James Nally - Games with the Dead - A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

Getting out unleashes a Grand National of competing terrors. They’re led at the first by the very real fear he’ll realise I’m not Tom Reynolds. What then? I yank down my baseball cap’s stiff peak until it fringes my vision. I take the holdall of cash and my identifying ‘Crown Estates’ clipboard from the back seat, walk to the car boot, open it and start to count. I feel exposed, helpless, JFK in Dealey Plaza. I make it all the way to seven before cracking. Boot still open, I set off pacing and weaving through people outside the station, taking sudden, wild turns like a coursed hare. If he’s planning a head shot, he’ll need to be Robin fucking Hood.

I rush to thirty, shut the boot and hotfoot into the station foyer. To my left, I spot the metallic-blue Mercury public phone he’s selected for our cosy chat. It’s framed by a glass hood, open at the front, New York-style. I wonder why he’s selected such an exposed phone, and hover there twitchily, head scoping in case of ambush. Through the frosted glass of a nearby waiting room, a frowning man peers out. Kidnapper or cop? Who can tell? Opposite me, two scruffy men in their twenties loiter outside the ticket office. One of them clocks my clipboard and approaches. I stiffen.

‘Are you doing a survey?’ he asks brightly.

‘No, I’m waiting for a phone call.’

He raises his arm. I flinch. Calmly, he reaches past me, lifts the receiver, checks for a dialling tone and replaces it. ‘Well it’s working,’ he says chirpily and returns to his pal. Kidnapper? Undercover cop? Mercury Communications telephone angel? Who knows.

A thunderous rumble grows inside the station. I step out from my glass arch to see an army of knackered, dead-eyed commuters march up a walkway towards me, looking set to sack the city. As they storm the ticket barriers, I scan their addled, timetable-enslaved faces.

Ready for anything and everything …

He could be one of them, ready to pluck the bag from my grasp and sprint to a getaway car.

No one stops. No one even looks. All hopes of a swift exchange evaporate.

I sag and step back, my back raging hot against the phone’s cold metal. The money bag’s strap burns a timely reminder into my left shoulder blade; I’m standing here alone with everything he wants. What if he’s watching me, planning to pounce? Who would save me?

I scan again. Those surveillance officers are either very good or very not here. The phone’s shrill ring lifts me six inches off the floor. I pick up, killing the ring and every other sound in the world, as if it has ceased spinning. I picture birds tumbling out of the sky, landing with a thud on Croydon concrete.

Cold hard plastic cools my scorching right ear. ‘Yes,’ I croak.

‘Tom Reynolds?’

‘That’s me.’

‘What’s your car reg?’ demands the Geoff Boycott sounda- like.

My addled mind empties like a toppled glass. I can’t even remember my own licence plate!

I whimper. He barks: ‘Make, model, colour?’

‘Nissan Bluebird. Maroon.’

I hear a muffled rustle. ‘Parked outside the station,’ I hear him say, faintly, as if to someone else. He’s got watchers!

‘Get back into your car,’ he demands, tetchily. ‘Follow signs for the M23 and A23 to Brighton. When you see a sign saying Brighton 8 miles, look out for the next left, the A273. Take the exit. On the left after 200 yards you’ll see a lay-by with two phone boxes. The first is a phone card kiosk. Taped beneath the shelf will be an envelope containing a new set of instructions.’

‘My God,’ I sigh into the dead phone. ‘The world’s grimmest treasure hunt.’

I almost run back to the car to parrot the details, then wait five agonising minutes before setting off south. Signs for Penge, Riddlesdown and Titsey flash past, making me wonder if every Croydon suburb is named after some squalid seventeenth-century disease. It would seem fitting. All I see are rows and rows of houses punctuated by identikit shopping parades, invariably featuring an estate agent, bookmaker, greasy spoon café, off-licence, post office, pharmacy and funeral parlour.

There’s the futility and emptiness of modern life, right there, I think, in my fug of fatalistic gloom. Each cluster of shops tells our real-life story: you buy a house, spend your life paying for it, cheer yourself up gambling, drinking and eating shit, get ill, old and die.

Zap! The suburbs vanish to a vast, velvet night-sky being munched on by tiny, shiny, Pac-Men; on closer inspection, aircraft queueing to land at Gatwick airport.

‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Fintan calls the A23, leading as it invariably does to sun-kissed excess-by-sea. Not tonight. The prospect of messing up in the South Downs yanks my knotted guts to twanging.

Be prepared for a last-second change. A sudden contact.

Crossley’s ceaseless advice drowns out all self-soothing inner monologues.

If he’s going to kill Julie Draper, there’s no reason why he won’t kill you …

Christ, poor Matt. My sweet, adorable stepson. The single best thing ever to happen in my life. Why am I taking this risk?

None of this is Matt’s fault. Stupid selfish grown-ups. I’m sure Zoe and I will be okay. We’re just in bit of a rut right now. Living together but not really living at all. It’s all work, childcare and sleep deprivation. I know I’m doing this for her. I’m just not sure why. To impress her? To prove myself? To make her worry about me? In place of an answer, I’ve coined a mantra: If I get through this, everything will be better. I’ll have proven myself, to her, to me. We’ll get back to how it was. She’ll look at me in that way again, eyes soft and warm. Smile at my corny gags. Sleep facing me.

But doubt, like night, has swallowed the last of the half-light.

A ghostly white sign shimmers in the gusty, malcontent air. I squint it into focus: ‘Brighton 8 miles’.

I slow to 40 and strain my eyes. The A273 slip road loops around so that I’m now heading north again; Brighton-bound A23 traffic pounds past to my left, headlights mercilessly fanning the lay-by like ravenous searchlights. The phone boxes command centre stage, spotlit by an amber streetlight. Good visibility brings mixed tidings; easier to see, harder to flee.

My car creeps into the lay-by, past the phone boxes. I perform a laboured three-point turn, helping myself to a 180-degree, headlight-illuminated view of the lay-by and the A273 beyond. I’m expecting the glint of hidden back-up cars, the outlines of poised police Ninjas. I see neither. Dread claws at my insides like a trapped rat. Surveillance are in front and behind. But they’re not here. It’s just me and him.

‘Right, I’ve pulled up at the phone box,’ I inform the dashboard’s covert radio, squeezing into my baseball cap and forensic gloves. I leave the car engine idling, my headlights beaming so that at least my non-existent back-up can see me.

I lean back, grab the money bag and step out. The trees shiver like widows at the workhouse door. Gravel crunches beneath my feet, but I can’t feel it. Halfway across, I spin 360. Nothing.

I jog to the phonebox, open it, the door squealing like teeth down a violin. I palm the underside of the cold metal shelf, feel paper, yank it free. The small brown envelope has double-sided tape on each corner. I turn over to see a giant letter ‘A’ scrawled in black marker. Christ , I think, how far through the alphabet is he planning to take me tonight?

Sprinting back to the car, I throw the cash in the back, get in, lock the doors and rummage inside the envelope. I flick on my pencil torch and read the instructions, typed on a cut-down piece of A4 paper.

This route will show if you’re being followed.