“Good morning,” he said. He had a Birmingham accent, which sounded so incongruously workaday that he promptly ceased to be creepy.
“I phoned,” said Nevada, “earlier.”
“Ah yes. You were interested in…”
“Counter surveillance.”
He nodded and said, “Please come to the counter surveillance counter.”
As we followed him over to a display case I restrained myself from asking who’s on first. He said, “I got your call and have selected a range of bug busters for you to look at.”
“Bug busters?” I said in what I thought was an entirely neutral and innocent tone of voice, but Nevada gave me a you-stay-out-of-this look. The man removed two handheld devices from the display case and set them on the counter for us to look at. One was twice as big as the other, but either of them would sit comfortably in your palm. The larger one looked like a walkie-talkie and the smaller like one of those battery packs people wear when they’re fitted with a radio mike. The man lifted the smaller one and smiled his best salesman’s smile.
“This is the Stone Circle 48 digital radio frequency monitor. It provides high quality bug detection at an affordable price.” He patted it. “This model costs just over five hundred pounds including VAT.”
“What does it do?” said Nevada with what I thought was admirable bluntness.
“What doesn’t it do?” He smiled his false salesman’s smile again and I sensed stale patter. “In fact it will detect any device emitting a radio signal between one megahertz and four point eight gigahertz. That includes telephone, video, small battery and mains powered transmitters and—”
“Tracking devices?” said Nevada.
“Oh yes, certainly, tracking devices too. Very much so.”
“Okay, what about the other one?”
He smiled again, but this time it looked sincere. He put the small device down and picked up the larger one, handling it with reverence. “This is the Stone Circle 10. It retails for fifteen hundred pounds.”
I said, “Fifteen hundred pounds!”
Nevada nudged me to shut up. “What’s the difference,” she said, “between that one and the other one?”
Our guide waxed lyrical. “This model covers a truly staggering frequency range, from zero to ten gigahertz.” I repressed the urge to ask him if it went to eleven. “Which covers all bugs which have recently become commercially available,” he concluded.
Nevada nodded. She’d got it. “So that one goes to four point eight and this one goes to ten.”
“That’s correct.” He looked lovingly at the device in his hand. I thought he was going to tickle its tummy. “Yes. All the way to ten gigahertz. It also has an optional beep tone.”
Nevada nodded decisively. “We’ll take that one.”
“Which one?” His Brummie accent spiked excitedly, as if he could hardly believe his luck.
“The more expensive one with the truly staggering frequency range.” Nevada nodded at it. “That will be fifteen hundred pounds, I believe you said?”
“Eighteen hundred, including VAT.”
“What!” I said.
Nevada stepped on my foot and handed the man her credit card. “That will be fine.” I had thought the guy would be reluctant to put down his beloved Stone Circle 10 but he discarded it like a hot potato and grabbed Nevada’s card quick before she changed her mind. He completed the transaction and wrapped our purchase for us. At that price I expected it to be sealed in an origami swan fashioned from handmade linen paper, but he just stuck it in a plastic bag with a dismayingly chunky instruction manual. The bag had the Spook Store logo on it, which turned out to be a cheesy angular double S motif that I probably wasn’t alone in thinking was tastelessly close to a certain well-known Nazi insignia.
As we walked out of the store I said, “Was it the optional beep tone that sold you?”
“Don’t be sarcastic.” As we got into the taxi she handed it to me and said, “You take charge of this.”
“What?”
“You’re the technical one.”
I reluctantly took the thing out of the bag and began trying to make head or tail of its instruction manual. We drove west down St John’s Hill, then Clean Head switched to the back roads, following some abstruse formula that only she knew, until miraculously we came back out onto the A3 by Huguenot Place.
By now I had worked out that, luckily, the manual featured instructions printed in a number of languages, which reduced the relevant English section to a more manageable size.
We turned left into Garratt Lane opposite the shopping centre and drove down it until we came to Sainsbury’s. Clean Head signalled for a left turn and pulled into the supermarket parking lot.
She ignored any number of available spaces and drove to a distant, lonely corner of the lot where only a few other vehicles were parked. She cut off the engine as we approached the painted rectangle of the parking space she’d chosen, and let the taxi drift the last few metres on momentum, coming to a stop exactly in the middle of the rectangle.
“She’s such a show-off,” said Nevada. Then, looking at me expectantly, “Well?”
“What?”
“Have you assimilated the manual?”
I had, as it happened. “I suppose so, sort of, yes.”
“Then let’s get started.”
I looked at her. “Do you really think this taxi is bugged? That they’re listening to our every word?” Whoever “they” might be.
“It’s a tracking device I’m concerned about. And let’s just say I want to exclude the possibility.”
“You think someone stuck a tracking device on us?”
“As I said, let’s exclude that possibility.”
I switched the device on. To my relief the little black and green screen came to life right away. “Looks like batteries were included. All that for just eighteen hundred pounds.” The front door of the cab opened and Clean Head got out. She opened the back door and climbed in with us. She sat down and smiled.
