Absolute Zero Read online

  Sixty feet below is nothing but hard pavement.

  He registers people running across the street. Someone screams and Thurston feels the skin on his fingers start to burn. In a second or two he won’t be able to hold his grip. Things become simplified at these moments: do something right now, or die.

  Adrenaline works differently in different people.

  Cody Thurston has always found when his adrenaline spikes, events around him slow to a crawl. So long as that slowness is not accompanied by paralysis, it can be a useful trait. In the sliced seconds of time he has left on the balcony, Thurston scans his surroundings for an out.

  There’ll be something. There has to be.

  And then he sees it. Not much but it’s all he’s got: a phone line bolted into the crumbling brickwork a yard or so down to his left. It’s too far to reach with his free arm but, by swinging across and down, using his own body weight as a pendulum, Thurston manages to hook his feet around the wire. He locks his ankles together, takes a deep breath and lets go of the railing.

  For a dizzying second he drops before the wire cuts into his ankles but he holds on. Now he’s hanging upside down from the burning building. He swings upwards and manages to grab on to the wire. He clings to it like a monkey on a vine.

  A slab of masonry topples from above and almost swipes him out of the sky.

  ‘Move!’ shouts a voice from the street and Thurston hauls himself hand over hand towards the steel telephone pole across the street. He’s about twenty feet from the V when he’s almost jolted off as a second piece of debris falls from the roof and bounces onto the wire. Thurston redoubles his efforts and, with each passing second, gets closer to safety.

  Less than ten feet from the telephone pole, the wire finally pulls free from the crumbling brick and Thurston is free-falling. He smashes backwards into the steel pole and the wire almost jerks loose from his hand. He falls another ten feet before he’s pulled up with a violent jerk as the wire finds its length.

  The wire snaps and now Thurston is falling again. He twists in mid-air and lands heavily on the roof of a car parked below. The sheet metal crumples and every last ounce of Thurston’s breath is knocked from his lungs.

  But he’s alive.

  As the buzz of unconsciousness closes in, he hears a rumble. He looks across at the V in time to see the roof collapse in an explosion of dancing orange sparks and blackened timber.

  And then there is darkness.

  CHAPTER 10

  LIGHTS. VOICES. THE clang of metal equipment and that unmistakeable antiseptic tang in the air. A gurney rumbles down a corridor, wheels squeaking on the rubberised flooring.

  Hospital.

  Thurston opens his eyes to see a young cop sitting next to the bed, his head bent over a phone, mouth slightly open.

  ‘Is she OK?’ says Thurston. ‘Barb?’

  The cop looks up, startled. ‘What?’

  ‘Barb Connors. She was in the pub. Did she get out?’

  The cop doesn’t answer.

  ‘She didn’t, did she?’ Thurston lets his head sink back and closes his eyes. An image of Barb trapped inside her room comes into his mind. She’s screaming, her clothes on fire. Thurston opens his eyes again and now there’s a doctor leaning over him with a syringe.

  ‘Wait,’ says Thurston, but the needle is already in his arm.

  ‘How long will he be out for?’ says the cop.

  The doctor shrugs. ‘Six, seven hours maybe.’

  ‘Tell m—’ says Thurston but he can’t complete the sentence. He feels as though he’s underwater with some great beast dragging him down into the depths. He fights to keep his eyes open but it’s no use. Blackness creeps in at the edges of his vision and his last coherent thought as he sinks back into unconsciousness is to wonder why there’s a cop in his room.

  CHAPTER 11

  THURSTON’S IN HOSPITAL for three days. He banged himself up pretty bad getting out of the V but it mostly looks worse than it is. He’s got nine stitches in a head wound and five more in his right hand. There’s been some low-level skin damage on one side of his face. No broken bones. He’ll live. The concussion was what concerned the doctors most. Despite the fall being broken by the car roof, Thurston hit hard. Internal bleeding was a distinct possibility but that has not shown up.

  As soon as he’s given the all-clear he dresses in the jeans, T-shirt and sneakers given to him by the cops and two of them sign him out and take him in handcuffs to a patrol car. No one has answered any of his questions about Barb Connors and he’s been allowed no visitors. The patrol car takes him directly to Paddington Green police station, less than a mile from the hospital.

