That not-quite-identifiable accent, unusual in a police officer. Doubt is beginning to enter Eve’s mind now. Expert hands pat her down, take her phone, and unholster the Glock. She hears the faint click of the magazine release, and then feels the pistol replaced. This, Eve knows with sick certainty, is no police officer.
‘Turn round.’
Eve does so. Notes the lean female form in the high-visibility jacket, leather trousers and boots. Watches as the woman’s hands lift her visor to reveal a flat, ice-grey gaze. A gaze that she has encountered once before. On a busy street in Shanghai, the night that Simon Mortimer was found with his head all but hacked from his body.
‘You,’ Eve says. She can hardly breathe. Her heart is slamming in her chest.
‘Me.’ She removes her helmet. Underneath it she’s wearing a Lycra face-mask that conceals all her features except those frozen grey eyes. Lowering the helmet to the ground she beckons to Cradle, who walks over. ‘Let the VW’s tyres down, Dennis, and put the car key in your pocket. Then wait over by the motorcycle.’
Cradle looks at Eve, smiles, and shrugs. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m afraid you lose this round. We look after our own, you see.’
‘I see,’ says Eve, trying to steady herself.
The woman takes her by the upper arm, leads her away a few paces, and examines her features as if trying to commit them to memory. ‘I’ve missed you, Eve. Missed your face.’
‘I wish I could say the same.’
‘Don’t be like that, Eve. Don’t be bitter.’
‘Are you going to kill Cradle?’
‘Why? Do you think I should?’
‘It is what you do, isn’t it?’
‘Please. Let’s not talk about that. We meet so rarely.’ She raises her hand and touches a finger to Eve’s face, and as she does so Eve is dumbfounded to see that she is wearing the bracelet that she lost in Shanghai.
‘That’s . . . that’s mine. Where did you get it?’
‘From your room at the Sea Bird Hotel. I climbed in one night to watch you sleep, and I just couldn’t resist it.’
Eve stares at her, blank-faced. ‘You . . . watched me sleep?’
‘You looked so adorable, with your hair all over the pillow. So vulnerable.’ She loops an errant tress behind Eve’s ear. ‘You should take more care of yourself, though. You remind me of someone I used to know. The same pretty eyes, the same sad smile.’
‘What was her name? What’s your name?’
‘Oh, Eve. I have so many names.’
‘You know my name but you’re not going to tell me yours?’
‘It would spoil things.’
‘Spoil things? You broke into my fucking house this morning, and you’re worried that you’ll spoil things?’
‘I wanted to leave you something. A surprise.’ She shakes the bracelet on her wrist. ‘In return for this. But now, although I’m really loving our chat, I have to go.’
‘You’re taking him?’ Eve nods at Cradle, who is loitering by the motorcycle, twenty paces away.
‘I have to. But we must do this again, there’s so much I want to ask you. So much I have to tell you. So à bientôt,Eve. See you soon.’
As they fly along the country roads, the trees and hedgerows still vivid in the early autumn sunlight, Cradle feels a profound lightening of spirit. They’ve come for him, as they always promised they would if he was blown, and now they’re going to take him somewhere safe. Somewhere the Twelve’s word is the rule of law. It will mean never seeing his family again, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices. In the case of Penny, that sacrifice is not so arduous. And the kids, well, he’s given them a first-class start in life. Fee-paying north London schools, skiing holidays in the Trois Vallées, godparents well-placed in the City.
He wasn’t expecting a woman to come for him, but he certainly isn’t complaining, given what he’s seen of this one. She certainly put that Polastri bitch in her place. And what genius to send her in the guise of a traffic-cop.
They ride for almost an hour, before stopping by a bridge over a river outside the Surrey town of Weybridge. The woman pulls the BMW onto its stand, then removes her helmet and jacket, tugs off her face-mask, and shakes out her hair. Taking off his own, borrowed, helmet, Cradle stares at her appreciatively.
He considers himself something of a connoisseur of the female form, and this one scores highly. The dark blonde hair sweaty, but nothing he can’t work with. The eyes a bit frozen and weird, but that mouth suggesting whole realms of sexual possibility. The tits? Sweet as apples beneath the tight T-shirt. And what man didn’t feel a stirring in his Calvins at the sight of a girl in leather trousers and biker boots? Dressed like that, she has to be up for it. And he is, effectively, a single man again.
‘Let’s walk,’ she says, glancing at the BMW’s satnav. ‘The rendezvous for the next stage of your journey is up this way.’
A path leads from the road down to the side of the River Wey. The water is dark olive, the current so slow that the surface looks still. The banks are shadowed by trees, and overgrown with cow-parsley. At intervals, narrowboats and barges lie motionless at anchor.
‘So where am I going?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Perhaps, if we meet again . . .’ he begins.
‘Yes?’
‘Bite of dinner? Something like that?’
‘Perhaps.’
They continue along the sun-splashed path, passing no one, until arriving at a broad weir-pool fringed with bullrushes and flag-iris.
‘This is the rendezvous,’ she says.
Cradle looks around him. The river, its waters moving smoothly towards the rushing weir, has the keen, indefinable smell of such places. Mud, vegetation and rot. There’s a timelessness about the scene that reminds him of his childhood. Of The Wind in the Willows, of Ratty, Mole and Toad. And that chapter he never quite understood: ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. Cradle is pondering this enigma when a police-issue baton, swung with extreme force, connects with the base of his skull. He pitches almost
