‘Chop chop then, Mr McMurphy. Shake a leg,’ said Sandra, snatching up the thousand franc note from the counter.
Her grasp tightened around his arm, and he felt himself being half dragged towards the exit.
‘Shouldn’t be allowed out if you ask me,’ he heard somebody in the queue say as they passed.
Outside in the car park, Sandra let go of his arm and rounded on him with an expression that was entirely unsuited to her carer’s act of a few short moments ago.
‘Are you completely bloody insane?’ she said. ‘“We’ve got a gun, you know”.’
Trevor could remember saying it, but he was sure he hadn’t used such a whiney voice.
‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said. ‘I’m delirious from lack of food. It’s like I was having some kind of mini breakdown. Like someone else was saying the words and there was nothing I could do about it.’
‘Oh gimme a break.’
‘It’s true. And if you hadn’t left your purse back at the hotel—’
‘I didn’t leave it. It was taken from me if you recall.’
‘Whatever,’ said Trevor, warming to his theme and suddenly aware that the fresh air seemed to have brought him back down to Planet Earth – for now at least. ‘And if I hadn’t had to spend a small fortune on van repairs and extortionate hotel rooms, I would’ve had more than enough cash on me to buy eight zillion whopper-cheesy-chilli-veggie-nugget-burgers and still have had enough left for three quarters of a ton of apple pie with or without squirty-foamy-cream.’
‘Finished?’
‘No. How much of my tenner did you spend on petrol?’
‘All of it.’
‘All of it?’ Trevor felt decidedly faint.
‘We need to get to Bristol, don’t we?’
‘You do. At this rate, I’ll have died of starvation long before we—’
‘Oh don’t be such a baby,’ said Sandra, reaching into her jacket pocket. ‘Here.’
Trevor caught his breath and stared down at the King Size Mars bar in her hand. ‘What’s that?’
‘What’s it look like?’
The juices began to flow inside Trevor’s mouth, and he gulped them back. ‘But I thought you said—’
‘Found a few coppers down the back of the seat in the car and a bit more under the mats.’
Trevor wanted to kiss her, but he wouldn’t have been able to take his eyes off the Mars bar long enough to aim straight. Besides, it was a pretty safe bet that she’d slap him.
‘I was going to say we’d split it fifty fifty,’ she said, ‘but it seems your need is far greater than mine. I don’t want you pegging out on me just yet.’
A variety of protestations flashed through Trevor’s mind, and he knew full well that the eventual ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of it’ sounded limp and utterly unconvincing.
‘Just eat the bloody thing, will you?’
He wrenched his attention away from the Mars bar to check out her expression. Yep. Definitely pissy. His fingertips reached out and made contact with the wrapper, and this seemed to trigger a slight thaw in her features.
‘In any case,’ she said. ‘I need to shed some weight.’
‘No you don’t.’
Trevor blurted the words out before he had given them due care and attention, and he couldn’t even blame the alien being for taking over his tongue this time. For once, Sandra seemed at a loss for a response, and she put a hand to her face and glanced over her shoulder as if startled by a sudden noise behind her. That wasn’t a… blush, was it?
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time we weren’t here.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Apart from the fitted cupboards, cooker and refrigerator in the kitchen area of the open plan living room, the apartment was almost entirely devoid of furniture except for a wing-backed armchair with wooden arms and legs, upholstered in faded gold Dralon, which looked like it had recently been retrieved from a skip. It was in almost the exact centre of the room, facing towards a wide, aluminium-framed window set into the wall opposite the main entrance to the flat. There were no curtains, and the late afternoon sun streamed in, illuminating vast clouds of dust particles that drifted lazily through the breezeless atmosphere.
The grey-haired man in the suit who occupied the armchair would have felt the warmth of the sunshine on his pallid and wrinkled face even though he was unable to see it. Nor would he have been able to walk over to the window and open it to let in some cooler air. He could not have politely asked the man who sat on the floor beneath it to put down his Nintendo game for a moment and reach up to open it for him. The same silver duct tape that held his arms and legs firmly fixed to the chair had also been used to gag and blindfold him.