  Inside the station, Thurston is shown into an interview room and left to wait. He takes a seat on one side of a plain wooden table. Now he’s away from the hospital, anger about his treatment is growing. They can’t think he had anything to do with the fire, so why all this heavy-handed stuff? He wonders if it could be related to something in his military past – the fire at the V bringing him to the attention of some shadowy black ops outfit. Almost as soon as he’s thought of it he dismisses it as fanciful. Thurston knows too that these kind of mind games are part of any interrogation process. Whatever’s happening, his conscience is clear.

  Eventually the door opens and two plain-clothes cops come in. One of them, a beefy-looking guy with thin reddish hair and what Thurston guesses will be a permanently flushed face, sits down and places a file on the table in front of him.

  ‘I’m DS Hall,’ he says. ‘This is DS Morrison. We’ll be conducting this interview.’

  Morrison is a tall, bland-looking man in his early thirties. He says nothing and takes a seat next to Hall.

  ‘You ready to tell me what all this is about?’ says Thurston. ‘I need to know if Barb Connors survived.’ He keeps his voice level, respectful. No sense in pissing these guys off if all they’re doing is their job. Still, Thurston has to repress the urge to shout.

  ‘Interview commences twenty-one fourteen, Monday, eleventh of January,’ says Hall. He shows no sign of having heard Thurston speak. ‘DS Hall and DS Morrison present. Subject, Cody Michael Thurston, formerly of 21 Hackney Road, London.’

  Thurston looks at Morrison but, seeing nothing there, he keeps his mouth shut. There’s a play going on here and Thurston can wait.

  ‘Why did you do it, Thurston?’ says Hall. ‘She knock you back? You try and screw her and she wasn’t having any of it?’

  ‘Excuse me? What are we talking about? Barb Connors? She’s eighty years old.’

  ‘He’s not talking about Barbara Connors,’ says Morrison. ‘At least, not yet.’ He looks down at the file. ‘We want to know why you raped and killed Sofi Girsdóttir.’

  ‘What?’ Thurston sits up straight.

  Hall makes a show of sighing. He exchanges a weary look with Morrison. ‘Is this how you’re playing it, Thurston?’

  ‘Playing what?’

  Hall leans forward and props his elbows on the desk. ‘Sofi Girsdóttir, your co-worker and ex-girlfriend—’

  ‘My what? Sofi’s not my ex.’

  ‘We understand you had a prior sexual relationship with her which ended recently.’

  ‘We went out once or twice. It didn’t work so we stopped. She’s not what I’d call an ex.’

  Hall leans further forward. ‘Was the fire an afterthought? Something to cover your tracks after you’d raped and killed Sofi?’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ says Thurston. ‘Sofi’s dead?’

  Without warning, Hall slaps Thurston across the cheek. Thurston bites back the instinct to ram Hall’s face into the table. He sees Morrison tense and thinks, He’s not entirely on board here. It’s useful information.

  ‘OK,’ says Thurston. ‘You can have that one, Hall.’ He wipes blood from his cheek. His head wound has reopened. ‘Let’s do things your way.’

  ‘While you’ve been in hospital pretending to be hurt,’ says Hall, ‘we’ve been busy out here build
ing a nice, shiny, completely airtight case against you. Want to hear how it goes? After the pub shut down for the evening, you tried it on with Sofi Girsdóttir. Maybe you weren’t happy about her breaking up with you. Maybe you are the kind of man who can’t control himself around women. Who the fuck knows? But you tried and when you were rejected you raped and strangled her. Later, to cover your tracks, you set the pub on fire and staged your own escape. Barbara Connors, an elderly lady, your boss, was left to burn alive.’

  Hall pauses for emphasis and holds up a hand. He counts off on his fingers as he talks. ‘We have a petrol can with your prints on it. We have multiple witnesses who saw you arguing with her on the night of the attack. We have sexually threatening emails from you on Girsdóttir’s computer. We have you alive and her dead. So, let’s keep things nice and simple, shall we? Tell us why and how and it’ll go easier on you, Thurston. Not much, but easier.’

  Thurston says nothing.

  ‘No request for a lawyer?’ says Morrison.

  ‘He’s upset, DS Morrison. I think he might cry.’

