Mother had had a Jack Russell when he was younger. They were snappy little rat-faced yobbos that growled at him every time he returned home from boarding school and snarled every time he’d approach her for a polite hug.

  He much preferred bigger dogs. They seemed less bad-tempered. ‘Sorry about all this, old chap,’ he said gently, ruffling the spaniel’s long ears. ‘It’ll be over soon enough.’

  With that, he closed the boot and got back into the warm vehicle.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Emma.

  ‘I like dogs,’ he replied curtly. ‘Some, anyway.’ He looked at his Rolex. Another twenty minutes and he was going to call that copper back.

  ‘Bait?’ repeated Okeke. She looked at Boyd.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Jay. ‘I can be bait. For a trap. I’m up for it.’

  Boyd rubbed his bristled chin absently. A trap sounded like the start of something possible, but they had to be open-eyed about this. They were up against three or four armed men. One of them, admittedly, was nothing more than a playboy wimp with a weak bladder… but guns had a habit of levelling things up for the weakest of arseholes.

  ‘Karl, that brewery downstairs from you,’ said Boyd, ‘it’s cluttered, full of blind spots. If we could lure them there, is it possible we could find a pinch point and jump them?’

  Christ, if Charlotte could hear me now.

  ‘It is,’ said Karl. ‘It’s basically a giant metal labyrinth. It’s full of pipes, vats, pumps… There are plenty of things to smack your head on and trip you up. It’s perfect.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Boyd. ‘So that’s our spot and Jay’s our bait.’ He looked at Okeke. She took a deep breath and nodded.

  ‘We’ll have the element of surprise…’ he said, ‘and it’s Karl’s home ground, but apart from that, what have we got?’

  ‘I have a crossbow,’ said Karl.

  ‘Can you use it?’ Boyd asked.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he replied. ‘Short range it’s as good as any gun.’

  ‘That, I presume, means you’re in?’

  ‘For my big bro? Of course I’m in,’ Karl replied.

  ‘I’m in too, sir.’ Boyd looked across the small lounge at Warren, who nodded. ‘I’m serious, sir.’

  ‘Warren,’ Boyd cautioned, ‘this isn’t your problem.’

  ‘I’m in. I’m not letting anyone else push me around tonight,’ Warren said firmly. Seeing the confused expression on Boyd’s face, he added, ‘Don’t ask.’ Then, ‘I’ve got a katana upstairs in my bedroom.’

  ‘What the bloody hell’s a –’

  ‘It’s a Samurai sword,’ Jay answered.

  ‘I’ve got a taser, guv,’ said Okeke. ‘And some PAVA spray.’

  Boyd nodded slowly. ‘Of course you have.’ He ran a finger along his lips. ‘So it looks like we’re doing this.’

  He was acutely aware that he was the one most invested in this plan. Jay could’ve run, Okeke too. And Warren? The lad was an innocent bystander.

  ‘Thank you,’ he muttered. Then cleared his throat. ‘I mean it. Thanks. All of you.’

  Emma, hands now bound in front of her, accepted a chicken drumstick from Roland. She wasn’t hungry in the slightest, plus she didn’t eat meat, but from the depths of her memory came a nugget of pop psychology: that this small gesture now might lead to a life-saving moment of hesitation from her abductor later.

  ‘Thanks…’ she said, taking a bite out of it.

  Outside the SUV, the three Georgians tore hungrily into the bucket of deep-fried chicken. Roland, however, pulled a face at the greasy chicken, opting to stick with the fries.

  Ozzie had wriggled onto his bound feet and a pair of nostrils were flaring over the headrest. ‘Give him a fry,’ Emma said. ‘You’ll have a friend for life.’

  Roland nodded. ‘Here you go, boy.’ He pulled one from his carton and watched it vanish instantly as he dangled it over the back seat.

  Connect with him. Talk.

  ‘You… you’re not what I expected,’ she said. ‘You know, as a Russian mafia boss?’

  ‘Half… and not even Russian,’ he replied. ‘Half Georgian. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Do you speak any… whatever the others speak?’ she asked.

