Marcus had known about stuff like that, and if he’d been standing here instead of Shirley, he’d be coming up with a plan.
Which would involve assuming the worst. There was no point treating the van as innocent, because being wrong could prove a disaster. So: would they recognise her, that was the first question. Were they watching her through a peephole, planning to whack her before heading into the library? Or had it been too dark last night, and Shirley just a moving target in the chaos? Their bullets had gone high – was that because they’d been aiming to miss, or were they lousy shots? She had a low centre of gravity, of course – in layman’s terms, was ‘short’ – and that might have thrown their aim off. Being a non-traditional shape had its advantages.
None of which would count for much if they emerged from the van, guns blazing.
She ate a chip, nodded as if in appreciation – every move she made now, she had an audience – and then, still nodding, moved round the car and opened the boot. Watching or not, they couldn’t see through metal, so wouldn’t have been able to observe as she rummaged about in Louisa’s detritus – an old blanket, a wine cooler, trainers – until she found, tucked under the blanket, the monkey wrench, and slid it up her right sleeve. Then, her arm ramrod straight, she closed the boot and returned to her meal, her right hand hooked into her jeans pocket, her left plucking chips and lumps of fish from the mound of paper and steering them mouthwards. Watch me now, Marcus, she thought, and imagined him saying You go, girl.
And she would.
She was just waiting for her moment.
He had no clue where Coe had got to, and when he tried calling got no response. This probably meant the dickhead wasn’t answering, rather than – say – that the dickhead had cornered a hit squad and had his hands full, so River couldn’t get too worked up about it, except for Coe being a dickhead: that never got old. The meeting hall was full now, an air of expectation hanging like fruit. Dennis Gimball, River gathered, was set to make some grand pronouncement: a declaration that he was about to rejoin the party he’d once defected from, a return trip across the Rubicon which many expected would end in his contesting the leadership. That would make as much difference to the ship of state as a koala taking over from a wombat, River thought, though he accepted he wasn’t a political expert. If he were he’d be looking for honest work, like every expert since 2016 should have been.
Anyway: no Coe that he could see. And nothing else to alarm him, or no more than such gatherings always offer: the swivel-eyed fervents; the Union Jack bowler brigade. A man wearing the widest pinstripes River had seen outside a zoo; a woman carrying a pot plant. The one thing absent was Gimball himself. A group by the stage, chatting among themselves and checking their watches, were presumably local dignitaries, and the dangerous-looking woman in blue might be Mrs Gimball, but there was no sign of her husband. Perhaps, like a rock star, he delayed his entrance until every seat in the hall was damp, though with this particular demographic that might prove a risky business.
He headed outside. There were people still waiting to get in, and the TV truck was mildly buzzing: all powered up and ready to shoot. But not that kind of shooting, River reminded himself. He tried to recollect the odds Coe had quoted on anything going down here tonight, but couldn’t. What he did remember was Coe’s equal insistence that he was right; that machinery was whirring; had already chewed up Abbotsfield and fourteen innocent penguins. Dennis Gimball wasn’t necessarily next on the list, but that there was a list was beyond dispute. That was what the dickhead reckoned, anyway. And dickhead logic was as powerful as any other kind.
So where was Gimball, anyway? Maybe he had nerves before an event of this kind, and was bent double over a toilet.
And where was Coe?
Deciding to walk the block once more, River rounded the corner and approached the building clad in scaffolding, which flaunted a cemetery spookiness now, the metal poles lending it a rackety, haunted air. And he was just starting to reach for his phone, to call Coe again, when he reached the alleyway instead, and saw two figures at the far end: one large, broad, intimidating; the other Dennis Gimball.
‘She’s eating chips,’ Shin said.
‘So?’
‘So would she be eating chips if she was on surveillance?’
Danny shrugged. It might be a good disguise; somebody saw you eating chips, they figured you were hungry and that was all. But they saw you hanging around outside a building, they might think you were keeping an eye on it. So he thought it best to keep an open mind.
Shin, though, was keen to close it down. ‘We don’t move until the streetlights have come on. I expect she will have gone by then.’
Danny caught An’s eye, but neither spoke.
This last twenty-four hours, every order from Shin’s lips sounded like a suggestion.
An had drilled a peephole in the van’s back door. Danny shuffled across to it, and Shin – weak-willed fool that he was – moved away to let him see through.
The woman was short, a little wide, would probably have been better off with a salad, and was clearly on her own. What kind of operation involved a woman on her own? She moved awkwardly too: stiff-armed. Not what you’d expect from a soldier.
Still, there had been a woman outside the target’s house last night, at the exact moment Joon came tumbling from the sky like a stork had dropped him. She’d hit the ground when Danny shot at her, and maybe that was because she’d been well trained, and maybe it was the human instinct at work: when bullets were flying, you dropped to your knees. He couldn’t recall anything specific about her: he had learned this at Abbotsfield, that when you held a gun in your hands, the people around you lost definition. They became wraiths, and anything they carried of personality dropped away, no longer of consequence. If you wished to retain your human stamp, stay away from the battlefield. This proposition remained true whichever end of a gun you were looking down.
Besides, they’d been out of there so quickly – Joon stuffed into the car like a bin bag – that he couldn’t be sure the woman hadn’t been shot: that might have been why she’d hit the deck. So maybe there was a dead woman in London, and this one was someone else, just eating chips.
It didn’t matter to Danny either way.
He said, ‘If she’s still there when we move, I will take her.’
‘I have given my instruction,’ said Shin, but he glanced at the others as he said it – at An; at Chris, who was up front, in the driving seat – as if enlisting their support.
When it was at last offered to him, Danny held Shin’s gaze as if it were something grubby he couldn’t put down, for fear of soiling the nearest surface.
It was his moment, he realised.
He said, ‘I wonder if your commitment is total.’
‘… Total?’
‘At Abbotsfield, your aim was all over the place.’
‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’
‘That your bullets flew wild and free, but didn’t actually hit anything. Except a chicken coop. You killed a chicken coop.’
‘I fired straight and true.’
‘You shot up the sky.’
‘I killed two, maybe three.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I fired straight and true,’ Shin repeated.