The greasy brown envelope lay torn on the floor and the contents were spread all over his coverlet. He had begun to understand that there was both good and bad news about the life of an assassin. The good news was that honest, decent family men were not likely to become targets, at least in his limited experience so far. The file he had read could only be described as disturbing – and there were photographs in it that he never wanted to see again. The bad news was that the sort of men who did attract the notice of paid killers usually had some inkling of the dangerous life they led.
Just as Peter Schenk had employed armed guards, so this new man, Victor Stasiak, had entrusted his safety to two ferocious dogs – and armed guards. Running him over was not a serious prospect and sadly the man had no passion for hang-gliding. As Albert read through the file, he noted a long-term interest in photography, but the potential for violent, sudden death seemed limited there.
Whoever had the task of researching the targets had done an incredibly thorough job, that much was obvious. As well as three different addresses around London and one in the Lake District, Albert had all the details he could possibly need. The house in Cumbria looked the most promising, if only because it was isolated and less likely to attract the attention of half a million Metropolitan policemen, among them one PC George Thompson, with his unpleasant interest in used notes and bank accounts.
Albert had even negotiated, when the voice called back to confirm he had received the envelope. In Albert’s experience, negotiation was an achingly embarrassing thing. He had once offered 80 per cent of the price for his washing machine, only to be told that Comet was a bit different to Wembley Market. In Wembley Market, he had offered half the asking price for a bottle of shampoo, but they said it was full price or he could push off. They hadn’t said ‘push’, either. One of his least favourite memories was having a kitchen installed three years before. Whenever he made the builders a cup of tea, the price had mysteriously gone up. In the end, he had spent the night in the Tudor Lodge Hotel rather than bankrupt himself with yet another conversation.
In his new persona as killer-for-hire, he had assumed a gruff voice and told his caller he wanted double the usual fee. To his amazement and delight, the voice had agreed, just like that. Twenty thousand pounds was a lot of money, by almost anyone’s standards. It would clear Albert’s debt to the bank and might even leave enough over for a trip to a casino. Albert stroked the pistol as he considered getting out of the life after that. He’d been lucky, but it couldn’t go on. One last job and he would be done with death, he told himself. He’d keep the gun, obviously, for home defence, or as a memento. He smiled wryly as the memory of an old Latin lesson came back to him: a memento mori – a reminder of death.
He made his plans that night and the following morning left a note on the shop door that said he would be closed for a few days. Experience suggested that not too many Eastcote residents would be disappointed by that, but it was basic good manners. He walked past the butcher’s shop on the way home and could not help glowering through the window.
The Nissan Micra 1.2 is quite a small car and his particular problem was that he didn’t know exactly what equipment he would need to gain entrance to a mansion in Cumbria. Albert had access to a small garage below the flats and over the years he had filled it with the same things as most other people. An ancient canvas rucksack caught his eye. Metal bowls and a tin cup clanked inside from some old camping trip. On a shelf, he found a roll of duct tape – Albert was perhaps the only man in England who pronounced the ‘t’, instead of referring to it as ‘duck’ tape. He spent a long time looking at a pair of pliers before putting them back with a sigh. A hammer seemed generally useful and he found a roll of rope that he had bought as a makeshift washing line years before. His best find was a pair of ancient binoculars, looking as if they had last been used to search for German battleships in the Channel.
A very old tool roll was helpful in putting his little kit together and at last the Micra was loaded and ready to go. According to his AA Road Atlas, Cumbria was just shy of three hundred miles away. As he drove through Ickenham towards the motorways that would take him north, he worked out his journey times in calm anticipation. Victor Stasiak did not know it, but death was heading up the M1 towards him.
When it isn’t raining, Cumbria is ranked among the most beautiful parts of England. It is difficult to confirm this because it’s always, always raining. The inhabitants delight and frolic in it, telling themselves that at least gardeners will be pleased. Gardeners are sometimes washed away in Cumbria. It has mountains as well, however, so those gentlemen are rarely washed far. They usually end up in a gully of some kind.
