Lewis had done quite a few things in his life that warranted a prison sentence. It was, as he later recounted to one of HMP Frankland’s resident psychologists, a grand irony that the thing he ultimately got done for was a complete accident.
He’d been running with Forster’s gang back in 2015, dealing with any hands-on work they needed done. A lot of money had gone missing, but the trail was a mile wide and led back to some schoolteacher: Ken Schofield. They’d picked up the man on his way home from work and brought him to an old warehouse on the Sunderland docks—nice and quiet and isolated, so they could go to work.
Hours later, and they’d gotten nowhere.
“Are you really going to make us do this all night?” Lewis eventually asked, circling the chair they’d taped Schofield into. He’d been carrying his laptop bag when they picked him up; the computer sat open on a table nearby. They’d managed to get his password out of him and found the wallet file containing the stolen funds, but transferring the money back out was proving problematic.
Schofield gagged and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. “Please,” he gasped out, “please, please stop—”
“You know how to make this stop,” Lewis replied evenly. “Give us the password for the wallet.”
“I don’t know,” Schofield sobbed. “I don’t even know how that file got onto my computer—I can’t—”
Lewis’ patience finally ran out. His arm whipped around in a brutal backhand, cracking sharply across Schofield’s face. The chair tipped over, and Schofield’s head hit the concrete floor with a wet crunching noise.
Schofield went limp in his restraints.
“Shit.” Lewis knelt to study the damage; blood leaked across the floor, spreading rapidly. He fumbled for Schofield’s pulse.
He couldn’t find one.
Edward Boulos’ manor house was a few miles outside Bath, which made it a two-hour drive from London. As the car approached the vast stretch of parkland that made up the estate, Jay turned off the main road onto a dirt service track; after about ten minutes, he rolled to a stop in front of an old, collapsed cottage.
While the house’s owner was out of the country, that didn’t necessarily mean it was empty; Boulos’ staff were around during the day to keep the place maintained, and the groundskeeper lived on the premises. The main road was too exposed to approach the house from that direction, but from this point it was only twenty minutes’ walk cross-country.
Clay climbed out of the car as Jay killed the engine, and they gathered up their equipment in silence.
This late in the year it was pitch-dark outside, and they were far enough from the city that there was very little ambient light. It was eerily quiet, compared to London; their footsteps and breathing seemed deafening in the silence around them as they wove through the woods surrounding the cottage.
After a few minutes the trees around them thinned. The house came into view, a hulking silhouette on the horizon. From across the fields came the faint sound of a dog barking.
Clay turned off his torch, and Jay followed suit. They waited there in the dark for what seemed like an eternity; Jay found it impossible to tell whether the dog was getting closer or further away, but eventually the sound faded. Clay switched his torch back on, signalling for Jay to do the same.
The southern perimeter of the grounds featured a massive, elegantly-landscaped garden full of topiary bushes and flower trellises, which offered plenty of cover on the approach to the house. At the top of a small rise sat the house itself: a huge, medieval-looking construction of grey stone. If Moran were here, he could probably tell Jay all about the history of the place—who’d built it, and whose hands it had passed through in the intervening centuries.
Clay offered no such information, instead leading the way to a stone outbuilding along the edge of the gardens. A CCTV camera was mounted over the door, with a wide enough field of view that approaching from the front wasn’t an option. Instead they circled round the back, finding a handful of small, dirty windows. They were closed, but not locked; Clay managed to slip open the latch of the nearest window and crawl inside, leaning back out to help Jay through.
The gardens were fitted with a computerised irrigation system networked to a series of thermometers and sensors. The central controller for the irrigation system was mounted on the wall inside the gardening shed; Jay popped the front panel open and quickly located a maintenance port on the motherboard, plugging his tablet into it.
As he’d hoped, the irrigation system was connected to the same network as the house’s security system. With the controller as a foothold, Jay could access the cameras and alarms. The alarms were easy enough to disable, as they were already designed to switch off during the day; all Jay had to do was adjust the settings for that time window so it included the next few hours. Disabling the cameras outright would be risky—Jay doubted anyone was watching them full time, but there was an outside chance he was wrong. Instead, he recorded a few seconds of footage from each camera and set it to loop over the live feeds.
