‘I didn’t want to leave a trace.’
‘I was having dinner with my girlfriend; she’s furious. Not used to me walking out on her before dessert. You have no idea how she gets if you deprive her of pudding. And as for all this secret agent stuff, if you wanted to talk about Cruikshank we could at least have met in a decent wine bar.’
‘That’s just it, Mr Baine, I don’t want to talk about Cruikshank. I know it’s a company you and Robert set up, and I know it holds the slush fund you just emptied out.’
‘That’s not true, it’s just—’
‘I know you’re being investigated by the Inland Revenue office. And I know you’re terrified that Robert will find out what you’ve been doing. You’ve been a very, very bad accountant, Mr Baine.’
‘I’ve had enough of this. You theatricals are all the same, you think you can get something for nothing. If you want to talk further with me, make an appointment at my office like everyone else instead of playing silly games. I should never have—’
‘Go on, say it: You should never have tried to seduce me.’
‘That’s a bit of a strong word. It was a stupid mistake. Susan was away—’
‘But I’m glad you tried. I went through your briefcase while you were in the bathroom. That’s how I discovered what you were up to.’
‘Stupid of me—’
‘You can’t change the past. But I can change the future.’
The spray hit Baine squarely in the eyes and snatched his breath away, burning and searing. His throat was on fire. He couldn’t see. He dropped his briefcase and slipped to his knees on the rain-soaked street.
He felt sick and disoriented, the acid in his stomach curdling the rich meal he had consumed, bringing it up into his throat. Now he could feel gentle guiding hands under his arms, carefully towing him away from the scaffolding lights and into darkness. He staggered and found his polished brogues connecting with wooden duckboards. Below, the tide was lapping at the shoreline.
His heart was hammering fit to burst beneath his ribs, and he flailed dizzily, but found himself pushed blindly on until he felt sure he was over water. He could hear it lapping somewhere far below, smelled its acrid tang even through the pain of the pepper spray.
And then he felt the rope.
Coarse and thick, it dropped over his head, suddenly tightening around his neck, an absurdity in this day and age—hadn’t they all been replaced with nylon? He reached up and felt it, rolls of the stuff arranged in some kind of—but of course that’s what it was, a hangman’s noose.
And now it was tight and getting hard to breathe, and his feet were stepping out into nothing but the updraft of damp, brackish night air from the river, and he was falling out over the Thames, and suddenly he realised that the steak and the wine and the bad-tempered girlfriend were the final moments of his life.
On Thursday morning at exactly eight o’clock, the workmen finishing the rebuild of Cannon Street station began hammering scaffolding pipes out of place. They always made as much noise as possible at this time, then knocked off at eight-thirty for a leisurely breakfast, knowing that one of the nearby Thameside residents would call the council to complain about the noise. In this way the workmen provided proof that they started on time, and as it was legal in the City of London to begin construction on the stroke of eight, the residents had no complaint upheld.
Amir Sahin slipped out of his harness and climbed along the planks laid across the bridge scaffold. He knew Health & Safety would go nuts if they saw him, so he stayed in the shadows beneath the green painted arch as he worked his way out over the water.
He had taken to keeping his coat and tools here because someone in the team was a thief, and he wasn’t going to leave his stuff back on the ground until he’d figured out who it was. Also, it was the only place where he could enjoy a cigarette; the bridge site had a no-smoking ban enforced upon it, despite the fact that they were in the open air and there were no flammable materials in use. Back in Dubai, where Amir had been working on the Burj hotels, they worked a hundred floors up on buildings, without safety cables, and side winds could pluck you out of the construction like a doll. But here in this wet, grey little country, every move you made had to be approved by a sour-faced foreman. No wonder everything took so long to get done.
He reached up to get his tool bag, which was wedged in a junction of steel poles just below the underside of the bridge, when he saw the rope and knew that someone else had been here. There had definitely been no equipment left out last night. It wasn’t one of theirs, for a start—they used standard issue blue nylon cord, not the kind of rough old hemp you used to find in fishing villages.