Brigands M. C. (36 page)

‘I’m hardly even drunk,’ Lauren protested, as she stood bolt upright with her arms rigid like a soldier about to march.

Joe looked at Anna. ‘What about you?’

‘I lied and told my mum that I was sleeping over at Tracy’s house,’ Anna explained. ‘But Tracy’s dad picked her up ages ago.’

‘You can stay here,’ Joe said.

‘But no hanky panky,’ Lauren snorted, as she bunched a fist. ‘He’s my man. You keep your hands off !’

‘Come on, sister,’ Dante moaned as he grabbed Lauren’s arm and pulled her forward. ‘Let’s get you home.’

‘We’ve got a wheelbarrow,’ Joe grinned. ‘You could stick her in that if you like.’

Anna cracked up laughing as Lauren staggered down the hallway, holding on to the walls and telling nobody in particular that she was perfectly fine and didn’t need any help. Then she tripped over the doormat and sprawled out on the patio.

‘Ooopsie daisy,’ Lauren giggled, as Dante rushed forward and helped her up. ‘Who put that stupid thing there?’

‘See you tomorrow, maybe,’ Dante called back to Joe, as he began walking up the drive with Lauren’s arm draped over his shoulder. ‘Or maybe at school on Monday.’

‘Not if I see you first,’ Joe said, giving the thumbs-up as he closed the front door.

Lauren being off her face had seemed funny back in the kitchen, but by the time they’d made it up the long drive and turned towards home the stumbling and giggling was getting on Dante’s nerves. When they reached a section of the busy lane with a grass verge he stopped walking, grabbed Lauren’s hand and jerked her arm to make sure she was looking at him.

‘I don’t know if Chloe’s home,’ Dante warned. ‘But if she sees you walking into the house like this you’re gonna face suspension from missions. So
stop
mucking about.’

Lauren poked out her tongue. ‘Bee boo,’ she giggled, showering Dante in spit.

Dante squeezed her hand hard and spoke firmly. ‘I’m not mucking about, Lauren. This is serious.’

‘You’re hurting me,’ she whined, as she tried tugging her hand free.

Dante was worried, because even though Lauren was completely smashed she still knew some nifty combat moves. But he kept squeezing Lauren’s hand because otherwise she’d ignore him.

‘You’re being an idiot,’ he barked. ‘Do you want me to leave you here? Because I will.’

As Dante said this, a big four-wheel-drive Toyota whizzed past, blowing Lauren’s hair about.

‘If you don’t let go of me,’ Lauren began angrily, but then her expression changed. ‘You know, your eyes are
dead
sexy when you’re angry.’

Before Dante knew it she’d grabbed him around the neck and started kissing him. Lauren was fit and he instinctively opened his mouth wide and pulled her in, but after a couple of seconds he saw sense and pushed her back.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘We’ve both had a few drinks and imagine if someone drives by. We’re
supposed
to be brother and sister.’

Lauren started to walk under her own steam. She was a bit wobbly, but Dante kept close and made sure that she didn’t fall or wander out into the traffic.

She turned back with a serious expression and a wagging finger. ‘I think you’re one of the nice guys, Dante,’ she slurred. ‘Most boys would have taken advantage. If you’d been like my brother you’d have my top off by now.’

‘Watch the cars,’ Dante warned, as a Ford skimmed by and blasted its horn.

Dante nudged Lauren back to the side of the road, but at least she was moving quickly and it was much easier going without her arm draped around his back.

The last third of the walk was on a much quieter road with a proper paved sidewalk. It curved up a gentle slope through the estate of luxury homes where they lived. Dante was relieved to be out of the traffic, but now he worried that Chloe would drive past or that Lauren would make a noise and disturb the neighbours.

What he didn’t expect was to see her start clambering through the hedge at the bottom of their road.

‘Where are you going?’ Dante asked.

‘I’m absolutely busting,’ Lauren said. ‘I’ll be two seconds.’

Dante tutted. ‘We’re three hundred metres from home. You
don’t
need to go in a hedge.’

