Hunted, page 3
‘Oh yeah?’ smiled Bailey. ‘What does that entitle me to?’
He rummaged round in a drawer and took out a small foil-wrapped chocolate. He placed it on the desk in front of her.
‘Your VIP welcome gift,’ he said with a beaming smile.
Bailey picked it up. The foil round the edges was somewhat scuffed, exposing the chocolate beneath. Her face dropped a little. ‘Thanks.’
Following his directions, she hauled her suitcase up a poky stairwell to her room on the first floor. The interior of the hotel was in serious need of redecorating, with peeling paint, threadbare carpets and tired-looking furnishings, and on top of that a strange musty smell permeated the dingy corridors.
Entering her room using the keycard Ravi had given her, she was immediately struck by how small it was. The bed might have been king sized, as advertised, but it was too large for the tiny room, preventing the door of the en-suite bathroom from opening properly.
Looking inside the bathroom, she saw that it didn’t appear to have been cleaned very well, noticing amongst other things that there was a length of used dental floss on the floor.
She sighed to herself. Well, she’d wanted somewhere low-key and that was what she’d got. She’d briefly contemplated getting an Airbnb, but had settled on the idea of a hotel because, despite being a little more expensive, it offered her more flexibility in terms of being able to maintain the requisite level of personal security. She could check in and check out as she pleased, and change rooms with relative ease if needed.
Kneeling down, she opened her suitcase and began to unpack her belongings. Seeing as the operation was likely to be of a relatively short duration, she hadn’t brought too much with her. A few sets of clothes. Some selected toiletries. A book of cryptic crosswords. Her work laptop. Laying out her items on the bed, she gazed down at them with the disconcerting feeling that she’d forgotten something important, but she couldn’t work out what it was.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a trilling sound as her mobile phone suddenly started ringing in her pocket. Taking it out, she recognised the caller’s number as that of her friend Detective Constable Emma Broggins. Emma, who was a similar age to Bailey, worked down at the same South London police station where Bailey was based and she was the closest thing Bailey had to a friend there. They played well off each other, Emma being quite gregarious and Bailey being quite the opposite; Emma was always telling Bailey she should get out more which was largely why she’d exhorted her to come out with them on Anthony’s leaving do.
She knew Emma was calling to follow up on the series of text messages she’d sent Bailey in the wake of her one-night stand with Anthony. Emma, being the one who’d introduced them both to each other, had been curious to know how it had gone. Swept up with recent concerns, Bailey hadn’t yet got round to responding to her.
She chewed her lip, debating whether to answer the phone. Whilst Emma was a good friend, Bailey wasn’t in the mood to discuss romantic issues at this exact moment. She was keen to get the operation up and running and every minute counted. Letting the phone ring out and go to answerphone, she made a mental note to call Emma back later that evening.
Sitting down on the bed, she booted up her work laptop and connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi network. The connection was a bit patchy but it functioned well enough to allow her to log into the Metropolitan Police computer system through a secure VPN.
Her fingers tapping rapidly on the laptop’s keyboard, she accessed the Police National Database and pulled up the files relating to the unsolved murders that had been ascribed to Rex. Stella had let her know which ones to look at and they seemed like a good starting point in terms of working out what steps to take next in order to catch him.
Although the unsolved cases totalled just seven in number, Bailey knew that Rex was rumoured to have killed substantially more people than this. She knew that these particular cases only comprised those instances where sufficient DNA evidence had been recovered to tie a distinct culprit to the murders in question. She imagined that for just as many other murders committed by Rex, DNA evidence wouldn’t have been available for whatever reasons, and on top of this it wouldn’t have surprised her if there’d been situations where deaths might have been disguised as accidents or suicides and thus never even considered as murders in the first place.
She began to read through the unsolved cases, feeling an undeniable chill of foreboding as she did so. They were a veritable catalogue of murder, mutilation and torture-on-request. A gangster who’d been beaten to death and thrown in the Thames. A drug dealer who’d had his brains blown out in the middle of Knightsbridge in his open-topped sports car. Another drug dealer who’d been injected with strychnine and left to die. A Kurdish gangster who’d been riddled with bullets in a social club in Haringey. An informant who’d had his tongue cut out. A prostitute who’d been thrown off the top of a tower block. Another informant who’d been tied up and buried alive.