  ‘Georgian.’ He shook his head. ‘I tried. But I was raised in the UK.’ He shrugged. ‘What’s the point, though? Anybody with common sense and enough roubles to bribe their way in comes to Londongrad.’ He grinned. ‘They love it here. They’ve all been working on their English for years.’

  ‘Is that what this is all about… just money?’ Emma asked.

  He shook his head and laughed. ‘Just money? There’s no such thing as just money. You might as well call oxygen “just oxygen”.’ He glanced at his men outside. ‘Money is what makes those peasants do exactly as I say. If you had more than money than me, I’d be the one with gaffer tape around my wrists.’

  ‘Roland… is that your first name?’

  He nodded. ‘Roland Sebastian Octavian Hammond. You know, once upon a time the Hammonds were established old money. English old money, that is.’

  ‘But not now?’

  He looked at her. ‘That’s why my mother married a Georgian twenty years her senior.’ He pulled a face. ‘She got herself a billionaire, and Rovshan got himself a trophy wife and a golden visa. A mutually beneficial arrangement. It worked out well.’ He laughed humourlessly. ‘And then they had me. The spare heir.’ He looked down at his watch again. ‘All right – it’s nearly showtime…’

  ‘Roland?’

  He looked up at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Please… tell me…’ She took a deep breath. ‘Am I going to survive tonight?’

  Roland turned back to his phone.

  ‘There’s got to be a way that nobody gets killed tonight, right? It’s got to be –’

  ‘Enough!’ he snapped. ‘Be quiet and eat your chicken.’

  48

  ‘We lure them into the brewery, lock them in and call 999: Gunshots heard inside this address. Hurry. Send armed police. That sort of thing,’ suggested Karl.

  ‘That’s if they all go in,’ replied Boyd. Karl’s suggestion didn’t account for one or more of them being parked up somewhere nearby with Emma in the boot. ‘If they hear blues-and-twos coming, the driver will be off.’

  ‘With Emma,’ Okeke added. ‘That doesn’t work, Karl.’

  Boyd checked his watch. It was 6.29 p.m. ‘Okay, we’re going to have to park this. Hammond will be calling me any second.’

  ‘Good luck, guv,’ said Jay.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll call you back as soon as we’re done.’ Boyd ended the call and looked down at his phone’s screen, waiting for it to light up again.

  ‘Clement. Lamb. Vigour,’ said Okeke. ‘Do you want me to write the location down?’

  Boyd nodded. His mind was racing. They’d picked a What3words address in the very middle of the building, rather than at the entrance. He was in two minds about it. If Hammond suspected a trap, then a location that required them to go into the old brewery screamed ambush. He’d just have to hope that Hammond was as stupid as he looked.

  ‘It’s going to be okay, sir,’ said Warren. ‘We’ve got this.’

  The phone suddenly lit up in his hand – Unknown Caller.

  ‘Right then,’ he muttered, and tapped the screen to answer. ‘Boyd.’

  ‘Have you made contact with Turner?’ asked Hammond.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. And did he tell you where he is?’

  ‘He told me where he’ll be staying later tonight. Yes,’ Boyd answered.

  ‘Well, I want to know where he is right now, not where he’ll be later!’

  Boyd wasn’t certain where Hammond was calling from. Emma had blurted ‘Hastings’. He hoped they still were and hadn’t got a head start on the way to Brighton. Either way he had to build in time to allow them to get to Karl’s place first.

  ‘I don’t know where he is as we speak,’ he said. ‘He’s scared, obviously. It sounded like he was in a public space. A pub or a bar maybe.’

  ‘So how long is he staying there?’ Hammond asked.

  ‘Until closing time, I expect,’ Boyd said.

  ‘And then – good grief, this really is like pulling teeth. Where will he be later, Boyd?’

  ‘He has a place to bunk down. That’s where his stuff is.’ Boyd took the scrap of paper from Okeke. ‘It’s a What3words location. Do you use that?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, I’m not an idiot.’

  Boyd read out the words and Hammond repeated them back to him.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘One moment.’ Hammond put him on hold. A moment later he was back on. ‘That looks like a business premises to me.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought too.’ Distract him. ‘May I speak to Emma again?’

  ‘Your daughter’s fine. Is Turner with anyone else or is he alone?’

