Revenger (19 page)

44

ROBBIE BELL WAS
in the VIP bar, backstage at the O2, watching his boss fawn all over Alexandra Vermulen, the lobbyist who was supposed to make him a star in the good ol’ US of A. Bell had introduced them and had watched the look of delight spread across Adams’s face, like a fat kid in a sweet shop, as he took in the blonde hair, the impressively well-preserved face and the dress that clung in all the right places. Bell wondered if Adams realized what an idiot he was making of himself gawping at Vermulen like that. She was smiling politely at his terrible jokes, but she obviously had no interest in anything other than his business, and meanwhile Nicki Adams was starting to get seriously pissed off with her old lech of a husband.

They were all the same, these political couples, Bell decided. The men were egotistical middle-aged bastards. The wives smiled bravely, then went home to stew in white wine, bitterness and tears. However much Adams might try to trumpet his uniqueness, he was no different from the rest.

Bell felt the phone buzzing in his jacket pocket. It was his press
secretary
, Carla Shepherd, calling, presumably updating him on the post-speech briefings she was giving the media, or asking for an official answer to a tricky question.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

‘It isn’t,’ she replied. ‘They’ve all gone.’

‘What do you mean, they’ve all gone? You’ve only been there five

minutes.’

‘I mean, Robbie . . . darling . . . that I was just talking them through the scintillating issue of the White Death when they all started looking at their phones and just getting up and walking away.’

‘What was it? Some kind of pathetic, overgrown student protest against our disgusting racist policies?’

‘No . . . that hadn’t gone down too appallingly. Once I’d persuaded them that the numbers were kosher, some of them were actually quite interested.’

‘So what was the problem?’

‘Apparently there’s been a riot in South London.’

‘Good. That’s just what we wanted.’

‘I don’t think so . . . not like this. Apparently some obscure little street in South London now looks like downtown Tehran. Fifty people dead.’

A chill feeling of dread started seeping through Bell’s system, like icy rain down the back of his neck. Casualties like that made for a major, major story; much too major for his liking.

‘How the fuck did fifty people die?’ he asked, thinking there had to be some kind of a mistake. He could just about believe fifteen people dying in a riot. Maybe. But fifty?

‘Someone started fighting back,’ Shepherd said. ‘There was an explosion, a bomb or something. It’s all still very confused.’

‘Shit!’

‘Look, you really need to see what’s happening. Get your laptop. It’s all over the news . . . and Twitter’s going mad.’

Bell picked up his briefcase and slipped from the room. The backstage area at the O2 is a warren of passages, offices and dressing rooms. Bell found an empty room, pulled up a plastic
chair
and logged on. Minutes later he was on the phone again.

Though Mark Adams didn’t know it, there was rather more to his campaign that met the eye. Such as, for example, the secret campaign fund that had been established, supported by wealthy donors who had been promised repayment in the form of preferential treatment as and when Adams took office. That fund had helped pay for the rally at the O2 and funded some of the supporting activity around it. It was the brainchild of Hartley Crewson, the founder of a public relations company that specialized in Westminster politics and City finance. He had been Bell’s boss before Adams had hired him. In many ways, he still was.

In fact, the entire Adams campaign had been Crewson’s idea.

He had spotted the gap in the market caused by the spectacular unpopularity of all the mainstream party leaders, and realized that the time was right for an outsider to take them on. He’d spotted Adams as the perfect candidate, mentioned the idea in passing on two or three occasions when the two men had met, and then watched with great satisfaction as Adams, like any other politician, had effortlessly persuaded himself that the idea of forming his own party was entirely his own stroke of genius.

Crewson had wanted to be the silent, invisible power behind the throne – one whose existence was unknown even to the man who thought himself king. So far the plan had been working perfectly, but now the Adams train was suddenly in danger of leaving the rails.

‘Yes, I know. I just saw it on the news,’ Crewson said when Bell told him about the riot. ‘This isn’t what we needed at all. It’s going to dominate every news-cycle for the next week at least, just when we wanted to be driving the agenda. I thought we were all on the same page about what was required.’

