‘Where the fuck are you going?’ Tomkins shouted.
‘She’s leaving you, mate,’ said the driver as Cara slammed the door. ‘Still want the West End, do we?’
The cab pulled away. Tomkins was left alone in the back, watching Cara hurrying along Half Moon Street in her black boots and long winter coat. He tried calling her phone but she wouldn’t pick up. Instead he texted Vosse and told him what Cara had done, only to receive the reply: At least somebody is using their initiative.
By then, the taxi was outside Fortnum & Mason, BIRD’s Jag was nowhere to be seen and Matt Tomkins was out of the hunt.
Cara understood from the group message that Vosse wanted the team to look for Kite in the area surrounding the Playboy Casino. There was a Four Seasons Hotel across the street, a branch of Nobu outside the Hilton on Park Lane, Theo Randall’s restaurant at the Intercontinental as well as a number of private members clubs – the Royal Air Force, the Cavalry & Guards – in the area. All of them would need searching.
Find BIRD, he had written. Find the car. Villanelle’s going to the Playboy. Divide up the rest. Let’s get control of this situation.
Cara could not shake off the sense that something was wrong. She looked at Kite’s last known position on the corner of Old Park Lane and wondered why his phone had gone down. A basement? A signal black hole? Or something more sinister?
She entered Cheshire Street from the east. A van emerged from a side road ahead of her, turned right and almost knocked her off her feet as it sped downhill in the direction from which she had come. Two men were in the front, both of Middle Eastern origin, both wearing dark jackets and white shirts. The man in the passenger seat had a beard but no sideburns. Their appearance seemed at odds with the nature of their work; as the van turned left at the bottom of the street, she saw KIDSON ELECTRICAL SERVICES emblazoned on the side next to a London phone number and a website address. Memorising the number plate, she reached the corner and saw that the van had emerged not from a side street, as she had first thought, but from a small underground car park. There was an office block next door with a space outside for smokers. Two Chinese women in floor-length puffer jackets were vaping near the entrance. Cara spoke to the younger of the two women.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Did two guys go in there? Both in grey suits and black ties, forty-ish? One of them British, the other from the Middle East?’
‘Don’t know anything,’ the woman replied. It was obvious that she spoke only limited English.
‘Didn’t see anyone,’ her companion added. She had bad teeth and a mangled London accent. ‘Ask him.’
A security guard with a goatee beard and acne scars was coming through the door. Cara asked him the same question and received the same answer. No, he hadn’t seen two men in grey suits and black ties. Perhaps they were around the corner in the casino? She gave him a brisk nod of thanks and turned her attention back to the car park. A sign on the wall said ‘FULL’, but the barrier was up and Cara could see movement inside a security hut at the base of the ramp. Her phone pulsed in her hand as she walked towards the hut, momentarily losing her footing on an uneven section of pavement. At the same time, a short, defeated-looking man in a brown woollen hat emerged from the hut. He was in his late fifties and wore a blue quilted jacket, torn at the shoulder, and scuffed black shoes. Like the security guard, he had a rough complexion but was very pale. Cara saw the stubborn, exhausted features of a man who had spent most of his life being pushed around.
‘Can I help you?’
An Eastern European accent. Cara guessed from his features that he was from the former Yugoslavia. She reached the bottom of the ramp so that they were face to face. The car park was small with a low, breeze-block ceiling and space inside for no more than two dozen vehicles. A section of torn plastic pipe had been left along one wall next to a black mini-skip with ‘Commercial Waste’ written on it.
‘Have two men been in here? Both wearing grey suits and black …’
There was no point in continuing. She had seen the Jaguar. Parked towards the rear of the car park beneath a faded poster of couples sitting around a roulette table in a packed casino. The man seemed to sense what she had seen and took a defensive step backwards.
‘That car,’ she said, pointing at it. ‘Where’s the owner?’
He shook his head. ‘What is this? Can I help you?’
‘Yeah. You can. That Jag.’ Cara continued to point at the car. ‘How long’s it been here?’
‘What do you want, please?’ he asked, and Cara saw that he was afraid.
‘I told you. The Jaguar.’
‘You have car here? What is your name, please?’
On her second day at Thames House, an instructor had told Cara’s intake that MI5 officers had the power to arrest members of the public and would be given identification cards made up by the Met so that they could pass for police officers. She had never had cause to take out her ID, but did so now, watching the attendant’s already pallid features pale still further as he realised what was happening.
‘Let’s do this the other way round,’ she said. ‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘Zoltan,’ he replied.
Cara suppressed a smile. It sounded like something he had made up on the spot, the sort of name you would give a robot dog in a Marvel movie.
‘And you’re the security guard here?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘You’ve been here for the last hour?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘So you saw that Jaguar coming in here less than ten minutes ago?’
The attendant shook his head. ‘I was
