Her Majesty's Hit Man

by Allan Prior

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled

Synopsis

When the British government needs to make an enemy disappear, Jay is the man they call on. He doesn't ask questions, because he doesn't want to know the answers. Jay is a contract killer and for him the rules of the game are simple - kill or be killed. His latest contract will not only require him to push his SAS training to its limit, but also put to the test the patriotism and sense of duty that set him on the path to becoming a cold blooded killer-for hire. A classic thriller from the creator of Z-Cars and Softly, Softly.

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Mulholland

Print pages: 336

Sample

The telephone rang, promptly at nine o’clock.

Jay knew before he picked it up that it was Mr Jones.

Mr Jones said, ‘How are you, dear boy?’

He was never able to make up his mind whether Mr Jones was gay or not. Probably not. Probably black leather and whips. Something way out, as Polanski had said to the police when they looked at the murder scene; look for something way out. He always remembered reading that. Mr Jones would be way out. He had to be. No suburban villa in Bexley for Mr Jones. No Teasmade at the bedside, no snug warm wife for Mr Jones, oh no. Mr Jones would be holed up in a posh mansion flat, probably in Kensington, and voyage up to Soho, by appointment, to get his rocks off. Mr Jones was not your obvious Etonian civil servant, despite the tie, which could even be bogus. No ordinary civil servant would be able to do what Mr Jones did. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

Mr Jones hired people to kill people.

On behalf of HMG. Which, of course, made it all right.

Jay knew what Mr Jones meant when he said, his voice thin and dry over the telephone, ‘I have a small, urgent job for you, dear boy. Are you free to drop by this morning?’

Mr Jones knew bloody well he was free.

Mr Jones had probably put watchers on him overnight. Somebody outside right now, very likely. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t doing anything else. Jay smiled to himself. While you’re doing that, you aren’t doing anything else. Who had said that to him? Some wally in the army, he supposed.

‘I could come right over?’

‘Do that.’ Mr Jones sounded pleased. ‘Are you coming by car?’

Jay said, ‘I’d better.’

‘I’m so glad you have the car again, dear boy.’

Mr Jones was reminding him that he had fixed the return of Jay’s driving licence six months before. He had let Jay trudge around London for three weeks, hopping on and off tubes and buses, just to remind him how the poor lived. Then Mr Jones had got the licence back, clean, no record of the prosecution. Jay never enquired how. There was very little Mr Jones could not do. Including arrange parking at Whitehall, possibly the most difficult thing in all London.

‘I’ll tell them to expect you. Just give my name to the fellow at the gate. He’ll find you a place. I’ll expect you in forty-five minutes. Take care, dear boy.’

And Mr Jones rang off.

He never used your name, Jay thought, always ‘dear boy’. Perhaps that made it easier. Perhaps it was just security. Who ever knew, with Mr Jones? He didn’t, and he had never met anybody else who worked for Mr Jones, so there was no point in thinking about anything Mr Jones ever did. He had his reasons, and they were his own.

As he put the kettle on to make a swift cup of coffee, Jay found that his hands were trembling, just a little.

It had been a while, that was all.

It was all the hanging about in the flat. Once Angie had gone off to her job at the BBC, his days were empty. He guessed she had been vetted by Mr Jones, who did not approve of women and had advised, in his creepy way, against Jay having any kind of permanent lady in his bed. Probably thought he should make an appointment in Soho once a week, like himself. Jay spooned in the coffee and smiled. Silly old pratt, he said aloud, but he did not believe it. Mr Jones might be old, well, fifty-five, but he was no pratt, and silly was not a word anybody could ever apply to him.

Creepy. That was the word.

Something in a fawn raincoat.

Mr Jones had worn the fawn raincoat, not new (did Etonians ever wear anything new?) when they had first met. By design, of course. In a leafy Surrey lane, for God’s sake. Mr Jones had introduced himself. ‘Hello, dear boy. I’m Jones. I was talking to your old CO the other day. Spoke well of you.’ Liar. His old CO would have spat blood. Unless he’d meant somebody at SAS. Jay never quite knew. Mr Jones talked like that. He implied, did Mr Jones. He left things in the air. Jay drank his coffee black, with a lot of sugar. The trembling had stopped, he noted clinically. It would not happen again, not until afterwards and with luck not even then.

