Dead Lions полностью

She was still jazzed from last night’s raid on DataLok, where the train company’s onboard-CCTV footage was stored. Subduing the infant on security hadn’t proved taxing, and chances were the morning shift would have unwrapped him by now: the kid had thought she was going to kill him. Finding the right files had taken longer, but the system wasn’t a closed book, not after four years at Regent’s Park Comms, and she’d uploaded everything and more to a website she’d created yesterday and had since taken down. Then she’d gone home, woken her lover, and committed a borderline act of rape. Lover had justifiably collapsed afterwards, but Shirley had taken a twist of coke then gone piledriving through the data, decoding the filing system in minutes: date, time, train number, destination, carriage. Recording was on, she estimated, a seven-second stutter, though that might have been the coke talking. The thought inspired a second hit: if this was going to take all night, she’d need all the help she could get.

It had taken a shade over two hours.

Two hours’ clock-time, anyway. Shirley was flying to her own schedule by this point. Coke, yes, but also an adrenalin high from the raid. Each seven-second onscreen jump echoed the beat of her heart. She registered plenty of bald men, baldness being as much fashion statement as male tragedy these days, but she had no doubt when she found the one and only Mr. B—there he sat, oblivious of the camera at the end of the carriage, and yet so square on to its field of coverage he might as well be mouthing cheese … He sat alone, staring ahead unsmilingly. Not even blinking. Except he probably was, amended coked-up Shirley Dander, was probably blinking in the six seconds spare he had out of every seven. But it was odd, nevertheless, that all around him was a funhouse of jerky movement, as his fellow-travellers conjured instant shapes from newspapers, or produced handkerchiefs out of nowhere, as if this were a magicians’ convention—and Mr. B alone remained stock still: a cardboard cut-out who didn’t even roll with the train’s movement. Or that’s how he’d stayed until reaching Moreton-in-Marsh, in the Cotswolds. Which boasted, among other attractions, a nice little café, open early.

Kenny Muldoon turned out quite the breakfast fiend: sausages, bacon, egg, beans, tomatoes; buckets of tea. Enough toast to carpet a barn. Shirley, no appetite, still had raw energy pulsing through her veins. But her last twist of coke was hours ago, and she had an unbreakable rule about never leaving home while carrying, so knew she was going to crash soon, with a long drive ahead of her … She nibbled a piece of toast, but swallowed a whole cup of tea without pausing, then poured another. Then said:

“So you collected a bald gentleman from the station last Tuesday, yes?”

“Don’t know about gentleman. Seemed a bit of a bruiser.”

“We won’t argue details. Where did you take him?”

“This some sort of romantic contretemps?” Kenny Muldoon rolled contretemps around his mouth like it was his last piece of sausage. “Sugar Daddy done a moonlit flit?”

Plucking the fork from Kenny’s unsuspecting grip, Shirley Dander impaled his hand with it then leaned on it heavily. Felt its tines scrape and pop through gristle; watched blood squirt like ketchup over the ruins of his full English.

“Heh, heh,” Kenny added.

Shirley blinked, and the fork remained in Kenny’s hand. She said, “Something like that. Do you remember where he went?”

Kenny Muldoon’s drooping eyelid was as much response as he was prepared to give at this juncture. Taxi drivers, thought Shirley. You could squash them into the same box holding all the bankers in London, and nobody would mind if you dropped it off a cliff. Her watchstrap had long been relieved of its bounty. She produced another tenner from her pocket instead. “I didn’t realise country life was so expensive.”

“You city folk don’t know you’re born,” he assured her. He put his knife down, took the money, slipped it into a pocket. Picked up his knife again. “Course I remember,” he said, as if everything that had happened between her question and this reply had been invisible business. “Couldn’t hardly not, he made such a fuss about it.”

“What sort of fuss?”

“Didn’t know where he was going, did he? Starts off saying he wants to go to Bourton-on-the-Water. Got halfway there, and he shouts out like he’s being kidnapped. Nearly took the car into a ditch, didn’t I? That’s not what you want in hard rain.”

His tone of voice made it clear that the incident still rankled.

“What was his problem?”

“Turns out he doesn’t mean Bourton-on-the-Water at all, does he? Turns out he means Upshott. And tries to make out that’s what he said in the first place, and I’m an idiot for not hearing properly. How long do you think I’ve been doing this job?”

Like she cared. “Fifteen years?”

“Try twenty-four. And I don’t mishear place names, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

In which case, wasn’t she due some change? “So what did you do?”