Page 67 of The Final Vow (Washington Poe #7)
Five hours later
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.’
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, I know he’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.
‘CCTV from this very building,’ she said.
‘And because anyone who successfully blows up a City of London skyscraper officially wins best terrorist at the terrorism awards – the IRA are the current title holders after their successful bombing of Bishopsgate in 1993 – now CCTV quality has to meet a certain standard. It’s why it’s so clear.
’ She touched the trackpad and zoomed in on the Can of Ham’s roof.
She pointed at two rectangular patches and pressed pause.
‘The two-storey plant room is underneath the arch. It houses the cooling towers, air- handling units and two generators. But because the generators have to stay cool, the area above them is open to the elements. The two patches that cover them are made of perforated mesh, but they’re coloured to look like glass.
That way, when you look at the building from a distance, the entire roof will appear to reflect light. ’ She pressed play. ‘Now watch this.’
Poe did. He watched the nearest mesh hatch open.
He watched a man climb out and lie down on the roof.
He watched that man take something from his jacket pocket and raise it to his eye.
Mathers pressed pause and zoomed in again. The picture did lose a bit of sharpness but the something the man had taken from his pocket was unmistakable.
It was the sight from a sniper’s rifle.
Mathers was right. They had got the bastard.