Itchy feelings, though, were superstitious nonsense, conjured into being by an overly greased diet, or too much cheese. Nothing to do with a sixth sense—geese didn’t walk on your grave. You could step on all the cracks you wanted, and your mother’s back remained her own concern.
Which was why he had an irritable moment coming on, because he had a bucketload of itchy feelings, every last one of them screaming at him to avoid the cracks, to watch his back.
This wasn’t the first time he’d had them lately. He’d spent the previous morning trawling amusement arcades in Brixton, alert for one Chelsea Barker, the latest of the hundreds of teenage runaways he’d searched for these past years, except that Chelsea, God help us all, wasn’t a teenager; Chelsea was twelve years old. It was like looking for a goldfish in a piranha tank—you had to be quick. So when the itchy feelings overtook him, he’d thought they were on her account. Twelve years old, and she could be anywhere. She could be right behind him. So more than once he’d turned to check, as if that were the way things worked, and runaway kids came looking for him instead of the other way round, but there was never anyone there, except that there always was—there was always someone there, in London. And in the course of checking, he’d seen the same face twice.
Only twice, and just for an instant. A random stranger, one of the thousands on the streets every day.
But once upon a time Bad Sam had been a spook, which meant he could never rule out the possibility that one of those random strangers might be looking to tick his name off a list. So superstitious nonsense or not, he paid attention when the itchy feelings started.
Yesterday, this had involved a complicated ride to a tube station three lines away, and a twenty-minute loiter on an unfamiliar platform, while he satisfied himself his tail was clean. The random stranger had been a young man with dark, serious eyebrows and two days’ stubble, wearing a black leather jacket over a light-blue polo neck, jeans and trainers. Something European about him. Stone cold awake at three in the morning, Sam had run the face through his mental files, and hadn’t found a match. There was a niggle, though—a loose thread at the hem of his memory. The stranger had been young, and Bad Sam had been out of the game for years. Maybe it was a family resemblance, but that made no sense. He’d been Secret Service, not mafia. Grudges weren’t handed down father to son. At four he’d fallen asleep, but had dreamed of foreign travel, and its attendant irritations: the documents that were never in the right pocket; the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.
This afternoon the itchy feelings were back, but the random stranger was nowhere to be seen.
It was another day of grey drizzle, London a cold wet misery, and Bad Sam was heading back to the office after his third morning of looking for, not finding, Chelsea Barker. His plan was to hit the phones again, and squeeze what leads he could from untapped contacts. London the cold wet misery was also a wolfpack world, and twelve-year-olds who were the hardest articles their schools had ever seen snapped like peppermint sticks on its streets. Finding the child was the most important thing in Bad Sam’s life right now, but still—those itchy feelings. Older, sterner creatures were snappable too. And who would go looking for Chelsea Barker then?
This junction here, tube station, church and building site: you had to be careful crossing. You had to look all ways. Lurking in the shelter of the station, bracing himself to face the waiting weather, Bad Sam Chapman turned his collar up against grey London’s worst.
Oh yes, grey London.
London was a class-A city, of course, constantly topping those lists which explained the world in bullet points. It had the best clubs, the best restaurants, the best hotels; it threw the best parties, and cobbled together the best Olympics ever. It had the best royal family, the best annual dog show and the best police force, and was basically brilliant except for the parts that weren’t, which were like someone had taken all the worst bits of everywhere else and shored them up against each other. And the traffic was a fucking nightmare.
None of which was news to Patrice.
Who wasn’t Patrice today, but that was hardly news either. His passport proclaimed him Paul Wayne, and this required no mental adjustment: Patrice had been Paul Wayne for as long as he could remember. And Paul Wayne was as much at home in London, even the bad parts, as anywhere in France; could order a drink either side of the river, and nobody would bat an eye. Because Paul Wayne didn’t just speak English, he spoke English English, the same way he spoke French French. He’d have tied Henry Higgins in knots, and if that wasn’t enough to piss Higgins off, Paul Wayne could have gone on to kill him with his bare hands in about fourteen different ways, because that, too, had been part of the training that had been taking place every moment of Patrice’s life. Patrice’s life was about being Paul Wayne. And today Paul Wayne was taking one Sam Chapman off the board.
Yesterday Chapman had spotted him and taken evasive action: ducking into the underground and adopting a sentry post at the end of a platform. Patrice hadn’t enjoyed the two-second report he’d had to make—Nobody at home. Will attempt redelivery—but at least it had given him a clue as to the target. Sam Chapman looked like most other people tramping the streets in lousy weather: pissed off, down-at-heel, in need of a better raincoat. But Chapman was also a pro, or had been, and that stayed in your blood. Responses slowed, but they didn’t disappear. When someone dropped a tray in a crowded restaurant, you looked every which way except towards the noise, hunting down the action it was meant to distract you from. And when you thought someone was tailing you you took evasive action, even if the thought was a secondhand murmur, a butterfly wing. If you felt a fool afterwards, at least you were alive to feel foolish. So Sam Chapman was that kind of target, which meant Patrice knew to prepare the ground this time; to check for escape routes and probable hideaways. A pro never went home with tingles running down his spine. A pro spooked on home territory took wing, and didn’t look back.
So this was today’s plan: spook him deliberately. Spook him, and watch him take flight.
Then bring him down.
Marcus had parked where he’d almost certainly get a ticket.
“Put a note in the window,” Louisa suggested. “Secret agent on call.”
He muttered something, a grumble about being designated driver. His fault for driving an urban tank, though; the only one with a car big enough to carry an unhappy passenger.
They were south of the river, half a mile from the Thames, near one of those busy junctions which rely on the self-preservation instincts of the drivers using it; either a shining example of new-age civic theory, or an old-fashioned failure of town planning. On one of its corners sat a church; on another, earth-moving monsters re-enacted the Battle of the Bulge behind hoardings which shivered with each impact. A tube station squatted on a third, its familiar brick-and-tile façade more than usually grubby in the drizzle. There was a lot of construction work nearby, buildings wrapped in plastic sheeting, some of it gaudily muralled with visions of a bright new future: the gleaming glass, the pristine paving, the straight white lines of premises yet-to-be. Meanwhile, the surviving shops were the usual array of bookmakers, convenience stores and coffee bars, many of them crouching behind scaffolding, and some of them book-ending alleyways which would be either dead-ends where wheelie-bins congregated, or short-cuts to the labyrinth of darker streets beyond. Once upon a time Charles Dickens wandered this area, doubtless taking notes. Nowadays the local citizenry’s stories were recorded by closed-circuit TV, which had less time for sentimental endings.