She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but it was true: Karl had her worried. He should have called by now, or been here, and he hadn’t and wasn’t. So, against better judgement and her normal optimism, she scanned the street for strange men.
‘Karl, you arsehole,’ she mumbled into the glass, and then turned away to grab the phone again. She took it upstairs, hardly able to believe what she was about to do. Go upstairs to pack a bag.
In the bedroom, she dialled, one hand clutching the phone, and one hand hauling clothing out of the drawers. She still couldn’t believe she was doing this.
‘Police, please,’ she answered the operator. Suddenly she felt daft. Karl wasn’t a missing child, and he hadn’t been gone for days. She would tell them what he’d told her, but maybe all they would hear was a wife complaining that her husband had gone to work and she hadn’t heard from him for an hour. They might tell her to simply wait. They might tell her not to waste their time.
But she wouldn’t get in trouble for a false alarm.
So, when the operator passed her to an emergency control centre, she told her tale. And with that done, she relaxed somewhat. She stopped dragging clothing out of the drawers. She stopped pacing the room. The police were involved now, so everything would be okay. She would wait, and she would do it right here. She would not run from her own house.
Thirty-Nine
Karl
For a long time they just sat there under the bridge. Waiting felt wrong because he was wracked with worry about Katie, about their little unborn. How was she reacting to the fact that he hadn’t called or returned home? What was she doing? Was she panicking? Were the bad men right now making their way to Karl’s house to get her? But the part of him that wanted to go running for her was beaten back by a practical voice: Varsity seemed to have gone, but he could still be out there, close, searching. He prayed that the world had stopped while they’d been stuck underground.
His paranoia and urge to run manifested itself in jittery movements, which, he realised, Liz had been aware of when she said: ‘Just wait a little longer.’ But she didn’t look up and her voice was dull. He wondered if she was picturing how things had gone down in the cottage after she’d run. All she had was a pair of words in a newspaper: THREE SLAUGHTERED.
‘We need to go. I need to find a phone as quick as possible.’
‘I hope she’s okay,’ Liz said, and then her head came up. Clear streaks through the dirt on her face showed she had been crying. But in those eyes now was a new firmness, as if the tears had sluiced away all sorrow. Maybe a new resolve was developing now that her husband, her protector, was gone.
‘She will—’ he started, and stopped when he heard a noise. A car engine.
‘Liz, wait,’ he said as she scrambled quickly out from under the bridge. Before he could grab her and pull her back, he heard a dog bark nearby.
She climbed the bank and vanished. Karl followed, if only because he didn’t want to be stuck here if they had to run. Liz was running towards the fence. He noticed that another vehicle had pulled up behind the truck.
He was too late to grab her, and she slipped through the gap, onto the street, and moved towards the new vehicle, a VW Caddy van with ‘Anderson Kitchens’ written on the side.
There was a guy in paint-smeared utility trousers and a jumper at the open back door. At his feet was a dog that bolted towards Liz as she approached. Karl relaxed as he realised this guy wasn’t one of those hunting him, just a nobody bringing his dog to the scrubland for exercise.
What happened next occurred with such speed that Karl found himself caught up in it before he could think. A third vehicle was coming down the road. Liz snatched a ball from the dog’s mouth and lobbed it. Hard, high. It sailed over the van and bounced in the middle of the road, and the dog went bounding after it. The driver of the van realised, screamed for the mutt to stop, and chased after it as it ran towards the oncoming third vehicle.
‘I can’t drive,’ Liz said as she snatched open the van’s passenger door.
Karl realised her plan right then, because he heard the van’s engine still running.
* * *
Thirty seconds later, they were fleeing in a stolen vehicle. He tackled a number of corners, found the main road, and lost the Caddy in heavy traffic. Only then, as he finally took a breath, did he notice a mobile phone mount on the dashboard. With a mobile phone.
He took deep breaths while the landline rang. He needed to adopt a calm tone when Katie answered so she wouldn’t worry. He needed to pretend that all was fine. He had left the shop with Liz, he would say – no mention of psychos chasing them along abandoned subterranean tunnels. He was waiting to call the police, he would say – no mention of hiding under a bridge while killers sniffed out their trail. But he had to insist that she got out of the house. He would get to a nearby supermarket, or somewhere else loaded with people, and arrange to meet her there, and then they’d head to her dad’s house in Harrow. There, among his potted plants and sagging bookcases, they would greet the police and end this infernal chapter of their lives.
From an unknown number, but there was a degree of hope in the voice that answered:
‘Karl?’
‘It’s me, baby,’ he said, a lump in his throat.
But not just hope, he realised. Distress, too.
‘Oh God, Karl, what’s going on? They’re here, they want you—’
And then her voice went dead, and there was a sound like someone snatching the phone. The mobile made a protest-like series of beeps as his fist tightened around it. The next voice he heard was that of a croaky male, and it said: ‘Seabury, you’re a hard man to find…’
Forty
Cooper
DC Cooper was knocking doors for information near Tile Kiln Lane when he got the call from Mac.
‘I just got word about an informant of mine,’ the DCI said. ‘He’s up to something. I’m going to go see him, but not alone. You okay there doing the door-to-door?’
Of course not. He’d recently transferred from working robberies in West London under a supervisor who hated him, and this was his chance to impress the new guy holding his career in his hands. And he was trying to make up for his slip: brand new and none the wiser, he’d asked the DCI if he had a family. It had been a month since he’d broken that cardinal rule of the office, but he still gave him funny looks.
So, he took the offer, noted the postcode, and got out of there, leaving an old lady to answer her door to no one.
Forty-One
Mick
At exactly the same time that the old lady was cursing kids for knocking on her door, Mick was feeling as if his heart had stopped. He reached into his pocket for a mint, but the matchbox wasn’t there.
He pulled the car to the side of the road, ignoring horns from other drivers, and ran his fingers around the footwell. Not there. He clenched his already-throbbing jaw.
The shop. When he’d pulled out his gloves in order to erase the Król problem, he must have dropped the matchbox of mints. With his DNA all over it. Right there at the crime scene. The one he’d just sent a murder detective to.
Traffic horns played another symphony as Mick slipped back into traffic. He opened the glovebox, just to check his gun was still there. Because he’d need that if the cops got to the scene before him.
Forty-Two
Cooper
The postcode from Mac belonged to a shop in Old Ford on a dead-end commercial unit. An electronics/security outlet called Sunrise Electronics. Mac’s car wasn’t there yet. Cooper pulled in front of a plain white panel van and immediately noted Sunrise’s part-risen shutter.
It set off an alarm bell but he knew better than to go in alone. Some of Mac’s informants were animals, and he didn’t want to get fucked up. But that open shutter was inviting…
No. The brass were obsessive over red tape and those guys were scarier and more dangerous than any criminal out there. So, he was going to sit right here and wait for Mac.
Forty-Three
Mick