Paternoster (2 page)

Jackie raised her hand and rubbed her fingers over her scalp. A harvested field.

‘Covering up this, at least,’ the nurse said, fingering the tattoo above her ear.

‘Good,’ she muttered. The pillow was cool and soft and she sank into it. ‘Good.’

Her hair was grown out into a crop by the time she was called to trial. She’d long ago left the hospital and been transferred to a safe house, guarded by a different set of policemen. She itched to be free of them, to start her life again. Eating proper meals and sleeping a solid eight hours a night had transformed her. Gone were her pallor and the bruises round her eyes. Gone, too, the stick arms and legs. Slowly she’d built up her muscles again, lifting cans of soup until she was strong enough to get to a gym. The policemen came jogging with her. It was safest to go at night, and that winter they pounded the streets in nobody-town where nobody knew her, and slowly she became herself again. Whoever she was, now.

When she walked into court, she was in a dark trouser suit and high heels, her chin tilted up. She met John Hammond’s eyes as she took the stand and swore to tell the truth. When the judge told her she could sit to give her evidence, she did so, her shoulders held back and her thumb rasping against her fingers. John Hammond and Dave the Nutter occupied the dock just yards away. Their barristers sat in line like boys waiting to be called into the headmaster. Their strategy seemed to be to pour the blame on to the others and to paint their clients as misguided innocents.

She drew deep breaths every time she answered a question. Her training held firm. Even when she was asked to repeat what had happened that night, how she’d been cut, who did what to her. Even when Hammond’s barrister rose to his feet, twitched his gown, stared at her over the top of his spectacles and commenced his interrogation with, ‘You infiltrated the gang?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you took drugs?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was part of your …’ he waved his hand as though searching for a word. ‘… Cover?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were an addict?’

‘No.’

‘No? But you took heroin?’

‘When I had to.’

‘When you had to. I see. And you’d taken heroin before this alleged incident took place?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could your drug taking have affected your perception? How sure are you that you saw what you claimed to see? Or was it all a product of your febrile imagination?’

Jackie sucked in a deep breath. ‘I wasn’t under the influence of any drug when I was attacked.’

‘Yet tests done on your blood and hair indicate that you had taken drugs.’

‘Not recently. But during my time with the gang, yes, I took drugs to show I was one of them.’

‘Did you ever see John Hammond take drugs?’

‘No.’

‘No?’ The barrister peeped again over his glasses and play-acted astonishment. ‘Then why did you take drugs, when the gang’s leader did not?’

‘The others in the gang, the subservient ones, did so. I did the same. It meant I could go unchallenged for two years.’

‘Yet you were challenged, weren’t you?’ A flap of a piece of paper. It could have been a shopping list, it was just a prop. ‘They found you out. I put it to you that it was your incompetence that precipitated that incident.’

‘No.’

‘You got too comfortable with your role in the gang, and you broke the rules, didn’t you?’

‘I did what I thought was necessary.’

‘Your own training manual doesn’t say anything about taking drugs in order to pass as a gang member. Had you taken drugs before?’

Her armpits were swampy. ‘At university. Once or twice.’

‘Once or twice at university.’ His voice dropped. ‘No one condones what happened to you. But I put it to you that your methods were unorthodox. You went native and jeopardised a long running operation.’ He pointed at her across the courtroom. ‘You were not authorised to take the actions you took, were you?’

‘Objection, my lord. Bullying the witness.’ The prosecution barrister woke up and made a desultory attempt to get things back on track. They had enough evidence to convict. Hammond’s barrister was doing what he was paid for, having a go, and trying to take her down with him. She was finished.

The judge released her at the end of the cross-examination, and she crept from the courtroom, humiliated.

Her heels clattered down the hallway and she shoved through a wooden door into the Ladies. Her face was ghostly in the purplish light: years before, the first time she’d attended court, she’d queried it and been informed that the light prevented drug takers from finding a vein. The cisterns were bolted shut, too. No hiding packages in there.

Jackie jumped when the door banged behind her.

‘You OK?’ Her boss, Miranda Tyson, kicked open the door to each stall, checking for eavesdroppers. ‘You had a rough ride in there. Tosser.’

