Now she looked up. "Goodness, Mr Wesley, what happened to you?"
I touched my forehead. "Tripped and fell. b.l.o.o.d.y London pavements."
"Dear me. I think we"ve got some plasters."
"I"ve some in my room, thanks." I paused. "No messages then?"
"Yes, there"s a message, came not ten minutes ago." She handed it to me, and I read it.
"s.h.i.t," I said in exasperation, letting my shoulders slump for the second time that day. "Can you make my bill up, please? Looks like I"ll be checking out."
I couldn"t risk taking a cab straight from the Allington to 27.another hotel - the cabbie would be able to tell police my destination - so I walked about a bit, lugging my suitcase with me. It was lighter than before, about fourteen pounds lighter, and too big for the purpose. Having used nearly all my cash settling my bill, I drew two hundred out of a cash machine. The first two hotels I tried were both full, but the third had a small single room with a shower but no bath.
The hotel sold souvenirs to guests, including a large holdall with the hotel name emblazoned front and back. I bought one and took it upstairs with me. Later that evening, I took my now empty suitcase to King"s Cross. Luggage lockers are hard to find in central London, so I deposited the case in the left luggage room at King"s Cross station. Seeing the size of the case, the man behind the desk braced himself before attempting to lift it, then was caught off-balance by how light it was.
I took another cab back to my hotel and settled down to watch the news. But I couldn"t concentrate. They seemed to think I"d hit the wrong person. They thought I was after the diplomat. Well, that would help muddy the water, I didn"t mind that at all. Then they mentioned that police had taken away a large box from a building across from the hotel.
They showed the alley where my little device had gone off.
The metal bin looked like torn wrapping. n.o.body had been injured, though two kitchen a.s.sistants in a Chinese restaurant had been treated for shock and cuts from flying gla.s.s.
They did not, of course, speculate as to how police had arrived on the scene so quickly. But I was thinking about it.
I was tumbling it in my mind, and not coming up with any clever answers.
Tomorrow, there"d be time for thinking tomorrow. I was exhausted. I didn"t feel like meat and wine any more. I felt like sleep.
28.4.There was little love lost between Freddy Ricks and Geoffrey Johns, despite which, the solicitor was not surprised to receive Freddy"s call.
Freddy was half cut, as per usual, and sounded dazed.
"Have you heard?"
"Yes," Geoffrey Johns said, "I"ve heard." He was seated in his living room, a gla.s.s of Armagnac trembling beside him on the arm of the sofa.
"Jesus Christ," wailed Freddy Ricks, "she"s been sftoti"
"Freddy, I"m ... I"m so sorry." Geoffrey Johns took a sip of burning liquid. "Does Archie know?"
"Archie?" It took Freddy an understandable moment to recognise the name of his son. "I haven"t seen him. I had to go down to the ... they wanted me to identify her. Then they had to ask me some questions."
"Is that why you"re phoning?"
"What? No, no ... well, yes, in a way. I mean, there are things I have to do, and there are about fifty reporters at the garden gate, and ... well, Geoffrey, I know we"ve had our differences, but you are our solicitor."
"I understand, Freddy. I"ll be straight over."
In Vine Street police station, Chief Inspector Bob Broome was deciding what to say to the press. They were clamouring around the entrance to the gloomy station. Even on sunny days, Vine Street, a high narrow conduit between Regent Street and Piccadilly, got little light, though it managed to get all the available traffic fumes and grime.
Broome reckoned the station had affected him. He thought 29.he could remember days when he used to be cheerful. His last smile had been a couple of days ago, his last full- throated laugh several months back. n.o.body bothered trying to tell him jokes any more. The prisoners in the cells were a more obliging target.
"So what"ve we got, Dave?"
Detective Inspector Dave Edmond sat opposite Broome. He had a reputation as a dour b.u.g.g.e.r, too. People seeing them together usually gave the pair a wide berth, like you would a plague ship. While Broome was tall and thin with an undertaker"s pallor, Edmond was round and tanned. He"d just returned from a fortnight in Spain, spent guzzling San Miguel on some beach.
"Well, sir," he said, "we"re still taking statements. The gun"s down at the lab. We"ve got technicians in the office building, but they won"t be able to report before tomorrow."
There was a knock at the door and a WPC came in with a couple of faxes for Broome. He laid them to one side and watched her leave, then turned back to Edmond. His every action was slow and considered, like he was on tranquillisers, but Edmond for one knew the boss was just being careful.
"What about the gun?"
"Sergeant Wills is the pop-pop guru," Edmond said, "so I"ve sent him to take a look at it. He probably knows more than any of the eggheads in the Ballistics section. From the description I gave him, he said it sounds military."
"Let"s not muck about, Dave, it"s the Demolition Man again. You can spot his m.o. a mile away."
