Dougie was already in the downstairs bogs of the Spice of Life before the cabbie was checking his watch to make sure he hadn’t turned up early. Had pulled out his sports bag from the cistern where he’d stashed it and busted the lock on the attaché case by the time the cabbie turned the engine off and stepped out of the car to take a look around. Dougie’s deftness of touch was undiminished by his years on the other side. He counted the bundles of cash roughly as he transferred them into his sports bag, eyebrows raising as he did. It was quite a haul for a weekly skim off a clip joint. He briefly wondered what else they had going on down there, then chased the thought away as excess trouble he didn’t need to know.
By the time the cabbie was standing over the crumpled heap in the alleyway, he had put the attaché case in the cistern and taken off the blue hood, rolling it into a ball when he nipped out the side door of the pub. He junked it in a bin as he came out onto Charing Cross Road and hailed himself a ride up to King’s Cross.
Dougie looked up from his racing pages. As if struck by electrodes, he knew Lola was in the room. She walked toward him, green eyes dancing, clocking amusedly his stupid cap and the bag that lay between his feet. Sat down in front of him and breathed, “Is it enough?”
“Aye,” nodded Dougie. “It’s enough.”
He hadn’t wanted there to be any way in which Lola could be implicated in all this. He’d had her phone in sick for two days running, told her just to spend her time packing only the essentials she needed, and gave her the money for two singles up to Edinburgh.
The night train back to the magic city, not even the Toon Army could ruin that pleasure for him.
“You ready?” he asked her.
Her grin stretched languidly across her perfect face.
“Yes,” she purred. “I’m ready.”
Dougie gripped the Adidas bag, left his floppy fries where they lay. As they stepped out onto the road, St. Pancras was lit up like a fairy tale castle in front of them. “See that,” he nudged her shoulder, “that’s bollocks compared to where we’re going.”
His heart and his soul sung along with his blood. He was leaving the Smoke, leaving his life of shadows, stepping into a better world with the woman he loved by his side. He took her hand and strode toward the crossing, toward the mouth of King’s Cross Station.
Then Lola said: “Oooh, hang on a minute. I have to get my bag.”
“You what?” Dougie was confused. “Don’t you have it with you?”
She laughed, a low tinkling sound. “No, honey, I left it just around the corner. My friend, you know, she runs a bar there and I didn’t want to lug it around with me all day. She’s kept it safe for me, behind the bar. Don’t vorry, it von’t take a minute.”
Dougie was puzzled. He hadn’t heard about this friend or this bar before. But in his limited experience of women, this was typical. Just when you thought you had a plan, they’d make some little amendment. He guessed that was just the way their minds worked.
She leaned to kiss his cheek and whispered in his ear: “Ve still have half an hour before the train goes.”
The pub was, literally, around the corner. One of those horrible, bland chain brewery joints heaving with overweight office workers trying to get lucky with their sniggering secretaries in the last desperate minutes before closing time.
He lingered by the door as Lola hailed the bored-looking blond bartender. Watched her take a small blue suitcase from behind the bar, kiss the barmaid on each cheek, and come smilingly back toward him.
A few seconds before she reached him, her smile turned to a mask of fear.
“Oh shit,” she said, grabbing hold of his arm and dragging him away from the doorway. “It’s fucking Stevie.”
“What?”
“This vay.” She had his arm firmly in her grasp now, was propelling him through to the other side of the bar, toward the door marked Toilets, cursing and talking a million miles an hour under her breath.
“Stevie was standing right outside the door. I svear to God it was him. I told you, he is bad luck that one, he’s voodoo, got a sixth sense — my mama told me about sheiit like him. We can’t let him see us! I’m supposed to be off sick, the night he gets ripped off — he’s gonna know! He’s gonna kill me if he sees me.”
“Hen, you’re seeing things,” Dougie tried to protest as she pushed him through the door, down some steps into a dank basement that smelled of piss and stale vomit.
“I’m not! It vos him, it vos him!” She looked like she was about to turn hysterical, her eyes were flashing wildly and her nails were digging into his flesh. He tried to use his free hand to extricate himself from her iron grip, but that only served to make her cling on harder.
“Hen, calm down, you’re hurting me...” Dougie began.
“There’s someone coming!” she screamed, and suddenly began to kiss him passionately, smothering him in her arms, grinding her teeth against his lips so that he tasted blood.
And then he heard a noise right behind him.
And the room went black.
“Fucking hell.” Lola looked down on Dougie’s prone body. “That took long enough.”
“I told you he was good,” her companion pouted, brushing his hands on his trousers. “But I thought you’d enjoy using all your skills on him.”
“Hmm.” Lola bent down and prised Dougie’s fingers away from the Adidas bag. “I knew this would be the hardest part. Getting money out of a tight fucking jock.”
The slinky Russian accent had disappeared like a puff of smoke. She sounded more like a petulant queen.
“Come on.” She stepped over her would-be Romeo and the pile of shattered ashtray glass he lay in. “Let’s get out of here.”
The car was parked nearby. As Lola got into the passenger seat, she pulled the honey-gold Afro wig off her head and ran her fingers through the short black fuzz underneath.
“I am soooo tired of that bitch,” she said, tossing it on the backseat.
Her companion started the car with a chuckle.
“He fucking believed everything, didn’t he?” He shook his head as he pulled out.
“Yeah... and you said he was a private detective. Well let me tell you, honey, you wouldn’t believe what I suckered that dick with. My dad was a Russian gangster. My mother was a Somalian princess. I was on the run from Swiss finishing school. Can you believe it?”
Lola hooted with derision. “Almost like the fairy tales I used to make up for myself,” she added. “You know, I thought he might fucking twig when I told him I was named after a character in a Raymond Chandler novel. But I couldn’t resist it.”
“Well,” her companion smiled at her fondly, “you certainly made up for the loss of that Queen Anne silver. We’ve got enough to keep us going for months now. So where do you fancy?”
“Not back to Soho,” Lola sniffed, as the car pulled into the slipstream of Marylebone Road. “I’ve fucking had it with those poseur thugs. I know. I fancy some sea air. How does Brighton sound to you?”
“The perfect place,” her companion agreed, “for a couple of actors.”
Dougie came around with his face stuck to a cold stone floor with his own blood. Shards of glass covered him. He could smell the acrid stench of piss in his nostrils, and from the pub above he could hear a tune, sounding like it was coming from out of a long tunnel of memory. He could just make out the lyrics: