‘So if Kim was hiding here they’ll have her.’
‘Unless she waited until they’d been and gone.’
She’s a kid, River wanted to say, a club hustler, scamming idiots like Ho: what would she know about tradecraft? But he could feel his chest constricting again. His organs felt like they’d been wrenched a notch tighter. But he managed to say, ‘I’ll do upstairs.’
Louisa said, ‘Yeah, me too. Shirley, you clear down here. Coe – watch the door.’
It was halfway through River’s mind to ask how come Louisa was giving instructions, but his wiser angels hushed him. There were recent, compelling reasons why neither River nor Coe should be allowed unsupervised charge of a tin opener, and the idea of Shirley taking command: well. His wiser angels had better things to do than finish that sentence.
Louisa led the way, and they parted company on the landing; Louisa taking the door into Ho’s bedroom – which accounted for the appalled look she was wearing – and River heading into the sitting room with the big, now broken, window.
Someone had entered the room, so she made herself stiller than ever. She was a coat on a hanger, a folded-up sweatshirt; something you’d expect in a wardrobe: one glance, you’d turn away and close the door. And then she’d be alone in the dark, and before long could start to breathe once more.
The trick was to occupy a space just slightly smaller than yourself, and then to keep doing that, over and over. Once you were done you’d vanished, and nobody would find you ever again.
The floorboard creaked. Something opened and closed. There were only so many places a hider could hide; so many a searcher could search. The time left to her was measured in seconds, and she could feel them dropping away, slipping through the gap beneath the door. They were noisy seconds, and made fluttering noises; they would give her away.
It had been an unwise choice, Roddy Ho’s house. She’d have been better off risking the streets.
Kim clenched her fist, around which she’d wrapped a wire coat hanger, and waited.
In Ho’s kitchen, Shirley was thinking: This doesn’t get used much.
By the back door was a tower made of pizza boxes; next to it, an overflowing bag of plastic bottles: energy drinks, coke, some brand names she didn’t recognise. The fridge was huge but underused, though its freezer section contained more pizzas and two bags of oven chips, putting Shirley in mind of a corner shop on a Sunday evening. Mind you, her own fridge was nothing to boast about; its only hint of green was bottled beer. But it was a relief Ho lived down to her expectations. If he’d turned out a secret gourmet, with a stash of white truffle oil and unrecognisable vegetables, she’d have had trouble with it.
She’d already checked the people-sized hiding places, the cupboards and under-table areas. No sign of Kim. It was a long shot anyway. Sooner or later she’d be found in a bin bag, just as misshapen as the one full of bottles, but squashier, and starting to stink.
Shirley hoped not, but hoping was one thing and brutal truth another. You didn’t have to be a slow horse to pick that much up.
She opened a cupboard, expecting mugs or plates, spices or flour. It contained a lot of tins of beans. A lot.
In her pocket, Marcus’s keyring felt heavy. It was the first time she’d used his universal key set, a trophy she’d snatched from his desk drawer. She’d been hoping for his gun, but Lamb didn’t hang around when it came to snaffling dead men’s trifles. She’d thought at first that he’d left the keys because he hadn’t realised they were a housebreaking kit, had assumed they were Marcus’s spares, but it hadn’t been long before a more credible explanation occurred: Lamb hadn’t taken Marcus’s keys because he already had a set of his own. Fine by her. She still wished she’d been first to the gun, though.
As Marcus himself would have pointed out, there were times when a gun came in handy.
Bad as things were – her heart pumping so hard, the wardrobe was probably pulsing in time – they could have been worse. The wardrobe could have been a coffin. When she’d stood by the window in her own house, too late to launch herself through it, there had been no sensation like this, of time leaking away; instead, everything had come to a stop. It was Shin who came through the door, holding a gun. Kim’s bladder had given, a little, and in that moment she learned that a getaway bag was not enough. What she needed was a second life, in which none of this had happened … She was not a good person, but she blamed this on circumstances: she was surrounded by victims, and whose fault was that? There were two kinds of men, she had long ago determined; the kind you could use as money-pumps, and they’d chalk it off to experience; and those who spat blood and came looking. One or two had found her. She’d not survive many encounters like that.
But Shin and his crew had been different. They’d known who she was, what she did, and it was clear their information came from some higher agency. There’d always been rumours about girls being recruited by the intelligence services: honeytraps were a popular device, and girls like Kim were honey. But she’d put it down to urban myth, generated by the girls themselves, to whom it lent mystery: they weren’t just mattress ornaments but players in a high-stakes game. The last thing she’d expected was to discover that she’d crossed paths with an actual spook. Even more gobsmacking was that this was Roddy Ho, whom she’d been fleecing for months without breaking a sweat. It might even have been funny, if Shin’s group hadn’t made clear the consequences of rejecting their advances. There was family in North Korea; aunts and uncles she’d never seen. A cousin with two infants – they’d shown her photos. These people could have been anyone, and blood relations, well – Kim’s life had not been made happier by the blood relations she knew. She thought she could live with the discomforts suffered by strangers.
Then they had shown her a mirror; her own face, its many small perfections.
If it had been easy persuading Ho to steal from credit card companies, it was a cakewalk having him plunder secrets. By the time she’d given him the code number of the file she wanted, he was convinced that poaching it was his own idea.
She had known, of course, that delivering the file to Shin would not be the end of the story; that once honeytraps were sprung, someone came to wipe away the honey. So her timing was off, getting caught at the window; she should have disappeared already, and be lying low elsewhere. But she was a London girl. Any other city, and she’d be game rather than huntress. And besides, there were only two kinds of men, and Kim never played one end when she could be playing both.
She had stood by the window, her getaway bag a lump on the lawn below, and made her mouth the right shape to greet Shin, who had come through the door holding a gun.
‘Thank God it’s you!’ she had said, and reached for him.
A car moved down the street at average speed, and though Coe took a tighter grip on the blade in his pouch, he gave no outward reaction. The driver studied him anyway, by the glow of the nearest streetlight. The neighbourhood would have been well aware that something had been going on in Ho’s house. Last night a body hurled through a window, and shots fired; today, black vans removing most of Ho’s possessions. But anyone curious enough to have approached the Dogs would have had their fingers nipped. That kind of word got round fast.
And even if it hadn’t, thought Coe, I am a bad man. Approach at your peril.
Oh shit had been his reaction when he saw the paint can hit Gimball. It hadn’t been pretty. But what he mostly thought now was how swiftly he’d got his act together; nearly as quickly as tattoo guy, who’d been away faster than a cat could blink. Even having to climb down two ladders, Coe hadn’t been far behind; collecting Cartwright, who was cartoon-stunned; propelling them both to the car. He was pretty sure nobody had seen them emerge from the alley. Which didn’t mean they were in the clear, but at least he’d won some breathing space.