The Sweeney 03 Page 4

  His pace quickened, but not too noticeably. He played the game casually, stopped for a second to buy an Evening Standard from a news stand, paused a second to read the headlines. He headed across the road, out in front of a darting Lotus and earned its horn, crossed Carlisle Place and headed into the giant wind tunnel entrance of Victoria Station. He appeared to drop his paper, grabbed it, took a look. The white Mercedes had braked on the corner of Vauxhall Bridge Road. The passenger in the car was out and sprinting towards him. Regan stepped out of the crush of people and into the first of the six entrance hallways to the main concourse. Then suddenly he was running. And everybody seemed to be getting in his way, and his elbows came out and he had to shove himself through English outrage.

  The whole process of moving in the number one east concourse door, hurtling through the protecting crowd, and out the furthest door three hundred yards away at the cab rank, took less than fifteen seconds. Regan shoved his warrant card under the nose of a grey-haired business man who was about to step into the first cab in the rank. Behind the man stood a long queue of commuters.

  ‘Police,’ Regan shouted loud in his face. ‘I need this cab.’

  The startled man stepped back.

  Regan jumped into the cab. ‘Police.’ He showed his warrant to the cabby. ‘Do as I tell you. Head down Buck Palace Road, left into Terminus Place, then up Wilton Road...’

  ‘Terminus Place is one-way, officer.’

  ‘Do it...’

  ‘What about insurance...? What about an accident?...’

  ‘Do it.’

  Regan by now had dropped to the floor of the cab. He edged himself up to look over the door as the cabman reluctantly moved the cab forward. No sign of the man who had run from the Mercedes.

  The progress from Buckingham Palace Road into the one-way Terminus Place was accompanied by a battery of motor horns and curses from his driver and from other road users hanging out of their cars, expressing how he was the wrong way up a one-way street. ‘Pull in here,’ Regan shouted through the noise.

  The cabman gratefully pulled into the kerb.

  ‘Edge along to the corner.’

  The driver slowly trailed the cab along to the corner. Regan looked carefully through the window across the street to the top of Wilton Road. The Mercedes was still there, its driver at the wheel.

  ‘See that white Merc across there?’ Regan asked the cabby.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’ll move off in a minute. You follow it.’

  ‘Could I bang the meter on, old man?... like I’m not a fucking charity,’ the cabman announced.

  ‘Do that, son. You do that.’

  The cabman pressed the lever down and the meter started ticking.

  ‘There you go,’ Regan said quietly. ‘When he gets in with the other one, get on after them.’

  The man who had followed Regan into the station was not sprinting now, though he did pace fast and direct across the stream of traffic to reach the parked Mercedes. The Mercedes’ driver powered down his window. There followed a short chat with a lot of shrugging shoulders and waving hands, and then the guy climbed into the back seat, as if he was used to being chauffeur-driven. Then the big car moved forward.

  The cabman revved his diesel and headed out through a gap in the traffic to follow the Merc down Buckingham Palace Road.

  ‘This is like bloody Kojak or somethin’...’ he informed Regan.

  ‘Fuck Kojak,’ Regan observed.

  The Merc driver knew his London traffic and carved his section of the road neatly from under the noses of the hundreds of other drivers heading north for the suburbs.

  The Mercedes was not going far. Through Pimlico, up Sloane Street, through the Park and north for ten minutes.

  Regan commanded the cabman to pull into the kerb and halt. He paid him the fare, £1.05, and 10p tip which was not over-generous. And he didn’t get out of the cab immediately. He was crouched down looking out into the rain, debating. The Merc had turned in and parked in front of the slope-sided building. The destination of the two men in the white car had been the Wellington Clinic.

  Regan flipped through the possibilities. The cabman had turned and was looking at him coldly. ‘You staying here long mate?’

  Regan climbed out and slammed the door. He put the umbrella up. He started to walk the hundred yards to the Clinic building. The cab took off, the cabman letting out some obscurantist obscenity drowned out by the vehicle’s noise and muffled by rain.

