Target (11 page)

I was standing in a phone box on the Edgware Road when I got the call from Tina. As soon as she'd hung up I picked up the receiver, took a deep breath, and dialled John Gentleman's landline number.

It rang for a long time before going to message. I didn't leave one, just counted to five and called again.

This time he answered, sounding groggy and pissed off. 'Who's this?'

I took a deep breath, then spoke clearly and slowly, as Tina had instructed. 'John Gentleman, I know that you're involved in the kidnap of Jenny Brakspear who lives in the apartment building where you work. You provided the kidnappers with a key to get into her apartment, you broke the security camera at the exit to the underground car park so they could get back out, you cleaned up after them—'

'I don't know what you're talking about!' he shouted, but there was uncertainty in his voice.

'You do, and if you admit it to me now and tell me who the kidnappers are, then I'll make sure your name doesn't get mentioned.'

'I told you: I don't know what you're fucking talking about!'

'You know they're going to kill her, don't you? And when they kill her, you're going to be an accessory to murder, and that means years behind bars. And you know exactly what that's like, don't you?'

'Who the fuck are you?'

'The one person who can help you. You've only got one chance to get out of this, Mr Gentleman, and that's to cooperate. Tell the police who you're working for, otherwise I'm going to spend every waking hour for the rest of my life building a case against you, and I'll make sure you go down for murder. Do you understand me?'

'You're that bloke who was with her, aren't you? Well, you listen to me! You can't prove a fucking thing! All right? And you're a dead fucking man messing around in stuff that doesn't concern you!'

'We'll see,' I said, and cut the connection.

Now there was absolutely no way back.

I called Tina. 'It's done.'

'I know,' she said, 'I heard you. Very menacing. Now we'll see what he does.'

It didn't take Gentleman long to react. As Tina listened, he made a call out from the landline, just as she'd hoped. Unfortunately, she had no way of knowing the number he was calling, but that didn't matter. If necessary, she could contact the phone company and find that information out later.

There was no answer at the other end, just an automated voice asking him to leave a message.

'I've just had a call from that bloke who saw you at the flat on Sunday night,' said Gentleman breathlessly into the phone. 'The bastard's threatening to go to the law and turn me in. This whole thing's getting out of fucking hand. You've got to do something because I ain't taking the rap for it. Call me back ASAP, OK? I'm at home.' He reeled out the number. 'I'm getting very worried here, and if I don't hear back from you soon I'm going to go to the law myself!' He slammed the handset back in its cradle, and the tilt switch stopped recording.

Tina exhaled. She'd just heard the final proof that the kidnapping had actually occurred. Now she knew she had to do something. Unfortunately, by illegally tapping Gentleman's phone she'd put herself in a difficult position. If she went with the recording to DCI Knox, or the Kidnap Unit, she was going to have to answer some very inconvenient questions. But if she didn't...If she didn't, it might cost Jenny Brakspear her life.

Tina suddenly felt completely alone. She knew who she needed to speak to. But the one person who'd be able to get her out of this predicament and move things forward without her losing her job was currently off the radar.

'Where the hell are you, Mike?' she whispered, staring out of the windscreen towards Gentleman's apartment block.

She stubbed out her cigarette, took a drink from a bottle of mineral water on the seat next to her, and phoned Bolt for a third time. Once again he didn't pick up. Once again she left a message, except this time she said that the kidnapping had definitely occurred and that she needed his help desperately. She cursed herself afterwards for using that word. It made her feel weak. Yet, if truth be told, she was feeling pretty desperate.

She wondered what Gentleman was doing, and phoned the mobile she'd left behind his sofa, prefixing the number with 141, so that Gentleman wouldn't be able to trace the call back to her own mobile on the off-chance he discovered the handset before she had a chance to retrieve it. It auto-answered and went to open mike. She could hear movement inside the apartment. It sounded like he was pacing up and down, but the reception wasn't very good. He was definitely panicking, and it crossed her mind to knock on his door, show him her warrant card and wait to hear what he had to say. But there was no guarantee that he could help locate Jenny, or even ID the people who'd taken her.

So, sweating in the heat of the day, Tina sat in her car and pondered her next move while listening to Gentleman as he moved about in his apartment. He occasionally let slip an angry muffled curse, but soon she grew bored of listening to nothing and ended the call. The street was deadly quiet, only the occasional car and pedestrian appearing, and after a while she shut her eyes and dozed off.

