The First Cut (31 page)

She barged east again, back to Portobello Road. It had stopped raining now and a weak sun pierced the clouds for a moment before fading away. She moved north for a couple of blocks and passed under the raised Westway motorway that snaked away to Oxford, its giant concrete girders blocking the sun.

Troy headed under the Westway flyover, the sound of music bouncing off the concrete undercarriage with renewed force. He was sick of running and he was getting tired of the crowds and the noise and the mayhem. He threw a twenty-pound note at a stall holder and grabbed a tasselled scarf that would have looked at home on a youth throwing rocks in Gaza. He tied it round his head. It was time to end this.

Nicky followed the curve of the overhead motorway. The crowds were so thick here she could hardly move through them. She could see the tops of the carnival floats as they moved in procession down Ladbroke Grove, the brightly coloured tips of the dancers’ costumes bobbing like buoys at sea. She drew up next to a building covered in scaffolding and looked around, but couldn’t see crash man. She glanced up and saw the legs of a reveller hanging over the planking of the scaffolding. She jabbed at his dusty Doc Marten boots and he looked down at her. She held out her hands, pleading for him to lift her up, and he leaned down and grabbed her hands. She reached out with her leg for a foothold on the hectoring sign warning of a security firm’s instant response if the scaffolding was climbed and as she swung round to put her other knee on the boards to get up, she felt her phone slide from her pocket into the crowd below.

Troy saw Nicky being pulled up on the scaffolding and – it couldn’t be – her phone actually fell out of her pocket to the ground. He barged through the crowd and grabbed it.

Nicky lay flat on the planking one storey up and couldn’t move or cry out for someone below to hand her phone back, because at that moment she saw crash man right below her, looking around. Had he seen her? She cursed, long, hard and silently, for her lost phone. She saw crash man walk away from the scaffolding towards the motorway as she climbed an orange steel ladder to the second floor. The sheeting covering the scaffolding was wet and sprayed water on her as it flapped in the gusty wind. Could it be that he hadn’t seen her? She tried to force open the windows on the second floor. Nothing budged. She couldn’t throw anything through them, either; they were double-glazed against the roar of traffic from the Westway.

Troy stood by the girders holding up the motorway and studied the scaffolding. He could see a dark shape on the second storey. Game over. He’d shoot her. A crowd and noise like this was perfect – if unconventional – cover. Troy began a thorough and methodical check of the buildings around him for CCTV cameras and faces at windows. The thousands of people were focused on the parade, not on what the bloke in the scarf was doing. The angle was perfect. He put his gun with its silencer inside a discarded plastic bag. He was free to take the shot.

Nicky jumped as someone banged on the window behind her. An old lady in a dressing gown was making shooing gestures to her from the other side of the glass. Nicky knocked on the window, pleading with her to open the window, her arms in a praying position. The woman came to within two inches of Nicky’s face and banged on the glass. ‘Help me!’ Nicky sobbed. The bullet smacked through the window three inches above Nicky’s head and ricocheted off the ceiling of the woman’s bedroom. They both stared mutely at the hole, at the cracks in the glazing running crazily across the pane. It was the woman’s screams that shocked Nicky into action. She crouched low and tried to scurry to the other end of the scaffolding as another bullet pinged noisily off metal. Nicky raced up the ladder to the third storey and lay flat on the planking. She was out of room. There was nowhere to go and crash man was below, trying to pick her off.

She watched the cars speed past on the Westway: normal people cocooned in the bubble of normal lives. How far removed she felt from them, how insuperable the chasm. She wanted to scream with the frustration of her predicament. How badly she wanted to cling onto life. She couldn’t see him below now; she didn’t know where he was. She crouched and began to pull at the planking. Now that there was a hole in the old lady’s window maybe she could smash her way through it. She hoped the woman’s heart was strong enough to take the shock. She pulled up a board. It was longer than she was expecting and more unwieldy to move. It was too long to swing and she dropped it, its end sticking out at right angles to the scaffolding. Then, worried in case it fell on people below her, she jammed the end of the board under the fixed piece of planking that she stood on. She looked up. Suddenly the concrete wall of the Westway didn’t look so far away from the end of the board.