  Regan headed for the entrance of the Clinic in Wellington Place. He started into the side street, was about to cross and pass between the stone gate posts and into the building, when suddenly the two guys from the Mercedes slipped out of the Reception double doors and made for the white car. They either didn’t see him or pretended not to. They appeared to be deep in a heated conversation. Regan quickly lowered the umbrella to obscure his face and changed direction down Wellington Place.

  There were half a dozen people in the street, coming or going from the Clinic, but no cars. He heard the Mercedes start and revv thirty yards behind him as he headed down the pavement. He quickened his pace. The side street was less than a hundred yards long, was in fact L-shaped. He passed a maroon Jaguar parked at the kerb. There was a chauffeur sitting in it, reading a morning paper through dark glasses. Regan reached the bottom of Wellington Place and turned right into Cavendish Avenue.

  Cavendish Avenue, round from the Wellington Clinic, is a wide street containing some of the finest houses in London. One of these, half way down, belongs to one of the Beatles. Their kind of bread put people in Cavendish Avenue, installed them in privilege and silence in a fine backwater, with well swept roads planted in cherry blossoms now beginning to burst under the cold spring rain. Regan walked over the first pink droppings, his pace quickening now. He wasn’t quite sure of the geography of this immediate network of roads, but felt his best move would be to circle the block and return to the entrance of the Wellington. By which time the Mercedes would probably be gone. He would have lost the Mercedes but he would be at least one move forward on the chess board. Those guys must have gone back to the Clinic for a reason.

  He was about fifty yards down Cavendish Avenue when he heard the howl of engines followed by the high-pitched screams of tyres. The two cars came lurching round the corner from Wellington Place. The Jaguar, which Regan had walked past and which had contained the chauffeur studying the morning paper, was in the lead. The white Mercedes was less than two yards behind. Both cars took the corner at over seventy, swerved on the loose-grit road, painting abstracts of black lines on it. Then they accelerated like the furies of Hell were after them, and both bore down on Regan.

  He ran. His feet pounding, fists bunched into his chest, squeezing out the energy, ran, hemmed in on one side of the pavement by the intransigent walls of the wealthy, built to keep intruders out, including those like Regan about to be swatted to death. This was exactly what was about to happen. That he was sure of. The Jaguar was coming for him. It had mounted the pavement a hundred yards away, torn a young ten foot cherry tree out by the roots and now had a clear run in on its real target. Two and a half tons of Jaguar motor was screaming and slewing down the pavement to wipe him flat. What he couldn’t be sure of as he tried to cover the last twenty yards to the garden door of the next house, which had a low wall which he might possibly be able to throw himself over, what he didn’t know was the role of the white Mercedes. His lungs were tearing but he was not going to make it. He slowed almost as it he felt he should bunch his body for the impact. He heard the car behind him. He heard the crack of semi-automatic fire, followed by the scream of the tyres of one of the cars suddenly altering course, then – the Jaguar hit him, and he hit the wall, and he felt his hands, which were supposed to protect his face and head, scrape off most of their surface skin on the brick wall, then his head connected with the bricks, and he was down and in semi-consciousness.

  He was kneeling, feeling the blood on his hands and his
face – but it wasn’t minutes after the impact, it was five seconds after the Jaguar had hit him, that he knelt there in Cavendish Avenue watching the two receding cars race away, unaccountably leaving him his life intact. He could see the gun in the hands of the passenger in the Mercedes. The guy was trying to fire into the Jaguar. The Jaguar was well and truly ahead now and disappearing round a left bend into Circus Road. The Mercedes hit a lamp post with a noise like an earthquake, sliced it off, and catapulted it in parts across the road. The Mercedes driver had tried to manoeuvre the car at an acute angle to the Jaguar so that the Mercedes passenger could get his rifle out of the window and pump shells into the maroon car. He’d partly succeeded. The Jaguar had dodged the fusillade of automatic shells and in doing so had only clipped Regan instead of hitting him full on. But the Merc driver had partly failed. In making the manoeuvre the car had gone out of control, sliced across the surface of the macadam, wrecked the lamp post before thundering off in further pursuit of the maroon Jaguar.

