I was on the fifth step, about two-thirds of the way up the stairs, when the surface beneath my right ankle gave way. My leg dropped through the shattered wood as my body crashed sideways, my arms flung out to try and keep my balance, my pistol banging against the side of the wall as I slumped against it.
Another trickle of sweat ran into my eye and I looked up to see the muzzle of a rifle aimed square at my face.
Chapter 10
THE AIR WAS loud with gunfire.
A bullet slammed into my thigh, knocking me backwards, my right leg wrenched out of the damaged staircase as I tumbled down the stairs to land on the concrete floor. Captain Smith stood in the doorway, his automatic rifle blazing away.
Moments later the body of the Iraqi insurgent crashed down the stairs to land beside me, his head slapping against the hard floor. He didn’t cry out. He was dead.
I looked up at the doorway. My CO was silhouetted in a nimbus of light. ‘Thanks for the assist,’ I called out to him through clenched teeth.
‘De nada,’ he said and then dropped to his knees, his weapon clattering to the floor.
‘Captain,’ I said, dragging myself up and limping over to him.
‘Anne didn’t make it,’ he said, his voice a wet rasp. ‘I guess I didn’t, either.’
He fell forward and I held him to stop him collapsing to the ground. ‘Looks like it’s just you, Dan,’ he said.
‘Don’t say that. We’ll get help. You’re going to be okay.’
He shook his head weakly. ‘There’s been too many lies in this damn war already. Truth is, we shouldn’t be here in the first place and I don’t think today is going to change anything.’
‘Just hang in there,’ I said. ‘I’ll get help.’
He shook his head again. ‘Do me one favour.’ His voice was a low croak now.
‘Anything,’ I said softly.
‘Look out for Chloe for me,’ Captain Smith said. Then he breathed out and died in my arms.
‘You got it, boss,’ I said, tears pricking in my eyes. ‘You got it.’
Chapter 11
I WAS STARTLED out of my reverie by the buzzing of the seat-belt sign flashing overhead once more.
We were about half an hour away from Heathrow by my reckoning. I checked my belt again, something you learn in the military: take care of your equipment and with luck your equipment will take care of you. The clasp was working fine.
I glanced across at Hannah. She didn’t seem too bothered that turbulence ahead had been announced, and was listening quietly to some music on her iPod. Some thrash rap, no doubt – or whatever the cool kids were listening to nowadays. I guess you could call me old-fashioned but I like my music with a melody to it. Maybe I was getting old.
I aged five years in the next five seconds, though, when the 787 hit an air pocket. It might be called a Dreamliner but air pockets are my worst nightmare. The state-of-the-art plane dropped like a stone. I felt a small hand holding my own and looked across to see my young charge watching me, concerned.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Statistically you have a lot more chance being killed crossing the road than you do flying.’
Whoever comes up with these sayings should be taken away and shot, if you ask me.
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But you looked like you were just about to have a heart attack.’
Hannah was trying to put a brave face on things, I could tell that. I forced the corners of my own mouth to form a smile. ‘Indigestion,’ I said. ‘I should have turned down that lobster sandwich. I never do well with crustacean-based food at altitude.’
‘I’m Jewish,’ she said.
I obviously looked puzzled.
‘Jews don’t eat shellfish,’ she explained.
‘I knew that, and very wise.’ I nodded. ‘Can play merry hell with the gastric juices.’ I winced as the plane was buffeted again.
‘If it lives in the sea it needs fins and scales to be kosher. But I don’t care – I love lobster.’
‘Not Orthodox, then?’
She looked at me again. ‘I’m not sure what I am any more. I didn’t make bat mitzvah, even.’
A sadness seemed to fill her eyes again. I looked down and saw that she was still holding my hand.
Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the turbulence cleared. She smiled up at me, but the sadness in her eyes didn’t go away.
‘So, you’re going to take care of me in England?’ Hannah said, letting go of my hand.
I couldn’t be sure but I thought I detected an amused quirk in the set of her mouth as she asked the question.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take care of you.’
Part Two
Chapter 12
Present day: London, England
LONDON IS THE greatest city in the world and don’t let anyone tell you different.
It is in May, at least. When the sun is shining.
I was standing by the panoramic window of my office, looking out over New Oxford Street.
Private has grown into a worldwide private detective agency. We have offices in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, Dublin – and right here in London, of course. We are expanding all the time. We are the biggest and we are the best. Our clients range from rock legends and movie stars to government departments. From a wife suspicious of her philandering husband to the Metropolitan Police itself.
One of our biggest clients was the woman I was watching from my office window as she walked across the street.
Alison Chambers, chief ‘Rainmaker’ from the law firm occupying the four storeys below us – Chambers, Chambers and Mason – hips swaying as if she knew she was being watched. Of course she was being watched! Alison Chambers drew glances like a foxglove draws bees.
She pushed the button on her key to open the car locks and then held her right hand facing back above her head and extended her middle finger. I grinned. She was having dinner with me later. It was her idea of a joke. I liked that about her. Always the tease.
