Lee Child - Personal

I kept his money and passed his ID wallet to Nice and said, ‘Check it out.’

Then I started in on the dead guy, and came away with an identical haul. Cash money, and an ID wallet. I kept the money and gave the wallet to Nice. She had the first one in pieces. She said, ‘I guess you were right. This is phoney. The plastic is deliberately scratched, and I think the yellowing is a highlighter pen. The ID card is a Word document, and the shield is a low-resolution image printed off a website, I imagine.’

I looked back at the dead guy’s tattoo. Maybe it wasn’t a twisted leaf. Because why would a big tough guy want a twisted leaf? Or any kind of a leaf? Unless he was a conservationist, which I was sure he wasn’t.

Maybe it was something else.

I said, ‘Watch this.’

I leaned in and untied the guy’s tie, and snaked it out of his collar, and ripped open the first four buttons on his shirt, and folded it back like a guy at a disco way back in the day.

The tattoo was not a leaf. It was a curlicue, a little decorative flourish adorning the top left corner of a letter of the alphabet, a capital, which started the first word of a two-word name or label, written in a curve high on his chest, where a woman would wear a necklace.

Romford Boys .

‘In case they go to prison,’ I said. ‘The other guys leave them alone.’

I closed the doors again and checked the handle.

Secure.

Casey Nice said nothing.

‘What?’ I said.

‘It was too big of a risk. Suppose you were wrong? It was only words.’

‘It was people looking away. Because they know what’s good for them. Maybe they’re used to it. Maybe those black vans mean only one thing in that neighbourhood. Maybe that’s how people disappear, never to be seen again.’

She said nothing.

‘And there were only two of them. If we were being chased up as unacknowledged foreign assets, they’d have given the job to Special Branch, who need to justify their enormous budget, plus they love drama anyway, so they’d have brought half a dozen SWAT teams, with tear gas. We’d have been outnumbered fifty to one. It would have been a war zone. It’s not like the movies any more. They don’t walk around town wearing trench coats.’

‘When did you know?’

‘They should have used a sedan. And they should have said they were MI5. You expect all kinds of bullshit from those guys.’

We got back in the front of the van and I leaned over and checked the glove box. There were two cell phones in there, both pre-paid burners with a set number of pre-paid minutes, both still in their drugstore packaging, effectively untraceable if bought with cash, which I was sure they had been. Diligent security, overall. Clearly the Romford Boys ran a tight ship. Any kind of operation was a point of vulnerability. Even picking up two unsuspecting strangers outside a cheap hotel. Anything could have happened. We might have struggled, and an unbribed cop might have driven by, at exactly the wrong moment. Hence no guns, and no knives, and no used phones. Less latitude for the prosecutor, less data for the files.

I waggled the stick, left, and up, and bumped across the blacktop, back to the road.

We drove south a mile, and then turned east for Romford. I like trash talk as much as the next guy, and I wanted to find the best place for a statement. I wanted the van found after a day of worry, and I wanted to see who did the finding, and I wanted to see it from a safe and secure location. So we put those three moving parts in play and cruised around until we found a spot that checked the boxes. Which was a cracked concrete parking lot behind a small supermarket. In turn behind the lot was the back of a guest house. The guest house was carved out of two old townhouses made into one, and it had plenty of windows. Casey Nice got a map on her phone and checked the area. It was satisfactory. The guest house was on a major north–south road, and there were turns east and west close by.

She said, ‘But they’ll have eyes in there, surely. Obviously they did in the minicab company. In exchange for a discount on their protection money, probably. Maybe a big discount. The guy who took us to Wallace Court must have phoned it in immediately.’

‘Because Wallace Court was on their radar,’ I said. ‘This place isn’t. And they think they’ve got us now, anyway. They won’t start looking again until they find this van. So we’re OK for the time being.’

We circled once more and pulled up a hundred yards short of the parking lot entrance. I told Casey Nice I would meet her on the corner. She said, ‘There might be a camera in the parking lot.’

I said, ‘I’ll keep my head down.’

‘Not enough. You’re very distinctive.’

‘We’ll be out of the country before they look at the tapes.’

She didn’t answer. Just got out and walked away. I knew exactly what we had touched, and I wiped it all with the dead guy’s tie, exterior handles, interior handles, steering wheel, shifter, column stalks, seat latch, seat-belt latch, glove-box latch. I dumped the tie in the gutter and shrugged my coat down off my shoulders and pulled the sleeves down over my hands, and I drove like that through the last short stretch and parked in a random slot near the supermarket’s loading door. I stopped the engine, and pulled the key, and blipped the lock, and walked away, bent at the neck and staring at the concrete beneath my feet.

Nice was waiting on the corner, and we walked another block and turned again, on a road that was wider and busier than most, with four lanes, with buses and trucks and bumper-tobumper traffic. We found the guest house’s front door, exactly where it should have been. We went in, and found a lobby that might have been fresh and clean about thirty years ago, but wasn’t any more. We asked for a room on the back. We said we were worried about noise from the road. We said the airline had lost our bags, and was supposed to bring them over. I paid in cash from the dead guy’s roll, and we got a big brass key, and we headed upstairs.

The room was cold, and a little damp, but the window was big, and we got an excellent view. The lot was right there, about forty-five degrees below us. The van was clearly visible, its back to us. Casey Nice sat on the bed, and I used a chair from a dressing table, set far from the window. I didn’t want someone to glance up and see two pale ovals pressed against the glass. Always better to be well back in the dark, like John Kott in Paris, on the dining-room table.

We waited, like I had many times before. Waiting was a big part of law enforcement, and a big part of army life generally. Long slow periods of nothing much, with occasional bursts of something . I was good at it, and Casey Nice turned out to be good at it too. She stayed awake, which was the main thing. She rested easy, not staring intently, but keeping her gaze where she would notice movement. At one point she used the bathroom, and I wondered about pills, but I didn’t say anything.

Then she asked the inevitable question. She said, ‘Do you feel bad about the guy?’

I said, ‘What guy?’

‘The guy who died.’

‘You mean the guy I killed in cold blood?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Some tough guy he was.’

‘Do you feel bad?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Really?’

‘Do you?’

‘A little.’

‘You didn’t do anything to him.’

‘Even so.’

‘He had a choice,’ I said. ‘He could have spent his days helping old ladies across the street. He could have volunteered in the library. I expect they have a library here. He could have raised funds for Africa, or wherever they need funds these days. He could have done a whole lot of good things. But he didn’t. He chose not to. He chose to spend his days extorting money and hurting people. Then finally he opened the wrong door, and what came out at him was his problem, not mine. Plus he was useless. A waste of good food. Too stupid to live.’