“All right,” Jay said, detaching his tablet. “We’re good.”
There was an access door to the gardener’s kitchen at the base of the hill, which Clay easily picked open. The house’s lower level was mostly storage and utility rooms—including a control room for the CCTV system, which consisted entirely of a desk with a computer and two monitors. It was surely somebody’s responsibility to come by and check the recordings every now and then, but at present the desk was unmanned. Clay led the way up the stairs.
Old as the house was, its decor was a hash of multiple eras: Victorian upholstered armchairs shared space with plush velvet sofas from the seventies, surrounded by Tudor-era panelled walls and heavy medieval wooden beams across the ceilings.
Clay had been fairly certain they’d find what they were looking for in the master bedroom, up on the second floor; he did a quick circuit of the room, then zeroed in on the wide bookcase along one wall, pulling rows of books off the shelves.
Behind the books, on one of the middle shelves, was a wall safe. Clay got out his notepad and amplifier and went to work.
Light peeked in through the bedroom window. Jay edged along the wall and peered outside; the light was coming from the headlamps of a large, black van that had just turned off the main road, making its way up the drive toward the house. Two more followed behind it, tires crunching across the gravel.
The vehicles rolled to a stop, and a woman stepped out of the one in the lead; she was dressed in a dark coat buttoned up to the neck, hair tied up in a tight, severe bun. Several others disembarked after her, all wearing dark, nondescript clothes.
Clay had abandoned the safe and sidled up to the window as well. “Right,” he said, audibly nervous, “who do we think they are?”
As Jay watched, the newcomers opened up the back of one van and began unloading a series of long steel crates, carrying them toward the grey stone barn next to the house.
“If I had to guess,” Jay said, “I’d say the woman is Sabine Rietveld.”
“Sabine Rietveld, as in the gunrunner Sabine Rietveld?”
Jay shrugged. “She and Boulos are friends.”
Clay stared at him, appalled. “You knew about this?”
“Well, she wasn’t supposed to be here!” Jay glanced toward the door. “Come on. We need to leave before they see us.”
Clay stepped away from the window, bending to pick up the black bag Jay had left on the floor in front of the bookcase.
Jay shook his head. “Leave it.”
Clay gave him a perplexed look, but assented and followed Jay as he hurried down the stairs.
They made it down the main stairwell and across the ground floor without incident. Outpacing Jay a little, Clay reached the door to the lower level first—then opened it to find the groundskeeper standing on the other side. At his side was a large, scruffy dog.
The dog snarled and barked, the sound echoing harshly through the house.
“Shit,” Clay hissed, and slammed the door shut again.
The barking had drawn attention; raised voices sounded from the front entrance of the house. Jay ran through to the breakfast room instead, the wide glass doors of which opened out onto the garden terrace. Clay followed him down the terrace steps into the gardens, both of them sprinting away from the house as fast as they could.
A loud crack ripped through the air. Ahead of them, a piece of wood splintered loose from one of the trellises and flew off into the dark. Jay’s heart jolted at the sound; he scrambled down behind one of the garden’s stone retaining walls, reaching up to drag Clay down with him. More gunshots sounded overhead, and Jay didn’t dare move out of cover. They were pinned down.
Sound carried far out here in the countryside, but they were literally in the middle of nowhere. Even if someone heard the gunfire and called the police, they wouldn’t arrive in time. Nobody was coming to save them.
Something moved in Jay’s peripheral vision as one of Rietveld’s men came around the side of the gardening shed, gun raised and pointed directly at them. “Don’t move,” he warned.
“Stay back!” Clay blurted out. “I’m wearing a bomb vest!”
The man’s gun lowered slightly. He looked Clay over with a perplexed expression. “No, you’re not.”
“Fuck. No, I’m not.”
The shadows behind the man resolved into a familiar silhouette, and Jay couldn’t help but smile.
The gunman realised too late what that smile meant; he couldn’t dodge in time as Moran clamped a hand around his wrist, twisting until the gun fell harmlessly to the grass. His elbow came around the man’s throat in a choke-hold, holding him still until his eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.
Moran dropped his opponent unceremoniously to the ground and stared at Jay with an expression of raw panic.
