say. He hadn’t understood what it had meant then, and still didn’t. It had just stuck in his mind like some line from a kids’ nursery rhyme.
Taking a tube from Hounslow Central to Barons Court, he then walked to Palliser road, which was located very close to Queens tennis club. Entering a stall in a public toilet, he locked the door, withdrew a nine-millimetre Beretta from a deep pocket of the dark-grey parka he wore and checked the magazine, even though he had done so three times before leaving the house. He then reached into another pocket for the cylindrical silencer and screwed it onto the end of the pistol’s barrel. With the extended weapon tucked in the waistband of his cargo pants, he flushed the loo, exited the stall and washed his hands thoroughly at a stainless steel sink that was lined with scum, before using a pleasantly scented hygiene lotion to sanitize them; the lotion being an item that he never left home without. The world was a germ and virus-ridden place that he considered to be as lethal as he was to the people he had chosen to kill.
The large house of his intended victim was an imposing edifice of Georgian construction, pristine white brickwork fronted by a wrought iron palisade that, as the front door and window frames, was painted in black gloss as shiny as patent leather dancing shoes, or the front door of number ten Downing Street.
He made his way along the road, counting the properties, to turn left onto a side street at the end, and then left again to enter a wide alley and once more count each individual house until he was at the rear of the targeted private residence, slowing to look both ways, to be certain that there was no one in sight before using one of the several keys, that were attached to a circular brass fob by a split ring, to open the solid hardwood door that was set into a seven-foot high brick wall topped with razor wire that fully enclosed the large back garden. Locking the door behind him, he strolled along a redbrick path that was laid in a herringbone pattern and bordered by mature trees and rhododendron bushes.
The back door to the house was fitted with a cat flap, and not alarmed, and as if on cue a large tabby wriggled its bulk through the aperture and jinked around him as he approached.
Selecting a Yale key on the bunch, he silently slipped it into the lock, turned it and pushed the door open, pausing to put the keys in a pocket of his parka and pull on a pair of latex gloves before entering a long hallway.
Jeremy Beaumont was just twenty-five minutes away from meeting the last person he would ever see.
Passing a storeroom and a large walk-in larder, he came to an enormous kitchen that he supposed would have had the staff to cater for a large and wealthy family in days gone by. This spacious residence was now home to one rich old man, and he found that objectionable, when so many decent, hardworking people couldn’t even get their feet on the first rung of the housing ladder.
Locating and switching on a kettle, he made a pot of tea, then checked his wristwatch. The housekeeper always took Beaumont tea at exactly nine a.m.
He entered the bedroom on the second floor of the house and placed the silver tea tray on a bedside table, and then drew the thick velvet curtains back to allow sunlight to flood the room.
Jeremy woke up slowly, his eyes almost gummed shut and his hands and knees pained by the now constant fire of arthritis that the prescription painkillers failed to nullify. Being eighty was a very poor substitute for the youth and even middle age that he had enjoyed every minute of. Now, with a pacemaker lodged in his chest and failing general health, he found each day a mounting trial to face.
“Good morning, Janet,” Jeremy said, turning over and rubbing at his eyes with swollen knuckles.
There was no reply. He blinked and reached over to the table for his spectacles, put them on and was faced by a young man sitting in an easy chair in front of the window, almost silhouetted by the backdrop of sunlight.
Jeremy felt confused and scared, and didn’t know what to say or do.
The silence that followed was untenable. “Who are you?” Jeremy eventually asked the stranger. “Where is Janet?”