“What could I do? Turned round and took him to Upshott. He made me restart the clock too, on account of how he wasn’t paying a fare somewhere he didn’t want to be in the first place.” Kenny Muldoon shook his head at the sheer bloody injustice of a world where such outrages occur. “You can probably guess the size of the tip, too.”
Shirley made an O-shape out of finger and thumb, and he nodded gloomily.
“So what’s Upshott?”
“Upshott? It’s hardly anything. It’s a hundred houses and a pub.”
“Not got a railway station, then.”
Muldoon looked at her as if she’d dropped in from another planet. Fair play to him though, she was beginning to feel that way herself.
He said, “It’s not got hardly anything, but that’s where I left him. Zero gratuity on a twelve-quid fare. Sometimes I wonder why I do this job.”
Spearing the last morsel of sausage, he used it to mop up the last of the yolk, then transferred it to his mouth. From the look on his face, it was evident he found some small consolations in the role life had concocted for him.
“And that was the last you saw of him?”
“I drove away,” said Kenny Muldoon, “and I didn’t look back.”
In London, the Highway Code applies on a curve: for motorists, it’s a rulebook; for taxis, a guideline; for cyclists, a minor inconvenience. Min swerved into City Road without pausing, and a southbound lorry missed him by at least a yard, but blared its horn anyway. Ignoring it, he threaded through the gaggle of tourists on the crossing, scattering them for the safety of the pavement, little red rucksacks and all …
His bicycle had been chained to the rack on Broadgate Square, and now, helmet on and jacket off, Min was as close to being disguised as he’d ever been. Even if the Russians were looking out their taxi’s back window, they wouldn’t cop to him. He was just another maniac on two wheels.
I don’t trust them.
It was weird the way the voice of common sense sounded like Louisa.
The taxi was heading for the Old Street roundabout. This offered a variety of directions, in any one of which it might vanish, but for now it was pausing at pedestrian lights a hundred yards ahead and in the process of changing. Min, pedalling as fast as he’d pedalled in his life, pedalled faster; pulled out to overtake a slowing bus, and banged his left elbow against it as the back-draught caught him. Briefly he was suspended in a perfect, gravity-free moment … The bus honked madly, and here were the traffic lights, and there they were behind him, and a taxi was kerbing twenty yards ahead, and that damned bus was gaining, and Min had no choice but to brake hard, or be smeared against the front of one or the back of the other. He left rubber on the road’s surface. His teeth clenched so hard, he didn’t recognise their shape.
Don’t be stupid. It’s because he didn’t want us to know where they’re staying.
The bus passed. Min hauled his bike round the parked taxi the way he might an unruly horse, and shouted something filthy through the driver’s window before starting to pedal again. His legs were cooked spaghetti, and the bike a torture device, until, with an inaudible click, they became one again, man and bike, Min and bike, and he was flowing into the Old Street roundabout, which boasted yet more traffic lights at its first spoke. Beyond them, four cars ahead, was a black cab, and Min was almost positive that the two heads conferring in its back seat were Piotr and Kyril—his legs were moving faster, the ground whipping away beneath his wheels, and there was a whole long stretch of Old Street, four hundred yards of it, before the pedestrian crossing—he’d never noticed before how many obstacles to free-flowing traffic littered the city, and would have been glad of it now, had the taxi not blown through the lights on amber, and sailed away towards Clerkenwell.
Min didn’t even decelerate. He clipped someone’s bag as he scythed through pedestrians, and shopping scattered in his wake, a welter of apples and jars and packets of pasta. Someone screamed. The cab was way ahead of him now, might not even be the right cab, and Louisa-in-his-head was gearing up for another verbal onslaught—