But Lauren was full of drunken determination and ploughed through the branches. As she stood up on the other side Dante heard her trainer skid, followed by a yelp and a kind of zipping sound.

‘Lauren, are you OK?’ Dante shouted, following her through the hedge.

Dante realised that Lauren had tripped over a knee-high railing. She’d then slid two metres down a forty-five-degree concrete embankment and landed in a drainage channel designed to stop the water that ran off the hill from flooding the road.

‘Are you OK?’ Dante asked anxiously. He cleared the railing and stepped gingerly down the concrete slope. At least the bottom of the channel was dry after all the recent hot weather.

It was almost dark, but the moonlight caught a pained expression on Lauren’s face. ‘I landed really hard on my hand,’ she explained. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done but it hurts like shit.’

*

McEwen parked five hundred metres back and watched through binoculars as Paul Woodhead reversed the white van into a dilapidated farm building a kilometre from his Dartmouth home. After padlocking the doors, Woodhead donned a crash helmet and leather jacket before getting on a small Yamaha trail bike and heading back out to the road.

‘What do you think?’ Neil asked over the police radio from inside the surveillance van.

‘I’ll stay here and see what we’ve got,’ McEwen said. ‘You follow Woodhead’s bike. He’s almost certainly heading for home, but let’s be sure.’

‘Copied and understood,’ Neil said.

McEwen grabbed a torch, a video camera and a lock gun from the glove box before stepping out of the BMW and heading towards the barn. He approached slowly and used the binoculars to check the building from all sides, making sure there was no sign of an alarm or surveillance cameras. When he got up close he flicked on the torch and shone it over the dirt outside the shed to see if there were any trip wires or motion sensors.

It all seemed reassuringly low tech. So was the two-lever padlock, which McEwen popped with a filed-down key and a sharp slam from behind. The wooden door was noisy and he jolted as his radio made a bleep.

‘He’s home,’ Neil said. ‘Watched him strip off through the bedroom window and head for the bathroom.’

‘Might as well come back here then,’ McEwen said. ‘I’m already inside.’

‘See you there,’ Neil said.

McEwen kept an eye out for security devices as he circled the van. Once he felt safe, he put on a set of clear plastic gloves and pulled the small video camera out of his pocket. The back doors of the van were unlocked and he caught a whiff of fish as the light mounted on the video camera illuminated the boxes.

‘Could start a nice little war with that lot,’ McEwen said a couple of minutes later when Neil arrived. ‘Grenades, assault rifles, bullets. There’s even an RPG launcher in there.’

Neil was shocked. ‘George didn’t order any RPG launcher.’

McEwen shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ve got other customers. Or maybe it’s for the Führer’s private armoury.’

‘What now?’ Neil asked.

‘There’s some miniature tracking devices in the BMW,’ McEwen explained. ‘We can use them to follow individual boxes when the weapons are moved. Unfortunately the mini trackers are a lot less reliable than the big suckers we stick on the cars.’

‘And then we watch and wait,’ Neil said. ‘The question is how long? Hours, days, weeks?’

‘I expect that the Brigands will want their money ASAP,’ McEwen said, as he looked at his watch and yawned. ‘All I know for sure is that I’ve been on duty since I got out of bed this morning, so I hope your boss Chief Inspector Johnson is sending someone down here to relieve us before too much longer.’

‘Someone’s coming down from our London HQ,’ Neil said, shaking his head ruefully. ‘But we’re gonna have to keep our eyes propped open for a few more hours yet.’

James spent the night on a huge feather mattress and managed breakfast in bed before 8 a.m., when a driver from campus arrived to take him and the bike back to Salcombe. The roads were Sunday-morning quiet and driving a van registered to an organisation that doesn’t exist means you can’t pick up speeding fines, so they made three hundred and twenty miles in less than five hours.

According to Radio Cambridge the trouble at the Tea Party had resulted in several stabbings, four people with serious burns and one fatality. The story had also made it on to the tail end of national radio news.

James couldn’t be seen arriving home in a van, so they pulled over fifteen miles from Salcombe. It was a glorious morning as James rolled his bike down a ramp and he powered off with only a slight headache and his busted helmet visor to remind him of the day before. The clear roads and lush countryside made him feel like he was riding through a TV commercial.

