The Invisible Assassin(38)

But right now, he was on his own, vulnerable.

Maybe I should just back out, he thought. I’ve got this far. Maybe I should retreat to the front door and slip out.

You’re overdoing it, he told himself. There’s no one here. If there was, they would have been at you by now. They wouldn’t have waited this long.

Come on, he urged himself. Open the door and walk in. There’s no one there. You’re OK. Get in, grab your stuff, and get out.

He hesitated, took a deep breath, then pushed open the door.

There was a body on the floor of his living room. Not just any body, it was the short man who’d stopped him in the street and threatened him. The same black T-shirt, the same short hair, the same scar down one side of his face, only now his eyes were wide open and he was perfectly still, and there was a knife sticking out of his chest.

Jake felt sick. He swayed. Who was this man? How had he got here? Who had killed him? And why?

‘I have to phone the police,’ he said aloud.

Suddenly, there was a crash from outside his flat, and as he turned he saw the front door being torn off its hinges and hurtling in, and then his flat was filled with men dressed from head to toe in black and holding automatic rifles.

‘Face down on the floor!’ screamed the man nearest to Jake.

‘But . . .’ he began.

‘On the floor!’ roared the man. ‘Hands on your head!’

Jake dropped to the floor and pressed his face into the carpet, his hands behind his head, as instructed. All he could see were big boots crashing around him, and then a shout came from one of the men.

‘Dead, all right! Stabbed!’

Jake started to get up, to explain, but a boot stamped down on the back of his neck, pushing his face back into the carpet.

‘Move again and you’re dead!’





Chapter 18




Jake sat in the cell. It was a bare box, with one small window made of wired glass high up in one wall. What was the point of the wired glass? he wondered. The window was about ten feet from the floor, with no way of reaching it, short of being a human fly or Spiderman and climbing up the wall. Maybe it was to stop the prisoners inside the cell from trying to break the glass; but the police sergeant had taken anything hard from Jake: his keys, money. They’d also taken his shoelaces and his tie.

Everything in the cell was fixed down. The metal toilet bowl in one corner. The bench on which he was sitting, and would be sleeping on if they didn’t let him out, was a slab of concrete set into the wall. There was a very thin mattress on the concrete slab, but there was no way he could throw the mattress at the window and do any damage to it.

He sat on the mattress on the bench. He’d been here for hours. He didn’t know exactly how long because the police had also taken his watch and his mobile. What was it that Albert Einstein had said about time being relative? That sometimes an hour can seem like a day, and sometimes it seems little more than a few seconds. He tried to work out how long he’d been in here. He’d been brought in at about one o’clock. The daylight coming in through the tiny window was still strong, so it was still the afternoon. Why were they leaving him for so long? To soften him up? Frighten him? They’d already done that.

He rubbed the back of his neck. It still ached from where the armed man in black had put his foot on it. He shivered as he remembered the black-clad men with the guns in his flat. Then the plain-clothes people had appeared: a man and a woman. They’d taken one look at Jake, lying on the floor, and at the body of the man in the living room, and then gestured at Jake and said, ‘Bring him along.’ After that, they’d stripped him of his possessions, and anything they thought he might use to harm himself, and had locked him in this cell.

They think I killed that man, he told himself, and a surge of fear went through him. They’ll put me on trial and fix it so I’m found guilty and spend the rest of my life in jail. And all because I saw a man turn into a vegetable! he groaned.

There was the sound of a key in the lock, and then the door swung open. A burly uniformed constable looked in at him.

‘All right, you,’ he said. ‘Someone wants to talk to you.’



‘Interview with Jacob Matthew Wells. Detective Inspector Edgar and Sergeant Club attending. PC Omulu also present.’

Jake sat at the bare table, looking across at the man who’d spoken into the recording device, Detective Inspector Edgar. Next to him was Sergeant Club. Jake presumed that the uniformed constable sitting on the rickety chair by the door was PC Omulu.

This room was very different from the interview room in the other police station, where he’d given his statement about being attacked. That room had seemed almost friendly, its walls painted a pastel shade of yellow. This room seemed threatening. The only furniture was the table and a couple of chairs. It smelt musty: stale sweat. The walls were dark. Jake could imagine people being tortured in here with no one coming to help them.