Fallen Angel (9 page)

‘Are you fucking serious?' The tone in her voice was hard. ‘You bring me here to tell me you've got a fucking grass – do you know what would happen to me if anyone found out that I was with you? Tough fucking luck. What do you expect me to do about it?'

Jack stared at her, his growing anger obvious. ‘You need to tell me who it is.'

‘This really isn't the best time, Khan, I'm kinda busy.'

Jack's words were bouncing around Collins's mind as she drove home as fast as she could in the vain hope that she could get back and see Sophie before she went to bed. Khan sounded slightly hurt.

‘But I'm only calling because you told me to.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You know, that thing we talked about, the thing you wanted me to do with, erm, the thing. Well, I did it. I did the thing, loaded it up and now … well, the other thing …'

‘Khan, are you at home?'

‘Yeah, why?'

‘I'm in my car. I don't think anyone's listening in on this call. You can feel free to make use of a few more words, give me a bit more of a chance to understand what you're trying to say.'

Khan sighed with relief. ‘I put the worm on the kidnapper's account and set up a remote link to my pocket PC. The alarm's just gone off, so I logged in and got the ISP. I thought it was going to be another Internet café, but it's not. It's a house, a house in Dulwich.'

‘Jesus, Khan, are you telling me you know where this guy is?'

‘I know where he is right now, yeah.'

Collins couldn't believe what she was hearing. ‘Then why the fuck didn't you tell anyone?' she asked urgently.

‘He's only just logged on and I'm telling
you
. Right now!'

Shortly after the call a team from homicide were screaming through the streets of South London. Collins and Woods were in a car with Khan, who was there to secure any evidence they found on the computer. Two armed-response vehicles had been diverted from their usual patrols around the capital and were also on their way.

Woods was at the wheel, expertly weaving his way through the evening traffic. Khan was in the back, half excited and half terrified about the events that were unfolding around him. Collins tried her best to concentrate on the task at hand, but her thoughts drifted back to her meeting with Jack Stanley. His words kept turning over in her mind. ‘There's a grass in my organization. You need to tell me who it is.' It was an impossible request. Although Jack hadn't said as much, it was obvious what would happen to the grass as soon as he had been identified: he'd be killed, which would make Collins an accessory to murder.

Collins snapped her thoughts back to the present as Woods quietly pulled up several houses away from their target – the place where, according to Khan, the kidnapper had logged on to the Hotmail account that was used to send the ransom demands. He switched off the engine, killed the lights and waited for the others to arrive.

The house itself was a run-of-the-mill semi-detached Victorian property; an iron railing marked the boundary
between the pavement and the small front garden. The lights on the ground floor were
off,
but there were signs of life upstairs.

Collins turned to Khan. ‘Listen carefully. The armed-response unit are going to gain entry to the house. Once they've secured it, DS Woods and I will go inside along with the senior officers. What I want you to do is wait right here. Don't even think about coming in until I call you. Is that clear?'

Khan nodded. ‘Crystal,' he said meekly.

Out of the corner of her eye Collins noticed something moving at the other end of the street. She turned her head and saw, bathed in the orange glow of the street lights, a team of armed police officers in black combat trousers, bullet-proof vests and helmets silently approaching the house from two directions. Each member of the team was holding a standard-issue MP5 semi-automatic rifle across his chest.

Three members of the team vanished around the back of the house to cover the rear entrance. The remainder lined up on the left of the door, weapons pointed dead ahead. The first man touched his hand to the side of his head, waiting for the go signal. At that moment the radio in the car crackled to life. ‘Go, go, go.'

The lead firearms officer nodded at the man beside him, then took a step back. The second officer lifted an enforcer battering-ram and swung it at the front door, reducing it to splinters. The man behind him flung himself on to one knee in the doorway and raised the sight of his gun to his eye. ‘Clear,' he yelled, signalling to the other members of the team to move in ahead of him.

Khan was watching the scene open-mouthed. It was amazing to think that all this was being done because of him. As the officers vanished inside the house, and the sounds of shouting and breaking furniture started to come through the windows, Khan suddenly noticed something on the pavement. He jumped out of the car to meet Collins, his eyes scanning the footpath.

‘Oh, shit,' he said, ‘shit.'

‘What is it?'

‘Shit, shit, shit,' he said. ‘He's good. He's really good.'

‘What's going on, Khan?'

The young man slowly lifted a finger and pointed to the pavement outside the house. Two faint semicircles were barely visible close to the kerb next to a glowing lamp-post. To the untrained eye they looked like the kind of marks left by those responsible for painting lines or digging up pipes, but Khan knew better.

‘Warchalk.'

‘Khan, I need you to stop speaking fucking jargon.'

Khan's eyes switched from the road to meet Collins full on. ‘It's warchalk. It's a sign people use to show there's an unsecured wireless network near by. Whoever lives in that house has installed a wireless Internet system and their coverage leaks out into the street. They call it “wardriving”: you drive around and make a note of places where they don't have a firewall to their network but they do have a strong wireless signal, then list them on the Internet and leave the marks. It means people with laptops can sit out here and get on the Internet for free, or, more to the point, they can get on by piggybacking on someone else's ISP.'

‘Fuck's sake, what are you trying to tell me?'

Khan spoke without making eye contact. ‘I don't think this is his house. In fact, I'd stake my granny's life on it.'

