Simon Kernick - Target

But the moment he stepped inside the main office he knew something was wrong.

There were nine people in there – seven men and two women – gathered in a rough circle around Mo Khan, who was sitting down with a phone in his hand, his expression grim. No one was speaking, and as they heard Bolt enter they all turned his way.

Trying hard not to show the tension he was experiencing, he stopped and looked around. 'What's happened?'

It was Mo who answered him, his longest-serving colleague, and the most senior person in the room bar Bolt himself. 'Tina's car's been found abandoned near a village called Bramfield in Hertfordshire.'

'And?' Bolt knew there had to be an 'and'. The faces said it all.

Mo took a deep breath, his face tight with pent-up emotion. 'And the body of a young woman's been found nearby.'

The man in the cream suit ran a comb through his thinning hair, straightened his jacket, and surveyed himself in the full-length mirror, pleased with the image that stared back at him.

He was not the best looking of men, he knew that. Physically, he was small and round in stature, with a large, hooked nose and thin, flinty eyes that hinted at an intelligence not entirely to be trusted. At school they'd christened him 'Shifty', and had tended to shun his company.

None of this bothered him unduly, however. After all, looks were transient. They disappeared eventually. He possessed something far more valuable. Power. There was a poise about him, a cool confidence in the way he carried himself, which had come from years of success in his chosen field. People treated him with respect. There were those who feared him too, knowing his reputation as a strong-willed man, unafraid of making tough decisions. Not the sort of person you would want to cross.

But what the man in the cream suit enjoyed the most was the fact that no one, not even those closest to him, had any idea of the true power he wielded. Nor the terrible secrets he harboured.

As he turned away from the mirror, the phone in his left trouser pocket began vibrating. He had a message. It was from a number he didn't recognize, but he knew the identity of the sender well enough. There was only one person in the world it could have been.

The message was in block capitals and just three words long.

STAGE TWO SUCCESS.

The man in the cream suit felt a tingling, almost sexual sensation running up his spine as he walked over to the window and looked out towards the darkening sea.

Events were moving fast now. All those months of planning were finally coming to fruition.

He looked at his watch and smiled.

Just twenty-four more hours…

There were plenty of reasons why I'd deliberately avoided involving Maxwell until now, but chief among them was the fact that I didn't trust him. After all, he was a career criminal with a moral code that was skewed at best, non-existent at worst, so not the kind of guy you'd automatically turn to for help. But that also made him the kind of person best suited to tell me what the hell my next move should be, because as a criminal he would at least have some idea how other criminals think, and be able to advise me accordingly. And even if he wasn't feeling charitable, I figured that the fact that I was writing a book about him would give him some incentive to help me. After all, when it came down to it, I was more valuable to him alive than dead.

Maxwell (he didn't seem to have any other name) had retired from the London crime scene having made, in his own words, too many enemies – a feeling I was becoming all too familiar with. He now lived in deepest Berkshire, an hour's drive out of town on a good day, close to double that when you were doing it all the way from Hackney at the tail end of rush hour, as I was now.

I didn't phone ahead, deciding that it was easier to turn up unannounced, and it was getting close to eight o'clock when I pulled up outside the pretty picture-postcard cottage with the thatched roof that was his current abode. For a city boy who'd grown up on a sprawling east London council estate it seemed a strange place to end up, a good mile from the nearest house and almost dead quiet, except for the very faint buzz of traffic that you get anywhere in south-east England, and the occasional plane overhead. But that was one of the many paradoxes about Maxwell. He might have been one of the top London hard men in his day, but he also liked to grow his own vegetables and while away his days fishing for trout in the nearby streams.

I was relieved to see that the front door was open, and as I got out of the car and breathed in the fresh country air I felt a lot better. The city and all the danger it represented suddenly seemed a long way away and, if I was honest with myself, the idea of someone like Maxwell being on my side came as a huge relief.

I could hear movement inside – a reassuring clatter of pots and pans coming from the kitchen – so I rapped hard on the door and called out his name, just so he'd know it wasn't one of his old enemies coming calling.

A few seconds later, Maxwell appeared in the narrow hallway, all five foot six of him, barrel-bodied and pug-faced, looking vaguely comical in an apron with a large cartoon pair of breasts on it. His grizzled face creased into a frown. 'All right, Robbie. Didn't expect to see you today. We didn't have a meet planned, did we?'

Maxwell always referred to me as Robbie – a term of address I'd always hated, but I'd never had the heart (or balls) to correct him.

'I need your help,' I said, looking straight into his narrow, hooded eyes.

The frown deepened, but he nodded. 'Better come inside then. Want a drink of something?'

I knew I needed to keep my wits about me, but the thought of a real drink proved irresistible. 'A beer, if you've got one.'

I followed him into the kitchen where a big pot was bubbling away on the stove. I didn't stop to look at its contents, but the smell was good, and I felt the first stirrings of hunger since lunchtime.

Maxwell opened two bottles of Peroni and handed me one, then led me through into his tiny sitting room where we always conducted our interviews, and which had clearly been designed for men of Maxwell's height rather than men of mine. I bent down, narrowly missing the overhead beam I'd almost knocked myself out on the first time I was here, and took a seat in one of the two old leather armchairs by the fireplace.

He sat down in the other one, placed the beer on the coffee table beside him, and lit a cigarette. If he was at all concerned about what I had to say, he didn't show it. But then that was Maxwell all over. He wasn't the kind of man to be easily fazed.

'OK,' he said through the smoke, 'what's happened?'

It seemed like I'd already told this story a thousand times, usually to a sceptical audience, but I had the feeling Maxwell would believe me. He'd inhabited the world where this kind of thing happened for a long, long time. So I told him everything, with the exception of Ramon's murder, every so often taking a big slug of my beer, while he listened in silence.

When I'd finished, he stubbed out his cigarette, rubbed a stubby, nicotine-stained finger along the side of his nose, and looked at me with a suspicion I wasn't expecting. 'You sure you ain't been smoking too much of the wacky baccy, Robbie? This is some fucking story and I know you've been prone to, you know, breakdowns.'

I met his gaze. 'It's the truth. I swear it.'

When the suspicious look didn't disappear, I told him I had the photographs to prove it and pulled the print-outs of the images Tina had emailed me from my back pocket.

'All right, let's have a look,' he said, and took them off me. He unfolded three of them and looked at them carefully. 'And these were taken today in London?'