I looked over at the framed original film poster of Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep hanging on the wall by the window. As ever, Bogey seemed to be judging me. I couldn’t see Bacall ever flipping him the bird. The print was a gift from an ex-wife who, I guess, thought she was pretty funny. I’m a private detective, after all. But that’s where the similarity ends. The difference between Dan Carter and the man in the hat is that I just have my wits to live on. I’m an Englishman – we’re not licensed to carry a gun!
I had just finished a video conference with Jack Morgan. He was a material witness in a big case just coming to trial in Los Angeles. A Supreme Court judge charged with the murder of her lesbian lover. And so he would be off the radar for a while. The case was drawing more attention than the OJ Simpson trial, and, even if he could have done, Jack would never have walked away from the free publicity.
He couldn’t walk away, though. The judge was a friend of his, and the men in black suits had slapped a subpoena on Jack. Putting him in a hotel with a couple of FBI agents babysitting him. Monday morning he’d be in court or he’d be in jail for contempt of it.
But Private London had nothing that needed his attention. We’d had a good month, settled a couple of long-running corporate cases and had plenty more business lined up on the books. Nothing that needed drastic action. For once – once in a blue moon – Dan Carter had a work-free weekend lined up. And I intended to make the most of it.
That guy leaning out from the prow of the Titanic probably felt just the same kind of optimism I was feeling. I’d never seen the film but I’m guessing it didn’t work out too well for him, either.
The phone on my desk rang. I picked it up.
‘Dan, it’s Wendy Lee. I’ve got a problem.’
Chapter 13
Chancellors University London
A HALF-MILE ACROSS London from the offices of Private, heading south and east. A barman in his late twenties called Ryan pushed a tray of shot glasses filled with tequila towards a red-f
aced pair of students.
They carried them to a nearby table and handed them round to a group of equally flushed young men. They were all wearing the university rugby colours and were chasing pints with slammers. One of them dropped his glass into his pint of lager and shouted: ‘Depth charge!’
Contempt was too mild a word for what the barman thought of them. He was a postgraduate student who had worked two jobs while getting his first degree and was still left with a mountain of debt. This lot of braying jackasses wouldn’t know a day’s work, or debt, if it bit them on their privileged arses. He looked across at a pretty dark-haired woman who was standing further along the bar. Sometimes he hated his job. Sometimes he liked it.
Chloe Wilson didn’t even notice the barman looking at her. She was feeling hot.
And not in a sexy manner, but in a sweaty, giddy kind of way. The three of them had come out all heels, squeals and ready to partay! At least, that had been the plan. Her two friends, Laura Skelton and Hannah Durrant, had been knocking back the vodka and Red Bulls since six o’clock like they were going out of fashion. And why not? They were all twenty-something-year-old students in the heart of the fine city of London on a Friday evening in spring – what the hell else were they supposed to be doing? But Chloe had held back on the booze. She had to. Someone had to keep a clear head. London could be a dangerous place, after all. Even on campus.
Chancellors University London, also known as CUL or Chancellors, was spread throughout the capital – as were most London-based colleges. But CUL dated way back to the sixteenth century. It had been founded by Henry VIII’s Chancellor – Cardinal Wolsey. It had a central block or two of ancient residential buildings and lecture halls in a warren of inner connecting squares and passages. In the sixteenth century it had been a theological school set to rival Magdalen College at Oxford University.
Nowadays it had a more secular curriculum. After the Reformation the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin had been one of the first to go under the sledgehammer. All trappings of Catholic worship stripped out. Now it was simply the Chapel Bar. It was at the northern end of Chancery Square beneath the main rectory and was a stone-flagged cellar that on this evening was packed wall to wall with animated young adults.
Like the three beautiful young women near the busy bar – making hay while the May sun shone bright.
Ryan stepped over to ask if they needed any more drinks. The dark-haired woman he had been watching earlier shook her head. But her friends drained their glasses and held them out for a refill. Not so much as a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you’.
Some of them were coming to the end of their time at college, Ryan knew. Some of them were coming towards the end of their first year. All of them with a bright future ahead. Their confidence was evident in their loud voices, their designer wear and perfect teeth. The privilege that they had inherited would be passed on through generations to come, as it always had been.
Some of them, though, had no future.
They just didn’t know it yet.
Chapter 14
ADRIAN TUTTLE, A tall, gangly, floppy-haired man in his late twenties, pushed the passenger door of my car shut with a bit more force than he probably intended.
It slammed closed. The sound of it echoed all along the street.
‘All right, Adrian,’ I said. ‘Take it easy. You sign on for Private, you’re on call twenty-four seven. Love life always takes second billing. It’s in your contract.’
‘What love life?’
I looked at my watch. Adrian had had to cancel a date when the call from the Met had come in, but I had no intention of missing mine.
Adrian was Private’s forensic photographer. He had his own company car waiting for him but had failed his driving test six times. His luck with the ladies was equally as spectacular. Wendy Lee, his line boss, a five-foot bundle of Chinese energy and an ex-Forensic Science Service pathologist, had called in from Holborn. Her car had broken down so I’d agreed to drive Adrian to the crime scene and meet there. I didn’t fancy his chances taking a taxi through London traffic on a Friday night. Official business meant I could put the detachable blue light on the roof of my BMW 4x4, blast the siren and cut through the commuters like a hot knife through butter.
