I shifted awkwardly in my chair, thinking that it might be time to go and make a brew.
‘It was my fault we got compromised.’ Her voice was drained of emotion, her head was down, hair falling forwards and blocking out her face as her hands flattened out the white towelling over her legs. ‘I stopped the car for a casual drop-off, but as Bob got out, his jacket must have got tucked in behind his pancake. His Sig and mag carrier were showing. I didn’t see it until he was half-way over the road.
‘I tapped the horn and he came back, ready to lift off. I said it was OK, don’t be stupid, no one’s seen it. Fact is, I was more worried about the serial being cancelled and looking a dickhead than being compromised, know what I mean?’
I nodded, but not really meaning it.
‘Anyway, he took my word for it, covered up and started again. I went the other side of the estate to pick him up. Next thing I knew that fucking JCB started rearranging the bodywork. So I did my stuff and the green army went into the estate in riot gear and brought out Bob’s body an hour or so later.’
Her face was still covered by hair, but I knew she was fighting the tears again. ‘Look, you can’t blame yourself. He should have checked himself before getting out of the car. It’s no one’s fault, things fuck up.’
‘No, you’re wrong. It fucked up because I was more worried about admitting to myself we were compromised. It felt like a failure and I didn’t want to accept that.’ She sat upright, swinging her feet off the settee. Her eyes were wet, her cheeks red, and she didn’t care about the robe now: it fell apart, exposing her legs. ‘I couldn’t tell anyone – maybe guilt – but I saw Bob, I saw them kicking and punching him to death. We could see each other, he was screaming at me for help. I was out of the car by then but couldn’t get to him. I watched them drop a fucking paving slab on his head because of me, but I couldn’t do anything about it . . .’
The tears just kept falling, but there was no noise from her now. Maybe she had already made enough over the years.
My heart quickened: I needed to know. ‘Do you have dreams about it – you know, like a film in your head?’
She went quite still, not even bothering to wipe away the tears. ‘You know, don’t you? You have them. I can’t stop it sometimes – even watching a TV fight will do it. You understand . . . It’s like, I replay it over and over again in my head, and it totally fucks me over. I can’t help it.’
Shit. This was more than enough. I stood up, cutting away there and then. ‘Want a brew?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right. Better shut up now before we become normal and talk about shit – you never know, the floodgates might really burst, and then we’d be totally fucked.’
She followed me into the kitchen and leant against the worktop, wiping her face with a tea-cloth as she watched me fill the kettle and fumble about for the teabags.
‘Ever since then, Nick, I’ve been the first to jump in. No task too small, Suzy’s your girl. No cheap psychology required – I survive even when I fuck up, even when I don’t deserve to. That’s why I’ll go to Berlin with you.’
I found the tea on the worktop behind her and got pouring. ‘I just need you when I get back.’
‘Think about it. It’s better for cover and, anyway, you don’t know what you’re going to find. Apart from that, of course –’ she grinned ‘– you’re fucking useless. How many times have I saved that lardy arse of yours?’
I passed her brew over and saw that scary look on her face again. Good, things were back to normal. No more talk of videos and gates bursting open. I was planning on keeping mine well shut. ‘So you’ve got a real syndrome? I just thought you were a fucking fruitcake.’
I got a laugh, but then her eyes narrowed. ‘What were you going to do if I’d said no? Kill me?’
‘I’d just have lifted you until I got Kelly.’
‘Look, I won’t lie to you. If I’m on my own and I have to make a choice between Kelly and DW, you know which I’m going to go for, don’t you?’
I nodded. ‘I’ve got two important questions.’
‘They’d better be.’
I pulled at the neck of my sweatshirt. ‘Can I use your shower and washing-machine? I’m covered in sand under here. And can you get on the phone to Air Berlin and book yourself on to my flight?’
53
The seats on the Air Berlin flight were small and cramped, but we were both so exhausted it didn’t really matter. Suzy had the window-seat and her head rolled against the side of the aircraft. The gallons of coffee we’d thrown down us all night hadn’t been enough to keep us going. It wasn’t long into the ninety-minute journey that we were both doing neck-breakers, mouths wide open, saliva dribbling down chins, much like every other early- morning passenger off for a day’s business in Berlin, except that they reeked of aftershave and sported suits and pressed shirts.
Suzy had driven us to Stansted in the runabout Geoff used when on leave, a beaten-up old Micra that chugged out of the garage and I replaced with the Vectra. It was better to be disconnected from it as I entered a new phase.
While the suits had been catching up on their beauty sleep, we’d been working out the plan for the pickup. We kicked round and round the possibility of replacing the bottles with others containing inert powder. In theory, it would be no problem to work the switch: we’d both done it enough times with weapons and equipment against other players in the past. But to do the job properly takes time, something we didn’t have. Any player worth their salt would have placed tell-tales on the bottles; maybe a small pin-hole in the foil that the replacement wouldn’t have, or maybe a taste. Rubbing ginger or a wet boiled sweet around the foil, or the cork before it was resealed, would leave a trace that could be picked up with a wet finger. But even if there were no tell-tales, what if he had the capability to test the contents? Could I afford to take that risk? The source would need to know that he had DW before he’d even think of handing over Kelly – not that I reckoned he planned to – and delivering it intact was the only way I had even the remotest chance of getting to her. Fuck the inert business. Dark Winter had to be delivered.
We had to travel on our own passports because there was no time to do otherwise. Her real name was Susan Gilligan or, at least, that was her maiden name. She’d never got round to changing her passport, even though she’d been married nearly four years now.
My head rolled with another neck-breaker that woke me up as abruptly as if I was having the falling-off-a- building-and-just-about-to-hit-the-ground nightmare. The day’s papers had slipped off my lap long ago and got ripped to pieces on the floor as we’d twisted and turned in the confined space to try to get even more uncomfortable. They were full of post-war Baghdad, America’s amber alert, which was being blamed on the Iraqi situation, and pictures of Canadians walking about in face masks to avoid contracting SARS. Nothing in the national pages about King’s Cross or King’s Lynn.
I wiped some saliva from the side of my mouth. The pre-landing announcements started in efficient German, followed by accented but perfect English. The aircraft began to lose height and we tried to find where our seat-belt buckles had hidden themselves.
I copied Suzy as she adjusted her watch to Central European time, then craned my neck to look out of her window. The sky was sunny and cloud free, and I could clearly see the Brandenburg Gate, surrounded by burgeoning high-rises. The whole of the centre of the city looked like a field ready for harvest, except that the yellow stuff wasn’t wheat, it was tower cranes.
‘Looks like a nice day for it.’ We hadn’t talked about the job itself since we entered Stansted, and wouldn’t again until we got out of the cab at the other end. We didn’t want to be overheard, and talking in whispers attracts too much attention.
Suzy had bought a guidebook at the airport, so we knew Bergmannstrasse was in the old Western part of the city, in an area called Kreuzberg, which I thought I knew from my time as a squaddie in the early eighties. The book said it had a large Turkish population, and Germans went there to escape National Service and become artists, punks or anarchists instead. That sounded about right. I wasn’t too sure about having seen any artists, but I’d spent a good few nights in West Berlin getting ripped off by Turkish bar owners and trading punches with German punks.
We landed and everybody stood up and clogged the aisle as soon as the seat-belt sign flickered off. The suits
