The Borgia Ring Read Free Page B

arrivals without promotion. They were seen as having failed in their last posting and consequently had to prove themselves in a new one. Pendragon also came with baggage, personal issues that had probably been discussed and dissected before he arrived to fill the role of number two at the station, answerable directly to the Super.
    And that brought Jill Hughes back to mind: a career cop, confident, almost androgynous except for the softness of her face and the shapely figure her uniform could not disguise. Her large brown eyes were attractive but betrayed no hint of sensuality. Superintendent Hughes was, Pendragon knew, a very tough, very strong-willed woman and an exceptional officer. At thirty-two, she was perhaps the youngest Super in the country, but she had little practical experience. Like himself twenty years earlier, she had been a top graduate from Sulhampstead Police College. Her team at Brick Lane had grown to respect her razor-sharp mind; but there was no denying the fact, Jack reflected, that she would be relying on him and on the case experience he could offer.
    He gargled some mouthwash as he did up his tie and rubbed his hand over the just-acceptable stubble on his chin. At forty-six, allowing for a slight paunch, he had kept hisathletic build, and although his hair was now more white than black, the flesh on his face was still taut. In a good light, he could just about pass for early-forties.
    He had been looking forward to a weekend spent revisiting his old stamping ground. Pendragon had been born within half a mile of the station and had lived in the heart of the East End of London for the first eighteen years of his life. There had been a few trips back after going up to Magdalen, Oxford, but when his parents died in the late-80s he’d felt no further inclination to return. Until, that is … He picked up his keys and made for the stairs.
     
    The front desk was unmanned as Pendragon crossed the hotel foyer and exited on to the street. The hotel was close to Moorgate tube station in the City, a five-minute drive from Mile End Road at this time of day. The streets were aglow with reflected neon. Pendragon followed his nose. He knew his way around London by simple instinct. The roads and the buildings might, on the surface, have changed during the decades since he had left, but the inner structure was immutable, the underlying topography intact. He could follow these roads as though they were leylines. London was ingrained into the very fabric of his being.
    And some things had not been tarmacked over or given a radical facelift. Most of the shops were now owned by Indian and Bangladeshi tradespeople, but some of the long-established family businesses remained. And although most of the old pubs had taken on new, trendy names and been made over, the landmarks of his youth still jumped out at him. Passing the Grave Maurice public house and the Blind Beggar, he remembered that they had once been favourite haunts of the Kray twins. The gangsters had been more powerful than God in this area when he was a boy.
    As he approached Jangles, an ambulance pulled away from the kerb and sped past him towards the London Hospital a few hundred yards down the road. Pendragon could see two police cars parked outside the shop, their blue lights splashing brightness across the drab brick and discoloured concrete surroundings. The shop window had been emptied before closing, anything precious safely locked away. The glass was masked with inch-thick steel bars. A scratched and scuffed blue-painted door set to the side of the shop stood ajar. Sergeant Jez Turner emerged from it and approached Pendragon’s car as he pulled up at the kerb.
    Turner was slim and rangy, his hair gelled back retro matinée-idol style. He had large dark eyes and a long narrow nose. His suit, a Hugo Boss he had found in a designer discount sale on Kensington High Street, was too good for the job. He knew it and the thought pleased him.
    ‘What’s the