Die Twice (2 page)

Which was true. I wasn't. But I consider myself to have principles – codes of conduct to which I strictly adhere – and that, I felt, gave me the justification to say my piece.

I was about to tell Danny this when the radio crackled into life.

‘All right, they're here,' hissed the disembodied voice. ‘Black Cherokee, three occupants. It's them.'

Danny started the engine while I slid silently out of the car, flicked the cigarette away, and walked towards the spot where the Cherokee would appear, knowing that this was going to be the one and only chance I was going to get.

There was a clank as it hit the speed ramp, then it came round the side of the main building and drove slowly into the car park, looking for a place to stop. I broke into a jog, waving my hands to get the driver's attention. In my Barbour jacket and shirt and tie, I looked every inch the harassed businessman.

The Cherokee continued moving but came to a halt as I reached the driver's side window and banged on it. ‘Excuse me, excuse me.' My voice was different now. Higher pitched, less confident.

The window came down and a hard-looking sod with a square jaw that looked like it was made of cast iron glared out at me. I put him at about thirty-five. My face dissolved into nerves. Both the driver and his front-seat passenger, a smaller, older guy with Brylcreemed hair and a greasy face, were already relaxing. They saw me as no threat. Just a man who pays his taxes and does what he's told for a living. I heard the one in the back mumble something but I didn't even look at him.

‘What do you want?' demanded the driver impatiently.

‘Er, I was wondering…'

I brought the gun up from my pocket, had this momentary paranoia that I might not have released the safety, and shot him twice in the right eye. He made no sound, simply fell back into his seat, head tilted to one side, and shivered out the final ounces of his life.

The front passenger swore loudly and immediately flung up his arms in a futile effort to protect himself. I leaned down slightly to get a better view of him and pumped out a further two rounds. One hit him in the elbow, the other in the jaw. I heard it crack. He shrieked in pain and then coughed violently as his mouth filled with blood. He tried to retreat in his seat, scrabbling about like a madman, unable to accept the fact that it was all over. I steadied myself and fired again, hitting him square in the forehead. The window behind him bloomed with red and his greasy features immediately relaxed. So far the whole thing had taken about three seconds.

But the one in the back was quick. He was already swinging open the door and coming out with what looked like a gun in his hand. I didn't have time to take a closer look. Instead I retreated three steps and squeezed the trigger as he came into view. I got him somewhere in the upper body but still he kept coming, and fast. I continued firing, holding the gun two-handed, teeth clenched against the noise that was exploding in my ears. The momentum of the bullets forced him backwards, driving him into the door. He did a manic, confused dance to the tune of the gunfire, his arms and legs flailing, and angry red spots appeared like pox on his crisp, white shirt.

And then the magazine was empty and everything stopped as suddenly and dramatically as it had begun.

For a second he remained upright, holding onto the door for support, the energy almost visibly leaking out of him. Then he sort of half fell, half sat down, losing his grip on it in the process. He looked down at the blood on his shirt, and then at me, and I got a good look at his face, which I didn't want at all, because it was young, maybe late twenties, and his expression was all wrong. What I mean is, it wasn't the expression of a sinner. There was no defiance there, no rage. Just shock. Shock that his life was being stolen from him. He looked like a man who didn't think he deserved it, and that was the moment when I should have known I'd made a terrible mistake.

Instead, I turned away from his stare and reloaded. Then I stepped forward and shot him three times in the top of the head. The mobile phone he was carrying clattered noisily to the ground.

I dropped the gun into my jacket pocket and turned towards Danny, who was now bringing the car round.

Which was when I saw her, maybe fifteen yards away, standing in the light of the rear firedoor, a bag of rubbish in each hand. No more than eighteen and looking right at me, still too shocked to realize that what she was witnessing was real. What do you do? A movie pro would have taken her out with a single shot to the head, although there was no guarantee I'd even have hit her from where I was standing. And anyway, I'm not interested in hurting civilians.

