The Wolves of London (13 page)

She shrugged, but her expression seemed to confirm it. Nodding at the computer screen she asked, ‘All that stuff about our movements being monitored… isn’t that just bullshit? Scare tactics.’

‘Maybe, but…’

‘But what?’

I grimaced. ‘Monitoring equipment is very sophisticated nowadays. I guess if they’ve got the resources they can follow us pretty much wherever we go – as well as keep tabs on our texts and calls and emails.’

Clover glanced quickly around as if searching for hidden cameras, a look of paranoia on her face. ‘I hate the thought that someone could be watching us at this very moment. Do you think they’re listening to this conversation?’

‘Who knows? It’s probably a bluff. But in a way I hope they
are
listening.’

‘Do you? Why?’

‘Because then I can tell them’ – I tilted up my head and raised my voice, addressing the room – ‘that I agree to their terms. That I’ll do their fucking job for them.’

Clover pulled a sympathetic face. ‘I’m sorry you got involved in this, Alex. I can’t help feeling it’s my fault.’

‘Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.’

‘What will you do until tonight? Go home?’

I thought about it. With Kate missing the spotlight would be on me. What if the police decided to monitor my comings and goings? What if the press got their teeth into it and set up camp outside my building? I couldn’t afford to be under scrutiny, not if it might jeopardise Kate’s welfare.

‘It’s probably best to lie low,’ I said, ‘keep out of the public eye. Can I stay here until it’s time?’

‘Sure,’ said Clover, making a sweeping gesture with her hand. ‘I’ll get Mary to send in some sandwiches.’

Twenty minutes later the two of us were sitting at Clover’s desk, eating ham and cheese toasties and drinking coffee. Clover picked at her toastie, breaking tiny pieces off the corner and nibbling at them. When my phone rang I snatched it from my pocket and answered it without considering the consequences.

‘Hello?’

It was my head of department wanting to know where I was. He told me that there was a lecture hall filling with students and no sign of the lecturer.

‘Sorry, Mike,’ I said. With everything that had happened I’d completely forgotten to inform the college of my whereabouts. ‘My daughter’s gone missing. I’m afraid my head’s all over the place at the moment.’

‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘When? How?’

I told him that I’d let him know when I had more details, that I wasn’t sure when I’d be back in, and that I had to get off the line in case the police were trying to call. I spent the rest of the day drinking coffee, smoking Marlboro Lights, reading the email over and over, and fielding calls from Candice and – yes – the police. DI Jensen wanted to know where I was (I told him I was staying with a friend because I couldn’t face being in the flat with all Kate’s stuff around me) and informed me that the search of the Sherwoods’ flat had yielded nothing. He also told me that background checks had revealed that Adam, Paula and Hamish Sherwood had never really existed, their carefully constructed false identities stretching back no more than eighteen months. He said that Adam’s and Paula’s likenesses, lifted from falsified online records, had been widely distributed among the nation’s law-enforcement agencies, but that as yet they remained unidentified.

‘Don’t worry, though, Mr Locke,’ he said glibly. ‘We’ll find them. It’s only a matter of time.’

I wanted to scream at him for telling me not to worry, but instead I thanked him and cut him off.

Despite my years in prison, during which I had been forced to turn patience into a fine art, as the day wore on I found myself becoming increasingly stir crazy. By early evening I was pacing Clover’s office like a tiger, all but climbing the walls.

The hours passed slowly.

K
ensington High Street, with its swanky shops and posh restaurants, is surrounded by parks and gardens. There’s Holland Park (I’ve taken Kate to the adventure playground there a few times because it’s not far from Chiswick), Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. The rest of the space is taken up by streets and squares lined with big and generally well-kept houses. In one of these lived Barnaby McCallum, the man I’d come to rob.

I left Incognito around eleven and arrived at High Street Kensington station not long after half-past. I was wearing the black zip-up jacket and jeans I’d left home in that morning, plus a dark blue baseball cap that Clover had lent me. The idea of the cap was that I’d be harder to identify if nosey neighbours happened to spot me on McCallum’s street. It made sense, but I couldn’t help feeling I was more noticeable and suspicious-looking with the cap on. As far as I was concerned, I looked like what I was about to become: a burglar.

