by RJ Bailey
‘Camden!’ Nuzha shouted. It wasn’t a request.
‘Yes, ma’am. Camden it is.’
I watched in the mirror for any pursuit, but none was apparent. Nor did anything ahead of me look like anything other than shoppers. Still, I stayed there in the Orange zone as we headed for the North Circular.
Not only am I not a detective, I’m not psychic. None of us are. Not even Freddie. There was no female intuition at work telling me there was trouble. No hunch. No Spidey sense. An event had triggered the E&E response; it’s just that it was subliminal. Either I had spotted something that my brain registered at a deep level, or I had heard something.
I closed my eyes for a split second and I saw it. There had been a reflection in the window. The guy walking away, hands in his windcheater, when I grabbed Nuzha.
But it hadn’t been the image of him in that glass, not in isolation. There was an aural component too. A sound. That of a camera or a camera phone. Almost too quiet to hear.
He’d been snapping our photos, had probably taken a sequence, and I hadn’t noticed until the last moment because I had been too busy searching the internet on the phone. Careless.
Fuck you, Tom Buchan and Russell Swincoe, you’ve filled my head with shit and I’ve lost sight of the fundamentals of PPO – protect the Principal.
I glanced at Nuzha in the mirror and she smiled. Camden was obviously a decent substitute for Brent Cross.
No matter what Swincoe’s suspicions about the Sharifs, I had to tell them some of my own. That Nuzha was being watched, by person or persons unknown, whose motives were for the moment unclear.
But they soon would be.
THIRTY-TWO
Friday night and the fridge looked like a crime scene – everything of value had been stolen and only the sad and the worthless remained. Some floppy carrots, half an iceberg lettuce and an out-of-date round of goat’s cheese were all that was on offer. And a third of a bottle of wine. I ran through all the Ready Steady Cook options with those and came up blank.
I was still worried about the photo-taking incident. I had asked for a face-to-face with the Sharifs when I dropped Nuzha off, but Ali warned me the dark clouds had turned into a full Sturm und Drang. So I told him my concerns and he promised to make sure Nuzha was on the property for the rest of the night. There was nothing else I could do, so I came home to examine my fridge.
I was beginning to think of going the takeaway route when I sensed Jess behind me.
‘Mum, there’s a sleep-over tonight. Do you think I could go if I finish all my homework?’ It was a relatively soft, tentative approach, but with plenty left in the tank if something more forthright was needed.
I cut to the chase. ‘What kind of sleep-over?’
‘Pizza and a movie.’ Sounded good. I wondered if they’d let me join in.
‘Whose house?’
It was often at this stage that some character, a new friend I had never heard of, was wheeled out. I knew all the dodges. I’d done them myself. Claiming to be sleeping over at one friend’s – a girl my mother knew and trusted, or at least trusted the parents – when in reality it was an all-night party at a far more racy alternative. If Mum had only bothered to search the bag that held my ‘pyjamas’ the game would have been up.
‘Whose house?’ Stalling, not a good sign. Cue alarm bells.
‘It’s at Chrissie’s.’
The bells faded. I knew Chrissie, liked her parents and her older sister – whom I’d used for babysitting – and they didn’t live too far away. But was Chrissie the ‘beard’ for something other than pizza and a movie?
‘The thing is, I thought we might stay in and have a, you know, have a chat, maybe watch some TV again.’
‘Chat?’ She pronounced it the way one might ‘leprosy’ or ‘nits’.
‘But if you want to go, then that’s fine.’ A beam of a smile began to form. ‘But only if I can pick you up in the morning. By ten.’
I couldn’t decide whether the expression that invaded her face was disappointed or puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘It’s a surprise.’
It’d be a surprise to me, too. Because I had no idea what excuse I’d use for pitching up at ten in the morning. But I’d think of one.
‘OK, thanks, Mum.’
‘I’ll give you a lift over.’
That way I could stop at the theatre for wine on the way back. After all, a third of a bottle for a Friday night? Behave.