‘We were,’ Bell replied. ‘And it worked perfectly at the O2. We had a perfect battle between our supporters and the usual rent-a-mob, with the police stuck uselessly in the middle. The choreography was perfect.’

‘So what happened at the other place?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well, you’d better find out, asap. I’ll keep an eye on things from my end.’ Crewson sighed. ‘We may have to be ready to take decisive action to contain the fallout.’

‘I understand. What do you want me to do about Adams?’

‘As little as possible. Keep him out of sight of the media. I don’t want him saying anything or doing anything until we’ve decided on the correct response.’

‘He’s meant to be talking to that American, Alexandra Vermulen.’

‘Perfect. I hear she’s a little cracker. She can keep the candidate entertained for the next couple of hours. If she wants our money, she might as well start earning it.’

When Bell got back to the VIP bar, Adams was looking flushed with success. Evidently no one had dared to tell him that he’d been wasting his time.

‘Ah, Robbie, there you are!’ He beamed. ‘We were wondering what had happened to you.’

‘Just a few loose ends to tie up.’

‘Excellent . . .’ Adams turned to Vermulen and said, ‘I would, quite literally, be at a loose end without Robbie.’

She gave him another politely enthusiastic smile.

Adams looked back at Bell. ‘I was just telling Alexandra about our plans for dinner. I thought she might care to join us. She was married to a general, you know? And her current beau is an old soldier, too . . .’ Now he glanced at his wife. ‘Nothing like a girl who loves a man in uniform, eh, darling? Anyway, I was thinking that the two of them ought to join us. What do you say? Can we call the restaurant and get a bigger table?’

‘Of course,’ said Bell. He was, by nature, opposed to any ideas he had not had himself. But there was something to be said for getting this old soldier along for the ride. He and Adams could tell old war stories, get pissed and pretend to be heroes . . . and with any luck it would be morning before Adams found out about the riot. ‘I’ll get on to it right away.’

45

CARVER WAS JUST
walking past a boarded-up pub on Stewart’s Road, keeping fifty metres between himself and the riot leader, when Alix called. He had his phone on vibrate and his earphones plugged in.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting,’ she said.

‘No . . . it’s all right,’ he murmured into the scarf, keeping his voice too low for the man ahead of him to detect it.

A slight note of anxiety entered her voice. ‘Are you all right? You sound a little down.’

‘No,’ Carver lied. ‘Just can’t speak very loud. How about you? How was Adams?’

‘Very, ah . . . interesting. He’s why I called you, actually. He was wondering if you’d like to join us for dinner. I didn’t know if you and Snoopy had already made plans . . . you’ve probably eaten already. Well, maybe you could join us for coffee.’

Carver really didn’t feel like going off to dinner with some puffed-up politician. He didn’t feel like doing anything. He was empty, washed-out and badly shaken up by what had happened in Netherton Street. The safest place for him right now was anywhere
but
here, and if he had any sense he’d be getting the hell out of London and taking Alix with him. But if he did that, he’d have to spend the rest of his life weighed down by the knowledge that he’d done nothing, if not to put things right – it was far too late for that now – then at least to find an explanation for what had happened and to make sure that those responsible were punished. Every instinct he had told him that it was all in some way connected to Mark Adams and his political campaign. If that was the case, then he needed to see the man for himself, hear what he had to say, look him in the eye and get a sense of just how far he was prepared to go and how many people he was prepared to sacrifice in the pursuit of power.

‘In the end, we didn’t eat,’ Carver said. ‘Snoopy had . . . well, he had something else to do. He found a girl. She seemed to like him . . .’

Alix laughed. ‘So he left you high and dry? Poor baby! Does that mean you’re coming to dinner?’

‘Why not? I’ve got an errand to run so I may be a little late. Where are you going to be?’

‘It’s called Roast,’ she said.

An image flashed across Carver’s mind: the scorched flesh of the bomb-victims. He swallowed hard and said, ‘Sounds great.’

46

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR MARA
Keane was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and big- footed. But then, as she liked to point out, you could say the same about Maria Sharapova. She had long since conquered the crippling self-consciousness of her youth and now saw her size as an advantage. It was much harder for a male colleague to patronize her if he had to look up to her while he did it. But even DI Keane wasn’t mentally strong enough to be able to walk unaffected through the carnage of Netherton Street.

