There was, thought Patrice, always something.
Shirley said, “Is that Bad Sam?”
“It’s his mobile,” Ho said.
“So it’s Bad Sam.”
“Unless someone else has his mobile.”
“So it’s Bad Sam.”
Ho snorted, but yeah, it was Bad Sam. Who let somebody else have their mobile?
Shirley said into her own phone, “He’s heading down the High Street. If he’s going to his office, he’ll take the one, two, third on his left. It’s an alleyway.”
“One, two, third?” Marcus said.
“I was counting. Can you see him?”
“Wait a sec.”
A muffled voice was Louisa, talking to Marcus.
Marcus said, “Yeah, we have him. Over the road.”
“There, that was easy, wasn’t it?” Shirley said. “Pick him up and bring him in.”
“You’re the boss all of a sudden?”
“You’re gunna let him go just ’cause I said to pick him up?”
Marcus had a brilliant answer for that, but before he could deliver it Louisa was tapping his arm.
“He’s turning off,” she told him, at the exact moment Roderick Ho said the same to Shirley.
Crossing the junction Bad Sam heard a crash, something heavy going through glass, and changed plans on the instant: there were always noises somewhere, and not all of them had to do with him, but he’d be an idiot to ignore the possibility, with those itchy feelings still scratching at his spine. So he slipped off the High Street before his turning, and headed down a narrow alley, where the ground was mushy with fag ends and the air smokily visible. Some of this was pumping from a vent set in the wall next to an open door, against which an olive-skinned man in a kitchen-worker’s smock was smoking a joint.
“Yo, Sam,” he said. “Sammity Sam.”
He always said that, and it always wasn’t funny. But Bad Sam always laughed, because you never knew when you might need a favour.
“Hey, Miguel,” he said. “You didn’t see me, and I wasn’t here, right?”
“Never here,” Miguel agreed as Bad Sam slipped past him, and through the kitchen, and out of the café’s front door onto another street entirely.
Here’s a thing about men in uniform: they go through a window as easily as any other kind.
Turned out it was only a traffic warden, but that wasn’t Patrice’s fault. And it made no difference to the way the glass rained down around him, the fingernail-sized nuggets of it used in bus-stops and windscreens. Libraries, too, were prepared for sudden impact. Probably wise, given the cuts.
But there was no time to dwell on that, because people would have phones out soon, and then there’d be more uniforms coming, the serious kind. In the two-second grace that follows unexpected violence, Patrice turned his collar up and strode through the obliging doors to see, on the other side of the road, the target turning down an alleyway not his own.
Louisa was gone in a flash, sprinting for the road, hoping to get into that alleyway before Sam Chapman disappeared out the other end. Marcus was slower, pausing to click the car locked: it was his vehicle, damn it, and they were south of the river, and the family was already one set of wheels down. Dying at his desk would look the softer option if anything happened to this one. So by the time he reached the road Louisa was just barely leaping to safety on the other side, a bus-horn blaring her home. The surface was slick with rain, and hurling yourself out into traffic, assuming it would stop, worked fine in the movies, but Marcus had seen people hit by cars, and didn’t fancy pissing sitting down for the rest of his life. Louisa was weaving in and out of people wielding umbrellas, and Marcus, running parallel with her, nearly crashed into a crowd gathered in a passage to his right: it was clustered round a large man lying in a puddle of glass and books. Noting the uniform, Marcus thought, Well you won’t be handing out tickets, but his follow-up was more to the point: Who put you through a window, mate? Someone more aggravated than a ticketed driver; he must weigh eighteen stone. And nobody tossed eighteen stone through a window without practice, or a trebuchet.
He looked across the road. Louisa was gone. He grabbed the nearest onlooker. “Who did this?”
“Are you police?”
“Who?”
The onlooker, scrawny, dandruffed, damp, said, “He was just a bloke, know what I mean? Didn’t look like he could throw a dart, let alone—”
A pro, thought Marcus. “Where’d he go?”
“Didn’t see, know what I mean?”
Marcus could just about work it out.
He scanned the area, but raining like this, most people hurrying, nobody stood out.
There was a gap in the traffic, though, so he took the chance and ran across the road.
When you flushed a bird, all you needed to know was which direction the sky was. Men were trickier, more devious.
But Patrice had studied maps, and knew that the alleyway the target had gone down led nowhere.
Which might mean the target was unlucky, and that was like finding money in the street. Hunting someone unlucky, you could just pick your spot and wait. But the target was a former spook, and while spooks made mistakes like everybody else, they didn’t run down blind alleys two hundred yards from home. Patrice moved past the entrance without pausing; just another Londoner caught in the rain. A little further on he took the next left, and looked back to see a woman following the target’s route.
There was hardly anyone on this street. The pavement was narrow, the kerbs flooded; parked cars lined the opposite side. To his left, a chain-link fence sealed off a space where a house had stood. From behind him came the growing wail of a siren, but this didn’t worry him. Add ten minutes for witness statements, and Patrice could be on the other side of London. Meanwhile, the target appeared from a doorway ahead and hurried up the road without looking round. Good tradecraft, thought Patrice, but in this case a mistake. He quickened his pace, and consulted the map in his head. Chapman would weave his way in and out of this tapestry of backstreets, trying to zigzag himself invisible, a common ambition when you knew you were prey. And in the attempt he’d pass through somewhere dark and lonely, maybe underneath one of the railway bridges which spanned the roads in this area. All Patrice would need was a second or two. He ran a hand through his hair. The rain was getting harder.
Ho watched the screen, lips moving. Behind him, Shirley said, “What happened there? Is he going through a building? He’s going through a building!”
She said into her phone, “He’s going through a building,” though Marcus had already gathered as much, twice.
Louisa emerged from the alleyway as he reached it. “Dead end.”
“He’s gone through a—”
“Building, yeah, I worked that out.”
“You got that map?” Marcus said, not to Louisa.
Into his earpiece, Shirley said, “Left, then left again.”
Bad Sam knew he’d been flushed by the breaking glass; that he’d fallen for the automatic escape principle, the one that said Fly. Now. But knew, too, that he’d bought himself a tiny advantage, one he could keep hold of provided he didn’t look behind.
He doesn’t know you know he’s there.
That in his mind, Bad Sam headed further into the maze of streets that looped round Corporation housing, dog-legged past schools, and threaded under bridges. In the rain he heard no following footsteps; just a steady patter on the pavements and, distantly, a police car’s plaintive wail. Don’t look round.