Blood Work (17 page)

'Look out!'

But for Derek Watters as he spun round to the
sound of the tortured engine, it was too late. Far too
late.

The jet-black Land Rover Discovery hit into him
still accelerating. The bull bar on the front of it
crushed his ribs, splintering them and piercing his
heart before the front of his head smashed down onto
the bonnet. He was thrown back into the street as the
driver stamped on the brakes and then into reverse,
the tyres biting and screaming once more. As Jimmy
Skinner ran across the road the back of Derek
Watters head slapped hard down on the road with
the crunching sound of a coconut being cracked by a
hammer.

The Land Rover roared backwards into Soho
Square, then drove round the green and, accelerating
once more, shot up Soho Street and out into the busy
traffic of Oxford Street, oblivious to the blaring of
horns and sudden screeching of brakes, and disappeared
as it turned left heading towards Marble
Arch. Skinner watched it go, trying to see the number
plate, but it had been taped over. He knelt down and
put his fingers to Derek Watters's carotid artery on
the side of his neck, though it was a movement made
more by instinct than expectation. But, surprisingly,
the prison officer had one last breath in him. As his
eyes clouded over he looked at the tall, thin, bone-faced
policeman kneeling beside him and sighed more
than spoke: 'Murder.'

Then his eyes froze, motionless, and Derek
Watters, forty-one years old, who never got to serve
his country by bearing arms, died on a chill, wet
street in a city that had a heart as cold as a solar
system where the sun had died out many millennia
ago.

Delaney sat behind the wheel of his car taking a
moment to collect his thoughts. Adjusting the rearview
mirror he looked at himself. He didn't know
what had got Kate Walker so agitated, she wouldn't
tell him on the telephone, just told him to meet her at
the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead. He knew it well
enough, it was just up the road from his new house.
What he didn't know was what had got her so
rattled; he could hear it in her voice, the thinnest
form of politeness covering someone close to
breaking point. It had something to do with what
happened in the hospital car park that morning, he'd
bet his life on it. Whatever it was that had gone
down, the clear fact was that Kate needed his help.
She didn't say it in so many words, but it was
expressed in her barely restrained emotion. She
needed his help. And that was the one thing Jack
Delaney couldn't walk away from.

He'd put the mirror back in position, switched the
engine on and slipped the gearstick into first, when
his phone rang. He angrily slipped the gear back into
neutral, glanced at the cover of his phone and
snapped it open.

'Make it quick.'

'Jack. It's Jimmy Skinner.'

Kate Walker sat at the long wooden bar in the Holly
Bush. Comforted on the one hand to be surrounded
in the warmth and hubbub of familiar faces and
voices of the early-evening crowd, and yet starting
every time the front door opened. She wanted it to be
Delaney coming through that door but was terrified
of the notion that it would be Paul Archer walking in
instead. She didn't know what made her suggest this
pub to Delaney. She wasn't thinking straight. Hadn't
been since she had woken up this morning to find
that man in her bed. She took a sip at her Bloody
Mary. Cautiously. She had no intentions of getting
hammered again tonight; besides, she was pregnant.
God knows what she was going to do about that.
And maybe she hadn't been raped. Maybe she was
blowing things all out of proportion. She certainly
had drunk a lot last night, maybe they had gone back
to her flat, got paralytic and just passed out in bed.
But if that was the case, why couldn't she remember
any of it?

She looked at her watch again. Where the bloody
hell was Jack Delaney? It had taken all her nerve to
call him in the first place and if he stood her up now,
leaving her alone at the bar like a jilted teenager, she
would kill him. She downed her Bloody Mary and
gestured at the barman for another. After all, two
wouldn't hurt. Would they?

The ambulance pulled away from the kerb and drove
slowly down Greek Street towards Shaftesbury
Avenue. It had no need for sirens and lights. The
police cars that had cordoned off the area, blocking
traffic from Soho Square, Bateman Street and
Manette Street, pulled away too. Nothing to see here
either. Not any more, at least. Delaney leaned back
against the painted glass of the porno bookshop and
put a cigarette in his mouth. He held the packet out
to Skinner who shook his head then lit the cigarette
with a lazy scrape of a match.