Finding little to help her in the files, she switched to the internet to see if she could unearth any supplementary insights on the cases that might ultimately lead her to Rex. For most of them it was just the odd local news article here and there, reporting little more than the bare facts of the crime in question. However, one of the cases stood out dramatically for the abundant news coverage that it had received at the time.
The gangster who’d been beaten to death and thrown in the River Thames was a man by the name of Vincent Peck. Peck had been the co-owner of a high-end strip club in Central London called Ruby Red that was popular with a number of big celebrities, and this tinge of sleazy glamour was the reason that his murder had received more news coverage than a normal gangland hit.
According to the police file, Peck had been killed three years earlier, which made his death the first actual hit to be attributed to Rex. His body had been found washed up near Sheerness on the Thames Estuary. The corpse had been in a fairly degraded state, having been in the water for a while, but the murder investigation team had managed to recover DNA from an unidentified individual via some blood spatters on his clothing. It seemed that Peck had put up some kind of struggle before being murdered.
Although the police file gave no indication as to the identity of the murderer, the news articles on the internet provided a tantalising hint as to who might have actually hired him, and Bailey realised that this information itself could provide a potential means of finding Rex.
A number of the more salacious articles alluded to a rift that had taken place between Peck and the other person who owned Ruby Red, a notoriously shady businessman by the name of Jack Wynter. Ruby Red was an extremely profitable enterprise, and it was some kind of financial wrangling over this that had caused Peck and Wynter to fall out with each other, Peck being murdered a short while afterwards. Following his death, Wynter had assumed full control of the club and all of its profits. It appeared that although Wynter was strongly suspected of being behind Peck’s murder, nothing had ever been proven.
As a police detective, Bailey was vaguely aware of Jack Wynter by reputation, knowing that although he claimed to be an innocent nightclub operator, he was little more than a gangster at the end of the day.
Looking at Peck’s murder in the context of her current situation, an enticing idea occurred to Bailey. One way to trap Rex might be to try and actually hire him. But in order to do so she would need to find out how to contact him. And that was where Jack Wynter entered the picture. If Wynter had used Rex to dispose of his former business partner – and it certainly seemed to look that way – then it was highly conceivable that Wynter knew how to hire Rex. All Bailey needed to do was ask him.
Not that it would be easy by any stretch. For a start, she’d have to approach Wynter in the guise of a fellow criminal for he quite obviously wouldn’t reveal that kind of information to a regular police officer. But even so, getting him to trust her would still present a considerable challenge. After all, he’d never met her before, and criminals weren’t very trusting people by their very nature.
She tried to think of a plausible means by which she could approach Wynter and gain his trust. Sitting there on the bed, she twisted her loose-hanging lock of hair round her finger and let it slowly uncurl as was her habit when she was contemplating the solution to a problem.
A sudden loud cacophonous racket ruptured the atmosphere. Bailey jumped and immediately tensed, her concentration shattering. She looked round wildly to see where the noise was coming from. After a few moments she realised that it was the sound of someone playing the bagpipes. It sounded like they were right outside her window.
Crossing over to the window, she looked outside to see that, sure enough, standing on the street directly below was a red-headed bearded man clad in green tartan blowing furiously into a set of bagpipes. The din gradually became discernible to her as the song ‘Scotland the Brave’.
She realised that the bagpiper was some kind of busker, probably plying the tourist trade emanating from the cheap hotels in the vicinity. She rolled her eyes and then noticed that the window was slightly open. That explained why the noise was so loud. She tried to close the window, but however much force she applied it didn’t seem to want to close. It appeared to be jammed open.
With a sigh, she gave up trying to close it and turned her attention back to the matter at hand.
5
It was a sunny Thursday evening at St Katharine Docks, unseasonably warm for mid-September. Well-dressed stylish people sat in the cafés and restaurants round the marina, basking in the laid-back atmosphere, eating al fresco and chatting and laughing, whilst the masts of the nearby yachts quavered ever so gently in the soft breeze.
The hitman known as Rex sat on the deck of his forty-foot luxury catamaran playing Solitaire whilst sipping from a can of San Pellegrino Limonata. He loved it when the weather was like this and he could sit outside.
St Katharine Docks was the most upmarket of the London docks and it was the only marina in Central London. The boats moored here were top of the range. No doubt about that. Sleek and pricey. The top brands: Beneteau, Dufour, Hanse. You weren’t going to find any shitty houseboats tied up at these docks.
