Witness X Read online

  Witness X

  A Group Fifteen Novella

  Mark Dawson

  With Scott Mariani

  Contents

  HIGHGATE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  VAUXHALL CROSS

  Chapter 3

  SIERRA DE LOS FILABRES

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  MALAGA

  Chapter 6

  VAUXHALL CROSS

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  FOUR YEARS EARLIER

  Chapter 9

  VAUXHALL CROSS

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  HIGHGATE

  Chapter 13

  THE COTSWOLDS

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  HIGHGATE

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  EPPING FOREST

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  HAMPSTEAD

  Chapter 23

  HIGHGATE

  1

  Tamsin Bell looked anxiously at her watch, worried about getting to work on time. She’d taken the job of assistant manager at an upmarket West End art gallery just two months earlier and was eager to please her new boss. Sebastian Faulkner would certainly be impressed when she rolled in twenty minutes late for the third time that month.

  Tamsin was pulling on her cashmere coat as she hurried down the front steps of the large, imposing and very expensive red-brick Victorian house into which she and her husband, Tony, had moved earlier that year, a significant upsize from the modest apartment they’d occupied since getting married. The front garden was strewn with autumn leaves, and more were spiralling down from the mature oak trees, covering the patch left bare by Tony’s Jaguar earlier that morning. Tamsin buttoned up her coat, feeling the bite of chill in the air that the brisk walk to Highgate tube station would soon warm away.

  The fact was that Tamsin didn’t need to work and only did so for pleasure, even though she’d learned early on that Seb Faulkner could be difficult in his ways. She could quit tomorrow and spend her days riding horses, reading, painting, pruning roses, whatever she wanted. Tony earned a good deal of money doing what he did for Rush Laboratories in Epping Forest, though quite what that was, he never really spoke about in detail, and she never really probed. Until the future day when children came into their life, a subject that had been discussed but never so far gone beyond the tentative planning stage, Tamsin was a free agent. She was still only twenty-nine. Children could wait.

  As she hurried on her way, the autumnal breeze catching her long blond hair, she was oblivious of the admiring glances coming her way from a couple of young guys sitting sipping lattes at a pavement café. Tamsin Bell, née Tamsin Gordon, had never considered herself a great beauty, though the rest of the world would beg to differ. Her looks were occasionally responsible for stopping traffic, but, of course, she was too unselfconscious to pay the least bit of attention.

  Tamsin was walking down the narrow, leafy approach to the tube station when she heard someone call her name. She glanced around to see who, but none of the commuters were acknowledging her, apart from the usual coy stares and smiles from single men. Then she heard it again. “Tamsin!”

  She’d never seen the man before. He was crossing the street diagonally towards her, signalling. How did he know her name? More strange, he was wearing a motorcycle helmet with the visor up. The helmet was black, like his leather jacket and jeans. What little of his face the helmet didn’t hide was obscured by wraparound sunglasses.

  A sports motorcycle was pulled up at the opposite kerb, its driver similarly dressed in black, his helmet visor flipped right down to shield his face. He was hunched down low across the tank, one foot on the road and the other on its peg, blipping the bike’s throttle with jerky little twists of his right wrist.

  “I’m sorry, do I know you?” Tamsin said to the man approaching her.

  She kept her voice pleasant enough, but she frowned as she struggled to recognise him. He was not a big man, lean and light on his feet, probably no more than five feet six in height. His complexion, what she could see of it, definitely had a light brown lustre. A customer of the gallery, perhaps. She wished he would at least remove his helmet. It unsettled her a little, like someone wearing a mask. As he walked closer, she noticed the object he was carrying in his gloved hand. It looked like a beaker of something. A clear, colourless liquid that appeared too viscous to be water.

  What was he doing?

  Tamsin’s body began to stiffen as she sensed that something wasn’t right about the situation. Her instinct was suddenly telling her to back off.

  Right off.

  Get out of here, now.

  But Tamsin’s self-preservation instinct was too slow, and her reaction was delayed by a crucial couple of seconds; two seconds that were about to permanently alter the course of her life.

  The stranger said, “Hey, Tamsin, have a drink.”

  And before she could duck out of the way or even flinch, he’d dashed the contents of the beaker in her face.

  She gasped, first in shock and surprise. Then in unspeakable horror as she felt the terrible burning sensation spread all over her face, like nothing she’d ever felt before. Her vision was suddenly all blurry, and breathing was difficult. She could smell something awful, like scorched feathers. She fell to her knees and pressed her hands to her face. The agony was so intense that she couldn’t even scream. That was when she looked down at her fingers with the one eye that could still see, and realised that the flesh of her face was coming away like melted wax in her hands. Which was the last thing Tamsin would remember before waking up in the hospital some hours later, after the first of many operations to save her from the ravages of the acid.

