“Jane left here yesterday, heading straight for you bastards,” she said.
“No, wait…”
“She told you where we were, didn’t she? Jesus, I don’t know what you did to her to make her give us up, but I know her. She’d have to be half dead before she told you anything that would lead you to me.”
“You’ve got it wrong…” the man gasped through his pain.
A tall boy stepped forward and cracked the man hard across the head with a truncheon. He crumpled to the ground.
“Don’t answer her back, fuckhead,” the boy shouted.
“Luke,” said Caroline, addressing the boy. “Get back to the others, tell them to pack up and move out. We’re not waiting, we’re going now.”
The boy nodded and ran off down the street.
Caroline knelt down beside the man.
“What was the plan, eh?” she asked. “Infiltrate us, let us think you’d help us fight the church and then lead us into a trap? Box us up and ship us out, problem solved?”
The man looked up at her. “I’m telling you the truth, I just want to help,” he said, his voice rough with pain. “How do you know Jane? When was she here?”
“I know her, you bastard, because she’s my friend. And she tricked you. That’s the best bit. She may have led you right to us, but she fucked you up at the same time.”
“I don’t…”
“John Keegan’s dead, motherfucker. She told me herself.” Caroline laughed, but there was no real humour in it. “She told you to pretend to be a dead man because she knew it would tip us off. So you lose, asshole. She was too clever for you.”
“No, wait, I see what’s happened here…”
Caroline stood up, levelled the shotgun at the man’s head, and blew his brains all over the street even as he tried desperately to cling to the cover story she’d so easily seen through.
“Back home, now,” she ordered, and the boys took off down the street.
Caroline stayed for a moment, looking at the corpse of the man who’d tried to win her trust. She had a moment’s doubt. What if…?
But she shook her head. No.
“Joke’s on you, churchman,” she said, and then she ran after her friends.
JOHN KEEGAN’S BODY lay in the street until nightfall, when the foxes and the dogs fought over it.
The foxes won, and dragged it hungrily away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I ALWAYS THOUGHT you kind of fancied me, Kate,” says Cooper, after swilling down the last mouthful of turkey with a swig of Chablis. It’s the first thing he’s said since I entered the room, escorted by two guards, and sat down to dinner.
The spread was impressive and smelt incredible. I considered refusing to eat, sitting there with my arms folded, defiant. But that would have been self defeating. I practically lick the plate clean, despite the nausea that his proximity provokes.
I consider correcting him, telling him I’m Jane now. But I pause for a moment as it occurs to me that the distinction is no longer so clear cut. Not now, not with this man sitting across the table from me.
“I did,” I reply. “But I always had really, really crappy taste in men.”
“Had?” he asks, amused.
“I’ve had better luck since the world ended.”
“So I gather.”
“Excuse me?”
“I heard on the grapevine that you hooked up with my old mate Sanders.” He leans back in his chair, smug at my surprise. “Oh, yes, I’ve been keeping tabs on you, Kate. Or, rather, my friends have.”
“The Americans.”
He nods. “I couldn’t believe it when your alias cropped up. I tried to tell Blythe that he’d got the wrong end of the stick, but he didn’t buy it. He was so convinced you were some kind of spook.”
I have a fork. If I launch myself at him, I’ve got a better than even chance of getting it through his eyeball. But he knows that I won’t. The reason I can’t kill him now is the same reason I couldn’t shoot him in the Commons. I need answers. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to begin asking the questions.
I can’t tell whether he’s changed in the last eight years, or whether the version of him I met before The Cull was a carefully constructed act. Is this the real man? He’s not that different. Speech patterns and body language are the same. The smile, the eyes, the good natured air of vague sarcasm — it’s all exactly the same.
“You have so many questions for me, don’t you?” he asks.
I nod.
“Then hit me. I’ll fill you in.” He dabs his lips with a napkin and pushes his chair back from the table, stretching his legs out and linking his fingers behind the back of his head. The midday sun is streaming through the lead latticed windows along the riverside wall of what used to be the Speaker’s Cottage. It casts his face into sharp relief.
I try to form my first question, but I come up blank.
“Let me get you started,” he says, smiling, for all the world the image of the genial, helpful friend. “Spider is dead. He died that very day.”
The same day I did.
“How?”
“I garrotted him.”
“Why?”
“He had outlived his usefulness.”
I shake my head. “No, sorry. You have to go farther back.”
“The clues are all there. You work it out. The point is that the man who killed your brother is dead.”
“But you let me think he was still alive.”
“Yes, I did. Listen, your role in leading me to his base of operations in Manchester was invaluable. I’d been trying to get a bead on that place for months. Little bastard wouldn’t tell me where it was. That was the problem, really. He’d decided not to trust me any more. Thought he could go it alone, run the business without my help and protection. Or, most importantly, without paying me my cut.”
“So you taught him a lesson.”
“Just so. The idea was that he would kill you himself. I planted that really obvious bug in the phone, assuming he’d find it and shoot you. How was I to know he’d go and kill your brother instead? That was a shock, I can tell you, to find out you were alive. I couldn’t just kill you, not after that. It would have aroused too much suspicion. So I managed to wangle you into witness protection.”
“And of course my absence protected you, not me.”
“Exactly.”
“You must have needed someone else on the payroll, someone at Hereford.”
“Natch.”
“And another bug besides the one in the phone.”
“In your shoe, set to become active after a couple of hours so that it would avoid detection.”
I nod, dotting Is and crossing Ts in my head. “So you ran Spider’s operation, he was just a front?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now…?”
“Now I don’t need a psychopathic Serbian mass murderer as my mouthpiece. There’s nobody to stop me running my business just the way I want. I use his name though. It had kudos in certain circles. Even after The Cull, there were people who knew the name. It made things easier.”
My mind works furiously, piecing it all together.
Cooper must have met Spider when he was in Serbia with the SAS during the Balkan conflict. Spider was probably already running some kind of organised crime ring, maybe even a trafficking route. Cooper offers him a way into the British market and they go into business together. Then he leaves the army and joins the police, managing eventually to get himself assigned to the case, making sure no-one gets close to his operation. This all works nicely until one day Spider gets cocky and tries to shut him out and run a Manchester ‘branch’ all on his own. He must be watching Cooper, making sure he isn’t followed. That must be a very complicated game of cat and mouse. No matter what Cooper tries, Spider outwits him.