That meeting in the green and lovely Surrey lane had started it all. Jay had been in the mood to try anything. He’d just had another row with Cherry and walked out of the cottage to cool off, to get away. It had been one of their early rows, when they could still make up in bed. Not like the ones that came later, with the drink and the horrors locked in his mind, horrors he could never talk to her about. Money had been the cause of the row. Cherry had been used to money and couldn’t live without it, a lot of it. It all seemed a very long time ago, the cottage, the kids, the swimming pool, the dogs. All so very long ago. Yet he sometimes ached when he thought of it. Even now. Jay lit his first and usually his only cigarette, which would send him to the lavatory and set him up for the day. He noted that his bowels were no looser than usual. That could only be good. Lately he had begun to wonder. Would Mr Jones ever call again, and if he did, what would his answer be?

Mr Jones had called. And he hadn’t even thought of saying no.

Which meant that Mr Jones knew him better than he knew himself.

Well, he would, wouldn’t he, the old creep?

Jay turned the five-year-old Jensen into the Whitehall car park on Horse Guards Parade. They were expecting him, called him ‘sir’, and told him where to park. He could have been going in to talk to some bluff old Service Corps major about an army contract for drawers, woollen, or vests, cellular. In a way he was doing something like that. He locked the car – was the road tax overdue again? – and walked quickly towards the building that held Mr Jones. It was September and a mild one in London. He nodded to the guardsman at the gate and the man saluted, and said, ‘Good morning, sir.’

They always knew if you’d been army.

That, too, had been a little time ago.

He had done things, even then, that the guardsman would never have thought the proper duty of a soldier.

Jay pulled his old Burberry around him and strode towards the looming Ministry building, riding like a shabby old liner in the grey seas of Whitehall. Bloody England, going on as if nothing had changed in the world. Guardees and men with breastplates on horses, for God’s sake. Sitting over their manifests and plotting their manoeuvres. Mind, we had a bloody good army, little but good. The Falklands had shown that. Granted, the opposition had been piss-poor but, just the same, the lads had done well, no denying it. Trouble was, not enough people were in uniform, or even knew what it was for. No conscription, so the country was full of pot-bellied boozers aged eighteen to twenty-five who wouldn’t know one end of a Lee Enfield from the other. Wankers, to a man, work-shy wankers. Still, the Falklands had shown we had some good stuff left.

He was sounding like his old man, in his head.

That could not be.

The old man was all guts and, as the American cousins would say, Old Glory.

Jay was not like that. Never could be.

Still, it had sounded just like the old man. Even the Burberry he was wearing had belonged to his father. Now, of course, every tab had been removed from it, and so had all the labels from every garment he wore, down to the scraped-out and obliterated maker’s mark on his shoes. His wrist-watch had no serial number. There was nothing in any of his pockets, except a handkerchief with no laundry mark, £20 in fivers and six £1 coins. Wear a suit, dear boy, Mr Jones had said, ringing off, so he had, one he’d worn before, on similar occasions. There was no grit or fluff in the pockets, and it had been recently cleaned. The cleaner’s tag had been taken off. Nice and clean. That was how he had been taught.

Jay presented himself at the reception desk inside the Ministry building. The uniformed commissionaire, with ribbons from Malaya and Suez, said, ‘Mr Jones, sir? If you’d follow me, sir?’

Jay stepped into the antique lift.

Mr Jones had tea waiting. It was Darjeeling and gave off a fragrant aroma, as he poured it into shallow Doulton cups and waved Jay to a chair. ‘I can’t stand this Ministry hogwash they bring around, so I have my girl brew up for me.’ Jay sat down. He had never seen any girl. He had never seen anybody, except the two men in plain clothes at the lift exit on the top floor, who had looked at him steadily, in the way that heavies, army or criminal, always did, at the depth of your shoulders and how you held yourself, wondering if you were trouble. Trouble? Jay smiled. He could have taken them both out in ten seconds. Only one had been armed, a small bulge under the left armpit. Shoulder holster. The other had nothing. Fresh-faced, about twenty, probably a boy learner. They didn’t look Regiment. Probably Army Security. Well, it was a living and it doubtless made Mr Jones feel safer.

Jay accepted the scented cup and a digestive biscuit.

All this fuss with the tea, he thought, so that Mr Jones does not have to shake hands.

