Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid (25 page)

Even so, Patterson’s intense anxiety meant that he couldn’t help offering unwelcome and unnecessary words of advice at annoyingly frequent intervals. He seemed particularly fond of shouting ‘Careful!’ or ‘Watch out!’ whenever a slower vehicle was blocking their path and Statham raced up to within three feet of its rear bumper, flashing his headlights until it got out of their way.

‘Do you have to get quite so close?’ he said when Statham’s latest victim – a silver BMW convertible – gradually eased over into the middle lane. The driver’s obvious reluctance to give way had perhaps been compounded by Statham having added several blasts of the horn to his repertoire of intimidation techniques.

‘Sorry,’ he said, taking his hand from the steering wheel just long enough to return the BMW driver’s single finger salute as he accelerated past. ‘I thought we were in a hurry.’

‘All I’m saying is that…’ Patterson lost the will to finish the sentence. ‘Oh never mind.’

They drove on in silence for several minutes, and both men stared straight ahead through the insect spattered windscreen.

‘You’re not still being cranky about that bacon sandwich this morning, are you?’ Statham said eventually.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Patterson with more than a hint of petulance. ‘It may have escaped your notice, Colin, but this whole operation has been an unmitigated bloody disaster right from the start. We’ve shelled out a hundred and fifty thousand quid of taxpayers’ money for an address we still don’t have. I’ve spent the last God knows how many hours twiddling my thumbs because two of the most incompetent agents in the Service managed to lose the pillock who actually took the money – and probably also knows what the address is. And, to cap it all, I’ve got the top brass all over me, wanting to know what the hell is going on, and some jumped-up Al Capone wannabe telling me he hasn’t got the money and the whole deal’s off until he has. And you think I’m being “cranky” because of some bloody undercooked bacon sandwich?’

Statham did his best to placate him by pointing out that they’d finally got a result from the APB and at least they were back on track again, so things could be a lot worse. But Patterson barely heard him. He was far too preoccupied with the rear end of a dark green Range Rover which loomed ever larger as they hurtled towards it.

‘Watch out!’ shouted Patterson, his knuckles glowing whiter than ever on the edges of his seat.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Quarter-pounders, half-pounders, cheeseburgers, chilliburgers, veggieburgers, nuggety things in batter – the pictures themselves looked almost good enough to eat. Trevor wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and steadied himself against the counter with the other.

‘Hello, sir. And what can I get you today?’

Trevor’s gaze drifted downwards from the photograph of an apple pie that was topped with a small tower of what looked like shaving foam, past the cherry red baseball cap and the enormous zit on the lad’s forehead to the slab-lensed glasses and the eager piggy eyes beyond them.

He shook his head and tried to focus. ‘Uh?’

‘What can I
get
you, sir?’

‘Erm, do you take Swiss francs?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Like this,’ said Trevor and painstakingly smoothed out a thousand franc note on the counter. ‘Sorry, I haven’t got anything smaller.’

Piggy Eyes’s laugh was more like a whinny. ‘It’s not that, sir. It’s just that we don’t—’

‘How much for a piggy sandwich?’

‘Sir?’

‘Bacon. –
Bacon
sandwich. Oink oink?’

It was as if his tongue had been taken over by some alien being. He could hear the words that came out of his mouth, but he seemed to have no control at all over what those words might be. The only drugs he’d ever taken were the sort you bought at Boots, but he would hazard a guess that this must be what it felt like when you were stoned. Not just the verbal thing but the slow motion wave machine inside your head and the feeling that someone else was operating all your limbs with lengths of floppy elastic.

Concentrate, Trevor. You need to get a grip before someone calls the manager – or the police even. He grabbed at the overhanging lip of the counter to stop himself from falling.

‘You feeling all right, sir?’

Again, Trevor shook his head in an attempt to clear his hunger-addled brain but immediately realised he’d failed when his mouth began to move and he heard the words: ‘I’ll give you a thousand Swiss francs for one BLT and a piece of apple pie. You can even skip the cream if you want. Frank won’t mind. He’s Swiss anyway. He’s got all the cream he can handle.’

Oh hell, that wasn’t really him with the braying cackle, was it?

‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to ask you to—’

Before Piggy Eyes could finish the sentence, Trevor leaned towards him across the counter and, with a conspiratorial wink, whispered, ‘We’ve got a gun, you know.’

‘Ah, so this is where you’ve been hiding, is it?’

The woman’s voice was familiar and so too was the firm grip on his arm. He turned to face her.

‘Come along now,’ said Sandra. ‘The coach is waiting, and everyone wants to get back for their tea.’

Coach? What coach? What was she on about? And why was she talking to him like he was a three-year-old?

‘I do hope he hasn’t caused you any bother.’

Trevor followed the direction of her sickly grin, which appeared to be targeted on Piggy Eyes’s Vesuvius of a pimple.

‘Well, er, no. I suppose, er…’

Even from where he stood in his own not-quite-so-parallel universe, Trevor could tell that the lad was struggling to come up with the appropriate corporate-approved response, and he was struck with a sudden and largely genuine pity for the poor kid. But the ‘Have a nice day?’ Piggy Eyes eventually opted for lost him every one of the sympathy votes he’d just notched up, especially as he made it sound more like a question than an imperative. And as for the accompanying stab at a mission statement smile, well…

‘Chop chop then, Mr McMurphy. Shake a leg,’ said Sandra, snatching up the thousand franc note from the counter.

Her grasp tightened around his arm, and he felt himself being half dragged towards the exit.

‘Shouldn’t be allowed out if you ask me,’ he heard somebody in the queue say as they passed.

Outside in the car park, Sandra let go of his arm and rounded on him with an expression that was entirely unsuited to her carer’s act of a few short moments ago.

