Kenny Muldoon turned out quite the breakfast fiend: sausages, bacon, egg, beans, tomatoes; buckets of tea. Enough toast to carpet a barn. Shirley, no appetite, still had raw energy pulsing through her veins. But her last twist of coke was hours ago, and she had an unbreakable rule about never leaving home while carrying, so knew she was going to crash soon, with a long drive ahead of her … She nibbled a piece of toast, but swallowed a whole cup of tea without pausing, then poured another. Then said:
“So you collected a bald gentleman from the station last Tuesday, yes?”
“Don’t know about gentleman. Seemed a bit of a bruiser.”
“We won’t argue details. Where did you take him?”
“This some sort of romantic contretemps?” Kenny Muldoon rolled contretemps around his mouth like it was his last piece of sausage. “Sugar Daddy done a moonlit flit?”
Plucking the fork from Kenny’s unsuspecting grip, Shirley Dander impaled his hand with it then leaned on it heavily. Felt its tines scrape and pop through gristle; watched blood squirt like ketchup over the ruins of his full English.
“Heh, heh,” Kenny added.
Shirley blinked, and the fork remained in Kenny’s hand. She said, “Something like that. Do you remember where he went?”
Kenny Muldoon’s drooping eyelid was as much response as he was prepared to give at this juncture. Taxi drivers, thought Shirley. You could squash them into the same box holding all the bankers in London, and nobody would mind if you dropped it off a cliff. Her watchstrap had long been relieved of its bounty. She produced another tenner from her pocket instead. “I didn’t realise country life was so expensive.”
“You city folk don’t know you’re born,” he assured her. He put his knife down, took the money, slipped it into a pocket. Picked up his knife again. “Course I remember,” he said, as if everything that had happened between her question and this reply had been invisible business. “Couldn’t hardly not, he made such a fuss about it.”
“What sort of fuss?”
“Didn’t know where he was going, did he? Starts off saying he wants to go to Bourton-on-the-Water. Got halfway there, and he shouts out like he’s being kidnapped. Nearly took the car into a ditch, didn’t I? That’s not what you want in hard rain.”
His tone of voice made it clear that the incident still rankled.
“What was his problem?”
“Turns out he doesn’t mean Bourton-on-the-Water at all, does he? Turns out he means Upshott. And tries to make out that’s what he said in the first place, and I’m an idiot for not hearing properly. How long do you think I’ve been doing this job?”
Like she cared. “Fifteen years?”
“Try twenty-four. And I don’t mishear place names, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
In which case, wasn’t she due some change? “So what did you do?”
“What could I do? Turned round and took him to Upshott. He made me restart the clock too, on account of how he wasn’t paying a fare somewhere he didn’t want to be in the first place.” Kenny Muldoon shook his head at the sheer bloody injustice of a world where such outrages occur. “You can probably guess the size of the tip, too.”
Shirley made an O-shape out of finger and thumb, and he nodded gloomily.
“So what’s Upshott?”
“Upshott? It’s hardly anything. It’s a hundred houses and a pub.”
“Not got a railway station, then.”
Muldoon looked at her as if she’d dropped in from another planet. Fair play to him though, she was beginning to feel that way herself.
He said, “It’s not got hardly anything, but that’s where I left him. Zero gratuity on a twelve-quid fare. Sometimes I wonder why I do this job.”
Spearing the last morsel of sausage, he used it to mop up the last of the yolk, then transferred it to his mouth. From the look on his face, it was evident he found some small consolations in the role life had concocted for him.
“And that was the last you saw of him?”
“I drove away,” said Kenny Muldoon, “and I didn’t look back.”
In London, the Highway Code applies on a curve: for motorists, it’s a rulebook; for taxis, a guideline; for cyclists, a minor inconvenience. Min swerved into City Road without pausing, and a southbound lorry missed him by at least a yard, but blared its horn anyway. Ignoring it, he threaded through the gaggle of tourists on the crossing, scattering them for the safety of the pavement, little red rucksacks and all …
His bicycle had been chained to the rack on Broadgate Square, and now, helmet on and jacket off, Min was as close to being disguised as he’d ever been. Even if the Russians were looking out their taxi’s back window, they wouldn’t cop to him. He was just another maniac on two wheels.
Why are you doing this?
I don’t trust them.
You’re not supposed to trust them. That’s part of the game.
It was weird the way the voice of common sense sounded like Louisa.
The taxi was heading for the Old Street roundabout. This offered a variety of directions, in any one of which it might vanish, but for now it was pausing at pedestrian lights a hundred yards ahead and in the process of changing. Min, pedalling as fast as he’d pedalled in his life, pedalled faster; pulled out to overtake a slowing bus, and banged his left elbow against it as the back-draught caught him. Briefly he was suspended in a perfect, gravity-free moment … The bus honked madly, and here were the traffic lights, and there they were behind him, and a taxi was kerbing twenty yards ahead, and that damned bus was gaining, and Min had no choice but to brake hard, or be smeared against the front of one or the back of the other. He left rubber on the road’s surface. His teeth clenched so hard, he didn’t recognise their shape.
This is because of the way he was looking at me, isn’t it?
Don’t be stupid. It’s because he didn’t want us to know where they’re staying.
So you plan to chase them home on a bicycle?
The bus passed. Min hauled his bike round the parked taxi the way he might an unruly horse, and shouted something filthy through the driver’s window before starting to pedal again. His legs were cooked spaghetti, and the bike a torture device, until, with an inaudible click, they became one again, man and bike, Min and bike, and he was flowing into the Old Street roundabout, which boasted yet more traffic lights at its first spoke. Beyond them, four cars ahead, was a black cab, and Min was almost positive that the two heads conferring in its back seat were Piotr and Kyril—his legs were moving faster, the ground whipping away beneath his wheels, and there was a whole long stretch of Old Street, four hundred yards of it, before the pedestrian crossing—he’d never noticed before how many obstacles to free-flowing traffic littered the city, and would have been glad of it now, had the taxi not blown through the lights on amber, and sailed away towards Clerkenwell.