his penchant for secrecy, I figured it wasn’t him. I was right, too. It was Emma, and I felt a twinge of excitement at the sound of her voice. I think I was getting sad in my old age.

  ‘How was last night?’ I asked her.

  She made a dismissive noise. ‘It was all right. Nothing special. I spent a lot of money and I’ve got a hangover. Like a lot of Sunday mornings, really.’

  ‘Well, take it easy for the rest of the day. That’s what Sundays are for.’

  ‘Do you think I’ve just been lying in bed, then?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Because I haven’t. I’ve been doing work. Work that you requested. You wanted Les Pope’s home address.’

  Suitably chastened, I asked if she’d got it.

  She reeled off the address and phone number of a place in Hampstead, while I scribbled them down.

  ‘He’s been there two years,’ she added, ‘and he lives alone. I can’t get hold of his mobile, though. I don’t think there’s one registered in his name. But you must have his number if you had his phone.’

  ‘I’ve got it somewhere, don’t worry about it. Did your article come out this morning?’

  ‘Front page.’

  I could hear the pride in her voice, and resisted the urge to remind her yet again to be careful. ‘Well done. And thanks again for your help.’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to look into Pope’s background yet, but I will do. How are you planning to get him to talk, by the way?’

  ‘I have my methods,’ I answered cryptically, wondering about that myself.

  ‘Don’t do anything that’s going to get you into trouble.’

  ‘It’s very nice of you to be concerned.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t want anything happening that’s going to mess up the story.’

  ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ I said, thinking that that was the first time I’d actually heard her laugh. Maybe it was a good sign.

  We said our goodbyes and I hung up and went back to my fish soup, which was tasty enough but curiously devoid of fish. I finished it off, though, then ordered a coffee and a slice of apple tart.

  There was no point making my visit to the elusive Mr Pope on an empty stomach.

  19

  Grantley Court was a pleasant T-shaped cul-de-sac made up of large semi-detached mock-Georgian houses, built on a gentle incline a little way west of North End Road. It was a new development, five years old at most, and open plan in its design, so there were no hedges or walls blocking the view of the buildings or the uniformly turfed front gardens. No trees had been planted on the pavements, either, giving the road something of an exposed look, which didn’t bode too well for any long-term observation of Pope’s place.

  I hadn’t hurried there, preferring to arrive in darkness, which at that time of the year in southern England was usually with us by four o’clock. I got there just after four, following a lengthy journey by bus and foot. Pope’s place, number twenty-two, was in the middle of the cul-de-sac, directly opposite the entrance and close to where the two strokes of the T joined. A newish silver Lexus was parked on the one-car driveway and a light was on on the ground floor, but I couldn’t tell whether or not he was at home. A burglar alarm, complete with flashing blue light, was attached to the second-floor exterior brickwork.

  Tomboy had lived round here once when he’d been a snout of mine, but in considerably less opulent circumstances. I didn’t have much recent experience of London house prices, but I couldn’t see that you’d get much change out of a million for one of these houses, given the central yet quiet location. That meant Pope was making some tidy money from somewhere, a lot more than he’d be paid for defending small-time crims like Jason Khan.

  I slipped onto the driveway of a house with no lights on across the road, and stood behind a parked people-carrier. From here I couldn’t be seen very easily from the road but still had a decent view of number twenty-two. I pulled out my mobile and called Les Pope’s landline.

  It rang for more than a minute, but no one picked up.

  So he wasn’t there.

  No matter. Time for plan B. It seemed logical to me that one of the last people Slippery Billy West would have spoken to before his death was Les Pope, since, as far as Billy was aware, Pope was the only man in the world aware of his plight. He was bound to have call
ed him, if for no other reason than to let him know that he’d arrived at his destination. So I rang the last number dialled from Slippery’s mobile.

  Once again, the phone at the other end rang for a good long while before it was finally picked up. The voice that greeted me was male. An ordinary middle-class London accent, no obvious signs of stress. And also, definitely not the same man with the blond hair I’d met yesterday.