It would still be light when I got back. Maybe I could fit in a run along the canal, pick up something at the vegetarian place near Broadway Market. That would be the healthier option than the Indian takeaway.
And nothing to do with the Slim Pickens. Nothing at all, despite those fluttering butterflies in my stomach. I am not doing that again. Not with him. Cheap lust and easy passions are too dangerous for a professional like me. Too much vulnerability. I couldn’t afford that.
Ah, the lies you tell yourself.
Before he became a nuclear cop, Paul tried his hand on The Circuit. He struggled at first. He didn’t have the sense he was contributing anything to society by looking after what he called ‘pampered yobs’. But he was approached by the British Council to work as a PPO for some of the cultural tours it was organising to more hostile environments – Shakespeare to Iraq, Ayckbourn to Haiti, YBAs to Kabul, that kind of thing.
His first assignment was chaperoning a group of jazz musicians to Saudi Arabia. True, Saudi Arabia is hardly the New Orleans of the Middle East. In fact, jazz is frowned upon, not least because of its louche connotations of booze and brothels. The British Council got round this by deeming it a ‘musical education’ tour for expats and their children, with the music to be played in school gymnasiums during the day, rather than at night, when the more sinful side of jazz might appear.
The tour went well, so he told me, thanks to local fixer Tony and his wife Sarah, who knew how to navigate Saudi sensibilities. But then, unlike me, Paul liked jazz, or at least the Miles Davis stuff the lads were adept at reproducing, and the Muttawa religious police gave them little hassle about playing the devil’s best tunes.
Heading back to the airport from the secure compound where they had been staying with the promoter, Paul heard the crump of an explosion. He looked in the wing mirror and saw the coil of black smoke rising from the gated compound. His mind went into rewind. The laundry truck that had passed them as they left. Something, maybe just the look in the driver’s eye, had flipped an alarm in his head, but, as they were leaving the country within the next two hours, he had ignored it.
‘Stop,’ he shouted at the driver who, having seen the smoke for himself, did no such thing.
Paul’s phone trilled. He answered. There was sobbing on the other end. Then a supreme effort to speak. It was Sarah. ‘No matter what you see, keep on going. Don’t come back. Tony’s dead. He was still in the lobby when the bomb went off. Get out of this fucking country, now.’ Then came a wail of anguish and the line went dead. Sarah knew that a second device might well have been planted to take out first responders and anxious relatives. As well as any concerned jazzmen returning to see if they could be of assistance.
Paul sat chewing the inside of his cheek until he could taste blood, as a stream of urgently flashing lights roared past them on that desert highway.
Once he had got the band airside, Paul turned around and went back to see the carnage. The bomb had only killed three people, four counting the bomber, which nobody did, a small miracle judging by the size of the crater. There was this smell in the air, he said, concrete dust, scorched metal, burning fuel, the stench of human flesh, a cocktail he would never forget.
As I lay, half-asleep, I thought I could almost taste it. And then I realised I could. I sat up and shook the sleep from my head, remembering the evening and my stopping off – despite every protestation I had made – at the Slim Pickens.
I sniffed. An acrid, rubbery smell was coming from nearby. Something was burning.
A
s I moved from the bedroom down the hall and into the living room, pulling a dressing gown around me, I could see flames licking up the wall. Or the reflection of them, bouncing off the water. The fluid, dancing pattern was overlaid with the more regular streaks thrown by the rotating blue and orange lights. In all, it looked like a very poor psychedelic light show.
I opened the doors and stepped onto the balcony and blinked as particles attacked my eyes. The stench was stronger out here, the sound of crackling and spitting amplified by the limpid water in the canal basin and the brick and concrete edifices that lined it.
Some way to the east, beyond the bridge, I could see the burning boat, now launching little Roman candles of sparks into the sky, and the barges on either side being frantically backed away, in case the blaze should spread. Shadowy figures moved on the quayside, some playing streams of water onto the vessels, others further back running Do Not Cross tape and keeping the gaggle of onlookers at a safe distance, doubtless in case a gas bottle went up.
