The Fireman Read online

  Praise for Stephen Leather

  The Fireman

  ‘An up-to-date story of intercontinental crime … fast-moving, lots of atmosphere’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Excitement is guaranteed’

  Independent

  The Double Tap

  ‘Masterful plotting … rapid-fire prose’

  Sunday Express

  ‘One of the most breathlessly exciting thrillers around … puts [Leather] in the frame to take over Jack Higgins’s mantle’

  The Evening Telegraph, Peterborough

  ‘A fine tale, brilliantly told – excitement which is brilliantly orchestrated’

  The Oxford Times

  The Birthday Girl

  ‘Action and scalpel-sharp suspense’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Terrifying, fast-moving and exciting thriller’

  Independent, Ireland

  ‘A whirlwind of action, suspense and vivid excitement’

  Irish Times

  The Long Shot

  ‘Consolidates Leather’s position in the top rank of thriller writers. An ingenious plot, plenty of action and solid, believable characters – wrapped up in taut snappy prose that grabs your attention by the throat … A top notch thriller which whips the reader along at breakneck speed’

  Yorkshire Post

  The Vets

  ‘The plot blasts along faster than a speeding bullet’

  Today

  ‘The book has all the ingredients for a successful blockbuster’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘If you feel a sleepless night coming on, here’s something to help you meet it head on; Stephen Leather’s fifth thriller. His last was praised by Jack Higgins who couldn’t put it down. The same goes for this’

  Daily Mail

  The Chinaman

  ‘Will leave you breathless’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Plenty of visceral excitements’

  The Guardian

  ‘A gripping story sped along by admirable, uncluttered prose.’

  Daily Telegraph

  Hungry Ghost

  ‘The sort of book that could easily take up a complete weekend – and be time really well spent … A story that’s as topical as today’s headlines’

  Bolton Evening News

  ‘Very complicated. Fun’

  Daily Telegraph

  Pay Off

  ‘A pretty impressive debut … sharp and economical … a pacey read’

  Glasgow Herald

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Pay Off

  Hungry Ghost

  The Chinaman

  The Vets

  The Long Shot

  The Birthday Girl

  The Double Tap

  The Solitary Man

  The Tunnel Rats

  The Bombmaker

  The Stretch

  Tango One

  The Eyewitness

  Spider Shepherd Thrillers

  Hard Landing

  Soft Target

  Cold Kill

  Hot Blood

  Dead Men

  Live Fire

  Rough Justice

  Fair Game (July 2011)

  Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thrillers

  Nightfall

  Midnight

  To find out about these and future titles, visit www.stephenleather.com.

  THE FIREMAN

  Stephen Leather

  HODDER & STOUGHTON

  Copyright © 1989 by Stephen Leather

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Fontana

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 84456 865 9

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 67222 8

  Hodder & Stoughton

  A division of Hodder Headline

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Lulu

  CONTENTS

  The Fireman

  Praise for Stephen Leather

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book

  Special Offer

  The first sound would have been the sound of the naked and wet body hitting the glass, a dull, flat thud followed by a crack as the window exploded into a thousand shards.

  Maybe she’d have screamed then, but fifteen floors above the ground it would have been lost in the wind as she followed the fragments of glass into space and began the long fall, arms and legs flailing for something, anything, to hold onto.

  I saw an old newsreel once, black-and-white and grainy; it had started off with a helium-filled airship coming in to land, swooping down with long ropes trailing from the nose. A ground crew of eight or nine men ran forward to grab the ropes and anchor the giant balloon, but a sudden gust of wind sent it soaring back into the air. Half the guys were smart enough to let go immediately, one dropped about twenty feet and broke both ankles.

  Three held on and rode the airship up into the grey sky, turning slowly on one rope as it climbed higher and higher. The guy filming was a real pro. He pulled back, showing all three of the men like lead weights on a fishing line, then followed them down as they fell, one by one, to their deaths. He tracked the first one down, then slowly panned back, showing just how high the remaining two poor sods had gone.

  He almost missed the second fall, but got the guy in the centre of the frame a second before he hit the ground. Then, slowly, he moved the camera back up and homed in on the last man on the rope, close enough so you could see his straining hands finally open and slip, so close you could almost feel the palms burn as they began to slide.

  The camera followed the doomed man every foot of the way to his death, you could see the arms whirling, the legs kicking, the mouth opening and closing as he screamed, all the way down. It’s not true what they say about people dying of shock, that your heart stops and you die long before you hit the ground. The fall doesn’t kill you, the desire to live is too strong for that, it’s smashing into the ground at one hundred and twenty mph that brings oblivion. Right up until the last moment you’re conscious and screaming.

  She’d have screamed as she realized that nothing was going to save her, that she was falling to her death in a shower of glass. She’d have screamed, but that high up no one would have heard her and once she’d started to move fast, once gravity pulled her down to her final bloody embrace, then the wind would have ripped the yell from her throat and dispersed it instead into the hot night air.