  Regan knelt on the pavement and watched his two palms fill with blood. He knelt to get his wind back, to still the pacing madness of his heart, to close his eyes for one second and commit to memory the Jaguar driver’s face, what he could visualise of it, and the registration number of his car. He would remember that. He knelt, holding his hands up, waiting for the shock aftermath to come and shake his body like a leaf. The pain in his hands came in pounding pulses. He held the palms of his wounded hands upwards, like another cruxified innocent. The rain water pattered into his palms, diluting the blood into little streams that fell to the pavement.

  The apartment had been professionally turned over. That is, real finesse had been shown in ripping the place apart, careful value judgements had been made of the same sort he would have made. The bastards who’d done it must have brought their own tools. They knew, like Regan knew, that it is not that easy to completely cut open two mattresses, unscrew the rear of the tv set. They must have brought a lino knife, screwdriver, neither of which Regan had in his flat. They had also taken up the wall to wall carpet in his bedroom, gone through his one hundred paperbacks, throwing the lot all over the floor. They’d looked inside his electric kettle, percolator, toilet cistern. They had also kicked in about £40 worth of Japanese Imari pot which had served as an umbrella stand in the hall. Regan reckoned they did this because they didn’t find what they were after. He was not disturbed by the loss of the Imari. He figured he might have ended up kicking it in from frustration, because there was absolutely no way he was going to work out what the fuck they wanted, and who the visitors were.

  He put on the kettle for some tea, changed his mind and painfully poured a scotch. The source of his pain, his hands, now swaddled like the Egyptian mummifiers had started on his body when their union called a quick strike. He had come from the run-in with the Jag, back to his flat in Hammersmith via St. George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, where a nice Paki MD did a fair job on his hand dressings and put some awesome disinfectant on his head grazes.

  He looked at the mess of the room, changed his mind again and made the large scotch a larger scotch, then sat down on the arm of a chair.

  The flat had been left to him by his mother. She’d died there years back. It was not as if Regan had left it exactly as it was out of blessed memory to her; he was just not somebody who bothered about the material comforts more than a roof over the pate, a gas ring for morning coffee, and a comfortable bed for intercrural activities. Also the mum had bequeathed a Spanish cleaner with the flat, a lady of many talents, not including familiarity with the English language, but she kept the place clean, washed his shirts, always had a pint of freshish milk in the fridge, bar of soap in the bath, paper in the bog, and finally, blessings abounding, he never saw her. He left her money out every Friday morning, and it was gone when he got home pm. The last time he’d seen her was at his mother’s funeral at Hendon cemetery. Regan reckoned that if he met her once she’d resign – otherwise she was stuck with this bloody job because she couldn’t ask for her cards from someone who wasn’t there. He wondered what she’d think when she bowled in eleven Ack Emma tomorrow and clocked this lot.

  The scotch warmed him, found the little mental mechanism which by now was probably holding a meeting of the nerve ends and saying they must all join together in a protest, shake the bugger up for the near miss one hour ago. Regan’s body relaxed. His brain stayed fine-tuned.

  If the firm that turned over this lot actually took paperback books off the shelf and went through them, ergo and etcetera they were looking for something small enough, trim enough to be hidden in the pages of a paperback. How about a piece of paper, or a letter, he asked himself? The question was rhetorical – it had to be something like that.

