The Enright-Gunn woman was brisk and professional — she looked like the headmistress of a smart school or one of those lady politicians. Her accent sounded brittle and alien to Jonjo’s ears and he began to feel absurdly nervous, his saliva drying up in his mouth, his normal articulacy leaving him.
“Yeah — no — it’s, ah, more a question of, you know, what’s”—he’d forgotten the bloody word! — “um, on offer, like.” Available, he remembered instantly. “What’s available,” he added more meekly than he meant.
“We’re over-subscribed, Mr Case. Too many soldiers leaving the army. Everyone wants to be a private security consultant.”
“Maybe, but there’s no way I’m going back to fucking Iraq. Apologies, excuse me.”
She smiled. Coldly, Jonjo thought.
“There’s a CP bodyguard role available in Bogota, Colombia.”
“No, no thanks, no. Not South America.”
She flicked through the folder on the desk in front of her. “Small-arms training in Abu Dhabi — a sheik’s private security team.”
“I don’t do training, Miss—”
“Mrs—”
“Mrs Enright-Gunn. Major Tim will tell you what I—”
“I’ve all the information on you, Mr Case, all of it.”
He left with nothing, only the promise he’d be on the top of the list for anything ‘exciting’. He paused in the lobby and drank three paper cupfuls of water in quick succession. As he tossed the cup in the waste-paper basket he saw Major Tim himself amble down the corridor; jacketless, lime-green braces on show, some papers in his hand. Jonjo reflexively came to attention, then stood at ease, thinking — what the fuck is going on here?
“Jonjo. How’re you?”
“In the pink, thank you, sir.”
Tim Delaporte was tall and lean, taller than Jonjo. He had Scandinavian blond hair, oiled back from his forehead, like a blond slick cap set above a sharp-featured, alert face with pale-grey eyes. When he spoke his lips hardly moved.
“Sorry I couldn’t see you. Emma’s handling placements these days.”
“No worries, sir.”
“Keeping busy?”
“Getting itchy feet. Looking for something interesting. That’s why I came in.”
“As long as you’re behaving yourself, Jonjo.” Major Tim wagged his finger at him and sauntered away.
“Good as gold, sir,”Jonjo said to his back.
Everything had been wrong about that meeting, Jonjo was thinking as he walked back home from Barrier Park with The Dog, everything. All the various subtexts he could discern were troubling. First, being fobbed off to that posh bint; second, being offered those piss-poor jobs — fourteen years in the SAS: who did they think he was? And then, third, that encounter with Major Tim, having been told he wasn’t even in the building. And what was this ‘behave yourself stuff?…Not for the first time he wondered what the Risk Averse Group knew of his freelance work; not for the first time he wondered if they were in fact his secret facilitators. If you wanted somebody discreetly slotted wouldn’t you go to an organisation that employed exclusively ex-special forces professionals, highly trained in lethal mayhem?…
If only he could find fucking Kindred, Jonjo thought angrily, approaching his house, then we’d be fine, home and dry. He searched his pockets for his keys. His house was only four years old, part of a row of detached and semi-detached ‘executive homes’ built on a landscaped tract of once derelict ground in Silvertown, close to Barrier Park. Every house had a garden and a garage built in to the ground floor. Jonjo had knocked through a door from the hall so he could access the garage from inside — it was where he kept his taxi-cab — as he often needed to move stuff in and out of his vehicle without his neighbours seeing him.
“We’ll be fine,” he said out loud to The Dog.
He froze. The banal pronoun had unlocked something in his memory. ‘We’…Who had said ‘we’ in such a way that it could trigger this memory twitch?…He thought back, and his mind returned quickly to his interrogation of Mohammed — he’d been distracted by that tosspot Bozzy and hadn’t picked up on it at the time. What had he said? “We drove to Chelsea, like. When he says he has to get his raincoat we was a bit suspicious — him being in the waste ground — thought he might be jerking us, thought he might do a runner.” We was a bit suspicious. Might be jerking us. But according to Mohammed it was just him and Kindred in the car. Why say ‘we’, then? The royal ‘we’? No fucking way. Somebody else had been in that car apart from Mohammed and Kindred. Time for another visit to our friend Mo, Jonjo thought, his mood lifting — he had always reckoned the answer lay in that sink, that stew that was The Shaft.
He heard his name called and looked up. It was Candy, his next-door neighbour. She crossed the lawn and knelt and fussed over The Dog and they talked about how well he was looking and the new diet.
“Day off, Candy?”
“Yeah,” she said, standing up. “I got a few days’ holiday owing.” She smiled. “All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl.”
“Too right.”
She was a fair-looking woman, Jonjo thought, nose a bit too lumpy, bit on the chunky side as well, you had to admit, but she had nice streaky blonde hair, clean nails.
“Fancy a bite of supper tonight?” she said. “I’m doing a moussaka, profiteroles. Got some DVDs in.”
“No war movies, I hope.” They laughed — she knew a little about his military past. “Yeah,” he said, “that would be smashing, Candy, love. Smashing.”
“Don’t forget to bring The Dog.”
Jonjo smiled, but he wasn’t thinking about the bite of supper or what was bound to happen afterwards. He was thinking about his next visit to The Shaft and what methods he would employ to make sure Mohammed told him everything that he wanted to know.
30
THE STEAM WAS AMAZINGLY opaque, like watery milk, almost, like slowly shifting watery milk, stirred by currents of air as people walked to and fro. A real pea-souper fog of steam, Adam thought.
“This is buzzing,” Ly-on said.
Adam turned. He could see Ly-on because he was sitting right beside him. His little pot belly swagged over the edge of his towel, his curly hair damp with moisture, flattening against his skull.
“I never be in a place like this,” he said.
“Tell me when you get too hot.”
Mhouse had gone out early that morning, for some reason, and Adam had been alone with Ly-on in the flat. He had washed up the dishes in the sink (boiling a kettle for hot water) and had taken a bucket through to the lavatory to flush and then refill the cistern. Living with one cold water tap to provide for a household had its disadvantages — very Third World, he thought. When he returned to the kitchenette Ly-on was cleaning his teeth in the sink. Adam felt suddenly unwashed, smirched — and consequently began to itch — he needed, he realised, a hot bath. A Turkish bath. Someone had handed him a flyer for the Purlin Nail Lane Baths when he’d been begging at London Bridge Station — this was what had set the notion in his head: words like ‘Sudatorium’ and ‘Tepidarium’ made the simple process of cleaning yourself seem both timeless and exotic. He slipped out, found a functioning pay phone on Level 1 and called Mhouse.
“You taking him where?” she said.
“To the baths in Deptfbrd. The Purlin Nail Lane Baths.”
“He can’t swim, you know.”