Page 169 of King’s Ransom

He’d shaved his hair to the scalp, but he hadn’t shaved his chin; stubble covered it.

And he was no longer dressed in an expensive suit. Today it was black jeans and a worn navy-blue hoodie.

Nor did he wear Tom Ford glasses.

His eyes were a cool grey, a different colour from what they’d been on the 21st. He must have worn contact lenses that day, to truly sell the Quinn McCade illusion.

Today his eyes had a deadness to them, a blank unfeeling stare.

But the overall structure of his face was unmistakable.

It was the man I’d met at 59West on December 21st calling himself Quinn McCade from Sinclair & Loewe Insurance, only now he was a shaven-headed, dead-eyed version of that individual.

He was the Unperson.

‘Hello, Samuel,’ he said.

‘Have you got a name or do you just want me to stick with “Unperson”?’ I said.

‘I quite like Unperson. It suits me.’

Uri hustled over to me, patted me down roughly, and quickly relieved me of Murph’s Glock and my backpack.

He was strong, Uri. He had the touch of an ironworker.

Winnie Tan turned to the Unperson impatiently. ‘You said this would be clean. That it would never be traced back to me. You said I would get satisfaction. Now this fucking private eye turns up at my house!’

The Unperson was still staring at me with his emotionless grey eyes.

‘He won’t be staying long,’ he answered calmly.

‘He knows fucking everything,’ Winnie Tan said.

‘Not everything,’ the Unperson said.

He stepped close to me, right up to my face.

‘Isn’t that right, Samuel?’

I said, ‘I know you had three clients on the 21st and, so far, I’ve found two of them: the Chinese Ministry of State Security working out of Doyers Street in Chinatown and now her. There’s still one to go.’

‘I want him dead and buried and never seen again,’ Winnie said to the Unperson.

‘Like you wanted with Yasmina Ivanova?’ I said.

‘Yasmina Ivanova is a stupid classless Russian whore,’ Winnie spat. ‘A dipshit model! No education, no substance, just sharp cheekbones and a hot body. She banged everybody on her way up, from modelling agents to Russian mobsters. I have three degrees in computer engineering. I have a brain. Can you imagine what it feels like to see the love of your life married to a woman like that? I needed her gone, forever, out of Aristo’s life. So, I hired him’—she jerked her chin at the Unperson—‘to set her up on December 21st. And it all worked great until you came along.’

‘What about all the people who died? The cops, the bodyguards, the FBI people?’

She waved her hand, irritated. ‘Who cares? They were inconsequential people, human rounding errors, nobodies with meaningless lives who the world won’t miss. People like Ari and me are important, we change the world.’

‘And Ajax King?’ I said.

‘He was the son Shelby had to Aristo when Aristo was cheating on me. His death was a bonus.’

‘You’re a really nasty lady, you know that?’ I said.

(It also occurred to me then that Winnie Tan’s two adult children had been overseas on the 21st, conveniently out of harm’s way when everything went down.)