‘Like I told Harry,’ she’d said. ‘I quit smoking. Six months, one week and four days ago to be precise. Never really thought I’d hack it, so I always made sure I had some with me. Still do. Silk Cut blue label. Not quite the same as Harry’s purple of course but close enough.’
‘Yeah, until he opened the bloody thing,’ Trevor had said.
Since then – and up until the moment that Sandra commented on Milly’s antics on the back seat – the two of them had barely exchanged more than a few words. Sandra had been concentrating on finding her way out of the city as quickly as possible but without damaging any innocent pedestrians, and Trevor had simply stared through the windscreen in a daze of catatonic stupor. His mind had gone into rewind and then fast forward, freeze-framing intermittently as he struggled to make sense of the last couple of days, and especially the last hour or so. It wasn’t that long ago that his only excitement in life was sitting down in front of the TV on a Saturday night to check the lottery results or finding there was fifty per cent off frozen peas at his local supermarket.
He tried to tell himself this was precisely why he’d finally decided to jack in his mind-numbingly tedious job at Dreamhome Megastores, buy himself a camper van and set off in search of adventure. In hindsight, though, being held at gunpoint and threatened with extreme acts of violence – not to mention being accused of murder and chased by the Secret Service – wasn’t exactly the sort of adventure he’d had in mind.
He remembered having hummed a few bars of Born To Be Wild just before the van had broken down but couldn’t recall anything from the lyrics that seemed particularly life-threatening. Hitting the open road and seeing where it took you. All pretty harmless really. And he very much doubted that the kind of adventure-seeking Steppenwolf were singing about involved ending up rotting in some prison for the rest of your life or some psychopath depriving you of your kneecaps or an unnatural and very bloody death.
He’d always thought that spending day after endless day advising ungrateful members of the public about the respective merits of different brands of drain rod was a living hell, but recent experience had taught him that hell was perhaps not a finite concept after all. There seemed to be degrees of suffering so that hell was more like a continuum where Satan’s eternal fires increased in intensity between working in a DIY superstore and being subjected to all the nonsense that had happened to him since he’d broken the lid of the toilet cistern at the hotel in York.
‘You want me to drop you somewhere?’ said Sandra.
The question was straightforward enough on the face of it, but Trevor’s brain wrestled with the words as if trying to evaluate their true meaning.
‘You’re letting me go?’ he said eventually, sensing there might be some kind of trap for the unwary in what she’d asked.
Sandra shrugged. ‘You’re not exactly my prisoner.’
‘Not any more, you mean.’
‘That was then. The situation’s different now.’
Trevor pondered this statement and decided that the situation had certainly changed, but for the worse rather than for the better. This was even truer in her case than his. It was Sandra who still had a chunk of Harry’s cash, so it stood to reason that it would be her that the psychos would be after, not him. And if MI5 really was involved, this whole business with Harry and the money was most likely to be the reason for their interest. No, all he had to worry about was that the police were probably still wanting to pin Imelda’s murder on him so, all in all, his most logical course of action would be to get as far away from Sandra as he could and sooner rather than later. At least then he might be able to get some much needed solids into the gaping black hole which was where his stomach used to be.
‘Where are you heading anyway?’ he said.
‘Bristol,’ said Sandra. ‘Which reminds me. Have you still got the card with the address on it?’
Trevor rummaged in the pocket of his fleece and pulled out the two index cards. He looked at them both and returned the card with the locker details to his pocket.
‘You actually going to this Cabot Tower place then?’ he said, scanning the address on the second card.
‘That’s the plan.’
‘Why?’
‘Call it professional curiosity if you like. And I also want to know what I’ve let myself in for if MI5 come knocking on my door.’
Trevor grunted. ‘Well you know what curiosity did, don’t you?’
She gave him a broad smile. ‘But then again, I’m not a cat.’
‘Which also means you don’t have nine lives either,’ said Trevor, studying her profile as she turned her attention back to the road. He hadn’t really looked at her this closely before, but now that he did, he saw that she was really quite attractive in a no-oil-painting kind of way. Her blonde hair was an inch or so too short to be shoulder length and was obviously dyed, but the colour was tastefully understated and looked as if it had been professionally done. Despite the variety of mascaras and lipsticks which had been tipped out of her bag at the hotel, she seemed to wear a minimal amount of makeup, although this might have been simply because she’d had little opportunity to add any in the last few hours. Even so, to Trevor’s eye, she had no need to enhance her already prominent cheekbones or the naturally rosy tint of the complexion beneath them.