Target

The crowd parted a little, letting him through, although they aimed angry mutterings at his back.

'He's dead,' said the man giving the heart massage, looking up as Bolt stopped next to him, his expression one of utter disbelief. 'Jim's dead.'

Bolt looked down and felt a guilty surge of relief. Jim was a well-built man in his fifties, wearing a check shirt and corduroy waistcoat. There was a blackened, coin-shaped hole where his right eye should have been.

'This man's been shot,' he said firmly so that everyone could hear him. 'An ambulance'll be here in a few minutes. We're trying to locate the killer right now, but there's another casualty round here as well.' Then, wiping away the raindrops on his face, he pushed through the group, looking for Fallon, praying he was OK.

He found him lying in a narrow alleyway just up from the pub. He was on his side in an approximate fetal position, and he wasn't moving.

Cursing, Bolt crouched down beside him, feeling for a pulse. 'Mr Fallon, Rob… can you talk to me?'

Sirens began wailing in the distance, coming from more than one direction.

Fallon moaned. He was bleeding from the mouth, but he also had a strong pulse. Slowly his eyes opened and he rolled over so he was staring up at Bolt, his face a mask of numb shock. There was a gash above his eye that was weeping a thin trail of blood down one cheek and he had a cut on his head as well.

'It's all right, Rob, you're safe now. I'm a police officer, and an ambulance is on the way.' He showed him his warrant card. 'Can you speak?' he asked, conscious that the sirens were getting closer, and that he had only a short time to talk to Fallon before he was taken to hospital.

'Yeah,' he said weakly, 'I can speak. But I think I might have broken my arm.'

Bolt looked down. His right arm was on the ground beneath him, and for the first time he saw that it was bent at an unpleasant angle.

'The doctors'll fix that. But I need to know about Tina Boyd. Do you have any idea where she is? We need to find her urgently.'

Fallon managed to shake his head a little. 'No. I was trying to get hold of her earlier.'

'Have you been in contact with her today?'

'Yes.'

'Where was she when you last spoke to her?'

Fallon winced in pain. 'Outside the doorman's place. John Gentleman.'

'Doorman?'

'The one at Jenny's place. Jenny Brakspear.' Fallon struggled to sit up, but failed. 'Listen, you've got to find her. The Irish guy, the one with the gun…I think he's got her.' He started to say something else but his words were drowned out by the blaring sirens as the first of the emergency services vehicles came to a halt on the road behind them.

Through the noise, Bolt told Fallon once again that he'd be OK now and squeezed his good hand. But inside he was in turmoil.

Where the hell was Tina Boyd?

Thirty-nine

When the phone in his left pocket began to vibrate, the man in the cream suit excused himself from his conversation with the mayor and his wife – a mountain of a woman who'd single-handedly polished off two plates of canapés – and weaved his way through the clusters of guests lining the swimming pool over to the cobbled steps leading down to the beach.

'Where are you calling from?' he demanded, walking along the sand away from the party.

'A phone box,' answered the man he knew only as Hook. 'We've got a problem. The witness I told you about. Fallon. We didn't get him.'

The man in the cream suit hissed through his teeth. It was a sound he made whenever he became angry or frustrated. In this case, he was both. 'I thought I told you specifically to get rid of him.'

'You did, but he managed to evade us.'

'If you'd dealt with him in the beginning, as I wanted you to do, we wouldn't have this problem, would we? Right now, he's a major threat to everything. I want him dead. Put all your resources into it.'

'It's too late. He's in the hands of the police.'

The man in the cream suit hissed again. 'I can't afford problems on this. There's too much riding on it. Neither can you. I'm sure I don't need to remind you that the two million you're being paid is conditional on events reaching a successful conclusion. If Fallon talks, that's not going to happen.'

'He's hurt. I'm not sure how badly, but he was hit head-on by a car travelling at speed which knocked him high into the air. I saw it happen. It's possible he might even be dead.'

'It would be useful if he was, but we can't leave it to chance. Can you get to him in the hospital?'

'It's possible, but it might be too risky.'

'I didn't think you were the kind who scared easily, Mr Hook.'

'I'm not, but I'm no fool either. That's why I'm still here.'

The man in the cream suit thought about pushing him further but decided against it. He was used to getting his own way, but he was also pragmatic enough to know that Hook had a point. 'Do what you can, but events are very close to fruition and nothing can go wrong now. There's too much riding on it. How far away are we from receiving the goods?'

'A matter of hours. As soon as we have them, no one's going to be able to stop us.'

'So everything's in place?'

'Absolutely.'

'Good. Kill Fallon. I'll sleep easier with him gone. And keep me posted on developments.'

He hung up and stopped walking, looking out to sea at the squid boats on the horizon. As with everything in life, there were complications, but the man in the cream suit was not the type to worry unduly. He was a gambler by nature. This was just a bigger gamble than usual. Even if it failed he would still be insulated from its repercussions, because he was also an expert at covering his tracks.

As he returned to the party, he heard his wife's high-pitched, faux upper-class laughter rising above the buzz of chatter as she talked to two middle-aged men in suits, one of whom was gazing unashamedly at her new breasts. The party had been her idea. Charmaine liked to act the glamorous hostess, and the man in the cream suit was happy to go along with it. She was a useful trophy, but little else. His real interest lay in much younger company, and he tended to travel overseas for his gratification, to Phnom Penh, Saigon and Manila.

Charmaine caught his eye as he took a glass of Krug from one of the waitresses, and flashed him an expensive smile. 'Darling, where have you been? I wanted to introduce you to some friends. This is Mohammed.' She pointed to the one focusing on her cleavage. 'And this is Atul. They're in import/export.'

The man in the cream suit came over and put out a hand to each of them in turn. 'Paul Wise,' he said, flashing a smile of his own. 'Very pleased to meet you.'

Forty

Mobile reception in the village was almost non-existent so Bolt found himself shouting into the phone as he walked away from the jumble of emergency services vehicles clustered around the pub. 'I need an armed guard on Robert Fallon. A minimum of three officers. He's currently en route to Wexham Park Hospital in Slough. This is absolutely top priority. He's the only live witness we have to what's been going on here.'

The man Mike Bolt was talking to was Frank Carruthers, the assistant chief constable of Thames Valley Police, currently in charge of the force while his boss was sunning himself on the Algarve, and who up until a few minutes before had been relaxing at home in front of the television. He sounded shell-shocked to find himself suddenly presented with a double murder investigation and absolutely no sign of any suspects.

'It's going to take me time to get a team over there,' explained Carruthers. 'All our ARVs are currently hunting for the gunmen involved in this incident, and we just don't have the resources you lot have got in London.'