I didn’t feel
too
nervous about the job itself; I was just eager to get it over and done with. My main focus was on Kate’s well-being, and any anxiety I had stemmed from the fact that I couldn’t afford any slip-ups for her benefit. I tried not to distract myself with thoughts about whether email man would fulfil his side of the bargain; all I could do was fulfil mine and hope that he would be true to his word. As I travelled across London I wondered whether my movements were being monitored, as email man had claimed. In a way I hoped they were. At least then he and his associates would know that I was doing all I could to follow their instructions, and that if I was stopped or prevented for whatever reason it wouldn’t be my fault.

Clover had given me a key to the French windows that led into McCallum’s drawing room, reiterating several times that I wouldn’t have any problems. She said that McCallum’s street was tree-lined and dark, the houses set back from the road and not too close together. She told me that McCallum had chosen the house specifically for its seclusion, and that whenever she’d been there at night the street had been graveyard quiet.

Although I was eager to get the job done I was anxious not to rush it. I was determined to keep a clear head and take my time. I had over two hours before I had to deliver the artefact to email man’s contacts at the hotel, so I had plenty of leeway. For that reason I stopped and ordered a takeaway latte at the still-open coffee booth in the station concourse. As I waited for my coffee I tried to stay relaxed, to keep looking straight ahead, even though my instinct was to check out the people who were still streaming back and forth even at this late hour. I paid for my coffee and strolled down the road, drinking it. I had a tatty old
A–Z
(something else which Clover had given me) tucked into the inside pocket of my jacket, but I’d had time during the hours spent mooching around in Incognito that afternoon to commit the route to memory, so I doubted I’d need it.

I didn’t. Crossing the high street, I took a right up Campden Hill Road, and ten minutes later, after another couple of turns, I was standing at the end of Bellwater Drive. By now the only sound I could hear was my own footsteps. I turned up the drive without hesitation, dropping my empty coffee cup over a garden wall as I did so.

Clover had been right. The street
was
dark. There were street lamps, but the orange glow they gave out seemed to get tangled in the black branches of the trees surrounding them and never reached the ground. I walked up the street slowly, but knowing that there was nothing more suspicious than someone deliberately trying to be unobtrusive I didn’t make any particular attempt to keep to the shadows or stay out of sight. Nearly all the houses I passed had soft light glowing behind at least one or two mostly curtained windows, but I didn’t see a soul, either out on the street or as a silhouetted head staring out of a window.

McCallum lived near the end of the street, at number 56. Not all the houses had visible numbers, but enough of them did for me to tell when I was getting close. I passed number 50, then another house, then one with 54 interwoven into its wrought-iron gate. Then there was a high hedge which looked black and shaggy in the darkness, and all at once I came to an opening in the hedge, and there, through a metal gate a couple of feet taller than I was, was McCallum’s house.

What can I say about it? I don’t know much about architecture, but like the rest of the houses I’d passed it was big and old and impressive. It was mostly white, with stone steps leading up to a front door tucked away underneath a porch supported by pillars. There were tall windows and lots of fancy bits of carved stonework and a rounded tower to the right with a roof that tapered to a point. From my point of view, I was pleased to see that the building was set back from the road beyond an expansive front lawn, that it was separated from its neighbours on both sides by a high wooden fence edged with trees and shrubs, and that it was completely dark, not a single light burning in any of its windows.

As well as the cap, the
A–Z
and the keys, Clover had also given me a pair of black leather gloves. I pulled them on and gave the gate a little push. I expected to have to climb over, and was already hoping I’d be able to do it without impaling myself on the spikes on top, but the gate shifted inwards a couple of inches before stopping with a metallic clatter. A quick look showed me that all I had to do was reach through a gap in the ironwork and lift a latch to get in. This I did, pushing the gate open, which creaked, but not too loudly. I shut the gate and stepped to one side, so that I couldn’t be seen from the road. Then I took a minute or so to let my eyes roam across the house and garden, checking out the terrain.