“Hi,” Jay offered gratefully.
Another gunshot went off overhead; Moran ducked and snatched up the abandoned gun, rolling down behind the retaining wall and bracing himself over Jay. After a breath, he peeked out and raised the gun, firing off a few shots into the dark. Shouts and curses echoed from the other end of the garden as Rietveld’s men rushed for cover.
Moran dragged Jay to his feet. “Run.”
Jay ran; Moran stayed at his side, herding him toward the main road. Between gasping breaths, he managed to get out, “Bomb vest?”
“Oh, like you’d have done better,” Clay shot back from where he’d pulled ahead of them. He slowed a little, twisting to look back toward the treeline. “We’re going the wrong way—the car is—”
More gunfire echoed from the garden; Rietveld’s men had lost sight of them, firing instead at their last known positions. They couldn’t go back that way. Moran kept herding Jay ahead of him, up the embankment to where a car idled in the road, doors open.
Kitty was in the passenger seat. “Come on!” she snapped frantically at them.
Clay reached the car first, clambering into the driver’s seat and slamming the door. Moran tossed the gun aside, then grabbed Jay by the back of his shirt and shoved him forward into the back seat of the car, climbing in after him.
The door swung shut as Clay hit the accelerator and the car lurched forward, speeding away down the road.
Sebastian was on Jay the moment the car started moving, hands skimming frantically over his body, looking for blood or, god forbid, a bullet wound—
“I’m fine.” Jay clutched at Sebastian’s arms, so tightly he could feel the imprint of each finger through his coat. “Sebastian, I’m all right.”
“I’m also fine,” Clay called from the driver’s seat, “in case you were—”
He yelped as Kitty reached over and smacked him.
“You can’t do that,” Sebastian breathed, grabbing at Jay and pulling him close. “You can’t leave me behind, I can’t keep you safe if you—”
“I had to,” Jay said sharply, meeting his eyes. “I had to make sure you’d never look over your shoulder and see him there, ever again.”
“You could’ve died.” The words rattled out of Sebastian without thought. “You could’ve been killed, and I’m not—I’m not worth that—”
“You are.” Jay’s grip tightened on Sebastian’s arms. “You’re worth protecting. You’re worth everything I can give you.”
Jay withheld information more often than not. He told half-truths and dodged questions he didn’t want to answer. But he’d never looked Sebastian in the eye and said something that wasn’t true.
And he never would.
It was as if, in the space of just a few sentences, the whole world had shifted beneath Sebastian’s feet.
Jay drew himself up so he could bring his face closer to Sebastian’s, until they were breathing the same air. “If you want me to stop,” he said, quiet and sincere, “I will.”
This was never about ruining Collier’s life; it wasn’t even about sending him to prison. Collier was a problem, and no rule of law or morality would stop Jay from solving him. There was only one way this would end.
Jay’s hands shifted to Sebastian’s face, cradling it between them. “Do you want me to stop?”
Sebastian’s eyes fell shut. “No.”
Jay’s lips brushed his—not a kiss so much as an absolution. A promise. Then he pulled back, settling into his seat.
“Clay,” he said. “You can drop me off at the office. I need you to take Sebastian and Kitty home.”
The adrenaline of the flight from Boulos’ manor faded quickly, and Kitty ended up dozing against the window as Clay drove them back to London.
First stop was an old office building on Chancery Lane. As the car pulled up to the pavement, Jay shifted in the back seat, leaning in to press one last, gentle kiss to Sebastian’s mouth. He climbed out of the car without a word, and Clay pulled back out into the street, heading for Chelsea.
Twenty minutes of silence later, the car rolled to a stop in front of Sebastian’s flat.
Kitty leaned out the passenger window as Sebastian stumbled from the car. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.” Sebastian sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Go home, Kitty.”
Kitty nodded, and Clay pulled away from the curb. “Clay,” she said slowly, watching the empty streets of London unroll in front of them, “what’s Moriarty going to do?”
Clay shrugged. “He never let me in on the whole plan. I wouldn’t want to be Collier right now, though.”
A question arose that Kitty really should have thought about before now. “Does he kill people?”
