Simon Kernick: Severed

When we got back to my place, I opened the door for Leah, followed her inside and shut the door. As I switched on the hall light, she reached up and pulled me close to her.

The kiss was electric, the intimacy incredible. Our hands ran across each other's bodies with an urgency that seemed to come out of nowhere, as if we both knew that very soon our time would run out. Clothes were ripped off and strewn across the room as casually as confetti. I kissed her neck, her pert round breasts, kneeling as I moved my lips down across her washboard-flat stomach, breathing in her warmth, revelling in her tight gasps of pleasure.

We finally made it to the bedroom where we made love with a furious intensity that I think surprised us both, and when we were finished, and temporarily sated, we lay there naked in each other's arms, talking and kissing, before the passion took us once again.

When we were resting a second time, she asked me if I minded if she smoked and I said, no problem, so she rolled a thick, three-Rizla joint, which we shared. It was my first dope since Afghanistan, and although it wasn't quite as potent as the stuff we got hold of then, it was enough to get me in one of those moods where the whole world's treating you right, and everything you say and do, and everything the person you're with says and does, is uproariously funny. We laughed, we made love, and the night went by all too fast, disappearing with the remorseless inevitability of grains of sand through an egg timer.

Some time towards dawn, just before we slipped into the sleep of the satisfied and exhausted, I kissed her forehead and ran a finger along the pale skin of her jawline, and she smiled that beautiful cherubic smile at me. In that instant I knew, with a blissful sense of terror, that I was falling for this girl in a big, big way.

The next day we stayed in bed until midday, and when we finally did rise, Leah made me take her back to the shop where we'd met. She wanted a picnic, so we bought salami, olives, stuffed peppers, ciabatta bread, Taleggio cheese and, of course, parma ham, and took it with us to Hampstead Heath, where we sat and ate it in the sunshine, washed down with a bottle of Chianti, before finally she said it was time to head back to her place in Richmond.

'I need to freshen up before tomorrow and get an early night,' she told me.

'Can I see you again?' I asked, and I knew that if she said no, I'd be heartbroken.

But she didn't. Of course she didn't.

If she had, then she'd still be alive.

Instead, she leaned over and kissed me gently on the lips. 'I'd love to.'

I drove her back to Richmond, and almost as soon as she'd said goodbye and walked away I felt that hollow emptiness all new lovers experience when they're forced to part, even if it's only temporarily. Thankfully, I didn't have to wait long for our next meeting. I called her the next morning from the BMW showroom I own, and we arranged to go out that evening.

And that was the beginning of a relationship that for the past three weeks had been growing progressively more serious. We might have lived a fair distance apart in travelling time, but we saw each other at least every other night, and in the last few days I'd been thinking that we were going places. I was in love. I wanted her to move in with me. I hadn't said as much – I was going to leave it another couple of weeks because I didn't want to scare her away – but I genuinely wanted to commit.

The last time I remember seeing Leah was early Wednesday morning when she left my house to go back to her family in Richmond, having arranged to meet friends that night. But at some point yesterday we must have seen each other, with fatal consequences. Where did we go? What did we do? And how the hell did we end up out here in the middle of the country, at the slaughterhouse where she met her bloody end?

The address I've been given is in a part of east London that has so far resisted the steady process of gentrification that's been a feature of so much of the East End since the late 1980s. The main drag is tired and litter-strewn with a windswept, forgotten feel about it. Running along both sides are cheap takeaways with bags of uncollected rubbish outside; discount shops offering all kinds of useless paraphernalia for under a pound; and, most common of all, empty, boarded-up units, blackened by smoke or covered in graffiti and fly posters. At one intersection there is even a roofless, jagged shell of a building that looks like it might have been bombed back in World War Two and is still waiting for its turn to be repaired. The house I want is on a quiet residential road, lined with mature beech trees. It must have been quite a grand road once, but its tired-looking Georgian townhouses have long ago fallen into disrepair, their white paint now, for the most part, a dirty, stained grey.

I drive past number 33 – not much different from the others, with an ancient Ford Sierra taking up the tiny carport – and keep on going, watching for any suspicious activity, anything that may suggest that this is some sort of trap.

When you've been a soldier exposed to guerrilla warfare, especially the hate-filled maelstrom of Northern Ireland, you learn to be paranoid. You develop antennae that can spot trouble in a way ordinary civilians can't. They're twitching now, telling me that the street's too quiet, almost dead. I don't like it. The Glock feels comforting against the small of my back, as does the Kevlar vest I picked up from home on the way here. I bought it a year ago after another car dealer I know vaguely in Tottenham was shot in the leg while trying to stop a masked gang stealing his two prize Mercedes. I'd intended to wear it whenever I was working late and on my own, but in the end it was never going to be practical, and even though I shelled out three hundred quid on it, it's been gathering dust ever since. Until now, that is.

I continue driving, keeping my eye on the rear-view mirror and the cars parked on either side of the road to see if they contain anyone who may be noting my presence. But there's nothing.

I find a parking spot in one of the adjoining roads several hundred yards away, between a battered old combi van and a skip that is overflowing with household junk, including, bizarrely, a huge African woodcarving of a long, narrow face that has a big crack running through it. The face seems to be giving me the evil eye, and I feel like telling him not to bother. The evil eye's been placed on me already.

It's just short of 12.15, and it's strange, but the fact that I'm on the move and at least temporarily in control of events again has helped to dissipate the grief and shock that almost incapacitated me earlier. I try to push thoughts of Leah from my mind. There'll be time to think of her later, when I'm alone and through this. But for the moment I need to concentrate on survival.

There's a navy blue New York Yankees baseball cap on the seat next to me – something else I picked up from home – and I put it on now. There are bound to be council-run CCTV cameras monitoring this area, and I don't much want them getting a good look at me. I pull the brim low over my face and get out of the car. The space is metered so I put a couple of quid in, knowing that the last thing I need is to return to the car and find it clamped or, worse still, towed away. Once again, I wonder what it is I'm collecting. The most obvious thing would be drugs. I don't like to generalize too much, but it would fit with the area. It's going to have to be some truly high-grade gear though, given how much effort has been made, including committing a murder, simply to ensure that I come here to pick it up. And that's what makes me think it may be something else, something hugely valuable but also dangerous. Because whoever wants this case won't risk coming here himself. It also bolsters my earlier suspicion that I know the person or people I'm doing this for: they would know that, with my training and experience only a little out of date, I have a better chance than most of emerging in one piece from a difficult situation.