“Was that in your knickers?” I said.
“I lifted it from Nico’s wallet just now,” she said. “The guy you took down with the ricochet.”
“You robbed him?” I said. “Who taught you that trick?”
“You did,” she said.
—
The cab dropped us off twenty-five minutes later on the north side of Richmond Bridge, at the foot of a hill lined with huge houses. I’d heard of Richmond Hill; tax-exiled rock stars owned properties here, for the few times a year they visited the UK. The reek of money reminded me of the Guvnor’s neighborhood, but these weren’t big tarty palaces with fake plaster columns—they were elegant white-painted Georgian mansions, hiding coyly behind elms and cherry trees. It was respectable, fashionable money round here, the sort that bought class and calm.
This neighborhood seemed a world away from burning high streets and mobs with arms full of loot, and I wondered what two scruffy, exhausted fugitives like us were doing here. Zoe led the way, taking a left turn, then a right, into a narrow cobbled backstreet running parallel to the Georgian avenue. Here the houses were much smaller. A mews terrace, I realized—the stables where the big houses had kept their horses years ago, and which had long since been converted into homes for servants. Not that many servants lived there now; these were what estate agents called pieds-à-terre, cottages owned by people with business in the city and proper homes in the country. Through the tiny windows I glimpsed cozy sitting rooms with artfully placed antiques and works of art above snug little marble fireplaces. More than one cottage had a steel lattice on the inside of every window: a sight that always made me wonder why so many rich people are prepared to let their homes look like prisons. Is it worth being that wealthy, having all those exquisite possessions, if you live in constant fear of getting robbed?
At the furthest end of the terrace was a glossy black door wreathed in ivy. Like all the other cottages, its three sash windows faced onto the street, one directly above the front door. In this one all the curtains were half drawn, which suggested the owners were away and thought this arrangement would fool prowlers into thinking they weren’t. Zoe was fumbling under the ivy on the doorframe, looking for something. When she found it she tugged the leaves away to expose it—a small metal box screwed to the wood, with twelve silver buttons in a grid, like an entry panel.
Zoe punched in six numbers. Nothing happened. She cursed under her breath. She punched them in again; still nothing. Then I heard her gasp “Oh!” at her own stupidity, and she hit the button at the bottom left, marked with a star. The panel popped loose and swung open, and Zoe pulled it back fully to reveal a single silver key hanging on a hook. It was like no other key I’d seen—a long tongue of metal with a pattern of drilled dimples—but it slipped into the front lock like any other key, and Zoe pushed the door open and stepped inside.
A burglar alarm buzzed, and in the cupboard-sized porch it was deafeningly loud. Zoe marched into the living room—there was no hallway—found the alarm panel and once more punched in six numbers. The buzzing stopped.
“That’s a relief,” she said. “I thought she might have changed the combination. Do want a drink of something? There’s bound to be some booze.”
“Whose house is this?” I asked as I followed her into the living room. I was scared to sit down; like the other houses in the street, this one was crammed with antiques—here they were mostly hand-painted porcelain figurines, the sort so delicate they’d explode if you so much as brushed against them. There was a tiny little chintzy sofa and a single, compact armchair, both of them immaculate—if a little dusty—and I stood among them awkwardly, aware I was still soaking and filthy and bloodstained in places.
“My aunt,” she said. “My mother’s sister. She spends most of her time in Italy. I haven’t been here in years.”
“Will she mind us being here?”
“I don’t really give a toss,” said Zoe. She was checking out the tiny kitchen next door—smaller than the kitchen in my dad’s house—and I saw over her shoulder that the fridge was empty and switched off.
“If you had this place, why…?” I said. Then I realized I didn’t want to know the answer to the question I had in mind, and dropped it.
Zoe turned to look at me. “If I had this place, why did I call Patrick?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Because my aunt is a toxic bitch,” said Zoe. “And I trusted Patrick.”
