Nobody Walks (24 page)

He ended the call and threw the phone at its owner. “Go fetch Oskar,” he told him. “Bring him back here. You too.”

“Boss.”

The nominated pair left, and Marten kicked Lepik in the head again. Then he swore loudly in several languages and kicked Lepik again, then again, and kept kicking him until the sweat soaked through to his jacket. Only then did he stop.

He was damp and panting.

His shoes were a mess.

The rest of his crew were studiedly not watching, their gazes fixed anywhere but on their boss, and what used to be their colleague.

Marten jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Get rid of that,” he said.

He went to get changed.

Behind him his men began prising up a section of carpet, folding it carefully so its contents didn’t spill.

Bettany had gone to
earth, avoiding the obvious places—transport hubs and cheap flophouses. Instead he’d taken the Metropolitan line to the suburbs and found a Travelodge. Back in the city, the Brothers McGarry’s crew would be flexing its fingers by now, poking them into all the local holes. The brothers themselves wouldn’t be seeing unwalled daylight for years, but their business would be trundling on, their old gangboss, Bishop, calling the shots. He’d be keen on meeting Martin Boyd again too. Boyd had robbed him of years of his life.

All that time in the shadows, hiding from himself as much as from anyone else, and here he was back again, stirring up old enemies and making new ones too. Nobody walks away, though. Everyone comes home in the end, one way or another.

He’d bought a takeaway which he ate sitting on the bed, watching the news. A minor story, relegated to local events, was a police action in N1 after a witness claimed to have seen an armed man. A Met spokesman explained that all such reports were treated with the utmost seriousness. If anyone saw a man with a gun, they should call the police immediately.

Bettany turned it off.

Oskar Kask had got away, but wouldn’t be on the loose long. He too would have to go home sometime, and Bettany had poisoned the well for him there. If his undercover years had taught him anything, it was that everyone expects to be betrayed. Marten Saar had bought his story as if he’d long since paid the deposit. Kask could look over his shoulder all he wanted, but Bettany had arranged for him to be flattened from the front.

He disposed of the food cartons, rinsed his mouth, undressed and got under the covers. But lying in the dark, the nearby traffic strangely comforting, Bettany found himself thinking about Martin Boyd again, the man he’d been for almost a decade. It was a strange trick, being someone else. Undercover was only half about remembering who you were supposed to be, it was mostly about forgetting who you were. Boyd came back to him in dreams even now, dreams freighted with memories of betrayal and grief, and when he woke he was never sure who these emotions were for, those into whose friendship Boyd had crept like a lizard, and who doubtless still cursed him from their cells, or for Hannah, for Liam, the loved ones from the life he lived when he was pretending to be Thomas Bettany. It was too late to know the difference any more, and neither Hannah nor Liam were there to tell him …

A jolt pulled him back from sleep, like a misstep from a pavement. Liam’s ashes. For a whole night Bettany had carried them round Hoxton, and their absence caused him to stumble now. They were back in the flat. Even as he had the thought, the disjunction struck him, that the ashes were
they
rather than
he.
They, Liam, were back in the flat.

So he would fetch them and scatter them on the river. That was his last conscious thought before sleep, that he would scatter
his son’s ashes on the Thames, but when he woke in the night it wasn’t from a dream of Liam but of Majeed, with whom he’d worked in Marseilles, and with whom he’d found a peculiar kind of friendship. Peculiar because Bettany had neither sought nor welcomed friendship these past few years. Survival had seemed enough to be getting on with. The dream had concerned betrayal, but the details slipped from meaning even before he opened his eyes.

He closed them again, but there was no more sleep that night.

Oskar finished
his beer and slipped out for a smoke. When he returned the bottle had been replaced by a fresh one and the girl responsible, he thought her name was Anita, winked to make sure he knew who to tip.

Anita. Maybe Annette. Something like that.

Still no Marten.