The marina was located in Wapping very close to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. In fact Rex could see the distinctive turrets of Tower Bridge from above the tops of the upscale apartments which lined the docks. The architecture here was a mixture of old and new with the former bankside warehouses now remodelled into luxury residential, office and retail space.
He lived here on the catamaran all by himself and that suited him just fine as he loved the feeling of freedom it gave him. He could just uproot whenever he pleased and sail wherever he wanted.
It was definitely a nice boat to live on. This particular model was known as a Lagoon 40. Possessing the distinctive twin hulls of a catamaran, it was white in colour with a teak deck and had a deceptively spacious interior which included a large saloon area with a faux leather sofa, four cabins and a well-equipped galley.
By all accounts it was a very expensive boat to purchase. But then Rex hadn’t actually purchased it. It had been more a case of appropriating it. After all, the previous owner hadn’t had much use for it… after Rex had murdered him. It had belonged to a gangster by the name of Vincent Peck and it happened to be fitted out with some very useful hidden compartments in the twin hulls which had been designed to hold illicit merchandise.
The boat had originally been called Eager Beaver, the previous owner having had a penchant for double entendres. Even though Rex had heard it was bad luck to change the name of a boat, he just wasn’t prepared to live on a boat called Eager Beaver so he’d renamed it Aletheia which he thought sounded a whole lot more sophisticated. Aletheia was the name of the Ancient Greek goddess of truth, and for some reason, something about that particular name had struck a chord with him.
Every so often he’d take the catamaran out to sea. A loner by nature, he liked being out on the open water with no one else but him for miles around. He’d always been partial to boats and sailing although he couldn’t recall quite where or how he’d picked up the taste for it.
Studying the playing cards laid out on the table before him, he reflexively scratched at the small scar which ran diagonally through his right eyebrow.
He only ever played one card game, and that was a version of Solitaire known as Concentration. The rules were pretty simple. You laid out the entire deck face down on a table and then you had to turn over the cards two at a time. If the two cards matched then you took them off the table. If they didn’t then you turned them back over. You just went on like that until you cleared the table. The goal was to do this in the shortest possible number of moves. The game was all about memory because you had to be able to remember which of the face-down cards that you’d already looked at matched the one you’d just turned over. Rex had reached the point where he could complete the game in just thirty-nine moves which was apparently better than most people.
He found the game an infinitely absorbing way to pass the time. But he also liked to play it in order to hone his powers of retention and recall, for having a good memory was a definite bonus when it came to planning and carrying out hits.
Considering that it was a game based on memory, it was ironic that he couldn’t remember for the hell of him where he’d learnt to play it.
About to pick up a card, he suddenly froze, his fingers hovering over the table. He sniffed the air. If he wasn’t mistaken he could detect the scent of a familiar perfume wafting in his direction. A smile slowly spread across his chiselled face.
‘Hello Milena,’ he said without turning round.
‘Don’t you ever get bored of playing that game?’ said a female voice with a strong East European accent.
‘It helps my memory,’ he replied, turning round slowly.
Standing on the pontoon just by the boat was a blonde woman with a sharp, pretty face dressed in a fashionable black trouser suit and designer heels holding a leather portfolio pouch. She looked like she’d just come from, or was on her way to a business meeting… which wasn’t surprising seeing as she was a businesswoman of sorts.
Milena functioned as his business manager, brokering contract killings on his behalf, earning a ten per cent cut of whatever he was paid. From Rex’s perspective, the good thing about having a business manager was that it insulated him from his clients and helped to maintain his anonymity which in turn served to increase his general mystique. And not just that, for Milena was a born saleswoman who was skilled at soliciting new work for him, a task he was more than happy to hand over to someone else.
She stepped aboard daintily, making her way across the deck to sit down at the table opposite him.
‘You know if you ever want to play with someone else, you can play with me sometime,’ she said with a flirtatious wink.
He knew she was just teasing though. She liked to tease. Their relationship was and always had been purely platonic.
‘I think I’ll stick to Solitaire,’ he said, turning his attention back to the cards.
Milena shrugged indifferently. ‘Suit yourself.’
Out of the corner of his eye he caught her studying him in that strange way that she sometimes did when she thought he wasn’t looking. A mixture of curiosity and intrigue, plus something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on… Fear perhaps. People who spent any amount of time round him, getting to understand the kind of things he was capable of, tended to become afraid of him.