Edmond nodded. "Unless it"s a copycat."
"What are the chances?"
Edmond shrugged. "A hundred to one?"
"And the rest. What about the phone call, did we take a recording?"
Edmond shook his head. "The officer who took the call has 30.typed out what he remembers of the conversation." He handed over a single sheet of paper.
The door opened again. It was a DC this time, smiling apologetically as he came in with more sheets of paper for the Chief Inspector. Outside, there were sounds of frenzied activity. When the DC had gone, Broome got up, went to the door, and pulled a chair against it, jamming the back of the chair under the k.n.o.b. Then he walked slowly back to his desk.
"Shame we didn"t get it on tape though," he said, picking up Edmond"s sheet of paper. "Male, English, aged between twenty and seventy-five. Yes, very useful. Call didn"t sound long distance." Broome looked up from the report. "And all he said was that there was going to be a shooting outside the Craigmead Hotel."
"Normally, it would be treated as a crank, but the officer got the impression this one wasn"t playing games. A very educated voice, quite matter-of-fact with just enough emotion.
We couldn"t have got men there any quicker." "We could if we hadn"t armed some of them first."
"The man who called, who do you think it was?"
"I suppose it could have been the Demolition Man himself.
Maybe he"s gone off his trolley, wants us to catch him or play some sort of cat-and-mouse with him. Or it could be someone who spotted him, but then why not warn those people on the steps?" Broome paused. His office wasn"t much bigger than an interview room; in some ways, it was even less inviting. He liked it because it made people who came here feel uncomfortable. But Dave Edmond seemed to like it too ... "The people on the steps, that"s another thing. We"ve got a journalist, a Secretary of State, and some senior bod from an East European emba.s.sy."
"So which one was the target?" Edmond asked.
"Exactly. I mean, did he get who he was going after? If not, the other two better be careful. Remember, he"s shot the wrong b.l.o.o.d.y person before."
3i Edmond nodded. "It"ll be out of our hands soon anyway."
This was true: Scotland Yard and the Anti-Terrorist unit would pick over the bones. But this was Bob Broome"s manor, and he wasn"t about to just hand the case over and catch a good night"s sleep.
"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," he said. "What about this other phone call, the one to the Craigmead?"
"We"re talking to the receptionist again. All she knows is that a man called wanting to speak to Eleanor Ricks. Ricks was paged, but she ignored it."
"She hadn"t left?"
"No, the receptionist says she walked past the desk while her name was being put out over the loudspeakers."
"Was the Secretary of State with her?"
"Yes. But she says she didn"t hear anything."
"So maybe Eleanor Ricks didn"t hear anything either?"
"Maybe."
"But if she"d taken the call ..."
"Molly Prendergast would have walked out of the hotel alone."
"And we"d have a clearer idea who the intended target was." Broome sighed.
"So what"s our next step. Bob?"
Broome checked his watch. "For one thing, I"ve a transatlantic call to make. For another, there"s the media to deal with. Then I"ll want to see those b.u.g.g.e.rs at the hospital."
"They"re being brought in."
"Good. Nice of them to help him escape, wasn"t it?"
"Think he might"ve had an accomplice?"
"I think," said Bob Broome, getting to his feet, "he might"ve just lost one of his nine lives."
"That phone call, sir."
"Oh, right." Broome sat down again. Someone was trying the door, but the chair was holding. He picked up the phone.
He knew one man who"d want to know the Demolition Man 32.was back in London. "I want to place a call to the United States," he said into the receiver.
33.5.Hoffer hated flying, especially these days when business cla.s.s was out of the question. He hated being cooped up like a factory chicken. He was strictly a free-range c.o.c.kerel. The crew didn"t like it if you strayed too far for too long. They were always getting in the way, squeezing these d.a.m.ned tin trolleys down aisles just wide enough for them. Those aisles, they weren"t even wide enough for him. You were supposed to stay in your seat to make the trolley-pushers" jobs easier.
Screw them, he was the customer.
There were other problems too. His nose got all blocked up on long-haul flights, and his ears bothered him. He"d yawn like a whale on a plankton hunt and swallow like he was choking down a lump of concrete, but his head got more and more like a pressure cooker no matter what he did. He waited till the better-looking stewardess came along and asked her with a pained smile if she had any tips. Maybe there were tablets these days for this sort of thing. But she came back to his seat with two plastic drinks cups and said he should clamp them over his ears.
"What is this, a joke? I"m supposed to wear these things all the way to London?"
He crunched the plastic cups in his beefy fists and got up to use the bathroom. There was a guy four rows back who kept laughing at the in-flight movie, some Steve Martin vehicle which had left the factory without wheels or any gas in its tank. The guy looked like he"d have laughed at Nuremberg.
