He tries to roll back but can't quite manage it, so I take his shoulders and gently help him onto his side. His eyes are no longer focusing, and his mouth is hanging open.
'Tell me the name of the client. And the code for the case. Can you do that?'
When he speaks, his words are slurred and final. 'God forgive me.'
Then his head goes limp.
I feel for a pulse. There isn't one. In desperation, I pump his chest. Nothing happens.
Finally, I accept the inevitable. He's gone. I exhale deeply and stand up. The room, already heavy with the heat, is now beginning to fill with the smell of death. I look round at the four corpses, all positioned unnaturally. Shaven Head is on his knees, leaning forward into Miami Vice as if he's kissing him. One hand is still in the other man's inside jacket pocket, where he was hunting for ID. I can hear the blood dripping heavily from what is left of his forehead as it splatters into his friend's lap. It is the only sound in the room.
Four people dead, all for a measly one hundred and fifty grand. You can't even buy a shed for that in London these days. I shake my head at the futility of it all as I look down at the briefcase containing the money. I could pick it up and take it, and I'd be leaving here one hell of a lot richer, but what's the point? It's blood money, and with Leah gone, I wouldn't even know what to spend it on. The other case, the one I'm here to collect, is far more important, because that'll lead me to the person behind this.
But as I turn round to go to pick it up, events take yet another turn for the worse. Before I've even taken a step, there's a huge crash downstairs and I realize that the front door to the house has just been smashed from its hinges. A second later come the urgent shouts I'm dreading.
'Armed police! Do not move!'
Their footfalls are heavy on the bare, carpetless floor, and I can hear them coming up the stairs. They are moving fast, which tells me that they know exactly where they're going.
And, worse still, who they're looking for.
8
As the footfalls get louder on the stairs, I make a rapid calculation. There is no way I'm going out the front of the building, so that leaves only one alternative: the back. I run into the kitchen, scooping up the burgundy case with its mysterious contents. It leads into a short hallway, and I hurry through and into a bedroom that appears to be missing a bed as well as furniture. A set of ancient French windows with peeling paint running down the frames leads out on to an equally decrepit balcony with a less than attractive view to the rear of the houses on the next street. I try the handles but they're locked, and there's no sign of any keys. Behind me, I can hear the shouts of the advancing coppers. It sounds like they're only seconds behind me. Only a few minutes have passed since the outbreak of gunfire and I don't know how they got here so fast.
Taking a step back, I karate-kick the midsection of the French windows. The lock breaks and the doors fly open. I run through, clambering onto the balcony's wooden balustrade. Below me, I can see two plainclothes cops with police-issue caps and MP5 carbines strapped to their shoulders climbing over the boundary wall. At least two cop cars are parked out on the adjoining road, and I can hear the sound of sirens converging from several different points in the distance. The balustrade makes a worrying cracking noise as I scramble down the other side of it and hang from the bottom rail by one arm before jumping the final dozen or so feet to the patio below. I hit the ground with knees bent to absorb the impact, and roll to one side – a typical parachutist's landing. A bolt of pain shoots like a bullet from my ankles to my calves, and my shoulder bumps hard against the stone. But I'm uninjured and back on my feet in a second, running for the fence that separates the garden from the rear of the neighbour's property.
'Stop or I'll fire!' yells one of the armed cops behind me.
Harsh words, definitely, but I'm calculating that he won't shoot me in the back. The British police have some of the toughest regulations in the world governing the use of firearms and can only pull the trigger if there is an immediate threat to life. And there isn't. At least not yet. Although maybe I'm being a little over-confident, given that these are days of paranoia, with men being held down and pumped full of head shots on the Underground. Everyone's a little bit more trigger-happy these days. But I was a soldier a long time and I'm used to taking risks. And today of all days, I'm not stopping for anyone.
I vault the fence, crash through the trellis running along the top, and land in a grubby backyard full of kids' toys. I run straight across it, vault the next fence, land in the flowerbed of a better-kept garden, then do a rapid left turn and charge through an unlocked gate at the end, which leads into the alleyway providing rear access to the properties. I sprint along it for about twenty yards, try a couple of locked gates, finally find one that isn't, and disappear through that. At no time do I look back or listen out for the pursuing cops, preferring to focus every ounce of my energy on putting as much distance as possible between me and the apartment where four men have just died, two of them by my own hand.
I run down a garden path towards a particularly attractive young woman who's sunbathing on a lounger, stark naked and glistening with tanning oil. She shoots up in her seat, putting one arm across her ample chest and the other down below, and stares at me from behind oversized sunglasses, like I'm the one with no clothes on, not her. The back door to her house is open, so I run past her and through the gap, emerging into a kitchen with a ton of washing to do in the sink. I jump over a binbag full of rubbish and continue into the hallway.
A muscular black guy in a string vest pokes his head out of one of the doors. 'Oy, you! Come here!' he barks angrily. He steps into the hallway to confront me, which is the moment when I tug the Glock free from the back of my jeans and aim it straight at him, all without slowing down.
'Out the way!'
He doesn't need asking twice, diving back inside the door and out of my line of fire with an impressive athleticism.
Replacing the gun, I pull open the front door and run down the steps. The sirens are almost on top of me now, seemingly coming from all directions. I can see the flashing lights of one cop car roaring down the street towards me and I know I have seconds rather than minutes to get out of here. I charge into the road and straight into the path of the cop car.
There's an angry screech of tyres as the driver brakes violently in a desperate effort to avoid me. He almost loses control, but somehow manages to stop about six feet in front of me without hitting any of the parked cars.
He's the only occupant of the car, and I'm guessing he hasn't been given much of a description of the suspect he's meant to be apprehending, because he looks more angry than anything else.
'What the hell do you think you're doing?' he yells, sticking his head out of the window.
'Stealing your car,' I tell him, producing the Glock once again, running up to the driver's side door and pulling it open. I shove the barrel against his temple, grab him by the shirt and haul him out of the car.
'You can't do this,' he splutters, but like most regular British cops he's unarmed, so it's perfectly obvious to both of us that I can.
I knee him in the groin to relieve him of any excess enthusiasm he may have, and shove him onto the pavement.
Another cop car has just turned into the street behind this one and is bearing down on us fast, so I don't hang around. Jumping into the driver's seat and flinging the Glock and the briefcase onto the passenger seat, I shove it into first and I'm off again. Unfortunately, I'm also going back in roughly the direction I've come, towards the murder scene; but it's a narrow road, and with the second cop car behind me, I don't have a lot of choice. Speed is my weapon here. Not much more than a minute has passed since they kicked in the door, so I'm thinking that the bulk of the arriving cops will still be concentrating on the house, not me. I change up into second gear, then third, accelerating towards the junction.