“I knew he was a prick,” I said. “I should have said something.”
“I knew what you thought,” said Zoe. “You’re not very good at hiding your feelings. Actually I thought he was a prick as well…I just didn’t know how big.”
“Are we talking about the same thing?” I said.
Zoe started checking out the cupboards, found a few packets of flavored instant noodles and examined the packaging to see how out-of-date they were.
“I knew he wanted to get into my knickers,” she said. “I just thought it was for the usual reasons. Guys like him think they can have any girl they see…. I didn’t know he was only chasing me because the Turk had told him to. That’s what’s really insulting.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t the only reason,” I said. “Who wouldn’t want to get into your knickers?”
“You don’t,” said Zoe. She tossed the packet onto the counter and turned to me. “Ever since I shopped you to the Guvnor’s people, and nearly got you killed. In fact, I don’t know why I’m having a go at Patrick. I’m no better than he is.”
“You apologized,” I said. “I got over that a long time ago.”
“Does that mean you do?”
“What?”
“Want to get into my knickers.”
“I can’t be that bad at hiding my feelings, then.”
“Carpe diem,” said Zoe, walking over to me.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
She coiled her arms around my neck. “It means come and get it,” she said.
—
After what Zoe had been through, I thought she’d want to take things gently, and I kept meaning to stop and ask if what I was doing was OK, but she made it pretty clear she didn’t want me to ask questions or slow down or stop for anything—not even when a porcelain shepherdess took a dive off the mantelpiece and shattered into a hundred razor-sharp fragments that ended up embedded in my backside. Maybe Zoe needed to wipe away the fear and degradation she’d been through—she wasn’t going to be anyone’s victim, and refused to behave like one—but at that moment I needed her as much as she needed me. We threw off the guilt and the torment and the terror with our clothes; we were safe together, for a little while at least, in this little doll’s house nobody knew about. London could have burned to the ground around us and neither of us would have noticed till the roof fell in.
—
The antique carpet was coarser than it looked and its weave was biting into the skin of my back, mostly because Zoe was lying on top of me with her hair tickling my face. It was suffocatingly hot and stuffy in that tiny sitting room and my backside was bleeding and I was ravenous and I hadn’t felt so happy in months.
“I saw you,” said Zoe. “As soon as they dragged me out into the street. That’s when I knew everything was going to be all right.”
“It nearly wasn’t,” I said. “That fat guy nearly had me.”
“You would have taken him,” said Zoe. “Eventually.”
“Then why did you shoot him?” I said.
She grimaced at the memory, then shrugged. “I was in a hurry,” she said.
When I laughed I realized how much my ribs ached, how much everything ached.
“How did you find me?” said Zoe.
“I asked Patrick,” I said.
“And he told you?”
“He didn’t want to,” I said. “But he got the impression I’d break his neck if he didn’t.”
“I wish you had.”
“He would never have given me a lif
t down here if I had.”
“He drove you all the way from York?”
“It was fun,” I said. “We listened to his CDs. Talked about you.”
“Drop dead.”
“We barely said a word the whole way down. I ended up wishing I’d taken the train. But he dropped me off up the street from where they had you, and pointed to the door. I got out, and he drove off.”
“And left you to it?”
“I don’t think he would have been much use, to be honest.”
“What would you have done, if that riot hadn’t started?”
“I have no idea.”
“How did it start, anyway? Did you see?”
“The police tried to arrest some black guys in a boy racer, and the crowd turned ugly, and somebody had a go at the cop car with a scaffolding pole, and after that it all went crazy.”
Zoe frowned. “Who did?”
“Everybody did.”
“No, I mean, who took a scaffolding pole to the cop car?”
How the hell had she zeroed in on that? I wondered. I hadn’t been boasting—it wasn’t something I felt proud of. “Some guy,” I said.
She sat up, her hands resting on my chest, her green eyes puzzled and her full lips parted in surprise. The sight of her was so distracting I didn’t hear her question.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Was it you? Who started the riot?”