He inhaled deeply and looked up at the night sky.
It was like a carmine canvas that an artist had
dragged thick, soot-stained fingers across. Like the
black fingers of blood that had crept along the
cobbles where Derek Watters had been murdered. He
exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked back at
his colleague.

'Definitely not an accident?'

Jimmy Skinner shook his head.

'Professional hit?'

'I'd say so. The guy didn't have a chance. Walking
along the street when suddenly out of nowhere . . .
Bang!' Skinner slapped one hand hard against the
other.

Delaney took another thoughtful drag on his
cigarette. 'And that was all he said. The one word.'

'Yeah. "Murder." Hardly the most insightful final
utterance, seeing as I had just watched him being
splattered halfway up Greek Street.'

'What's going on, Jimmy?'

Skinner shrugged drily. 'Looks like somebody
doesn't want anyone talking to you.'

Delaney nodded in agreement. 'Looks like.'

'I'd watch your back, if I were you, Jack.
Somebody going to all this trouble, easier maybe to
just take you out.'

A cloud cleared the moon, throwing for a moment
a spill of yellow light that reflected in the black orbs
of Delaney's eye.

He threw his cigarette on to the road, the sparks
flaring briefly then dying out as he crushed it under
heel. 'Maybe.'

Kate sipped on her third or fourth drink. She wasn't
drunk, just couldn't remember how many she had
had. Time passes in a different way when you're lost
in thought. No matter what Einstein said, some
things aren't relative. She tasted the fluid in her
mouth, thin and liquid and she realised that all she
was drinking was melted ice, any vodka in the glass
long since gone. She rattled the glass and held it out
to the barman, who refilled it and added the drink to
her tab. She swirled it in her hand, watching the
splash of red wine, which the Holly Bush always
added to a Bloody Mary, spin like a star system in a
universe of its own. Like a black hole. Like the eye of
Sauron.

Some time later she looked at the oak-framed
mirror above the bar and could see the front door to
the pub opening and a man with curly dark hair
entering and her heart pounded suddenly in her chest
and she struggled to breathe. She knew the symptoms.
It was a panic attack. And being the doctor
that she was, Kate knew that sometimes panic was
absolutely the appropriate response.

A single, skeletal leaf was cartwheeling along the
road. It was a dry, brittle, frail thing and it came to
rest, finally, in the damp gutter that was already
clogged with the decomposing corpses of leaves from
the semi-denuded trees that lined the street. A street
of wealthy people, whose lives behind the closed oak
doors and wrought-iron gates were consumed with
problems other than mortgages and council tax or
the National Health Service. This was a street of
financiers, of publishers, of authors and literary
agents, of property developers and quantity surveyors,
of Harley Street doctors and surgeons . . . and
of a forensic pathologist who had, just that very day,
sickened of death, and handed in her notice. The man
in a car across the road from her house didn't know
that, however, and it wouldn't have made any
difference if he had. Her job, after all, had brought
her to his attention in the first place.

He looked down at the pointed toe of his cowboy
boot as it rested on the accelerator pedal and was
glad he had gone for the snakeskin rather than the
leather option. He could relate to snakes. The ability
to move silently and unseen. The ability to shed one's
skin. The ability to bare one's teeth and terrify. He
smiled to himself humourlessly, and the light from
the watching moon lent his teeth a cast the colour of
old ivory. He looked across once more at the empty
house and waited.

Hunters knew how to wait after all.

Jennifer Cole looked at the images on her Macbook
laptop with professional detachment. A woman in a
corset wearing old-fashioned seamed stockings and
posing like a Vargas pin-up come to life. She was a
full breasted woman in her late twenties, her bee-stung
lips painted red with a hint of purple, the tip of
her tongue visible and wet with promise, the pupils in
her dark painted eyes wide with desire. She wasn't
making love to the camera, she was fucking it.
Jennifer flicked through the next pictures, some in
uniform, some topless, some in elegant lingerie from
Agent Provocateur. The burlesque look was very
popular at the moment. A hint of goth, a hint of forbidden
pleasure. Pain and pleasure, sugar and spice.
She spent a lot of money on her lingerie and the
photos that she used to update her webpage at least
once a month. She probably didn't have to do it so
often, but the truth was she enjoyed the ritual of it.
The costumery and the perfumes, the candlelight and
the moonlight. The black and red satin sheets. The
artistry.

