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He looked up at the narrow, black clouds scudding across an already dark and crimson sky then suddenly down again as he heard the sound of an engine screaming in high revs and the concurrent sound of tyres screeching on tarmac. He looked up the street and the carrier bag in his right hand slid from his open fingers. The bottle inside it hit the pavement hard and smashed. But Jimmy Skinner didn't register it all. He was too busy shouting, straining his lungs in the face of the gusting wind.

'Look out!'

But for Derek Watters as he spun round to the sound of the tortured engine, it was too late. Far too late.

The jet-black Land Rover Discovery hit into him still accelerating. The bull bar on the front of it crushed his ribs, splintering them and piercing his heart before the front of his head smashed down onto the bonnet. He was thrown back into the street as the driver stamped on the brakes and then into reverse, the tyres biting and screaming once more. As Jimmy Skinner ran across the road the back of Derek Watters head slapped hard down on the road with the crunching sound of a coconut being cracked by a hammer.

The Land Rover roared backwards into Soho Square, then drove round the green and, accelerating once more, shot up Soho Street and out into the busy traffic of Oxford Street, oblivious to the blaring of horns and sudden screeching of brakes, and disappeared as it turned left heading towards Marble Arch. Skinner watched it go, trying to see the number plate, but it had been taped over. He knelt down and put his fingers to Derek Watters's carotid artery on the side of his neck, though it was a movement made more by instinct than expectation. But, surprisingly, the prison officer had one last breath in him. As his eyes clouded over he looked at the tall, thin, bone-faced policeman kneeling beside him and sighed more than spoke: 'Murder.'

Then his eyes froze, motionless, and Derek Watters, forty-one years old, who never got to serve his country by bearing arms, died on a chill, wet street in a city that had a heart as cold as a solar system where the sun had died out many millennia ago.

Delaney sat behind the wheel of his car taking a moment to collect his thoughts. Adjusting the rearview mirror he looked at himself. He didn't know what had got Kate Walker so agitated, she wouldn't tell him on the telephone, just told him to meet her at the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead. He knew it well enough, it was just up the road from his new house. What he didn't know was what had got her so rattled; he could hear it in her voice, the thinnest form of politeness covering someone close to breaking point. It had something to do with what happened in the hospital car park that morning, he'd bet his life on it. Whatever it was that had gone down, the clear fact was that Kate needed his help. She didn't say it in so many words, but it was expressed in her barely restrained emotion. She needed his help. And that was the one thing Jack Delaney couldn't walk away from.

He'd put the mirror back in position, switched the engine on and slipped the gearstick into first, when his phone rang. He angrily slipped the gear back into neutral, glanced at the cover of his phone and snapped it open.

'Make it quick.'

'Jack. It's Jimmy Skinner.'

Kate Walker sat at the long wooden bar in the Holly Bush. Comforted on the one hand to be surrounded in the warmth and hubbub of familiar faces and voices of the early-evening crowd, and yet starting every time the front door opened. She wanted it to be Delaney coming through that door but was terrified of the notion that it would be Paul Archer walking in instead. She didn't know what made her suggest this pub to Delaney. She wasn't thinking straight. Hadn't been since she had woken up this morning to find that man in her bed. She took a sip at her Bloody Mary. Cautiously. She had no intentions of getting hammered again tonight; besides, she was pregnant. God knows what she was going to do about that. And maybe she hadn't been raped. Maybe she was blowing things all out of proportion. She certainly had drunk a lot last night, maybe they had gone back to her flat, got paralytic and just passed out in bed. But if that was the case, why couldn't she remember any of it?

She looked at her watch again. Where the bloody hell was Jack Delaney? It had taken all her nerve to call him in the first place and if he stood her up now, leaving her alone at the bar like a jilted teenager, she would kill him. She downed her Bloody Mary and gestured at the barman for another. After all, two wouldn't hurt. Would they?

The ambulance pulled away from the kerb and drove slowly down Greek Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. It had no need for sirens and lights. The police cars that had cordoned off the area, blocking traffic from Soho Square, Bateman Street and Manette Street, pulled away too. Nothing to see here either. Not any more, at least. Delaney leaned back against the painted glass of the porno bookshop and put a cigarette in his mouth. He held the packet out to Skinner who shook his head then lit the cigarette with a lazy scrape of a match.

He inhaled deeply and looked up at the night sky. It was like a carmine canvas that an artist had dragged thick, soot-stained fingers across. Like the black fingers of blood that had crept along the cobbles where Derek Watters had been murdered. He exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked back at his colleague.

'Definitely not an accident?'

Jimmy Skinner shook his head.

'Professional hit?'

'I'd say so. The guy didn't have a chance. Walking along the street when suddenly out of nowhere . . . Bang!' Skinner slapped one hand hard against the other.

Delaney took another thoughtful drag on his cigarette. 'And that was all he said. The one word.'

'Yeah. "Murder." Hardly the most insightful final utterance, seeing as I had just watched him being splattered halfway up Greek Street.'

'What's going on, Jimmy?'

Skinner shrugged drily. 'Looks like somebody doesn't want anyone talking to you.'

Delaney nodded in agreement. 'Looks like.'

'I'd watch your back, if I were you, Jack. Somebody going to all this trouble, easier maybe to just take you out.'

A cloud cleared the moon, throwing for a moment a spill of yellow light that reflected in the black orbs of Delaney's eye.

He threw his cigarette on to the road, the sparks flaring briefly then dying out as he crushed it under heel. 'Maybe.'

Kate sipped on her third or fourth drink. She wasn't drunk, just couldn't remember how many she had had. Time passes in a different way when you're lost in thought. No matter what Einstein said, some things aren't relative. She tasted the fluid in her mouth, thin and liquid and she realised that all she was drinking was melted ice, any vodka in the glass long since gone. She rattled the glass and held it out to the barman, who refilled it and added the drink to her tab. She swirled it in her hand, watching the splash of red wine, which the Holly Bush always added to a Bloody Mary, spin like a star system in a universe of its own. Like a black hole. Like the eye of Sauron.

Some time later she looked at the oak-framed mirror above the bar and could see the front door to the pub opening and a man with curly dark hair entering and her heart pounded suddenly in her chest and she struggled to breathe. She knew the symptoms. It was a panic attack. And being the doctor that she was, Kate knew that sometimes panic was absolutely the appropriate response.

A single, skeletal leaf was cartwheeling along the road. It was a dry, brittle, frail thing and it came to rest, finally, in the damp gutter that was already clogged with the decomposing corpses of leaves from the semi-denuded trees that lined the street. A street of wealthy people, whose lives behind the closed oak doors and wrought-iron gates were consumed with problems other than mortgages and council tax or the National Health Service. This was a street of financiers, of publishers, of authors and literary agents, of property developers and quantity surveyors, of Harley Street doctors and surgeons . . . and of a forensic pathologist who had, just that very day, sickened of death, and handed in her notice. The man in a car across the road from her house didn't know that, however, and it wouldn't have made any difference if he had. Her job, after all, had brought her to his attention in the first place.