“What happened to this private?”
Melinda nods bleakly at the body on the floor. “You found her.”
Reece and I exchange a look, probably thinking the same thoughts. The death of Melinda’s friend is a warning of what’s in store for her, too, if the officers catch up with her.
But it’s not great news for us, either.
“We’ve been used,” Reece mutters quietly, getting there a moment before me. “They set us up like gun dogs.”
He’s right. We find Melinda Blake and, hey-presto, they find her, too. I think back to see if I can recall any tail on us over the last couple of days. But when you’re not expecting to be followed, why check the rear-view mirror?
I remember Jennings’s response when we told him we’d called on Bream. He’d been frosty. Okay, he’s not the most sociable type we’ve ever worked for, but even for him it was more than cool.
Because he’d been expecting us to find Blake first, not Bream.
“Jennings,” I say, and Reece nods in agreement. It was Jennings who’d supplied us with the story on Blake’s “brother”. If whoever was following us had been expecting us to lead them to Melinda Blake’s hideout, simply because that was our current assignment, they would have gone in hard. It must have been a shock finding a short fat man in a fancy dressing gown instead of a former female army provost with a dye job.
It was too late to back out, so they shot him.
And now this. If the killers knew where Melinda was hiding, it could only have come from the information we’d given to Jennings.
And he’d expressly delayed us coming in here. Now we knew why.
“They’ll be looking for us now,” concludes Reece.
We settle Melinda in a small hotel with plenty of exits and head for Jennings’s place in west London. It’s in a Georgian terrace near the BBC, with state of the art security cameras everywhere, and we park the Range Rover right outside. Just so he gets the message.
I should feel like one of the Magnificent Seven walking across the pavement, but remembering what happened to most of them, I feel vulnerable instead.
Reece kicks on the heavy front door and it opens with a sigh.
A bad sign.
We step inside and find one of Jennings’s assistants, a chinless wonder with more muscle than brain, waiting for us. He advances like a runaway train, but Reece simply side-steps and clips him in the throat with the edge of his hand. He collapses and flops about on the carpet like a beached haddock.
We head on into the inner sanctum where Jennings has his office.
Or rather, had his office.
He’s sitting in his chair behind his desk, and whatever he had in mind for his final action, improving the decor clearly wasn’t uppermost.
“An officer and gentleman to the core,” mutters Reece sourly, looking at the automatic in Jennings’s dead fist. “He hasn’t paid us yet.”
I open a desk drawer and find a wad of notes in an envelope. I liberate the assets for our greater good, then go back to the outer office, where the assistant is just about sitting upright. He sees us coming and tries to crawl away across the carpet, but Reece steps on his ankle, pinning him to the floor.
“Where are they?” I say, bending down so he can see me. By the look in his eyes, it’s clear he knows what happened, and wants to get away before he becomes suspect number one. He also knows who I’m talking about: Majors Collinson and Pullman, pride of the Intelligence Corps.
“They... they’ve gone,” he gasps, struggling to stay out of Reece’s reach. “I don’t know where. I saw them leaving... and found him like that.”
“Makes your heart proud, doesn’t it?” I say. The cream of the army, and they turn out to be sadists and women-killers. Thank God we didn’t need them for something serious. Like fighting a war.
I reach for the assistant’s tie and give it a nasty twist on the way past. I know — not gentlemanly.
But I’m no officer.
Reece and I return to the hotel, during which time we agree a plan of action. It’s clear we can’t let things go, because Collinson and Pullman now know who we are.
We collect Melinda and take her to another, larger hotel, surrounded by busy streets, bus routes and underground stations.
I hand her a key-card and a holdall. “Go to room two-one-one. Here’s a change of clothes and some cash. Take off everything you own — jewellery included. Get dressed in the new stuff and leave the hotel through the rear cark park.”
She takes the key. “What then?”
“Just keep walking,” says Reece. “Don’t look back. Your trail needs to be clean.”
“Why?”
“Because if they get to us, they’ll surely get to you.”
It’s cold and brutal, but she needs to see the facts.
“You need to make a fresh start,” I explain. “Temporarily, anyway. Go to the beach, get a new job, invent a new name and background. It sounds drastic, but with those two still out there, it’s the only way. It won’t be for ever.”
She still looks doubtful. “What are you going to do?”
“Go after them.” We don’t really have a choice. It’s no good going to the police, and while Collinson and Pullman are out there, they’ll always be a threat — to us as well as Melinda. They’ll never let up.
For them, it’s become part of the game.
The only thing they haven’t reckoned on is that we know how to find people, too. However good they are, or where they go.
And like I said, we don’t always take them back.
Melinda blinks and tries a smile. It’s shaky, but comes out right in the end. “Okay. But when it’s finished, how do I find you?”
“You won’t have to. We’ll come find you.” I give her my best cheesy smile. “It’s what we do, remember?”
The Hard Sell
Jay Stringer
They’d been brought together by Ed Baker, the only real long-con player in the Midlands. People said he never got involved in anything that had fewer than ten moves.
There were five of them at the meeting:
Jake Nichol, former pro wrestler. He’d got as far as the big two in America before dropping out. He never quite made it, but he did get pinned by Hulk Hogan.
Returning to England, Jake got put away for holding up a petrol station without a gun. The cops eventually found him with a mashed-up banana in his pocket. He went in a failure but came out a minor legend.
Tom McInnes. Young and green, he was making a name at short con. Nobody liked him because he had the charm of a dead rat, but he was willing to learn. He had some nervous disorder and was always moving or twitching.
Jamie Prescott. He talked a lot. He did it well. Put him in a suit, he was the smoothest lawyer you’d never seen. Put him in overalls, he could convince you he could turn your car into a spaceship.
The strangest member of the group, the one everyone’s eyes kept drifting to, was Claire Gaines. She was the youngest daughter of Ransford Gaines. Everybody in the room was scared of Ransford Gaines and they all decided to be scared of his daughter, too.
They sat around a pool table in the back room of Ed’s favourite pub and waited until he arrived. Jake leaned back and swigged from his bottled beer.
“You know the problem with modern wrestling?”
“No, go on,” Tom took the bait.
“It’s the endings. Everybody knows how it’s going to happen, like.”
“Yeah, well, it’s all fake, innit?”
“Of course it is, but that’s like saying a movie is fake. You get someone good in that ring and it’s like a great film, or a great song, it’s telling you a story. It’s making you feel something, or that’s what it should do. It doesn’t, not any more.”
Jake’s speech was interrupted when Ed finally arrived. He was wearing a suit and carried a laptop. He looked like he was about to do a presentation at a board meeting. He set the laptop on the pool table.