‘Are you well, dear boy?’ Mr Jones peered over the rim of his cup. His collar was stiff, his hair thin and pomaded, his skin sallow and his suit dark and none too new. His eyes were something else. Mad, probably, Jay thought. But then, you’d have to be mad to sit in this perfectly ordinary civil service office, with this worn carpet and the curtains that didn’t close, and do what he did. Himself, too. He was mad to be here. It was a mad situation.

But some poor sod, as they said in the army, had to do it.

It just happened to be him, and it happened to be Jones.

Simple as that.

He’d got posted, that was all.

‘Fine,’ said Jay. ‘I’m fine. What’s the job?’

Mr Jones looked faintly disapproving. ‘All in good time, dear boy.’ He smiled, showing the National Health teeth. ‘How is the little lady?’

He meant Angie.

‘She’s all right, as far as I know.’

‘Oh? Is she away?’

‘She’s at work. At the BBC. Making up some actor’s face at this moment, I imagine.’

Mr Jones nodded and placed his cup carefully in his saucer. ‘That is still on, is it? All going well?’

‘I don’t talk to her, if that’s what you mean. About anything that matters, that is.’

‘The women.’ Mr Jones sighed. ‘They are a problem.’

Amen to that, thought Jay.

He said, ‘Angie’s no problem. She’s a very ordinary uncomplicated girl who doesn’t want to get married or anything like that, not yet anyway.’

‘Not too many like that about,’ said Mr Jones, obviously not believing him. ‘But discreet, even if she ever … knew?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Jay. ‘But she won’t.’

‘No,’ said Mr Jones, ‘of course not. That would cause … problems.’

‘Can’t happen.’ Jay finished his tea and put his digestive biscuit back in the saucer. He had lost his appetite. The old poofter bringing up Angie had done it. He kept Angie in one compartment of his mind. He lived with her, went to the movies with her, sometimes took her on car drives to the coast, Brighton usually, he was very fond of Brighton. God, he really was getting like his old man, the old boy had forever taken floozies to the place after his mother died. Floozies, what had happened to floozies? They had disappeared with the British Empire, that’s what had happened to them. No such thing any more. Angie wasn’t a floozie; she was a make-up girl at the BBC, and the kindest bed-mate he’d ever had. They had been together now for eighteen months and they still exploded when they touched. If the wind was in the east, anyway. That was another of the old man’s sayings: ‘if the wind was in the east’ meant sex. If he felt like it, she did. At once. If he didn’t, she simply snuggled up to him. She would hold his hand and watch television with absolute contentment. She was tall, almost too tall for Jay, who was five-nine, but she had a good, slightly plump figure, which she never slimmed. Her eyes were hazel and her hair was gold. She loved him very much and would have liked to have a child by him, but she had only said it once and later pretended it was a joke. After Cherry, the selfish bitch, she was a wonderful find, all giving and not much taking. He did not love her in the mad way he’d loved Cherry, anyway at the start, but he liked her very much, and admired her simplicity and trust. He did not want anything more than that from any relationship with a woman.

As Mr Jones said, anything else was a problem.

The wind, however, was often in the east.

Angie had kept him on a level keel for a long time now; perhaps she was the only thing that had. The drinking had gone down to manageable proportions for quite a while and the dreams had stopped for a bit. Lately, however, he had started to drink again and there had been a few dreams, not many and not too vivid, but a shade too often for comfort. Jay shifted in his seat, suddenly eager to get on with it, get it over with. What was the old pratt going on about now?

Mr Jones was asking him if he would like more tea.

Jay shook his head.

Mr Jones put his fingers together to make a steeple. ‘About money?’

Jay sat very still and waited.

Mr Jones passed across a slip of paper. It had a figure written on it.

‘I thought that,’ Mr Jones said, raising his eyebrows.

Jay nodded, hardly seeing the line of figures. ‘Fine.’

‘In the same place, naturally.’

Jay nodded, again. It would go towards the nest-egg. He forced himself to do the sum, which God knows was easy enough. He knew how much there was in Zurich. Add this to it, and it came to £35,000. Not a fortune but he was getting there. Soon, very soon, he would go and draw out the lot, not just sit about waiting for the odd five grand, arranged to make it look to Angie as if he was working, as if he could afford the rent of the Hammersmith pad. Two rooms, kitchen and bathroom in the rather sleazy block, car doors banging for an hour in the morning; trees in the streets, pigeons shitting on the cars all night. When it was fifty or sixty grand, he’d call it a day, and take Angie off to Vence, buy that dilapidated old cottage. It needed work doing on it, but he could do that himself, he was very handy at the old DIY. Maybe he would even give her the kid she wanted.