  With a last impassive look at his victim as she lay writhing on the ground, the attacker sprinted nimbly back to the waiting motorcycle and leaped astride the pillion, yelling to the rider in a language that none of the immediate witnesses to the incident happened to understand. The rider snapped the machine into gear and tore open the throttle, and the bike took off with a howling roar from its twin exhausts and its front wheel skipping off the road.

  It accelerated wildly up the street, punched into the traffic and was gone forever.

  The attack had been swift and efficient and was over in moments. But for Tamsin Bell, the nightmare was just beginning.

  2

  Things moved quickly after that.

  Two paramedic teams were dispatched in fast-response cars and attended to the victim, who was airlifted to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead shortly afterwards by a London Air Ambulance helicopter. Meanwhile the police were working at full throttle to seal off the crime scene and quiz potential witnesses.

  They soon singled out two key candidates: Rashid Hakimi, who was fifty-eight, and Stephen Brooks, who was thirty-four. The two men had each made a 999 call moments after the nightmare happened. In separate statements, Hakimi and Brooks gave almost identical descriptions of the attacker, his accomplice and the getaway vehicle, which was described as a large black and green sports bike. The witnesses’ reports concurred that the helmets both men were wearing would make identification of the pillion passenger very difficult, and the rider impossible, as his visor had remained closed the entire time.

  However, while Hakimi had been too far away to hear, Brooks offered the vital information that the attacker had called the victim’s name at least once, possibly twice, before assaulting her. This seemed to confirm that the attack had not been a random incident, but a targeted strike, as most such crimes were. Brooks also reported that the attacker spoke with
a particular accent that he described as ‘Chingrish’, although that pejorative expression wasn’t used on his statement; instead, it was cautiously worded to read that the alleged perpetrator ‘sounded as if he might have been of possible Far Eastern ethnic origin’.

  Meanwhile, footage from CCTV cameras was scrutinised. It revealed the route that the getaway motorcycle had taken from Highgate tube station: Tamsin Bell’s two assailants had dumped the bike less than a mile away and hopped into a waiting van. Police soon recovered the bike, a Kawasaki ZZR1400, reported stolen across town earlier that morning. It had been torched and was found totally clean of fingerprints other than its owner’s. The plain white VW Transporter panel van had been fitted with false number plates and its location was still unknown.

  Somewhat more promisingly, specialist technicians had managed to isolate half a second’s worth of camera footage in which the rider and his pillion passenger removed their helmets as they clambered inside the Transporter. They were already hard at work on enhancing the video image frame by frame in the hope that it might offer a positive ID of either man; it was a long shot, and expectations were not high.

  During this time, a very distraught Tony Bell was called away from his office at Rush Laboratories, a private science facility where he’d served for the last eight years as a technical coordinator and project manager. Having been informed by police of the nature and severity of the attack on his wife, Tamsin, he demanded to see her. That wasn’t possible, they said, because she had already been hurried into surgery.

  Under sedation for shock, he was then interviewed by officers of Scotland Yard. He professed to have absolutely no idea why anyone would have targeted his wife like this.

  No, neither he nor she had any particular friends or acquaintances of Chinese, Japanese or other Far Eastern ethnicity.

  No, they were not in any kind of trouble. Why would they be? They were a happily married, middle-class, financially comfortable, debt-free and law-abiding couple, as far from trouble as it was possible to get.

  And no—emphatically no—Tamsin was not romantically involved with anyone else. This was not a malicious act of revenge by some thwarted lover, or anything like it, and Bell passionately refuted and resented the very idea. This was, he insisted, simply a cruel and monstrous act against an innocent victim.

  While all this was going on, the surgeons were battling desperately to repair their badly ravaged patient. The first major issue to deal with had been the threat of cardiac arrest, resulting from the systemic toxicity brought on by the acid her assailant had used against her. Once they’d succeeded in averting that danger, their second concern was the damage to the respiratory tract caused by the involuntary inhalation of acid vapours. It would take a lot of effort to get her breathing normally again. Next on their list of urgent priorities was rescuing the left eye, which was at this point welded shut by a mess of fused tissues; only further investigation would tell whether anything was left of the eyeball inside.

  And there would be a lot more work after that. Lips, nose, ears, cheeks, chin, throat—all had taken a direct hit from the acid. This was what was euphemistically termed a ‘life-altering trauma’. Even if they performed miracles, the surgeons’ prognosis was that the beautiful young woman would be severely disfigured for life.

  They had a hell of a long day ahead of them.

