Blackout Read online

  Blackout

  Mark Dawson

  Unputdownable

  Contents

  Blackout

  Prologue

  Four Days Earlier

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 2

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Part 3

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  A Word From The Author

  Get Exclusive John Milton Material

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  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By Mark Dawson

  In the John Milton Series

  In the Beatrix Rose Series

  In the Isabella Rose Series

  In the Soho Noir Series

  Standalone Novels

  Blackout

  Prologue

  JOHN MILTON tried to figure out what had woken him up.

  He couldn’t.

  He opened his eyes and immediately wished that he hadn’t. Bright light flooded in, exploding little detonations of pain in the front of his head. He squeezed his eyes shut again. The pain remained, reduced to a dull throb that pulsed behind his eyes. He felt awful. His skin was clammy. He felt sick.

  Milton tried to remember.

  What was it?

  What had woken him?

  A raised voice.

  Yes, that was it. He was sure. Someone had screamed.

  He opened his eyes again. He was flat on his back, lying on a bed. His head was turned to the side, and he could see the bedside table a few inches away. Beyond that was a bureau upon which was positioned an old-fashioned television. He tried to push himself upright. The pain flared and he felt an almost overwhelming urge to be sick. He fought it back, propped himself up on his elbows, and raised himself enough that he could look around the room.

  It was a plain space, on the small side, and decorated in neutral colours. There were two single beds with a bedside table between them. Milton’s bed was a mess: the sheets were sodden and bunched around his legs, and the pillow was on the floor. The other bed was untouched, save a scattering of banknotes that had been cast across it. Milton saw a bottle on the bedside table. The label said Grasovka Bison Grass vodka. The bottle was almost empty and lying on its side. The neck was over the edge of the table and, as Milton looked down, he saw a puddle on the tiled floor.

  He started to feel uneasy.

  What had happened here? He couldn’t remember. He tried to recall what he had been doing the previous night, but he couldn’t. It was as if his memories were obscured by a thick shroud and, despite his best efforts, he could not move it aside. He closed his eyes again and furrowed his brow, trying to remember where he was and how he had gotten here. It was hopeless.

  He reached further back. He remembered arriving in Manila, checking into a hotel—this one, yes? Yes, he thought it was—and then walking to a bar. He remembered Jessica. She had been there, just as she had promised she would be. He remembered how beautiful she was and how little she had changed in the years since he had last seen her. He remembered that they had talked, but not what about.

  And, after that… nothing.

  Everything else was hidden behind the shroud.

  His heart sank. He knew what must have happened. There was only one explanation, but the thought of it made him sick to the pit of his stomach. He had been drinking. Must have been. After days and then months and then years of sobriety, he’d thrown it all away and gone back to the bottle. He thought of the men and women that he had met in the program, the rooms around the world in which he had listened to their stories and shared some of his, and he felt ashamed.

  He had let them down.

  He had let himself down.

  He needed to find a meeting.

  He carefully swung his legs around and over the edge of the bed so that he could put them down and, careful not to step in the vodka, he gingerly pushed himself up to a sitting position. His whole body ached and he thought, again, that he was going to vomit. He steadied himself and, easing himself to a standing position, looked around the room once more. He saw another vodka bottle on the floor in the corner of the room. This one had been broken, the heavier base standing upright while the neck lay horizontally across the tile. There were two glasses near it, both shattered, tiny fragments catching the light that slanted in through a gap in the curtains.

  Milton saw that the door had not been closed properly. It was on an automatic mechanism, but it needed to be pulled in order for it to close all the way. He crossed the room and opened the door fully. Heat washed into the room. It was bright and stifling outside. He peered up into the sky; the sun’s position said that dawn had been three or four hours ago. There was an empty parking lot, with weeds forcing their way up between cracks in the asphalt, and beyond a row of parched palm trees loomed the swoop of an overpass. The traffic was loud, and fumes hung over the road in a vapour that Milton could taste against the back of his throat.

  He closed the door and turned back into the room again.

  Where was he?

  How did he get here?

  There was one other open door that led into the bathroom. He crossed the room and went inside.

  The room was small. There was a toilet and a basin with a small cupboard beneath it.

  He froze.

  There was a body on the floor.