Albert had an umbrella, of course. It was a beautiful thing, bought from James Smith and Sons on New Oxford Street. It had struts and spars and it hummed in the wind as he heaved it open into a wet Cumbrian gale. He had also chosen a tweed jacket, expecting it to help him blend in up north. It is a little-known fact that one stage of making tweed cloth involves leaving it to soak in urine. Sheep urine is much prized but for obvious reasons is extremely difficult to collect. They won’t stand still. Human urine is the only remaining choice, and as a result there was a faint odour of wee around Albert as his jacket grew damp.
He had parked his car in a town his map told him was called Keswick and was walking down a rainy street where every second shop sold waterproof clothing and hiking boots. Or heavy jumpers. Or old-fashioned sweets, for some reason. Perhaps hikers take comfort in barley twists or lemon drops as they wait for the rain to stop. It never does, though, so some of them never come down.
Albert had a huge choice of places offering bed and breakfast, down every side street. He picked one at random and lugged his heavy bag and umbrella through the door. He told himself wearily that tomorrow would do well enough to despatch Victor Stasiak from this world to the next.
Chapter Six
Halliday stood outside the main entrance to Harefield Hospital, shivering slightly in a grey drizzle. He was out. More importantly, the catheter was out. He was free. He had made a call at last from inside the hospital and a long, black car was now sliding through the rain towards him, parking itself on a set of red lines usually reserved for ambulances. He opened the door, wincing slightly as the stitches in his groin pulled with the motion. It was a mystery to him why the doctors had decided to approach his heart from as far away as a vein in his leg. Perhaps they enjoyed the challenge.
From his chart he had learned that a tiny cage had been inserted in his heart, a ‘stent’, as they called it. It held the vein open and allowed the blood clot to disperse. He frowned at the thought of the strange thing keeping him alive. Presumably they knew their business. He was walking again, after all. He set his jaw as he slid into the back seat of the car and nodded to the driver. He knew his business as well. In ten years of successful work, he had not suffered a single injury or come close to talking to a policeman – until a complete stranger had run him over in a side street with a Nissan Micra. It was frankly humiliating, but he knew how to handle problems like that.
‘I need another gun,’ he growled.
The driver nodded and opened the glove compartment, handing back an oiled Colt Government and two clips of ammunition. Halliday tested the mechanism with swift, much-practised moves before showing his teeth in a savage smile. The driver blinked into the mirror at the white glare, but wisely decided not to notice.
‘Where to?’ the driver said.
Halliday didn’t have to think. He’d had time to plan in the endless days in the ward.
‘Eastcote. The Tudor Lodge Hotel.’
It would do as a base for a few days while he found out everything he needed to know. He didn’t like to admit it, but he also needed more time to recover. His heart had been damaged while part of it was blocked shut. The slightest exertion set off sharp pains across his chest and made him gasp as if he’d been running a fast mile. Although he hated the idea, Halliday was forced to admit it might
be time to collect his savings and retire. There was just one last job to do first.
As the limousine pulled away from the hospital, they passed a lone police car coming the other way. Both of the uniformed occupants looked over at the black car, but they couldn’t see through the darkened windows. John Halliday smiled to himself. He had nothing to fear from their questions now. He hadn’t given them his real name and they could search for ‘Nigel Farnsley’ all they wanted. He gripped the pistol tightly, taking comfort from the familiar weight. Someone was definitely going to pay for what had been done to him.
Albert’s first problem after breakfast was confirming that Victor Stasiak was in residence. A man with at least three houses – the ones Albert knew about – could not be pinned down easily in one spot. Albert had brought enough money for a week at the bed and breakfast. If that failed, he knew he would have to try his luck in London. That was not a pleasant prospect. London was full of potential witnesses and there was something about the empty ruggedness of Cumbria that appealed to the assassin in him.
