‘No idea. But I certainly intend to find out,’ said Sandra. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing else we can do here. Let’s go before someone shows up.’
Trevor rolled his eyes. So she had been listening to him after all. ‘And what about the Honourable Member for Baileyhill and Redbridge?’ he said, even though he had no desire to delay their escape a second longer than necessary.
Sandra glanced at the dead MP. ‘There’ll have to be a by-election, I suppose.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about…’ He tailed off when she turned towards him and he could see the smirk on her face.
‘I know what you meant,’ she said. ‘We’ll tip off the police as soon as we’re clear of the place. Anonymously, of course.’
Trevor barely registered the last few words as his attention was distracted by the screech of tyres from the street outside. ‘What was that?’
‘Somebody in a hurry by the sound of it.’
He was already at the window, looking down on a dark blue Ford Mondeo that was slewed sideways across the middle of the road. The driver had his head out of the window, and a shortish man in a tan-coloured leather jacket seemed to be yelling at him while another guy stood watching from a couple of yards away. There was something familiar about the man in the leather jacket, but he couldn’t quite place him. As he trawled his memory for some clue as to where he’d seen him before, he became aware of Milly’s frantic barking from inside Sandra’s car.
‘Anything I should know about?’ said Sandra, who had made no move to join him at the window.
Trevor was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy about what he was seeing and hearing from outside and thought that her tone seemed inappropriately nonchalant. He was about to tell her what was going on when the man who was talking to the driver suddenly slammed his fist down onto the roof of the car and took a step backwards.
‘Holy shit,’ said Trevor when the man’s face came fully into view for the first time, and he instantly ducked down below the window sill. ‘It’s him.’
‘Him who?’ Sandra’s tone was a lot less nonchalant all of a sudden.
‘The guy who stopped me when I was trying to leave the festival.’
‘The one you almost ran over?’
‘That’s the one. Er… Patterson.’
‘On his own?’
Trevor shook his head and crawled to the side of the window so he could stand upright again without being seen. ‘No, there’s at least two others. Maybe more.’
‘Anyone see you?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Well that’s something to be grateful for, I guess.’
From his position beside the window, Trevor strained to try to see what was happening in the street below without being spotted himself. He soon discovered that this was an almost impossible task and decided to err on the side of caution. He began to turn towards Sandra but stopped immediately when he felt something hard and cold being pressed into the back of his neck, just below the base of his skull.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
‘Useless fucking twats.’
MacFarland had seen Harry Vincent in some blisteringly foul moods before but never anything that came even close to this one. Apart from an all too brief interlude when he’d fallen asleep, Harry had spent almost the entire train journey labelling pretty much everyone as useless fucking twats – all of the other passengers who were keeping him awake with their ‘constant bloody yattering’; the train company for making him spill piping hot coffee and staining his clean white shirt; the railway engineers for ‘pratting about’ and making him half an hour late arriving in Bristol; and of course MacFarland himself for just about everything.
The driver of the taxi they’d climbed into outside the station was another one, but this was after he’d taken exception to Harry’s derogatory remark about his ethnicity and ordered them back out again before he’d even released the handbrake. Then, every taxi driver on the planet automatically became a useless fucking twat on the basis that Harry had had to wait ten more minutes until another cab was available.
In this particular instance – and on several occasions during the past hour – the twats in question were Carrot and Lenny. Ever since Harry had first called them from the train, he had repeatedly tried to phone them back but with a resounding lack of success.
‘Why don’t the bastards pick up?’ he said in response to the incessant ringing tone as the second taxi driver ferried them through the streets of Bristol.
‘Maybe there’s no signal,’ said the cabbie helpfully, glancing at Harry’s reddening face in the rear-view mirror.