pause. ‘King’s Lynn.’ Another pause. ‘Yes, that’s right. Eighty-eight Sir Lewis Street.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, maybe four or five hours?’ She nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
I held up three fingers and mouthed three.
‘Sir, we should be there in three hours.’ It was a while before she could get another word in edgeways. ‘OK, sir, yes, we will.’
I beckoned the phone over.
‘Sir, Nick wants to talk.’ She handed it to me.
‘What is it?’
‘What do we know about the source? Is this int reliable – is he reliable? It sounds bullshit to me. Only yesterday he was telling us how hard it is for him. Why should we rush up there on what could turn out to be —’
‘Because no matter how unreliable the information or even he may or may not be, there is no other option. So, until the decision is made to inform others about this, you will rush wherever I want you to. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
The line went dead.
‘You know King’s Lynn, then? You don’t sound like a Norfolk boy.’
I ignored her and told her what the Yes Man had said as we got to the car. She rubbed her hands with what looked almost like excitement. ‘Which way, then?’
‘Just get us to the M11.’
We stopped at a garage once we were on the North Circular and bought sandwiches and a bottle of Coke for me, and four apples and a yoghurt for her. Eventually we got on to the motorway towards Cambridge. I’d been brooding about the reasons the ASU might have chosen Norfolk, and it suddenly dawned on me. ‘If Fuck-face back there is right, King’s Lynn could make sense.’
She took her eyes off the road for a second and turned to look at me through her light blue sunglasses.
‘The train goes direct from there to Liverpool Street and King’s Cross. Good stand-off location, considering the state of alert around the City.’
‘So they’d rig everything up in King’s Lynn, take the train to King’s Cross, and start sprinkling – maybe even splash some about on the way?’ Suzy indicated to overtake a truck. ‘But wouldn’t a few Malaysians, Chinese or whatever stick out up there?’
What did I know? ‘There are some docks up there, and one or two takeaways. Fuck-face better be right.’
We left the motorway and began to drive through the flat, boring fields of Cambridgeshire. I got the blister pack out of my jeans and threw two more capsules down my neck mixed with by now very warm Coke, then waved it at Suzy.
She shook her head. ‘Had some before picking you up. Listen, maybe Fuck-face knows the ASU, maybe he’s taken the train up – that’s why he’s staying in St Chad’s? Whatever – if he’s right, we get this done quick, you get to sort your shit out, and I get to be in the cadre, know what I mean?’
She nodded away as I pushed the antibiotics into my back pocket, then obviously decided it was time to get off the subject of Fuck-face. ‘So what’s her name, then? How old is she?’
Ignoring the question, I got myself comfortable, but she wasn’t giving up. ‘Come on, I know you want to tell me. Besides, we may not see each other after tomorrow if Fuck-face is right, eh?’ She turned back to the road and gave me some space.
‘Kelly . . . Her name is Kelly, and she’s fourteen.’
‘She’s not your daughter?’
‘No, I sort of look after her.’
‘She could have worse, I suppose.’
A sign whizzed past – ‘King’s Lynn 42’ – and what seemed like twenty miles later another said, ‘38’. The road was elevated in places and there were dykes either side, waterways draining the fenland, and miles and miles of jet-black earth growing spuds or carrots or whatever.
‘So, foster-dad, step-parent, whatever you are, what’s it like having to look after someone else?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘That your great insight to parenthood, is it – all right?’
I pushed the seat back so I could stretch my legs. ‘Here’s what I reckon.’ I turned to face her. ‘First off we buy a town map, find out where this place is, then get into the town and have a look, yeah? What time does it get dark?’
Before she could answer, the moan-phone rang. I passed it across. ‘Here. I’m an arsewipe-free zone, remember?’
She hit the keys and put it to her ear. ‘Hello? Yes, sir, I’m on secure.’ She looked at me and rolled her eyes. He wouldn’t have been able to talk to her if she wasn’t. There was a pause. ‘Oh, no, he’s driving, sir.’ She nodded in response to whatever was being said, then looked at me, her face very serious. ‘Yes, sir, I will.’
Pressing the off-key with her thumb, she passed the phone back to me. ‘The address has been flagged up for two years with Immigration and local plod.’
‘Is he doing anything about it – you know, unflagging it?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope – deniable, remember, Norfolk boy.’
‘Fucking idiot.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Are you ever going to tell me what you’ve got against him?’
We were just coming into the outskirts of King’s Lynn and Suzy pulled into a BP station. You always start an op with a full tank, and in any case we needed the town maps.
As I walked back across the forecourt looking at the folded-out map I could already feel the breeze off the North Sea. King’s Lynn was at the bottom right-hand corner of the Wash. The Great Ouse ran through it, which was presumably how the boats made it into the docks.
We crossed a ring-road lined with DIY, furniture and electrical superstores with a few burger franchises thrown in, and as we followed signs for the town centre things began to change for the worse. It was a sad mix of 1970s concrete and hundred-year-old red-brick housing. The whole place looked as if it needed a massive dig-out and a coat of paint. Quite a few of the shops were boarded up. We passed a huge open-air car parking lot alongside a drab grey concrete shopping precinct, then a few crumbling, peeling Georgian houses.
Suzy was looking as pissed off as I was, screwing up her face and shaking her head, chewing even faster on her nicotine gum as we passed a group of three teenage mums with prams and badly dyed blonde hair.
We kept on the main artery coming out of town towards the bypass. I checked the map. We weren’t far away from Sir Lewis Street now. Huge fuel-storage tanks and industrial pipework started to come up on our left, half painted, half rusting. ‘We need Loke Road – on our right.’
We both saw it. We were just short of the dock entrance as we turned right off the main, alongside a vast area of wasteground. ‘Sir Lewis coming up, over a stream and first left.’
Suzy looked even more depressed as we made our way behind the back yards of Sir Lewis, row upon row of two-up, two-down red-brick terraced houses straight out of
We continued past the target road and Suzy was still complaining: ‘It’s so fucking soulless.’
As I looked down the narrow alleyways that punctuated the terraces I could see washing in almost every yard, and bin liners spewing out their crap on to the street. Somebody in the sixties had made a fortune convincing the residents to shell out on stone cladding and pebbledash. There were plenty of tired for-sale signs stuck to the fronts of houses, along with the obligatory Sky dish, and none of the cars parked on either side of the narrow road seemed to have a registration plate higher than J.
We passed a local store, a handpainted sign for a hairdresser’s, and a pub. Then, within a minute or so, we were surrounded by 1950s council houses and low-level flats. We turned right, towards the railway station.
‘Let’s park up there and come back to do a walk past.’ If you park in a residential area, people expect you to go into a house nearby.
The road signs ran out but we eventually found the station, an old Victorian brick and glass building, with a brand new Morrisons superstore next to it and a Matalan clothes shop. Suzy turned into the Morrisons car park and we sat studying the map to get our bearings.
