Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid (17 page)

‘What?’

The irritation in his colleague’s tone would have been unmistakable to most, but Statham apparently misinterpreted the question as encouragement to continue with his explanation.

‘Transport caffs,’ he said, swallowing the sausage and wafting a hand in front of his mouth. ‘You’d think they’d know how to do a decent bacon sarnie a damn sight better than somewhere like the Savoy Grill, wouldn’t you? Of course, if it was something like steak tartare or lobster au something-or-other, for instance, then you’d expect the boot to be on the other foot because they’ve—’

‘Colin?’

‘Mmm?’ said Statham, taking a slug of tea.

‘Why don’t you just shut up and pass me the HP sauce?’

‘Oh, okay.’ He picked up the plastic bottle of brown sauce at his elbow and handed it to Patterson. ‘Good idea. Smother it with enough of this stuff and you’ll never know the difference.’

‘Yes… I… will,’ said Patterson as if he were addressing a three-year-old whose first language was Swahili. ‘Because although it might disguise the
taste
, it’s not going to persuade me for one moment that this bacon is anywhere approaching crispy like I asked for in the first place.’

Unlike the other half dozen customers in the café, Statham seemed oblivious to the dramatic rise in volume with which this last sentence was delivered and chomped noisily on a generous slice of black pudding.

‘You know what?’ he said, leaning forward again and gesticulating with his fork at the bacon, which by now was almost entirely invisible under a blanket of sauce. ‘You could always cut out the fatty bits and just leave them on the side of the plate.’

With careful deliberation, Patterson replaced the lid on the sauce bottle and set it back down on the table. He looked up and registered the childlike enthusiasm in Statham’s eyes. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed,’ he said, ‘this is what is commonly referred to in the meat trade as
streaky
bacon.’

Statham sat back, deflated. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean. I suppose you wouldn’t be left with a great lot if you sort of… filleted it.’

‘Not only that, Colin, but I’d need to be a bloody neurosurgeon with a very sharp scalpel and about a couple of hours to spare.’ With that, Patterson slapped the top slice of bread back onto his sandwich and took a large bite. It took only a few moments of chewing before he realised he’d seriously overdone the HP sauce. He grabbed a paper napkin and spat most of the mouthful into it, and there was a loud clattering noise as the remainder of the sandwich connected with the plate in front of him.

‘I guess the sauce didn’t do the trick after all then,’ said Statham with what appeared to be a sympathetic smile.

Patterson drained half a mug of tea and then reached for a fresh napkin to wipe away the traces of brown sauce from his chin.

‘Bloody tea’s cold too,’ he said and looked at his watch. ‘Christ almighty, what the hell are they doing? They should have reported in twenty minutes ago.’

‘You want me to call them?’

‘No,’ said Patterson with a heavy sigh. ‘I’ll do it. You go and get me another tea – and make sure it’s hot this time. And get some crisps or biscuits or something. At least they won’t have messed those about.’

* * *

Jarvis roughly folded the sports section of
The Mail on Sunday
and slid it onto the top of the dashboard. He glanced across at Coleman, who had tilted the passenger seat as horizontally as it would go and was lying back with his eyes closed and his mouth open.

‘You asleep?’

There was no response.

He turned his attention to the campsite entrance and began to tap out a rhythm on the steering wheel. After a few seconds, he added an improvised melody, humming it at first and then whistling as he became more confident in the way the tune was developing.

‘Not bored, are you?’ said Coleman.

Jarvis stopped whistling but continued his tapping as he looked to his left to see that Coleman’s eyes were still shut.

‘Didn’t wake you, did I?’ he said.

‘Wasn’t asleep.’

‘Course you weren’t. That’s why you’ve been snoring your head off for the last half hour.’

Coleman’s eyes snapped open and he turned his head to fix them on his accuser. ‘I don’t snore.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The missus would have told me.’

Jarvis laughed. ‘You’ve been divorced for three years.’

‘So?’

‘So to my certain knowledge you haven’t slept with anyone since. So how do you know it’s not something you’ve developed since you were married?’

There was a brief pause as Coleman held his partner’s gaze. Then he yawned and stretched. ‘Anything happening?’ he said with a cursory nod towards the campsite entrance.

Jarvis stopped his drumming. ‘Not since the boys in blue dropped him off, no.’

The two men lapsed into silence for a few minutes until Jarvis rubbed his stomach with the palm of his hand and said, ‘I could murder a bag of chips and a couple of saveloys right now.’

‘You and me both, mate.’ Coleman checked the dashboard clock. ‘I haven’t had anything to eat since— Oh shit. Look at the bloody time.’

Jarvis looked. ‘Yeah? So?’

‘We were supposed to report in twenty minutes ago.’ He grabbed his mobile phone from the top pocket of his jacket just as it began to play the opening bars of
The William Tell Overture
. He didn’t need to look at the display screen to know who was calling him. ‘Hello?’…

… ‘Yeah, sorry, guv. Bit of a bad signal here.’

… ‘It’s fine now, yes, but we had to move up the road to—’

… ‘Not since they brought him back, no.’

… ‘A what? Sorry, guv, the signal’s going again.’ He smirked at Jarvis and made a circle with the index finger and thumb of his free hand while flexing his wrist up and down.

… ‘Oh right. Yeah, we put a tracker on the camper while he was away.’

… ‘But there’s only one entrance, guv.’

… ‘Okay.’

… ‘Okay, we’ll get right onto it.’

… ‘Yeah, fine. By the way, we haven’t had anything to eat for hours. I don’t suppose there’s any chance we—? … Hello? … Hello?’ He held the phone in front of him to look at the display. ‘Bastard hung up on me.’

