Chapter 20
‘Keep your seats,’ Kate continues. ‘You’re not under arrest, yet.’
‘But—’
‘I’m just curious how you knew about his appointment. How you knew about him at all, in fact. You were two of the crew at his house, I take it?’
‘Are we having lunch, or what?’ Em has clearly intuited the same rule.
‘Here? Not on my department’s budget.’
‘Ah,’ says Em. ‘Yes, of course, this should have been on Mr Harcourt. Well, I’m sure we can cover it. Al?’
‘Absolutely.’ I’ve got about ￡200 in my wallet – in notes, thank goodness.
Use a traceable credit card in front of a police officer at a meeting this incriminating, and I may as well just drop myself off at Wormwood Scrubs and ask if they have any rooms going.
‘What sort of crime do you specialise in, by the way?’
‘Financial.’
Well, that’s useful to know, at least. ‘Shall we have a drink before we start?’
‘This is a work meeting.’
‘A non-alcoholic beer?’ I gesture into the abyss, and within a few seconds a waiter has beached by our table.
We place our order (two glasses of Soave, one lemonade for Kate).
I’ve now spent about thirty quid and bought us precisely sixty seconds.
At my current budget, I can afford for us to kill time for just over five more minutes. It’s not sustainable.
‘Financial crime,’ says Em. ‘And you wanted to see Mr Harcourt about that.’
Kate frowns. ‘No. He wanted to see me.’
‘Sorry?’
‘He made the appointment. I was coming here as a favour to him. Except that he was killed a few days ago. As you know.’
Davy made the appointment. Davy was the one wanting to speak to the police about whatever he was up to. That makes no sense. I had thought he might be in enough trouble for the police to be after him, hence the detectives getting to his place so fast, but … what?
Em speaks again. ‘Sorry, if you know he’s dead, why are you here to have lunch with him?’
‘Because I thought someone he was associated with might come along. Or the people who killed him.’ Kate smiles, and I blench.
Em isn’t fazed in the slightest. ‘Did he tell you what it was about?’
Kate purses her lips. ‘I’m not going to discuss private police business with two people who’ve just turned up claiming a vague personal connection with a murdered man.’
‘All right,’ says Em. ‘That’s fair enough. Let’s order, and then we’ll talk.’
I look down at the menu. It’s one of the ones where every dish contains one ingredient you’re comfortable with (lamb), two you’ve vaguely heard of (brassica, pommes à la Chantal), a few totally unfamiliar ones (aliguelles, smadellas, beresali), and a number of terms that seem entirely out of place in a culinary environment (wet-shaved, caressed, Alsatian).
At the end of each two-line description is a frighteningly large two-digit number.
We order, between us, a number of dishes we are destined never to eat. I still wonder what became of my foamed scallop with slacklined crontili. I hope someone in the kitchen got to enjoy it at least. The waiter glides off.
‘So?’ Kate says. She’s very demanding.
‘We were working with Mr Harcourt,’ I say. ‘He told us about the appointment. That’s why we’re here.’
Now. ‘Working with’ is my euphemism for ‘being held at gunpoint by’. And he obviously told us nothing. But persuading Kate that we were genuinely involved with Davy is the only way I can see her divulging any information about what he was up to. And it bloody works. She leans forward.
‘Go on.’
‘We worked at the agency,’ Em says. ‘Harcourt and Wallace.’
‘In what capacity?’ Kate has produced a notebook from nowhere and is scribbling.
‘We were on his mentoring programme,’ Em continues. ‘He told us he had a proposal for a job for the two of us. And he mentioned this meeting. It felt like he wanted us to be here. Almost like he needed witnesses.’
Kate is interested and doing a rotten job of hiding it. ‘Did he say anything about the work he wanted you to do?’
‘No. He invited us the night before he …’ Em’s head drops, and she does a good impression of someone overwhelmed by emotion.
I put my hand on her shoulder, and she reaches up and wrings it, painfully hard.
