by Rob Johnson
‘You all right, chief?’
Patterson rounded on his denim-clad colleague, his mouth loaded with a variety of abusive remarks, but his brain seemed unable to select any one in particular. Instead, he pointed at the guy with the ponytail who was staggering away and bouncing off the occasional parked car. ‘Get after him, Colin. I want a word.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know yet, but I reckon there’s a good chance that if we lose him, we’re stuffed.’
Colin Statham set off at a trot, and Patterson dabbed his handkerchief at the damp patch on his trousers, which had begun to spread slowly downwards. If it hadn’t been for those damn Cupid poofters, this would never have happened. Not only that, but he’d have got to the van a couple of minutes earlier and would probably have a better idea of what the hell was going on. All he’d seen was the guy with the ponytail reeling backwards from the side of the camper and then the van lurching off and almost running him over. He was pretty sure the man behind the wheel was the same one he’d collared at the arena exit, but who the woman was, he hadn’t got a clue.
He raised his wrist to his mouth and spoke into the sleeve of his jacket, ‘Come in, Sneezy. Do you read me?’ Not for the first time, he wondered which idiot had had the bright idea of codenaming this job Operation Snow White.
His earpiece hissed momentarily, and he winced as he heard the words, ‘Sneezy here. Go ahead, Grumpy.’
Patterson thought he could hear a stifled snigger in the background. ‘There should be a white VW camper van passing your position any second now,’ he said. ‘Registration whiskey six three five papa juliet tango. Keep on its tail but do not intercept. I repeat, do not intercept. – And don’t bloody lose it. I want to know exactly where it goes.’
‘Will do, Grumpy. Van just passing us now.’
He was certain he heard a giggle this time. ‘Who’ve you got with you?’
There was a brief pause and then: ‘Sorry, sir. Can’t tell you that.’
‘What are you talking about, you can’t tell me?’
‘It’s just that… ‘ Sneezy was obviously trying to compose himself. ‘He’s Bashful, guv.’
The suppressed giggling suddenly erupted into an explosion of laughter so loud that Patterson snatched the earpiece from his ear to avoid being deafened.
‘Oh ha bloody ha. And now you’ve had your little joke, just remember this, Mr Sneezy. You two clowns lose that van and you’ll be sneezing out of your sodding arseholes. Got it?’
Through his earpiece, which he was now holding a couple of inches from the side of his head, he heard a car engine starting up and possibly the word “tosser”.
* * *
Despite his lean and athletic appearance, Colin Statham had a long history of avoiding anything which remotely resembled physical exercise, and so he was not the best equipped for a high speed chase on foot. Fortunately for him, however, his target on this occasion was going nowhere fast.
Must be completely trollied, he thought, as the man weaved this way and that, his arms flailing around in front of him as if he were negotiating his way in total darkness. His lack of forward progress meant that even Statham had little trouble gaining on him, and when he was within ten feet or so, he contemplated a headlong dive to bring the guy down in a spectacular looking rugby tackle. But he immediately decided against it when he noticed the bogginess of the ground. Instead, he drew the Glock 17 pistol from the holster inside his jacket and held it flat against his hip, pointing downwards so as not to arouse unnecessary attention. He grabbed hold of a flailing arm and spun the man round to face him. A pair of severely bloodshot eyes blinked back at him several times as they attempted to focus.
‘Get off o’ me, ya wee shite.’
Statham easily dodged the wayward punch and thrust the barrel of his gun into the man’s groin. ‘Shut up and keep still if you value your nuts.’
‘What d’ye want? Money or wha’?’
Statham raised the cuff of his jacket to his mouth. ‘You there, Grumpy? This is Sleepy. I have our man. Repeat. I have our man. Where are you?’
‘Grumpy? Sleepy? Yir havin’ me on, right?’
Statham did not respond.
‘Ye Special Branch or somethin’?’
‘Nasty cut you’ve got there,’ said Statham, nodding at the blood dripping from the gash on the back of the man’s hand. ‘I’d get that seen to if I were you.’
‘’Cos if ye are, yir making a very big mistake here, pal.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Anything happens ta me an’ the whole deal’s off. Ye know what I’m sayin’?’
Statham was beginning to feel uneasy about this whole situation and stole a glance over his shoulder to see if Patterson was about to come to his rescue in deciding what to do next. What he saw instead, and for the briefest of moments, was a large fist and something dark and heavy looking. He barely even had time to register the savage pain in the side of his head, but it returned quickly enough when he opened his eyes to see Patterson crouching over him.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Statham as his hand made tentative contact with the fiery swelling just above his right ear.
‘Well?’ Patterson’s bedside manner left a lot to be desired.
Statham propped himself up on one elbow. ‘Somebody jumped me.’
‘The guy with the ponytail?’
Statham shook his head and instantly regretted it. ‘Someone else. I’d caught up with the ponytail and was waiting for you. Next minute, bang. Goodnight Vienna.’ Still nursing his wound, a thought suddenly occurred to him, and he scanned the ground around him. ‘Damn.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Bastard nicked my gun.’ He pushed himself into a sitting position, and a memory forced its way into his throbbing brain. ‘He said something about the deal being off if anything happened to him.’
