And quickly. Their cars were not best placed for a getaway; the whole strategy might have been better thought through. Or even just thought through.
The front door was pushed open. Someone called, “Hello? Everything all right in here?”
“River . . .”
He had dropped to his knees and was peering under the sofa again. Sid still wasn’t there.
“I’ve called the police,” the voice said.
Send in the clowns, Louisa thought. “It’s all good,” she said. “Nothing to see.”
“You broke in! We were watching!”
Jesus, didn’t anyone mind their own business any more?
River was on his feet, still clutching Sid’s phone. “They cleaned the place out. So how come they left this?”
“It was under the sofa. Maybe they didn’t see it. Can we leave?”
“I saw it. First thing.”
“You were looking. You knew it was here. River—”
A distant siren. But not distant enough.
She said, “Being arrested is not going to help. We need to go. Now.”
A man appeared in the doorway, holding a phone like a lightsabre, filming. “This is evidence,” he said. “This is evidence you’re breaking in.”
“For fuck’s sake,” said River. The siren was growing loopier as it bounced against walls and tumbled round houses. The man shrank back but kept his phone trained on them, or did until River snatched it in passing; he made an attempt to retrieve it, but Louisa pressed a palm against his chest, briefly pinning him to the wall.
“Please,” she said, meaning it, then caught up with River who was out of the door now, a phone in each hand, robbery added to the charge sheet. She’d paid good money for that abandoned crowbar. Unlikely she could claim it on expenses.
The traffic was moving, the lights green, but two cars remained stationary, their occupants watching the show. She was sprinting now, on River’s heels, and as they turned into the lane where they were parked, blue lights spiralled into her peripheral vision, bouncing off the trees that lined the opposite side of the road. River’s car was winking at him; he’d tossed the stolen phone aside and his keys were in his hand. She fumbled in her pocket for her own. What were they going to do, take off in two separate vehicles? The fast and the futile.
That seemed to be River’s plan. Throwing open his driver’s door he said, “Different directions. They can’t chase us both.”
“Of course they can chase us both! They’re the fucking police!”
And were here already. Two cars pulled into the lane, the second so close behind the first they might have been humps on the same camel; both were unmarked but with flashers on their dashboards, and their blue genies pounded against the squat building to their left, somersaulted River’s and Louisa’s cars, then bounced across the children’s playground before regrouping and doing it all over again. River was shaking his head, anger and frustration boiling off him, and gripping his keys so tightly he might have been making impressions. Police officers emerged from their vehicles. Louisa was wondering just how much trouble they were in when her phone rang.
“Put that down!”
“Put down your phone!”
“Put it down!”
But she answered it anyway.
“What?”
Lech said, “You still want to visit that safe house? Because I can let you have the alarm code, if it’s any help.”
This was plainly true in other professions also: acting, singing, modelling, anything involving lounging round a pool, monarchy.
This one more specific, but definitely a growth area in the UK.
What Devon Welles hadn’t mentioned to Louisa was the overlap between the two—last night, while they’d been having dinner, his team had been babysitting a nepo-brat’s birthday bash thrown by a former pol living with a death threat, a duty Devon had been glad to avoid. He was professional enough to keep personal feelings wrapped while on the job, but Peter Judd tested boundaries. Before he had fielded security for the one-time Home Secretary, the most challenging of Devon’s employers had been Diana Taverner, who was equally persuaded of her general rightness, though less inclined towards narcissism and mendacity. That aside, the main difference between watching Judd’s back and working Taverner’s home security was having to suffer the former’s self-satisfaction, which oozed from him like slime from a slug.
Actually, no. The main difference was the amount he was getting paid.
Which was not something that bothered him, he thought—checking his kit, preparing for his afternoon shift—though he sometimes wondered what Emma Flyte would have made of it. He missed her, and still heeded her judgement on important questions, though would admit to resting a thumb on the scales now and again. Emma had understood the need to make a living, but she’d have drawn the line at working for Judd.
