I just had to breathe, so I let the air out through my mouth as quietly as I could and took another deep breath in.
I wished I could see what was happening in the shop. After a few seconds I heard the door close, ringing the bell once again, but was the gunman on the inside or the outside?
Mr. Patel stood stock-still above me, giving me no indication either way.
“He has gone outside,” he said finally without changing his position.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“He is standing and looking round,” Mr. Patel said. “Who is he and why is he chasing you? Are you a criminal?”
“No,” I said, “I am not.”
I remembered the phone under my arm. The operator had obviously got fed up waiting and had hung up. I dialed 999 again.
“Emergency, which service?” said a voice again.
“Police,” I said.
“Police Incident Room, go ahead,” said another voice.
“There’s an armed gunman in the street on Regent’s Park Road in Finchley,” I said quickly.
Mr. Patel looked down at me.
“Mr. Patel,” I said urgently, “please do not look down. The man might see you and come back into the shop.”
“What number Regent’s Park Road?” said the voice on the phone.
“Near the corner of Lichfield Grove,” I said. “Please hurry.”
“Your name, sir?” said the voice.
“Foxton,” I said into the phone. “Mr. Patel, what is the man doing now?”
“He is walking away. No. He has stopped. He is looking back. Oh, goodness gracious, he is coming back this way.”
Mr. Patel leaned down, grabbed some keys from a hook under the counter and walked out of my sight.
“What are you doing?” I called after him urgently.
“Locking the door,” he said.
I didn’t have time to think whether it was a good idea or not before I heard Mr. Patel turn the key in the lock. Now the gunman would be sure where I was. And I could hear the door being shaken.
“Mr. Patel,” I shouted, “get away from the door. The man has a gun.”
“It is all right, Mr. Foxton,” he said with a laugh. “It is not him shaking the door, it is me. The man has gone past. I cannot see him anymore.”
It didn’t mean he wasn’t there so I stayed exactly where I was. My heart rate may have come down a few notches, but, as far as I was concerned, it was still no laughing matter.
“Now, Mr. Foxton, why is a man with a gun chasing you? It is like a film, no?”
“No,” I said. “This was very real life. He was trying to kill me.”
“But why?” he said.
It was a good question. A very good question.
I remained sitting on the floor behind Mr. Patel’s counter until the police arrived. It took them nearly forty minutes, and I had telephoned 999 again twice more, before two heavily armed and body-armored officers finally made an appearance at the shop door. Mr. Patel let them in.
“About time too,” I said, standing up from my hiding place.
“Mr. Foxton?” one of the officers asked, his machine pistol held at the ready position with his finger over the trigger.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s me.”
“Are you armed, sir?”
“No,” I said.
“Please put your hands on your head,” he said, pointing his gun towards me.
“It’s not me who’s the gunman,” I said, slightly irritated. “It was the man who was chasing me.”
“Put your hands on your head,” the policeman repeated with a degree of menace. “And you, sir,” he said, pointing his gun briefly towards Mr. Patel.
We both put our hands on our heads. Mr. Patel smiled broadly as if he thought the whole thing was a huge joke.
The second officer came forward and searched me, making sure he didn’t get between my chest and the muzzle of his colleague’s weapon. He then did likewise to Mr. Patel. Then he went through the shop and out of sight through a plastic curtain into the room behind. He soon reappeared, shaking his head. Only then did they relax a little.
“Sorry about that, sir,” said the first officer, securing his gun across his chest with a strap. “We can’t be too careful.”
I put my arms down. “What took you so long to get here?”
“We had to seal off the whole area,” he said. “Standard practice when there’s a report of a gunman.” He put his finger to his ear, clearly listening to someone on his radio earpiece. “Now, sir,” he said to me, “my superintendent wants to know if you have a description of this gunman.” His tone suggested that he didn’t altogether believe that a gunman had been stalking the streets of Finchley on a sleepy Tuesday afternoon in late April.
“I think I may have better than that,” I said. “Mr. Patel, does your closed-circuit TV system have a recorder?” I had passed some of my time waiting for the police by looking up at the small white video camera situated above the racks of cigarettes.
“Of course,” Mr. Patel replied. “I need to have it to catch the young scoundrels who steal my stock.”
“Then, officer,” I said. “please would you kindly inform Detective Chief Inspector Tomlinson of the Merseyside Police that we have the murderer of Herb Kovak caught on video.”
But how had he known where to find me? And why?
12
In the end, it was I who rang Chief Inspector Tomlinson, but not before the Armed Response Team had completed a full debriefing of the events in Finchley.
“So you say you saw a man standing outside your front door?” asked the response team superintendent as we stood in Mr. Patel’s shop.
“Yes,” I said. “He was ringing the doorbell.”
“And he had a gun?”
“Yes,” I said again, “with a silencer.”
There was something about his demeanor that said that he too didn’t really believe me. Mr. Patel hadn’t seen any gun nor, it seemed, had anyone else.
“He shot at me,” I said. “As I ran up Lichfield Grove. He shot at least twice. I heard the bullets whizz past my head.”
A team was dispatched to search and in due course one of them returned with two brass empty cases in a plastic bag.
Suddenly, everything became more serious. They believed me now.
“You will have to come to the police station,” said the superintendent. “To give a statement.”
“Can’t I do it here?” I asked.
“I need to reopen my shop,” said Mr. Patel anxiously.
“At my house, then?” I asked. “I need to get back to University College Hospital. My girlfriend had an operation this morning and she’s expecting me.”
Reluctantly the superintendent agreed to do it at my house, and we walked down Lichfield Grove together. The road had been closed to traffic, and about a dozen police officers in dark blue coveralls were moving up the road in line abreast, crawling on all fours.
“Looking for the bullets,” the superintendent informed me before I asked. “Don’t touch the door,” he said as we arrived at my house, “or the doorbell.”
I carefully opened the door with my key, and we went into the kitchen.
“Now, Mr. Foxton,” the superintendent said formally, “tell me why a gunman would come calling at your front door.”
It was the question I’d been asking myself for the past hour.
“I’m sure he was here to kill me,” I said.
“That’s very dramatic. Why?”
Why, indeed, when he could have done it so easily at Aintree at the same time as he killed Herb. What, I wondered, had changed in the intervening ten days that meant that I needed to be killed now but hadn’t needed to be then?
I told the superintendent all about the murder at the Grand National, and it was then that I again suggested calling DCI Tomlinson.
“My goodness, Mr. Foxton,” the chief inspector said with a laugh. “You seem to be making a habit of being interviewed by the police.”
“I can assure you it’s a habit I intend to give up at the earliest opportunity,” I replied.