Chapter 36

Big City Nights was in Hulme. The guy Koenig wanted lived in Hale. The two parts of Manchester were twenty-five miles apart but could have been in different countries. Hulme was urban. Parts of it were decaying, like it had cancer. Other parts reminded Koenig of Soviet-era East Berlin. But Hale was leafy and green. Koenig thought it looked like the set of a Richard Curtis film. A utopian, but depressingly bland, vision of England. Danielle explained Hale was the perfect balance of city and village life. A lot of soccer players lived there, she said. They only ventured into Manchester to play soccer or to film themselves committing sex crimes.

The address Steeleye had given Koenig was a shop. The embassy Jag had an intuitive satnav, and Koenig had found the shop easily enough.

Danielle had agreed to wait two hours before she called it in. Koenig had asked for six, but she was a cop and there was a gun on the premises. It wasn't something she could ignore. Two hours was the best she could do.

Draper had wanted to go to Hale as well, but Koenig didn't want Steeleye's goons trying to redeem themselves by sending a warning. She needed to stay in Big City Nights. Make sure they didn't do anything dumb.

He'd manoeuvred Steeleye's swollen finger from the Glock 46's trigger guard. Steeleye had passed out, which Koenig had thought was probably for the best. He'd popped the Glock's magazine. It wasn't full, but it wasn't empty. He'd slid out the top round. Checked it for flaws. Bullets were as illegal as guns in the UK. A lot of rounds were recycled or old. Words for unreliable in Koenig's world. But these had looked fine. Fat and shiny and deadly. He'd pushed the magazine back into the Glock. Racked it. Handed it to Draper. Knives were OK for crowd control. But guns were better.

‘A word of warning, guys,' he'd said to Steeleye's Z-list henchmen. ‘If you think I'm bad, try something with my colleague here. She has a diplomatic passport and no conscience whatsoever.'

Koenig didn't like the Jag. He thought it was a strange choice. It was too conspicuous for an unsanctioned job. It stood out. Koenig wondered why Bernice hadn't just hired them a car. Something boring. Boring was good in Koenig's world. Boring didn't stand out. But Bernice had insisted they take the embassy Jag.

And for some reason Draper had been reluctant to leave him alone with it.

Which made Koenig wonder if there might be something different about this Jag. Something not found in the owner's manual. Something off-spec. And because he'd once been a federal agent, he stopped wondering and decided to find out what it was.

So, before arriving in Hale, he'd driven to an industrial park and found somewhere quiet to search the car. He found what Draper hadn't wanted him to find in under a minute. A concealed button that opened a compartment under the dashboard. He removed what had been hidden and sighed. He made a few adjustments, then put it back where he'd found it.

*

The shop Koenig wanted was called This Is My Hollywood. It was an upmarket movie memorabilia store. The website listed a 1956 Forbidden Planet poster, an original Emperor Ming costume from the second Flash Gordon serial, and a skateboard from Back to the Future . Good stuff if it was genuine.

A man called Marion Summers owned the shop. Steeleye assumed Marion wasn't his real name. It was a girl's name, he'd said. And it was. Mainly. But it hadn't always been. It used to be a unisex name. John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison. Before he entered witness protection, the spree killer Charles ‘Sonny' Pearson was called Marion Pruett. Given the store Summers owned, Koenig guessed his given name had come from his parents' love of Westerns rather than men executed by the state of Arkansas. A lot of John Wayne fans had subjected their sons to a lifetime of bullying by naming them Marion.

This Is My Hollywood was a red brick building with an understated sign. Marion Summers had just flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED . Koenig recognised him from the store's website. He was a forgettable-looking man. Thin, balding, a bit nerdy. But not so nerdy he'd stand out. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and a REBEL SCUM SINCE 1977 Star Wars T-shirt.

Koenig glanced at his watch. It was 5 p.m. He guessed when you owned your own business you opened and closed when you wanted to. He knocked on the glass door.

Summers shook his head and pointed at the sign.

Koenig knocked harder.