Not Dead Enough (4 page)

Ignoring the hip flask, which the Irishman now offered him for the second time, he concentrated on the big decision of which club to take. The elegant way to go was his pitching wedge, then, hopefully, just a short putt. But years of hard experience at this game had taught him that when you were up, you should play the percentages. And on this arid August surface, a well-judged putt, even though he was off the green, would be a much safer bet. The immaculate green looked as if it had been shaved by a barber with a cutthroat razor rather than mown. It was like the baize of a billiards table. And all the greens were lethally fast this morning.

He watched the club secretary, in a blue blazer and grey flannels, stop on the far side of the green and point towards him. The two men flanking him, one a tall, bald black man in a sharp brown suit, the other an equally tall but very thin white man in an ill-fitting blue suit, nodded. They stood motionless, watching. He wondered who they were.

The Irishman bunkered with a loud curse. Ian Steel went next, hitting a perfectly judged nine iron, his ball rolling to a halt inches from the pin. Bishop’s partner, Glenn Mishon, struck his ball too high and it dropped a good twenty feet short of the green.

Bishop toyed with his putter, then decided he should put on a classier performance for the secretary, dropped it back in his bag and took out his pitching wedge.

He lined himself up, his tall gaunt shadow falling across the ball, took a practice swing, stepped forward and played his shot. The club head struck the ground too early, taking a huge divot out, and he watched in dismay as his ball sliced, at an almost perfect right angle to where he was standing, into a bunker.

Shit.

In a shower of sand, he punched the ball out of the bunker, but it landed a good thirty feet from the pin. He managed a great putt that rolled the ball to less than three feet from the hole, and sank it for one over par.

They marked each other’s scorecards; he was still a creditable two under par for the front nine. But inwardly he cursed. If he had taken the safer option he could have finished a shattering four under.

Then, as he tugged his trolley around the edge of the green the tall, bald black man stepped into his path.

‘Mr Bishop?’ The voice was firm, deep and confident.

He halted, irritated. ‘Yes?’

The next thing he saw was a police warrant card.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Branson of the Sussex CID. This is my colleague, DC Nicholl. Would it be possible to have a word with you?’

As if a massive shadow had fallen across the sky, he asked, ‘What about?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the officer said, with what seemed a genuinely apologetic expression. ‘I’d rather not say – out here.’

Bishop glanced at his three fellow players. Stepping closer to Detective Sergeant Branson, keeping his voice low in the hope he could not be overheard, he said, ‘This is really not a good time – I’m halfway through a golf tournament. Could it wait until I’ve finished?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Branson insisted. ‘It’s very important.’

The club secretary gave him a short, unreadable glance and then appeared to find something of intense interest to him in the relatively shaggy grass in which he was standing.

‘What is this about?’ Bishop asked.

‘We need to speak to you about your wife, sir. I’m afraid we have some rather bad news for you. I’d appreciate it if you could step into the clubhouse with us for a few minutes.’

‘My wife?’

The DS pointed towards the clubhouse. ‘We really need to speak in private, sir.’

8

Sophie Harrington did a quick mental count of the dead bodies. There were seven on this page. She flipped back. Eleven, four pages ago. Add those to four in a car bomb on page one, three blown away by a burst of Uzi fire on page nine, six on a private jet on page nineteen, fifty-two in a fire-bombed crack den in Willesden on page twenty-eight. And now these seven, drug runners on a hijacked yacht in the Caribbean. Eighty-three so far, and she was only on page forty-one of a 136-page screenplay.

Talk about a pile of poo!

Yet, according to the producer who had emailed it two days ago, Anthony Hopkins, Matt Damon and Laura Linney were attached, Keira Knightley was reading it, and the director Simon West, who had made Lara Croft, which she had thought was OK, and Con Air, which she had really liked, was, apparently, gagging to make it.

Yeah, sure.

The tube train was pulling into a station. The spaced Rastafarian opposite her, earphones plugged in, continued to knock his raggedly clad knees together in tune with his jigging head. Beside him sat an elderly, wispy-haired man, asleep, his mouth gaping open. And beside him a young, pretty Asian girl reading a magazine with intense concentration.