He raised his head to meet her gaze, and as always she quickly suppressed the look, once again resuming her brisk and friendly visage.
‘You only ever come here for two reasons,’ he said. ‘When you have a new job for me. Or to hassle me about one I’m in the middle of. And I think I can guess which of the two reasons it is today.’
She raised one eyebrow in disapproval. ‘The client specified that this job has to be completed by the eighth of October, at all costs. I come here and what do I find? You’re sitting here drinking lemonade and playing cards.’
‘It’s a nice evening to be sitting outside,’ said Rex with an offhand smile. ‘Anyhow, you know as well as I do that once I’ve been paid I always finish the job. When have I not? It’s a matter of professional integrity.’
And he had been paid well for this particular job.
One hundred and fifty thousand pounds upfront.
Rex always insisted on advance payment. Sometimes the client attempted to wheedle a ‘half now, half later’ deal. But in his opinion, only the little-league operators settled for that, the kind of workaday killers who just did domestic jobs. Here in the big leagues it was all or nothing. But for that, those who hired him got platinum service. He prided himself on never having once let a customer down. Reputation was everything in this business and he did all he could to keep his as pristine as possible. After all, good word-of-mouth ensured a steady stream of new work.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ he said. ‘Everything’s in hand. Now that I know her real name, it’ll only be a matter of time before I pinpoint where Bailey Morgan lives. The files I got from the lawyer’s house didn’t contain any information about her so I’ve had to resort to other slightly more long-winded methods.’
Rex had spent a good part of the previous day utilising a specialist database to which he subscribed. The database aggregated the personal data of millions of UK citizens – their names, addresses, telephone numbers, shopping preferences and much more – making it a very handy reference tool for someone like him. The monthly subscription cost wasn’t cheap but he’d found that the return on investment was more than worth it.
He was betting that at some point in the past Bailey Morgan had let her name get onto a marketing list, most likely as a result of an item or service that she’d purchased. She would no doubt be receiving junk mail as a result but what she, like most people, probably wasn’t aware of was that her data would have been sold by that very same company to the third party who operated the database which Rex found so helpful.
He rummaged round in a drawer and took out a small foil-wrapped chocolate. He placed it on the desk in front of her.
‘Your VIP welcome gift,’ he said with a beaming smile.
Bailey picked it up. The foil round the edges was somewhat scuffed, exposing the chocolate beneath. Her face dropped a little. ‘Thanks.’
Following his directions, she hauled her suitcase up a poky stairwell to her room on the first floor. The interior of the hotel was in serious need of redecorating, with peeling paint, threadbare carpets and tired-looking furnishings, and on top of that a strange musty smell permeated the dingy corridors.
Entering her room using the keycard Ravi had given her, she was immediately struck by how small it was. The bed might have been king sized, as advertised, but it was too large for the tiny room, preventing the door of the en-suite bathroom from opening properly.
Looking inside the bathroom, she saw that it didn’t appear to have been cleaned very well, noticing amongst other things that there was a length of used dental floss on the floor.
She sighed to herself. Well, she’d wanted somewhere low-key and that was what she’d got. She’d briefly contemplated getting an Airbnb, but had settled on the idea of a hotel because, despite being a little more expensive, it offered her more flexibility in terms of being able to maintain the requisite level of personal security. She could check in and check out as she pleased, and change rooms with relative ease if needed.
Kneeling down, she opened her suitcase and began to unpack her belongings. Seeing as the operation was likely to be of a relatively short duration, she hadn’t brought too much with her. A few sets of clothes. Some selected toiletries. A book of cryptic crosswords. Her work laptop. Laying out her items on the bed, she gazed down at them with the disconcerting feeling that she’d forgotten something important, but she couldn’t work out what it was.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a trilling sound as her mobile phone suddenly started ringing in her pocket. Taking it out, she recognised the caller’s number as that of her friend Detective Constable Emma Broggins. Emma, who was a similar age to Bailey, worked down at the same South London police station where Bailey was based and she was the closest thing Bailey had to a friend there. They played well off each other, Emma being quite gregarious and Bailey being quite the opposite; Emma was always telling Bailey she should get out more which was largely why she’d exhorted her to come out with them on Anthony’s leaving do.