  It was a woman. She was lying on her side with her torso between the cupboard and the toilet and her legs bent with her knees to her chest. Her dark hai
r was fanned out across the white tile. Her skin was pale, almost white, and it highlighted the obscene bruising around her exposed throat.

  Her head was angled toward him and he could see half of her face.

  It was Jessica.

  His stomach turned and the sick churned up from his gullet in a hot, acrid rush. Milton couldn’t hold it down. He stepped over the girl’s body and vomited into the sink, gout after gout of it until the sink was splattered and he was left feeling hollowed out and dizzy.

  “Hands up!”

  Milton turned around.

  The door to the bedroom was open and a woman was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a light blue shirt, a navy-blue skirt, and a navy-blue cap with a crest in the centre. Milton recognised it: Philippines National Police. The holster on her belt was empty. She had taken out a Glock 17 9mm pistol and was aiming it straight at him.

  “Hands!”

  Milton did as he was told.

  “You speak English?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Come out.”

  He looked at Jessica’s body again and then back at the officer.

  Am I responsible?

  “Step into the room.”

  Did I do that?

  Milton wanted to tell her that it wasn’t what it looked like, but the words caught in his throat. He knew why: he couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was exactly what it looked like. He couldn’t remember what had happened. Was it possible? He’d killed before, dozens of times, more than a hundred and fifty ghosts who had eventually ushered him along the road to sobriety. There had been another time, years earlier, when he had woken up with blood soaking his shirt, no memory of how it had got there, and then came a communiqué from Control congratulating him on a job well done.

  Is this the same?

  Did I kill her while I was drunk?

  He couldn’t say.

  He stepped out of the bathroom.

  “Knees. Now!”

  The police officer was young. She was holding her weapon a little too tightly, the butt clutched deep in her palm and her index finger too rigid around the trigger. Her hand shook, making the muzzle quiver, and Milton knew that disarming her would have been a simple thing.

  But he didn’t want to disarm her.

  He turned around, sank to his knees, and put his hands out behind his back so that the officer could cuff him.

  Part I

  Four Days Earlier

  1

  WILLIAM LOGAN stared out of the windshield, munching sunflower seeds and watching the rain streak down the glass. Russell Square might have been a desirable address once, but that time had long since passed. The grand terraces that hemmed in the square had been turned over to businesses, the houses carved up into offices. The local authority made only a passing attempt to keep the park tidy, and the benches arranged around it were as likely to be occupied by homeless drunks as by the night-shift workers who braved the rain for a cigarette beneath the shelter of the overhanging branches.

  It was coming up to ten at night. A thick bank of cloud had rolled over the capital, and the stars were hidden behind it.

  Logan had only just returned from Manila. His skin, usually so pale, was tanned and, if he closed his eyes, he could almost remember the warmth of the sun on his face. He had been there for two weeks, making preparations. The task he had been given was complicated and his target had a reputation that would have put doubt into the most confident operator. Logan had been responsible for similar assignments in the past, but this one was different.

  This was the first that had robbed him of sleep.

  He was reaching for the pack of sunflower seeds when he saw him. He was on foot, walking from the direction of the nearby tube station. There was nothing particularly impressive about him. He was a little over average height, around six feet tall. He had an athletic build, perhaps two hundred pounds. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a leather jacket. He had no umbrella, and the rain had plastered his dark hair to his scalp.

  Logan watched as the man paused at the corner of the square, waited for a taxi to roll through the puddles, and then crossed over to the single-storey structure that was set in the road next to the railings that encircled the small park. There were a handful of similar buildings all around London. Logan had seen them before and had been curious enough to investigate them online. They were shelters for taxi drivers, places where they could park their cabs and go for a cup of tea and something to eat. They had been around for years and much more numerous before competition made them less and less economic until—mostly—they were unsustainable.

  The man paused at the door, ran his hand through his wet hair to sweep it out of his face, and went inside.

  Logan leaned back in the seat and exhaled.

  Just watching John Milton made him nervous.

  2

  “I’LL BE OFF, THEN, LOVE.”

  The owner of the business was a bottle-blonde East Ender called Cathy. Milton took her coat from its hook and held it open so that she could put it on. It was a plastic raincoat with a leopard-skin print, the kind of gaudy style that summed her up. Milton had come to find it charming.