I could feel the panic rising in me, a prelude to the guttural shock that would floor me, my heart quivering like a bird trapped in a room, flinging itself against my ribcage, the first shivers of horror invading my brain, but I killed all the sensations dead. This was no time for a raw, incapacitating burst of emotion. I had to deal with this. My other self, that is, the detached professional, not the one who had had sex with Tom Buchan a few hours before. She had to shine a cold, clinical light on what this meant. And she had to act on it.
As I stepped back into the living room and imagined I could feel the heat of the inferno on my back, I allowed one thought to register.
Trouble had found the Slim Pickens at last.
PART FOUR
THIRTY-THREE
‘Yeah?’ I could hear the thickness of sleep and maybe the desiccation of alcohol in Freddie’s voice.
‘It’s me,’ I said.
She made a noise that was an acknowledgement, although it barely qualified as language.
‘’S up?’ A beat. ‘Jesus, what time is it?’
I was sitting on my sofa, now fully dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, watching the first tentative light of dawn bleach the residual glow of the fire from my wall. ‘Early.’
I heard the muffled cadences of another, huskier voice coming down the line, then Freddie again. ‘Go back to sleep.’
I imagined a hairless boy-man rolling over and pulling the covers across his head.
‘Sorry, Freddie, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘Probably shouldn’t have rung my telephone at this hour then, eh? No, fuck off.’
For a second I thought she meant me. But then the Dolphin raised his voice – disappointingly using words rather than clicking sounds – and there was an answering bark from Freddie. ‘Jesus, can you give me a minute, I have to put the hamster back in his cage.’
I held the phone away from my ear for a while, only half-listening to the snarling and spitting at the other end. She came back on loud and clear at the tail end of the spat. ‘Because she’s family, and you’re just a cock and two balls on legs. Close the door on your way out.’ She let out a long sigh and spoke to me. ‘Quite a nice cock and two balls, and not bad legs either,’ she said wistfully.
‘Family, am I?’ I asked. The last time anyone claimed me as a relative it was MI5.
‘Close enough. Rather you than my tight-fisted sister and her retard of a husband. I’m going to walk through to the kitchen and make coffee. Just talk, I’ll listen.’
So, I told her everything, from the feeling I’d had that my picture had been taken with Nuzha at Brent Cross, through sex with Tom Buchan – she managed to bite her tongue there – right up to the mysterious explosion on his boat.
‘Christ, and you’re talking like you are reporting a cat up a tree. Blown up? The fuckin’ thing was blown up?’
I watched a grim-faced Tom pad across the living room in bare feet. We had had a flaming row because he had wanted to go down to his boat. I told him that was the last thing he needed to do. If it was an accident, the fire brigade would find out what caused it. If it wasn’t . . . well, there might be people watching. People who might well assume he was dead. Which gave him a breathing space. It was a long slog, but he finally accepted that. Tom made the symbol for a drink – and possibly a peace offering – and I gave a thumbs up and made a T sign. ‘If I hadn’t decided I wanted sex in my own bed, he’d have been on board.’
‘Does he know how lucky he is?’
‘What, having sex with me or not being burned to a crisp?’
‘Oh, ha-ha. I don’t know how you are so calm.’
‘Nor me. But I am. For the moment.’ I wasn’t sure how long this would last. I had to get Tom to some sort of safety – I would imagine that would cause an argument, even though I was equally certain he had nowhere to go other than the now-defunct barge – and the same applied to Jess. If the shit that was happening was even peripherally connected to me, I wanted to know my daughter was safe from harm.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Freddie asked.
‘I need someone to talk this through with, to try and make sense.’
‘Not this Tom?’
I watched him take out a jar of instant coffee and peer at it in distaste, as if it contained human remains. ‘I think he’s about to go into mourning for his coffee machine. Also, I have plans for him. No, I need you to walk with me through the last twenty-four hours. Try to make sense of it.’