Her hand went to her mouth as she saw I'd seen her, and I knew that any moment she was going to let out a scream that would probably wake the dead, which, with the dead only just being dead, I didn't want at all. So I lowered my gaze and hurried round to the passenger door, hoping that the gloom and wet had obscured my features enough to make any description she gave worthless.

I jumped in and kept my head down. Danny didn't say a word. He just hit the pedal and we were out of there.

It was 9.04.

*   *   *

The journey to our first change of transport took exactly four minutes and covered a distance of approximately two and a half miles. We'd parked a Mondeo in a quiet piece of Forestry Commission land earlier that day. Danny now pulled up behind it, cut the engine, and got out. I leaned under the passenger seat and removed a full five-litre can of petrol which I liberally sprinkled over the car's interior. When it was empty, I got out, lit a book of matches, stepped back so I was well out of the way, and flung them in, followed by the murder weapon and the two-way radio I'd been using. There was a satisfying whoosh as the petrol ignited, followed by a wave of heat.

When they came across the mangled wreckage it wouldn't tell them anything. We hadn't left any fingerprints and the car itself would be almost impossible to trace. It had been stolen in Birmingham six months ago, given new plates and a respray, and stored in a lock-up in Cardiff ever since. In this line of business, you can never be too careful. Contrary to popular belief, most detectives couldn't detect a heartbeat on a speed addict, but you never know when you might be up against the next Ellery Queen.

We now followed a pre-arranged route for four miles through a mixture of B and single-track roads and it was 9.16 when we pulled into the car park of Ye Olde Bell, a busy country pub on the edge of an affluent looking commuter village. Danny drove up to the far end and stopped behind a burgundy Rover 600.

This was where we parted.

‘Did that girl get a good look at you?' he asked as I opened the door. They were the first words he'd spoken since the shootings.

‘No, we'll be all right. It was too dark.'

He sighed. ‘I don't like it, you know. Three murders, and now we've got a witness.'

Admittedly it didn't sound too good when he put it like that, but at the time there was no reason to think that we weren't in the clear.

‘Don't worry. We've covered our tracks well enough.'

‘There's going to be a lot of heat over this one, Dennis.'

‘We both knew that when we took the job. As long as we keep calm, and keep our mouths shut, we won't feel any of it.'

I gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder, and told him I'd call him the next day.

The Rover's keys were behind the front driver's side wheel. I got in, started the engine and followed Danny out of the car park. He turned south and I turned north.

And that should have been that, but tonight was not my lucky night. I'd barely gone three miles and was just short of the turning that would take me back to London when I hit an improvised roadblock. There were two Pandas with flashing lights at the side of the road: officers in fluorescent safety jackets were milling about a BMW they'd already stopped. My heart gave an initial jump but I quickly recovered myself. No reason to worry. I was a man on my own, unarmed, driving a car that had never been within five miles of the Traveller's Rest, and they wouldn't even have the vaguest description of me yet. The clock on the dashboard said 9.22.

One of them saw my approach and stepped out into the road, flashing his torch and motioning for me to pull up behind the other car. I did as I was told and wound down the window as he approached the driver's side. He was young, no more than twenty-three, and very fresh-faced. They say you can tell you're getting old when the coppers look young. I could just about have been this kid's dad. He looked really enthusiastic as well. That wouldn't last. A second officer stood a few feet behind him, watching, but the other two were preoccupied with the driver of the other car. None of them appeared to be armed, which I thought was a bit foolish under the circumstances. I could have run this roadblock and they wouldn't have had a chance.

‘Good evening, sir.' He leaned down into the window and gave me and the car a gentle once-over.

It always pays to be polite. ‘Evening, officer. How can I help?'

‘There's been an incident at a hotel called the Traveller's Rest on the A10. About fifteen minutes ago. You haven't come that way, have you?'

‘No, I haven't,' I told him. ‘I've come from Clavering. I'm on my way to London.'