  ‘Alone. He doesn’t know who to trust. He doesn’t know anyone in Brighton. I want to speak to Emma now.’

  ‘You’ll get to speak to her again once I have Turner. I’ll call you again when we’ve found him.’ The call ended abruptly. Boyd lowered the phone. He realised his hand was shaking.

  ‘Guv?’

  He looked up at Okeke and Warren. ‘I think he’s going for it.’

  ‘Did he give a specific time?’ asked Okeke.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s unlikely they’re anywhere near Brighton yet. Doesn’t make sense for them to set off without knowing which direction to head. When they arrive, I expect they’ll stake out the building and wait for Jay to turn up, hoping to get him before he goes inside. We need to make a move.’ He stood up. ‘We have to get there ahead of them.’

  Okeke and Warren got up quickly.

  ‘Warren, you’re with me. You drive.’ He realised his hands were too shaky to take the wheel himself. ‘Okeke, we’ll meet you there.’

  ‘On it.’ She grabbed her bag and headed for the front door.

  ‘Sam!’ he called out after her.

  She stopped.

  ‘I’ll call you when we arrive. Let you know if the coast’s clear.’

  She nodded, pulled the door open and was gone.

  Boyd turned to Warren. ‘You’d better get your ninja sword.’

  Jay carried the old wooden mannequin down the metal stairs, its wooden peg-feet clanging loudly on each step in the darkness as he descended to the brewery’s abandoned work floor. It was heavier than it looked.

  ‘Are you okay down there, Jay?’ Karl asked.

  ‘I need a light here or I’m going to go arse over tit,’ Jay complained.

  ‘Wait for me at the bottom. I’ve got a torch,’ Karl said.

  The clanging finally stopped as he touched down on concrete. The plan – which was a pretty big word for what they had come up with – seemed wildly optimistic. They were setting up a ‘squat’ among the innards of the defunct brewery, which basically meant putting this stiff, cumbersome and utterly unconvincing Victorian window dummy into a sleeping bag and making it look as though it was huddled around a glowing camping light.

  Karl joined him at the bottom of the stairs, a sleeping bag under one arm and a full carrier bag in the other.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Jay asked.

  ‘Some more props,’ Karl informed him. ‘A thermos, radio, tins of food. Some beer. Gotta make it real, right?’

  ‘I like your thinking.’

  ‘There’s a couple of large empty drums in the middle of the floor. I guess fermenting vats. We could set up in one of them.’ Karl panned the torch towards the dust-choked labyrinth of pipes and valves in front of them.

  ‘This looks good.’ Jay nodded. ‘Perfect.’

  The space resembled a tangled jungle made from scrapyard junk. Not only was the ground floor crammed with the bowel-like clutter of pipes and valves, but it had also become a depository for all the office furniture and bric-a-brac that presumably had occupied the floor above once upon a time. There were wooden chairs and old desks, filing cabinets and stools all stacked untidily in what little floor space was left.

  ‘Follow me,’ said Karl. He stepped forward, picking his way past some wooden bar stools – they had nice, thick oak legs and padded leather seats – ripe for upcycling, Jay noted. ‘Mind the trip hazards,’ Karl pointed out.

  Jay glanced at the brick floor. There were potholes where loose bricks had been dislodged, creating block-shaped, ankle-breaking dips in the ground. He hefted the heavy mannequin onto one shoulder and had just begun to follow Karl when he felt his Nokia buzz in his pocket. ‘Hold on a sec, bro.’

  He set the mannequin down, fished out the phone and answered the call. ‘Have they called yet?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Boyd. ‘Warren and I are on our way over. Sam’s bringing up the rear.’

  ‘Is Sam okay?’ Jay asked, concerned.

  ‘She’s tooling up,’ Boyd said. ‘Listen, Jay… I told them you sounded like you were in a pub and were planning to stay as late as you could. So that’s hopefully going to buy us a few hours to get ourselves in place and ready.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Jay asked.

  ‘No, I’m hoping,’ said Boyd. ‘I think they’ve only just left Hastings. They wouldn’t have known which way to head until I told them. Plus, I think I heard seagulls their end.’

