Mark Pearson - Hard Evidence

'Of course, sir.'

'And don't call me sir. If I get back on to the force after this little lot, I'll be lucky to be a uniformed constable.'

'He said that if you got in touch, he wants to see you.' She paused. 'I don't think you should do it. I don't think he can be trusted.'

'Oh, I think he can be trusted all right.' Delaney smiled, but it had all the warmth of a dead man's hand. He took out his phone and hit Bonner's number on speed dial.

Bill Hoskins walked over to the gas ring he kept in his maintenance hut, flicked a match to light the gas and put the kettle on. Some minutes later, he was settled in his armchair with a mug of tea, some Rich Tea biscuits and a book. He was reading The Moonstone by WiIkie Collins. It was a long book, longer than most he read, but he loved a good mystery and he liked to take a page or two on his tea breaks.

A short while later, his tea finished, the book lay flapping open in his lap. In the summer heat he had gently nodded off to sleep. He was awakened by the sound of the door opening.

'Hello?'

He squinted into the bright sunlight spilling into the room and he could tell that it wasn't the attractive young lady who had come to see him earlier in the day, as he'd hoped, but someone entirely different. He sighed, irritated. 'What do you want?'

As the shot rang out, he had his answer. He opened his mouth to protest, but the words died with his breath on his lips. He slumped back in his chair, the book falling to the floor. Bill Hoskins never would get to find out who had stolen the Moonstone. He'd taken his last page.

Kate sat nervously in her car, parked on a double yellow line. She looked at her watch and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Further down the street she could see a traffic officer slowly walking along the line of illegally parked cars. Where was Delaney? And what the hell was she doing anyway? She was a forensic pathologist, for goodness' sake, not Tonto to Jack Delaney's Lone Ranger. What was she doing running around London trying to find a murderer?

The traffic officer looked across pointedly at Kate and she swore under her breath and turned the engine over, pulling back into the traffic just as Delaney came out of the church carrying a small overnight bag. She stopped, ignoring the angry honks from behind, and leaned over to open the door for him. The traffic officer watched as Delaney opened the boot of the car and put his bag inside. He closed the boot and walked slowly forward. The officer's gaze was lingering a little too long for Kate's comfort.

'For God's sake get in, Jack. That copper's looking at you.'

Jack got into the car, pulling the door closed behind him. 'He's just Traffic.'

'He might well be, but your face has been all over the place.'

Kate floored the accelerator and headed into Oxford Street. 'Where to?'

'Angel.'

'What's there?'

'Eddie Bonner. I just spoke to him.'

Kate looked across, concerned. 'Do you think that's particularly wise after what I just told you about the caretaker's statement?'

Delaney shrugged. 'I guess we'll find out.'

Head north from King's Cross towards Holloway, up a long, busy hill lined with scruffy warehouses and aluminium-roofed offices, and after about half a mile or so you get to Angel tube station. Turn right and you are in Islington proper, if proper is the word. Delaney could remember when the area was in two halves. On one side of the divide lived the poor and on the other the rich, like a line had been drawn across the road. That had all changed now, since the late eighties and early nineties, from the Angel tube station all the way down the main road past the King's Head and beyond was the world of the chic and the sleek. Designer pubs crammed in with trendy restaurants and bistros. Chain bars that catered to the nouveaux hoorays, like the Slug and Lettuce, All Bar One and the Pitcher and Piano, had replaced the old Islington that Delaney remembered. Not that he didn't still have a drink in the King's Head when he got a chance, where you were as likely to share a pint with an Irish fiddle player as with a long-haired drug dealer with dreams of rock stardom that had long since crashed and burned. There was something about the untouched nature of the place that Delaney took to, and if it was an affectation that they still rang up the sales on an old-fashioned till with the amounts demanded in l.s.d. – the currency, not the drug – then it was a small price to pay for a little defiance amidst the ravages of progress.

Much as he might have wanted to, Delaney didn't tell Kate to turn right as they reached the top of the hill. She turned left past the Angel tube station and then right, off the main thoroughfare into a series of back streets that led to a bleak industrial wasteland in a matter of a few short minutes. They drove in silence until Delaney cursed colourfully as the car bucked and bounced over the uneven and broken road surface. He turned to Kate. 'Sorry.'

'I think we've got more to worry about than a little swearing, don't you?'

Delaney shrugged in rueful agreement and Kate laughed, a nervous laugh, a little too loud, betraying the tension coiled like an ache in her stomach.

Delaney put his hand on her knee. 'It's going to be all right, Kate.'

A twist or two further along the battered road led them to a series of old Victorian warehouses, long abandoned and shambled together in mutual disrepair. Kate drove slowly up to the ramshackle, slope-shouldered building that Delaney had pointed to and stopped the car.

'Be careful, Jack.'

He leaned across and kissed her. 'If I'm not back in ten minutes, call the police.'

'Not funny.'

Delaney opened his car door, and Kate put her hand on his arm. 'Maybe I should come with you.'

'I want you to stay here.'

'It's a set-up. Bonner could have cleared you and he hasn't.'

'You told me. Just keep an eye on the building. Anybody comes in after me, you phone, all right? That's all you have to do.'

Delaney got out of the car and walked around to the boot. He popped the lid open and unzipped his overnight bag, moving some clothing aside to reveal a cloth-wrapped object hidden at the bottom. He picked it up, unwrapped it and hefted it in his hand. An unregistered gun he had had for about four years now. He checked it was loaded, even though he knew full well it was, and laid it across his left thigh as he shut the boot and walked across to the warehouse door. He stopped at the entrance, looked around the corner and then walked in.

It was dark inside and it took a moment or two for his eyes to adjust. As his vision slowly returned, he could see the place was a very old building in complete disrepair. It was partly demolished, and a series of half-destroyed rooms led mazelike to a big open area. Crumbling walls, garishly streaked with different-coloured paint, spread out erratically into the distance. Upper levels visible through collapsed floors. It was like the ruins of a modernist castle. On one wall a futuristic soldier with a bare chest and improbable muscles and armed with a hand-held rocket launcher had been painted above a garish slogan written in large blood-red letters: 'PAINTBALL 3000 – SURVIVAL HURTS'. The different-coloured paints splattered on the walls now made sense to Delaney. The post-apocalyptic effect had clearly been designed with the local yuppie market in mind. War games for young professionals letting off steam by pretending to blow ten degrees of shit out of each other. Delaney smiled at the irony. A few miles down the road, the disaffected, drug-dealing youth were doing it for real.

Delaney made his way slowly through the series of rooms. Placing his feet carefully so as not to dislodge the randomly scattered piles of old brick and masonry. It was clear that there were plenty of places for the paintballers to lay an ambush, and Delaney felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise as he moved from one area to the next.