  He picked up the phone and dialled Scotland Yard. He asked for Special Branch, and Herrick. The switchboard told him to wait. After thirty seconds, Herrick’s voice purred into the phone. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Regan. Listen.’ His voice was cold, sharp. ‘Somebody tried to kill me, near the Wellington Clinic. Maroon Jag MLN 405J. I won’t bother you with a description of the driver. I’ve come back to my apartment in Hammersmith. It’s been turned over. I’ve got a theory about it. I think you guys have set me up. I haven’t had any contact at all with the opposition yet. You lot, I suspect, are in some way involved in this case, may well know the opposition. I think one of your pox-ridden colleagues has given out my address with some fucking outlandish fairy story attached to it. Now I don’t mind that, if I know what the story is, but to set me up as target and not have the common courtesy to tell me from what direction the shots are coming, that’s something else...’

  Herrick interrupted acidly. ‘All double Dutch to me son...’

  ‘What’s your problem? There’s a joker in the pack. I’m going to find him. I don’t think it’s you. You’re not dumb enough to play this kind of hand. But somebody did, and I’m going to find him, and when I do I’m going to break his fucking neck...’

  Herrick may have had a reply, but Regan slammed down the phone before it got started. He didn’t want a debate. He wasn’t sure of his ground – not sure whether it was Special Branch. He was only sure of one thing, that he’d been set up for something right from the moment yesterday when the ACC had put him on their roving commission. But why set him up, and for who? And what were the stakes if they were prepared, and they obviously were, to risk his life to get results?

  It was ten past nine, the night outside moonless and misty, and still the rain. Regan followed an airport security sergeant, who had a long stride, down the walkways in the basement of Number One Terminal, London Airport, through a couple of ‘No Entry’ doors, heading for a ramp out on to an area of the runways. Regan had arrived at Heathrow at nine exactly. He had been told on reporting to Airport cid that the Boeing had landed six minutes earlier. As far as they could discover, its single passenger hadn’t left the plane.

  There was a jumble of hardware on the square mile of cement apron, Boeings, Tri-stars, taxiing around in a howl of engines that made talking impossible. The sergeant stopped a couple of times to get his bearings. Then he saw the plane and lengthened his stride again. By the time they had circumnavigated the terminal’s outbuildings, dodged the ground traffic of petrol tankers and pick-ups, and reached the Boeing, Regan was out of breath. He had experienced this once before; often, after shock, the heart is tired and it’s no time to run the hundred metres in 9.57.

  The Boeing 727 sat right on the edge of the parkway, navigation lights off, but the whole cabin blazing. The plane was painted yellow and black. There was no lettering down its sides, just the registration numbers on the tailplane.

  The landing stairs were already in position. The sergeant mounted them, with Regan following. At the top, the door to the cabin was closed. For a moment the security man looked nonplussed. Do you knock on the door of an airplane? Or use the shortwave airport lapel r/t to call the captain that visitors are waiting on the landing stairs. The security m
an tapped on the door of the jet, and looked even more put out when an Arab appeared at the window and waved him away. Regan tapped the security man on the shoulder – he knew the reason for the waving away gesture – the door would slide out a foot before hinging open. The Arab unlocked the mechanism and pushed the door open.

  The security man turned to him. ‘I’ll leave you, sir.’

  Regan nodded and stepped into the cabin.

  There were three men in view. Two, including the guy who opened the door, were the stewards, their blue robes and red fez probably some kind of uniform. The third man, drink in his hand, was standing by a leather couch across thirty feet of deep pile white carpet. He nodded to Regan as he entered. Regan nodded back.

  Regan started off across the carpet. He reckoned a very expensive interior decorator had been hired to produce a very simple effect. The regular inside of the plane, seats and overhead bag-and-coat closets, had been taken out, the shag carpet laid down, the walls and roof lined with black leather. There were five couches, three of white leather, two of black. There was a long ebony unit, running down one side of the plane. Some of its doors were open. It seemed to contain exclusively bottles of booze. There were cocktail titbits in silver salvers on the top of the black unit. There was little else except a white tv set sitting on top of a custom-made unit incorporating a VCR machine.