Thicker Than Water

‘Can she breathe?’ I asked.

‘Course she can breathe,’ Cheadle snapped. ‘She just can’t effing see, is all. The kid goes there.’

He pointed to a bare and maculate mattress thrown down diagonally across the floor of the van. I leaned forward and laid Bic down on it carefully. He was still twitching and muttering, but he never even came close to waking. I wished I’d remembered to bring a blanket. Cheadle was right, the night was warm enough to make blankets unnecessary: it would just have made this feel less like a kidnapping.

Cheadle slammed the door shut and I went round to the passenger side.

‘Trudie is in your safe keeping, Castor,’ Gwillam reminded me. ‘No less than the boy.’

I nodded, acknowledging the point. ‘We should be back inside of an hour,’ I said. ‘One way or another. Be ready for us. I want to get this over with. And Gwillam - if we’re followed, we stop. No second chances.’

I climbed into the passenger seat and there was a solid metallic chunking sound as Cheadle reached down to lock the doors from his side.

‘You got a mobile on you?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

‘Turn it off. They might not know your number, but if they do you might just as well be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Better put it in there, for the duration.’ He pointed down to a box at my feet. I’d taken it to be a toolbox but when I opened it, it proved to have thicker sides than that, the interior space small and cluttered. Cluttered with telecommunications gear, mainly: esoteric stuff whose purposes I didn’t know and didn’t care to guess: there were even some naked circuit boards.

‘Right,’ said Cheadle, ‘we’re off.’

He backed down the steps again, bumpity bumpity bump, and reversed out onto the road.

‘Is Trudie going to be okay back there?’ I asked."

"He threw the briefest of glances towards the back of the van. ‘Should be,’ he said. ‘So long as she hadn’t got any inner-ear problems.’ There was an observation window which presumably opened into the van’s rear space, but when I went to open it Cheadle put his hand on mine and shook his head.

‘No no no. The magical mystery tour is waiting to take her away. This is a full professional service, satisfaction guaranteed, and we put the blanket over the top of the cage so the little birdie can sleep. You» ca he got my money?’

I handed over the notes that Gwillam had magicked up from somewhere. Cheadle fanned them out and nodded, apparently satisfied.

We drove around South London for forty minutes, taking every alley and back crack that Cheadle could find. He turned the radio on, but only a dull bass-line thudding came out of it.

‘Your speakers are bust,’ I said.

‘Nope,’ Cheadle replied. ‘They work all right - but they’re mounted in the back of the van. If her indoors is trying to figure out where we’re going by the sounds of the city, she’ll have her work cut out for her. As for you and me, well, we’ll have to make do with witty repartee, won’t we?’

That turned out to mean dead silence. I sat back and watched him work.

It wasn’t just a case of randomly tacking across the city. He was checking for tails, too, his eyes on the rear-view mirror for so much of the time that I was really afraid we were going to hit something. At one point he stopped, took his own phone out of the reinforced box, turned it on and made a call. He didn’t speak but he listened for half a minute, then turned it off and replaced it.

‘You do this sort of thing a lot?’ I asked, as we drove down Camberwell Church Street.

Cheadle made a tutting sound. ‘I do what I’m paid to do.’

‘Nicky said you’d worked for him before,’ I observed.

‘I don’t know any Nicky,’ Cheadle said shortly, in a tone that made it clear that further questions would not be welcomed.

We rolled up to Imelda’s place just as the moon rose, so I guess I’d put the time at about one in the morning. Cheadle waited at the back of the van, leaning against the doors, while I went around the back and up the stairs to talk to Imelda.

She wouldn’t have been happy to see me even if my knocking hadn’t got her out of bed. She wrapped her tent-like floral-patterned nightgown around her and stared me down with a face like a volley of small-arms fire.

‘We had this conversation, Castor,’ she growled.

‘We did,’ I admitted. ‘But the situation has changed, Imelda. A kid’s life is at stake. You have to let me do this.’

It was - I admit it - a cheap shot. But it was the obvious cheap shot, and I’m way too cheap not to take it when it offers. Imelda is a mother herself, and Lisa is the one thing in her life that she can’t be hard-bitten and cynical about.

So I told her about Bic, and I let her make the call. That’s how big a bastard I am.

Five minutes later she was unlocking Rafi’s »locbasdoor, having previously removed the wards from it.