She knew Emma was calling to follow up on the series of text messages she’d sent Bailey in the wake of her one-night stand with Anthony. Emma, being the one who’d introduced them both to each other, had been curious to know how it had gone. Swept up with recent concerns, Bailey hadn’t yet got round to responding to her.
She chewed her lip, debating whether to answer the phone. Whilst Emma was a good friend, Bailey wasn’t in the mood to discuss romantic issues at this exact moment. She was keen to get the operation up and running and every minute counted. Letting the phone ring out and go to answerphone, she made a mental note to call Emma back later that evening.
Sitting down on the bed, she booted up her work laptop and connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi network. The connection was a bit patchy but it functioned well enough to allow her to log into the Metropolitan Police computer system through a secure VPN.
Her fingers tapping rapidly on the laptop’s keyboard, she accessed the Police National Database and pulled up the files relating to the unsolved murders that had been ascribed to Rex. Stella had let her know which ones to look at and they seemed like a good starting point in terms of working out what steps to take next in order to catch him.
Although the unsolved cases totalled just seven in number, Bailey knew that Rex was rumoured to have killed substantially more people than this. She knew that these particular cases only comprised those instances where sufficient DNA evidence had been recovered to tie a distinct culprit to the murders in question. She imagined that for just as many other murders committed by Rex, DNA evidence wouldn’t have been available for whatever reasons, and on top of this it wouldn’t have surprised her if there’d been situations where deaths might have been disguised as accidents or suicides and thus never even considered as murders in the first place.
She began to read through the unsolved cases, feeling an undeniable chill of foreboding as she did so. They were a veritable catalogue of murder, mutilation and torture-on-request. A gangster who’d been beaten to death and thrown in the Thames. A drug dealer who’d had his brains blown out in the middle of Knightsbridge in his open-topped sports car. Another drug dealer who’d been injected with strychnine and left to die. A Kurdish gangster who’d been riddled with bullets in a social club in Haringey. An informant who’d had his tongue cut out. A prostitute who’d been thrown off the top of a tower block. Another informant who’d been tied up and buried alive.
Finding little to help her in the files, she switched to the internet to see if she could unearth any supplementary insights on the cases that might ultimately lead her to Rex. For most of them it was just the odd local news article here and there, reporting little more than the bare facts of the crime in question. However, one of the cases stood out dramatically for the abundant news coverage that it had received at the time.
The gangster who’d been beaten to death and thrown in the River Thames was a man by the name of Vincent Peck. Peck had been the co-owner of a high-end strip club in Central London called Ruby Red that was popular with a number of big celebrities, and this tinge of sleazy glamour was the reason that his murder had received more news coverage than a normal gangland hit.
According to the police file, Peck had been killed three years earlier, which made his death the first actual hit to be attributed to Rex. His body had been found washed up near Sheerness on the Thames Estuary. The corpse had been in a fairly degraded state, having been in the water for a while, but the murder investigation team had managed to recover DNA from an unidentified individual via some blood spatters on his clothing. It seemed that Peck had put up some kind of struggle before being murdered.
Although the police file gave no indication as to the identity of the murderer, the news articles on the internet provided a tantalising hint as to who might have actually hired him, and Bailey realised that this information itself could provide a potential means of finding Rex.
A number of the more salacious articles alluded to a rift that had taken place between Peck and the other person who owned Ruby Red, a notoriously shady businessman by the name of Jack Wynter. Ruby Red was an extremely profitable enterprise, and it was some kind of financial wrangling over this that had caused Peck and Wynter to fall out with each other, Peck being murdered a short while afterwards. Following his death, Wynter had assumed full control of the club and all of its profits. It appeared that although Wynter was strongly suspected of being behind Peck’s murder, nothing had ever been proven.
As a police detective, Bailey was vaguely aware of Jack Wynter by reputation, knowing that although he claimed to be an innocent nightclub operator, he was little more than a gangster at the end of the day.
Looking at Peck’s murder in the context of her current situation, an enticing idea occurred to Bailey. One way to trap Rex might be to try and actually hire him. But in order to do so she would need to find out how to contact him. And that was where Jack Wynter entered the picture. If Wynter had used Rex to dispose of his former business partner – and it certainly seemed to look that way – then it was highly conceivable that Wynter knew how to hire Rex. All Bailey needed to do was ask him.