‘What the hell are they playing at?’ said Patterson. ‘The whole point of “the deal” was to leave the address in the locker, and they haven’t. The only reason I stopped the joker who made the pickup was because you’d told me the locker was empty. And now he’s buggered off in a bloody camper van.’
‘Anyone after him?’
Patterson nodded. ‘But I told them not to intercept. For all we know there may not even be an address so if they’re mucking us about, I want to know where he ends up.’
‘Who’s tailing him?’
‘Sneezy and Bashful?’
Statham’s laugh was cut short by the flash of pain that shot through his head. ‘Thank God it’s not Dopey, I suppose.’
‘Quite.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Trevor drove the van as fast as he dared but slow enough to avoid knocking anyone else down. All the while, he continued to give himself a good mental kicking and asked himself the same question over and over again. Why oh why had he ever got involved in all this? Okay, so not all of it was his fault. The van breaking down, ending up in that hotel in that particular room with a dodgy toilet flush. That was just chance. And it wasn’t as if he’d broken the cistern lid deliberately.
Even then, it was guilt that had driven him to try and replace it, so he could hardly be blamed for that. Looking in the wallet which was taped inside the lid? Natural curiosity. He was only human after all. As for taking it away with him… All right, so he’d panicked. Perfectly normal in the circumstances and so was the fact that he’d been in a hurry and forgotten to hand it in at reception like he’d intended. Actually using the ticket to get into the festival and taking the package from the locker was…
Well that was a little trickier to work out, but the upshot was that he had someone who may or may not be a copper after him as well as a gun-wielding psychopathic Scotsman. Then there was this crazy woman sat next to him – also with a gun.
‘Which way?’ he said when they reached the main road.
‘Whichever. For now, I just want to get away from this place.’
Trevor turned left, purely on th
e basis that he had entered the site from the right, and it somehow seemed like a good idea to head in the opposite direction.
‘So who are you, and why exactly did you nick the envelope from my toilet?’ the woman said after a couple of miles of silence.
‘Believe me, I keep asking myself the same question.’
‘Which one? The who are you one or the nicking one?’
‘The nicking one. I’m Trevor Hawkins.’ He decided there was little point in giving a false name this time. He didn’t have a clue who this woman was, but she did have a gun.
‘I know what your name is. What I want to know is who you’re working for.’
‘Me?’
‘No, I was talking to the bloody dog,’ she sneered. ‘Yes, you.’
‘Well I suppose you could say I’m unemployed at the moment. I’ve just packed in my job at Dreamhome Megastores, you see, and—’
She rounded on him and aimed the gun at his face. ‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘Pardon?’ Trevor frowned back at her.
‘You tell me you don’t know why you stole the envelope from my room, so I can only assume somebody told you to but didn’t give you a reason.’
‘Look, it was a mistake. That’s all. I know it was a stupid thing to do, but there was nobody else involved. I promise you.’
‘A mistake?’
The pistol persuaded him that his best course of action was to tell her the whole story from when he’d first set off in the van the day before to the moment he took the package from the locker.
‘Speaking of which…’ she said when he’d finished and held out her free hand towards him, nodding at his chest.
Trevor unzipped his jacket and pulled out the padded, green Jiffy bag. He passed it to her and, on the edge of his vision, noticed her lay the gun down on top of the dashboard. Not that this was particularly significant. Making a grab for it and forcing her to get out of the van at gunpoint simply wasn’t an option. Hell, he barely knew one end of a gun from the other, and she wasn’t going to sit there and wait while he figured it out.
‘So you haven’t opened it then,’ she said. ‘That’s something, I suppose.’
Trevor wondered how critical this might be to saving his life. Perhaps if he knew what was inside the Jiffy bag, she’d have to kill him, but because the seal was still intact she might just take the damn thing and let him go. – Perhaps.
‘What about the index cards?’ she said. ‘You leave the one with the address and the key in the locker?’
Uh-oh. She was going to kill him after all. He considered telling a little white lie, but his hesitation and flushed cheeks must have given him away.
‘Oh great,’ said the woman. ‘Well that’s me totally screwed then. Two grand for what should have been a perfectly simple job and, thanks to you, I doubt I’ll see a single penny of it now. And then of course there’s the small issue of a dissatisfied client who’s probably got a contract out on me already.’
Trevor kept half an eye on the top of the dashboard. Please don’t pick up the gun. Please don’t pick up the gun. Please don’t p—
She picked up the gun.
Oh bloody Nora. – But surely she wouldn’t shoot him while he was driving. She might end up getting killed herself. That was it. Keep driving. As long as he kept going, she wouldn’t be able to do anything. If she told him to pull over, he’d refuse. Simple as that.
He glanced across at her and saw the last thing he expected to see. Instead of staring into the barrel of the pistol, he was looking at the side of it, and it was pointing straight up under the woman’s chin.
‘May as well end it all now,’ she said. ‘No sense prolonging the inevitable.’
