Forgetting the keys, Sly Monteith turned to leave, and the next moment the world whipped past him like it was a yo-yo: he was heading for the doorway and its urine-perfumed stairwell, and then he wasn’t. Instead, he was slammed back against the van’s panels, breathless, his ankles dangling in space. Donovan’s fists were scrunching his lapels, and Donovan’s voice was drilling into his ear.
“Once more,” Donovan suggested. “Where are you meeting him?”
There was a sudden sense of release, several sudden senses of release, and Monteith’s feet were back on the ground, and the contents of Monteith’s bladder were heading the same way. Donovan’s face twisted in contempt, and as much to prevent him expressing it as anything else, Monteith found the words tumbling out.
“Anna Livia Plurabelle’s.”
“. . . Where?”
“Park Lane. Really quite decent, they do a good . . . ” Monteith’s memory, or imagination, tailed away. What did they do that was good? A sudden taste of spring lamb in a blackcurrant jus filled his mouth, almost real enough to wash away the smell of his own piss.
Standing in a car park, slumped against a van. Discovering that the scheme he’d been orchestrating had been someone else’s all along . . .
At least that had been their choice.
“What time?”
Monteith said, “Half an hour?”
His trousers were clammy, and for a disconnected second he pictured himself turning up at Anna Livia’s—
He felt the soldier’s hand on his neck.
“This is what you’re going to do,” Donovan said. “You’re going to lie quietly in the back of the van. Nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t want to get in the van.”
His voice sounded as if it were coming from some distance away. From down the hall, the far side of the kitchen . . . From the pantry where he used to hide when he was small, and things weren’t going right.
“Doesn’t matter what you want. I’m going to tie you up, but I’m not going to hurt you. No worse than what we did to the woman.”
Monteith wasn’t thinking about the woman. He was thinking about being left in the dark of the van; tied up and gagged . . .
“What’s all this about?”
“Not your concern.”
Donovan pulled him round to the back of the van, one of whose doors hung open. The smell was the usual aroma of men and petrol and motorway miles and motorway food. The thought of being locked inside it filled Monteith with horror.
“I’m going to throw up,” he said.
He retched, bending double. Donovan swore under his breath, but relaxed his grip a fraction, and Monteith wriggled out of his jacket.
“Oh for God’s sake,” muttered Donovan, and took off after the runaway.
You didn’t have to go back far to recall a culture that said: Yes, we like a drink at lunchtime. The political culture, he meant—Peter Judd was well aware that the culture in general was chucking booze down its neck like a mental hobo. But the political culture, meaning Westminster, had cleaned up its act since the millennium, a shift in which Judd himself had played no small part. A public disavowal of some of the more famous extravagances of his youth had, near as damn it, established a party line, or at least had drawn a line across which his party didn’t dare tread. Backbenchers were like those dipping desk-toy ducks—start one off, and it would continue until forcibly stopped. Or in this instance, stop until forcibly started. Once the House’s reputation for being more or less sober during daylight hours had been salvaged, and his own status as architect of the “New Responsibility” (copyright, some broadsheet reptile) safely established, Judd was happy to revert to drinking at lunchtime when he felt like it. One of the advantages of being a Big Beast in a Parliament noted for its stunted brethren.
Pygmies, he thought, swirling the quarter inch of Chablis, breathing in the perfume, then nodding at the girl to fill the glass. Anna Livia’s chose its staff carefully. This one was a redhead, her hair tamed with a black bow matching the shoelace tie that dangled onto the table as she poured. Flesh-toned bra, so as not to show beneath her blouse. Such observations came naturally to Judd, who could no more look at a woman without assessing her bedability than he could see a microphone without minting a soundbite. She smiled—she had recognised him, of course—then replaced the bottle in its bucket and moved away. He’d leave a decent tip, and get her number. He was supposed to be behaving himself, for reasons of marital harmony, but a waitress hardly counted, for God’s sake. He glanced at his watch. Sly was late.
Sly was another pygmy, of course.
