Free The Hireling's Tale by Jo Bannister Page A

troubled. ‘Damn it, Frank, have we got this wrong? It would almost make more sense if he’s not one of the delegates at all. If he was, the mechanic should have been here earlier. It’s only a fluke that any of them are still in town. What if it’s a local man he’s after?’
    Shapiro scowled at her. ‘You’re supposed to be narrowing the field. Now you tell me it could be anyone in a population of about sixty thousand.’
    Liz twitched him a little smile. ‘Not just anyone. Someone wealthy and well-connected. Whoever wants him dead certainly is, but he wouldn’t have to spend this kind of money stepping on some little person who annoyed him. If he’s hired a real pro it’s because the target’s going to be hard to reach. He may have permanent protection, or he may know he’s in danger. That’s why it has to be a long-range hit.’

    Shapiro thought, She’s getting good at this. ‘So on a list of council-tax payers he should be in the top band.’
    ‘Along with an awful lot of others,’ Liz admitted ruefully. ‘We can’t protect them all. We can’t even warn them all: ten per cent would have heart attacks, forty per cent would grab the nearest gun - to the immediate danger of themselves, their families, their neighbours and their milkmen - and the rest would end up in hospital with perforated ulcers. If we do nothing, someone’s going to die. If we do too much, half a dozen people could.’
    That was when the phonecall came in. Shapiro took it; Liz went to leave but he waved her back to her seat. ‘Mr Kendall - Mr Kendall, calm down. Tell me what’s happened.’
     
     
    Donovan went with him. Shapiro explained while he drove. It would have been normal practice for the sergeant to drive while the superintendent sat in state beside him, but motorcyclists don’t make good chauffeurs. They lean into the corners, and forget that they need more space on the road than the width of their knees.
    ‘Well, now we know what our assassin’s here for,’ he said. ‘He’s here for Philip Kendall. How the sales director of a custom engineering company comes to make the sort of enemies who send round a professional hit man is something else.’
    ‘He wouldn’t tell you?’

    ‘He said he didn’t know. He sounded panicky enough for it to be the truth.’
    ‘What happened?’
    Philip Kendall took a leisurely breakfast, as he always did, with his wife and the Financial Times. Before leaving for work he took his geriatric Labrador for a stroll round the garden of his house at Cambridge Road. Once they used to walk as far as the Chevening Moss Road; but Rosie was getting old seven times faster than her master, a gentle inspection of the shrubbery suited her better now.
    They were returning to the house, Kendall was actually climbing the steps to the back door, when a brick in the wall beside him exploded. There was no noise except a sort of clipped pfutt as a shower of masonry fragments erupted from the hole. They stung his hand; it was almost more that than the sound that drew his attention.
    When he looked at the hole in the wall, his first absurd thought was, You’d almost think a bullet did that. His second was, A bullet did do that! He left his third thought out on the step with the surprised dog while he raced inside, locking everything that would lock, curtaining everything that would curtain, grabbing for the phone.
    ‘Is he all right?’
    ‘He says so. He doesn’t think there was a second shot. Of course, by then he was under the sofa.’
    Shapiro’s car wasn’t the only one heading for the scene. Access to the back gardens in the smart part of Cambridge Road was by a green lane running behind the houses. An Armed Response Unit was on its way
to intercept anyone leaving that way, though in all likelihood it was already too late. The moment Kendall disappeared into his house a professional assassin would evacuate the area. He wouldn’t get another chance in the immediate future, and any delay