I almost believe her in the moment, even though I realise after a second what she’s actually doing.
‘I’m going to get your pills. They’re in your bag, aren’t they? Did you leave it in the cloakroom?’ She nods through her sobs, and I slip from the table before Kate can reply.
I glance around as I make my way across the restaurant.
It’s the usual clientele you’d expect at 2.
20 on a weekday afternoon: good-timers nearing the end of their careers, a couple of discreet pairs of lovers doing some preliminary carb-loading before their cinq à sept.
But there’s one table that is almost blindingly out of place.
Two men, blending in about as well as Mary Whitehouse at the Notting Hill Carnival.
They’re drinking tap water, and they’re dressed in ill-fitting dark suits.
They’re even sitting facing the same direction, for God’s sake, so they can both watch Kate at her table.
I don’t know why they bothered changing out of their uniforms. As I pass, one turns his head a fraction to see which way I’m going.
It’s no good unfolding the piece of card Em slipped into my hand in the gloom of the restaurant. But under the dim lights of the Gents, I can just about read it.
Go now. I’ll catch up.
A few options present themselves, all of them bad.
The window in the Gents is so small that a big ferret would struggle to get through it. If I stay in here much longer, either of the two coppers outside will come in to scoop me up.
The main restaurant door: well, I could theoretically go that way.
But I feel like Em will need a clear path in that direction to get herself out, and if I do escape by the route I have in mind, that might create enough confusion to give her an easier time leaving.
Odd, I think. Consideration for another.
So that leaves option three.
I have never escaped via a kitchen before. It’s clichéd, and I wouldn’t touch a cliché with a nine-foot pole. But at least I did all that research. And there’s a trick I’ve always hoped to try. Now seems as good a time as any.
I remove my jacket and bundle it up, take my phone from my jeans pocket, find the right app, and …
oh, thank God. Even in a basement surrounded by thick brick, I have just enough signal.
As the phone, now cradled in the heart of my bundled jacket, starts playing a YouTube video called NEWBORN CRYING SIX HOURS NO ADS at full blast, I plunge back into the gloom of the restaurant.
The cop’s head swivels round as he hears the noise, then he sees a torso hurrying by wearing different clothes to the ones I went in with, and hears a horrible shrieking, and just thinks an unwise new dad has tried treating himself to a fancy lunch.
He turns his attention back towards Kate and Em.
I turn right, head for the kitchen door, and shoulder through it.
Now, in most movies, the kitchen is a hive of activity, right?
A maze of gleaming steel and white ceramics, with chefs screaming at sous-chefs, sous-chefs kicking apprentices, waiters yelling for service now …
Ideally the camera pans the whole place in one single tracking shot, weaving between flames and people bandaging the thumb they’ve just sliced off and a few others racking up lines of cocaine to snort before mopping a rogue dot of jus off an eighteen-inch plate because the Michelin man is in and their ass is on the line.
That may be the case normally. All I can say is this: if you turn up midweek at 2.
30, after the lunch rush is comfortably over, you don’t get that sort of thing at all.
There are three people in here – one presumably cooking our mains, the other two dealing with some late puddings for another table.
The three of them are, at least, wearing chef’s whites, so that’s one point for the cliché crowd.
One of the two junior ones focusing on the pudding looks up and sees a dishevelled young man holding a screaming bundle. On the plus side, I bet lots of new parents look like slightly tired, wired scarecrows, so really the last several days of stress have just been deep cover.
‘Back door?’
She jerks her thumb.
‘Thanks.’
Before anyone can challenge me, I’m walking confidently through towards the exit. Time and again, that’s the most important rule of all. Take the initiative, and everyone else just … lets you take it. It’s magic, really.
And then, just as I’m at the fire door, about to open it into the little basement courtyard that I know from my research has a stairwell leading up to street level, from where I can get back to the main road … one of the two plain-clothes officers pushes through the door to the kitchen.