Grace came to her then. What she had suffered; the questions that were never answered; the fact that the architect of all this would get away with it. Justice would not be served. She backed up against the wall. And in that split second Nicky ran. She sprinted away from the building with all the explosive speed her muscles were capable of, out along the plank into nothingness.

Troy was taken aback. He jerked his head a fraction too much and shot too high, firing over Nicky’s left shoulder into air.

Nicky long-jumped off the end of the board and cartwheeled her arms to gain the maximum distance towards the grey cement of the motorway wall. She was so scared of not reaching it at all that she misjudged and her speed took her clean over the top of the motorway barrier onto the hard shoulder, where she landed with a sickening thud and rolled into the slow lane.

Gemma Woodhead had one hand on the steering wheel and was picking at her nose ring with the other as she drove along the Westway. It was sore and she wondered if it was becoming infected. She should have made sure that Jezza had disinfected the needle properly. But then that was quite like Jezza, a bit slapdash, a touch too casual. It’s what she’d liked about him at the beginning. That seemed like a long time ago now. She was meeting him at Camden Market, T-shirts for sale in their plastic wrappers in the back of the car as requested. Make that demanded. The turquoise ones were better than the multicoloured ones. She’d tell him that when they went for ale later, not that he’d listen; he never listened to her, or took her advice, for that matter. She’d tell him a lot of things over the eight pints they’d sink. She was still mad about the timing, that their T-shirts were finally printed and packaged at the end of August. The hottest summer for years and they hadn’t been ready to capitalize on it.

Gemma felt her nostril throb as a weak sun was cut off by a cloud. She needed to be more forthright, say what she really believed and not be steamrollered by Jezza. She would start today. She was going to put her own needs first for a change; it was her money that had printed the T-shirts, after all. Gemma was thinking that Jezza sitting up and taking notice was as likely as seeing pigs fly, when over the wall of the motorway came a bright awkward shape that tumbled across the hard shoulder and into the slow lane. Gemma’s first thought was that it must be a piece of costume that had caught on the wind and separated itself from the carnival somewhere on the streets below her. She didn’t brake because she thought it might float away again, like a plastic bag in wind, but then she realized the shape was very, very solid and – oh my God, it was a woman. Gemma Woodhead slammed on the brakes of lazy Jezza’s Polo and the car began a vicious skid on the slippery road.

Nicky’s first thought on feeling the hard road beneath her was how much it hurt to survive. She was winded and could only lie motionless, staring at the white sky. The screech of brakes came to her slowly and as she turned her head she saw wheels bearing down on her.

Gemma tried to swerve into the middle lane but she clipped the front of an Ocado delivery truck and began to spin down the road. The truck came to a screeching halt on the tarmac as Gemma pulled up in a spray of brakes and noise a few inches from the central reservation.

Nicky tried to stand as a woman with red hair and a long gypsy skirt got out of a yellow hatchback and began running towards her. Euphoria flooded her as she realized she’d survived a death leap and got away from crash man.

‘My God, oh my God, oh my God,’ was all the woman could say. ‘Oh my God, you’re bleeding.’

The Ocado delivery man was walking over, on the phone. ‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ he shouted.

Cars were beginning to stack up behind them, a queue lengthening away down the motorway as people gathered.

The woman had nearly reached Nicky and was gawping at her. Nicky started walking towards the woman’s car.

‘Oh my God, are you OK?’

Nicky stared at the yellow car. Then she turned to face the redhead. ‘I need your car.’

‘My car?’ the woman repeated, the words meaningless.

Gemma felt the woman grab her elbows. She looked panicked and wild, her hair was wet and her arm was a scraped-up mess, but her deep blue eyes seemed filled with determination.

‘I’m really, really sorry, but I need your car.’ Gemma felt the woman’s warm hands on her skin ‘Please forgive me, but I’m going to take it.’ The woman seemed so intent that Gemma nodded, shock still reeling through her veins. She watched speechless as the wet woman ran to her car, got in and took off in a wobbly squeal of brakes down the Westway. As she watched Jezza’s wheels and all of Jezza’s T-shirts fade into the distance, all Gemma could think was that the woman had been so polite, so forceful yet so polite. Oh my God, so unlike Jezza.

