He went around all the doors, pulling at the handles. When he couldn’t get in he went back to his jeep and opened the rear door. Rummaged inside.
‘What’s he doing?’
‘I don’t know.’ Steve didn’t turn. He handed Sally the phone, then tipped the rear-view mirror down and watched Jake. ‘When he comes back don’t stop filming, but keep the camera on his face. Don’t have it on me – OK?’
She knelt up on the seat and swivelled round, aiming the camera out of the back window. As she did, Jake emerged from the jeep. He was holding something long and metal, lit red by the car lights. It took her a couple of moments to realize it was a tyre iron.
‘Steve,’ she began, but Jake had already lifted the tyre iron and swung it down on the roof of the Audi.
‘Fuck.’ Steve slammed his hand on the horn. ‘You shithead.’
The noise was deafening. A group of kids in the stairwell of the block of flats opposite stopped what they were doing and turned to watch. Steve took his hand off the horn, opened the window and leaned out. ‘Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
Jake reappeared next to him, bending down and grinning at them nastily. With one hand he dangled the tyre iron. The other he extended for the phone. Steve gave the hand a contemptuous look. ‘I really don’t think so.’
‘Well,’ Jake said, ‘I do.’
He raised the tyre iron again, ready to bring it down on the car, but this time something stopped him. It had been a quick movement, like lightning. Steve had leaned back in the car and straightened himself enough for his jacket to fall briefly back from his stomach. It happened so fast that Sally thought she’d imagined it, but she hadn’t. Jake had seen what was there too, and his face changed instantly. It was the butt of a gun, tucked in Steve’s waistband.
Jake lowered the tyre iron and stood awkwardly, uncertain what to do. For a moment he was the same fidgety person she’d seen at David’s. ‘Yeah, well.’ He glanced around, checking up and down the street who was watching, giving the kids in the stairwell a look that made them all turn away. He licked his lips and made a circling motion with his hand. ‘OK, man. Let’s just do it – just do it and put it to bed, eh?’
‘Thank you,’ Steve said. ‘Thank you very much.’ He closed the window again. ‘You can turn the camera off, Sally, and count out the money.’
‘W-what?’
‘You heard.’
Shakily she switched off the phone, reached down to the bag at her feet and began counting the stacks of twenties. She kept trying to see into Steve’s waistband, covered now by his jacket. ‘Was that what I thought it was?’ she murmured.
‘It’s decommissioned. Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot my nuts off.’
‘I can’t believe this.’ She glanced up at Jake, who was standing a few feet away, arms folded, bouncing his head back and forth as if he was moving to music no one else could hear. ‘I can’t believe any of it.’
‘Neither can I. Just count the money.’
She did, and passed it hurriedly to him.
‘OK. Start filming again. When we leave, get a good shot of the jeep. The licence plate especially.’
She turned on the phone and scrunched back in the seat, holding it in front of her like a shield. Steve wound down the window. Jake came forward, glowering at him. He snatched the money and sauntered back to the jeep. He slammed his door and sat for a moment, lit by the interior light, bent over as he counted the blocks of cash. When he had finished, he didn’t look at them, just reached up to switch off the light, started the jeep and roared away, narrowly missing taking their front bumper with him.
‘Did you get his number?’
Sally nodded. She stopped the video and sank back in the seat, breathing hard. ‘God,’ she muttered. ‘Is this the end of it now? Is this really the end?’
‘Shit. I hope so.’ Steve readjusted the mirror and started the engine. ‘I really, really hope so.’
18
Captain Charlie Zhang was based temporarily in an old Victorian red-brick villa, set, incongruously, in a garrison to the east of Salisbury Plain. It might have been a military base, but when Zhang led her along the cool, carpeted corridors, Zoe decided the Military Police definitely had it better than the common-or-garden cops. There were fitted carpets and panelled walls, and the doors all closed with a reassuring
Zhang’s commanding officer was a cool-looking woman in late middle age, Lieutenant Colonel Teresa Watling – the army equivalent of a chief superintendent and fairly heavy hitting in the grand scheme of things. With her blow- dried grey hair, the gold pendant over her black turtle-neck and her black reptile-skin heels, she looked like a Manhattan businesswoman. In fact, she explained to Zoe, as they went along the passageways, it was far more pedestrian than that. She had been born and brought up in the home counties.
‘Cool.’ Zoe swung the ID they’d issued her at the control gate. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Anything.’
‘When I get tied to the chair, are you going to be the bad cop or the good cop?’
Lieutenant Colonel Watling ignored that. She stopped at a door and pushed it open. The room inside resembled a boardroom at an oil company, with a polished walnut table and twelve hand-carved teak chairs. There were water glasses and leather notepads at each place setting, so clearly the cutbacks that were axing thousands of backroom staff in the civilian police hadn’t reached here yet. The three of them filed in. Zoe chose the seat at the head of the table, furthest from the door, and Captain Zhang sat next to her, his long, delicate hands folded one on top of the other. Six large files were placed down the centre of the table. It would have taken a long time to amass that lot, Zoe thought. A long time.
Lieutenant Colonel Watling opened a sleek black box and offered it to Zoe. At first she thought it was a humidor – it seemed somehow appropriate to light up a stogie in a place like this, kick back a little and watch the sky out of the window go indigo. She wasn’t going to say no if that was the way the evening was going to work. Maybe a little snifter of Talisker on the side. But it wasn’t cigars in the box: it was coffee capsules, in rainbow colours. She looked at the key and chose the strongest.
‘Black, please. Two sugars.’
Watling began to make the coffee. Zoe watched her, wondering how she’d got this job. It would be cool to wear Jimmy Choos to work, she thought. Maybe swap them now and again for combats and a quick, safe investigation at one of the bases in Iraq or Afghanistan. She’d heard they had a Piacetto cafe in Camp Bastion that did the best cakes. ‘I know your boss,’ Watling said. ‘I worked with him on a couple of operations in Wiltshire.’
‘Was he into psychological profiling in those days?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing. He’s a nice guy. What do you want to talk about?’
‘Oh, just this and that.’
‘This and that?’
Watling gave Zoe her coffee and lined up her own cup next to the leather writing pad. She sat down and clasped her elegant hands on the pad. ‘Zoe,’ she said. ‘Do you remember those good old days when the Crime Squad and the Intelligence Service combined forces and SOCA came on line? How we were told it was going to revolutionize our lives? The right hand was at last going to know what the left hand was doing?’
‘Did you believe it?’
She gave a cold laugh. ‘I’m a post-menopausal woman who’s lived in a man’s world for twenty years. A more cynical, cruel creature it’s hard to find. But it’s true, I thought SOCA might help. I believed that at least other agencies would check it – make sure a target they were looking at didn’t have a great big flag marked “SIB” waving over it. Why didn’t you
‘You’re telling me Mooney’s in trouble?’