Suddenly a scream came from within the house, followed by a commotion at the front. Officers from the firearms team dragged out a middle-aged man and his wife, then carried out their two small daughters. Everyone in the family looked absolutely terrified: the woman was hyperventilating, and a small streak of blood ran down from the man's lower lip. Both children were crying hysterically.

Collins watched the scene before her with growing horror. ‘Bollocks.' She glanced around the street. Curtains were twitching; a few people were emerging from their doorways to get a better look at what was going on. Collins could easily read what they were all thinking: what on earth had that poor family done to deserve such heavy-handed treatment?

It was a horrible scene, a nightmare of the worst-possible order, and she could bear it no more. She turned to Woods. ‘Get us out of here. I've had enough of this fucking shitty day.'

Five a.m. Time for breakfast. He had cooked the eggs and bacon to perfection, then placed them in the oven to keep them warm while he cleaned up around him. He didn't stop until the kitchen was spotless and all that was left behind was the faint odour of fried food. Cleanliness was next to godliness, and breakfast was the most important meal of the day.

He rarely needed to sleep more than a couple of hours each night and had got into the habit of collecting the morning papers the night before, driving to Central London to pick up the first editions ahead of time.

He laid the papers out, just as he had always done, neatly stacked on the right-hand side of the breakfast table. Everything was in place. Once he'd had his shower and washed his hair, he'd be ready.

As he showered, his thoughts reverted back to the night before. He had just logged on and was about to send the parents another email when his state-of-the-art software flashed up an alert warning him about a worm on the account. He couldn't risk uploading the file and being caught before his work was done. He immediately broke the connection and retreated to a safe distance.

The police got there far faster than he had expected. He almost enjoyed the sight of them dragging out that poor, innocent family. He particularly liked the look of anger on the face of the young Asian man who had pointed to the chalk marks on the pavement and the look of frustration on the face of the older woman with the blonde highlights beside him.

It was a minor setback. He would need to open a new Hotmail account before he could continue, but in the meantime he would send his latest message to the parents of Daniel Eliot in the old-fashioned way.

Five minutes after his shower he sat down to eat. He picked up the first paper from the pile. The headlines were all about the murder of Daniel Eliot, page after page of pictures, interviews and eyewitness accounts of the scene around the church. He ignored it all. Occasionally he picked up a pair of scissors and cut out a word or two, some large, some small, collecting them together into a pile on his left.

After breakfast he cleaned up after himself and went downstairs to the room he liked to call his study. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves from the box on the side of his desk and began to work his way through the pile of words cut from that morning's papers, carefully wiping each and every one one clean.

Jack Stanley wound down the window of the six series BMW and flicked the remains of his cigar butt out on to the rough grassland that led down to the deserted beach just a few miles along the coast from Margate.

He was sitting in the passenger seat, facing out to sea, waiting for the first sign of the inflatable speedboat that was making its way across the Channel. Danny Thompson, his long-time friend and enforcer, was sitting beside him. ‘Why do we use this cunt when he's always late?' asked Danny, glancing at his watch.

‘That's why I got out of bed at fucking half three this morning. To sort it out.'

‘This cunt's gonna get us into trouble.'

‘I know. We'll deal with that when he arrives.'

The two men had grown up together on the Blenheim Estate, and from an early age Danny had idolized Jack. Danny had always been short-tempered and confrontational. At the age of fourteen he had been sentenced to two years at Feltham Young Offenders Institution after slashing a sixteen-year-old boy across the face with a Stanley knife in revenge for losing a football match. Since then Jack had learned to use Danny's natural propensity for violence to his advantage, trusting him to enforce Jack's authority on the estate, a position Danny took great pride in. He therefore knew exactly what their trip to
Margate this morning was all about and had come prepared. Rarely now did Jack ever do his own dirty work.

Under Danny's seat was a semi-automatic Glock 17L pistol and silencer.

‘What about Collins?'

‘She's not turning our way at the moment.'

‘You want me to sort it out?'

‘Nah. Leave it to me. For now anyway. If she doesn't come round to our way of thinking, we'll have to teach her a lesson.'

‘Like what?'

‘We'll set her up.'

‘About time. I've never liked the bitch.'

Jack turned to face Danny. ‘Keep your fucking opinions to yourself.'

Before Danny could reply, their attention was drawn by the faint sound of a powerful outboard motor heading to shore.

As the first rays of the early-morning sun appeared and began to burn off the mist, they got out of the car and started to make their way across the rough dunes towards the sea. Danny tucked the gun into the back of his jeans, while Jack kept a look out for any passers-by.

The RIB pulled up on shore and out climbed Mark Dennings, a small-time dealer from the estate who worked for Jack as one of his couriers. He pulled a large duffel bag out of the boat and began to walk towards the two men.

‘Where the fuck have you been?' said Jack. ‘This is the third time you haven't done what we asked you to do.'

Mark's face broke into a broad grin. ‘Chill out. I got
the gear, ain't I? I always get the gear. You know that, Jack.' And with that Mark gave him a pat on the back.

Danny and Jack exchanged a glance that said they knew he was high again. Jack nodded his head at Danny, who without a moment's hesitation pulled out the gun from behind him and shot Mark twice in the head, his body slumping down on to the wet sand.

Danny replaced the gun in his trousers, stepped forward and picked up the bag, then looked straight out to sea.

‘Fuck me, look at that sunrise, isn't it beautiful?'

Jack rolled his eyes. ‘Fuck that, I'm hungry. Let's get some breakfast.'