Ambulances had been going to and fro in a constant stream for the best part of an hour. There hadn’t been many wounded rioters or local people for the doctors at the A & E department at St Thomas’ Hospital to deal with. Many of those who had still been alive when the first emergency service personnel had arrived had been beyond treatment: the best that could be done had been to make their passing slightly less terrible than it might otherwise have been.

Meanwhile, the sheer number of corpses that had to be photographed in situ and given a preliminary forensic examination
was
so great that even though police officers and forensic pathologists had been drafted in from the entire Metropolitan Police area, the fatalities were all still lying where they had fallen. The figures quietly going about their business amongst the dead looked like ghosts themselves in their hooded white scene-of-crime suits, which glowed in the spotlights set up to illuminate a crime-scene encompassing an entire street. The rain had stopped, but the pavements were still slick with water and there were puddles by the side of the road.

Keane heard a polite cough beside her and turned to see a balding man in his late fifties, with his remaining hair cropped as close as his beard. His name was Dr Karl Lewisohn. He had a wise, gentle face with liquid black-brown eyes, and they looked at Keane over the top of the glasses he required for the close-range examination of dead bodies. He stood half a head shorter than her.

‘Hello, Mara,’ he said. ‘I would have said “good evening” but it hardly seems appropriate . . .’

She gave a little smile. ‘Hello, Karl . . . Ghastly, isn’t it?’

‘Well, let me put it to you this way. In a typical three-month period, roughly sixty-five post-mortems are carried out in the whole of Greater London, and less than thirty of them are determined to be homicide. We’ve got over fifty dead bodies here, in a single night, and every one of them was killed by another human being.’

‘So when are you going to be able to give me the post-mortems?’ she asked, getting down to business.

‘Oh, it’ll be several days, maybe weeks, before you get them all. But I can give you the basic summary right now.’

Together, Keane and Lewisohn ran through the deaths at the Khyber Star restaurant and the Dutchman’s Head pub. They were all the results of frenzied, uncontrolled acts of violence. Then Lewisohn pointed towards Paula Miklosko’s car, still wedged against the garbage truck, and said, ‘Now this is where it gets interesting.

‘There are two clusters of bodies on the street itself. One, by that
abandoned
car over there, shows more examples of knife deaths, but whoever carried out the killings wasn’t just another rioter. He knew exactly what he was doing. He even killed one victim with a knife thrown to the base of the throat – a very rare skill indeed. Now, moving on, there are two men in the middle of the road who have both been killed by firearms – almost certainly the same firearm in the hands of a single shooter, and I’m betting it was a pistol.

‘Again, you’re looking for an expert. Both victims were shot at extremely close range, which of course makes the job easier in some ways, but both were carrying weapons of their own: a machete and an axe, respectively. It takes very considerable courage to maintain a steady hand and a clear eye under those circumstances, but this man was remarkably self-controlled. He hit one of the rioters in the shoulder, but the man just kept coming at him. Our shooter didn’t flinch. He stood his ground and fired a second, fatal round.’

‘That sounds like someone with military training,’ Keane observed.

‘Absolutely,’ Lewisohn agreed, ‘and not just training. I’m certain we’re dealing with more than one serving or recently retired soldier with considerable combat experience. I haven’t even got to their real pièce de résistance yet.’

‘You mean the Lion Market?’

‘Quite.’ Lewisohn began walking towards the wrecked supermarket. He paused to let an ambulance drive past them, taking bodies away to the morgue. Then he went on a few more paces and stopped on the edge of the scene, where it was still calm enough for them to talk in peace.

‘Again there are several shootings,’ he continued. ‘Two victims were killed outside the shop, this time with a shotgun, and the blood evidence suggests that a third may have been wounded. I presume this was a straightforward defensive action against some sort of a charge. But then the rioters managed to get into the shop, and that’s where at least two more of them were hit at point-blank
range
– in the guts – again with a shotgun. Once more we see the same pattern of a shooter remaining calm enough to fire with deadly effect when almost overrun by assailants.’