“No! Well—” Clay paused, and it wasn’t a good sign how long he had to think about it. “Not … not directly.”
Kitty had never been sure whether she wanted to kill the man who had broken her neck. She’d definitely fantasised about hurting him—marking him for the rest of his life, like he’d marked her. But killing him almost felt too intimate. As if, in taking his life, she’d be enmeshing it with her own forever.
But she wasn’t Sebastian. And Moriarty had put the choice in Sebastian’s hands.
She just had to hope he’d made the right one.
It had been a rare evening in for Jason Collier; Kara had the chef cook up a nice roast for dinner, and they’d opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate his impending appointment as minister of health.
Just as they were getting ready for bed, though, a text came in from Piper:
Need to meet at the office regarding our arrangement, it’s urgent
Collier considered leaving it until morning, but there was quite a lot of money on the line—not to mention the future of his career. He made his excuses to Kara—something about a late-night emergency meeting with the prime minister—and slipped out, taking a cab to Chancery Lane.
The street was quiet this time of night; the windows of the old office building were all dark, save for one. A piece of printer paper was taped over the door buzzer to form a makeshift sign:
OUT OF ORDER
Call for entry
A phone number was listed beneath.
Grumbling, Collier pulled out his phone and dialled the number.
The phone rang for an age before the call timed out and disconnected.
Sabine Rietveld poured herself a generous glass of port from a bottle she’d found in Ed’s wine cellar, settling into one of the overstuffed sofas in the ballroom.
“They had a vehicle waiting,” reported Martin, who she’d delegated to coordinate the search of the house. “Looks like at least two accomplices.”
“Did they take anything?” Sabine asked. There was quite a bit of valuable product stashed in the barn; she already had buyers lined up, and replacing it all on short notice would be problematic.
“Not sure,” Martin replied. “We’re taking inventory, but right now it doesn’t look like there’s anything missing.”
Another of her men—Evan or Ifan or something—entered, carrying a black bag. “Found this in the master bedroom,” he said. “They were trying to get into the safe.” He set the bag down on the marble-topped coffee table and unzipped it—then lurched back with a terrified expression. “Fuckin’ hell!”
Inside the bag were several blocks of Semtex, fitted with a detonator wired to a small, cheap mobile phone.
“Move,” Sabine barked, leaping up off the sofa and backing away from the table. Her men hurried to comply. “Call Tavo, see if he can—”
The screen of the phone lit up, and it buzzed with an incoming call.
Sabine bolted from the room. Her men weren’t far behind, all of them piling out of the ballroom into the narrow hallway beyond, taking cover around the corner.
The phone kept buzzing. And buzzing.
Finally, it stopped.
Sabine edged up to the doorway, peering back into the ballroom. The bag sat innocently on the coffee table.
She gestured to Martin. “Go check it out.”
Martin looked uneasy at the prospect, but getting blown up was a preferable outcome to what would happen if he disobeyed one of Sabine’s orders. He carefully sidled down the hallway into the ballroom, approaching the coffee table as if every step might set off the bomb.
He stood over the bag, peered inside, looked up at Sabine, and shrugged.
“The phone,” Sabine said. “Get the phone.”
Martin reached into the bag—cringing the whole time—and swiftly detached the phone from the nest of wires around it.
A breathless moment passed. Nothing happened.
Sabine straightened and, doing her best to project an air of confidence, strode into the ballroom to examine the contents of the bag. She’d worked with quite a few explosive devices as a commando; this one was passably competent but haphazardly constructed, and the electrical relay between the detonator and phone had been wired incorrectly.
Snatching the phone from Martin’s hand, she pulled up its call history and noted the most recent number—the number of whoever had tried to kill her.
“Look this up.” She shoved the phone back at Martin. “Find out who it is. I’d like a word.”
Collier waited around Chancery Lane for fifteen minutes before he finally concluded Arlo Piper wasn’t coming. He ended up having to walk down to Fleet Street to hail a cab.
What should have been a quick ride back home stretched into an agonising delay when it turned out a delivery truck had stalled out at the mouth of Brompton Road, blocking the way back into Knightsbridge. The cab driver made noises about taking a detour, but home from here was maybe ten or fifteen minutes away on foot; Collier paid the driver, stepped out of the cab, and started to walk.
