DS Habiba Malik. The woman I had last heard calling me through the sea mist, threatening to hunt me down with dogs. And now her voice was in my ear, with an intimacy that made me shiver. Because it was that voice, her voice, that had grilled me hour after hour on the night of Gabe’s death, and then again the next day, pulling apart my story and putting it back together in the most damning way. It was Malik who had urged me through my account again and again, winkling out details I barely remembered, picking up on inconsistencies I hadn’t even noticed myself—and it was her voice that had made me run, when I’d heard her out in the corridor, urging my arrest.
And although she’d been wrong about my guilt, she’d been right about practically everything else—more often than I wanted to admit. This case had stunk, from beginning to end. It was all wrong, just as she’d told Miles that night. And she’d had me pegged too. Where Miles had looked at me and seen nothing but a harmless, grieving widow, Malik had seen me for what I was—someone steely, someone determined—a flight risk. And she’d been right.
Fuck. In one sense answering the phone hadn’t done much—Malik must have known, as soon as Gabe’s phone lost service, that I was behind it. But I had given her certainty where before there had been doubt. Now the police knew exactly where to look.
“Jack, look, I understand,” Malik was saying in my ear. Her voice was kind, sympathetic—the tone she’d used on that first night, when she had helped me pick out clothes to take to the police station and wash Gabe’s blood off my hands. But I knew that kindness was a means to an end. I had done enough calls like this myself—calls where you just wanted to keep your mark on the line long enough to get the information you needed. I was Malik’s mark. And she was good. “Your sister told us what’s been going on,” Malik was saying now, her tone warm. “She told us you didn’t do this. But you can’t help yourself by running. We want to believe you. We want to find out who did this, but we can’t do that without your help. Will you help us, Jack?”
“I know who did it,” I said. My voice shook. “At least, I know who led them to Gabe. His name is Cole Garrick. He works for Cerberus Security. And he is—” My voice cracked. “He was Gabe’s best friend. And you need to arrest him right now.”
“We’re looking into all—” Malik began, but I interrupted.
“Listen to me—this was a contract killing, by the people who employ Cole. He’s probably got an alibi up to the hilt because he wasn’t the one who actually cut Gabe’s throat, but he was the person who started all this, and he was the person who put Gabe into their crosshairs, and if you wait to act, they will kill Cole too. If you want him alive to stand trial, you need to take him into custody right now.”
“Let’s talk about all this at the station,” Malik said persuasively. “You must be exhausted, Jack. Let me send a car to pick you up.”
I put my hand to my head, feeling something very close to a hysterical laugh bubble up inside me. Exhausted? Exhausted didn’t even begin to cover it. I felt… I felt like I had nothing left to give, nowhere else to go. My side hurt. My joints hurt. Everything hurt, and I felt constantly on the verge of throwing up. Was it really time to stop running? Maybe it was.
But then I heard something. My head went up, listening. It was a police siren. And when I put my head down and looked out of the food court window, I could see blue lights slicing through the darkness of the car park.
If I gave myself up now, I would have to trust Malik to believe my story, read Gabe’s garbled notes, understand the significance of what I had found, and, more importantly, act on it, before Cole’s handlers got to it.
Because whatever Cole had done, whatever he deserved, I didn’t want him to die. I wanted him to end up in prison for what he had done to Gabe, but I didn’t want him killed.
Most crucially of all, I wanted that zero-day exploit—the exploit that had cost Gabe his life—patched so that no one else could ever benefit from it. Whatever those people were doing, whatever information they were gaining, it was worth killing for. And Gabe had taught me there was only one sure way of making certain that patch happened.
Publicity.
“Goodbye, Malik,” I said, and I stood up, packing away the laptop.
“Jack,” she said, and her voice was sharp now. “Jack. Don’t—”
I hung up. I turned off the phone with Gabe’s SIM in it, and my own, and shoved both into my rucksack.
Then I began to walk. Not particularly fast. Just the brisk walk of a woman with somewhere to go and something to do. And not towards the door, where I could see another pair of blue lights pulling into the forecourt. With my head down and my hood pulled up, I was walking the other way. Deeper into the service station. Towards the stairs, and the overpass that lead to the southbound service station.
Pulling myself up the steps was more of an effort than I wanted to admit, and as I rounded the halfway landing I had to hang on to the banister and hold myself up for a moment before I continued up the next flight. When I reached the top there was cold sweat running down the hollow of my spine, and it was all I could do to stop my knees from giving way. The pack on my back felt like a dead weight, and now I dug inside it, pulling out everything I didn’t need—the wash bag, the sling, the water bottle—every bit of weight except the things I would need to see this job through to the end. I let the items fall to the floor, then pulled the half-empty bag back onto my shoulders, straightened up, and began to walk again. Mercifully, the corridor was quiet, no one around, and I was able to hold on to the wall as I half walked, half jogged through the tunnel, over the six lanes of traffic below.
As I passed, I could see the lines of cars beneath, see another police car speeding north, from London, towards the service station, and a part of me almost wanted to laugh. Three cop cars. Who on earth did they think they were dealing with, Osama bin Laden?
I was halfway across now, but looking back over my shoulder I could see the blue lights clustered around the entrance to the food court, and could imagine the police fanning out inside, searching the booths, the loos, the back exits.
How long before they noticed the overpass? Another patrol car was speeding north on blue lights, siren wailing, but this one passed underneath and I knew probably heading for the next junction, intending to double back and search the southbound service area. I had to get across before they made it.
I quickened my step, feeling the perspiration prickling at the back of my neck and across my upper lip. My whole right side was throbbing now, from my breast to my pelvis, pulsing with every beat of my heart, but I pushed myself on, stumbling once, and just catching myself by grabbing hold of the windowsill of the tunnel. I groaned, not trying to hide the sound, for there was no one up here, and held myself up while the tunnel stopped lurching and swinging, then carried on, trying to breathe with short, shallow pants, as it hurt to fill my lungs completely.
I was at the stairs now, and I skittered down them, trying not to look like someone on the run from what was now quite an obvious collection of blue lights on the other side of the motorway. Another car screamed north underneath the pedestrian tunnel, heading for the flyover at the next junction. What was that, five now? Six?
As I came down the stairs into the eerily identical southbound foyer, I was half expecting to be greeted by a matching collection of uniformed police, but there was no one there apart from a second, equally bored security guard, who did not look up as I walked quickly across the beige tiles and out into the night.
Outside I looked left and right, trying to figure out where the fuck the HGV area might be. Did they have a separate terminus? I couldn’t see one—but on the far side of the parking lot was a collection of rigs, and peering through the spattering rain I could see at least two had lights on inside the cabs.
As I stood, trying to decide what to do, blue lights appeared on the slip road leading from the southbound motorway, and my heart gave an involuntary leap in my chest. The sight made up my mind, and I took a deep breath and began to walk as quickly as I could through the rainy night, towards the lighted cabs.
* * *
“DO YOU KNOW BILL WATTS?” I asked, for the fourth, or maybe fifth, time, and for the fourth, or maybe fifth, time, the driver shook his head.
“Sorry, darlin’. Is he a driver? Have you tried inside?”
He nodded back towards the service station, and I looked over my shoulder to see a second police car sliding to a halt in front of the steps. I turned back, hoping my face wasn’t too obviously ashen.
“I’ve already been—”
“Bill Watts?” A voice came from behind me, and I turned again to see a rig, not too far away, with the window cracked open and a cloud of vape smoke coming from the slit. Now the driver rolled it down further and peered out. “I know him. Chatted to him on the radio earlier. I think he’s heading north, though. Darlington or summat? Doubt he’ll be here.”
I felt a rush of relief.