He sat with hands flat, fingers spread wide. Even when he raised them they stayed steady. It had been a close-run thing, but history didn’t read match reports, it just gave the result. Oskar had dealt with many problems but this was the first time he’d gone up against a professional—Bettany had been a spy, and spies receive training dope peddlers don’t get. So Oskar could clap himself on the back for being here at the club, a beer in front of him, and not dead on a towpath.

Halfway through these thoughts two men approached.

Zac and Karu.

No Marten.

Oskar leaned back.

“You took your time.”

“There’s been a change of plan,” Zac said.

“What change?”

“We’re meeting back at the flat.”

“Why?”

Karu said, “Because Marten said so.”

“Okay, sure,” Oskar said. “Let me just finish my beer.”

He smiled lazily, reached for the bottle, and broke it on Karu’s forehead, then wiped the remnant across Zac’s face. While Zac wept blood, Oskar walked calmly to the exit. As he stepped outside, the noise behind him was swelling to a roar.

“What’s happening?” the nearest smoker asked.

Oskar turned the collar of his jacket up against the cold. “Didn’t see.”

At the corner he hailed a cab.

“Where to?”

“Farringdon Road.”

Settling back, he wondered how Marten had found out, then dismissed the question as irrelevant. All that mattered was what happened next. And while Marten was supposedly the brains, it didn’t take Oskar more than half a minute to collate a few bullet points.

Back to the bolt-hole.

Collect spare gun.

Find Marten.

Shoot him.

After that, everything was back on track.

The crew wouldn’t be a problem, having worked with Oskar as long as they had with Marten. They wouldn’t be swearing blood oaths, they’d be shrugging shoulders, and by morning they’d have fallen in line.

Well, maybe not Zac and Karu.

As for the Driscoll business, Dame Spook would have to find some other way of sealing that deal. Oskar would concentrate on
locking down the business with the Cousins’ Circle, enough to keep her happy.

The taxi pulled over to give a whooping police car, its busy blue light bouncing off nearby windows, room to scrape past.

Oskar checked his pockets for his wallet, hoping he hadn’t left it behind in his hurry. It was there, though a second check of the same pockets revealed that the blue plastic lighter wasn’t. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t be used to identify him. It wasn’t even his.

“Here’s fine,” he said, when Farringdon station’s new facade came into view. He paid the driver, and stepped out into damp night air.

When Flea opened her
eyes she was assailed by unfamiliar shapes. No—she was assailed by familiar shapes in unfamiliar configurations. There was a wardrobe and a curtained window. There was a door. There was the foot of the bed she was lying on. Nothing unusual, but not her own bedroom.

Waking in a strange bed wasn’t an entirely new experience, but she didn’t make a habit of it. On this occasion, anyway, she was alone.

No light penetrated the curtains. It could have been ten at night or two in the morning.

And then the day’s details returned to her in one big information dump, and she groaned softly. On her breath she could taste the brandy she’d been given “for the shock” when they’d arrived at Vincent’s, and the second she’d drunk largely for the taste, and the third because … well, because. She recalled her knees giving way, as the morning’s tension resolved itself in a moment of utter liquidity. The arm wrapped round her throat was there again, and people were pointing guns at her. She remembered being carried somewhere, presumably to this very bed, but could not remember
who by. She pondered that for a moment or two, then groaned again, and pulled herself upright.

She was fully clothed, thank God, but could not find her shoes. Her bag, too, was presumably downstairs. And it occurred to her that having a violent stranger seize her was perhaps not the most dangerous thing to happen to her today, because here she was after dark, in Vincent’s spare bedroom, and how well did she know him? Boo Berryman too, come to that? Wasn’t there something odd about the pair of them, living together in this half-hidden house? And why hadn’t either of them thought to leave a glass of water on the bedside table?

Driven by thirst, she padded out of the room as quietly as she could, onto a dark landing. There was a vague illumination from downstairs, a flickering light laid on by the special effects department of whatever spooky film this was. Anyone could be lurking down there. This morning, when Tom Bettany had chased the gunman out onto the towpath—at that moment it had seemed like it was all over, the mad plot she’d fallen into after Liam had died. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

The stair creaked, and the noise echoed downstairs, as if someone had shifted on hearing her approach.

