Poe did some mental calculations. He’d been awake for twenty hours. Bradshaw, who admittedly didn’t need more than four hours a night, had been awake even longer. Getting in his car and driving for five hours wasn’t a sensible thing to do.
‘Five hours,’ he said.
‘You sure?’
‘Maybe a bit longer, I’m still in my underpants. And Tilly probably has to unplug herself from her mainframe or something.’
‘I meant are you sure you don’t need some sleep?’
‘We’ll share the driving. What have you got?’
‘I’ve just got off the phone with Mathers.’
‘Don’t tell me, she’s convinced the commissioner that we need to be officially involved again?’
‘Better than that,’ Flynn said. ‘They’ve got the bastard.’
Chapter 67
Five hours later
The roof of 100 Bishopsgate, City of London
Poe thought ‘They’ve got the bastard’ was abitof an overstatement. What Mathers had was an anonymous tip. Although, as far as anonymous tips went, it was a good one. Someone who didn’t want to get involved – and really, who could blame them? – had called the hotline saying they’d seen a man matching Ezekiel Puck’s description accessing the service lift in 70 St Mary Axe, a 90-metre-high office building in the City of London. Due to its ridiculous shape – oval with flat sides – 70 St Mary Axe was informally known as the Can of Ham. It was a custard pie’s throw away from two other food-related architectural pisstakes – the Gherkin and the Cheese Grater.
The anonymous tip had been the forty-third that day, but something made the cop who’d answered the phone take it seriously. Before he’d hung up, the caller claimed to have been a portrait artist. He’d said he’d studied faces for years and he was as sure as he could be that the man he’d seen getting into the service lift was the same man the police were searching for. The cop had gone down to the Can of Ham himself and accessed the security footage.
He’d then called Mathers and said, ‘It’s Puck.’
Poe and Bradshaw joined Mathers on the roof of the surveillance building, Building 1, 100 Bishopsgate. It was a forty-storey tower, twice as high as the Can of Ham. The cops on the roof, and Poe counted fifteen, could see down on to the roof of the Can ofHam, but, as long as they didn’t stick their head over the edge, they would remain invisible to anyone looking up. It was a good choice.
It wasn’t yet seven in the morning, but the sun was already beating down. Gulls circled lazily overhead, screeching like mating cats. Despite being so high up, the air was morgue still. Poe loosened his collar.
Bradshaw fanned her face with her hands. ‘I should have put on some factor thirty,’ she said.
Mathers had her eyes glued to a pair of surveillance binoculars. Flynn was standing beside her. They were both damp with sweat. The kind of damp that turned into a rash. When Flynn saw them, she tapped Mathers on the arm. Mathers handed Flynn her binoculars and headed their way.
‘Sorry about the outburst last week,’ she said when she reached them. ‘I needed to buy you guys some space.’
‘We figured as much, ma’am,’ Poe said. ‘Although I gather you didn’t need us in the end.’
‘We got lucky,’ she said. ‘Any other member of the public and the call would have been logged to chase up later and we might have missed the bastard.’
‘It’s definitely him?’
‘The E-FIT is uncanny, but we checked with his ex-wife and with his neighbours in Ripon. They confirmed it.’
‘Someone’s sitting on them?’
Mathers nodded. ‘They won’t be able to contact him.’
Poe glanced over the roof, took in the street view almost 200 metres below him. The gaps between the City of London’s sky towers had wide walkways and places to sit and eat. There were food trucks and coffee carts. Trees and flowerbeds. But it wasn’t quite Richard Curtis’s London. The air still reeked of exhaust fumes and the sound of jackhammers was pervasive. A defecating tramp was being arrested by the City of London cops.Poe wondered if it had even registered with the people down there. An army of them were ignoring everyone and everything as they hurried to work. Others were sitting down to enjoy a coffee and a breakfast muffin, oblivious, or choosing to be oblivious, to the bare-arsed tramp being frogmarched away. And for some reason they weren’t bothered about the sniper. It was as if the City of London wasn’t involved in the lives of the little people. They were there to make money and a serial sniper wasn’t going to stop them having their morning latte. A triumph of capitalism over common sense.
Poe cast his eyes over the men and women eating and drinking below him. The people emptying bins and sweeping pavements. The high-rise window cleaners on their aerial platforms. If any of them were undercover cops, they were good. They’d have to be – Ezekiel Puck would be surveillance aware. He’d know what to look out for. ‘You’re sure he’s coming back?’ he asked Mathers.
‘Oh, Iknowhe’s coming back.’ She led them through the service hatch and into a room on the top floor of Building 1. The table was packed with laptops and tablets and high-grade communication systems. She opened one of the laptops. She pressed play and said, ‘Watch this.’
The screen showed the Can of Ham from above. Poe glanced at Mathers.
