There was another burst of singing from the floor of the room. Someone had sat themselves at a piano and was banging out old Cockney songs.
'Are we within earshot of Bow Bells here, do you think?' mused Dawn, throwing back the remains of her drink.
'Basildon, maybe,' said Alex.
'Not that I've got any quarrel with that, as an Essex man myself' Den Connolly suddenly appeared beside them, sweating and massive.
'Before I'm too pissed to understand a word you're saying,' he asked Alex, 'who exactly was it you was after?'
Alex dismissed Dawn with a nod of his head and a pat on her dove-grey behind.
'Joseph Meehan. Code-named Watchman. You finished him for Box.'
Connolly nodded.
'I ain't officially here,' he said eventually, his words slurring.
'I ain't officially anywhere. But you know that.'
Alex nodded.
'I know the score from Stevo. No one hears your name. Ever.
And if you can give me what I need you can rest easy about that other business.'
'You gimme your word on that?' Connolly glanced meaningfully down at the assembled company.
'My friends'd be very pissed off if... They're my family now, y'understand -forget fuckin' Hereford, RWW, all that old bollocks.'
Alex looked him in the eye.
'I give you my word.'
Connolly pursed his lips and nodded slowly and vaguely to himself 'Tomorrow. Lunchtime.
Bring your...' He gestured vaguely towards Dawn, who was whispering confidences to Marie.
'Meanwhiles, order anything you want. Open bar, like I said.'
They left around 2 a.m. Not because Alex thought that Connolly might relent and talk to him that night, but because he felt that he needed to prove his credentials to the ex-NCO. He had to show proper respect. Leaving early would have been regarded as very graceless. So he had stuck around, downing drink after drink, and looking suitably impressed by the tales of blags, slags, grass-ups, fit-ups, bent coppers, unnumbered shooters and all the rest of the hard-man mythology.
Dawn meanwhile rested wide-eyed at his side, with her arm draped lightly round his waist. They looked, in short, like any impressionable young couple who happened to have stumbled into a bar full of criminals.
When the last goodbyes had been said and they'd finally reached the car, Dawn blinked hard several times and reached in her bag for the key.
'You OK to drive?' asked Alex blearily.
'I've actually drunk comparatively little,' said Dawn.
'I always get rum and a Coke in that situation that way you can just keep your glass filled with Coke and no- one's the wiser.
Well, ephedrine or no, I'm well and truly bladdered, I'm afraid,' Alex slurred.
'But mission accomplished, sort of' 'Get in,' said Dawn.
At the hotel they stood together for a moment in front of the open window. The port and the yachts were lit up now, and the sea was an inky black below them. A tide of drunken benevolence washed over Alex.
'You were great,' he said feelingly, placing a hand on her warm shoulder.
'Especially Maceing that bonehead of Connolly's.'
She smiled and inclined her cheek to his hand.
'You've already thanked me for that. I enjoyed myself What d'you think tomorrow holds?'
'Dunno. All that lunch invitation stuff was just to buy himself time. The more of his hospitality he can persuade us to soak up, the less bad he's going to feel about us leaving empty-handed. At the moment he accepts that I'm kosher and you're just the sweet thing I happen to be travelling with, but he's worried about who comes after me. Where it's all going to end.'
'What's he got to hide, Alex?' she asked gently.
'Enough.'
'So what promises did you make him?'
Careful, Alex told himself woozily. She doesn't know about the Park Royal job.
'Oh, I strung him along...'
'You think he'll talk to you tomorrow?' Dawn asked sharply.
'Because tomorrow's all we've got. In thirty hours Angela gets back from Washington and any time after that...'
Alex nodded. She didn't need to spell out the danger that Meehan posed. Privately, he was far from convinced that Connolly would talk to him, but he couldn't see how else the situation could have been handled. The alcohol was pounding at his temples now and the knife cuts were beginning to pulse in unison.
'Why don't I get those dressings off?' she asked him.
'Let a bit of fresh air at your poor face.
Lie down on the bed?'
He could quite easily have removed the dressings himself, but lay there breathing in her jasmine scent and her smoky hair, and the faint smell of rum on her breath. She was OK, was Dawn, he decided. A bit of a bitch at times and the most irritating bloody driver he'd ever met, but what the hell? She had a tough job. He could live with her downsides.
And she really was quite seriously pretty with those cool grey eyes and that soft, secretive mouth. Without especially meaning to, and with a vague stab at discretion, he glanced down the grey linen front of her dress as she inched the dressing from his cheek.
She didn't seem to be wearing any sort of bra and he recalled with a rush of pleasure the feel of her breasts against him in the bar.
'That's not fair,' she said reproachfully.
'What's not fair?'
'Here I am, doing my big Florence Nightingale number and all you can do is stare down my front, panting like a dog. You're supposed to be an officer and a gentleman.'
'No one ever said anything about being a gentleman,' said Alex.
'And I'm not panting, I'm breathing.'
'Well, stop it. And shut your eyes, or I'll rip your ear in half again and you wouldn't like that, now would you?'
Alex smiled, and tried not to think about George Widdowes' ears lying grey and bloodstained against the pillow. The same thought evidently occurred to Dawn, for her movements abruptly hardened and became businesslike.
When she had finished she stepped out on to the balcony with her mobile phone.
'Can you give me a moment?' she asked, punching out a number.
'Personal call.'
He took himself into the bathroom. The boyfriend, he thought, and felt a sudden urge to hit Dawn's unknown lover very hard in the face. Several times, preferably.
He glanced in the mirror, at the angry black stitch-tracks across his face. You look like shite, Temple, he told himself You'd be lucky to trap some swamp donkey from Saxty's looking like that, let alone this foxy little spook. Get real.
By the time she returned he was down to his boxer shorts and looking for the Nurofen.
'Turn round,' she said.
'Let me look at that thigh.'
Alex obeyed. Five minutes later she folded her arms.
'OK,' she began.
'This is the deal. You get the bed and the blankets from the cupboard, I get the quilt on the floor.'
'I'll go on the floor. You take the bed.'
