E. Seymour - Final Target

‘Rent-a-mob,’ I pitched in.

‘We’re talking the extreme end of the spectrum.’

‘And Lars, where does he fit?’

‘Thanks to an old art school friend, he had an in to a particular group of anarchists in Berlin who have heavy connections here.’

‘Then look no further. There’s your answer. He was bumped off because he got rumbled, either by his contacts in the UK or those in Germany.’

McCallen shook her head. ‘Lars had bailed months before. There was no reason to kill him.’

I didn’t like to point out that I’d killed men for weaker reasons. When a seriously bad guy got an idea in his head that someone was for the chop, there wasn’t much that could be done to dissuade him.

‘You said the association was over and that he’d extracted himself from his buddies, so what was Lars doing in Hampshire eight months ago?’

She viewed me with instant suspicion. ‘How the hell do you know the timing?’

‘Don’t be so damn suspicious.’ I indicated the aerial shot. ‘I’m good with trees. If you want a nature lesson, I’m happy to give it,’ I said, arch. Actually, the countryside had never done it for me, but my grandfather ensured that my Gloucestershire roots were not wasted. In later life, it had proved useful.

She looked at me a second longer than was comfortable. I’d often thought that talking to McCallen was like throwing jelly at the wall and seeing if it would stick. ‘I genuinely don’t know why he was in the New Forest,’ she said. She looked quite unhappy. However, this time, I reckoned she was being straight with me.

‘When did you last see him?’

‘End of January, and once briefly two months before his death.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘No,’ she said, slow-eyed.

‘No subsequent contact?’

‘A couple of phone calls.’

‘When?’

‘March.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘The weather.’ She looked ticked off.

‘Fine, don’t tell me.’

Her expression told me that on this we were in agreement. ‘Nothing you need to know,’ she added.

‘Maybe Lars wasn’t what he seemed.’

‘That’s what I’m beginning to think.’

The penny didn’t drop; two-pound coins rained down on my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If you’ve allowed yourself to be compromised, that’s your lookout. No way in hell am I going to get involved, investigate, or anything else.’

‘I can’t go to Berlin, but you could.’

‘Which bit of my answer don’t you understand? And aren’t you forgetting something? One step outside the United Kingdom and a Mossad hit team will be snapping at my heels.’ The shout lines of my last job boxed my ears. With McCallen’s help, I’d foiled a plot to sell an ethnically specific biological weapon to an extreme fundamental terrorist group, and had killed one of my old clients, Billy Squeeze, in the process. During the fallout, it had emerged that Mossad was out to get me for an unspecified crime. I’d never properly worked it out. I might have jeopardised one of their operations by taking out a player. I might have unwittingly killed one of their informers. Whatever the detail, they’d only called their dogs off because I’d removed Billy, a man on their hit list, but I knew that it was only a temporary reprieve.

McCallen responded by doing what she does best – she threw me a curve ball. ‘What if Pallenberg was killed to get to me?’

I blinked. Was this the part of the story she hadn’t told me? I knew that there had to be another reason and my curiosity and lust for excitement meant that I was a millimetre from being dragged into her web. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘Threats.’

This was my cue to ask her to spill all. If she did, then I’d be done for. She threw me a look that could best be described as ravishingly doomed. My jaw clicked because all I really wanted to do was sweep her into my arms and tell her that I’d help in any way I could.

‘Not my problem,’ I said.

She stood up. ‘You know how to get hold of me if you change your mind.’

‘I’m not going to change my mind.’

She gave a knowing smile and left.

The next morning I passed on the gym, stayed in bed longer than usual and wondered if the activities of the night before had been a dream. McCallen’s anarchic reappearance had awoken long-dead emotions and knocked me off balance. Made me consider what the German had that I didn’t. I let out a sigh and pressed my head deeper into the pillows in a futile effort to evade the simple truth. Lars Pallenberg had not spent fifteen years of his sorry existence knocking people off.

She had nerve, I was forced to give her that. And she knew how to get to me, the ‘personal threat’ argument a blinder.

I finally dislodged myself from my cosy pity, got up, showered and shaved and stared at my reflection. You’re looking good. More rested , McCallen had remarked. My normally cropped dark hair could do with a cut. The rest of me appeared much the same: blue eyes, wide nose, high Slavic cheekbones, but I got what she meant. I’d lost the hunted look.

I dressed in a pair of jeans, open-neck shirt and sweater, black loafers. Standing in the kitchen, eating a solitary piece of toast, I looked around me. I hadn’t really got the hang of homemaking. I had all the right kit, furniture in the rooms, plantation shutters on the windows, yet the deliberate absence of personal touches, anything that could betray my true identity, gave it a slightly sterile air. Occasionally I’d buy flowers – freesias, my mother’s favourite – but that was about as far as my interior design went.

I gazed out of the window at a grey, wet January day that was already dark before it got going. Miserable summed it up and it reflected my mood. I might have committed to a home and car and gainful employment, but I had nobody with whom to share my life because I could never reveal my past. McCallen was the only woman who knew me well, understood the way I ticked, and McCallen was off-limits and unattainable. I was the equivalent of a city after a bomb has been dropped on it – ruined and empty.

With no particular place to be that morning, I pulled on a leather jacket and let myself out onto a street of terraced houses. Collar up, I walked with a brisk step past the watchmaker’s, nodding good morning to the guy inside, and round the corner to a short row of shops, my destination the newsagents. Perhaps McCallen had a point, I reasoned, as I picked up copies of the local newspaper and a couple of broadsheets with my standard pint of milk. I couldn’t keep running away from the world now that I’d made a conscious decision to reclaim it. With a particular eye for any development opportunities, I did a quick browse of the window of an estate agent. Nothing grabbing me, I went back home and soon had a mug of fresh coffee and newspapers spread out at the breakfast bar like recently received gifts.

Confronted by the usual suspects: war, economic woes, the Eurozone crisis and failures in various institutions, little seemed to have changed since I’d tuned in last. Marginally bored and about to flick to the business section, a face suddenly stared out that made me skid to attention.

Smoothing out the page, I looked into the dark, heartless eyes of the man I’d known as The Surgeon, the soubriquet earned because Chester Phipps was as physically strong as an orthopaedic surgeon and as skilled at exploring human anatomy in spite of his skinny physique. It was a good picture, one of which he’d have been proud had he been alive to see it. Taken a couple of years ago, it showed him wearing an elegant navy pin-striped suit, shirt loosely open at the neck. He was seated, cigarette rakishly held between his thin fingers, legs louchely crossed, his grizzled, moustachioed features gathered tightly beneath a mane of long grey hair. Staring directly at the camera, thin and intense, he could have been an art connoisseur rather than a crime lord whose interests included, to quote the man himself, ‘cocaine, crack and cunts’. A headline accompanied the photograph: ‘New Killing as Turf War Escalates’.