She was woken with a start by the rumble of an engine, and as she opened her eyes she saw a dark blue Toyota Land Cruiser with blacked-out windows drive slowly past before pulling up on the other side of the road about twenty yards up from Gentleman's place.

A white man in dark glasses and a baseball cap got out the passenger side and took the briefest of glances up and down the street. The day was warm, mid-twenties and humid, yet he was still wearing a jacket, and even from twenty yards away Tina could see that the pale, almost translucent skin of his face was stretched tight from plastic surgery.

It was the kidnapper who'd threatened Rob.

She grabbed her Nikon camera from the seat beside her and started taking pictures. She managed to get several good ones in profile before the suspect turned and started walking in the direction of Gentleman's flat. She turned her attention to the Land Cruiser, getting a shot of its number plate as the driver accelerated away and disappeared under the railway bridge.

The suspect walked up to Gentleman's building, paused for just one second, and then went directly inside.

Tina tensed, listening. A part of her was pleased. She'd got a photo of one of the kidnappers, and given the way he looked it shouldn't be too hard to put a name to him. But another part of her was extremely concerned, because the manner of his arrival, and his demeanour and appearance, suggested he wasn't here to bolster Gentleman's morale.

She looked at her watch, made a mental note of the time – 2.45 – and phoned the mobile in the flat again, listening as it was auto-answered at the other end.

For the first few seconds there was silence. Then she heard a faint knock on the door, and the sound of footfalls. Gentleman said 'Who is it?' but Tina couldn't hear any reply. There was the sound of the door being unlocked, then Gentleman said something else, but this time it was unintelligible.

And then nothing. Not a sound for at least ten seconds. She thought she heard the door closing again, but couldn't be sure.

Tina frowned. Keeping the phone to her ear, she picked up the Nikon with her free hand.

Thirty seconds passed before she heard the deep engine rumble of the Land Cruiser. She watched in her wing mirror as it drove by her for a second time, heading back in the direction of the railway bridge. As the vehicle reached Gentleman's building, the driver slowed. A second later, the man in the cap and sunglasses walked out the front door.

Tina flinched. He was alone. Where the hell was Gentleman?

She dropped the phone, zoomed in with the Nikon and got off a couple more shots as he opened the passenger door, keeping his head down. As the Land Cruiser pulled away for a second time, Tina picked up the phone again and heard nothing but silence coming from Gentleman's apartment. She began to get an ominous feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She looked up at the second-floor windows. Nothing was moving up there. Cursing, she called Gentleman's landline. It rang and rang, finally going to message. She looked up his mobile number in her notebook and called that. It went to message too.

Either he was no longer at home or, far more likely, he was dead. Tina knew she'd miscalculated. If Gentleman had been killed, there was no way of avoiding the fact that it was her fault, because she was the one who'd set events in motion. 'Shit,' she whispered, 'what have I done?' She knew the answer: she'd acted like an amateur, and now the repercussions were going to be enormous.

She was still professional enough to know that she had some extremely valuable evidence in her possession, however. She pulled her laptop from under the passenger seat, plugged the camera into it, and watched as the photos she'd just taken downloaded. She then opened up her email account and sent the photos to Rob Fallon's and Mike Bolt's email addresses with the same message for both – Do you recognize this man? – before signing out and replacing the laptop under the seat.

There was no point phoning Bolt – she'd left enough messages for him already – so she called Fallon instead, asking him where he was.

'In the West End, looking for a hotel room. What's happening?'

'I'll give you a full briefing later. In the meantime, get into your email account. I've just sent you some photos. Download them on to a USB stick but don't show them to anyone until you hear from me. Understand?'

'Sure,' answered Fallon. He started to say something else but Tina said she'd phone him in an hour, and ended the call.

She stretched in her seat and sighed. What the hell was she going to do now?

Then the passenger door opened and the man in the cap and sunglasses climbed inside, holding a short-barrelled pistol with a silencer attached. 'Start driving now,' he said calmly, 'or you're dead.'

Mike Bolt was shattered. He hated inter-departmental meetings at the best of times, but when they dragged on and on, as this one with the people from the Financial Intelligence Unit had, they truly pissed him off. He, Mo Khan, his own boss, Big Barry Freud, and three other members of the team had gone into the meeting room at half past ten that morning and were only just emerging now, almost four and a half hours later, at five to three. Lunch had been sandwiches that tasted of plastic, eaten at the table while various people had continued to drone on, and now Bolt's back was aching badly and he was still hungry.

