But why have I been targeted? It's the one question that keeps cropping up. Slowly but surely, I'm beginning to think it must be something to do with my past, something that happened in my army days. The presence in London of Eddie Cosick, the man I used to know as Colonel Stanic, and the fact that he seems to be the man Iain Ferrie, a former colleague, was blackmailing, makes it too much of a coincidence to be otherwise. The problem is, this still doesn't help me because I didn't really know either man, and therefore have no idea why they would have chosen to involve me in their business deal.
I wonder about Alannah. She claimed to be a Serbian policewoman looking for her sister. She even showed me a photograph of her, and seemed genuinely concerned. Yet it looks certain that she betrayed me to the police, first at her house, then at Cosick's place. They can't have been responding to my 999 call. It was too fast. I know Lucas didn't call them, and I didn't. That only leaves her. She must have been there. Watching the place. Working with someone to set me up.
A thought strikes me then. There is still a main player out there, someone else involved in this. This person wanted the briefcase, and it looks like he now has it. So maybe it was him, not Cosick, who was being blackmailed. For some reason he wanted Cosick dead, but, more importantly, he wants to keep me alive. And there can only be one reason for that: so that I carry the can for everything that's happened today.
Alannah must be working for the main player. It's why she rescued me from the brothel. It's why she tried to get me to go to Cosick's place, knowing that the police would arrest me there. It's why, when I didn't bite, she called them to her house.
According to Ferrie, the person he was blackmailing hired a mysterious contract killer known as the Vampire to secure the briefcase. This Vampire must have been at the brothel today, and Marco and MAC-10 man must have delivered the briefcase to him there. He must then have discovered the tracking device, and guessed that someone had followed and was probably close by. In a remarkable show of brazenness, he'd then tracked Snowy down, and finished him off in his customary fashion.
But then, when I spoke to Alannah, she told me she'd not seen any strangers at the brothel. She might easily have been lying, but what if she wasn't?
I try to recall what both Ferrie and Lucas said about the Maxwell and Spann murders. The Vampire got past the security cameras and caught three men, including two highly trained bodyguards, completely off guard. Just like Cosick and his men were caught off guard tonight. Ferrie spoke about him with awe. A shadowy killer who leaves no trail, as if he's invisible.
But maybe everyone's looking at this the wrong way. What if the Vampire managed to get close to his victims because there was something about him that made them let their guard down, that made them think he wasn't dangerous, that made detectives scouring any CCTV footage discount him out of hand? In other words, what if he wasn't a 'he' at all? What if 'he' was a 'she'? An attractive young woman with blonde hair and golden skin, who looked the very antithesis of everyone's idea of a contract killer?
So, no, Alannah wasn't lying about not seeing the Vampire back at the brothel.
She wasn't lying because she is the Vampire.
35
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced I'm right about Alannah. But that leaves me no further forward. I still have a mountain to climb in terms of convincing the police of my innocence, and, if anything, it's now got a little bit higher.
There are, however, two factors running in my favour. Firstly, I am actually innocent, and I hope that that's going to count for something. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, I have secured extremely good legal representation in the form of my ex-wife, Adine.
I first met Adine at something most law-abiding citizens won't ever have come across. It's called an acquittal party, which is exactly what it says it is. It was four years back. A guy from our old unit named Harry Foxley had just been found not guilty of GBH for his part in a fight that had left two men seriously injured, one of them with a fractured skull.
To be fair, it wasn't Harry's fault. He was walking home from a friend's house late one night when a gang of about half a dozen drunken teenagers decided to pick a fight with him. Harry's only a little guy, barely five seven, and I suppose in the dim light, and from their position across the road, he must have made a tempting target. They started throwing abuse at him, and when he ignored them and carried on walking, they took this as a sign of cowardice. Hyped up with bravado and booze, they crossed the road and began following him, still keeping up the steady stream of abuse.
It was a very bad move. Some of the hardest people I've ever met have been little guys, and Harry's no exception. He has the lean, wiry build of a champion flyweight, and there isn't an ounce of fat or spare flesh on him. At least there wasn't then. Things may have changed, although somehow I doubt it. He smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish but possessed reserves of stamina that would put most men to shame. He was the battalion's arm-wrestling champion three years running, beating men twice his size, and although he wasn't the kind of man to look for trouble, he wasn't the sort to shirk it either. So when his tormentors had worked themselves up sufficiently to launch an attack, they got one hell of a lot more than they bargained for.
Harry knocked the leader out with a single left hook, then went charging into the others, fists flying, spreading immediate panic among their number as they realized belatedly that this was going to be no walkover. One made the mistake of pulling a knife. Harry broke his wrist, then his jaw, before slamming him head-first into a brick wall. The others ran for it.
Unfortunately, the first guy he'd punched cracked his skull as he hit the pavement and spent the next six weeks in a coma, and it was alleged by one of the gang that Harry had kicked him while he lay on the ground unconscious, which is something I know he wouldn't have done.
The police, though, took a different view. Harry was one of the five men from our unit court-martialled and imprisoned for their part in the revenge attack at the pub in Crossmaglen, and he'd only just come off parole, so their decision to charge him with two counts of GBH may well have been coloured by what they perceived as his history of violent behaviour.
I didn't attend the trial, but it lasted more than a week, and I know from what I read and heard that the prosecution lawyers attempted a serious character assassination on Harry, dredging up the worst aspects of his past to bolster their arguments. However, both they and the police should have realized that in these violent days in which we live, juries tend to sympathize with individuals who are the victims of un-provoked gang attacks, and feel that they should have the right to fight back, even if the damage they inflict is pretty serious. So it was no real surprise to anyone with an ounce of common sense that Harry was acquitted on both charges.
The story, then, had a happy ending, and a party was held in a pub in the West End to celebrate. I was on leave at the time and was back in London. I can't remember now who called to tell me about it, but I ended up going anyway. I hadn't seen the guys for a long time so I thought it would be nice to catch up.
When I got there, the place was packed. Harry was holding court to a crowd at the bar where he was giving a blow-by-blow account of the events of the fateful night and looking none the worse for his ordeal. There were quite a few faces from the past, including, as I recall, Maxwell and Spann, but it was a dark-haired woman about my age, wearing a two-piece business suit and thick-rimmed black glasses, who caught my attention. She was slim and very pale-skinned, with a look you might call severely pretty, like one of those sexy secretaries who can suddenly transform themselves into a completely different woman with a quick flick of the hair and a dumping of the specs. She was standing on the periphery, nursing a glass of white wine in both hands, and looking out of place amid the revelry as she spoke with Maxwell, who'd never been one of the world's great conversationalists. I joined them and introduced myself, and pretty soon Maxwell melted away and it was just her and me.