with the man’s enquiring face looking down at him. Then he saw the muzzle again, lowering, getting monstrously large until he felt its warm metal pushing into his mouth. He tried to speak, to plead, but the cold muzzle was being forced upwards, pressing into the roof of his mouth, the line of the short, hard barrel aiming directly through the slim bone and into the brain.
There were words in his head, something about being so terribly sorry. Wrong place and wrong time. The man’s voice was calm as if talking about the weather. The weather. It was a shit-awful day to die, Paul thought, as the pistol flinched at the sudden pressure being applied to the trigger.
By the time Don Headley received the news the phones in the ops room were already buzzing with enquiries from the press. At first he couldn’t believe what had happened. Reality had broken into the middle of his exercise and two men were dead.
As soon as he could he got away from his desk and drove to Bramley Road. It was mid-morning and the traffic was heavy. On all sides drivers drummed their steering wheels in frustration as the long queues edged slowly forwards. The rain had stopped and a harsh winter light percolated through the thick layers of cloud, muting the colours into one continuous semblance of grey. It was a part of the country Don particularly hated, the dense belt of urban wasteland spread thickly around central London. Successive decades had added to it, pushing it out ever further until towns that had once counted themselves lucky to be outside the city now found themselves being sucked in, not enjoying full membership but rather taken on board as second-class citizens in a dubious club.
Hounslow, Isleworth, Sunbury, Feltham – the names rolled past, each representing an identical sprawl of little red houses and car-packed residential streets. It wasn’t so long ago that such roads would have boasted hardly a single vehicle parked at the kerbside, but increasing prosperity had combined with thoughtless marketing by the car manufacturers, whose eyes were solely on profit, and it had resulted in nearly every household owning at least one vehicle. Along either side of every road parked cars were jammed in nose to tail. It struck Don as a case of suicide by self-strangulation on a national scale. No one individual was prepared to sacrifice his car, not even with the prospect looming of the next generation gassing itself. Public transport was overcrowded and stank, so what was the incentive?
For an incentive to work and change a lifestyle it had to produce a more immediate threat. But then with smoking even that hadn’t worked, Don reflected as he waited impatiently behind a lorry that was belching obnoxious blue fumes. It was almost possible to predict to a smoker the year in which his habit would bring about his agonizing death, and yet nine times out of ten he would continue. What was the answer? Don was buggered if he knew. Perhaps the species was on track for extinction and it was as simple as that. Self-destruction had replaced self-preservation as the prime motivation in the human psyche, and no one had even noticed. He grinned sardonically. They had probably been too busy watching Gladiators.
It was another half hour before he drew up outside the house. A policeman came to his window to wave him on but he produced a pass and was allowed to go in search of a parking space. The curtains in the neighbouring houses twitched as inquisitive eyes followed him out of the car and down the driveway. The couple in the house on the opposite side of the road were less circumspect and stood at their open doorway, mugs of tea in their hands, interested to find their mundane existence disrupted by something as exciting as a murder.
Chief Inspector Rod Chiltern met Don at the front of the house.
‘The SOCO’s round the back with his lads. Be careful not to touch anything.’
Don scowled at him, resenting the caution. Nevertheless, he was only there as an observer. It was police business and had nothing to do with the SAS. So far.
He followed Chiltern down the narrow path. The first thing he saw when he emerged at the back outside the kitchen door was the body of Colin Field. It was propped up against the wall as if he had just sat down for a rest. His legs were splayed, the scuffed trainers out of sync with the portly figure of their owner. His head was cocked heavily to one side, the eyes open a slit, lips pursed. A trickle of blood had dried to a crack of dark purple running from the corner of his mouth to his chin, but the real sign of damage was the blood on the red brick of the wall, splashed liberally as if a child had flung a can of paint at it.
A couple of yards from him, Paul Robins lay on the crazy-paving terrace. Don noticed the shattered hand and could imagine how Paul had received the wound. The wound in his chest was bad but he judged it had probably not been fatal. That had been reserved for the head shot.
He moved carefully round to the far side.
‘Jesus,’ he whistled.
Chiltern nodded. ‘Not much chance of giving him the kiss of life, is there?’ he said.
The explosion of the gun in the confined space of the mouth had blown out most of the teeth, propelling them through the thin wall of the cheeks. But where the bullet had exited through the top and back of the skull there was a gaping hole. It had taken the larger portion of the brain with it and slammed it in a rough fan shape on the paving stones.
‘How well did you know them?’ Chiltern asked.
Don shrugged. ‘Reasonably. They’d been on my course for a while and you get to know the guys quickly that way.’
He was being polite, tempering his opinion because he knew that Chiltern had worked with both the dead men for several years. In truth Don had found them to be a couple of no-hopers, overweight, inefficient, dim-witted and bungling. Just the stupid sods, in fact, to walk straight into the middle of an armed gang without so much as a catapult. But no one deserved to die like this, he thought. Not even these two.
He crouched down beside them and looked around. The scene-of-crime officer had done a thorough sweep and everything that might be needed as evidence was circled with a thin chalk line. Principal among these items were several cartridge cases. Don asked if he might have a closer look at one of them and the SOCO nodded.
‘Don’t bugger up the prints, and put it back where you found it,’ he snapped, busy with a measuring tape, marking the distance from Colin’s body to the point where he estimated the firer must have been standing.
Don took a pair of gloves from his pocket and slipped one of them on. Carefully, he picked up the nearest of the cases and examined it. It was 9mm calibre. Powerful enough to silence a full-grown man, especially at almost point-blank range. No wonder Colin had been flung against the wall with such force, he thought.
But there was something unusual about it and a moment later Don realized what it was. He had come across its kind only once before. Several years ago he had been on secondment to the Sultan of Oman’s army. The Sultan’s quartermaster had done some shopping around on the open market for ammunition in an effort to cut costs. British ammunition had proved the most expensive, and he had finally opted for a batch of Pakistani-made rounds, both 7.62mm and 9mm. They hadn’t performed as effectively or as consistently as the British-made ammunition, several of the rounds misfiring and causing stoppages owing to an insufficient charge of powder in the brass case. But they had done the job and Pakistani ammunition had been used a great deal thereafter.
Turning the cartridge case in his fingers, Don was convinced that this was from the same source. He replaced it in its white chalk circle, where it looked as if it was about to be part of some Satanic ceremony.
He voiced his opinion to the SOCO, who grunted and said, ‘Right now