  Milton had been back in his job for a few weeks now. Cathy had taken him back on since her son, Carl, had decided that he didn’t want to follow in her footsteps and serve tea and baked beans on toast to the capital’s cabbies after all.

  “It’ll be quiet tonight,” she said.

  Milton nodded his agreement. He had been working at the shelter long enough to know that she was right. The rain would empty the streets, the cabbies would have less business, and many of them would call it a night and go home. The shelter would stay open, though. It was one of the things of which Cathy was most proud: the shelter had been open three hundred and sixty-five days a year for the last sixty years. She joked that not even Hitler had been able to make them shut. When Milton had pointed out that she had previously explained that her grandfather had only opened the shelter after the war, she had laughed and told him that she never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

  There was only one driver in the shelter tonight. He finished his can of Rio and handed it to Milton.

  “You still in Theydon Bois, darling?” he asked her.

  She raised a hand. “You don’t have to drive me, Cliff.”

  “Not a problem. I’m knocking it on the head. Nothing happening tonight. And I live out that way. No bother at all.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Save me walking to the tube in this filth.”

  Milton went over to clean the table. Cliff said goodbye and opened the door. Cathy told Milton that she would see him tomorrow, stepped over the threshold and followed Cliff to his cab. Milton took the dirty plate and mug to the sink and filled the basin with warm water. He watched through the small window as the lights of the cab flicked on. It set off around the square.

  He washed and dried the crockery, wiped his hands on the tea towel, and then went over to switch on the digital radio. He selected the pre-set for Planet Rock and, as the new single from the Dirty Pirates began to play, he filled the urn with cold water and set it to boil.

  * * *

  THE NEW Metallica record was just winding down when Milton heard the door open.

  He turned to see who it was.

  “Evening.”

  Milton had never seen the man before. He was in his late forties or early fifties, much shorter than Milton at perhaps five seven or five eight, and slender. His hair was brown and full, held in place with enough product that Milton immediately suspected a little vanity. His face was lined, his chin bore a noticeable cleft, and his dark eyes were partially obscured behind the reflection on the lenses of his glasses.

  “Are you a driver?” Milton asked.

  “No,” the man said. “I’m not.”

  “I’m sorry. There are rules here. Only cabbies can come in. If you want anything, I’ll have to serve you through the hatch.”

  “I’m not here for refresh
ments.”

  “Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “I have a message for you, Mr. Milton.”

  Milton stopped. He very rarely used his real surname and had never done so here. “Do we know each other?”

  “No,” he said. “We’ve never met. But I know who you are. We’ve worked for the same employer.”

  Milton found that his throat had become dry. “The government?”

  The man nodded.

  “I haven’t worked for the government for a long time. I’m sorry to be rude, but, whatever it is, I’m not interested. I’m busy. You need to be going.”

  “It’s a personal matter. For you, I mean. I think you’ll want to hear it. It’s important—I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t.”

  Milton found that he had screwed up the tea towel.

  “I don’t—”

  “Please, Mr. Milton,” the man interrupted. “You’ll thank me.”

  Milton looked at him. There was nothing threatening about him, but he was more concerned about the message than the messenger.

  “Just five minutes. That’s all I ask.”

  Milton relented. “Five minutes.”

  The man took one of the bench seats. Milton picked up a stack of dirty crockery, went through into the kitchen and put it in the sink. The water was tepid, so he turned on the hot to warm it up, watching the man in the reflection offered by the darkened windowpane ahead of him. He wondered if he had seen him before, but he couldn’t place him. There were so many memories from his past that were cloaked by the fuzz of his drinking, others lost completely; he gave it a moment’s thought and then abandoned the attempt. There was no point in trying. He wouldn’t be able to remember.

  He poured two mugs of hot tea and took them over to the table. He handed one to the man and sat down opposite him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Logan. William Logan.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I work at Manila Station. Have done for years.”

  Manila. That brought back memories. Milton had been to the Philippines twice, on two different assignments. The first had involved the death of an MI6 agent who had been selling secrets to the Russians and the Chinese. Milton remembered that very well: he had garrotted the man on a ferry between Manila and Cagayan de Oro and tossed the body over the side.