Severed (34 page)

When I open them again, Leah is bent down beside the major. 'It's OK,' I hear her whisper, her voice suddenly full of emotion, reminding me of how she used to talk to me. 'We'll get you help.'

Then she stands above me, the silencer pointing down towards my face. The end of it is barely three feet away.

My mouth goes dry. The pain is roaring through me in waves. After everything I've been through, I have no energy left to fear my fate. When she pulls the trigger again, it'll all be over. I'll be joining Lucas, Ferrie, Snowy and so many other comrades from down the years.

'My father always said you were a good soldier, Tyler, which is why you'll die quickly.'

'Why?' I whisper, and I'm not asking the reason she's going to kill me. That part feels strangely irrelevant. What I want to know is why did she pretend to share so much with me? Why did she let me make love to her? Why did she tear me apart when I'd never done a thing to deserve it? But she doesn't answer, maybe because she can't, and I know it's the end.

I clench my teeth and tense, waiting for the inevitable impact, determined not to close my eyes. Making her watch me in these last seconds, and hunting desperately for any tiny chink of emotion in her eyes to show that somewhere deep down she feels a twinge of regret about what she has to do . . . but there's nothing.

Nothing at all.

The front door flies off its hinges and lands with a crash on the carpet, and a blinding white light like a lightning strike fills the room. Leah's eyes widen and she stumbles, dazed by the flash grenade, before regaining her footing and staring at the door.

There follows a shout that for the first time actually fills me with relief. 'Armed police! Drop your weapon!'

'Drop your weapon! Drop it now!'

The silencer's still pointed at my face. Is she going to pull the trigger? One last, murderous act of defiance?

But no. In one movement, she swings the gun away from me towards the door, the idea of surrender as alien to her as it was to her father.

This time, however, her luck finally runs out. Two angry bursts of automatic weapon fire
shatter the silence, and Leah disappears from view. Just like that. Gone in an instant.

Again, there's that long second of silence when everyone stops to draw breath, and then the shouting and activity start as people pour into the hallway.

Someone leans over me, his face close. 'You're going to be all right, mate,' he says, but the pain is so intense I'm not sure I believe him. He moves aside and calls for medical help. 'This one's been shot as well,' I hear him shout. 'Shoulder wound.'

I no longer care. I'm beginning to black out now, and I'd welcome unconsciousness with open arms if only I could lift them. But my whole body feels like lead. People move across my vision, but they seem to blur into one another like watercolours in the rain. Only one stands out. She has long blonde hair. I squint, try to concentrate my gaze, anxious to see if it's her or not. It's difficult to tell. She has her back to me. And it's too late. I'm going. Going . . .

Gone.

DI Mike Bolt comes to see me again. I wouldn't say we'd become friends, but it's his third visit and I'm getting quite used to his company. The first time he came with his colleague, DS Mo Khan, and they questioned me under caution, the doctors apparently having said I was fit enough to be interviewed. That was four days ago. Bolt asked me if I wanted the services of a lawyer, and I knew that Adine would kill me if I didn't call her, but for some reason I honestly didn't feel I needed one. You see, I'd got to this position where I knew there was no point not telling the truth. All the lies I'd used to save myself had just made matters worse, and in the end I simply didn't have the energy to keep up
the charade. It was time to lay everything on the line and throw myself at the mercy of the forces of law and order, and that's what I did. I told them the whole story as I knew it from beginning to end, adding, for what it was worth, that I was sorry I'd bullshitted them in the first place. I had to be a bit economical with the truth when it came to the fact that I'd killed four people, of course, since, self-defence or not, admitting something like that would have spelled the end for me.

Bolt said that he was pleased I'd seen sense, and he seemed it as well, but he also told me that I was under arrest on suspicion of murder, and that I couldn't leave the hospital.

This wasn't exactly news. For the whole time since I'd come out of the operating theatre, I'd been in a room on my own, well away from any of the hospital's other patients, with a police guard outside the door. Even if I'd wanted to escape, I couldn't have got very far, considering the number of tubes and wires I was hooked up to. To be honest, at no point did the thought cross my mind. I'd had enough activity and excitement to last a lifetime.

The second time, Bolt came on his own. He
even brought me a box of wine gums and some grapes, which I thought was a nice gesture. He had a few points that he wanted clarifying. I gave him the information he needed, then asked him some questions of my own. I wanted to know what had happened to Leah, or Alice as her name turned out to be, and he told me that she'd died from gunshot wounds at her father's house, having never regained consciousness. The news still saddened me, but it was also as if a strange, dark chapter in my life had ended, and could now at last be put behind me.

I asked about the major as well, and Bolt answered that, like me, he was still in hospital with gunshot wounds but was going to make a full recovery. He wouldn't give me any further information, citing the fact that investigations were still ongoing, so I let it go at that. Instead we shot the breeze for a little while - about football, of all things. I was sure he was only talking to me to create some sort of camaraderie, but to be honest, I appreciated the company. Because of my situation, the number of visits I get are fairly limited, and people aren't exactly queuing up to see how I'm getting on. My brother's come once, as has my mother, and, to be fair,
Adine, but that's pretty much it, and I can't help but brood over the fact that had Lucas still been alive, he would have been here for at least an hour every day, livening the place up, because he was that sort of guy. I never saw that much of him in the last couple of years of his life, maybe once every three months or so for a bite to eat and a few drinks, and I will always regret that I didn't spend more time with him towards the end.

