‘What about the Dog Support Unit? The sniffer dogs must be able to follow my trail from Bloomsbury back to the kill site?’
‘Do you know the best way to distract a sniffer dog, Max?’ Whitestone asked me.
‘Introduce another animal, prey or food,’ I said. ‘Villains call it hiding the ball. You introduce a scent that’s strong enough to distract the sniffer dogs from what they’re meant to be hunting. Is that what they did?’
‘Not them. It’s the rats, Max. The millions of rats down there. The sniffer dogs don’t have a chance picking up a trail in a world full of rats.’
‘I want you to talk to Professor Hitchens later today,’ the Chief Super said. ‘There might be something you recall about the kill site that will ring some bells for him.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand . . .’ Whitestone said.
I waited.
‘Why aren’t you dead, Max?’ she asked.
I had told Edie Wren everything that I could remember but I had not mentioned the Glock 17. Because I did not know where to begin with the Glock and I did not want my friend to go to jail.
But I knew that our people must have found the gun by now.
‘The pipe they hanged me from broke and they took off,’ I said in reply to Whitestone’s question. ‘Just lucky, I guess.’
Whitestone and Swire exchanged a look. I knew what was coming so I got there first.
‘And they couldn’t shoot straight,’ I said. ‘I managed to get hold of their firearm after it was discharged. Presumably you’ve found it by now? Some kind of Glock. I’m no firearms expert.’
Whitestone glanced at her notes.
‘Yes, a Glock,’ she said. ‘The search team found it down on the tracks of that old tube station.’ She looked at me levelly, reading me the way I had seen her read so many faces in interview rooms. ‘A Glock Safe Action Pistol,’ she said. ‘The British Army like them. Standard issue, apparently.’
‘Forensics will find my prints all over it,’ I said.
‘You shot at them?’ Swire said, her face darkening.
Every time a member of the Metropolitan Police discharges a firearm, he or she triggers an enquiry that treats him or her as a potential criminal. You are arrested. You are investigated. Unemployment and incarceration are both real possibilities just for pulling that trigger. Even if you shoot Osama bin Laden. And that’s what they do to our highly trained Specialist Firearms officers, the Armed Response Vehicle officers and Tactical Support officers – the specialist police who are actually meant to be carrying a gun.
I had no idea what they would do to someone like me and I wasn’t anxious to find out.
‘The magazine was empty by the time I had the weapon in my hands,’ I said. ‘I pulled the trigger but it didn’t go bang. I took it with me for evidence and dropped it when I got out of the way of a train.’
Silence.
They looked at each other and back at me. They were not sure if they wanted to buy it. I found I did not care.
‘What about PC Rocastle?’ I said.
‘Who?’ said the Chief Super.
‘The uniformed officer who was on duty in Abu Din’s street. I saw he had gone down when they took me away.’
‘Oh – PC Rocastle got shot with whatever taser knock-off they used on you,’ Whitestone said. ‘He’s shaken up. Nerve ends a bit scrambled. But he’ll live.’
The Chief Super nodded once. The debriefing was over.
Her voice stopped me at the door.
‘And one final matter, DC Wolfe,’ she said. ‘We’ve had an enquiry from the MoD about a misper.’
‘A missing person?’
‘Yes.’ She stared down at her notes, although I felt she did not really need to. ‘A Captain Jackson Rose,’ she said. ‘The MoD is anxious to contact him. We understand he’s a friend of yours and wondered if you knew of his whereabouts?’
‘Jackson was staying with me for a while. Then he left.’ I stared at them. Their faces gave nothing away. ‘Why does the MoD want to reach him?’ I asked.
‘That’s MoD business not Met business,’ the Chief Super said, a sudden frost in her voice. ‘Do you have any idea where Captain Rose might be?’
I thought of a beach hut by the English seaside where the water was freezing cold even in the middle of a blazing summer, and I thought of two boys who believed that they would be friends forever.
‘No,’ I said.
27
Tara Jones was standing outside New Scotland Yard.
There is an eternal flame in the lobby of New Scotland Yard, remembering the officers of the Metropolitan Police who died in the great wars of the twentieth century, and I paused by it to watch Tara Jones waiting out on the street.
Through the security fence I could see her standing by the revolving sign, a file in her hand, oblivious to the two young detectives who turned their heads to look back at her. She was one of those women who do not care very much about the effect they have on men. Or don’t care at all. I came through the revolving metal gates that let you out of the New Scotland Yard and walked up to her.
And it was only then that I realised that she was waiting for me.
‘They said you were dead,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘On the Internet.’
I smiled. ‘And it’s usually so reliable.’
She smiled back at me. We still had not touched.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘Mustn’t grumble,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. Really. It all could have been a lot worse.’
‘I’ve got this for you.’
A double espresso from Starbucks. It’s the thought that counts. I took a sip.
‘Thank you.’
She shook her head. ‘Oh God, oh God.’
‘What?’
‘Your neck.’
There was a thick red welt around my neck that was hidden under my shirt collar apart from where the rope had angled up to the knot, leaving a livid stripe of raw flesh slashed from my Adam’s apple to left ear.
She touched my face with both her hands, her fingertips measuring the bones beneath my skin. I took her in my arms and lightly touched my mouth against her mouth. It wasn’t quite a kiss. It was as if we were seeing if our mouths were a good fit. The preliminary exploration was a success. They seemed to fit perfectly. They seemed to fit better than any other mouth I had ever known. We tried again, deeper this time. Then we broke abruptly away, suddenly aware that we were standing under the revolving sign outside New Scotland Yard. But she took my hand and would not let it go. We walked toward my car.
She was not smiling.
‘What just happened?’ she said, running a hand through her hair, the gold wedding band glinting in all that shiny blackness.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
But it wasn’t true.
I knew exactly what had happened.
It is when we are closest to death that we cling most strongly to life. It is when we can feel the chill of the grave on our skins that we crave the touch of warm human flesh. When we learn that we are all alone in the universe is exactly when we need another mouth. It is our most basic human impulse. The meaning of life is more life, I thought, pitching the empty Starbucks carton into a bin.
I squeezed her hand and smiled at her unsmiling face, and at that moment she was the only woman on earth that I wanted.
‘Do you want to get a real coffee?’ I asked her.
We drove to the Bar Italia.
I could have dropped the BMW X5 in the underground car park of West End Central and then we could have walked across Regent Street to Soho. That would have been the obvious thing to do. But I did not want to break the spell, I did not want her to change her mind about going for a proper cup of coffee, I didn’t want her to change her mind about me.
Because as I steered the big BMW around St James’s Park and Trafalgar Square and into the narrow streets of Soho, the spell between us felt like a fragile thing, as if it could dissolve at any moment.