Simon Kernick - Severed

I turn round, and Lucas nods to let me know that everything's OK. Then I start forward again, the gun raised in front of me.

We slip into a windowless entrance hall with a high vaulted ceiling dominated by a crystal chandelier. The hall is empty and dark. To my left, a wide, richly carpeted staircase with banisters on either side runs up to the next floor. Huey's deep, macho warbling is coming from up there, and it's where the only light in the house is on. Directly ahead of me the front door is closed, as are all the doors off the entrance hall. There is no sound nor sign of activity coming from beyond them.

'Looks like whoever was here might have left in a hurry,' Lucas whispers, his eyes shining like sapphires behind the mask.

'Why would they leave?'

'Shit, Tyler, I don't know.' He hisses these last words, but his voice sounds artificially loud in the stillness of the hallway.

Slowly, I start up the staircase, my legs feeling heavy. The Browning's stretched out in front of me, but if this is a trap and someone appears from nowhere, gun blazing, it's going to be next to useless. Feeling increasingly tense, I glance round at Lucas. He's following three steps behind, but like me, he's looking backwards to check that the ground floor remains clear – acting point, like he used to do in Belfast and Crossmaglen when we were out on patrol.

Above me, a long balcony stretches the length of the floor. There are three doors visible, and unlike the ones downstairs, they are all open. It's from the middle one that the light and music are emanating, the light casting an all too faint glow. My grip on the gun tightens, and I put a little more pressure on the trigger. It's an utterly reflexive move, based on years of experience as a combat soldier. I shift the barrel in a low arc, watching for any movement.

A stair creaks; a long, low whine.

I keep going, my attention drawn to something on the carpet at the top of the staircase, partially obscured by the angle I'm viewing it from.

It's an unfashionable cream-and-tan brogue, the toe end sticking through a gap in the balcony's banister, and it's attached to a leg.

I clench my teeth. There can't be two people known to Eddie Cosick with this kind of bad taste, so it has to be the shoe that nearly kicked my face in earlier this evening, the one that belongs to Marco.

My heart is beating loud in my chest. I remember Sellman and his friends feigning death this morning to catch Ferrie and me off guard.

If this is an ambush, I'm dead. No question.

As the staircase swings round ninety degrees, I see more of Marco, still wearing that same dark suit, sprawled out on the carpet directly in front of me. He's lying on his front, one arm dangling over the top stair, his head and shoulders hidden by the retaining wall at the end of the balcony. Behind me, I hear Lucas curse as he too catches sight of the body.

I reach the final step and stop only inches from Marco. I count to three in my head, listening for a sound that may indicate that someone is just out of sight, waiting to put a bullet in me.

This is the problem with house clearances. There are always so many ambush points.

As I wait, my eyes move in the opposite direction, which is when I catch sight of the guy who was with Marco in the cafe in King's Cross this afternoon – the shifty little bastard with the MAC-10. He's lying on his back, his head and shoulders propped up against the doorframe of one of the unlit rooms. He's got the very same MAC-10 in his left hand now, and he's staring at me.

At least it looks like he's staring; in reality, he isn't actually seeing anything. A deep, curved gash like a grinning mouth crosses his throat from ear to ear, from which a curtain of blood has cascaded down onto his suit, drenching it. There are even flecks on the pale hand that still clutches the weapon he never got a chance to use.

'Heart and Soul' finishes playing on the stereo, and I know I will never be able to listen to that song again because I will always associate it with the ice-cold cloud of fear that's creeping up my spine.

The CD ends, and silence envelops everything.

As I step over Marco's body and his head and shoulders become visible, I see that he also managed to pull his gun and that it lies a few inches clear of one of his outstretched arms. It doesn't take a detective to work out that he died the same way as his friend. Although his face is pushed into the carpet, a large pool of blood has formed round his neck, and I can see each ragged edge of the wound he's suffered.

I swing my gun round, looking up and down the empty hall. I'm reminded again of Ferrie's grim story this morning concerning the deaths of my two former comrades, Maxwell and Spann. Two rigorously trained soldiers who'd been taken out without a chance to fire their weapons, their throats cut, just like this.

'It's the same guy who killed Snowy,' says Lucas, who has now reached the top of the stairs.

He's right. So, the killer Ferrie described as the Vampire isn't dead, after all.

I don't say anything. The room with the light on is beckoning me like a beacon, and I walk towards the half-open door, moving with slow, silent steps.

'Careful, Tyler,' Lucas whispers, and I turn and face him. He hasn't moved, and in his dark clothing and balaclava, he's almost invisible in the gloom. 'These guys haven't been dead long. Someone could still be here.'

It's a fact I'm brutally aware of. I listen for anything out of place before pushing the door fully open with one hand and lifting my unloaded gun with the other.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I look inside.

He's been strapped with masking tape to a chair facing the door, his head slumped forward so that I can't pick out his features. The chair belongs to a dressing table covered in bottles of perfume and other feminine accoutrements, all of which appear to be untouched. There are no signs of a struggle. He's dressed in pale linen trousers and a peach-coloured, short-sleeved shirt that's heavily bloodstained. On his feet are the kind of expensive tasselled loafers so beloved of certain middle-aged men who always seem to wear them without socks, as this man is doing. He has thick-set, hairy arms, a fat belly, and thinning hair. Straight away, I know this is Eddie Cosick. And there is little doubt that he too is dead.

I'm too late again. It seems that wherever I turn, I run into brick walls. Cosick is the end of the trail for me. I have nowhere else to go.

I step inside and see that this is the master bedroom, a huge room done out tastefully in various pastel shades. A pine-coloured stereo unit sitting on top of an antique chest of drawers was the source of Huey Lewis's greatest hits.

I stop in front of the body and lift the head up by the hair. The shock hits me hard. Someone has really gone to town on Eddie Cosick. The top half of his right ear is missing where it's been sliced away – and the hair surrounding it is sticky with congealing blood. But this pales into insignificance when compared to the sight of his right eyeball, still attached to a thick thread of muscle tissue, which hangs down bulbous and glassy over his cheek. I'm reminded of my own situation in the brothel only a few hours earlier, and know full well that this could have been me.

But it's not that which is keeping me frozen to the spot as I stare down at the ravaged face. It's the fact that I recognize him.

It's been a long time, and in the intervening period he's lost some of his hair and added a fair amount of weight, but even after what's been done to his face, there's no mistake. This is the man I used to know as Colonel Stanic back in Bosnia, a commander of the local Serb militia based near us in the east of the country. I only ever came face to face with him twice, while accompanying our senior officers to meetings with him and his people, and we never spoke. Occasionally I saw him pass in a convoy of open-top jeeps while I was out on patrol, and I remember that even though his forces were meant to be hostile to our presence, he had this habit of standing up in his vehicle and saluting us, as if he had to prove that he was a proper soldier.