James Deegan - John Carr

‘What the hell happened in there then, James?’ said Spicer, as he closed the door. He shook his head in something that looked like amused wonder. ‘I mean, we had a good shout, anyway, but once they withdrew the sources…’

‘Just give thanks, Paul,’ said the QC, unbuttoning his starched collar. ‘It’s a lot easier when the other side makes your argument for you.’ He chuckled. ‘I’ll have a chat with Bernard later, but I suppose they just saw the writing on the wall. Charlotte should take a lot of the credit for that.’

Charlotte Morgan blushed. ‘I don’t think I did very much,’ she said. ‘I’d say it was Emily, more than me.’

‘I always thought there was a chance they’d fold if we could put them on the spot over their covert sources,’ said Emily Souster, her eyes almost ablaze. ‘But even I didn’t expect it to be as easy as that.’

Coffee was poured, and drunk, and there was the usual small talk which follows the end of a major case.

After twenty minutes or so, James Monroe Caville looked at his watch, stood up, and reached for his collar and wig and black leather box briefcase.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘There’s no rest for the wicked. My clerk has managed to squeeze in a con in Chambers at two, so I must bid you adieu . Best of luck, Mr Mahsoud.’

‘Thank you,’ said Zeff Mahsoud with a nod and a distant smile.

‘I’ll see you to the door,’ said Spicer. ‘While we have you, there’s another little matter that we need to run by you. Emily, do you mind…?’

He indicated that Souster should accompany them.

‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ she said, before following the two men.

Once they had left, Zeff Mahsoud turned to Charlotte Morgan.

‘I’d like to thank you for your assistance also, Miss Morgan,’ he said, in an accent that hovered somewhere between Bradford and the tribal badlands of southern Waziristan. ‘I was worried that we might not succeed.’

‘You can never be certain,’ she said. ‘But once they withdrew the evidence from those sources it was really only going to go one way.’

‘It has been a very difficult time for me.’

‘I’m sure it has. But it’s over now.’

‘Yes,’ said Mahsoud. ‘Well, as I say, I am grateful.’

He paused for a moment.

Then he said, ‘I suppose you’re very busy also?’

‘Rushed off my feet,’ she said, with a laugh. ‘But it’s better than the alternative.’

‘I expect you are looking forward to your holiday,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Spain, I think you said?’

‘Oh, goodness, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m shattered. Yes, my boyfriend and I are going with some friends at the beginning of August. Emily, too.’ She nodded at the door through which Souster had left. ‘Can’t wait.’

‘I had the greatest holiday ever in Barcelona,’ said Zeff Mahsoud, sitting forward in his seat. He paused. Then he added, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘And, of course, Spain was a muslim territory from 717.’

‘Bit before my time,’ said Charlotte Morgan, with a laugh.

‘Wonderful galleries and architecture,’ said Mahsoud.

‘In Barcelona?’ said Charlotte. She began gathering up her papers, and stood up. She smiled. ‘So I believe. But too much culture never did a girl any good. It’s Marbella for me, I’m afraid. I’m all about the sun, sea and sand.’

6.

LATE THAT EVENING, after he had travelled north from Euston, and been reunited with his wife and their daughter, Zeff Mahsoud slipped out of the family home.

He had an important call to make, to a keeper of secrets.

It was the first of many.

PART TWO

7.

THREE MONTHS LATER

JOHN CARR LAY on a white towel in the hot sand, propped up on his elbows, staring out at the tranquil Mediterranean Sea.

Gentle waves – no more than ripples – broke, soft and frothy, on the beach.

Close to the shore, the Med was striped in dazzling turquoise shades, decorated with playful flashes from the noonday sun; further out, the waters turned a dark and mysterious blue, flat calm but hiding myriad untold secrets in their timeless depths.

It was very beautiful, Carr had to admit.

But despite that he was as restless as ever.

There were things John Carr liked about beaches, and things he didn’t.

The things he liked were good-looking young women in bikinis – who often liked him right back.

The things he didn’t like were sand, heat, flies, screaming kids, lying around doing nothing, and being caught looking at good-looking young women in bikinis by his teenaged daughter.

There was plenty of eye candy in the vicinity, but Alice was immediately to his left.

Stretched out on her towel, wearing mirror shades.

He thought she was asleep, but he couldn’t be sure, because he couldn’t see her eyeballs, because of the mirror shades.

So he kept his own eyes front.

John Carr had retired from 22 SAS as a Squadron Sergeant Major, having fought his way across every theatre of operations from the first Gulf War onwards in a long and distinguished career.

He’d twice been decorated for gallantry – not for nothing had he been known as ‘Mad John’ – and he had taken no shit from anyone in a very long time indeed.

But Alice, seventeen years old, and sixty-two kilos wringing wet, could bring him to heel with one withering look and a few choice words.

He wasn’t sure what they were filling her head with at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, for his thirty-five grand a year, but a lot of it seemed to revolve around the patriarchy, feminism, and the objectification of women.

It mystified Carr, who’d grown up in the 1980s on the streets of the rough Edinburgh suburb of Niddrie: he respected birds, right enough, but since when had it become a sin to fucking look at them?

Still, better safe than sorry.

He rubbed the livid, inverted-crescent scar on his chin, and stared dead ahead.

They were twenty metres from the sea.

It really was beautiful.

Shame about those screaming kids.

One of them was really wailing now – he’d dropped his ice cream in the water, snot was bubbling from his nose, and his fat, orange, German dad was trying to calm him down.

Shame about the kids, and a shame about the sand in Carr’s shorts, too.

And in the crack of his arse, and between his toes, and gritty in his mouth.

He sighed, and looked to his right.

His son George – seven years older than Alice – was eyeing up a couple of pretty Spanish girls, his own girlfriend face-down on her towel and oblivious.

Beyond George, a couple of older blokes casually ogled Alice as they trudged by.

Carr stared at them, hard, and once they caught his eye, and clocked his menacing physique, they looked quickly away and moved on.

He glanced down between his legs and flicked at a piece of dried seaweed with a grey driftwood twig.

Funny how life turns out.

You grow up in a council tenement block, surrounded by concrete, broken glass and graffiti, you don’t expect to find yourself rubbing shoulders with Europe’s filthy rich on a beach at Puerto Banús.

Back home in the UK, Carr’s day job was as head of London security for the Russian oligarch Konstantin Avilov. Earlier in the year Carr had taken out a Ukrainian hitman who had tried to kill his boss on the streets of London, as part of the ongoing, low-level power struggle which increasingly stretched out from Moscow in every direction around the globe.

As a thank you, his boss had given him a big payrise, and a Porsche Cayenne – bit tacky, for Carr’s taste, so he’d quickly swapped it for a classy 5.0L V8 Supercharged Range Rover, in Spectral British Racing Green.

Avilov had insisted, too, that he take a couple of weeks at his Marbella villa, a ten-bedroomed, chrome-and-white monument to vulgarity, in a gated community five minutes away at Vega del Colorado.