‘Are you completely bloody insane?’ she said. ‘“We’ve got a gun, you know”.’

Trevor could remember saying it, but he was sure he hadn’t used such a whiney voice.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said. ‘I’m delirious from lack of food. It’s like I was having some kind of mini breakdown. Like someone else was saying the words and there was nothing I could do about it.’

‘Oh gimme a break.’

‘It’s true. And if you hadn’t left your purse back at the hotel—’

‘I didn’t
leave
it. It was
taken
from me if you recall.’

‘Whatever,’ said Trevor, warming to his theme and suddenly aware that the fresh air seemed to have brought him back down to Planet Earth – for now at least. ‘And if I hadn’t had to spend a small fortune on van repairs and extortionate hotel rooms, I would’ve had more than enough cash on me to buy eight zillion whopper-cheesy-chilli-veggie-nugget-burgers and still have had enough left for three quarters of a ton of apple pie with or without squirty-foamy-cream.’

‘Finished?’

‘No. How much of my tenner did you spend on petrol?’

‘All of it.’

‘All of it?’ Trevor felt decidedly faint.

‘We need to get to Bristol, don’t we?’

‘
You
do. At this rate, I’ll have died of starvation long before we—’

‘Oh don’t be such a baby,’ said Sandra, reaching into her jacket pocket. ‘Here.’

Trevor caught his breath and stared down at the King Size Mars bar in her hand. ‘What’s that?’

‘What’s it look like?’

The juices began to flow inside Trevor’s mouth, and he gulped them back. ‘But I thought you said—’

‘Found a few coppers down the back of the seat in the car and a bit more under the mats.’

Trevor wanted to kiss her, but he wouldn’t have been able to take his eyes off the Mars bar long enough to aim straight. Besides, it was a pretty safe bet that she’d slap him.

‘I was going to say we’d split it fifty fifty,’ she said, ‘but it seems your need is far greater than mine. I don’t want you pegging out on me just yet.’

A variety of protestations flashed through Trevor’s mind, and he knew full well that the eventual ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of it’ sounded limp and utterly unconvincing.

‘Just eat the bloody thing, will you?’

He wrenched his attention away from the Mars bar to check out her expression. Yep. Definitely pissy. His fingertips reached out and made contact with the wrapper, and this seemed to trigger a slight thaw in her features.

‘In any case,’ she said. ‘I need to shed some weight.’

‘No you don’t.’

Trevor blurted the words out before he had given them due care and attention, and he couldn’t even blame the alien being for taking over his tongue this time. For once, Sandra seemed at a loss for a response, and she put a hand to her face and glanced over her shoulder as if startled by a sudden noise behind her. That wasn’t a… blush, was it?

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time we weren’t here.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Apart from the fitted cupboards, cooker and refrigerator in the kitchen area of the open plan living room, the apartment was almost entirely devoid of furniture except for a wing-backed armchair with wooden arms and legs, upholstered in faded gold Dralon, which looked like it had recently been retrieved from a skip. It was in almost the exact centre of the room, facing towards a wide, aluminium-framed window set into the wall opposite the main entrance to the flat. There were no curtains, and the late afternoon sun streamed in, illuminating vast clouds of dust particles that drifted lazily through the breezeless atmosphere.

The grey-haired man in the suit who occupied the armchair would have felt the warmth of the sunshine on his pallid and wrinkled face even though he was unable to see it. Nor would he have been able to walk over to the window and open it to let in some cooler air. He could not have politely asked the man who sat on the floor beneath it to put down his Nintendo game for a moment and reach up to open it for him. The same silver duct tape that held his arms and legs firmly fixed to the chair had also been used to gag and blindfold him.

Lenny – the man with the Nintendo – had not so much as glanced in his direction for the past half hour or more, so intent was he on his game. His brow was deeply furrowed in concentration as his thumbs worked feverishly at the console, stopping abruptly every once in a while and swearing in frustration. Considerably less often, he would lift one of his thumbs from its button to punch the air with a victorious exclamation such as ‘Yes!’ or sometimes ‘Oh yes!’

‘What time is it?’

‘Damn it,’ said Lenny, dropping the console onto his lap. ‘I was just about to get to Level Four then till you opened your pie-hole.’

Carrot’s bald head protruded from a blue and yellow sleeping bag in the far corner of the room, his features almost entirely obscured by the ginger toupee, which he had pulled down over his eyes to block out the light while he tried to sleep. He wriggled a hand up through the neck of the sleeping bag and adjusted the wig to its rightful position. Then he unzipped the bag as far as his waist and sat up, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles and yawning loudly.

‘As if it isn’t hard enough to sleep with your constant bloody bleeping,’ he said through the tail end of the yawn, ‘I also have to put up with you shouting “yes” or “bugger” or “shit” every few seconds.’

‘Oh pardon me for breathing.’

Carrot looked at him and stretched expansively. ‘Lenny, I hate to have to tell you this, but you do sound unbelievably camp at times. You know that, don’t you?’

Lenny gave him the finger and took hold of the window sill to haul himself to his feet. He pulled a face and massaged his backside with both hands. ‘Jesus. Remind me to bring a cushion or something next time, will you?’

‘Next time?’ Carrot snorted. ‘I bloody hope not.’

‘It’s all right for you, matey. You’re not the one with the old racing injury.’

Carrot made no reply, but his eyes followed Lenny as he walked stiffly over to the kitchen area and began rummaging through the litter of empty cans, foil takeaway containers and pizza boxes on top of the breakfast bar.

‘So what time
is
it then?’

Lenny checked his watch. ‘Half four,’ he said with the irritable tone of someone who had yet again been distracted from the job in hand. ‘Don’t tell me there’s no bloody food left in this craphole.’

‘You only just had lunch.’