“Why not?”
Larry tried to stay calm. With two words Susan managed to convey her belief that packing in this case — perhaps even the job — would be a good move.
“Eddie Myers interacts with me, he refuses to talk to anyone else but me. I have to—”
“Larry! There’s police hanging around the kids’ school. They’re parked outside the house. I’ve been told not to let the boys play in the street. I mean, how long is this going to go on for? Do you ever think what I’m going through? Does it occur to you that maybe I need you at home?”
Larry closed his bag and picked it up. He tried to put his arm around Susan and kiss her. She backed away.
“Just go, Larry.” Her voice was cold — even colder, he thought, than her premenstrual snarl. “Go on, get out!”
He paused at the bedroom door.
“If it’ll make you feel safer, I’ll have a word with Frisby. Okay? It’s just two more weeks, I swear...”
He went downstairs. Susan heard him talking from the hall.
“John, Tony, come and say good-bye.” The boys mumbled and she heard him kiss them. “Now, be good boys and look after your mum, okay?”
A great bubble swelled in Susan’s chest. She ran out of the bedroom and hurried down the stairs.
“Larry. Larry, wait.”
The front door slammed shut.
As the week started and time began to tick down toward the zero point where McKinnes would have to part with Von Joel, the Superintendent began to see this stage of the operation as an all-or-nothing exercise in expectations that were not, by any sane measurement, justified. He told no one he thought this, of course, and in his heart hewished the best for the long shot, because success here could be good for him as well as McKinnes. It could be a formidable professional boost, the kind that would not be forgotten — the kind that could yield a lot of mileage.
In his imagination he saw himself and McKinnes in fanciful terms, as two astute seismologists waiting for a particular boulder to roll off a ledge and start a landslide against which every advance precaution had been taken; the problem, the hellish big maybe was that the boulder, poised on the edge as it undoubtedly was, might never budge. For all their expert knowledge and accumulated experience, they just couldn’t be sure it ever would.
The cost of the operation was crippling. Men and vehicles were deployed on standby in numbers and on a scale which was unprecedented for a crime that no one could say was going to happen. McKinnes had Von Joel for another two weeks, but the Superintendent knew the manpower backup would not be available for anything approaching that length of time.
“Pray for a result at the earliest,” he told McKinnes, “before the odds against success get steep enough to break your heart.”
On Tuesday morning, at an open-air cafe in Regent’s Park, Sydney Jefferson conducted business with Lola del Moreno and Charlotte Lampton. It was a brief meeting, as always, and the real business was conducted with Charlotte alone, acting as a signatory on Von Joel’s behalf. She signed several legal documents and initialed amendments to others; Jefferson checked everything carefully, then put the papers in his pocket. From another pocket he took something wrapped in a yellow cloth and passed it to Charlotte. She quickly pocketed it. Throughout the meeting Jefferson’s eyes kept darting around the park. When the transactions were completed he seemed anxious to leave.
“That’s it,” he told Charlotte. “I don’t want to see either of you again.”
Lola arrived at the table with two cups of tea and a sausage roll. Jefferson looked about him again.
“No more calls,” he said, “not at home, not at the office, understood? I’m out, until the trial. If there is one,” he added, smiling tightly.
Without a good-bye or even a wave, he turned and walked away, leaving his briefcase on his chair. Lola watched him go, slowly munching her sausage roll.
“Jefferson reckons he’s still in the same place,” Charlotte said eventually. She picked up the lawyer’s briefcase. “He’s allowed to go running early mornings, every morning.”
“Did he give you a shooter?” Lola said.
Charlotte sighed. “Why don’t you say it louder? Maybe somebody didn’t hear you.” She leaned forward across the table. “Yes,” she hissed, “he had it in his pocket.”
“Oh,” Lola said, rolling her eyes and doing her Mae West impression, “I thought he was just pleased to see us!” Charlotte wasn’t amused. Lola nodded at the briefcase. “Is that all the money?”
“Yes,” Charlotte snapped, “all we’ll get, anyway.” She glanced at her watch. “Come on, we’ve got to get moving. He’s a slimy sod, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d bought us out.”
“Well,” Lola said, “I guess at least we’ll be rich.”
Von Joel and Jackson ran stride for stride. They were up to five miles — they’d started at two, upping to three, and on the last two mornings it had been five. They were well matched, almost identical in size. The pair of them were over six feet tall, both wore tracksuits, and apart from the handcuffs that bolted them to each other at the wrists, they looked to anyone watching like innocent joggers, both ever eager to hear the fat Mars Bar-sucking Shrapnel give them their timing from a stopwatch. No one approached them, no one even attempted to pass on a message, a signal. No car tailed them, no cyclist, nothing happened apart from two men taking a very early morning jog.
On Thursday morning McKinnes had a brief, anxious meeting with the Superintendent. For their separate but deeply linked reasons, neither of the men could quite look at the other.
“It’s been four days,” McKinnes said. “Nothing doing. Short of driving them to the bloody bank, I don’t know what to suggest.”
“We can’t keep all these men and vehicles on standby forever, Mac.” The Superintendent stared glumly at the map of Regent’s Park on his office wall. “They’re screaming at the cost as it is.” It was short-fuse time, and it had come sooner than the Superintendent had expected. “This is a waste of time and money — get him over to the Secure Unit at Reading.”
That was not an order. Not yet. But it was time to start making peremptory noises.
“Why the hell doesn’t he make a sodding move?” McKinnes demanded of thin air. “Why? What’s he waiting for? I’ve made it easy enough for the bastard...”
At seven o’clock on Friday morning, under the eyes of more official observers than an outsider would have believed, Larry Jackson jogged around the Inner Circle at Regent’s Park with Von Joel cuffed to his right arm. They kept up a good measured pace around the virtually empty park, and near the end of their circuit Frank Shrapnel put through the same radio message he had been transmitting since Monday.
“Fifth day, no contact. Myers just runs with Jackson, over.”
On this particular morning, on the other side of the park wearing a tracksuit with the hood up, Lola del Moreno was running toward a car parked by the trees. She got in and pushed down her hood. Charlotte, behind the steering wheel, lowered her binoculars.
“It was him!” Lola panted. “It was definitely him! Now what do we do?”
“We wait,” Charlotte said. “We just keep on coming. Hire a different car tomorrow. We’ll tail them again.”
“But maybe he don’t know we’ve traced him,” Lola protested. “Can’t we give him some kind of signal?”
“No,” Charlotte snapped. “We can’t.”
Activity that evening at the safe house was as low-key as it had been all week. The official drill now was that Von Joel simply be supervised and offered recreation; serious interrogation was at an end, since all but the most trivial loose ends, in prosecution terms, had been tied up.