  ‘Ah, the elusive Mr Pope,’ I said, hoping it was him. ‘You sound different.’ There was an audible intake of breath at the other end and I knew that I had the right man. I continued before he had the chance to speak. ‘We need to meet again, and this time I want to make sure that it is you. I’ve seen a photo now so I know who to expect. Don’t bother contacting your friends. They didn’t get rid of me last time, did they? If you want to stay in one piece and get yourself out of this situation alive, then you’re going to need to give me some information, and quickly. We’re going to meet in one hour’s time. Five fifteen. At a pub called the Cambridge Arms on Charing Cross Road, just down from the Palace Theatre. Come there alone.’

  ‘I’m not in London,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I’m miles away.’

  ‘Then you’d better find some very rapid means of transport back. One hour’s time, and it’s non-negotiable.’ He tried to protest, but I ignored him. ‘And don’t try anything to get me off your back either. If you’re not there, I’ll come looking for you, and since I know that you live at twenty-two Grantley Court – it’s a lovely place, by the way – I don’t think you’ll prove that difficult to find. This is your last chance. I’d take it, if I were you. Understood?’

  There was a long pause. ‘How do I know you’re not going to try and kill me?’

  ‘The Cambridge Arms is slap bang in the heart of the West End. The whole area’ll be swarming with people. I won’t get the opportunity to do you any harm, and no one’ll be able to harm me either. Which is the way I like it. So make sure you’re there. Otherwise I’ll burn the house down, and that’ll just be for starters.’

  Having given as good a tough-guy act as I could, I ended the call while he was still talking and continued to watch the house, just in case he was actually in there, lying low.

  I stayed where I was for the next fifteen minutes, staring at Pope’s front door twenty yards away, knowing that if he was there he was going to have to make a move soon if he wanted to get to the pub in time. But he didn’t. Nothing happened. During the whole fifteen minutes, only one car came past, driving slowly by before dislodging its contents – a family with two young kids and a baby – at a house a few doors down. Otherwise, the street was quiet. The wind had picked up and high, jagged clouds streaked across the night sky. The temperature had dropped, too, and I felt myself shivering. Then it began to rain.

  I came out from behind the people-carrier and crossed the road, moving quickly. An eight-foot-high wooden fence at the side of the house joined Pope’s place with his neighbours’, blocking access to the rear of both properties. Presumably a deterrent to casual burglars, it was never going to stop the more determined intruder, and it didn’t stop me. I jumped up, grabbed the top and hauled myself over with only the minimum of fuss.

  Pope’s back garden was small and square, with half of it paved. A large, near-impenetrable leylandii hedge at the end obscured whatever it was that the garden backed onto.

  I crept round to the back of the house and found myself staring through half-pulled blinds into a substantial and surprisingly tidy kitchen-diner, with plenty of gleaming pots and pans hanging from hooks above gleaming work surfaces. It looked like something out of a cookery show. For a man under pressure, Pope wasn’t letting things go. A single ceiling light was on, but the room was empty and the door at the far end was shut.

  Now for the hard part: getting in. Once upon a time, people were a little bit slack about their home security, making breaking-and-entering an altogether simpler affair, but in the last two decades burglary had become endemic in England, so now everyone was a lot more careful. Doors and windows were far more secure. Alarms were commonplace. People made sure they double-locked everything.

  Life for your casual burglar, just like your casual car thief, had become far more difficult, which was why successive governments were always harping on about the fact that under their careful stewardship, overall crime was on the way down (they never mentioned the fact that violent crime was on the way up, as frustrated thieves started targeting people rather than their property). But you always got one idiot, someone who didn’t listen to the advice of the crime-prevention officers, and it looked like I’d found him.

  The back door of Pope’s place was locked, but I could see a key poking out of the lock itself. I took my notebook out of my pocket and ripped out a blank page, then knelt down and pushed it through the gap at the bottom of the door until only an inch or so of it was showing. Getting back up, I dug out the Swiss Army knife I’d bought the previous day in Oxford Street and located the smallest screwdriver. It was then simply a matter of fiddling in the lock with the screwdriver until the key was dislodged on the other side, a process that took about ten seconds, but only because I was a bit rusty. When the key hit the paper, I bent down and pulled it back through. And that was it, I was in.