  ‘There’re seagulls here too, you know, guv?’ Jay pointed out.

  ‘Right, fair point. Jay, listen. Set up the bait and get yourself hidden as quickly as possible. I’ll text you when we’re close.’

  ‘We’re gonna set up a camp inside a huge beer vat,’ said Jay. ‘Make it look like I’ve been hiding out in there.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Boyd said.

  ‘You’ve seen what it’s like downstairs?’ Jay asked.

  ‘Briefly. A bloody mess.’

  Jay chuckled. ‘It’s ambush heaven, guv. They won’t know what hit them.’

  ‘Hopefully. That’s the plan.’

  ‘You ever see that film Predator, guv? You know the one with the invisible a–’

  ‘Jay?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Crack on, eh?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll contact again when we’re close. All right?’

  ‘Roger that.’ Jay ended the call and tucked the phone back into his pocket. Karl was looking at him.

  ‘He said we’ve got to get this done super quickly,’ said Jay. ‘We could have visitors at any time.’

  ‘Shit,’ Karl said. ‘Okay then… Let’s do this.’

  49

  Roland was relieved to be on the move again. Sitting around waiting was like meekly asking Fate to pick a direction and decide the future. Waiting was for farm animals in slaughter pens. Not for him.

  He had the girl’s mouth taped up. He was onto her. She was chatting to distract him. Chatting to try to forge a bond with him. Well, that little plan of hers had been swiftly foiled with a rag in her mouth and some gaffer tape over her flapping lips.

  He’d taped the dog back up too. If it suffocated, so be it. Once they’d put a cap in Turner’s head, they could do this girl and her dog, firebomb the place with petrol and make like ghosts into the night.

  A few hours from now he’d be back in his penthouse flat, washing the smell of petrol and blood off his hands, and those vulgar apes could grunt back to whatever basement cage Rovshan kept them in.

  And he could relax once more.

  The really annoying thing was that he shouldn’t have been bothered with any of this. None of it. If Mummy, the silly bitch, hadn’t had one of her gin-fuelled panic attacks and caught him off guard ringing him like that, he wouldn’t have been overheard by Tweedledum and Tweedledumbass outside the club. His endeavour would have been well on its way to a quiet and very satisfactory conclusion.

  The old man would be lingering at death’s door by now, confused and weak. Mummy would be dutifully weeping her crocodile tears on one side of his bed and he would be on the other, reassuring the insane old bastard that the Salikov business would be safe in his hands. And mere inches away from him, on his father’s bedside table, dissolved and undetectable in his herbal tea, would be the cause of his rapidly deteriorating condition.

  Roland’s FSB contact at the embassy had told him they called the slow-acting nerve agent Blue-T. Blue because of the gradual but increasing hypoxia it caused over several weeks. The prisoners they’d tested it out on had died with discoloured gums – the normal healthy pink had been reduced by the absence of oxygen in the blood to an almost blue-grey hue.

  The ‘T’ part of the name hadn’t been explained. Maybe T for toxin? he wondered.

  The agent had provided him with a bottle of liquid with an eyedropper lid and instructions that just one drop a day would do the job, untraceably, within a month. Any more than that would accelerate the hypoxia and attract suspicion. The initial symptoms would be fatigue, fuzzy-headedness, an inability to concentrate. Given that Rovshan had been working long hours over the last year to smoothly migrate his fortune to London, those symptoms would be seen as work exhaustion.

  Nothing that some bed rest and a nice cup of tea couldn’t fix.

  His mistake had been assuming that Mummy Dearest would actually fucking cope. All she had to do was add one drop of the bloody stuff to Father’s tea every morning and, since he was paranoid right now that they might be after him, he retained no domestic staff. There were no butlers, Michelin-star chefs or suspicious housekeepers to peer over her shoulder. It was simple. Or should have been.

  Roland checked the maps app on his phone. They were roughly halfway there, approaching a town called Lewes. But the traffic was slow-going. It was nearly seven in the evening and the little people were still grinding their way home in their little cars.

  In broken, appalling, Russian he told Gregor that, once they arrived, the other two were to go in, find Turner and deal with him. They should take an ear and then torch the place. He and Gregor would stay in the vehicle.