The long journey the day before had boosted James’ confidence in the saddle. He rode fast and when he pulled on to the brick driveway he’d have been happy to turn back and do it again. He rummaged in his backpack, but couldn’t find his door key and rang the bell.

Lauren came to the door in pool shoes and James’ Green Day T-shirt. ‘Where’s your key, div?’ she said dourly.

‘I wondered where that shirt disappeared to,’ James said. ‘You look
seriously
rough.’

‘Joe’s party,’ Lauren explained in a flat voice, before raising her arm to show off a plaster cast.

‘Who’d you punch?’ James grinned.

‘You’re
so
funny,’ Lauren said, and wandered into the kitchen with James behind her. She reached up into a cupboard and grabbed two fizzy paracetamol tablets from a medicine box. As she dropped the pills into a glass of water, Dante came in from the garden smelling of grass. His bare chest glistened with sweat.

‘
How
convenient,’ Dante complained. ‘Lauren can’t push the mower with her broken wrist and you turn up just as I roll it back into the garage.’

Hot from his ride, James filled a mug with tap water and gulped it down. ‘You still haven’t told me how you did your wrist in.’

‘Let Dante explain,’ Lauren said, waving her hand in front of her face. ‘I’m going back to bed for a bit. Tell Chloe that if she makes lunch I don’t want anything.’

‘Not even a nice pickled beetroot and raw liver sandwich?’ James teased.

Lauren glowered at her brother. ‘James, if I spew up I’m gonna aim at you.’

‘You should have seen her,’ Dante said quietly, as Lauren padded upstairs to her bed. ‘She drank about a dozen wine spritzers. She was
completely
smashed. She tried squatting in the hedge at the bottom of the road to take a piss and she fell into the drainage channel.’

James burst out laughing. ‘You’re shitting me! She doesn’t usually get drunk. She always says she doesn’t like the taste of alcohol.’

‘I thought she was gonna get in trouble with Chloe,’ Dante explained. ‘Fortunately the pain from her wrist had sobered her up by the time Chloe got to the hospital.’

James found all this highly amusing. ‘Well, that’s something else I can wind her up about. Is Chloe in?’

‘Sitting on the patio reading the
Sunday Times
while I slaved my guts out in the sun,’ Dante explained bitterly. ‘I’m gonna dive in the shower.’

James wandered out into the back garden where Chloe lay on a sun lounger wearing big sunglasses. She had the
Style
magazine from the newspaper and James thought she looked sexy in shorts and a lime green bikini top. He’d already called her the night before and explained everything that happened at the Tea Party, minus his two hours bonking in the back of a caravan.

‘Get back OK?’ Chloe asked.

‘Pretty painless,’ James nodded. ‘And the hotel was nice so I got some kip.’

‘You had a call about an hour ago. Dirty Dave.’

James smiled casually. ‘He’s got a kind of hero-worship thing going with me since I saved his butt at the service station yesterday. I tell you, if I play him right I could get right in close with the Brigands.’

‘That’s why you’re here,’ Chloe smiled. She reached towards a bottle of suntan lotion that was just beyond her fingertips. ‘Pass that up, would you?’

‘Don’t strain yourself, girl,’ James said, as he kicked the bottle towards her. ‘Did you get a number?’

‘Written on a Post-it by the phone,’ Chloe nodded.

The lotion bottle made a farting noise as Chloe squeezed it. James grabbed the phone in the living-room and dialled Dirty Dave’s mobile.

‘Are you home OK?’ Dave asked.

‘Just arrived,’ James said. ‘I’m sorry I bailed, but it was getting messed up in there. My mum’s gonna kick my arse: my helmet’s busted, my Kawasaki needs a new indicator lamp and my tent, sleeping bag and everything got cremated.’

‘No one’s holding it against you,’ Dave said. ‘The Führer’s wife Marlene was on that coach. She says you’re a sodding hero the way you chain-whipped that Bitch Slapper.’