‘Maybe his signal went,’ said Jarvis with a broad grin. ‘So what exactly are we getting right onto?’

‘He wants us to check out the van and make sure the guy’s still actually in there… without being spotted ourselves of course.’

‘Well where else is he gonna be? There’s only one way out, and we’ve been watching it the whole time.’

‘That’s what I told him, but he still wants us to make sure.’ Coleman reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. ‘Toss you for it.’

‘What?’

‘We can’t both go, can we?’ He flipped the coin into the air, caught it in the palm of his right hand and slapped it onto the back of his left.

‘Heads,’ said Jarvis and watched carefully as Coleman revealed the coin. ‘Best of three?’

‘On your bike, pal,’ Coleman said as he returned the coin to his pocket. ‘And while you’re at it, see if the site shop’s open yet.’

Jarvis grunted and opened the driver’s door a few inches. He stopped abruptly and snatched it back towards him when his peripheral vision caught sight of a small white hatchback speeding past from behind.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Not a single car goes by in over an hour, and then Lewis bloody Hamilton comes along and nearly takes the sodding door off.’

‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre,’ muttered Coleman and reached for the newspaper on top of the dashboard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sandra swerved slightly to avoid hitting the door of the dark blue Mondeo. She glanced in the rear-view mirror as she accelerated away and caught sight of Trevor, who was half lying and half crouching on the back seat with Milly beside him.

‘So you’d no idea you were being staked out by the same people who followed us yesterday?’ she said.

‘No. They police as well?’

‘Maybe. But like I said before, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys at the moment.’ She looked at Trevor in the mirror again. ‘And I have to say the same applies to you, my friend.’

Trevor shifted his position and asked if it was safe to sit up yet. Sandra told him it would be better to stay put for a few minutes, and she waited until they got to the junction with the main road before she stopped the car to let him move into the passenger seat. He strapped himself in, and she heard a strange sound that was somewhere between a gurgle and a growl.

‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Is that you or the dog?’

‘I’ve hardly eaten a thing in two days. I don’t suppose we could—’

‘No, I don’t suppose we could.’

Sandra tightened her grip on the steering wheel. My God but he’d got some nerve. First he dumps you at some crappy little roadside diner – which, by the way, involved you in a shitload of time, trouble and expense to get back to the festival and pick up your car – and now he reckons he can try it on again. Well have I got news for you, Trevor boy.

‘The thing I don’t get…’ he began.

Oh yeah? And what would that be, Mastermind?

‘
One
of the things I don’t get is how you knew where I was. I mean, I know the police have a whole load of technology and stuff, but…’

Sandra didn’t feel much like answering or getting into technical details about automatic numberplate recognition, but he’d probably just keep on at her till she did. ‘Let’s just say I have some useful contacts. When I called this particular one, there were already two APBs out on you, so I—’

‘Two?’

‘Yup.’

‘I don’t understand. Why would the police put out
two
APBs?’

‘I didn’t say the police were behind both of them, now did I?’

Sandra kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead, but she could sense that Trevor was staring at her, waiting for her to continue with an explanation. She decided to make him work for it.

‘Well?’ said Trevor eventually. ‘So who put out the other one?’

‘The thing is, this contact of mine is a pal, right? But even he couldn’t tell me the answer to that.’

‘Couldn’t or wouldn’t?’

Sandra shrugged. ‘What’s the difference? It all comes down to the same thing.’

‘And what’s that exactly?’

‘Think about it. Somebody with the authority – but who’s not the police – puts out an APB, but no-one’s supposed to know who that somebody is. In fact, it’s a big
secret
,’ she said with heavy emphasis on the last word.

She looked across at Trevor’s expressionless face and realised the penny still hadn’t dropped.

‘Secret Service would be my guess,’ she said and turned her attention back to the road.

‘Secret Service?’ Trevor laughed. ‘What, MI5 and all that?’

‘Probably.’

‘And why would the Secret Service be interested in
me
for God’s sake?’

‘You were the one who told me your van used to belong to James Bond,’ she said and hummed the first few notes of the 007 theme tune.

Ever since she’d spoken to her contact and begun to suspect that MI5 might be involved, Sandra had developed serious misgivings about the true significance of the package she’d been hired to collect and deliver. Of course, she’d assumed from the very first that there had to be something not entirely legal about the whole setup. No-one’s going to pay out two thousand pounds when a courier service could do exactly the same thing for a pittance – unless there was something dodgy going on. But operating on the edge of the law – or sometimes just outside it – was often part of the job as far as she was concerned, and the money had been too good to turn down. MI5, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter. Jesus, they only ever got interested if it was something to do with national security or terrorism. That kind of stuff.

Then there was the issue of the cigarette packets. She had grilled Trevor about those back at the campsite, but he’d been so adamant that they were all he’d found in the Jiffy bag, she’d been inclined to believe him. But even when she’d carried out a pretty thorough search of the van, she couldn’t be a hundred per cent certain he was telling the truth, and she wasn’t about to take any chances. She didn’t know much about her clients, but she’d formed the distinct impression that they weren’t the kind of people who would take failure lightly. If any shit was going to hit the fan when she dropped off the package, she wanted Trevor there as her human shield. Not surprisingly, he’d dug his heels in at first, insisting that he’d simply made a huge mistake and almost pleading with her to just take the Jiffy bag and leave him behind, but Sandra’s gun had soon convinced him that this was not an option.

She’d also been more than curious to know why the police had picked him up, but she’d decided that her priority was to get the package to Sheffield as instructed. She’d told the guy on the phone it would take her about two hours to get there, and she was already running late. Quizzing Trevor about the police could wait till they were on the road, and now seemed like as good a time as any.