Not that it would be easy by any stretch. For a start, she’d have to approach Wynter in the guise of a fellow criminal for he quite obviously wouldn’t reveal that kind of information to a regular police officer. But even so, getting him to trust her would still present a considerable challenge. After all, he’d never met her before, and criminals weren’t very trusting people by their very nature.
She tried to think of a plausible means by which she could approach Wynter and gain his trust. Sitting there on the bed, she twisted her loose-hanging lock of hair round her finger and let it slowly uncurl as was her habit when she was contemplating the solution to a problem.
A sudden loud cacophonous racket ruptured the atmosphere. Bailey jumped and immediately tensed, her concentration shattering. She looked round wildly to see where the noise was coming from. After a few moments she realised that it was the sound of someone playing the bagpipes. It sounded like they were right outside her window.
Crossing over to the window, she looked outside to see that, sure enough, standing on the street directly below was a red-headed bearded man clad in green tartan blowing furiously into a set of bagpipes. The din gradually became discernible to her as the song ‘Scotland the Brave’.
She realised that the bagpiper was some kind of busker, probably plying the tourist trade emanating from the cheap hotels in the vicinity. She rolled her eyes and then noticed that the window was slightly open. That explained why the noise was so loud. She tried to close the window, but however much force she applied it didn’t seem to want to close. It appeared to be jammed open.
With a sigh, she gave up trying to close it and turned her attention back to the matter at hand.
5
It was a sunny Thursday evening at St Katharine Docks, unseasonably warm for mid-September. Well-dressed stylish people sat in the cafés and restaurants round the marina, basking in the laid-back atmosphere, eating al fresco and chatting and laughing, whilst the masts of the nearby yachts quavered ever so gently in the soft breeze.
The hitman known as Rex sat on the deck of his forty-foot luxury catamaran playing Solitaire whilst sipping from a can of San Pellegrino Limonata. He loved it when the weather was like this and he could sit outside.
St Katharine Docks was the most upmarket of the London docks and it was the only marina in Central London. The boats moored here were top of the range. No doubt about that. Sleek and pricey. The top brands: Beneteau, Dufour, Hanse. You weren’t going to find any shitty houseboats tied up at these docks.
The marina was located in Wapping very close to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. In fact Rex could see the distinctive turrets of Tower Bridge from above the tops of the upscale apartments which lined the docks. The architecture here was a mixture of old and new with the former bankside warehouses now remodelled into luxury residential, office and retail space.
He lived here on the catamaran all by himself and that suited him just fine as he loved the feeling of freedom it gave him. He could just uproot whenever he pleased and sail wherever he wanted.
It was definitely a nice boat to live on. This particular model was known as a Lagoon 40. Possessing the distinctive twin hulls of a catamaran, it was white in colour with a teak deck and had a deceptively spacious interior which included a large saloon area with a faux leather sofa, four cabins and a well-equipped galley.
By all accounts it was a very expensive boat to purchase. But then Rex hadn’t actually purchased it. It had been more a case of appropriating it. After all, the previous owner hadn’t had much use for it… after Rex had murdered him. It had belonged to a gangster by the name of Vincent Peck and it happened to be fitted out with some very useful hidden compartments in the twin hulls which had been designed to hold illicit merchandise.
The boat had originally been called Eager Beaver, the previous owner having had a penchant for double entendres. Even though Rex had heard it was bad luck to change the name of a boat, he just wasn’t prepared to live on a boat called Eager Beaver so he’d renamed it Aletheia which he thought sounded a whole lot more sophisticated. Aletheia was the name of the Ancient Greek goddess of truth, and for some reason, something about that particular name had struck a chord with him.
Every so often he’d take the catamaran out to sea. A loner by nature, he liked being out on the open water with no one else but him for miles around. He’d always been partial to boats and sailing although he couldn’t recall quite where or how he’d picked up the taste for it.
Studying the playing cards laid out on the table before him, he reflexively scratched at the small scar which ran diagonally through his right eyebrow.
He only ever played one card game, and that was a version of Solitaire known as Concentration. The rules were pretty simple. You laid out the entire deck face down on a table and then you had to turn over the cards two at a time. If the two cards matched then you took them off the table. If they didn’t then you turned them back over. You just went on like that until you cleared the table. The goal was to do this in the shortest possible number of moves. The game was all about memory because you had to be able to remember which of the face-down cards that you’d already looked at matched the one you’d just turned over. Rex had reached the point where he could complete the game in just thirty-nine moves which was apparently better than most people.