She was joking of course. Or was she? Maybe the woman was a total headcase, and he’d tipped her over the edge by messing up her—
There was the sudden blare of a horn, and Trevor had to swerve sharply to avoid the oncoming car.
‘Jesus. Keep your eyes on the road, will you? You want to get us both killed?’
Nothing further was said for the next several minutes. The only sounds were the hum of the engine and Milly snoring loudly on the back seat. Trevor caught a glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror and realised at the same time that the dark blue Ford Mondeo was still there, about sixty or seventy yards behind them.
‘I wish he’d overtake if he’s going to,’ he said.
‘Who?’ Her voice seemed wearily unconcerned.
‘The car that’s been behind us ever since we left the festival site. He’s had plenty of chances to get by.’
The woman skewed her head to look in her wing mirror. ‘Slow down a bit.’
Trevor eased off the accelerator pedal and watched the Mondeo drop back.
‘Now speed up again.’
He accelerated and so did the Mondeo, maintaining the same distance between them as before.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘That’s all I need.’
‘Are we being followed?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘Who is it?’ Trevor knew that this was probably a silly question the moment the words left his lips and wasn’t surprised when he didn’t get an answer. Presumably, they must be something to do with the Scottish bloke or Patterson.
‘We’ll have to try and shake them off whoever they are.’
Despite the seriousness of his situation, Trevor couldn’t help but laugh. ‘In this?’
‘Why? What speed will it do?’
‘Sixty? Sixty-five maybe if it’s going downhill with a following wind.’
‘Oh terrific.’ She continued to monitor the progress of the Mondeo in the wing mirror, a heavy frown indicating that she was deep in thought. ‘You got much fuel?’
‘Plenty. I filled up before I got to the festival.’
‘How big’s the tank?’
‘Dunno exactly. About eighty litres, I think.’
‘Right,’ she said, staring into the wing mirror. ‘I think I’ve got an idea.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
For a dead man, Harry Vincent didn’t look too bad at all. In fact, apart from the roll of belly spilling over the waistband of his brightly striped swimming shorts, he appeared to be in remarkably good condition. His skin was tanned to a pale teak colour, and his thick sandy hair, combed backwards from his forehead, was only just starting to show signs of thinning.
Lying on the sun lounger beside the pool, he had been watching his wife swim back and forth for the past ten minutes or so, sipping his rum and Coke and occasionally pulling on his cigar. They had been childhood sweethearts, and even now, forty-odd years later, he loved her as much as he had done during those heady days of teenage romance. Harry knew she felt the same way about him.
He exhaled a large cloud of cigar smoke and smiled. He had worked hard all his life to be where he was now, lazing in the late afternoon sun at his Greek villa while Donna sent ripples of silver across the surface of the pool. By his own admission, his labours had rarely been within the boundaries of what might be considered legal, but there again, as he often told himself, how many bankers, stockbrokers, lawyers or politicians were there who could honestly say they had never once broken the law in pursuit of their goals? Okay, so maybe very few of them had actually had people killed during the process, but what about the arms dealers whose apparently legitimate trade resulted in the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent men, women and children? At least he’d never been responsible for the deaths of any women or children, and most of the men had pretty much deserved what they’d got.
As far as he was concerned, he was little different from any of the so-called captains of industry who are driven to succeed at all costs and no more ruthless than the chief executive of some blue chip multinational. Where his own ambition and work ethic had originated from, he couldn’t be sure. He certainly hadn’t inherited them from his father, who had been a builder by trade but a drinker by inclination. Like so many of his contemporaries growing up in the East End of London,
he had simply wanted to escape – to carve out a better life for himself – and this of course meant making money. Lots of it.
Some of his own mates had looked to the boxing ring as their way out, but Harry had seen at first hand the physical cost to too many of the older kids who had explored this route and failed. Apart from joining the army, the only other alternative was crime. Not the petty pilfering, burglary and car theft sort of crime, but the big league, where the risks were inevitably greater but the rewards immeasurable. Harry had witnessed the consequences of failure in this area too, but he had believed himself to be far smarter than those who had got caught, and to a great extent, he had been proved right over the following years.
He took another sip from his rum and Coke and set the glass down on the low table beside him. Donna was beginning to climb the ladder out of the pool, and he went to meet her with a gaudily patterned beach towel. She squeezed some of the water from her long and unnaturally auburn hair when she got to the top step, and Harry reached behind her to drape the towel over her shoulders. She hugged it around her and kissed him lightly on the lips.
‘Thanks, love,’ she said, looking into his eyes as if in the aftermath of the first passionate kiss on their first date.
Harry took a couple of paces backwards and gave a sweepingly flamboyant bow. ‘We aim to please, madam.’
Donna laughed and gave him a playful tap in the ribs with the side of her foot as she walked past him. He feigned falling sideways onto the tiled floor, theatrically rolling in fake agony until he fell off the edge and into the pool with a dull splash.
By the time he’d clambered out, Donna had already put on her sunglasses and had settled onto her own lounger, reading a Hello magazine.