He nodded understandingly, and then looked at me again. You could tell that for some reason he wasn't entirely convinced, although I don't know why. I'm not the type who arouses suspicions. I genuinely look like a nice guy. There shouldn't have been any alarm bells.

But there were. Maybe I'd just met the new Ellery Queen.

‘Have you got any identification, sir? Just for the record.'

I sighed. I didn't want to have to do this because it could well cause me a lot of long-term problems, but I didn't see that I had much choice.

For a split second I baulked.

Then I reached into my pocket and removed the warrant card.

He took it, inspected it carefully, looked back at me, then back at the warrant card, just to double check, probably wondering why his instincts were so wrong. When he looked back again, he had an embarrassed expression on his face.

‘Detective Sergeant Milne. I'm sorry, sir. I didn't realize.'

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Course you didn't. You're just doing your job. But if you don't mind, I'm in a bit of a hurry.'

‘Of course, sir, no problem.' He stepped back from the car. ‘Have a nice evening.'

I said goodnight, and put the car in reverse. Poor sod. I remembered only too well what it was like to be out on nights like these, being paid a pittance to stand around for hours on end with the rain pissing down on your head. Knowing that the people you were meant to be looking for were probably miles away. Oh, the joys of being a uniformed copper.

I waved as I drove past, and he waved back. I wondered how long it would take him to lose the enthusiasm; how long before he, too, realized that by playing by the rules he was just banging his head against a brick wall.

I gave him two years.

2

I used to know a guy called Tom Darke. Tomboy, as he was known, was a buyer and seller of stolen goods. If you'd nicked something – whatever it was – Tomboy would give you a price for it, and you could be sure that somewhere down the line he'd have a customer who'd take it off him. He was also an informant, and a good one too if you measure such things by how many people his information convicted. The secret of his success lay in the fact that he was a likeable character who was good company. He used to say that he listened well rather than listened hard, and he never asked too many questions. Consequently, there wasn't a lot that went on among the North London criminal fraternity that he didn't know about, and such was his affability that even as the local lowlifes were going down like overweight skydivers no-one ever suspected old Tomboy of being involved.

I once asked him why he did it. Why, as the Aussies would say, did he dob in blokes who were meant to be his mates? Because the thing was he didn't really strike me as the grassing sort. He came across as being a decent bloke who was above such petty deceptions. Tomboy had two answers to this question.

The first answer was the obvious one. Money. There were good rewards on offer for information on criminals and Tomboy needed the cash. He wanted to retire from the game with his freedom intact because he believed that with the onset of technology, and its availability to the police for fighting crime, the writing was on the wall for middle-ranking career criminals such as himself. So it was a case of making hay while the sun shone, building up a nice little nest egg (he'd set a target limit of £50,000), and then getting the fuck out.

The second answer was that if he didn't dob them in, someone else would do it anyway. Criminals are usually notorious braggarts. Since they can't tell the whole world what they've done for fear of retribution, they like to boast about their exploits to one another. And since by definition they're a dishonest lot – as Tomboy once said, ‘Whoever heard of such a thing as honour among thieves?' – sooner or later someone's going to inform on them if the money's right. All he did, if you believed his rationale, was get in there first.

So that was Tomboy's philosophy. There's no point in not doing the deed because one way or another it's going to get done, and if you're going to get paid to do it, all the better. I thought about that as I drove home through the rain that night. If I hadn't killed those men, someone else would have shot them. Either way they ended up dead. If you're in the line of business where you make enemies of people who'll pay to have you killed, you've got to be prepared to accept the consequences. That was how I justified it to myself, and that was how Tomboy had always justified it to me, and it had never done him any harm. In fact, it appeared to have done him a lot of good. The last I'd heard he was living out in the Philippines. He'd made his fifty grand, probably a lot more knowing him, and had invested it in a beach bar and guesthouse on one of the more far-flung islands. He'd sent me a postcard from there a couple of years back in which he'd extolled the virtues of the laid-back tropical lifestyle. It had ended with him saying that if ever I fancied a job working at his place, I should let him know.