'Is it just me,' he asked Mo as they walked back to the team office, 'or are we in exactly the same place with Paul Wise as we were four hours ago?'

'I don't know,' answered Mo, sounding dazed. 'I'm too tired to think. But I wouldn't bet on an arrest being imminent.'

Bolt grunted, switching his phone off silent. 'My sentiments exactly.'

The meeting had been a hugely detailed rehash of what was in the report. There'd been the usual promises of greater cooperation between the various departments within SOCA, but aside from a few recommendations from the FIU people, who were going to put a degree of pressure on the various people involved in converting Paul Wise's money from dirty to clean, there was still no plan for bringing him to justice, or even curtailing his activities.

As far as Bolt was concerned, there were way too many meetings in SOCA and it was slowing them all down. Not for the first time in these past few months he hankered for a return to the good old days when he was part of the Met's Flying Squad, facing the comparatively straightforward task of chasing down armed robbers. At least you knew where you were with them.

The phone bleeped and he saw he had three messages, all from Tina Boyd. He wondered what was so urgent that she'd called that many times. As he listened to them, he realized that there had clearly been some major developments in the kidnap case she'd spoken to him about the previous day. Still, he was surprised she wanted to talk to him about it rather than her bosses at Islington CID.

He pressed call-back but it said her phone was switched off, which seemed odd if she was so keen to get hold of him. He sighed, hoping she hadn't got herself into trouble, knowing it wouldn't be the first time. Tina had a habit of relying heavily on her initiative and being prepared to go it alone on investigations, and occasionally she wasn't very good at judging when to stop. The positive side to this was that she usually got results. But, he thought grimly, it wasn't always such a positive if she was out there alone, dealing with the wrong kind of people.

'Anything the matter, boss?' asked Mo as they got back to the office.

'Nothing exciting,' Bolt replied, unsure about how much to tell Mo, who'd never got on that well with Tina, and who probably wouldn't approve of him encouraging her to follow up on her leads.

Although the team worked in an open-plan office, Bolt had his own small room at the far end. He went in there now and tried Tina's number a second time. Still switched off. He sat back at his desk and opened up his email screen on the PC.

There were ten new messages from various people, which was about average, but straight away he saw that the most recent one was from Tina, and that it had been sent just ten minutes ago. He opened it and read the message: Do you recognize this man?

There were five photos attached. He double-clicked on the first one. It was a profile shot of a man in a cap and sunglasses. The quality was good – Bolt could see that the skin on his pale face was tight, as if he'd had plastic surgery – but the subject was clearly well disguised. The second shot was similar but with less of the subject's face showing. The third was of the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser on a residential street. He took down its registration number, wishing Tina had given a bit more of an explanation in her email as to what this was all about. Then he opened photo number four.

This one was a close-up, full-frontal shot of the man in the cap and sunglasses from the chest upwards. He was trying to keep his head down and wasn't looking at the camera, but even so, there was something familiar about him. Bolt expanded the photo until it filled the screen, then focused on the pale face. It looked like the man had suffered burns at one time because the plastic surgery looked more like repair work than anything cosmetic. He zoomed in on the chin. The quality got worse, the picture beginning to blur, but a rectangle of skin lined with scar tissue remained distinctive. It was about half the size of a credit card and much fainter than it had been before, but unmistakable nonetheless.

Bolt felt a physical jolt. He took a deep breath and zoomed out again so that he was back to just the face. 'Jesus, it can't be,' he whispered. 'Not you.'

He turned away from the screen and called out to Mo.

'Is this who I think it is?' he asked, turning the monitor round as Mo came into the office.

Mo stared at the picture for a long time.

'It's him, isn't it?' said Bolt, zooming in again and pointing out the scar.

'It is,' said Mo at last. 'It's Hook. Who sent you this?'

Bolt's throat felt dry as he answered. 'Tina Boyd. About ten minutes ago. I'm guessing she was the one who took the photo.'

'Have you spoken to her yet?'

Bolt shook his head. 'No. Her phone's switched off. I just tried it.'

'Do you know when she took it?'

'No, but I'm guessing it was probably today. And here in London.'

Mo whistled through his lips. 'So Hook's back in town. There's got to be a very good reason why he'd risk his neck to be back here.'

Bolt dialled Tina's mobile again. It was still off.

'Well, whatever it is,' he said, 'I'm truly hoping he hasn't crossed paths with Tina. Because if he has...'

He let the sentence trail off. They both knew all too well what Hook was capable of.