That, of course, was in the future.

‘Let’s go, Geronimo,’ he said.

Mr Jones smiled, slightly disapproving. ‘We are the eager beaver this morning, aren’t we?’

He opened a file.

Very slightly, although the room was cool, Jay began to sweat.

The taxi was waiting on a double yellow line on the other side of Whitehall. Jay walked across the wide road towards it, taking deep breaths. The driver was nobody he knew, nobody ever was, and didn’t even turn his head as Jay got into the back of the cab. As soon as Jay sat down, he drifted out into the traffic, along Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square. Jay put on his thin gloves, picked up the black leather briefcase lying on the back seat, and opened it. They had given him a Beretta 952 Special, fitted with a silencer. It was a .22, high muzzle-velocity, explosive head. Make a hell of a mess, but inside, where it mattered. He slipped it into the left inside pocket of the Burberry and put on the pair of heavy-rimmed glasses with plain lenses that were also in the briefcase. A little disguise was better than a lot. Look ordinary, that was the first rule. The briefcase would have no recognised ancestry. There was one thing about Mr Jones. He never overlooked detail.

Jay sat back in the seat and tried to think of nothing.

He used the old Canadian relaxation technique. First relax the head. Then the neck. Then the spine. Then the legs. It didn’t do much good, but it passed the time. The taxi wound its way up Shaftesbury Avenue and took a right into Soho. The place was busy, the businessmen hurrying about, the brassy old whores smoking their first cigarettes of the day and the first punters eyeing them up. My God, the optimism of some people. Jay looked at his watch. Twelve-thirty exactly. Another two minutes to get there. On the dot. One thing, it hadn’t been a long ride to work.

The taxi came to a sudden halt.

‘We’re over a minute early,’ said the driver, through the glass partition.

‘I’m not waiting,’ Jay replied. ‘I’m in and out. You be here when I do come out.’

‘If I’m not,’ said the driver, ‘I’ll be cruising round, pick you up at the bottom of Lexington Street, as per instructions.’

Jay felt a cold anger. ‘You be here, pouf,’ he said. ‘Don’t piss me about.’

The driver made no reply to that, except to say, ‘We’re only a minute in front now.’

Jay took a deep breath and got out of the cab.

He slammed the door and walked quickly into the narrow doorway bearing the gilt sign ‘Eastern Tours’. He walked up the stairs quickly, but one at a time. The place, like everything in Soho, smelt musty and full of the sin of years, somewhere under the dark panelling that covered God knows what. The tourists who came in here would have to be hard up for a holiday. Probably Party comrades from the Clyde or Marxist schoolteachers from Hull, in owlish glasses, going to see the Promised Land at cut-rates. Mr Jones had said he would be unlikely to see anybody on the stairs and he didn’t. He counted them just the same. Eighteen. Say nine inches deep each. Plenty of clearance-room at the bottom. If he had to, he could jump the last ten. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He pushed the door open at the top of the stairs and walked into the reception office. As Mr Jones had predicted, there was nobody at the desk. If there had been, his orders were to abort. Still at an easy pace, he lifted the counter-flap and walked into the office-space behind the reception desk. Two men in shirt-sleeves were at the far end of the office, their backs to him, one staring out of the window into the street. Nobody nearer, good. He hefted the briefcase in his left hand and turned smartly into the glass box of a private office, with no name on the door. The door was open (the office was very warm) and it was a good deal darker in there, due, he supposed, to the wooden files that loomed all around the walls. The man was not where Mr Jones had said he would be. Instead of sitting at his large desk in the centre of the office, he was bending over a small filing-cabinet at the far end of the room. He wore a cream shirt and his hair looked long but fashionably cut. Well, Mr Jones had said he would be young.

At that moment a telephone rang in the outer office. The man who had been looking out of the window walked up to the ringing instrument, picked it up and spoke into it. He looked towards Jay and the glassed-in office but did not seem to see anything, for he turned away again, still talking, and idly picked his nose.

Jay walked quickly and quietly across to the young man, put the Beretta to the back of his head and pressed the trigger. The body fell forward, into the gloom. There was almost no blood, as far as Jay could see. These Berettas were the job. He looked again, crouched low down, just to be sure.

He was still a long moment.