“This is a little bit humiliating,” she said.
“Why?” said Nevada.
“Because it’s my cab.” She shrugged. She did seem a bit embarrassed. “It’s like going to the STD clinic to be checked out.”
“Not that you’d know,” said Nevada.
Clean Head grinned. “Not that I’d know.”
The instruction booklet had actually been written in an imaginative variant of English, just similar enough to lure the casual reader into a false sense of security. But I had managed to glean the basic facts, and we scanned the inside of the rear of the cab. Then we got out and Clean Head let me into the driver’s compartment. I was a little surprised that she hadn’t insisted on checking this private space herself, and felt a bit privileged. I noticed that she drank San Pellegrino mineral water and had a Françoise Sagan paperback on the go.
No bugs anywhere, though.
We stood outside the taxi and I ran the device all over its surface. Nothing. We stood and looked at each other. “That’s it, then.”
Nevada shook her head. “No. Now we have to check underneath.”
“By we, we mean me?” I said. Both the women looked at me.
“You’re doing so well,” said Nevada. She didn’t quite bat her eyelashes, but she might as well have done. “I wouldn’t want to interfere.”
“Well, that’s a first.”
Clean Head plucked the lapel of her jacket, by way of explanation. “And this is new.”
“Well, you’re just lucky I’m not wearing my Paul Smith,” I said, and got down on my hands and knees on the grubby tarmac and set to work with ill grace. The idea was to do it from several angles so as to make sure everything got scanned. I started at the front of the cab. After a few seconds I had to roll over and change hands. “I’m getting a cramp in my shoulder.”
“Poor darling,” said Nevada. “We’ll give you a massage afterwards.”
“We’ll get some baby oil from Sainsbury’s,” ad
ded Clean Head and they both cackled. It was a big vehicle and to make sure I covered every centimetre I had to get down on the ground at six separate points—once at each corner of the vehicle and once on each side in the middle.
A family of shoppers were walking past and they paused to gaze at us curiously as I pawed under the car. Nevada called to them, “He’s such a cheapskate. It’s only a pound coin.”
“Two-pound coin,” I snarled. But the light on the monitor screen stayed green, the RF readout didn’t flicker and the optional beep tone didn’t beep. I got stiffly to my feet. “Nothing.”
Nevada looked at Clean Head. “The STD clinic has given you a clean bill of health.”
We got some coffees from the Starbucks around the corner and all sat in the back of the cab. It smelled wonderful with the three cups of coffee in there. “All right, we’ve ruled out a tracking device,” said Nevada. She was at her most businesslike and I was a little surprised she wasn’t asking us to take notes. “But is it still possible we’re being followed.”
“If we were,” said Clean Head, “we wouldn’t know it.”
“Why not?”
“If they were any good at their job, they’d be almost impossible to spot.”
“Well, they’re not that good. We managed to spot them once.” Nevada looked at me. “You remember? Coming back from Brompton, across Putney Bridge. But we managed to shake them off.”
“That doesn’t mean they stayed shook off,” said Clean Head. “And perhaps they’ve got more careful since then.” She sipped her coffee. “I know how I’d do it.”
“How?”
“I’d have one in front and one behind. Not too close. That way if one lost you, the other could keep you in sight. It wouldn’t be hard.”
“What kind of vehicles would they use?” said Nevada.
She shook her head. “Impossible to say. But definitely silver.”
I said, “Why silver?”
“Look around you.” Nevada and I looked around the car park. At least every second car was an almost identical shade of silver grey. I’d never noticed it before, but she was right.
“But now I know what to look for,” said Clean Head. “And I know what to do about it.” She was buzzing, and not just with the coffee. This was clearly more fun than Bonjour Tristesse. We pulled out of the car park, turned right and headed for Armoury Way. We were bound for Goldhawk Road, our search for the record resumed.
As we crossed the river again, heading north, a thought suddenly hit me. “We didn’t shake them off.”
“What?” Nevada looked at me.
“That night crossing Putney Bridge. We didn’t shake them off,” I said. “We led them to Tinkler’s.”
12. PEOPLE CARRIER
You wouldn’t believe how many silver vehicles there are on the roads of London, once you start looking for them. I lost count of the number we passed, or were passed by, as we drove across the river to Hammersmith and then north to the Goldhawk Road.
I hit all the charity shops there. It didn’t take long, because they didn’t have much in the way of records. Then we drove past Shepherd’s Bush Common and stopped on the corner of Wood Lane. Now I’d work the Uxbridge Road. The first shop here had an impressive selection of accordion music on LP, mostly from Germany for some reason, but no jazz in evidence.
There was a plump woman sitting behind the counter trying to thread shoelaces into a pair of old-fashioned ice skates. I smiled at her and said, “You don’t happen to have any jazz records at the moment, do you?”
The woman looked up from the pair of ice skates and said, “We did have a box. But we just sold the whole thing.”
“To a blonde woman?” said Nevada.
“Yes. A pretty little thing. Bought the lot.”