  Thurston stares at a spot on the wall somewhere past Hall’s shoulder, trying to put together something coherent from the information he’s receiving. Barb’s dead. Well, he knew that already. He heard the screams. Sofi being dead is a shock. And the crap about him raping her is doubly shocking. Thurston thinks about the evidence Hall recounted. He thinks about that quite a bit.

  It’s the reason why he’s not going to ask for a lawyer, because the torrent of shit coming out of Hall’s mouth means one thing and one thing only: this is a grade-A stitch-up. There’s no point in Thurston protesting his innocence, no percentage gained in whining. If someone’s putting this much effort into framing him then he has to come up with something better than asking for a lawyer. No, Thurston keeps quiet because he isn’t planning on sticking around.

  Still, there could still be advantages to talking.

  Putting your opponent’s mind somewhere else, for example. Thurston wants something from Hall but needs him off balance to get it.

  ‘How much are you getting, Hall?’ says Thurston. ‘Enough?’

  Hall frowns. ‘Come again?’

  ‘For the frame,’ says Thurston. He switches his gaze to Morrison. ‘You know about this too? Wait, no, I’m guessing not.’ Thurston smiles bleakly and holds Morrison’s gaze. ‘Your partner’s for sale, Morrison. A cheap whore. There must be a part of you, deep down, that knows the little fucker’s dirty, right?’

  Morrison glances at Hall and Thurston sees the barb has hit home. Morrison isn’t in on this – whatever ‘this’ might be – but has enough suspicion about Hall already to figure he could be bent.

  ‘Ah,’ says Thurston, ‘you do.’

  ‘Very funny, Thurston,’ says Hall. He leans forward close enough for Thurston to smell the cigarette smoke on his breath. ‘You’re going down, dickhead,’ he whispers. ‘For a long time. And you know what they do with rapists inside.’

  Thurston lunges at Hall, grabbing him by his lapels and pulling him across the table. He moves so quickly, he and Hall are on the floor of the interview room before Morrison can react.

  Thurston and Hall grapple for a few seconds before Morrison hauls Thurston off his partner. Hall staggers to his feet and punches Thurston hard in the stomach. Thurston drops.

  ‘Steve!’ spits Morrison. ‘Enough.’

  Hall, breathing heavily, controls himself with difficulty. He brushes his thinning hair back into place and adjusts his tie. Thurston is curled on the floor in a foetal position.

  ‘Interview terminated,’ says Hall.

  He knocks on the door and two uniforms step in.

  ‘Overnight,’ says Hall, bending over Thurston. ‘And we’ll get you a lawyer, Thurston. You’re not getting off on some technical bullshit.’

  Thurston says nothing. Instead, he concentrates on slipping the mobile phone he’s taken from Hall’s pocket into his sock. He’ll need it later when he gets out of here and comes after every last motherfucker responsible for the killings of Sofi Girsdóttir and Barb Connors.

  CHAPTER 12

  ONCE HE’S DOWN in the cells, Thurston’s chances of escape will reduce drastically. At the very least, Hall’s phone will be discovered.

  No, if he’s going to get out of here, there’s only going to be one opportunity: on the short journey between the interview room and the lower cells while the two cops taking him there assume the action is over. Slumped between the two uniforms, he waits until they pass the fire exit door. The cops aren’t expecting any trouble from the hobbling Thurston so when it comes he meets little resistance. They haven’t even cuffed him.

  Big mistake.

  Without warning, Thurston drives the point of his elbow full into the gut of the cop to his left and pops the knee of the other with a simultaneous downward heel kick. With both men disabled, he smashes the fire alarm glass and pushes open the exit door. The bare concrete stairwell is empty but won’t be for long. Thurston walks slowly down, pretending to look at Hall’s mobile. Cops begin to stream into the stairwell, barely giving Thurston a second glance. Lesson one in the dark arts he’s been trained in: if you look as though you belong somewhere, no one questions it, not even cops.

  This strategy does have a fault: it is strictly a short-term solution. The fire alarm Thurston triggered to cause confusion works well. But by the time he gets to the fire exit door at the foot of the stairs he can detect a shift in the information spreading through the cops milling around outside. News of his escape is in the air. He hears voices raised, sees fingers pointed his way.

