Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

But there was nobody here to smooth her hair down now. Her father was dead, killed by a landmine in Angola when he was out there tending to sick children. Her mother couldn’t look after herself, let alone Suze.

Another noise. ‘It’s just the old house creaking,’ she whispered to herself.

The front door was locked. The windows too.

So why didn’t she feel safe?

It crossed her mind that she could go downstairs. Sometimes she picked up groceries for Vern and Dorothy, the sweet old couple who lived underneath her. She’d become friends with them. They were always on her case, telling her she should be settling down with a nice young man. A week ago they’d gone off on a cruise of the Norwegian fjords, and had left their key with Suze, just in case. But something prevented her even from moving, let alone venturing down the staircase in the middle of the night.

I should get out of here, she thought. Go somewhere else for a few days. Get my head straight.

That’s what she’d do. First thing in the morning. Pack a bag. Get out of London.

But morning seemed a long way off. She glanced over her shoulder at the front door. She had locked it, hadn’t she?

Another chill ran through her. She felt too scared to get up and check.

03.26 hrs.

Chet awoke suddenly.

It took him a few seconds to remember why he was sitting behind the wheel of his car in this dark side street, and he cursed himself for having dropped off. He was frozen. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a police siren. But this street was quiet.

Almost.

He squinted in the gloom. Through the windscreen he could see a figure up ahead. Twenty metres away, max, and walking towards him.

Instinctively, Chet felt his fingers creeping towards the ignition key. The figure was moving quickly. At fifteen metres, he could make out that it was a woman. Slim. He couldn’t see her face, not in the darkness.

The angry features of the intruder in his flat flashed through his mind.

Ten metres. Chet started the engine and put the lights on full beam. The figure stopped, throwing her hands up to her face, alarmed by the sudden glare. When her hands moved away, Chet saw that her skin was elderly and wrinkled, her hair grey and her clothes old. She cast a fearful look in Chet’s direction, then turned heel and hurried off.

Just an old woman wandering the streets at night. Chet turned off the engine and the lights, aware of a damp patch of sweat against his back despite the coldness of the air. He cursed his paranoia. Of course nobody knew where he was.

He checked his watch. 03.28. Three hours till he RV’d with Doug. It couldn’t come soon enough.

06.23 hrs.

Early, but the main roads of London were already crammed with traffic. The bus drivers were beeping their horns in frustration at each other as their headlamps glowed in the semi-darkness.

Commuters were already hurrying into Clapham Junction in their suits and overcoats, beating the crowds as they gripped their briefcases and free sheets and paper cups from Starbucks with plastic lids. Their breath steamed in the cold morning air, and nobody seemed in any way interested in anyone else around them.

Certainly nobody gave Chet a second glance as he queued up to buy a ticket from the machine. He decided to use cash rather than his card — too easy to trace.

Ticket in hand, he walked along the covered walkway from which a number of flights of wide stairs led down to the platforms. The sound of trains arriving and departing was everywhere. Station announcements echoed over the Tannoy. Chet checked his watch. 06.29. Platform 15 was at the other end of the walkway. He limped towards it as commuters hurried past.

He was at the top of the steps leading down to Platform 15 when he heard the sound of a train coming into the station, its wheels making the familiar, rhythmic sound over the tracks, blotting out the sound of a station announcement; and he was just hauling himself down the steps when he heard a man scream.

Chet stopped. He could hear the train braking quickly, then there was shouting. He limped quickly to the top of the stairs, where he saw an already crowded platform. There was a commotion at the end of the platform from which the train had arrived and it sent a sick feeling through Chet’s body. ‘Get out of my way,’ he roared as he barged past a couple of commuters. ‘Move!’

The train had stopped now. Chet turned left, towards the front end. The other travellers were giving each other anxious looks, as if they didn’t know quite what to do; a few made angry remarks as Chet stormed through them.

He was alongside the front carriage when he heard a second scream. A woman. Hysterical. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! ’

Chet continued to push his way through.

‘Someone help him,’ the woman sobbed.

He reached the edge of the platform and pulled the sobbing woman out of the way. There was a streak of blood on the front of the train, and through the windscreen glass he could see the driver with a horrified look on his face.

Chet stared down at the track. It was impossible to make out the features on the mangled body that lay there. The side of the face that was visible was just an oozing welt of gore. One arm was pinned behind the figure’s back in a gruesomely unnatural position, the shoulder joint and the elbow obviously snapped and splintered; the other arm was simply crushed.

But Chet didn’t need to see the face. All he needed to see was the prosthetic leg, almost identical to his own. It was still vaguely attached to Doug’s knee, but pointing out at a ninety-degree angle, and split about halfway down.

Dread and anger seeped through Chet’s bones in equal measure. He staggered back from the edge of the platform to allow two Transport Police officers to take his place. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please step back from the platform,’ one said loudly. ‘Please step back — the emergency services need to come through.’

Chet hardly heard them. He pressed his back against a rail map on the platform wall as the chaos unfolded, trying to suppress the sickness, trying to think clearly.

Was his friend dead by coincidence? Like hell he was.

But with the possible exception of Doug’s girlfriend, nobody knew they were meeting. Nobody knew they were there.

Suddenly Chet felt his blood turn cold. He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and stared at it.

Somebody must have been listening in to their conversation.

He cursed himself for being so stupid, then quickly fumbled with the handset’s rear panel and removed the battery and SIM card so that the phone couldn’t be tracked. He stuffed the SIM card into his wallet; the phone he could dump when he found a bin.

Quickly he replayed in his head what he and his friend had said on the phone. Would any eavesdropper have known that Doug was an amputee too? Chet didn’t think so. And there was only one conclusion to draw from that…

‘ Jesus, mate, ’ he whispered to himself. ‘ They were after me, not you. I’m so fucking sorry. ’

Then his skin prickled as another realisation hit him.

He’d made more than one call using this phone the night before.

A face rose in his mind. Red hair. A small silver stud in her pretty, turned-up nose.

Suze McArthur.

Chet stuffed the dismembered phone in his pocket and started to push his way hurriedly back along the platform. He had no idea where the young woman lived. He had no idea what she knew. But he had to get to her now. And fast.

Before someone else did.

Chet had a name. He had a phone number. Ten minutes later, after a call from a public phone box to an old army mate of his who had access to the Police National Computer, he had an address committed to memory.