  The next sound would have been the sickly crump as she slapped into the ground like a wet sheet. I guess horns would have blared, passers-by would have screamed and before long the sound of a siren would have cut through the night as an ambulance arrived, too late.

  She’d have died alone in the road, a long way from home. I should have been there. She was my sister and I should have been there.

  I love a good rape. A gangland killing can sometimes make the front page, but more often than not it’ll be below the fold, or shoved inside in later editions. A robbery
has to be into seven figures at least before it’s worth a mention, and unless someone gets his head blown off it’s not going to get any further than a page three lead. A hit and run isn’t even going to merit a couple of paragraphs in the ‘stop press’ column. But give me a good juicy rape, preferably with a dose of over-the-top violence, and we’re talking page one, possible splash.

  The one I had in my notebook was a cracker of a tale, mother and daughter in a caravan on a site just outside Brighton. Husband tied up and forced to watch before being beaten over the head with one of his own golf clubs. Two youths, one black, one white, one of them carrying a shotgun, the other a kitchen knife. Jesus, the story had everything, sex, violence, a police warning that they could strike again. The only thing missing was an orphaned dog. So long as the Prime Minister didn’t call a snap election or die of AIDS it was going on to page one. I’d picked up the story myself from a pal on the Serious Crime Squad, and I’d talked my way into the hospital room where the daughter lay bandaged and on a drip feed. It had been easy. OK, so I might have given the orderly the impression that I was with the police and not just a nosey hack, but I hadn’t actually lied. I would have done, but I hadn’t had to. I’d just said that we had a few more questions and that and the fawn raincoat did the rest. The girl had lost her front teeth and she didn’t, or couldn’t, open her eyes for the twenty minutes I spent interviewing her, but I could hear her clearly enough. Good quotes, too, or at least they would be after I’d polished them up a bit.

  I was practically running to my desk when Bill Hardwicke’s gravelly voice grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and jerked me back to his office. Office, that’s a laugh. One of six glass-sided boxes tagged onto the side of the open-plan converted wine warehouse where we worked, it was more like a squash court with furniture.

  Bill always reminded me of a hamster in a cage, looking in vain for his exercise wheel. I bought him a pack of gerbil nibbles once and left them on his desk, but he didn’t find it funny. No sense of humour, but Bill Hardwicke is one of Fleet Street’s best news editors. Not that there was anything left of the Street now that all the nationals had moved out to the East End, but you know what I mean. He looked like a balding boxer, squashed nose and all, but one who hadn’t trained for half a dozen years and who’d developed a taste for the finer things in life, like high-cholesterol food and malt whisky. He was sitting in his ergonomically-designed desk. He was totally out of place in the hi-tech office, a relic of the days of hot metal, Linotype machines and 3 am deadlines.

  ‘How did it go?’ he growled.

  ‘Magic,’ I said, and I could feel myself grinning from ear to ear. I rushed the details past him and he raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Then get thee to a terminal, my son. Now.’ I turned to go, when he added: ‘By the way, a call came for you while you were out. Switchboard put it through to my office, it was from Hong Kong.’

  ‘Sally?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he replied, not looking up as he toyed with his page plans. ‘It was some copper. Wouldn’t say what he wanted, said he had to talk to you. You got a story going on in the exotic Far East?’

  ‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ I said, and left him to it. I slung my coat over the back of my own ergonomically-designed chair and sat down heavily. I logged onto the system using my three-fingered technique – first and second finger of my right hand, first finger left hand. It was OK for a thousand words or so, beyond that and my hands began to ache. What the hell, when was the last time a tabloid hack had to write a thousand words?

  There was an air of gloom hanging over the office, dampening the electricity that you normally find sparking through a newspaper. The technology was partly to blame, removing forever the clickety-click of typewriters and the whirr of stories being pulled out to be thrust into the hands of waiting copy boys. Now it is all done electronically and the only time paper is involved is in the final product.

  We’d been writing all our stories into the computer for about four years, and the subs were well used to working on the machines, but now we were trying to do full-page makeup on screen and traditional newspaper skills were about as useful as a rubber sledgehammer. Management had brought in a team of young, thrusting computer programmers in three-piece suits to do the business. Except that they couldn’t. Now the silicon chip whizz-kids, headed by the chairman’s son, a curly-headed bastard called Simon Kaufman, were working in tandem with the middle-aged shirt-sleeved grumblers who made up our subs desk. Tempers were getting frayed, young Kaufman had publicly humiliated and sacked two of the older down table subs and there had been one stand-up fist fight, but we were no nearer to getting the production fully computerized and it was starting to get everybody down.

  I leant back and started to shuffle the facts and quotes into a coherent pattern that would get my name back onto the front page. I looked around the office as my mind got into gear.