Flea froze.

The sound was not repeated.

How had she ended up here, anyway? It seemed as good a time as any to ask that question.

Because of Liam, she decided. It was because she had been friends with Liam Bettany, who, for a while—if she were honest with herself—she had thought might be a prospective partner, but who had proved too unfocused, too unsuccessful, too broke. And so she had turned her attention to her boss, Vincent Driscoll. For a while now, she had entertained a fantasy of
drawing Vincent out of his shell, dragging him from the hideaway he’d constructed for himself. This would be a challenge. The fact that he was rich didn’t hurt. But right this minute, what she was mostly remembering was how, when Tom Bettany had aimed the gun at him, Vincent had seemed preternaturally calm. Even for a man set at an angle to everyday emotions, wasn’t that a little scary?

The flickering light, she realised, came from a fire.

There were only two ways to go, up and down. So she went on down, into the large room that constituted most of the ground floor of Vincent’s bachelor house.

Her eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom now, but even so it took a moment to locate him. He sat on one end of a wide sofa at the far end of the room, and in the firelight looked otherworldly. His skin wasn’t fair so much as faint, as if she might prod right through him, were she so inclined. His body would ripple round her finger like a reflection.

The glass of red wine he held had either been filled very full to start with or he’d made no serious inroads yet.

Her shoes and her bag lay on the floor by an armchair. Next to them, a half-filled brandy glass.

She approached warily, unsure how this was going to develop, and because he didn’t speak, she found she had to.

“You’re still up.”

Mentally, she awarded herself a state-the-bleeding-obvious prize for this.

“I seem to have been in bed,” she went on.

He said, “I know. I carried you there.”

“Oh.” Her mind flapped around for a fuller response, and possibly her mouth did too, but in the end all she could manage was, “So … What are you doing?”

“Just thinking.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt …”

“I’d finished.”

“Oh.”

She didn’t know how to pick up from this. Thinking, to her mind, was something you did more or less continually. Sitting with a glass of wine, staring at a fire, you were almost certainly deep in thought. Even if the thoughts were shapeless and inexact, they remained thoughts—there was nothing else for them to be.

He said, “I had an idea.”

She realised that it wasn’t only the firelight that was making his eyes gleam. The gleaming was coming from within. For the first time she could recall, she was seeing Vincent Driscoll lit by his own being.

Forgetting her need for water, she sank onto the sofa.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

Oskar’s Farringdon
bolt-hole, the one nobody knew about, was up a flight of stairs, through a dirty front door sandwiched between a dry cleaners and an electrical goods shop that had whitewashed its windows the previous week. He headed up in darkness and went straight for the bedroom where he kept his spare gun in a shoebox on top of the wardrobe.

The shoebox was there, but the Glock had gone.

He blinked twice.

The gun remained absent.

Then he closed the box thoughtfully, almost mournfully, knowing the time for panicking was over.

The time for panicking had been back in the club, when Marten was late. Because Marten was never late.

Oskar stepped into the living room, and turned the light on.

Marten sat in the armchair, Oskar’s gun in one hand, and a cigarette in the other that he lit as soon as Oskar appeared.

“That’s better,” he said.

Blue smoke drifted ceilingwards.

He waggled the Glock as if it were his finger.

“Don’t bother getting comfortable. We’re not staying.”

Oskar asked, “How long have you known?”

“About this place? Since five minutes after you picked up the keys. About the rest of it, the alliance we make with the Cousins’ Circle so you can inform on their activities to the British secret service? Not so long.”

“Bettany,” said Oskar.

“He told me his name was Boyd.”

Marten tapped ash onto a carpet frayed colourless.

“And that he was supposed to kill me. And that if he didn’t, you would.”

“You can’t have believed him.”

“Can’t I? Why can’t I do that, Oskar?”

“We’ve been partners forever.”

“Which means neither of us could ever betray the other, is that right? Please—”