I didn’t mention that I wasn’t sure how much I could trust him.
‘OK.’
‘And . . .’ I didn’t quite know how to phrase this. I was feeling alone and outnumbered. There was something I needed, if I was going to get to the bottom of this.
‘And what?’
‘I need to know you’ve got my back.’
Which, of course, meant I was expecting trouble. There was an intake of breath that morphed into a small, ironic laugh as she exhaled. I felt a warm glow of relief flush through me. ‘OK, Buster. It’ll be just like old times.’
I hoped not. Old times meant blood and death. But, of course, I hoped in vain.
THIRTY-FOUR
I had to wait for a less antisocial hour before I made my other calls. Meanwhile, I checked the contents of my RTG bag. I dressed in a ProTex bra, T-shirt, sweatshirt and jeans chosen not for the label but for the amount of Lycra in them, which imparted more freedom of movement. Over the top I put on a lightweight KOTOL SF combat jacket, as used by the Army Ranger Wing of the Irish Defence Forces, the Republic’s equivalent of the SAS. It was the usual multi-pocket number, but with slots for cellphone and a metal and Kevlar reinforced sheath that took the Eickhorn knife. There was also a built-in pistol holster. How I wished I had a pistol to go in it.
Meanwhile, I swapped the SIM card from my MI5 iPhone to the mobile from my RTG bag. It was a distinctly dumb phone – an old Nokia – with no singing and no dancing allowed but it had a battery life measured in months not minutes. Plus, I no longer trusted that smartphone. Hackable, as Jack might say, very hackable.
Shortly after seven the message I had been waiting for pinged through and I left Tom in the flat while I went to bring my car closer to the exit. I felt naked as I walked across the courtyard to it, the corrosive smell of the Slim Pickens still hanging in the air. I wasn’t sure there were eyes on me, but it felt like it and I strained to keep the walk fluid and natural. Don’t run. Don’t let them know you are on to them.
Of course, it could just be another dose of paranoia. Whoever torched the boat – and the smart money had to be on the kid from Kosovo, all grown-up and seething – there was no guarantee they had seen me take Tom back to my place. It had only been because I knew Jess would be out for the evening and I had red wine in the flat and he didn’t have any on board that I insisted. A craving for something other than corner-shop sauvignon blanc – and, I had to admit, a somewhat softer bed than the spine-bruiser on the boat – had saved both our lives. For now.
I spent ten minutes checking my Golf for a tracker. Nothing. I then sprayed the number plates with liquid glass, a totally illegal way of making sure that London’s camera recognition systems wouldn’t clock the registration. Another speciality of One-Eyed Jack. Thing is, it tends to raise alarms among operators, who don’t like being blind. They then usually put out a stop-and-detain message, so it is a one-short-trip option only.
I reversed as close as I could to the door of my block and waited. Tom had no phone, of course. He was down within a few minutes and slid in next to me. He looked pale and shaken. But then, he had lost everything he owned.
‘I’ve got to warn the others in the squad,’ he said.
‘I thought you had?’
‘It was only a theory before this. Should we tell the police?’
I had a better idea. ‘We will, in a roundabout sort of way. But I don’t want them taking you in for questioning or anything like that. Not for a few days.’
‘Look, I know you said to stay away, but can we drive by, take a look at my boat?’
‘No.’ I said it with all the firmness I could.
‘There’s a road opposite the mooring we could go down.’
I turned and fixed him with what I hoped was a piercing stare but were probably just the red-rimmed eyes of a madwoman. ‘Tom, listen to me. No. Not a good idea. If there are eyes-on hereabouts, they’ll be there. You know that. Don’t you?’ He ought to, if he’d been listening to a word I had said.
Tom scratched above his ear in a way that looked like a nervous tic. Some of the stuffing had certainly been knocked out of him. ‘Yeah.’
