‘Excuse me,’ Bobby said to the older guy. ‘Sir Richard isn’t moving out, is he?’
The guy stopped, looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t know, pal.’
The young removal guy had left the door open, and they could see a short hallway and then another door opened into what seemed like a big room, with dust covers visible.
‘So you’re just kind of taking his furniture out for a while,’ Bobby said.
‘No. We’re taking this furniture.’
‘Out of Sir Richard Barber’s flat.’
‘No, pal. Sir Richard Barber’s flat’s the next floor up. I know that for a fact, on account of we moved him in.’
‘So whose is this?’
The foreman stood with his hands on his hips. ‘With all respect, pal, what’s it to you?’
‘We’re supposed to see Sir Richard,’ Bobby said. ‘We were told to come here.’
‘Well you were told wrong, because Sir Richard …’
‘Next floor up, yeah. But I was definitely given this number. So who lives here?’
‘What you got here is a show apartment for Bright Horizon Developments, and if you don’t mind we’ve got half an hour to get this room cleared.’
‘You’re moving the stuff to another apartment?’
‘You want to know everything, don’t you, mate?’
‘Uh, Barber,’ Grayle said, ‘that is Richard, was getting us some information about this block. See, we were hoping to get an apartment here ourselves …’
The removal guy relaxed. The American accent seemed to make it all right.
‘I, uh … I’m having a baby,’ Grayle said.
‘Congratulations.’ The guy started looking for the bump.
‘In late summer … Uh, I just thought. Honey, if this is the show apartment, maybe that’s where Richard said he’d meet us. My husband, he’s a lawyer,’ patting Bobby on the arm. ‘He gets things wrong a lot. Could we …?’
The guy sighed. ‘Yeah, all right … just for a couple of minutes.’
‘Oh, you are so good,’ Grayle said.
And so they walked around all the rooms, Grayle clinging to Bobby’s arm and looking thrilled. The bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen were all fully equipped and furnished. The bedroom had a four-poster and a faint but unmistakable smell of marijuana. Grayle and Bobby exchanged glances.
The main room — the parlour, the drawing room — was almost cleared. Just a few small tables, two boxes full of ornaments and framed photos and bric-a-brac and a Cotswold village watercolour in a gilt frame. The two Georgian windows had the same view as from the top of the stairs.
‘This is wonderful.’ Grayle looked blissfully around, her gaze coming to rest on an empty alcove with a tasteful plaster moulding. ‘Oh, look, honey, wouldn’t that be just the perfect place for the big Chinese vase?’
‘Perfect, darling.’ Bobby gave the removal guy a these women kind of long-suffering smile.
‘Used to be one there last time we was here, I think,’ the removal guy said. ‘Maybe it got broke.’
‘It happens,’ Bobby agreed.
It happened so bloody quickly, you would not have believed it.
Marcus and Lewis had parked in Malvern Link, no more than five miles from Overcross Castle. It was a straggle of mainly modern shops hanging loosely from the famous priory town on its steep hillside. Marcus needed money from a cashpoint, also an Ordnance Survey map of the area. Never liked to go anywhere without a large-scale OS map.
He could have been away from Lewis’s car no more than seven minutes.
As he turned away from the cashpoint, squinting at his receipt, he heard a young chap say, ‘Oh yeah, sure it is … and that’s the Pope cleaning them windows.’
‘No, honest to God,’ another man said excitedly, ‘I’m not kidding. It bloody is …’
Marcus stuffed the notes into his wallet, pocketed it crossing the street. Couldn’t see any shop likely to sell maps. Never mind, he’d get one somewhere else.
Lewis’s charcoal-grey Honda Accord was parked on a corner of the shopping street and a side road leading to a housing estate. When Marcus returned, there was a small crowd around it, as though it had been in an accident.
Marcus groaned. God almighty, Lewis had been discovered. You tended to forget he had a famous face these days. There’d be bloody autographs and jokes about Kelvyn bloody Kite and this curse nonsense, and they wouldn’t get away from here for a good half-hour.
But as he drew closer, it became apparent that the situation was not quite like that. There was a woman shouting at Lewis through a gap in the driver’s side window. She was in her thirties, buxom, in a green leather coat. A teenage boy with her was grinning inanely.
But the expression on the woman’s face, Marcus saw, was one of explicit, self-righteous rage.
‘… ripped them up, my mother did! Ripped ’em up! Twenty quid’s worth! She says, “I’m not taking no chances.” Two weeks after her operation, this is, you swine. That’s what you’ve done — destroyed a simple pleasure for ordinary folk. Destroyed their only little dream. Twenty quid’s worth of tickets! That’s nothing to you, is it? That’s small change to the likes of you!’
‘What the bloody hell…?’ Marcus tried to squeeze between two pushchairs.
‘Yow won’t get him, mate,’ a man said. ‘He’ll not come out, he won’t. He’s locked the doors.’
Marcus looked at the man’s reddening face and, in an appalled moment, realized that this was not just one belligerent bitch, but the whole bunch of them. He could see tomorrow’s tabloid headlines: Lottery Rage. Virtually overnight Lewis had become — in other circumstances this would have been almost bloody funny — Britain’s most hated man.
The great British public.
‘Lewis!’ Marcus pushed through, wondering why the silly bastard didn’t wind up his window. Then he saw an elderly chap with his walking stick jammed in the gap. Over the heads of two jeering women, he glimpsed Lewis hunched down in his seat, the stick waggling back and forth over his ludicrous mauve hair, Malcolm barking furiously, bumping around on the back seat.
‘You should give this lady her twenty quid back,’ the old bastard shouted. ‘Least you can do. Go on, get your wallet out, you bloody cream poof!’
‘Now look-’ Marcus stopped. He’d heard a long, rending squeak. He turned to see the teenage boy’s fist juddering down the Honda’s flank.
Lurched at the kid. ‘You little sod!’
The kid stepped back and the penknife dropped into the road and Marcus flung out a foot and kicked it under the car.
‘You leave him alone!’ the harpy in the leather coat shrieked. ‘He’s off school with his asthma!’
‘Don’t you worry, madam,’ Marcus snarled, veteran of a hundred confrontations over the castle walls, ‘if he’s having trouble breathing, I shall be delighted to perform an emergency tracheotomy with his own bloody knife. Now get back, all of you. Are you insane?’
Noticing then, to his alarm, that his own breath seemed to be jammed in his chest. Legacy of the bloody flu.
‘Hello, his boyfriend’s turned up now.’ Some oaf from behind. Laughter. Marcus’s fists tightened, nails digging into his palms; he tried to turn, but he was wedged between the car and two youths in reversed baseball caps.
‘You want your money back, love? We’ll shake it out of him, shall we do that? Nathan?’
‘Just get out of my way, sonny,’ Marcus snarled. ‘I have to find a police-’
Hands seized him from behind. ‘That’s right, mate, don’t turn your back on the bugger,’ the old man crowed. ‘Bloody ole shirt-lifter, bloody arse-bandit.’ Marcus, flailing, was prodded and jostled as the Honda began to move. Four of the bastards bumping it up and down.
‘Shake him out of there, boys!’ The pensioner joyfully wagging his walking stick through the window of the bouncing car. Malcolm standing in the back with paws on the front seat, snapping at the stick until the old bastard jabbed it to the back of his throat and he squealed in rage and pain and fell back.