Private Royals (Private 12.50)

‘You’ve got it,’ said Knight.

‘Check back in with me after you talk to her,’ Morgan told him and hung up.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Hooligan said over his shoulder before realising he was talking to an empty space.

‘I’ve got my own plan,’ Knight said, running through the door.

CHAPTER 28

DESPITE HIS MONIKER – given to him as a rowdy teenager by his siblings – Jeremy ‘Hooligan’ Crawford, a few speeding tickets notwithstanding, rarely broke the law.

‘I’m a bloody model citizen,’ he said firmly, as if trying to convince himself.

He had grounds to believe the statement. After all, Jeremy Crawford had shown that, no matter what circumstances a person was born into, they could rise high with a dash of natural talent and a bucketful of hard work.

Hooligan had earned degrees in both mathematics and biology from Cambridge University by the age of nineteen. By twenty, he’d added a masters in criminal and forensic science from Staffordshire University. There he’d been headhunted by MI5. Hooligan had worked in the government’s domestic intelligence agency for eight years before Private had lured him away with a staggering pay rise. In those eight years the East Ender had played a key role in building the systems that monitored London’s surveillance grid for signs of terrorism, and as one of its architects, he knew of the system’s weak points, its windows and its doors.

‘I must be bloody mad,’ he giggled nervously under his breath.

Because he was about to break into one of those weak points.

CHAPTER 29

INSPECTOR ELAINE POTTERSFIELD was a long-term servant of the Met, the service giving her a salty edge that had led to her blaming Peter Knight for the death of her beloved sister – Knight’s adored wife. It had taken the events of the London Olympics to reconcile the pair, and now Elaine was the doting aunt to Knight’s two children that he’d always wanted her to be. Early on a Saturday morning, she expected that her brother-in-law’s phone call would be an invitation to lunch, or perhaps to join him and the children in the park.

It wasn’t.

‘We’re in the shit,’ Knight told her over the phone whilst running at speed through the corridors of Private HQ.

‘Let’s hear it,’ Elaine said, switching from loving aunt to ice-cold detective in the blink of an eye.

‘There’s a flat-panel truck around Westminster with precious cargo. Either Jones Brothers signage or freshly painted over. We need it found.’

‘That’s not much to go on.’

‘I know,’ said Knight. ‘And we’ve got less than an hour to find it.’

‘Bloody hell, Peter! If you want me to work miracles, I need a little more information.’

‘You can narrow the radius down to one mile around Horse Guards.’

‘Horse Guards?’ Elaine asked. ‘Today’s Trooping the Colour. If there are lives at stake here, Peter, then you need to come clean – like right bloody now.’

‘One life,’ Knight confessed. ‘And if I thought a full blues-and-twos response was the best way to keep them alive, then you know that’s what I’d do, Elaine.’

There was a pause as his sister-in-law thought it over.

‘I’ll put out a call. Find and follow, no intervention.’

‘Thank you,’ Knight said and hung up the phone. He came to a halt at a desk to the rear of Private HQ’s large offices.

‘Can I help you, Mr Knight?’ the motor pool attendant asked.

‘Get me a bike,’ Knight told him. ‘A fast one.’

CHAPTER 30

HOOLIGAN’S FINGER HOVERED over the speed dial. With a wry smile he realised that what he was about to do could possibly spell the end of his career.