The Skip Tracer's chat-up was like hypnotizing someone with a pendulum: the trick lay in its very obviousness. From the secretary he elicited Cal Devenish's personal bank details: 'We're worried a payment hasn't gone through and everyone's at lunch at this end. Yes … a big payment … I thought I might have the account number wrong … it looks like a five, but it could be an eight … 'Digit by digit he extracted the account number, without the young woman on the end of the line even realizing that he'd provided her with no accreditation at all except holiday snaps and a false name. 'Carrot, see, big dick Barbadian one!' he snapped at Dave when he'd broken the connection. Then he called Devenish's bank and pretended to be a manager from another branch: 'He's applied for a loan here … nothing large, but I felt I ought to check it out …' With each call he made, the Skip Tracer morphed astonishingly: from City Editor to Financial Director, from FD to Bank Manager. His voice changed, his accent changed, his wiry body coiled and stretched across the desk. 'I see, really?' He scribbled a number on a pad and chucked it over to Dave while still on the call. 'Well, that is strange, but very rich men can be, can't they? And it's all business for us, no?'
Dave was looking at the number, which had six digits. The Skip Tracer hung up. 'Carrot, see, loan, get it, nosebag, banker nosebag, that is — a loan.'
'He's got over seven hundred grand in his current bloody account!' Dave expostulated.
'£743,485 to be precise,' the Skip Tracer said. 'He's fucking loaded. But I don't do pro bono, my son, no way Jose, I'm not some fucking ambulance chaser. You'll have to cough up, on the nail, on the nail. And no borrowing to pay me.' He wagged a finger. 'I know those sharks, I know the vig.'
'Aren't you worried about them tracing all of that?' Dave put in. 'All those dodgy calls?'
'Cummear.' The Skip Tracer pulled Dave to his feet and tucked his arm around the bigger man's neck. Dave smelled sweat and aftershave — both of them were lashing off him. 'I'm gonna like you, son. I'm gonna enjoy doing stuff fer you, b'lieve me. B'lieve it. Cummear … see the flex, see the phone wire, lets follow it …' The Skip Tracer three-legged Dave out the door and in through the open door of the adjoining office. It was empty save for a pile of phone directories and smelled of new carpet tiling. The phone wire snaked across the chequerboard and disappeared into a wall. 'There it goes into its little hole. Company that rents this gaff' — he laid a crooked finger against his tip-tilt nose — 'I've never seen 'em. They'll be one of those nosebag fronts with their name on a plate in an accountant's office on the Isle of Man. Ironically it might be the same bean counter who fronts up for your man Devenish. Geddit?'
Dave was renting Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the full-flat. The open-top, straight-six Bentley was a pig to handle, and the wings were mostly useless in Central London. The flying car grunted and squealed at the rank under the heavy steel joists of St Pancras. A fare came flapping out of the greenish aviary of the station, a tall stick of a man, his white beard and black robe giving him a vulturine appearance. 'Where to, guv?' Dave asked him, and the fare replied stiffly, 'Parl-men-till.'
The fare was a tedious old fucker, who couldn't forbear from lecturing Dave on London's architecture. Dave hated birds — especially old human ones; he hated their alien stare, their hollow bones, their greasy feathers, their hard, pointed lips. The fare's thesis was simple: the city had ceased to evolve after the Great Fire. The last three hundred and fifty years were only a series of recapitulations, the erection of new-old buildings, tricked out in the styles of lost civilizations. He pointed out the neo-Gothic station frontage, its triplets of lancet windows complete with quatrefoils, its angled and flying buttresses, its iron pinnacles and gabled niches. Despite himself Dave craned to look up and piloted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang into the gulch being excavated for the Channel Tunnel terminal. Luckily, its wings spontaneously unfurled, the huge car swooped back up on to the roadway. The fare was unfazed. He discoursed on the wooden, barrel-vaulted roof of King's Cross, then directed his attention to the neoclassicism of the terraced houses lining Royal College Street — their snub facades alluding to the possibility of stately porticos, their anorexic pilasters referencing temples long since crumbled. 'Vares nuffing nú unnersun, mì sun.' The fare spoke the broadest of cockney, vowels crushed to death by rumbling lorries on the Mile End Road. 'Doan ask wy ve öl daze wuz bé-er van vese, coz U aynt gó ve nous fer í. Lemme tellya, no geezer az a fukkin clú abaht iz oan tyme, yeah? Ees juss lyke a fukkin sparrer — '
'The sparrows are nearly all gone in London,' Dave put in.
'Eggzackerly!' In the rearview mirror Dave saw the old man's bony digit waggle. 'Eggzackerly, lyke a fukkin sparrer aw a bitta bá-erred cod.'
'They're going inall.'
'Rì agen, gawn, cort inna eevul fukkin net, mayt, an eevul fukkin net vat juss cum aht uv ve fukkin sky.'
Coming up Highgate Road, Dave used the steep slope after the railway bridge to take off, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang unfurled its wings once more, and soared up over the redbrick, 1930s blocks of Lissenden Gardens. He banked the flying car and came in on a flat approach to the summit of Parliament Hill, touching down on the path with hardly a bump. They rolled to a halt, and the fare got out. Dave searched the dash for a meter but couldn't find one. There was hardly any point in trying, for when he looked again he saw that the old man had done a runner, pelting off down the hill towards the Highgate Ponds, his long black robe streaming behind him. 'I s'pose I'll just have to wipe my mouth on that one,' Dave muttered to himself.
Dawn was silvering the mirrored buildings of the City — further to the east the bridge at Dartford floated above the riverine mist. The streetlights were still on, phosphorescent trails in the oily swell of streets and buildings. Dave felt an aqueous queasiness when he saw the long line of the North Downs to the far south — they were distant islands, uninhabited and uninhabitable. At his back he sensed the ridges of Barnet and then the Chilterns rising up, wooded shores against which London lapped.
Carl and his mother were sitting on one of the benches that looked out over the city. As Dave drew closer, he saw that they were both in their nightwear. He sat down, putting his arm around his son. 'Are you going to do the baddest thing in the world, Dad?' Carl asked, and Dave replied, 'Yes, son, yes, I think I will.'
'How're you going to do it, then?'