  Time to go.

  Thurston moves to the kerb and waits a few seconds for what he wants on the Harrow Road. Behind him he sees five or six cops moving towards him.

  C’mon, c’mon.

  A courier on a big scrambler weaves slowly beside a stationary BMW. Thurston steps out into the road and, in a swift movement, drags the courier backwards off his bike.

  ‘Stop!’ yells a voice.

  Thurston jumps onto the bike and guns it through the crowd of cops on the pavement. Without hesitation he roars straight down the steps of the Joe Strummer Subway, ducks under the Westway and comes up the other side heading south on the Edgware Road. By the time the first pursuit vehicle has been alerted, Thurston is at the northern edge of Hyde Park. He turns in through the gates and dumps the bike in a clump of trees. At a park cafe he swipes a blue zip-up windcheater and a baseball cap from the coat rack near the door.

  Brim down, collar up, Thurston walks east towards the West End.

  Six minutes after exiting Paddington Green, he’s in the wind.

  CHAPTER 13

  OLD HABITS DIE hard. Thank Christ.

  From Hyde Park, Thurston makes his way on foot to the rear of a gym at the side of St Pancras station. He counts nine bricks up and nine along from the western corner, puts a finger in a crack in the mortar and levers out a small plastic bag. Inside is the key to a locker stationed next to the Eurostar terminal.

  Even though he’s been out of the game for a decade, Thurston’s kept a go-bag in the locker for the past two years. The bag contains a passport in the name of Michael Flanagan, a smartphone and charger, two thousand in cash and a clean credit card, also under the name of Flanagan. The account the credit card charges back to has better than two hundred grand sitting there – the pay-off for some security work Thurston did in Mozambique after leaving the forces. He didn’t do anything illegal, but the payment and the client left a bad taste in his mouth. He stowed the cash in the Flanagan account and told himself he’d only touch it on a rainy day.

  Right now it’s pouring down.

  Thurston takes the bag from the locker and walks south from St Pancras, stopping on Tottenham Court Road to buy a laptop and a holdall. He fills the holdall with clothes bought at the first department store he finds. He also buys a navy business suit and a pair of black brogues, and tops the purchases with a heavy overcoat and scarf, dumping the clothes h
e’s been wearing in the store dressing room. At a walk-in hair salon in Soho he gets his collar-length blonde hair dyed black and cut short. The stubble he usually wears is shaved clean. At a large chain pharmacy he buys a pair of glasses with plain lenses. By 4 p.m., the Cody Thurston who escaped from Paddington Green that morning is almost unrecognisable.

  Thurston takes a train to Heathrow and books into a chain hotel in sight of the runway. Airport hotels are the perfect place to hide. Too many people coming and going for anyone to get suspicious. In his room, he charges his phone and laptop, orders some food from room service and settles back on the bed to examine DS Hall’s phone. One message in particular gets Thurston’s attention, as does Hall’s calendar. He opens his new laptop and spends three hours researching the information on Hall’s phone. Around ten he turns off the lights and tries to sleep.

  The next few days are going to be busy.

  CHAPTER 14

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON. THE end of a nightmare week.

  Two days after Thurston’s escape and Steve Hall has got precisely nowhere in tracing the Australian. Hall’s superior officer, DCI Venn, flays him alive and tells him in no uncertain terms to get a result, or else get ready for a long stint down in Records.

  ‘This is a departmental embarrassment, Hall. A man under your watch – a killer, no less – waltzes out of Paddington Green in broad daylight. Have you any idea of the mountain of shit I’m having to wade through because of this? Get him found and make it quick or I’ll bury your pathetic fucking career so deep you’ll need an archaeologist to find traces.’

  It’s enough to drive a man to drink. Or, in the case of DS Steve Hall, to 22 Logandale Lane.

  From the outside, 22 Logandale Lane looks like any other semi-detached in a quiet street off the Fulham Road. To those in the know, the house is one of West London’s wildest knocking shops with specialities in rent boys, pain and coke, all of which tick Hall’s recreational boxes. And since Hall’s patch covers the area, he can come and go as he pleases, his admission costs taken care of by ensuring what goes on inside number 22 doesn’t come to the attention of the police.