  VAUXHALL CROSS

  3

  Far away across London, on an upper floor deep inside the confines of an anonymous-looking grey block of a building overlooking the Thames, the new case file landed on the desk of a man whom his colleagues, including most of his superiors—as well as the army of personnel he commanded—knew only as ‘Control’. The world to which he belonged was fond of anonymous titles. Control was the supreme ruler of the closeted little kingdom of Group Fifteen, a subdivision of an organisation that was dubbed the ‘Firm’. The functions and operations that the Group performed were virtually unknown to the outside, and for very good reason.

  Control had been enjoying a rare coffee break at his desk when the hurriedly assembled case file came through, marked top priority. He flipped open the folder and addressed its contents with his customary look of severity, which grew graver as he read down the page. When he had finished, he closed the file and leaned back in his plush leather desk chair. He ruminated for a few moments, then reached for the phone.

  His aide-de-camp, an ex-soldier called Tanner, came into his room.

  “Sir?”

  Control replied in a flat, expressionless voice, “Get me Number Twelve.”

  SIERRA DE LOS FILABRES

  4

  High in the sierra, another day was slowly drawing to a close. The daytime hours were still warm even as autumn crept closer, but a far cry from the brutal heat of summer. Bryan Duffy had been here for most of the season. He could take the heat. He’d taken Iraq in July.

  Later, as he did every evening, Duffy would take a moment to stand atop a high rock and watch as the sun sank behind the mountains, turning their blue ridges to the colour of blood. The nights were getting chillier. Bryan Duffy could take the cold, as well. He’d seen Afghanistan in January. This was nothing.

  Duffy was sitting on a sun lounger that overlooked the pool. His guitar was across his lap, his head bent low over the instrument, his hands aching from hours of playing. The pulsing, heady music was as much part of this savage and feral landscape as the mountains and the rivers. To feel its sounds and rhythms throbbing through you was to be one with this place. When Duffy played, he felt himself disappear. That was why he loved it so much.

  Flamenco guitar was one of the most difficult and challenging musical arts to master. Because it evolved largely out of the long rule of the Moors over Spain, its Arabic rhythms were alien to the traditional Western ear. The Spanish gypsies here had it in their blood. Duffy had found a tutor in one of the bars he visited in Zahara de la Sierra. The music seemed to flow effortlessly from the man, but then he had devoted his life to the near-impossible physical techniques that a flamenco player must learn. Duffy was a white boy from Croydon and at a natural disadvantage.

  But then, life had never been easy for Duffy. He was used to that. He had never retreated from a challenge in all his thirty-three years, and he wasn’t about to shrink away from this one either. Never back down. That credo had brought him as much bad luck and trouble in his time as it had good things. But that was who he was. He was going to learn how to play. He would play until his fingertips dropped off. Then he’d go on playing with the bony stumps. He had been like that when he had initially been told he wasn’t right for the army. The sergeant on the range who had taught him to shoot had said the same thing. Duffy had proved them wrong. He was competitive and he hated failure. And he had had to find something to do during his unwanted and enforced leave of absence from everything he knew in London.

  He continued for another hour until it was too dark to play, and then he packed up his guitar and placed it among the scant possessions that he carried in the back of his beat-up old Jeep. Two kilometres down the mountainside, the speckled lights of the little mountain village glowed faintly. There was a little taverna down there, off the pretty little village plaza, which Duffy had visited a few times and would visit again tonight.

  He climbed into his Jeep and made his way down the twisting rocky road.

  5

  Zahara de la Sierra was a Pueblo Blanco, one of the ‘white towns’ that gathered on the flanks of the mountains in the Sierra de Grazalema. The villages were characterised by the whitewashed walls and red and brown tiled roofs of the buildings. Duffy found that the men and women who lived here were deeply traditional, with a natural distrust for outsiders. It had taken Duffy several weeks to feel as if he was, if not quite accepted, then at least tolerated within the village. The length of his stay had made it obvious that he was more than a tourist, and his fluent Spanish had done much to endear him.

  He walked into Cerveceria El Gallo, his favourite taverna. It wa
s a Saturday night, and the old stone-built barroom was quiet and half empty. His kind of place, far away from the troubles of the world.

  “Una cerveza, por favor,” he said to the barman, spilled some cash on the bar and carried his beer to a table at the far end of the room.

  He sat with his back to the wall, positioned so as to be able to see both the door and the windows. Old habits never die. He sipped his beer, flexed his tired fingers and sat quietly, listening to the music in his head. But his watchful eyes missed nothing.

  Like the other stranger in the village, for instance. Through the window Duffy saw him get out of a black Mercedes SUV and cross the plaza. Moments later, the stranger entered the taverna. The man was clearly not a local. He was dressed in a light suit, a little travel wrinkled and dusty. He was obviously ex-military, and he walked with a limp. Duffy knew why: a convoy that the man had been travelling within had been hit by an IED on the road out of Kabul, and he had lost his right leg below the knee.