Then he straightened up, put the Beretta back into the inside pocket of the Burberry, and walked out of the office, not too quickly. There was nobody in the reception area, and he passed through on to the stairs. A very high fear threshold, that was what they’d told him, in the Regiment, a very high fear threshold, even for us. Of course, nobody can keep it up for ever. They had smiled, in their sinister SAS way. Jay took the last four steps at a jump, surprising himself, and then straightened up, breathed in deeply twice, and opened the door to the street.

The taxi was there.

He walked to it, still not hurrying, and got in.

The driver gunned the engine, which was running, and moved off. ‘Jesus, you were quick.’

‘Yes, I was.’ Jay put the Beretta and the glasses into the leather briefcase, locked it and placed it back on the seat.

‘How did it go?’ The driver didn’t look back. Jay hadn’t seen his face clearly yet and never would.

‘It went fine,’ said Jay, ‘except it was a woman.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said the driver, still not looking round.

He dropped Jay quickly at Leicester Square tube-station, and drove off before Jay could go through the fiction of paying him.

Jay got a ticket from the automatic machine and went down the escalator, standing all the way.

To his clinical surprise, his legs were trembling; he supposed with anger.

The tube rattled on, half-filled with lunchtime travellers, mostly shoppers, An Asian woman in a sari sat opposite. He looked at her with forced interest. Anything to get rid of the terrible anger. What a balls-up, what a frigging balls-up. He concentrated on the woman opposite. Something about the way she sat, the slant of her face, reminded him of the desert women in Aden. Up in the Radfan, his first job with SAS, fighting tribesmen egged on by the Egyptian and Yemeni terrorists; 120° in the day, below freezing at night, a war fought with Land Rovers and jelly and bazookas and air back-up. A war nobody acknowledged to have ever begun or continued or ended. The Regiment had done well there, but they did well everywhere. Bloody efficient, the Regiment, then as now. He took a deep breath, catching his reflection in the carriage window opposite. Fair hair, helped a little by the conditioner, as his barber called the dye. My God, the bloody Radfan was twenty years ago, building sarfans out of stones to keep the ice-cold air out at night, that was twenty bloody years ago, and what was he doing, twenty years after all that, but sitting on a tube train, stopping next at Green Park, and feeling a cold anger that he’d just been involved in the biggest fuck-up, bar none, of his career.

Career, what was he thinking about?

It wasn’t a career, and it certainly wasn’t a vocation.

It was a war, an Underground War, as real as this underground train. He was in it, as he was in this train. The rules of the Underground War were simple. They took out one of yours, you took out one of theirs. If you thought it worthwhile, you took out one of theirs first. He never knew which was which and he never asked. Nothing like this had gone wrong before, although there had been moments. The girl in the Eastern Tours office could have been just a functionary, even British, though the high cheekbones had screamed Slav, as he crouched down and turned her untouched face round to him, like a lover. Probably some innocent. It was no use caring, he told himself. All that had happened was that Mr Jones had made a boo-boo, his first ever. It had been, Jay thought, a highly visible, a far too highly visible exercise, from the very start. Walking in, walking out, for Chrissake, when had he ever walked in before?

In the German tavern, his very first job, he had walked in, yes, but that had been a very different operation. Nobody in the tavern had known him, how could they, he had only been in Berlin two hours, brought into Tempelhof by jet fighter from Northolt, and out to the bierkeller in a taxi. The man had been sitting alone, drinking lager in vast quantities, as they had told Jay he would be. An ordinary middle-aged worker, to look at, in his shiny peaked cap and shabby leather coat. As they had said he would, the man had gone, finally, to the pissoir. Jay wondered how he lasted as long as he did without going. The man had been making water in the pissoir, when he had seen Jay come in, look round and see the place was empty, and then reach into his pocket. The man had looked surprised, sliding down into the channel of flowing water and, Jay supposed, piss. He had seen Jay, seen the weapon in his hand, but he had not reacted, his hands had stayed frozen at his flies because, as they had told Jay years before, when you have the drop on anybody they take five whole seconds to react, in any way at all. And it did not take five seconds to press a trigger. He had turned round, walked out of the tavern, hailed a taxi back to Tempelhof. He had been back in London two hours later.

Today had been different.

Today, there had been people around, people who could describe him. The man on the telephone in the office, for instance. Jay got to his feet, found the tube door open and got out at Green Park instead of going on to Baron’s Court, as he should have done, to report in to Mr Jon. . .