The car bounced and bashed him, and Hassan Ahmed tried to make himself smaller. In his mind, he escaped in seventy different ways, but his body remained in the boot.
The common wisdom was that car-theft gave you a buzz, but that probably only held true if your evening hadn’t already involved blood, firearms and a severed head. The car was a beat-up Austin, taken from a sidestreet, and River guessed its owner’s reaction on finding it gone would be a sigh of relief. There were no spare keys in the glove compartment or behind the rearview mirror, but there was a mobile phone in the former; a chunky grey thing that looked like River’s own phone’s distant ancestor. Hotwiring took him seven minutes, which was probably six minutes fifty over the record. He’d driven back the way they’d come, crossed the river at Blackfriars, then tried to use the phone to call the hospital again, only to find it was pre-pay, and out of credit.
This, at least, gave him a buzz, but not a welcome one. Throwing the phone through the window would have relieved his feelings, but he settled for swearing heavily. Swearing was good. Swearing helped. It kept his mind off the possibility that Sid was dead; kept it, too, from flashing back to the head on the kitchen table, raggedly sawn from its owner.
But why had it been familiar?
He didn’t want to dwell on it, but knew he had to … The answer was buried within his subconscious and ought to be within his grasp. He stopped swearing. Remembered he was on a mission, and came to a halt at a junction, reestablishing his bearings. He was on Commercial Road; heading for Tower Hamlets, where he’d collect Kay White. Stationary, he was hooted by a car behind, which swung out to pass him. He swore again. Sometimes it was good to have a visible enemy.
Because God knows, River thought bitterly, he was weary of the invisible kind.
Pushing thoughts of severed heads aside, he resumed his journey. Another two minutes, and he found his turning: on the left-hand side was a three-storey brick-built block, its matching window frames and guttering marking it out as association housing. Maybe twenty yards ahead, double-parked outside what could easily be Kay’s address, was the car that had hooted him three minutes ago: lights on, engine running. A figure hulked behind the wheel. River reversed into a space, and disconnected the ignition wires. Got out and walked back to the main road. Turned the corner, dropped to one knee and peered back round, just as a man brought Kay White out of her home and loaded her into the waiting car.
She was neither cuffed nor roughly handled. The man was guiding her by the elbow, but it could have been taken as support if you didn’t know what you were watching. He settled her into the back seat, and got in after her. The car moved off. The moments during which River could have done anything to stop any of this had been over before he got here, and he wasn’t sure what use he’d have made of them anyway. The last time he’d tried an intervention, Sid had wound up lying in the street.
The car reached the next junction, turned, and was gone.
River returned to the Austin, and stole it all over again.
Struan Loy’s night had started promisingly. He’d had a date, his first in three years, and had planned it like an attempt at Everest, the base camps being wine bar, Italian restaurant and her place. Base one had proved a tremendous success, inasmuch as she had turned up; base two less impressive, as she’d left halfway through, and base three remained whereabouts unknown. Loy had returned home to an unmade bed and three hours’ sleep, interrupted by the arrival of Nick Duffy.
Now he sat blinking in harsh underground light. The room was padded, its walls covered with a black synthetic material which smelled of bleach. A table dead centre had a straight-backed chair on either side, one of them bolted to the floor. This was the one on which Loy had been told to sit.
‘So,’ he said to Diana Taverner. ‘What’s up?’
He was aiming for a carefree delivery, with about as much success as Gordon Brown.
‘Why should anything be up, Struan?’
‘Because I’ve been brought here in the middle of the night.’
And certainly looked like he’d dressed in the dark, thought Taverner.
‘Nick Duffy brought you here because I asked him to,’ she said. ‘We’re downstairs because I don’t want anyone to know you’re here. And we’re not having this chat because you’ve done anything wrong. We’re having it because I’m reasonably sure you haven’t.’
She leant just enough on
He said, ‘I’m glad to hear it.’
Taverner said nothing.
‘Because I’m pretty sure I haven’t done anything.’
‘Pretty sure?’
‘A turn of phrase.’
She said nothing.
‘I mean, I know I haven’t done anything.’
She said nothing.
‘Or not since, you know.’
‘Not since that e-mail suggesting that your boss and mine, Ingrid Tearney, was an Al Qaeda plant.’
He said, ‘It was the outfit she wore on
She said nothing.