As we left the store, I saw her.
She was wearing matching dark blue ski jacket and ski pants, practical enough for the chilly weather but also as close to anonymity as you could get in a plausible city outfit. She was also wearing a pair of sunglasses. They did a pretty effective job of concealing her features, but if anything they helped me. What I immediately recognised wasn’t her face but purely an animal sense of her. The way she moved.
“It’s the woman from the boot fair, the one who got chucked out,” I said.
“And it’s definitely the jazz bitch,” murmured Nevada. “The one I had the wrestling match with over those records of yours.” We had stepped into a doorway and stood there watching the woman. She hadn’t seen us. She looked up and down the street then turned left, heading towards the Tube station. There was a promising cluster of charity shops in that direction and it was where we were headed, too. As soon as the woman turned away and set off, Nevada started to step out of the doorway. I stopped her.
“What are you doing?” she said. “If we let her get ahead of us she will have cleaned out every store before we get there. We have to get ahead of her.”
“No, we have to follow her.”
“What are you talking about? She’ll buy the records.”
“We want her to. We want her to buy a shitload of records. More than she can carry.”
She looked at me like I was nuts, but only for a moment. Then she got it. “And she’ll have to put them in her vehicle.”
I nodded. “So we get to find out what her vehicle looks like.”
She frowned for a second, then said, “All right, but if as a result of this initiative she scoops up the record we’re looking for…”
“She won’t,” I said. “I mean what are the odds?” I was far from certain about this though. It was a chance. But one I thought we had to take.
“If that happens I’m going to want your head on a plate.”
“Way to motivate the staff.” We stepped out of the doorway and went after the blonde. I knew the location of the next charity shop and I made sure we stopped short of it, which was just as well because she popped back out of the door a few seconds after she’d gone in. No records, evidently. The same thing at the next shop.
At the third shop she stayed in for a couple of minutes then came back out with a big canvas bag, which could have contained two dozen LPs. It must have been heavy but she didn’t have any trouble carrying it. A strong woman. I tried to stop myself from speculating fretfully about what might be in the bag. We stayed out of sight at a bus shelter until she moved on to the fourth and final charity shop. She remained in there quite a long time.
Nevada and I were standing in the concealment of an open-fronted telephone booth. It was a minimal structure, but enough to break up our silhouette. “I didn’t know they still had telephone booths,” said Nevada. “How reassuring. And how reassuring to know they still stink of urine.”
“Here she comes,” I said.
The woman came out of the shop. She was still only carrying the same bag she’d had when she went in. So had she found nothing? She had been in the shop some considerable time. That would make sense if she’d been flipping through the crates. But that wasn’t her style.
She was of the sledgehammer school of record hunting. Buy everything now and look at it later.
She remained standing in front of the charity shop, scanning the street both ways. Nevada and I pressed ourselves behind the phone booth. “How long is she going to stand there?” said Nevada. Just then a vehicle pulled out of the traffic stream and up to the kerb opposite the shop front.
It was a big sports utility vehicle, or people carrier as they’re called.
And it was silver.
The woman went back to the door of the charity shop and opened it and said something. She stood back and two skinny teenagers came out of the shop, each carrying a yellow plastic crate of records. I guess that the kids worked in the store and had been enlisted to help. They’d evidently thrown the crates in as part of the deal. The woman in the ski suit had just bought everything. She looked sufficiently well heeled to have no trouble coming up with a generous purchase price… for pretty much anything she wanted.
&
nbsp; The big side door of the people carrier was thrown open. A brawny man got out and helped the kids put the crates into the vehicle. I got a good look at the guy’s face and his short cropped blonde hair.
It was the jerk from the boot fair. The knucklehead who had knocked me off my feet.
I was surprised at how unsurprised I was.
They loaded the records, the kids went back into the shop, and the man and woman got into the people carrier and drove away.
* * *
We told Clean Head to drive us back to the hospital, going by the most circuitous route possible and taking at least an hour to get there. We wanted to visit Tinkler one more time and on the way there we wanted to have a good look for our new friends. But knowing what their vehicle looked like turned out to confer surprisingly little advantage to us.
From time to time we spotted the silver people carrier, or a vehicle very similar. Sometimes it was in front of us, sometimes it was behind us, and a surprising amount of the time it wasn’t in sight at all.
After about twenty minutes Clean Head opened the sliding window that sealed her off from the passenger compartment and said, “I think you’re right. A silver SUV is definitely tracking us. But that doesn’t really help us until we know what the other vehicle is.”
“You think there’s definitely another vehicle?” said Nevada.
“It’s the only way to do it properly.”
I glanced out the window to our right and watched a small figure on a lightweight motorcycle dart past. The rider, who looked like some kind of courier with a shoulder bag, was sexless and anonymous behind a full-face helmet. Bike and rider vanished into the traffic flow ahead of us. I said, “I’ve been seeing a lot of those small motorcycles. You know, trail bikes, around 60cc, that sort of thing.”
Written in Dead Wax Page 13