Then, suddenly, there was a bellowing roar and the sound of footsteps charging down the hall. The gunman began to turn round but never made it as he was hit in the upper body by the office chair Merriweather had been sitting on a few minutes earlier. The gunman stumbled but managed to raise his gun in Merriweather’s direction and fire off a shot before he was rugby-tackled from the front and sent flying backwards into the room.
Malik tried to get out of the way but he was too late, and the gunman and Merriweather crash-landed on top of him, taking his breath away. Within a second they’d rolled off, and Malik saw that their assailant had lost his gun, which had disappeared off somewhere in the darkness, leaving him unarmed as he struggled to fight off a still roaring Merriweather who was raining blows down on his head and body. He managed to get in a punch that connected with Merriweather’s jaw, but the other man, his adrenalin and aggression now at full tempo, hardly seemed to notice it as he launched a flurry of counter blows, rolling round so that he was on top of his opponent. At the same time, Harold had got to his feet, having picked up the Browning in his good arm. He looked in a lot of pain and was moving unsteadily, but it didn’t matter now because flashing blue lights were appearing outside the window as the ARVs came screeching to a halt.
‘You fucking bastard!’ screamed Merriweather as he continued to pummel the third gunman. ‘Think you can fucking kill me, eh? Do ya? Come on, you cunt, fight me now!’
There was a lot more noise as the first armed officers came charging through the front door. ‘Armed police!’ one of them cried out, an MP5 in his hand pointed in the direction of the still fighting Merriweather. ‘On the floor, now!’
For a split second, Malik’s heart went into his mouth as he saw the officer’s finger tensing on the trigger.
‘Don’t shoot! We’re police! Whatever you do, don’t shoot!’
‘Get on the floor now, or I fire!’
‘For God’s sake, Jack, leave him alone!’
Knowing he was risking his own neck now, Malik, still winded, sat up and grabbed Merriweather by the shirt with both hands, pulling him away from the now unconscious gunman.
Merriweather turned round, a ferocious expression on his face, and Malik half thought he was going to lash out at him, but then the expression calmed as he finally came to his senses. He lay down on the floor, hands raised above his head.
It was finally all over.
50
Woodham and the uniforms stopped in front of the two of us.
‘What’s happened, sir?’ I asked, an irrational fear that it might be something to do with Tina — a relapse of some sort — playing havoc with my imagination.
‘There’s just been an attempt on Jack Merriweather’s life.’
Now I just felt a good, hard jolt of shock. ‘What happened?’
‘Three gunmen turned up. Two police officers have been shot — not Malik — but thankfully the attempt failed.’
‘Fucking hell,’ said Stegs evenly.
‘How the hell did they find out where he was?’
‘We don’t know. Only a handful of people knew the location. There’s going to have to be a full and thorough investigation.’
‘Have they caught the gunmen?’ asked Stegs.
Woodham turned to him with a look of suspicion. ‘I think one, or possibly more of them, might have been shot, but, yes, they’ve all been apprehended.’
‘Good.’
I let go of Stegs’s arm, and watched him carefully. He stared back at me, his expression asking me to believe him, but something in it wasn’t right. Something said that he knew much more than he was letting on.
‘I’m telling you the truth, John. I promise.’
I wondered how he’d react when I told him we knew about Trevor Murk. Act surprised, and continue to keep to his story, I thought. Stegs Jenner was a born liar. He’d been doing it for a career for the past ten years, and I reckoned he’d been honing his trade for a lot longer before that. I decided then that it wasn’t worth mentioning Murk just yet. Best to spring it on him in an interview, where any silence or spluttering denials would be recorded.
But something was bothering me. You see, the thing was, parts of his story made sense. Vokes hadn’t been there at the first meeting with O’Brien. He’d also been on the raid from which the murder weapon had almost certainly been lifted. He hadn’t wanted to be left in the room back at the hotel, had tried to insist that it wasn’t him. Vokes Vokerman could answer a lot of questions.
Except he was dead.
I sighed, continuing to fix my gaze on Stegs Jenner. ‘Wherever we go, Stegs, and whatever we uncover, things always seem to keep coming back to you.’
‘You’re getting paranoid, John,’ he said, the beginnings of a smile on his face.
Just that little bit too cocky for my liking.
Which was when all the frustrations and fears of the day got the better of me and I punched him hard in the face. For just one second, it was the most satisfying blow I’d ever landed, and it knocked him spark out.
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t see that,’ said Woodham, a faint smile appearing beneath the big moustache.
Afterwards
Life, it seems, never goes quite the way you want it to go, and what you think might happen often never does. DCS Noel Flanagan, the head of SO7, was uncovered as the leak to Neil Vamen. There’d been some canteen talk in the dim and distant past centring on the fact that he wasn’t quite as straight as he’d have the Brass believe, but no one ever expected him to have been responsible for providing information that led to the death of an officer from his own unit, and that came within seconds of collapsing the case he and SO7 had been working on for years. Not only was it out of character, it was always going to be impossible to do without being found out. It was the police equivalent of a suicide note. Rumours abounded as to why he’d done it, and there was even talk that Vamen’s operatives had kidnapped his daughter and used her to extract the information from him, but no-one ever knew for sure, and neither father nor daughter ever said a word about it. Neither did we find out who the anonymous caller was who’d given Malik those few minutes’ warning that an attack on Jack Merriweather was imminent. Again, rumour suggested it might well have been Flanagan, perhaps suffering a fit of guilt (although it seemed a little strange, him incriminating himself), but no-one ever found out for sure.
Initially, Flanagan was not only suspended but also charged with perverting the course of justice. However, the charges were later quietly dropped due to lack of evidence, and he left the police, having denied any wrongdoing. He now lives in France with his wife, while his daughter continues her studies at university in the UK.
Stegs Jenner also left the Force. He was questioned at length about a number of crimes emanating from the hotel and their aftermath, but he too denied everything and the evidence against him remained weak. When confronted about his relationship with Trevor Murk, who’d been confirmed now as the shooter in the O’Brien/MacNamara killings, Stegs expressed shock. He admitted to having had a long and well-documented relationship with Murk, but claimed to be wholly unaware that his erstwhile informant was also a killer with not only the deaths of O’Brien and MacNamara to his name, but also the earlier murder of the garage owner Paul Bailey, as well as the strange killing of Hans Rieperman, otherwise known as Tino Movali, a small-time Dutch porn actor whose body was found two days later in the same building where Murk had been killed. He’d been shot with the revolver Murk had been carrying when he’d died, and it was surmised that he had been the one responsible. Intriguingly, Stegs admitted to meeting both men in the days leading up to their deaths, but explained that the reason for this was that Murk had introduced him to Rieperman, who was a drug dealer, in order to set him up and claim a financial reward. Stegs said that, even though he’d been suspended at the time, and it went against all the police rules to have unofficial contact with informants, he’d gone along to the meeting out of curiosity. It had, he said, been the last he’d seen of both men. As for his visit to Vamen’s solicitor, the reason for this, apparently, was to let Carroll know that Stegs was on to him and his client, and that he was going to make them pay for almost getting him killed at Heathrow.