  I shut the door gently behind me and crossed the kitchen. The house was silent and it was obvious that, unless he was hiding under his bed hoping all his problems would go away, Les Pope wasn’t here.

  I stopped at the kitchen door and listened again, but the silence remained. At least, that is, until I opened the door. As I did this, one of the alarm’s motion sensors picked up the movement, and the silence was shattered with a high-pitched, metallic shriek. Ignoring the noise, I strode into the hallway, found the light switch, then went through the ground floor opening doors, knowing what I was looking for.

  The telephone rang. This would be the firm managing the alarm system responding to the message sent to their control room that the alarm had been tripped. Their next call would be the police, but I wasn’t too concerned about this. Burglar alarms going off are not a top priority for the Met, because they’re usually tripped by accident. Unless I was very unlucky, it would be twenty minutes at least before someone arrived. More of a concern were the neighbours. I checked my watch and decided to give myself two minutes.

  I found the study at the front of the house, and went straight over and closed the curtains before switching on the lights. There was a large and immaculately tidy antique desk facing one of the walls, with well-stacked bookshelves directly above it. One of the other walls was also lined with bookshelves, while the third contained a number of photos hanging in frames.

  I tried the desk drawers but they were all locked, then had a quick shuffle through the thick piles of paperwork stacked in boxes marked IN-TRAY and OUT-TRAY. But in the few seconds I had, I didn’t see anything of interest. Turning round, I scanned the photos on the opposite wall. One man appeared in most of them, and it made me think that either Tomboy hadn’t seen him in a long time, or, more likely, he was trying to hide something from me, because Les Pope – and I was sure it was him – was a supremely ugly individual. A twelve-by-eight colour photo of him standing next to an ex-footballer I recognized, but couldn’t put a name to, had pride of place on the wall. Pope was grinning from ear to ear, while the footballer just looked vaguely embarrassed, his eyes drifting towards one of Pope’s pudgy hands which had appeared round his shoulder. I could sympathize with the footballer’s plight. Pope might have been in his early forties but he looked nearer fifty. He was balding fast, even though wedges of oily black-grey hair were combed across his pate in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable, and his features all seemed misshapen and oversized, as if they’d been very badly moulded. His face sagged; his lips were like chipolatas; and his crooked, snub nose was the largest of its kind I’d ever seen. Only the eyes – big, blue and smiling – acted as redeeming features.

  Either way, he was now going to be extremel
y easy to recognize.

  I started to turn away, knowing that time was running short. Then I stopped and did a double-take.

  A photo higher up the wall had caught my eye. It was black and white, in a dark wood frame. Quite how I noticed it I still don’t know, since it hardly stood out. A group of men on a golf course, posing in front of the clubhouse. Seven or eight of them standing in a row, smiling as they faced the camera. I looked again, closer this time, but there was no mistake. You don’t forget the faces of men you’ve killed, and you don’t forget the face of a man who’s asked if you can supply him with a young girl to murder. When Les Pope had been setting up the execution of Richard Blacklip in a Manila hotel room a year ago, he’d claimed that he’d been acting on behalf of someone the target had abused as a child. That was what Tomboy had told me, anyway.

  But here were Blacklip and Pope in a photo together, only one person between them.

  I pulled it down from the wall, roughly removed the frame and folded the picture in half before shoving it into the back pocket of my jeans.

  There was movement outside the window. Torchlight. Then a knock at the front door. It was time to go.

  I retreated swiftly through the house and out the back door, not bothering to shut it behind me, then made straight for the leylandii at the back of the garden. I couldn’t hear any movement behind me and I didn’t look back.

  Three minutes later I was through the hedge, across someone else’s back garden and out onto a different street.

  No one followed.

  ‘I’m changing the time,’ I told Les Pope when he picked up his phone. ‘It’s now six thirty. Same place.’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got a better idea,’ he said quickly.