“We came by train.”
“Good. Now we clean house. Al, keep an eye on her. And no one’s shooting anyone.”
“Like no one’ll trace your email, right?”
“We’ll do post-mortems later.”
So there Sid had sat, while the team cleaned house—obviously a team, used to such removals. The way they split tasks without conferring. The way they didn’t talk while doing them.
Al had watched her without seeming to, a skill honed in a million pubs, a hundred market squares. River would love this guy. He’d want to hear his life story, then recount it all to Sid afterwards.
Cleaning up took three minutes. Sid had days it took her longer than that to rinse a coffee mug.
When they were done, CC sent them out to his car—blue Peugeot—bags in hand; still clearly the boss, despite what she read as a hairline fracture in his command. He said, “A thousand pounds isn’t what I had in mind.”
“My day isn’t going to plan either. I’d intended to return a library book.”
“What’s Taverner going to do?”
“Teach you the error of your ways,” Sid said. “I imagine.”
“But if she was planning a hard stop, she’d not have sent you.” He tapped his breast pocket, where he’d tucked the envelope. “Or this.”
“No.” Don’t get involved. You had a job to do; you’ve done it. But it couldn’t be helped; she was who she was. “Look—CC?”
“What they call me.”
“Okay. Whatever you think you’re holding over Diana Taverner, she clearly doesn’t care. She told me she wasn’t going to do you harm, but she lies just for practice. If you want my best guess, by trying to blackmail her, you’ve given her leverage.”
“So no happy ever after.”
“I don’t know how this’ll end. But you’ve money in your pocket. If I were you, I’d give some thought to dropping out of sight.”
“This isn’t 1963. With a thousand pounds I could barely drink myself to death. And there are four of us.”
“Not if you walk away.”
“You think I’d do that? What do they teach you at the Park these days?”
She assumed he wasn’t anxious for an answer to that.
He said, “You’ll have to come with us.”
“Am I expecting a bullet in the neck in a lay-by?”
“Al is fond of Daisy. It’s not a good idea to threaten her in his presence.”
She walked in front of him, out of the house, down the road, round the corner. The others were already in his car, and Avril got out at their approach, making space for Sid in the middle of the back seat.
“I’m next to her?”
“Just don’t make eye contact,” Avril said.
Between the other two women, Sid put her head back as CC started the engine. She imagined it raining, imagined it night. Wondered how a day that had started the same as most others had come to this, and decided that the blame lay with herself, for believing that any task devised by Taverner would turn out other than a mantrap.
She did not think, though, that these people were about to kill her. Even Daisy, whose thigh she could feel against her own, wasn’t a danger; just someone who’d miscalculated a threat and responded accordingly. Not so different from her own history, or that small part of it that involved being bundled into a car by strangers. The anger that had drained from her now had left her feeling worn out, like a story told too often. In the front seat, the big man—Al—was asking CC, “How long has it been since you handled an op?”
Fifty minutes later they pulled into the services at Beaconsfield, and Sid found herself being escorted into the loos by Avril and Daisy. Before slipping into a cubicle, she said, “You think I couldn’t escape?”
“You’re not a captive, dear. Just a bit of a nuisance.”
CC and Al were waiting by a bubble gum dispenser when they’d finished. CC ushered the others back to the car with a hand gesture, then handed Sid her tote bag, which held her purse, her sunglasses and her emergency make-up kit. “Where’s my phone?”
“I haven’t touched it.”
Which, if true, meant it was back in the safe house, having scattered when she went sprawling. Shit. A cherry-red cover, a present from River. She was dead.
“I’m sorry about this.” He looked it too, and a penny dropped. She wasn’t about to be left in a lay-by with another bullet in her head. She was about to be abandoned in a service station twenty miles from London; Muzak blaring from hidden speakers, and no phone to call an Uber.
She said, “Whatever Taverner wants you to do, run a mile.”
“I appreciate the advice. But I’ve the others to think about.”