Gemma stood in the middle of a stationary Westway, realizing she still had a lot of work to do on her new dedication to assertiveness.

T
roy experienced with a shock an emotion he had never felt for a woman before: admiration. As he melted into the crowd and pushed his way away from Ladbroke Grove, keeping his head down to avoid the security cameras, he felt stunned. What a jump! That didn’t mean she was okay; there was a good chance she was badly injured or even dead, but the problem was he had no idea what was happening up there on the Westway and no way of finding out – for now. Nicky Peterson was one ballsy girl: he wouldn’t have done it.

His mind flashed back to consoling her in the country lane outside that big pile, his hands expertly massaging her shoulders, feeling the muscles in her neck, reaching under her long blonde hair and across her wide shoulders, fingertips passing over the bump in her clavicle to unclip the necklace and fold it in his large hands: an insurance policy. He had spent a long time later holding that necklace, weighing it in his palm. It was attention-seeking, bold, a bit trashy. It reminded him of her. She was strong, someone who could fight back: a worthy opponent.

He almost laughed as he began to jog east, clearing the worst of the crowds. Boy, did she pick the wrong men! A husband who had taken out a contract on her, and a toy-boy lover who had tied her up – and he could imagine the rest. But she was still standing, taking the blows. That appealed to Troy. He would have liked to have been with a woman like that.

He heard the impatient whop-whoop of a police car and three uniforms ran past him. His temporary good mood evaporated as he realized he had made a mistake: he should have shot her at her house when he had the chance. He had given her just the tiniest opening and she had taken it. He had underestimated her. Women. They were meaner and harder than men. Desperate women were the most dangerous of all. He picked Nicky’s phone out of his pocket. She had made a grave error dropping that, but he needed to tie this all up – find and kill the bitch. And he knew where he had to go for that. He began to head back to Maida Vale.

When Troy was less than five minutes’ walk from Greg’s house Nicky’s phone began to ring so he pressed the answer button.

‘Nicky? Nicky, can you hear me? Thank God. Where are you?’

It was the husband. ‘Surprise, surprise.’

‘Where’s Nicky?’ Greg’s voice was a whisper.

‘She dropped her phone and I kindly picked it up.’

‘Is she with you?’

‘Not now.’

‘Where the fuck is my wife?’ Greg shouted down the phone.

Troy smiled. ‘You’re going to take me to her.’

‘Who are you, what do you want?’

‘What do I want? Money.’

‘I’m not paying you a fucking penny—’

‘Francesca and your wife . . . you’re going to hand over plenty for both of them.’

Greg made a noise that Troy couldn’t catch. ‘I don’t understand—’

‘Oh shut up! You fucking hired me!’

‘I hired you?’

‘She your new bit on the side, the woman who called me? You can give me a bell in a few years when you need her doing too, eh!’ There was a long pause and Troy thought the connection had gone. ‘You still there?’

‘I want to be with you.’

His tone had changed. The high-pitched, desperate denials had gone; his voice was now low and flat. This was better, the pretence was over and they could simply get down to business.

‘That’s not how I work.’

‘I want to be there when you—’

‘No.’

There was another long pause. ‘I hired you, I paid you, and you owe me. You punched me in the bloody face.’

Troy thought for a moment. It was unconventional, but he reasoned it meant more money or safety. If the husband was having second thoughts, he’d have to kill both of them in the end anyway. He’d already lost Struan on this job; if he kept him close he could make it look like Greg had killed Nicky and then himself. He could tie up all the loose ends. ‘What car do you drive?’

‘What?’

‘You heard me, what car?’

‘A BMW. Why?’

‘Open your door.’

‘What?’

‘Open the front door.’

A few moments later the door of the white stucco house swung open and Troy saw Greg, phone still to his ear, standing on his doorstep, craning up and down the street. He leaned back against the warm metal of the BMW convertible parked in the road outside.