  There were four phones lined up along the gap where our desks met, Roger’s and mine. Two were white, one was black and one was the same musty green you find on bacon that’s been in the fridge for three weeks, hidden behind the bottles of Schweppes tonic. Roger and I each had a white one, both connected to the switchboard, one of those swish jobs that plays ‘O give me a home where the buffalo roam’ to waiting callers. The black and green phones were of the old fashioned type, both were direct lines and we’d taken the numbers off them. The number of the black one we gave out to our police contacts, the green one to anyone else we thought might give us a story. The white ones rang all day, — social chit-chat, the odd punter with a bit of gossip, hacks from the other papers ringing up for info, the odd obscene caller ranting about the politics of the paper or a mistake on the racing pages. We get more than our fair share of nutters on the crime desk, you either hang up on them or, if you’ve got the time, you can play with them, sitting back in your chair with your feet on the desk until you get bored with the game.

  If the green phone rang it was more serious and more often than not we’d get a story out of it. If the call came on the black phone Roger and I would reach for it together because it would be a tip off, anonymous or otherwise, that could lead to a splash. Usually he’d beat me to it, maybe because he was six years younger, maybe because he was faster, or had longer arms, but mainly it was because that phone faced toward him. Rank has its privileges. He was the chief crime reporter, it said so on his business card, while mine just said ‘crime reporter’. He got first crack at the black phone, an extra fifty quid a week on his expenses, and a car.

  Roger the Dodger was sitting opposite me now filling in an expense sheet, and I knew he’d had a curry last night because his breath reeked of it. He was chewing the end of his felt-tipped pen.

  ‘Go all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Not bad,’ I said. Keep your pissy little hands off, I thought. This one’s mine.

  ‘Andy, any chance of a coffee?’ I asked, and was treated with a contemptuous look that said there was about as much chance of that as of hell freezing.

  There were two secretaries servicing the specialist writers’ section, when they weren’t doing the really important work like painting their nails, getting their hair done or typing out press releases for our motoring correspondent’s freelance public relations operation. The better of the two was a squat little blonde with perfect skin and big feet, accurate typing and one hundred and ten words-per-minute shorthand. Her name was Katy and she looked after the two industrial correspondents, the defence/aviation writer, the motoring correspondent and our consumer affairs specialist.

  The other girl was Andrea. We called her Andy, which she most definitely wasn’t.

  She was a looker, a stunner. Tall and willowy, blonde like Katy but with legs almost half as long again, breasts that you just ached to touch and a smile that made you want to grab her and kiss her. Half the office lusted after her, and the other half were women. Andy had an address book which was slightly smaller than the L-R section of the London telephone directory
and a voice that was a cross between Sloane Square and a razor blade being scraped across a blackboard. She spent most of the day on the phone talking to her boyfriends, girlfriends, relatives, lovers; interminable conversations in a voice that set your teeth on edge and she had a laugh like a donkey’s bray. She was supposed to look after five of us: two on the crime desk, our Royal correspondent, the education writer, and the medical expert. I had one fifth of her, and I had the fifth that answered back. She was unreliable and a pain in the arse.

  Roger and I had spent the best part of nine months trying to get rid of her, ideally to swap her for Katy so that Willis, the motoring correspondent, could suffer for a change. We’d tried piling work on her, being sarcastic, being rude to her, Supergluing her desk drawers shut, loosening the casters on her chair. None of it had worked and we’d got to the stage where we were talking about putting ground glass in her coffee.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ I asked Roger.

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, cheers. Did Bill tell you about the call from Hong Kong?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Said he’d call back.’

  ‘Something up?’ he said, and he had the look of a fox after a chicken, the scent of a trip abroad in his pockmarked nostrils. I was glad to be able to disappoint him.

  ‘Dunno. Could have been my sister.’ He lost interest as his hopes of a freebie evaporated. I took his chipped Union Jack mug and the pint pot I’d nicked from the Bell pub. I walked over to Andy’s desk and plonked them down on her magazine. ‘Thanks, love,’ I said and bared my teeth. She scowled and took them over to the sink where we kept the coffee machine – God, she had a sexy walk – and a couple of the subs leered over the top of their terminals as she walked by and slammed the mugs down on the draining board. I bashed out the first couple of paras of the story on autopilot, as I thought about the days when I used to spend most of my time on the road, before I had to play second fiddle to the likes of Roger the Dodger.

  I missed the adrenaline rush that comes with being a fireman. Time was when all I did was cover the big stories, the ones guaranteed to make page one. I was the guy always ready to get on a plane at a moment’s notice, covering everything from hijackings to ferry disasters, but that was before I’d started to have the blackouts. If it hadn’t been for Bill Hardwicke I wouldn’t even be number two on the crime beat. It was Bill who’d pulled me back from Beirut after I’d gone on a bender and missed a suicide bomber who killed a dozen marines as I lay slumped over a table in some sleazy back street bar. It was Bill who sent me to an expensive private nursing home to dry out at the paper’s expense. And it was his signature on the bottom of the letter in my personal file that said if I ever again let my ‘drinking problem’ get the better of me I’d be looking for a new employer.