Page 61 of Safe Enough

“Is it urgent?”

I thought of Cameron on his way to Muswell Hill. Being shadowed by a recon marine with a grudge.

“It’s very urgent,” I said.

“Who are we looking for?”

“A guy called Mason.”

“First name?”

“Mason.”

“No, first name.”

“Mason,” I said. “Both his names are Mason.”

“Hold the line,” he said.

I spent the time working out Cameron’s likely route. He would probably walk. Too short a journey to drive, too awkward on the tube. So he would walk. He would walk through Alexandra Park.

“Hello?” the guy at the embassy said.

“Yes?”

“Mason Mason served eleven years in the Marines. Originally a UK citizen. Made the rank of First Sergeant. He was selected for Force Recon and served all over. Beirut, Panama, the Gulf, Kosovo. Received multiple decorations and an honorable discharge just over three years ago. He was a damn fine jarhead. But there’s a file note here saying he was just in some kind of trouble. One of the Overseas Veterans’ associations just had to bail him out from something.”

“Why did he leave the Marines?”

“He failed a psychiatric evaluation.”

“You get an honorable discharge for that?”

“We kick them out,” the guy said. “We don’t kick them in the teeth.”

I sat there for a moment, undecided. Should I dispatch sector cars? They would be no good in the park. Should I send the woollies on foot? Was I overreacting?

I went on my own, running all the way.

It was late in the year and late in the day and it was already going dark. I crossed the railway as a train rumbled under the bridge I was on. I watched the road ahead, and the hedges on each side. I didn’t see Cameron. I didn’t see Mason.

Alexandra Park’s iron gates were already closed and locked. This facility closes at dusk, said the sign. I climbed over the gates and ran onward. The smell of night mist was already in the air. I could hear distant traffic all the way from the North Circular. I could hear starlings roosting somewhere to the south. In Hornsey, maybe. I followed the main path and found nothing. I saw the dark bulk of Alexandra Palace ahead and stood still. Go on or turn back? The streets of Muswell Hill, or the park? Surely the park was the danger zone. The park was where a recon marine would do his work. I turned back.

I found Cameron a yard off a side path.

He was half hidden under some low shrubbery. He was on his back. His coat was missing. His jacket was missing. His shirt had been torn off. He was naked from the waist up. He had been ripped open from the sternum to the navel with a sharp blade. Then someone had plunged his hands inside the wound and lifted his stomach out whole and rested it on his chest. Just pulled it out, the whole organ. It was right there on his chest, pale and purple and veined. Like a soft balloon. It had been squeezed and pressed and palpated and arranged until the faint gold gleam of the charm bracelet showed through the thin translucent lining. I saw it quite clearly, in the fading evening light.

I think I was supposed to play the part of the Kosovo wife. I was Cameron’s coconspirator, and I was supposed to recover the jewelry. Or Kelly Key was. But neither of us did. Mason’s tableau came to nothing. I didn’t try, and Kelly Key never even saw the body.

I didn’t report it. I just got out of the park that night and left him there for someone else to find the next morning. And someone else did, of course. It was a big sensation. There was a big funeral. Everyone went. Then there was a big investigation, obviously. I contributed nothing, but even so Mason Mason became the prime suspect. But he disappeared and was never seen again. He’s still out there somewhere, a mad recon marine blending in with the local population, wherever he is.

And me? I completed my probationary year and now I’m a Detective Constable down in Tower Hamlets. I’ve been there a couple of years. My numbers are pretty good. Not quite as good as Ken Cameron’s were, but then, I try to live and learn.

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