The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018. Charles Cumming

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      ‘Mine’ turned out to be a small, one-bedroom flat in Marylebone. Carradine had expected to be invited to lunch at Wheelers or White’s; that was how he had written similar scenes in his books. Spook meeting spook at the Traveller’s Club, talking sotto voce about ‘the threat from Russia’ over Chablis and fishcakes. Instead Mantis sent him an address on Lisson Grove. He was very precise about the timing and character of the meeting.

      Please don’t be late. It goes without saying that this is a private matter, not for wider circulation.

      Carradine was about halfway through writing his latest book, still four months from deadline, so on the day of the meeting he took the morning off. He went for a dawn run in Hyde Park, had a shower back at his flat and ate breakfast at the Italian Gardens Café. He was excited by the prospect of seeing Mantis for the second time and wondered what the meeting would hold. The possibility of some sort of involvement with the Service? A scoop that he could fictionalise in a book? Perhaps the whole thing would turn out to be a waste of time. By ten o’clock Carradine was walking east along Sussex Gardens, planning to catch a train from Edgware Road to Angel. With a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Mantis, he wanted to rummage around in his favourite record store on Essex Road looking for a rare vinyl for a friend’s birthday.

      He was halfway to the station when it began to rain. Carradine had no umbrella and quickened his pace towards Edgware Road. What happened in the next few minutes was an anomaly, a moment that might, in different circumstances, have been designed by Mantis as a test of Carradine’s temperament under pressure. Certainly, in the context of what followed over the next two weeks, it was a chance encounter so extraordinary that Carradine came to wonder whether it had been staged solely for his benefit. Had he written such a scene in one of his novels, it would have been dismissed as a freak coincidence.

      He had reached the south-west corner of the busy intersection between Sussex Gardens and Edgware Road. He was waiting to cross at the lights. A teenage girl beside him was nattering away to a friend about boyfriend trouble. ‘So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again.’ A stooped old man standing to Carradine’s left was holding an umbrella in his right hand. Water was dripping from the umbrella onto the shoulders of Carradine’s jacket; he could feel droplets of rain on the back of his neck. In the next instant he became aware of shouting on the opposite corner of the street, about twenty metres from where he was standing. A well-built man wearing a motorcycle helmet was raining punches through the passenger door of a black BMW. The driver – a blonde woman in her forties – was being dragged from the vehicle by a second man wearing an identical helmet and torn blue jeans. The woman was screaming and swearing. Carradine thought that he recognised her as a public figure but could not put a name to the face. Her assailant, who was at least six feet tall, was dragging her by the hair shouting, ‘Move, you fucking bitch’, and wielding what looked like a hammer.

      Carradine had the sense of a moment suspended in time. There seemed to be at least twenty people standing within a few feet of the car. None of them moved. The rest of the traffic at the intersection had come to a standstill. A large white Transit van was parked in front of the BMW. The first man opened a side panel in the van and helped his accomplice to drag the woman inside. Carradine was aware of somebody shouting ‘Stop them! Somebody fucking stop them!’ and of the teenage girl beside him muttering ‘Fucking hell, what the fuck is this, this is bad’ as the door of the van slammed shut. The middle-aged man who had been seated on the driver’s side of the BMW now stumbled out of the car, his hair matted with blood, his face bruised and bleeding, hands raised in the air, imploring his attackers to release the woman. Instead, the man in the torn jeans walked back towards him and swung a single, merciless punch that knocked him out cold. Somebody screamed as he slumped to the ground.

      Carradine stepped off the pavement. He had been taking boxing lessons for the past eighteen months: he was tall and fit and wanted to help. He was not sure precisely what he intended to do but recognised that he had to act. Then, as he moved forwards, he saw a pedestrian, standing much closer to the van, approach one of the two assailants. Carradine heard him cry: ‘Stop! Enough!’

      ‘Hey!’ Carradine added his own voice to the confrontation. ‘Let her go!’

      Things then happened very quickly. Carradine felt a hand on his arm, holding him back. He turned to see the girl looking at him, shaking her head, imploring him not to get involved. Carradine would have ignored her had it not been for what came next. A third man suddenly emerged from the Transit van. He was wearing a black balaclava and carrying what looked like a short metal pole. He was much larger than the others, slower in his movements, but went towards the pedestrian and swung the pole first into his knees and then across his shoulders. The pedestrian screamed out in pain and fell onto the street.

      At that moment Carradine’s courage deserted him. The man in the balaclava entered the van via the side door and slammed it shut. His two helmeted accomplices also climbed inside and drove quickly away. By the time Carradine could hear a police siren in the distance, the van was already out of sight, accelerating north along Edgware Road.

      There was a momentary silence. Several onlookers moved towards the middle-aged man who had been knocked out. He was soon surrounded by the very people who, moments earlier, might have defended him against attack and prevented the abduction of his companion. Through the mêlée, Carradine could see a woman kneeling on the damp street, raising the victim’s head onto a balled-up jacket. For every bystander who was talking on their phone – presumably having called the police – there was another filming the scene, most of them as emotionally detached as a group of tourists photographing a sunset. With the traffic still not moving, Carradine walked across the intersection and tried to reach the BMW. His route was blocked. Car horns were sounding in the distance as a police vehicle appeared at the eastern end of Sussex Gardens. Two uniformed officers jogged towards the fallen men. Carradine realised that he could do nothing other than gawp and stare; it was pointless to hang around, just another passer-by rubbernecking the incident. He was beginning to feel the first quiet thuds of shame that he had failed to act when he heard the word ‘Resurrection’ muttered in the crowd. A woman standing next to him said: ‘Did you see who it was? That journalist from the Express, wasn’t it? Whatserface?’ and Carradine found that he could provide the answer.

      ‘Lisa Redmond.’

      ‘That’s right. Poor cow.’

      Carradine СКАЧАТЬ