The guy in the sweater didn’t answer.
She said, ‘My friend in Chicago told me this is where she came.’
The guy in the sweater said, ‘For what?’
He wasn’t English. That was for sure. He wasn’t French or Dutch or German. Or Russian or Ukrainian or Polish. Serbian was entirely plausible.
Casey Nice said, ‘My friend had concerns about her personal safety. You know, in a foreign city for the first time. Without the precautions she would be legally entitled to take at home.’
The guy in the sweater said, ‘Are you from America?’
‘Yes, from Chicago.’
‘This is not a gymnasium, lady. We don’t teach self-defence here.’
‘My friend said you have certain items for sale.’
‘You want a gold watch? Take two or three. Use them to bargain for your life.’
‘My friend didn’t buy a watch.’
‘What did she buy?’
Nice put her hand out, low down, away from her side, slightly behind her. She clicked her fingers. My cue, I supposed. The driver. Or the help. Or the bagman. I stepped forward and took out the dead guy’s cash roll, and held it lightly between thumb and index finger, and I tapped it end-on against the glass counter, and I held it there, upright, a fat greasy cylinder as big as a whisky glass, sour and dense with paper money. The guy took a good long look at it, and then he glanced at me, and then he turned back to Casey Nice.
He said, ‘Who is he?’
‘My bodyguard,’ she said. ‘But he couldn’t get his gun through the X-ray machine.’
‘There are laws here.’
‘There are laws everywhere. But the same thing gets past them all.’
The guy looked back at the money.
He said, ‘Go wait in the minicab office. Next door. Someone will drive you.’
‘Drive me where?’
‘We don’t keep those items here. Too many police. They search us all the time. There are laws.’
‘Where do you keep them?’
The guy didn’t answer. He took out his phone and dialled. He said a short sentence in a low tone and a fast foreign language. Not French or Dutch or German. Or Russian or Ukrainian or Polish. Serbian was still top of the list. The guy clicked off his call and shooed us away and said, ‘Go. They will drive you.’
THIRTY-ONE
WE WENT, AND they drove us. In the minicab office there was a guy already on his way around the counter as we stepped inside. He was a version of the guy in the pawn shop next door, a little younger, a little straighter, a little heavier, but just as dark and unshaven. A cousin, possibly, or just a guy from the same little village in the old country. He showed us to a Skoda sedan at the kerb. A taxi. We got in the back, he got in the front. Behind the wheel. He started it up, and hit the gas, and we took off, and we heard the click of the locks, as we passed a certain pre-set speed.
There was no point asking where we were going. No way would we get an answer. A silent driver was all part of the theatre. Not that it mattered, anyway. We knew generically, if not specifically. We were heading north, clearly. We didn’t need the exact name of the next-but-one overrun manor that lay in that direction, as long as we could picture it. Or picture part of it. The important part. A storage unit, possibly, in a bland and deserted business park on the dismal edge of a blighted part of town, or a barn-like structure on open land near a tangle of streets, or maybe a real barn, way out in the country, an hour or more north of town. Maybe we were in for a long trip. By the sound of it the Skoda had a diesel engine. Which would be economical. I leaned forward and checked the gas. It was full.
Outside the window the traffic was slow and the view stayed suburban for a good long time, and then I saw the arch of the big soccer stadium, which meant we had made it to a place called Wembley. Still heading north. But we didn’t settle in for a long trip out of town. We turned pretty soon, and looped around a little, almost back on ourselves, and I saw a sign to a place called Wormwood Scrubs. Which was the name of a famous London prison, I thought, which gave me a clue about the kind of neighbourhood we were headed for.
But we didn’t go all the way to the prison. The streets we passed got a little darker and gloomier, but we turned off the main drag some ways short of the worst of it. We took a sudden left, and then another, through a gate in a brick wall, and then straight inside a large brick building, that could have been a streetcar depot a hundred years before, or a factory, back when people made things in cities, other than noise and money. Now the place was being used as an auto repair shop, by the look of it specializing in fast and dirty fixes for the minicab trade. There were piles of part-worn tyres, all grey and dusty, and every car I saw was similar to the Skoda we were riding in. Battered sedans everywhere, one of them up on a hoist, some of them with dented panels cut away, all of them presumably being brought back to whatever kind of code was demanded of telephone cars. We could lose our licence, the guy in Barking had said, and I guessed there were more ways of losing it than just taking the wrong kind of booking.