I hesitated. “It was all I could think of,” I said.
She stared at me, as if she was too shocked to speak; then lay down across me again, her breasts pressing into my chest, and she kissed me, tenderly at first, then more urgently, and I ran my hands through her hair and rolled her over, knocking into a side table and sending another porcelain shepherdess tumbling to her doom.
—
An hour later we’d shared a hot bath and something to eat. The instant noodles were two years past their sell-by date and tasted like ready-salted sawdust, but we were both so hungry we didn’t mind. Now wearing only a bath towel, Zoe lay across the double bed—a big brass monstrosity draped in lacy white sheets that took up almost the whole main bedroom—examining the Turk’s laptop.
It was one of those sleek ultraslim numbers in brushed aluminum with no moving parts, not even a DVD drive. As soon as she opened the lid it sprang to life—well, to the log-in screen, anyhow: a bland blue field with a generic silhouette for a picture and a single empty log-in box, with the caption in a curly foreign script that I took to be Turkish.
“Did you grab the power adapter?” said Zoe.
“Damn it,” I said. “No.”
“Never mind,” she said. “Finding a new one shouldn’t be a problem. Provided there are still some shops left tomorrow.”
“We don’t even know if there’s anything on it we can use.”
“I’ll find out,” said Zoe. “It’s not as if I have anything else to do.”
“Does this place have Internet?” I said.
“No, but one of the neighbors will,” said Zoe. “I’ll just piggyback on their wireless.”
“So you can hack it? The laptop?”
“Anything a human being can program, another human being can hack,” said Zoe. “In theory. Given enough time.”
“I’m not sure if we have much time,” I said. “The Turk got away in one piece. He’ll find what’s left of his people soon, and they’ll regroup, and he’s going to want that laptop back.”
“Let’s hope he does,” said Zoe. “Because that would mean there’s something on it we can bargain with.”
—
Later that night we unlocked the bedroom windows and hauled them open and lay naked in the draft. The rain had cooled the night air, and after months of stifling heat, getting goose bumps was a novelty; besides, it gave us an excuse to cuddle up more closely. We talked and dozed and shagged and talked and dozed again; she told me a little about the bored, resentful cops who had been babysitting her in the safe house. She’d mentioned her dad to them, not so much to impress them as to make conversation, but they seemed to know the story already, and they weren’t impressed. Maybe they knew the truth behind the official version: that DCI Prendergast had been on the take from the Guvnor, and when he was no further use the Guvnor had murdered him. When the call came to shut down the safe house and send Zoe back to York the cops guarding her couldn’t oblige quickly enough, and ignored all her protests; less than twenty minutes later she’d found herself on the street, alone, in some Midlands city of rotting concrete. She couldn’t reach me, and Patrick was only an hour or two away by car….
She didn’t go into detail about what the Turk’s men had done while they’d held her prisoner, and I didn’t ask, because it didn’t matter anymore. But when I told her about my time at the Guvnor’s place in Maida Vale and about Richard killing the nanny and going after McGovern’s kids, and how I’d stolen his phone, she turned her head towards me.
“What time was that?” It was dark in the little room but I could sense her frowning.
“About three in the morning. No, four…the Guvnor let me go about half four.”
“Someone rang the Turk,” she said. “He was at the flat, I heard them talk.”
“Richard, I know.”
“No…this was later. About seven in the morning—no, exactly seven—Nico had this stupid digital watch that used to beep the hours, and I heard it go off. The Turk had arrived really early, to talk to his guys, and someone called him, and the two of them spoke in English. The Turk didn’t say much, but I think it was about how you’d killed that guy, because he looked really pissed off.”
“You mean it was someone else on the Guvnor’s crew?”
“It must have been. Who else knew that Richard was dead? But I heard a bit of what this other guy said—he made it sound like Richard had been his best friend; it was weird.”
