Dillon finally fell into bed at 3 a.m. It was a seedy boarding house near Piccadilly, and he wasn’t planning on staying there for more than a night or two. Other than what he was wearing, he had no clothes. It had been one hell of a day! He fell asleep the instant his head hit the pillow. His last thoughts were that it smelt damp and a little musty.
Dillon woke as soon as it was light. After showering, he felt a lot more alive than he did hours before. He skipped breakfast at the boarding house and instead went to a small café near the London Eye, owned by an old friend of LJ’s. He ate a full English breakfast with two rashers of bacon, two eggs, two sausages, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, button mushrooms and two pieces of traditional black pudding. He washed it down with a mug of steaming hot tea, with toast and jam to finish.
It was too soon to go back to his apartment, so he decided to take a chance on returning to Max Quinn, conscious of the risk factor involved for both Max and himself.
Max had worked long into the night. Like most good professionals, once the job was under way he couldn’t stop until he’d seen it through to the end. Dillon studied the identity card with a magnifying glass: Investigator Robert King; a work of art.
“What about the Monet?” asked Max, as Dillon was about to go out the door.
“Keep it safe for me until I call back for it.”
“Thanks, Max; you’ve done a great job.”
He left that area of the city as fast as he could. The address Havelock had sent to him in a text message was in East London. The street was behind an ugly block of flats that, since being built in the late nineteen sixties, had steadily fallen beyond being a run-down slum, and was now a dark and dangerous ghetto.
The street was short, comprising terraced houses from beginning to end. He found number fourteen, and noticed an old Vauxhall Vectra parked almost directly in front of the house. The registration number matched the one the old lady had written down. He rapped hard with his clenched fist on the weathered front door, but heard nothing from inside. He knocked loudly again on the flaking paintwork.
The curtains twitched in the front room, but nobody came. Dillon hammered on the door; his intention was to make so much noise that the whole street would hear if it was not opened.
From somewhere inside, a man’s voice shouted angrily at Dillon.
“What the hell are you playing at, you piece of shit? You’ll break the bloody door down!”
A moment later, the door was opened and a man stood there in open-neck shirt, black trousers, and highly polished leather shoes. He was big and thick-set, well-muscled, somewhere in his early fifties.
“I was just taking a leak. What do want?”
“Are you the owner of that car?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Well, I do. You see, I’ve just hit the side of it and I thought I’d do the right thing and come and tell the owner. But if you’re not the owner…” Dillon left the words hanging.
“What, you’ve hit my car?”
The big man went to step forward, Dillon was anticipating that would be his reaction and taking him by surprise, barged him back through the doorway. Using the heel of his shoe, he slammed the door closed. The big man took a wild punch at Dillon’s head, which he easily moved away from and countered with a hard punch to the man’s nose. Blood instantaneously started to pour down over his stubble chin and onto the white shirt.
“Who the hell are you, and what do you want?”
“Get this and get it the first time: I ask the questions. All that you have to do is answer them, right?”
“Piss off, or I’ll rip your head off and flush it down the toilet.”
In the time it takes a cobra to strike, Dillon’s flattened palm made contact with the left side of his head. The big man immediately started to scream. The instantaneous pain from the perforated ear drum was excruciating and all he could do was hold his flattened hand against the already-swollen flesh and hop around in circles.
“Now that I’ve got your undivided attention, that car of yours was seen outside an apartment building near the embankment and then again later outside a house on the other side of the river. On the first occasion, you were spotted, at the very same time, a man was brutally beaten in one of the apartments. On the second where a young prostitute was found murdered. Coincidence or just amateurish bad luck that you were spotted?”
The hard eyes went blank.
“Someone nicked it last night. I only found it this morning just round the corner from here. Must have been those bloody joy riders again, happens all the time.”
He’d produced a white handkerchief and was now holding that against his throbbing ear.
Unimpressed, Dillon said, “Let’s go and sit down in the front room.”
They went into the small room. Some trophies lined the mantelpiece, one of a boxer on a highly polished wooden plinth. It was quite a pleasant room. Dillon motioned for the big man to sit on a chair by the window.
“Is your wife in?”
“I’m divorced. My girlfriend’s at work.”
“Why am I not surprised that you’re divorced. After all, I doubt if you’ve done an honest day’s work in the entirety of your miserable life. Your girlfriend brings home the bacon, whilst you sit around with your feet up all day. Nice.”
“You’re asking for trouble, mate.”
“So there’s no one else in at the moment?”
“And no witnesses to see you get done over either.”
Dillon took his time gazing around the room, letting the silence and the tension build up; there is nothing more unnerving if someone has something to hide. He walked round the room, peering at this and that on shelves and in glass-fronted cabinets.
“So don’t you want to know who I am anymore, Bull-Dog?” Dillon asked suddenly, taking the man whose name was Alf ‘Bull-Dog’ Fletcher, by surprise.
“I know who you are, you crazy bastard. Why don’t you do the human race a favour? Top yourself.”
“I’m impressed that you’re able to string a sentence like that together, Bull-Dog. But I’m afraid I can’t do that. Look, I’m going to make this a little easier for you.”
Dillon pulled out the Glock from its shoulder holster and quickly screwed the silencer in place.
“You think that’s going to scare me into blabbing, do you?”
“Oh, it’s not to scare you with, Bull-Dog. It’s most definitely to kill you with.” Dillon shrugged nonchalantly at the other man.
“Get stuffed. Look, I’m still none the wiser as to why you’re bothering me with all of this. You’ve quite obviously got the wrong car and person.”
“You know exactly what this is all about and I definitely haven’t got the wrong person. You and your buddy beat somebody up yesterday. Drove across the river and murdered an innocent young prostitute, leaving her to be found on a bed in a house I was staying in. You were seen with this other man entering and then leaving both properties.”
Dillon lied easily about the safe-house murder just to see what reaction he got from him.
Dillon stood by the mantelpiece and using the silenced barrel of the Glock, slowly swept the heavy trophies off; each one landed with a heavy thud on to the carpeted floor. Bull-Dog reacted angrily, went to stand up only to be met with a pistol whipping across the side of his face. Blood immediately flowed freely from the long gash.
“The thing is this, Bull-Dog: I can carry on working you over for as long as it takes and you blackout, or you can simply tell me what I want to know and I’ll leave without any further nastiness. Oh, there is a third option. I can call a friend of mine who just happens to be a Detective Chief Inspector in the serious crime unit.