He was a few blocks from home when his phone rang; Piper was finally calling him back. He answered with a brisk, furious, “Where the hell are you?”
Piper’s voice was unbothered, almost bored, as he replied, “I’m afraid I had to cancel our appointment.”
Collier’s hands clenched into fists, walking a little faster. “It’s the middle of the night. I waited around that fucking office for ages. Do you have Boulos’ files or not?”
“About that,” Piper said dryly. “Edward Boulos doesn’t actually have blackmail material on the prime minister. His friends are in much lower places than that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a bomb in Edward Boulos’ house,” Piper explained, in a soft, lecturing tone that didn’t at all match what he was saying. “It’s hooked up to a phone detonator. I happened to leave that phone’s number on a sign taped up over the doorbell at the office.”
Collier’s stomach dropped as he stumbled to a halt. “What?”
“Don’t worry. The bomb isn’t wired right—it won’t go off. Although that does mean the call it received will shortly be traced back to your phone.”
“But—but I didn’t—that doesn’t make any sense.” Collier wiped his forehead; it was cold out, and yet he’d started to sweat. “Nobody could think I was really responsible for that.”
“You’re right, they couldn’t—unless you happened to pay any large sums of money into suspicious accounts recently.”
Which was exactly what Collier had done, on Piper’s advice.
“And then there was the car we left behind,” Piper went on. “Its navigation history will lead right back to Chancery Lane. I’m afraid we left quite a lot of bomb-making equipment behind—as well as a bottle of your favourite scotch, with your fingerprints on it.”
Collier’s mouth had gone dry; he swallowed. “So you’re framing me,” he said. “You’re … what, trying to get me arrested?”
“No,” Piper said, slow and patronising. “That’d be letting you off easy, I think.”
“Then what—?”
“I said Boulos has friends in low places. One of those happens to be an arms dealer who’s concerned about nearly getting blown up tonight. And she has a trail to follow—one that leads right back to you.”
“But it wasn’t me.”
“You’re welcome to try and explain that to her. Personally, I don’t like your chances.”
Collier spun on his heel, eyes frantically casting around. The street around him was empty, but someone was standing at a corner up ahead, phone to their ear. Watching him.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Collier couldn’t help but ask.
“Because of what you did to Sarah,” Piper replied. “And Helena. And Camille. And Sebastian.”
“Sebastian? Sebastian Moran?” Collier hadn’t paid much thought to Moran for decades, until he’d spotted him at the reception a few days ago and wandered over to say hello. He’d seemed … fine, really. A little stiff, a little confused, but he couldn’t still be sore over how things had been at school. “Listen, that was … that was just what everyone did. Things got out of hand, but …”
“I don’t care.” Piper’s voice had gone sharp and cold. “I don’t care what you tell yourself. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people can justify anything to themselves. And that the world is made for men like you.”
The low rumble of a motor came up the road behind Collier, growing louder with every moment. A black van was coming up the street toward him, slowing as it approached.
The figure standing up ahead turned and walked away, disappearing around the corner. Out of the dark, Piper said, “Goodbye, Mr. Collier.”
The line went dead, and the van rolled to a stop at his side.
Sebastian had known the moment he got home that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He crawled into bed anyway, for lack of anything better to do; he wasn’t sure how long he laid there in the dark before he heard the front door open.
Jay appeared in the doorway of his bedroom, little more than a thin silhouette in the dim light.
After a moment, Sebastian asked, “Is he dead?”
Jay shrugged. “You’ll never see him again.”
Sebastian exhaled a small, quiet noise of relief.
Jay moved closer, settling on the edge of the bed, and Sebastian sat up. This close, Jay’s face was limned in the faint light peeking in through the curtains.
He looked … scared. But not of Sebastian. His voice was flat and hollow when he asked, “Are you afraid of me?”
Jay would do anything for him. It was something Sebastian hadn’t fully understood until tonight—not just the idea itself, but the vast monstrous scope of what “anything” meant for a man like Jay.
Sebastian reached for him, pulling him in close. Jay sighed, relaxing into Sebastian’s chest, and Sebastian pressed a kiss into his hair, letting the silence stretch between them.
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