At the far end of the carriage, sitting beneath a swinging grab-handle and an advertisement for an employment agency, was a creepy-looking shell-suited jerk in a hoodie and dark glasses, long-haired with a beard, face buried in one of those free newspapers they give out in the rush hour at tube station entrances, occasionally sucking the back of his right hand.

It had been Sophie’s habit, for some time now, to check out all the passengers for what she imagined the profile of a suicide bomber to be. It had become one more of her survival checks and balances, like looking both ways before crossing a road, that were part of the automatic routine of her life. And at this moment her routine was in slight disarray.

She was late, because she’d had to run an errand before coming into town. It was ten thirty and ordinarily she would have been in the office an hour ago. She saw the words Green Park sliding past; the advertisements on the wall turn from a blur into images and clear print. The doors hissed open. She turned back to the script, the second of two which she had intended to finish reading last night before she had been interrupted – but wow, what an interruption! God – even just thinking about it was making her dangerously horny!

She flipped the page, trying to concentrate, in the hot, stuffy carriage, in the few minutes she had left before the next stop, Piccadilly, her destination. When she got to the office she would have to type a script report.

The story so far . . . Squillionaire daddy, distraught after beautiful twenty-year-old daughter – and only child – dies from a heroin overdose, hires former mercenary turned hit man. Hit man is given unlimited budget to track down and kill every person in the chain, from the man who planted the poppy seed to the dealer who sold the fatal fix to his daughter.

The logline: Death Wish meets Traffic.

And now they were pulling into Piccadilly. Sophie crammed the script, with its classy bright red cover, into her rucksack, between her laptop, a copy of the chick-lit book, Alphabet Weekends, which she was halfway through, and a copy of the August edition of Harpers & Queen. It wasn’t her kind of magazine, but her beloved – her fella, as she discreetly referred to him to everyone but her two closest friends – was some years older than her, and a lot more sophisticated, so she tried to keep up to speed with the latest in fashion, in food, in pretty well everything, so that she could be the smart, hip girl-about-town that suited his planet-sized ego.

A few minutes later she was striding in the clammy heat down the shady side of Wardour Street. Someone had once told her Wardour Street was the only street in the world that was shady on both sides – a reference to its being the home of both the music and the film industries. Not entirely untrue, she always felt.

Twenty-seven years old, long brown hair swinging around her neck and an attractive face with a pert snub nose, she wasn’t beautiful in any classic adman’s sense, but there was something very sexy about her. She was dressed in a lightweight khaki jacket over a cream T-shirt, baggy grungy jeans and trainers, and was looking forward, as always, to her day in the office. Although today she felt a pang of longing for her fella, not sure quite when she would see him next, and an even deeper pang of jealousy that tonight he would be at his home, sleeping in a bed with his wife.

She knew the relationship wasn’t going anywhere, just could not see him giving up all that he had for her – even though he had ended a previous marriage, one from which he had two children. But that did not stop her adoring him. She just couldn’t bloody help that.

She totally adored him. Every inch of him. Everything about him. Even the clandestine nature of their relationship. She loved the way he looked furtively around when they entered a restaurant, months before they had actually started sleeping together, in case he spotted someone who knew him. The texts. The emails. The way he smelled. His humour. The way he had started, recently, to arrive unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Like last night. Always coming to her little flat in Brighton, which she thought was strange as he had a flat in London, where he lived alone during the week.

Oh shit, she thought, reaching the door to the office. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

She stopped and tapped out a text:

Missing you! Totally adore you! Feeling dangerously horny! XXXX

She unlocked the door and was halfway up the narrow staircase when there were two sharp beeps on her phone. She stopped and looked at the incoming text.

To her disappointment it was from her best friend, Holly:

RU free 4 party 2morrow nite?

No, she thought. I don’t want to go to a party tomorrow night. Nor any night. I just want—

What the hell do I want?

On the door in front of her was a logo: a symbol of lightning made in the image of celluloid. Beneath it the words, in shadowed letters, Blinding Light Productions.