It had been a long time since Jennifer Cole had
needed the money she made from her services. She
had got into it, as most did, from need. But that
need had passed. She was selective now too. She
didn't work every night and was extremely choosy
about her clients. After all, that was the main thrill
for her, the power she felt. She didn't feel degraded
or used, just the opposite. It was her decision, her
choice to make. And it was never something she
regretted. She knew about the human body, how it
functioned, how it was put together, what parts
needed maintenance. Sex was just part of that. And
it was fun.

She flicked forward to the last of the images. She
was wearing a long fur coat that she had bought on
a cruise trip to the Norwegian fjords one year. The
real thing, never mind the paint-throwing hypocrites
with their leather belts and shoes. It was mink, thick
and luxurious. Her hair was piled high on her head
with silver threads adorning and confining it. She
wore silver boots with high platform soles and heels.
The coat was open, her breasts jutting with the pride
of the goddess Diana, her sex cupped in the
sculptured, rounded vee of a silk thong, and in her
right hand a long, silver-handled riding crop.

Her small silver mobile phone rang and she
answered it slowly, patting her hair as she looked at
herself in the mirror. Her pupils widened as she
licked her lips and purred.

'Hello. How may I help you?'

If she'd been a cream cake, she would have eaten
herself.

'Angelina. It's me.'

Angelina, her stage name as she liked to think of
it, had been taken from an early American feminist
hero of hers, Angelina Grimké, and not, as some
had assumed, after the famous actress. She looked at
the photo of herself holding a crop and thought it
must have been an omen of sorts that he should
have called just then. 'Hello, bad boy. How have
you been?'

There was a pause, then his voice, husky with
desire. 'I don't think Santa is going to have me on his
nice list this Christmas.'

'You've been naughty?'

The voice on the other end was breathy. 'Ooh,
yeah.'

She could hear the need. 'I hope you're not being
naughty right now?'

'Not just yet.'

'You want to come and confess to a superior
mother?'

'Not today.'

'Oh?'

'I want you to come to me.'

'It's going to cost more.'

'I don't mind paying. Bad men pay for their sins,
don't they? Sooner or later we all pay.'

'If they know what's good for them.'

'I know what's good for me.'

Jennifer Cole had only met the man recently. He
had visited her a couple of times at her flat in Chalk
Farm but she recognised the soft burr in his voice and
knew one thing for sure: he was good-looking with
kinky tastes. Just her kind of man. She didn't do this
to pay the rent, after all.

'Where do you want to meet?'

'I thought we could go for a drink first.'

'It's your dollar, babe. You spend it how you
want.'

'That's what I want.'

'Where?'

'Camden?'

'Sure. Tell me when and where.' She listened then
hung up the phone and looked at her picture on her
laptop again. Only the hair colour was wrong. Her
midnight cowboy liked brunettes. She picked a wig
off a stand and slipped it over her head. She stood up
and picked up the long riding crop from one of her
bedside cabinets and gave it a swishing flex in the air.
She slammed the crop down hard on the bed with a
satisfying thud and smiled. Christmas was coming
early to Camden.

Hampstead was huddled against the weather. The
scudding clouds had taken on weight and mass now,
and although the wind still blew at a constant rate
the swollen sky above was black and unbroken. The
air was cold and threaded with moisture. Delaney
looked up at the night sky, the moon now hidden
behind the low wall of cloud that hung over the
spread city like a biblical judgement. It shouldn't be
so dark this early at this time of year, he thought as
he looked at the entrance to the pub, deliberated for
a second or two and then tapped a cigarette from a
crumpled packet into his hand and searched through
his pockets for his matches. The scent of the perfume
Opium suddenly filled his nostrils and he realised a
woman had come up to stand beside him. She was in
her late twenties in a fake-fur coat and was holding a
lighter out to him. Delaney was taken aback for a
moment then leaned forward so she could light his
cigarette.