When he thought back, last night wasn’t so discouraging after all. He and Annabelle were making a kind of progress toward having full sex. Even that would have been unthinkable two months ago. He heard the voices coming from the kitchen, and barged straight in.
His mother and father were sitting at the long table in the middle of the room, both of them in bathrobes. There was tea and toast on the table, along with jars of marmalade and honey. The wallscreen was silently playing a news stream.
“Morning,” Tim grunted. He sat down at the table opposite from them, and reached for the jug of orange juice.
“Morning, Tim,” his father said.
Tim saw his father’s hand move out of his mother’s lap where he’d been squeezing her leg. And his voice, that was cheerful. And they were both smiling, leaning close to each other. Two contented people.
Very slowly Tim’s eyes tracked back up to his father’s face. A handsome young face, reasonably similar to his own. A young face on a young body. And then there was his mother, gorgeous as always, even with her hair uncombed—which it never was at breakfast. Could they have…Last night, did they…Had they actually been…
“Careful, Tim,” his mother called.
His glass was full, and orange juice was leaking over the rim to flood down his hand. “Shit! Sorry.” He stopped pouring, and looked around for a cloth. His face was bright red. He knew that for certain, his skin was surely hot enough to blister.
“Here.” His father handed over a dish cloth.
Tim began dabbing away. “Thanks.” He concentrated hard on the task. There was
“So what’s the plan for today?” his father asked. “You and Annabelle going out?”
“Er, no, she’s visiting her cousins today. I’ve, got some, um, friends coming round later.” Tim stood up and dumped the dripping cloth in the clothes hamper. “We’re doing some stuff.” He sat down again and found the toast.
“Stuff, eh?”
“Yeah.” At the edge of his vision he could see his father and mother exchange a glance and grin at each other.
“Good stuff?” Jeff asked. “Bad stuff? Terrible stuff?”
“Er, your old Jet Ski, actually. We’ve fixed it up, and we’re going to test the engine. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Fine by me.”
Tim slapped some butter on a slice of toast and gulped down his orange juice. “I should go and get ready. They’ll be here soon.” With the toast in his hand he fled out of the kitchen. When he was halfway up the stairs, he was sure he heard laughter behind him.
20. AWAY DAY
JEFF DROVE DOWN TO LONDON. The Europol team hadn’t liked that, nor Lucy Duke; they all wanted him to take the train. But he allowed Lieutenant Krober to come in the car with him while Lucy and the rest of the team followed in their own vehicle.
He didn’t do it to be obstinate; he just remembered how much he used to enjoy driving before the nineties, when everyone suddenly had three cars and drove like characters out of Wacky Races. Now it was like the early seventies again, except the roads had been in much better condition back then. But with strategic (i.e., punitive) Green fuel taxes and the huge Brussels-funded investment in public transport over the last twenty years, people had reluctantly moved back to the trains and buses. It left long stretches of the Al where he couldn’t see any other vehicles at all. When another car did come into view it was normally a big luxury model like his own, most of them ignoring the speed limit. Every car in Europe had to have a journeytracker unit fitted in order to get a road license, and the journeytracker was linked to the Galileo positioning satellite network. It enabled the EuroTransport Bureau to monitor the location of every car all the time, and impose instant fines if the speed limit was ever exceeded. Jeff had gotten a software fix for the annoying unit, of course—every car owner did; garages slipped them in as a matter of course. But today, with Krober in the car with him, he stuck reasonably close to the one hundred twenty kph restriction.
Despite all the restrictions and exorbitant license costs, trucks were still fairly common, big sixty-ton juggernauts powered by liquid gas. Every few kilometers Jeff would pass the burnt-out chasses of similar vehicles, all of the models dating back about ten years. Fires must have burned fiercely at the time, consuming the surrounding bushes and trees to create little dead-zones. These patches of scorched earth had now been reclaimed by keck weed and giant thistles, whose leaves were sallow and misshapen thanks to the chemicals that fire-fighting crews had left, staining the soil. With their rusting metal hulks netted by vines, and every viable component stripped off, the ruined trucks looked like the abandoned relics of some mighty Soviet-era transport project.
Jeff avoided making any comment to Krober as he drove past the frequent wrecks. They were all foreign haulers, careless enough to have been spotted by their English counterparts or local Separatist groups. Nobody from the Continent drove through England now. Freight containers were all unloaded at ports and the Channel Tunnel depots, allowing the deliveries to be undertaken by English firms. Or at least English-registered firms.
As soon as he crossed inside the M25 orbital the car’s journeytracker told him he’d been charged a fifty euro fee for a London CityDrive day license. The traffic picked up when he took the A41 into the West End, smaller cars and vans closing around him, along with innumerable buses and the city’s ubiquitous black taxis. Jeff’s journeytracker kept issuing directions, though he liked to think he could still remember the way through the maze of streets. E-trikes and bicycles tooted angrily at anything with the audacity to be on the same road. Inside the North Circular Road the CityDrive license fee went up to seventy-five euros. By the time he got around Hyde Park and arrived at the Knightsbridge flat he was paying a hundred fifty.
Sue hadn’t changed the apartment, at least not the way she’d set about the manor with decorators and interior designers. Half the furniture was new, and he was sure some of the kitchen fittings were different. But at least the rooms remained the same shape. He’d bought the entire top floor of a typical five-story Regency-style town residence, which had seen so much refurbishment and development the only original feature remaining was the white facade.
Lucy Duke could barely conceal her jealousy as she looked around the rooms with their high ceilings. When she stepped out onto the tiny roof terrace, the tops of the trees in Hyde Park were just visible.
“This is fabulous,” she said. “It must be worth a fortune.”
Jeff was peering over the railing at the street below. The traffic here was very light, mostly taxis. “I didn’t buy it to make money,” he said. “I just wanted somewhere to stay when I’m in town. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with hotels over the years. Even if you ever manage to find a good one, they always seem to change management every six months and you’re back to square one.”
“I see.”
He masked a smile. The notion must have matched her sense of efficiency.
Back inside he checked to see if the housekeeping service had stocked the big fridge. They’d certainly kept the place clean and tidy. There was fresh linen on the bed, even some yellow roses in the living room. “I can provide breakfast for everybody for the next two weeks,” he called out. “Are you staying here?”
“No,” she said. “My flat’s over in Battersea. It’s not far. I’ll go home tonight.”
There were three bottles of Krug champagne in the fridge. “Fine.” He hoped it was Sue’s boyfriends who were paying for this stuff rather than his household account.
The surprise of that thought made him frown.
