A Good Day To Die by Simon Kernick Page A

concerned the fact that one week after the double murder of former Islington police officer DCI Asif Malik, thirty-one, and Islington resident and convicted street robber Jason Khan, twenty-two, in a Clerkenwell cafe, the police seemed no nearer to solving the case. The article went on to suggest that DCI Malik, one of the National Crime Squad's newest and most talented ethnic-minority officers, had been tipped for rapid promotion within the ranks, and could possibly have become the Met's Chief Constable one day, which might have been taking journalistic licence a little too far. Malik had been an extremely good copper, there was no doubt about it, but even so he'd been a long way from the top of the pile.
    Still, journalists aren't interested in presenting the bare facts. They're interested in stories, and it seemed from my trawling of the Internet over the past few weeks that Ms Neilson had been very interested in this particular one. She'd written a further three articles for the paper concerning the murders. One was simply an account of Malik's life and career, but the other two examined possible motives for his killing. In the main, these centred round Malik's work for the National Crime Squad, which had seen him involved in investigations intoa heroin-importation gang and an organized paedophile ring, although he'd also made enemies in the North London criminal underworld during the two years he'd spent in Scotland Yard's SO7 unit, prior to joining the NCS. Not surprisingly, then, there was no shortage of suspects, but in the most recent article, published the previous week, Ms Neilson had concentrated on one criminal gang in particular, who, she said, had some questions to answer. She described the gang's leader as a shadowy thug who'd been responsible for a number of murders, but didn't name him. Instead, she implied in a none-too-subtle manner that he might be getting some inside help from within the team investigating the murders. 'Just what were Malik and Khan meeting about?' she'd demanded in the last paragraph. 'And why are more than a hundred full-time detectives still asking that question? Perhaps there are those amongst them who don't wish to find out.'
    The ugly head of police corruption. I didn't suppose the feisty Ms Neilson had endeared herself to the investigating officers with articles like that, but then it wasn't her job to cosy up to them, and in a time when police officers could be unmasked as hitmen, it wasn't such an outlandish accusation either. And unlike anyone else, bar the ones who'd organized it, I knew there was an inside man. Someone who'd passed on the message that Slippery Billy was under suspicion.
    There'd been plenty of articles in the nationals about what had happened to Malik and Khan (although none had contained quite the same polemic as Ms Neilson's), but as time passed and other news stories jostled for position, interest had begun to fade, particularly in the absence of any significant new leads. The articles had got shorter; the editorials praising the sacrifices of individual police officers in the face of lawlessness had disappeared; life had moved on.
    The police wouldn't give up, of course, but five weeks with no arrests is a long time. And now that the man they'd been on to had disappeared into thin air before they could even question him (there'd been no mention of Billy West anywhere in the media), morale would be dropping fast and resources thinning out as officers were moved to newer and easier cases.
    But Emma Neilson was still interested and that was good enough for me. It also helped that she didn't work for one of the bigger papers. It meant she'd be easier to track down and hopefully less suspicious of my motives. I might have had the advantage of knowing who'd organized the murders as well as whose finger had been on the trigger, but I needed to find out some background on the story, and she was the ideal person to start with.
    Once upon a time, I could have phoned