Simon Kernick - The Business of Dying

I heard a police car approaching behind me so I darted into another side street and kept running. The car continued on, missing me, and I kept going, trying to put as much distance between myself and the carnage as possible.

But exhaustion was taking hold. I had a stitch in my right side and I was having difficulty breathing. My legs felt as though they were going to go under me at any moment, and the only thing keeping me going was the fear of getting caught.

And the desire for revenge. One way or another the people who were trying to fuck me up and put me out of existence were going to pay for their crimes. I wasn't going to die that fucking easily.

Another hundred yards, another hundred and fifty, and then I could run no more. I half jogged, half staggered into a dingy-looking back alley by the side of a school and found a spot out of sight of the road. I sat down against the wall and panted my breath back to normal – a task that seemed to take for ever. Above my head, the clouds unloaded their rain on the city. Slowly, the sirens faded away.

The desire for revenge. It was the only thing I had left in the world. Part Four

I could have walked away from the whole thing. Gone underground, waited a few months, then left the country. That was basically what I'd intended to do, but, in the end, I felt that I couldn't leave things as they were. Questions needed answering, and scores needed settling. It was as simple as that. Everyone had fucked me up: my bosses at work, Raymond Keen, and now even Carla Graham.

Carla Graham. That she was somehow involved in the murder of Miriam Fox was no longer in doubt. It was almost certainly not her who'd pulled the knife across her throat, not given the size and depth of the wound. But she definitely knew who'd done it. And why. It was her motive for being involved that intrigued me the most because for the life of me I couldn't understand what it could be. She was right about the blackmail plot – it just didn't seem enough to kill someone for. And what about the evidence against Mark Wells? Were he and Carla in it together? It was difficult to conclude otherwise, given the evidence against him, and yet it made no sense. Neither could I understand why he'd gone round to Miriam's flat after the murder and been genuinely shocked to discover police officers there. If he'd been the killer, surely he'd have expected that and avoided the place?

I was still in the dark, and I didn't like it. I should have cut my losses, but I guess I'd simply hit the point where everything had gone so far downhill that I no longer cared what happened, as long as I got the chance to get even with the people who'd been pulling the wool over my eyes through all this.

That night, after getting my breath back and wiping the worst of the blood off my face, I hurried home through the back streets and threw on a single set of new clothes, before hailing a cab on City Road and getting it to take me to Liverpool Street station. From there, I got on the Underground and took the Central Line right back across town to Lancaster Gate, before making my way to Bayswater using a combination of walking and the bus.

It was five to eleven by the time I arrived at the hotel where I kept the safety deposit box. I knew the owner vaguely from my previous visits, and he was at the desk in the cramped foyer when I walked in, smoking a foul-smelling cigarette and watching football on a portable TV. He nodded as I approached, and I told him I wanted a room. Without taking his eyes off the TV he leaned over, removed a key from one of the numbered hooks on the wall behind him, and put it down on the desk.

'Twenty pounds per night,' he said, in a thick foreign accent. 'Plus twenty deposit.'

I told him I wanted to book for three nights and counted out four twenties. He took the money, again without taking his eyes from the TV. 'Up the stairs to the third floor. It's on the right.' One of the teams scored and the commentator shouted excitedly in Arabic or Turkish, or something like that, but the owner didn't bat an eyelid. I assumed he supported the other side.

The room was small and horrifically done out in 1970s-style orange and purple, but it looked clean, and that was good enough for me. It was private, too. I wouldn't draw attention to myself staying here, where the remainder of the occupants were almost certainly going to be newly arrived illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, and where the owner probably wouldn't go voluntarily to the police about anything.

I threw off my clothes and lay down on the bed, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep breath. The chase was on now, but the police were still in a difficult position. They couldn't just print my photo in the next day's papers. It might have been pretty obvious that I had been involved in the Traveller's Rest killings, but they still couldn't be absolutely sure that I didn't have an alibi for the night in question. For all anyone knew, I could have had a mistress up in Clavering I'd been seeing on the sly; I could have been with her on the night in question. And maybe it was simply coincidence that the killer looked so much like me. For the first, and probably the last, time in my life I actually gave thanks to those who had drafted the laws of our great country for making them so obviously in favour of the criminal. They needed hard evidence against me, and maybe at the moment they just didn't have enough. They'd be pulling out all the stops to find me, but they'd still be doing it with one hand tied behind their backs. For that reason, and that reason alone, I still felt there was hope of evading capture.

I finished the cigarette and lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling and wondering where I was going to be in a year's time. Or even a week's. Out in the hallway a door slammed and I heard a lot of shouting in a foreign language. A man and a woman were arguing. It lasted about two minutes, then there was the sound of someone running down the stairs. I picked up the mobile and wondered whether it was worth trying Danny again. I decided against it. Somehow I knew he wouldn't answer.

I sighed. Somewhere out there, Raymond Keen was relaxing, enjoying the fruits of his success. Some time soon he'd find out that the attempt on my life had failed, which was going to be more than a little inconvenient.

And some time soon after that he'd find out that he'd made a big mistake trying to silence me.

I left the hotel at just after eight o'clock the following morning, dressed in the clothes I'd changed into the previous night, and took a walk in the direction of Hyde Park. It was a brisk morning and a watery sun was fighting to push its way through the thin cloud cover. I stopped for breakfast and coffee at a cafe on the Bayswater Road and took the opportunity to take a look at the papers.

The shooting incident at the Gallan was frontpage news, as I'd expected. However, at the time of going to press, details were still fairly limited. They'd named the dead police officer as Detective Constable David Carrick, aged twenty-nine, but the man I'd despatched remained anonymous. I wondered if they'd ever find out who he was. The report confirmed that a third man had suffered gunshot wounds at the scene and was now under police guard in hospital, where his condition was described as serious but not life-threatening. For the most part, the story revolved around the drama of the shoot-out, with the inevitable witness reports, but it was clear its authors didn't have any real idea what it had been all about. There was a quote from one of the Met's assistant chief constables saying that gun crime, though on the rise, was under control in London, although I don't suppose many of the readers believed him. The paper's leader column assumed that drugs had been the motive behind the shooting and claimed that the government was going to have to do something radical to quell demand among the nation's youth. Which was a sensible enough viewpoint, even if it remained to be seen whether drugs had actually been the motive in this case. Whatever Raymond and his associate, Mehmet Illan, were involved in was still a mystery. The only thing you could say for sure was that it was both illegal and highly profitable. Drugs, I suppose, was as good a guess as any.