‘He’s doing his job,’ Jackie said, running a bowl of cold water and splashing her face. She dabbed it dry with a paper towel and said frankly, ‘I’m finished, aren’t I?’

‘No.’ Miranda hitched her bum against a basin. Her nails were painted navy and a huge tiger’s eye ring dominated her middle finger. ‘When do you want to come back to work?’

‘Undercover?’

Miranda shook her head. ‘You’re outed, sweetie.’ As Jackie started to protest, she said, ‘It’s not the drugs. I understand all that. Been there myself.’

‘I never injected. Smoked, yes. I could control that.’

‘I know. But you’ve taken a pounding, and two years undercover is enough for now. Try something new. There’s plenty to get your teeth into.’ She leaned into Jackie and said in a tempting, sing-song voice, ‘Mobile phone cash transaction fraud.’

Jackie wrinkled her nose.

‘Hey, don’t diss it. International transactions, links to terrorism. Could be a scoop.’

Jackie tossed the paper towel into the bin.

Miranda studied her. ‘I could arrange a secondment, if you like. Five expressed an interest.’

‘Five?’ MI5, the Security Service. ‘Agent running?’

‘No. But casework. You’d be good. They’ve asked for you to design some training for their rookies, too.’

‘What about Six?’

‘You don’t want to work for those wankers,’ Miranda said. ‘They all think they’re James Bond, comparing willies all day long.’ She paused. ‘You’d have a bigger willy than any of them. They wouldn’t like it.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘You coming back in? Watch the rest of the trial?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Shame you missed the first day,’ Miranda said. ‘James Little gave evidence while you were holed up in the witness room.’

‘Little Jimmy?’ Jackie cast her mind to the skinny Scot with his love of puzzle books. ‘I heard he pleaded guilty.’

He’d already been sentenced; was already serving time in some Victorian monstrosity that retained its hanging shed.

‘He did. He also testified against the gang.’

‘Hell.’ Her guts crunched at the thought of how much courage that must’ve taken.

‘Spilled the beans about it all. What the gang was up to, where the guns were headed, the whole lot.’ Miranda scrutinised herself in the mirror and smoothed her fingertip along a wrinkle beside her eye. ‘And how he sneaked out of that warehouse and called the police. Told them what Hammond had planned for you. Even gave them the number plate. It’s down to him they found you so quickly.’

‘What?’ Jackie felt a stone in her stomach.

Miranda turned to face her. ‘Little Jimmy saved your life.’

Jackie couldn’t face the courtroom again that day. She wandered the London streets, dazed, barely aware of the hustle on the pavements and stink of hot bodies on the Tube. The Thames flowed by, brown and unperturbed, deprived of her corpse but sated with others. She turned her back on it and headed into the city, and lost herself in the litter and lights and crocodiles of European school kids sporting identical backpacks.

She lurked at the back of the court to hear the summing up, and was there when the jury returned guilty verdicts against both defendants. Dave the Nutter was sentenced to twelve years. He jabbed his arms through the bars of the dock and swore at the judge, threatening to kill him. The judge didn’t bat an eyelid, just intoned, ‘Take him down,’ with a yawn.

Dave the Nutter’s invective echoed behind him as the prison guards yanked him down the steps to the cells.

John Hammond was expressionless as the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. He lifted his head and his gaze scoured the packed courtroom as Nutter’s footsteps receded. Jackie cowered down in her seat. Hammond’s eyes locked on hers, and he drew his finger across his throat.

Then they led him away and she started to breathe again.

The target house was on the opposite side of the street. A red-brick semi, in a part of Cheltenham where all the roads were named after poets. Wide, tree-studded pavements surged with mothers, kids and pushchairs on the school run.

Eden Grey lowered the car window. Chill air gusted into the car, carrying the children’s babble on its wings. She waited for a cohort to rumble past, then lifted the camera to the open window, adjusted the focus, and rattled off a series of shots. A white van was parked outside the target house, the logo of its former owner a spectre looming over its new identity: Wilde About Gardens. A website and mobile phone number were written in green swirling text underneath a drawing of a tree and flower. Eden closed in on the website and mobile number, and the shutter snapped.