As a boy, he had read The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, which involved gentlemen wearing tweed chasing other, more unsavoury, gentlemen across the moors of Scotland. He could not recall all the details, but in his hiking gear, with the wind, and of course the rain, he felt glorious. In waterproof Gore-Tex trousers, with a rucksack and a large map flapping in the wind, he might as well have been invisible as he trudged up hill and down dale – and sometimes up dale and down hill. There were a few others like him, hardy-looking men for the most part, out enjoying the rain and the cold. For Cumbria, it was a fine morning.
Keswick town lies on the edge of a huge lake named Derwentwater. Albert hadn’t wanted to park too close to his quarry, but as the morning wore on, he found he’d underestimated the distances involved. At first, he took long, deep breaths and strode along the edge of the lake. By the time he’d worked his way through the valley of Borrowdale, he was weary. He slogged through Honister Pass and began the long ascent of the fell known as Rannerdale Knotts. It looked over the lakes of Buttermere and Crummock Water, and as he read each name on the map, Albert Rossi began to wonder if he’d somehow wandered into the set of The Hobbit.
He reached the summit by the early afternoon, fairly close to exhaustion. Only the sight of Buttermere village below raised his spirits. Victor Stasiak had his holiday home there and it was high summer, when the rain warms a bit. Albert stood panting, chewing on something called Kendal Mint Cake, which seemed to be a kind of brittle glass made of sugar. He worked a piece out from where it had impaled the roof of his mouth and stood looking down on the houses below. It was a little depressing to see a nice road running close by. Clearly he could have spared himself the hike, but his aim of scouting the area from a safe distance had certainly been fulfilled. Albert could feel the weight of the pistol in his rucksack. It could also have been his flask, or the paperback book he had brought with him, or the binoculars, or even the bulky file with all the vital details of Victor Stasiak’s life, but in his imagination, it was definitely the gun.
Victor Stasiak was excited. An observer would have seen no betraying sparkle in his eyes as he flipped and tugged his tie into a Windsor knot, gazing into a long mirror as he did so. The face that looked back was heavy-jowled and serious, with a solid jaw almost submerged in the layers of good living. Freshly shaved and gleaming rolls of pink fat disappeared into his collar. If the same observer was feeling unkind, he might have described it as the face of an elderly carp, with thicker lips than are usual on a man. When Victor Stasiak tensed his jaw, the lower lip overrode the top one. A determined carp then, a carp who has met most of life’s little irritations and triumphed over them. A carp, in fact, who tended to leave life’s little irritations in graves around the Cumbrian countryside.
Victor Stasiak cared nothing for scenic beauty. His entire purpose in choosing a holiday home close by Buttermere lake was its suitability for burying his competitors. Let’s assume for a moment that they were at least dead first. It wasn’t always true, but let’s assume it anyway.
With a soft grunt, Victor Stasiak finished with his tie and held out his arms for a long cashmere coat that would have caught Albert Rossi’s interest immediately. His manservant raised it at the right moment, so that the fleshy arms vanished into the long sleeves and short-fingered, heavy hands poked out at the other end. It was a good coat and proof against the worst Cumbrian weather.
Yet such things were wasted on the man they contained. The reason for Victor Stasiak’s excitement lay not with the prospect of an invigorating walk, or even the finest of cashmere. He was looking forward to meeting his second in command in one of the most scenic spots in Buttermere. He was looking forward to it because he had discovered the man had been cheating him over a number of years.
Victor Stasiak smiled at his reflection. A contented carp looked back. He had chosen the spot carefully, a bridge over the longest waterfall in Cumbria. He would enjoy seeing his colleague falling onto the rocks below.
It was a rare event for Victor Stasiak to get his own hands dirty with such things, but the betrayal was a personal thing for him. He smiled again. A personal personnel issue. To be able to make a pun, even a weak one, in English was a source of some pride for him. He flexed his hands, imagining them around a throat. It would be a good day.
‘Bring the car round to the front,’ he told his servant. ‘Have Jonas and Walker follow me in the Audi with the dogs.’
