'What are you going to do to me?' she asked, trying hard to keep her voice even, more frightened than she'd been in years. Perhaps ever.
'Why, I'd have thought that was obvious,' he said quietly. Then he grabbed her by the chin, jerking her face round so she was looking directly into his pale face, even though they were travelling at close to thirty miles an hour. 'I'm going to kill you.'
Twenty-nine
It had just turned four o'clock when I finally found an internet café on a side street near Bloomsbury in the heart of the West End, and signed into my email account. The day was sunny, the streets were crowded, and I was hot and bothered, having been trooping round for much of the afternoon buying clothes and provisions and then looking for somewhere to check my mail, all the time waiting for news about what Tina was up to, because it was clear she was up to something.
I clicked open her email, saw the message, and downloaded the photos.
The first one stopped me dead. It was him. The strange-looking Irish kidnapper. I could only assume Tina had taken this photo outside John Gentleman's place. Seeing his face now made me go cold, bringing back black, terrible memories that I knew were going to stay with me for the rest of my days. I scrolled through more of the photos, finding it difficult to believe that this man had abducted Jenny and murdered Ramon in cold blood. He looked so much more ordinary in a cap and sunglasses.
I wear a four-gigabyte memory stick round my neck which contains my most up-to-date drafts of Conspiracy as well as my book on Maxwell, and I copied all the photos on to it. I'm not the kind of person to rely too heavily on technology, though, so before I deleted them on the PC I printed them off in colour on one of the café's printers, paid the blank-eyed man at the desk, and headed out.
Now that the Irishman had finally come out into the open, I was itching for an update from Tina. In our last conversation she'd said she'd call in an hour, but that was an hour and twenty minutes ago, so I figured I could get away with hassling her.
Her phone was switched off. I waited five minutes, then tried again. Same message. I remembered only too well what this man was capable of – how he'd managed to conceal himself in my flat, listening to Ramon and I talking before striking silently and coldly in the space of seconds. If Tina had been taking photos of him, she'd have had to get close. Maybe too close.
I walked the streets of the West End for a while, trying her number, always in vain, waiting for a call that I had an ominous feeling was not going to come.
And it didn't.
My car was parked near Belsize Park Tube station and I took the Northern Line to get it. By the time I arrived, I had a plan. It was a fairly basic one, as most of mine tended to be, but it would have to do.
I'd picked up an A to Z some time earlier, and now I drove across north London through the choking rush-hour traffic until I came to a quiet rundown street of cheap 1960s housing. I've got a good memory for facts and figures and I remembered John Gentleman's address from when I'd been round to see him at the apartment block on the night Jenny was kidnapped. Since Tina's last known location was outside Gentleman's flat, I figured it was as good a place as any to start looking for her. Risky perhaps, but I was running low on options.
But as I drove under a railway bridge, hoping to see Gentleman's building come up on the right, I was forced to come to a stop. Ahead of me, police vans were parked on both sides of the road and lines of bright yellow scene-of-crime tape ran across it with a sign below saying POLICE NOTICE: ROAD CLOSED. A cluster of onlookers had gathered round the outside of the cordoned-off area, looking excited, while a group of men and women in top-to-toe white suits were trooping in and out of a clapped-out building with sludge-grey paintwork.
I knew without checking the number that this had to be Gentleman's place. And, like everyone else, I've seen enough crime programmes on the TV to know that the presence of this many police, particularly the ones in white suits, means that something extremely serious has taken place. Like murder.
As I sat staring at the scene, trying to take it all in, a uniformed cop approached the car, waving at me to back up. Heeding his instructions, I turned round and found a parking spot further back the other way before returning on foot, looking round for any sign of Tina.
I tried her number again. Still off.
'Do you know what's happened here?' I asked a couple of overdressed old ladies who were tutting and shaking their heads as they watched the police at work.
'Murder,' growled one. 'Some poor sod killed in his own home.'
'Just keeps getting worse,' said the other, continuing to shake her head. 'You wonder when it's all going to stop.'
'They should hang 'em,' said the first lady. 'Bring back the death penalty. That'd sort it out.'
I thanked them and walked round the scene-of-crime tape and through the onlookers to the other side of the street. But still I couldn't see Tina. I went to the top of the road, checked the parked cars. They were all empty.
Where the hell was she?
I looked at my watch. It was nearly six p.m. More than three hours since we'd last spoken; two since the time she'd told me she'd ring. The sun's rays were weakening as evening began to draw in, and I got a leaden feeling in my gut.
Maybe I should have gone to the police there and then. In hindsight, it would have been the best move. But what stopped me once again was the fear that they wouldn't believe me, particularly my story about Ramon, and that I'd end up a suspect, even if I showed them the photos I had.
Instead, I decided to turn to the one man I'd avoided throughout all this. The subject of my book Enforcer, and my last resort.
Maxwell.
Thirty
Five years earlier, not long after Mike Bolt had joined the National Crime Squad, the organization that became SOCA, he'd found himself involved in a case that had ended up having a lasting impact on him.
It started when a three-man gang of Jamaican thugs based in Dalston took to holding up drug dealers at gunpoint and relieving them of their product and their money. These men were extremely violent and, on the one occasion they did meet resistance, they shot the dealer dead and seriously wounded his bodyguard, sending out an ominous message to all those who might defy them. In fact, so successful did they become that for a short while the supply of crack and heroin in the borough plummeted as the other dealers moved out to safer areas. The gang's luck, however, was always going to run out, and when they robbed two crackhouses belonging to Nicholas Tyndall, a high-level gangster in neighbouring Islington, getting away with tens of thousands in cash and drugs, it finally did.
Tyndall was not the type of man to let such blatant disrespect go unpunished. Because he had a great deal more power and influence than the dealers the Jamaicans had robbed in the past, it hadn't taken him long to identify them. Incredibly, it seemed they weren't even making much of an effort to hide their crimes, clearly thinking they were above retribution.
This changed when one of their number, Ralvin Menendez, was found dead on waste ground near his home, a bullet in his head and his severed penis and testicles stuffed into his mouth. A week later, a second member of the gang, Julius Barron, was discovered at home dead in bed, in exactly the same condition.
The two men's deaths generated only minimal publicity. Drug-related murders within the black community were common, and even though these killings were particularly brutal, there was still little that set them apart from the many others that occurred that year in London.