It's a sad but undeniable fact of a soldier's life that comrades die. You're taught to grieve and then to move on. Yet I find it difficult to comprehend that last Friday morning there was a thriving private eye business in Whitechapel staffed by two good friends of mine. Then I paid them a visit, and now that business and those men are no more. It's a bitter cross to have to bear.

Maybe, just maybe, if I'd had more time for the men who'd been flung out of the army for avenging what had happened to me and the others that day in South Armagh, none of this would ever have happened. But as Bolt pointed out on his last visit two days ago, if they hadn't tried to take the law into their own hands by
avenging it, none of it would have happened either. I suppose you can keep going back, can't you? If the IRA hadn't planted that bomb; if the British hadn't intervened in 1969; if Oliver Cromwell had been a nice guy . . . The point is, what's done is done, and that's the end of it.

Anyway, Bolt's here now. He hasn't brought wine gums or grapes this time, but he's looking pretty happy, which I'm thinking is probably a good sign and, as he sits in the chair next to the bed, I quickly get confirmation that it is.

'We're going to be taking the police guard away from your room,' he tells me, 'so, officially, you're no longer going to be in our custody.'

I ask him if that means I can go. 'Technically, you're still under suspicion of murder, so you're going to remain on conditional bail for now, and we're keeping your passport until the situation changes. But, yes, as far as I'm concerned, you can go.'

'Thank God for that. I was never any good in hospitals.'

Bolt smiles. It's a look that suits him, even though it accentuates his scars. 'Me neither. I was in one for six weeks once.'

'Really? What happened?'

'Car accident.'

'Is that how you got the . . .?' I tap my face.

He nods.

'It must have been a bad one.'

'It was.' He clears his throat. 'I can also let you know that we've made some arrests in connection with the rape and murder of three Eastern European prostitutes. The arrested men include a government MP and a prison governor.'

'Jesus.' I shake my head. 'I thought I'd met some of the worst this world has to offer. It seems I didn't even know the half of it.'

'There are a lot of bad people out there,' he admits, 'some of them in high places. But we always get them in the end.'

I think back to the packages of decaying human flesh, and the photograph Alannah had shown me. 'And it was Ferrie's evidence, the contents of the briefcase, that led to them being arrested?'

He nods.

'How the hell did Ferrie get hold of all this stuff?'

'We believe he was already blackmailing a
prominent businessman in an earlier sex abuse scandal, and that this man was also involved in the case we're investigating now. It's conjecture, but we think Ferrie was watching the guy, and that's how he found out about it. He compiled quite a dossier, which included details of burial sites, so it wouldn't have been that difficult to have recovered the body parts.'

'What good are the body parts?' I ask. 'From a blackmailer's point of view?'

'Well,' he says with a sigh, 'most importantly, they contain DNA traces and other physical evidence connecting them to the person or persons who killed them. But they can also be used to identify the victims, which is useful in building up a picture of how the whole operation worked, and who was involved in it.'

I try to make myself comfortable in the bed. My shoulder still aches intensely.

'What happens now?' I ask him.

'The arrested men are being questioned. So far, no charges have been brought, but if they are involved and we have the evidence we think can convict them, they'll be charged with murder.'

'You mean, it's not cut and dried?'

He leans forward in his seat, and speaks quietly. 'Off the record, the evidence against them is strong. That's as much as I can say.'

'And what about the major? Can you tell me what's happening with him now?'

He sits back. 'He's still in custody in hospital, and since his arrest he's refused to say a word to any of us, but his silence hasn't helped him. He's now been charged with a number of offences, including murder, so he's not going anywhere fast.'

I wonder where they've got the evidence from for charges. As far as I know, nothing implicated the major at any of the murder scenes. And with his business partner dead, there is no-one else, bar me, who can point the finger at him. And all it is is my word against his. I think again of Alannah's part in all this, but when I ask about her, I draw a blank. Bolt doesn't seem to know about her - or, more likely, he's not saying anything. So she remains, as ever, a mystery.

There's another mystery, too. 'Was Ryan really using his own daughter as a contract killer? Ferrie said she was nicknamed the Vampire.'

'I don't think we'll ever know the full story
there,' he tells me. 'The thing is, you often get unsolved murders attributed to mysterious contract killers, and there's been talk in police circles in Europe of a killer known as the Vampire, but most of it stems from the triple murder in Paris, the one where your former colleagues Maxwell and Spann were murdered. Because of the way the killer got in and out so efficiently without anyone seeing him, he's now being conveniently blamed for killings all over the place, which is probably more to do with lazy police work than anything else. It's certainly possible that Alice Ryan committed the Paris killings, but there's no hard evidence to prove it. What we do know is that at the time of the Paris murders, Maxwell and Spann were under investigation by Interpol on suspicion of drug and gun smuggling, and from what we've been able to piece together, both men had ended their business relationship acrimoniously with Major Ryan and gone into partnership with the man they died alongside, so the major may have a motive for having them killed.'

I lie back in the bed and shake my head. You go through life thinking you know so much, but in fact you know nothing at all. These last few
weeks have been a revelation to me, and mainly for the wrong reasons.

Bolt gets to his feet. 'You're a very lucky man, Tyler. You've come up against some very dangerous people and you're still alive.'

I don't feel very lucky, but then again, I am still here. With another couple of scars to add to my total, granted, but still here nonetheless, and largely intact. Maybe I should be thankful.

'You're still going to need to report in to us regularly, and we're going to want to speak to you again at some point, so don't go off on any long trips round the country, OK?'

'What about short ones?'

Bolt pulls a business card from his pocket and hands it to me. 'Call me if you leave town.'

'Sure.'

We say our goodbyes, and he tells me to stay out of trouble.