He found the game an infinitely absorbing way to pass the time. But he also liked to play it in order to hone his powers of retention and recall, for having a good memory was a definite bonus when it came to planning and carrying out hits.
Considering that it was a game based on memory, it was ironic that he couldn’t remember for the hell of him where he’d learnt to play it.
About to pick up a card, he suddenly froze, his fingers hovering over the table. He sniffed the air. If he wasn’t mistaken he could detect the scent of a familiar perfume wafting in his direction. A smile slowly spread across his chiselled face.
‘Hello Milena,’ he said without turning round.
‘Don’t you ever get bored of playing that game?’ said a female voice with a strong East European accent.
‘It helps my memory,’ he replied, turning round slowly.
Standing on the pontoon just by the boat was a blonde woman with a sharp, pretty face dressed in a fashionable black trouser suit and designer heels holding a leather portfolio pouch. She looked like she’d just come from, or was on her way to a business meeting… which wasn’t surprising seeing as she was a businesswoman of sorts.
Milena functioned as his business manager, brokering contract killings on his behalf, earning a ten per cent cut of whatever he was paid. From Rex’s perspective, the good thing about having a business manager was that it insulated him from his clients and helped to maintain his anonymity which in turn served to increase his general mystique. And not just that, for Milena was a born saleswoman who was skilled at soliciting new work for him, a task he was more than happy to hand over to someone else.
She stepped aboard daintily, making her way across the deck to sit down at the table opposite him.
‘You know if you ever want to play with someone else, you can play with me sometime,’ she said with a flirtatious wink.
He knew she was just teasing though. She liked to tease. Their relationship was and always had been purely platonic.
‘I think I’ll stick to Solitaire,’ he said, turning his attention back to the cards.
Milena shrugged indifferently. ‘Suit yourself.’
Out of the corner of his eye he caught her studying him in that strange way that she sometimes did when she thought he wasn’t looking. A mixture of curiosity and intrigue, plus something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on… Fear perhaps. People who spent any amount of time round him, getting to understand the kind of things he was capable of, tended to become afraid of him.
He raised his head to meet her gaze, and as always she quickly suppressed the look, once again resuming her brisk and friendly visage.
‘You only ever come here for two reasons,’ he said. ‘When you have a new job for me. Or to hassle me about one I’m in the middle of. And I think I can guess which of the two reasons it is today.’
She raised one eyebrow in disapproval. ‘The client specified that this job has to be completed by the eighth of October, at all costs. I come here and what do I find? You’re sitting here drinking lemonade and playing cards.’
‘It’s a nice evening to be sitting outside,’ said Rex with an offhand smile. ‘Anyhow, you know as well as I do that once I’ve been paid I always finish the job. When have I not? It’s a matter of professional integrity.’
And he had been paid well for this particular job.
One hundred and fifty thousand pounds upfront.
Rex always insisted on advance payment. Sometimes the client attempted to wheedle a ‘half now, half later’ deal. But in his opinion, only the little-league operators settled for that, the kind of workaday killers who just did domestic jobs. Here in the big leagues it was all or nothing. But for that, those who hired him got platinum service. He prided himself on never having once let a customer down. Reputation was everything in this business and he did all he could to keep his as pristine as possible. After all, good word-of-mouth ensured a steady stream of new work.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ he said. ‘Everything’s in hand. Now that I know her real name, it’ll only be a matter of time before I pinpoint where Bailey Morgan lives. The files I got from the lawyer’s house didn’t contain any information about her so I’ve had to resort to other slightly more long-winded methods.’
Rex had spent a good part of the previous day utilising a specialist database to which he subscribed. The database aggregated the personal data of millions of UK citizens – their names, addresses, telephone numbers, shopping preferences and much more – making it a very handy reference tool for someone like him. The monthly subscription cost wasn’t cheap but he’d found that the return on investment was more than worth it.
He was betting that at some point in the past Bailey Morgan had let her name get onto a marketing list, most likely as a result of an item or service that she’d purchased. She would no doubt be receiving junk mail as a result but what she, like most people, probably wasn’t aware of was that her data would have been sold by that very same company to the third party who operated the database which Rex found so helpful.