A woman came into view, herding along three children on scooters. Eden shoved her camera under a newspaper and adjusted the car’s heater until they were out of sight.

‘Come on,’ she muttered. ‘Time for work.’

As if he’d heard her, a man came out of the target house. He was in his early fifties and had a flat bottom and saggy jeans like the back end of an elephant. A Christmas pudding bobble hat was tugged down over thick grey hair. A woman in a quilted dressing gown appeared in the doorway behind him, planted a standard eight-pound pressure kiss on his lips, then waved as he clambered into the van and drove away.

Eden gave him a few seconds’ headstart, then slipped in the clutch and followed.

She almost lost him at the junction. He hurtled out in front of a bus coming from the right, and a BMW from the left. The BMW driver made the international hand signal for ‘wanker’ and flashed his lights. The van tore up the road with a belch of blue smoke from the exhaust.

Eden waited at the junction, tracking the van with her eyes, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. She’d lose him at this rate. If only one of these cars would let her out. She sighed with a pang for the glory days, hurtling round the streets with the lights flashing and the siren blaring, the comforting heft of a gun tucked in her side.

Someone let her out and she hit the accelerator. The van had turned left into a housing estate, a maze of identical houses. Damn! She could waste the morning trawling round trying to hunt him down in there. Her heart sank at the prospect of another morning lurking outside the target’s house; all the windows in the street had Neighbourhood Watch stickers.

Her luck was in. Rounding a corner, she caught sight of the van. Surging ahead, she followed it through the warren until it drew up outside a large detached house. She slowed and drove past, parked up at the end of the street, slung her camera round her neck, and walked back, keeping the target in view.

Christmas pudding man had the back of the van open and was lugging out bags of compost.

‘Bad back, is it, sunshine?’ Eden said to herself. Ducking behind a car, she raised the camera and took thirty shots of him hauling out compost. Inching closer, she scouted round for a good viewpoint, somewhere she wouldn’t be seen. There was a house ahead, curtains and blinds closed, no cars in the driveway. A good bet the owners were out. Perfect. She clipped up the street and ducked behind the gate. From there, she had an excellent view of the van and the target.

She kept the camera trained on him as he heaved ceramic pots and paving slabs from the back of the van, recording every move. He wasn’t the sort of scumbag that used to be her prey – the pimps, drug dealers, gun runners and general forgers of misery – that was over now. Now it was insurance frauds and cheating husbands. Eden sighed. You can’t go back, she reminded herself. Jackie’s dead, remember? But the weight of Jackie’s ghost pressed on her shoulders.

A woman with a toddler turned the corner ahead of her, their voices high on the fresh February air. The little girl had on a red duffel coat and pink shoes, and was clutching her mother’s hand, chattering.

‘That’s right, Molly,’ the woman said.

Molly. Eden’s head snapped round. Molly. Her heart clenched. The girl was too young to be her, and she had blond hair. She’d always imagined Molly with dark hair, but the name snagged her, and familiar grief started to simmer deep in her mind.

She shrank back as the woman and child drew level. Her eyes met the girl’s; she smiled, and Molly smiled back.

It happened in an instant. A cry of ‘pussy cat!’, a flash of a red coat, brakes squealing. ‘Molly!’

Then Eden was across the road, her arms snatching up the girl, and the two of them landed heavily on the pavement.

Eden sat up, wincing. ‘You all right, sweetheart?’

‘I’ve bumped my head!’ Molly cried.

‘Let me see. Oh dear, you have got a bump. I’m sorry, sweetie.’

‘There was a cat,’ Molly said, tears brimming in her eyes. Eden glanced round. An ugly orange cat perched on a wall nearby, licking its tail.

‘Molly! Are you hurt?’ Molly’s mother ran across the road and gathered her into her arms. She stroked the blond locks back from her head, examining the bump. She turned to Eden, ‘Are you OK? How did you … thank God … thank you.’

Eden scrambled to her feet, testing herself for injuries. Luckily the camera was on a neck strap and had been shielded by her body as she landed. She unwound it from her neck and inspected it, relieved to find it wasn’t broken. She couldn’t afford a new camera. The car was due its MOT soon and she was already praying it would pass, knowing in her heart it wouldn’t.