The bathroom: now there was another problem. A j.a.panese coffin would have been roomier. It took him a 34.while to get everything set out: mirror, penknife, stash.
They"d been sticky about the knife at airport security, until he explained that he was a New York private detective, not a Palestinian terrorist, and that the knife was a present for his cousin in London.
"Since when," he"d argued finally, "did you get fat. terrorists? Come to that, when did you last see a pocketknife terrorist? I"d be better armed with the in-flight knife and fork."
So they"d let him through.
He took a wrinkled dollar bill from his pocket and rolled it up. Well, it was either that or a straw from the in-flight drinks, and those straws were so narrow you could hardly suck anything up. He"d read somewhere that eighty percent of all the twenty-dollar bills in circulation bore traces of cocaine. Yeah, but he was a dollar sort of guy. Even rolled up, however, the dollar was crumpled. He considered doing a two-and-two, placing the powder on his pinky and snorting it, but you wasted a lot that way. Besides, he was shaking so much, he doubted he"d get any of the c.o.ke near his nose.
He"d laid out a couple of lines. It wasn"t great c.o.ke, but it was good enough. He remembered the days of great c.o.ke, stuff that would burn to white ash on the end of a cigarette.
These days, the stuff was reconst.i.tuted Colombia-Miami s.h.i.t, not the beautiful Peruvian blow of yore. If you tried testing it on a cigarette tip, it turned black and smelt like a Jamaican party. He knew this stuff was going to burn his nose. He saw his face in the mirror above the sink. He saw the lines around his mouth and under his eyes, c.o.ke lines. Then he turned back to the business at hand and took a good hit.
He wiped what was left off the mirror with his thumb and rubbed it over his gums. It was sour for a second before the freeze arrived. Okay, so he"d powdered his nose. He doubted it would put wheels on the movie, but maybe he"d find something else to laugh at. You never could tell.
35.Hoffer ran his own detective agency these days, though he managed to employ just two other tecs and a secretary. He"d started in a sleazy rental above a peep show off Times Square, reckoning that was how private eyes operated in the movies. But he soon saw that clients were put off by the location, so he took over a cleaner set of offices in Soho.
The only problem was, they were up three flights of stairs, and there was no elevator. So Hoffer tended to work from home, using his phone and fax. He had one tec working for him; he"d only met the guy twice, both times in a McDonald"s. But the clients were happier now that Hoffer Private Investigations was above a chi-chi splatter gallery selling canvases that looked like someone had been hacked to death on them and then the post mortem carried out. The cheapest painting in the shop covered half a wall and would set the buyer back $12,000. Hoffer knew the gallery would last about another six months. He saw them carry paintings in, but he never saw one leave. Still, at least Hoffer had clients. There"d been a while when he"d been able to trade on his name alone, back when the media exposure had been good. But stories died quickly, and for a while the name Hoffer wasn"t enough.
$12,000 would buy about eight weeks of Hoffer agency time, not including expenses. Robert Walkins had promised to deposit exactly that sum in the agency"s bank account when Hoffer had spoken to him by phone. It was funny, speaking to the man again. After all, Walkins had been Hoffer"s first client. In some ways, he was Hoffer"s only client, the only one that mattered.
The Demolition Man was in action again, and Hoffer badly wanted to be part of the action. He didn"t just want it, he needed it. He had salaries and taxes to pay, the rent on his apartment, overheads, and money for his favourite drugs.
He needed the Demolition Man. More crucially, he needed the publicity. When he"d started out for himself, he"d hired a publicity consultant before he"d hired an accountant. When 36.he"d learned enough from the publicist, he"d kicked her out.
She had a great body, but for what she was costing him he could buy a great body, and it wouldn"t just talk or cross its legs either.
When he"d got the call from London, he"d been able to pack his bags in about thirty minutes. But first he"d called to get a ticket on the first available flight, and then he"d called Robert Walkins.
"Mr Walkins? This is Leo Hoffer." On the force, they"d all called him Lenny, but since he"d left the force and recreated himself, he"d decided on Leo. The Lion. So what if he was actually Capricorn?
"Mr Hoffer, I take it there"s news?" Walkins always sounded like he"d just found you taking a leak on his carpet.
"He"s in London." Hoffer paused. "London, England."
"I didn"t think you meant London, Alabama."
"Well, he"s there."
"And you"re going to follow him?"
"Unless you don"t want me to?"
"You know our agreement, Mr Hoffer. Of course I want you to follow him. I want him caught."
"Yes, sir."
"I"ll transfer some funds. How much will you need?"
"Say, twelve thou?" Hoffer held his breath. Walkins hadn"t been tight with money, not so far, though he"d nixed Hoffer travelling club cla.s.s.