I could have got one of my operatives to take him, but I like to go out with my agents in the field regularly. Let them know we are a team at Private. Besides, if I’d wanted to be a desk-jockey manager shuffling paper I would have joined a bank. But that night I’d told Wendy I’d swap her taxi for my car and leave them to it. Forensic examinations were definitely not on my agenda for the evening.
Ahead of us the familiar blue lights of parked police cars flashed, and yellow tape blocked the public from the crime scene that lay beyond it.
‘She could have been the one,’ continued Adrian morosely as he unzipped a large carry-case.
‘You’ll get another chance,’ I said, slapping him on the back as he stepped into his scene-of-crime overalls. ‘There’s someone for everybody, you know. Even you.’
Most people assumed that the white-suited forensic photographers and videographers seen on the TV news photographing and recording crime scenes were members of the police force. And sometimes they were – but sometimes they weren’t. The Metropolitan Police, and the other forces throughout the country, also used independent companies. Like us.
The forensic division of Private London had a contract with the Metropolitan Police, purely in the photographic area. Forensic pathologists themselves were still under the direction of the Forensic Science Service, which was an agency of the Home Office working with the police.
Adrian’s boss Wendy Lee had been a popular and highly respected pathologist at the FSS before I recruited her to head up Private’s forensic unit. Some cases required independent forensic analysis before they came to court – and the resources that Private offered Dr Lee tempted her away almost as much as the far higher salary I dangled under her nose. We gave her access to the kind of superior technology that the Met could only dream about.
The detective in charge at the scene, DI Ken Harman, nodded to me as Adrian and I walked up. We’d worked together before.
‘Dan.’
‘Ken.’
We shook hands briefly. And he held up the tape for us to cross under.
POLICE – DO NOT CROSS THE LINE
Somebody had crossed the line, though, I thought ironically as I straightened up again on the other side of it. As ever, it was the smell that hit me first.
Someone had crossed the line big time.
Chapter 15
SCENE-OF-CRIME OFFICERS STOOD to one side, ready to start processing the site once it had been thoroughly photographed.
Bright lights had been mounted on tall stands, illuminating the area as if it were a film set. Adrian fired up the light on his hand-held HD video camera and started shooting.
I looked down at the body, wrapped in translucent plastic. The features just about discernible as a woman’s. Maybe.
‘Who found her?’ I asked.
The detective grunted in what could have been ironic amusement, could have been something stuck in his throat. ‘Little toerag by the name of Jason Kendrick. Fourteen-year-old one-man sodding crime wave. Raped and stabbed a teenage prostitute just two streets or so across. Scuttled here just like a rat when he heard the blues-and-twos. Then ran back out again as soon as he saw this,’ Harman said, pointing at the mutilated corpse.
‘Can’t say as I blame him,’ I said.
The detective grunted again. ‘He does. He ran straight into a police car.’ Harman smiled grimly.
‘And the girl?’
‘She’ll live. She fell on her own knife as she tried to fight him off but missed all her major organs. She was lucky.’
‘I guess, but that’s the kind of luck I can do without.’
‘I hear you.’
‘And the boy rapist?’
‘Again, he’ll live. Scrapes and bruises. Hit the side of the car and
was winded, apparently. Couldn’t breathe and thought he was going to die.’ Harman twisted his mouth into something between a scowl and a smile. ‘Can’t say the world would have been the poorer if he had done.’
I didn’t comment. Seems to me there’s all kinds of bad luck in the world. The kind that gets you working the streets selling your body while you’re still little more than a child. The kind that gets you into trouble with the law when you are five years old and have been taught no different. The kind that gets you running into speeding police cars nine years later after upgrading to the sort of crime that means you’ll live out the rest of your childhood – and then some – in an institutional correction facility.
The kind of luck that gets you laid out on the cold floor of an old workshop. Being the centre of attention in a way that no one would have wished upon themselves in their worst nightmares.
I watched as Adrian put down the video camera, unzipped his case, took out his stills camera, screwed a lens onto its body, and stepped over to begin photographing the corpse.
He was using an MD180 which, according to Jack Morgan, was the best damn camera ever manufactured for the processing of crime scenes. He had insisted that Private London’s forensic unit should use the same and I reckon that Adrian would have kissed him for it. He certainly handled the camera as reverentially as he would a lover.
Wendy Lee stepped under the tape, suited-up but gloveless. I tossed her my car keys.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.
‘Boss.’
I looked down again at the dead body. Like I said, it had been wrapped in heavy plastic. But rats had eaten away the central section, exposing the torso, pelvic area and upper ribcage. Bones protruded and much of the soft inner flesh and organs had been eaten away. There was no pooling of blood around the area.
A uniformed constable suddenly held a hand to his mouth and dashed out of the room.
I followed him out.
Not the start to the weekend that I had planned.