‘Yes, sir,’ his manservant said, bowing low.
It took time to train his staff to the right level of obedience, but Victor Stasiak believed it was worthwhile. For a man who had grown up in the steelyards of a Lithuanian port, such things were a simple joy.
‘Hat,’ Victor Stasiak said.
A heavy black bowler was held out and he fitted it carefully onto the dome of a head almost as perfectly round as the hat itself. Victor Stasiak was not a fool. He knew the English bowler hat had not been in fashion for sixty years or more. As a younger man, he had been impressed by a Bond film, in which the villain wore such a hat, complete with a metal rim capable of decapitating statues. Victor Stasiak had never thrown his hat at anyone, but the idea of a razor-sharp ring of steel available to him when all else failed was very much in keeping with his character. In addition, it suited him.
As well as the smell of wet tweed, which gives the House of Lords its distinctive odour, it is another little-known fact that Britain has the most extensive network of number-plate-recognition cameras in the world. Most motorways, main roads and town centres are covered by it. The information is kept for up to five years and a policeman with an interest in a particular vehicle could, if he so chose, call up video records of its travels over that entire period.
PC George Thompson was well aware of the irritating criminal tendency to swap their own number plates for those of a tractor, or just an innocent car of the same make. Every year, tractor owners in particular were forced to contact the Metropolitan Police and point out that while they would love to have been doing a hundred miles an hour in London, it simply wasn’t possible in a Massey Ferguson. He doubted Albert Rossi had gone to those lengths to avoid detection and he was not disappointed.
Thompson sipped at a cup of dark orange tea and tapped idly at a computer in Uxbridge police station. It was six o’clock in the morning and he had come in early to gain access to a computer that usually took eleven close-written forms even to touch. He had found the password jotted down in the desk drawer and if anyone checked, the records would show his absent colleague had become fascinated by a particular Nissan Micra. George Thompson looked grim as he sipped and tapped and then worked the mouse for a bit.
He could not have explained his suspicions about Albert Rossi. The sudden appearance of cash was certainly interesting; so were the weak excuses Rossi had offered to explain his good fortune. Fishing brown envelopes out of station bins was another black mark against him. Yet there was something more; Thompson could
feel it. He was a believer in instinct and when his return visit had found the shop closed and Albert Rossi apparently vanished, his instincts had stopped gently prodding and begun a more determined assault. As he sat in the office and followed the video record into Cumbria, Thompson’s suspicions picked up a cricket bat and looked meaningfully at him.
Something was up. He was aware that he didn’t have a shred of real evidence. His superiors were unlikely to fund a day away from his desk on nothing more than a series of hunches. Yet he had a week of leave to use up and there were worse ways to spend it. He made up his mind. His Rover 75 could put him in Cumbria by noon at the latest. Where was the last hit from the cameras? He checked again and nodded to himself. Four miles outside Keswick, a traffic camera had recorded the little Micra buzzing its way north. Keswick. Thompson knocked back the last of the tea. At worst, he would have a half-day by a pleasant lake, but it was just possible that he would also discover what the hell was going on.
Chapter Seven
Albert Rossi approached the house he had marked on his map, creeping down a hillside in darting movements as he passed from tree to tree. He reached the bottom, hidden behind an enormous privet hedge that ran the length of the drive, at almost exactly the moment two black cars swung round to the front door. As Albert watched, the rear one was loaded with burly men and two snarling Alsatian dogs. He sank lower into old vegetation, suddenly terrified that he would be seen.
He hardly needed his binoculars. Twenty yards from him, the front door opened and Victor Stasiak came out, sheltered from the rain by another man carrying an umbrella. Albert felt his pulse race at the sight of his quarry. The tendency to wear black bowlers had been mentioned in the file but even if Stasiak had been bare-headed, there was no mistaking the heavy frame. The coat was very good quality, Albert noted, a little enviously. It seemed crime paid rather well.