The layout was pretty much as Clover had described. From what I could see, she was right about the lack of security too. There was nothing to indicate a system had been installed since she’d last been there. The building itself, and the grounds, looked reasonably well maintained, though there were enough ragged edges to show that McCallum was no perfectionist. That also fitted with what Clover had said about the old man employing a skeleton staff to keep things ticking over. Pushing myself away from the hedge, I started to walk up the path towards the house, but it was crunchy with loose stones and gravel, so after a few metres I side-stepped on to the lawn.

The grass, spongy from the day’s rain, absorbed my footsteps completely. Not that I expected anyone to hear me. According to Clover the old man was in bed by eleven every night and once his head touched the pillow he was pretty much dead to the world. I knew the French windows that led into the drawing room were round the back, so I made my way there, scanning the ground ahead so that I knew exactly where I was putting my feet. Once the shadow of the house had fallen over me, it was almost pitch-black, only a few shreds and speckles of light leaking in from the street and the sky above to give any definition to my surroundings. I slowed down, worried about tripping over or into something and injuring myself. There would be nothing worse than messing up due to my own clumsiness and stupidity.

I reached the French windows without mishap and felt for the lock. As soon as I had it I slotted in the key and turned it with a rusty creak. I pushed the metal handle down and the door opened easily. A couple of seconds later I was inside.

The room I was standing in smelled of dry old carpets and furniture polish. I couldn’t see much. There seemed to be lots of empty floor space, some items of furniture – possibly armchairs – over to my right, flanking what I guessed was probably a fireplace and mantelpiece, and something long and flat-topped – a bureau or a sideboard – against the wall to my left. Directly opposite the French windows the wall looked extra-dark and oddly uneven, which puzzled me for a second before I realised it was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Somewhere in the building I could hear a clock ticking, and there were the usual tiny creaks you get in any old house as the structure settles and shifts. But apart from that, nothing. Right at that moment it was hard to believe I was in the middle of one of the busiest cities in the world.

Leaving the French windows ajar, I made my way across to what I guessed was the sideboard on my left. Clover had told me that this was where the old man kept the obsidian heart, on a little velvet stand beneath a glass dome. As I approached it, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what I’d do if the old man had moved the heart. It was possible, especially considering that people had been offering him pots of money for it. What if he’d put it in a safe, or even a safety deposit box in the bank? Would email man blame me if I couldn’t fulfil the task through no fault of my own? More to the point, would he carry out his threat to harm Kate?

My anxiety lasted all of three seconds. I was within a couple of steps of the sideboard when I made out the gleam and vague shape of a glass dome. I stepped closer, trying to identify what was beneath it. All I could see was a fuzzy black blob, which could have been anything. I reached out with both hands and carefully lifted the dome aside. Despite what Clover had said I half-expected an alarm to go off, but nothing happened.

Although it was still too dark to see clearly, I could now tell that the object was roundish and gleaming dully. I reached out and picked it up, lifting it from the plinth it had been resting on. It was heavy for its size and sat snugly in my palm like a slightly misshapen egg. It had to be what I’d come for, but I tugged the glove off my left hand with my teeth so that I could touch it with my fingertips to make sure. I was thinking that if the old man was worried someone might try to steal the heart, he could have put a decoy here. I felt like a blind man reading Braille as I ran my fingers over the object’s smooth, cool surface. I tried to picture what a human heart looked like, with its valves and veins and bulges. From what I could tell this was a pretty accurate representation.

Satisfied that I’d got what I came for, I put the glove back on, and was about to zip the heart into my jacket pocket when I heard the creak of a floorboard behind me. I spun round, and a shape rushed at me out of the darkness. Immediately I realised someone must have been sitting in one of the armchairs by the fire, hidden in the shadows, the whole time I’d been here. I could just make out a thin, stooped figure waving something above its head – a walking stick or a cane. As I turned to confront it, the figure let out a shrill, ragged screech. Then it brought the cane sweeping down towards me.