Our eyes meet for a second, and then he starts walking briskly towards me. He’s reaching for something at his belt, too. Whatever he’s getting out, I don’t want to be on the other end of it. So, bundle and all, I shoulder through the door and speed up.
Courtyard: check. Stairwell: check. I run up the stairs, trying to fold my jacket as tightly in on itself as possible for what I’m about to do next, and as I get to the top, the police officer bursts through the door from the kitchen.
He is halfway across the courtyard when I shout a warning, holding the bundle up in front of me. He pauses.
‘Catch.’
And then, still holding onto my phone, I chuck the rest of the baby-bundle over the edge of the stairwell down to the concrete floor behind him.
His face in that moment is a mask of sheer terror.
He’s a good copper, but he’s only human.
He swivels like a cat trying to get to it.
And I don’t wait to see his reaction when he finds out he’s just given himself a heart attack preventing a ￡45 jacket from Next getting slightly grubby, because I’m already running along the alley back to civilisation.
Out onto the street. Good. The more street, the more people, the better my chance of blending in.
The Tube is a couple of hundred metres away.
That’s my best option. I can’t stay on foot: I’m willing to bet the copper runs faster than me, once he’s recovered from the baby-shock.
The traffic is gridlocked, and I don’t have the swagger to steal a motorbike and race off on it.
Also, I can’t ride a motorbike. Tube it is.
Through the crowds, keeping my head forward (looking back will just give him something to lock onto).
Oxford Circus is its usual lovely self. There’s a scruffy street preacher explaining through a low-quality tannoy that we’re all saved already – good news, I guess, although I personally would have shaved if I had such glad tidings to impart – and about a thousand shoppers milling around.
Down the first stairs, jump half the second flight, vault the barrier – no time for the Oyster card here, and the staff aren’t legally allowed to chase you any more – and onto the left escalator.
I risk a look back. There’s a bit of a kerfuffle at the barrier.
Shit. He’s still after me. Where to go? Wherever gets me above ground soonest. No, forget that.
Wherever will shake this guy off most effectively. Which train is coming first?
I spent a few miserable evenings hanging around in Oxford Circus for warmth eight years ago, and I know the station quite well.
There’s a passage linking the left-hand tunnels – heading to the northbound Victoria and Bakerloo platforms – where you can jerk through to the right-hand ones, heading southbound.
But even better, you can run through from left to right, then double back on yourself and head along the narrow pipeline leading to the Central Line.
And once you’re down there, you can peg it along the platform and loop back if you need to.
So that’s what I do. Down, dodge right, double back, and through, until the Central Line opens up and, brilliant, I smell the warm sewer breath of an approaching train. I keep going towards the other end of the platform as it comes in, then risk a look.
Unbelievable. He’s about four carriages behind, and he’s got his eyes on me. It’s not crowded enough to lose him. And if he gets on the train, he can make his way through the carriages between this stop and the next one, and by the time we’re at Tottenham Court Road I’ll be his.
The doors open. I dive onto the train, and from a corner by the doors I can just see him heading up the platform, trying to get as close to me as he can before they close.
Now he’s on, at the other end of the carriage from me, and starting down the first section. Wait for it … wait for it …
The doors start beeping, and I throw myself at them before they close.
He buys it. He dives off the train, just as I grab the rail above me and almost dislocate my shoulder hauling myself backwards.
He’s on the platform, skidding towards the wall like a cartoon character.
I’m still on. The doors close. And by the time he’s stopped and turned back towards me, the train is moving.
We’re still separated, but he’s running alongside the train, pulling something out.
As he gets closer to me, he holds it up; a camera phone.
I don’t have time to turn away before he’s got a shot, and then he’s pulling up, because we’re plunging into the tunnel.
Great. Now he’s got a decent picture of me.
I slump back against the carriage door, and look around for the first time. I’m getting a lot of weird looks, and someone is wailing. Am I covered in blood or something? Did I hurt myself?
It takes me about thirty seconds to realise my phone is still playing the screaming noise, and switch it off.
I wonder what’s happened to Em.