Then she entered the small, hip office suite. It was all Perspex furniture – Ghost chairs and tables, aquamarine carpets, and posters on the walls of movies the partners in the company had at some time been involved with. The Merchant of Venice, with the faces of Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons. An early Charlize Theron movie that had gone straight to video. A vampire movie with Dougray Scott and Saffron Burrows.

There was a small reception area with her desk and an orange sofa, leading through to an open-plan office where sat Adam, Head of Business and Legal Affairs, shaven-headed, freckled, hunched in front of his computer, dressed in one of the most horrible shirts she had ever seen – at least since the one he wore yesterday – and Cristian, the Finance Director, staring at a coloured graph on his screen in deep concentration. He was dressed in one of his seemingly bottomless collection of fabulously expensive-looking silk shirts, this one in cream, and rather snazzy suede loafers. The black frame of his collapsed fold-up bike sat next to him.

‘Morning, guys!’ she said.

For a response, she received a brief wave of the hand from each.

Sophie was the company’s Head of Development. She was also the secretary, the tea-maker and, because the Polish cleaning lady was away having a baby, the office cleaner. And receptionist. And everything else.

‘I’ve just read a really crap script,’ she said. ‘Hand of Death. It’s dross.’

Neither of them took any notice.

‘Coffee, anyone? Tea?’

Now that did elicit an instant response. The usual for both of them. She went into the kitchenette, filled the kettle and plugged it in, checked the biscuit tin – which contained just a few crumbs, as usual. No matter how many times a day she filled it, the gannets emptied it. Tearing open a packet of chocolate digestives, she looked at her phone. No response.

She dialled his mobile.

Moments later he answered and her heart did a back-flip. It was so great just to hear his voice!

‘Hi, it’s me,’ she said.

‘Can’t talk. Call you back.’ Colder than stone.

The phone went dead.

It was as if she had just spoken to a total stranger. Not the man she had shared a bed with, and a whole lot more, just a few hours ago. She stared at her phone in shock, feeling a deep, undefined sense of dread.

Across the street from Sophie’s office was a Starbucks. The shell-suited jerk in the hoodie and dark glasses who had been sitting at the far end of the tube train carriage was standing at the counter, the freebie newspaper rolled up under his arm, ordering a skinny latte. A large one. He was in no hurry. He put his right hand to his mouth and sucked on it to try to relieve the mild, tingling pain like a nettle sting.

As if on cue, a Louis Armstrong song began to play. Maybe it was playing inside his head, maybe inside this cafe. He wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter, he heard it, Louis was playing it just for him. His own private, favourite tune. His mantra. ‘We Have All the Time in the World’.

He hummed it as he collected his latte, picked up two biscotti, paid for them in cash and carried them over to a window seat. We have all the time in the world, he hummed again, to himself. And he did. Hell, the man who was near on a time billionaire had the whole damn day to kill, praise the Lord!

And he had a perfect view of the entrance to her office from here.

A black Ferrari drove along the road. A recent model, an F430 Spider. He stared at it unexcitedly as it halted in front of him, its path blocked by a taxi disgorging a passenger. Modern cars had never done it for him. Not in that way they did for so many people. Not in that must-have way. But he knew his way around them, all right. He knew all the models of just about every make of car on the planet, and carried most of their specifications and prices in his head. Another advantage of having plenty of time. Staring through the wheel spokes, he noticed this car had the Brembo brake upgrade, with 380mm ceramic discs with eight-pot callipers in front and four-pots at the rear. The weight saving was 20.5kg over steel.

The Ferrari passed from his line of vision. Sophie was up on the second floor, but he wasn’t sure which window. Didn’t matter; she was only ever going to go in and come out of this one door here, which he could see.

The song was still playing.

He hummed to himself happily.

9

The club secretary’s office at the North Brighton Golf Club had a military feel which reflected the secretary’s own background, as a retired army major who had managed to survive active service in the Falklands and Bosnia with his important bits – and most important of all, his golf handicap – intact.