I stared upwards into the darkness. The wind swept the sounds of the city over us: the rumble of a passenger jet coming in to land, two dogs in the next street having a barking competition, and as ever, the wail of sirens—tonight there seemed to be more of those than ever, their wails overlapping and distorting each other like a dozen drunken singers mangling the same tune.
That was the question I hadn’t wanted to ask the Guvnor, but I’d asked Junior: If the Turk turned Richard, how do you know he hasn’t turned someone else?
From what Zoe was saying, it sounded like the Turk had. Which was fine, in one way, because the sooner the Guvnor was defeated the sooner this war would be over, and the Turk wouldn’t need to use Zoe or me as pawns anymore…Except after today the Turk wasn’t going to be interested in playing chess. Thanks to me two of his people had been crippled, three killed, and he himself had only just escaped being stoned to death in the street like a whore in the Bible. I was headed for that shredder of his, and knowing the Turk he’d find a way to have Zoe lower me in while he watched. And if the police ever found out I had started that riot in Clapham, they’d happily let him.
I knew now where Amobi and the other cops stood in this battle—on the sidelines, watching. Why would they care if the Turk had a mole in the Guvnor’s mob? They had no use for that information. The only person who might find it useful was the Guvnor himself. Right now, maybe just for a day or two, the Turk was weakened and on the defensive; this might be all McGovern needed to finish him off.
I had to get back to the Guvnor and tell him. Somehow.
—
The next morning, after a breakfast of baked beans warmed in the microwave, Zoe retrieved a second laptop from a wall safe concealed behind a painting. She explained to me her aunt used the same number combination for every lock, with a roll of her eyes that suggested she considered anyone who did that a total cretin. I nodded agreement, failing to mention I too used the same password for almost everything online…but then unlike her aunt I owned nothing worth stealing and I had no secrets worth knowing.
While I looked on Zoe fired up the second laptop, decrypted the next-door nei
ghbor’s wireless security, logged on to the Net using a proxy, and downloaded a suite of utilities from some Finnish hacker site. Then she set about creating a VPN, or something, into the Turk’s laptop. At first she explained what she was doing, but as the work got harder her explanations tailed off. I’d stopped listening by then anyway: computer hacking isn’t exactly a spectator sport, and I had a job of my own to do that wasn’t nearly so straightforward. I had to find the Guvnor again, this time without Amobi’s help.
That afternoon I kissed Zoe goodbye like a dutiful husband heading to the office. Neither of us mentioned that this might be the last time we ever saw each other; to say so seemed to invite disaster somehow, and if I’d thought about it too hard I might never have left. It took me fifteen minutes to walk to Richmond station; there were cop cars patrolling the streets, looking for would-be rioters, and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by running. I caught a tube train that would take me all the way across London, albeit very slowly, and sat hunched in the end carriage with my hood up, trying to look inconspicuous. Every tube train and platform and forecourt was dotted with surveillance cameras, but before very long I gave up worrying about them or even looking for them—what was the point, when they were everywhere? The time to avoid being caught on CCTV would have been during that riot, but in the heat of the moment it had never occurred to me.
During the last outbreak of rioting, before the London Olympics, the cops had eventually come piling in with shields and batons to clear the streets—but they made relatively few arrests at that point. All that came later, when they’d gathered every scrap of CCTV footage they could find and analyzed it frame by frame, identifying everyone they could who’d been present, regardless of what those people had actually been doing. About four weeks after the riots came a wave of dawn raids: snatch squads had kicked in doors across the city, rounding up hundreds of suspects at the same time. When the accused came up in court the magistrates refused to hear any denials or excuses or explanations. It was like everyone who’d witnessed the unrest was infected with a plague virus and had to be quarantined before an epidemic of rioting brought down our civilization. One guy had been sentenced to a year in prison for taking a plastic bottle of water from the wreckage of a shop long after the real looters had been and gone.
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