‘No, you won’t,’ Cheadle demurred. ‘You’ll do it right here. You can keep your underwear on, and it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. But no pockets, no hoods, no buttons or zips. That’s the deal, love. Take it or leave it.’
Gwillam nodded and Trudie stripped. You can say what you like about religious fanatics, but they show a dedication to the cause that’s nothing short of admirable. Some of them have very shapely bottoms, too, I couldn’t help but notice.
The contents of the rucksack turned out to be a baggy sky-blue tracksuit with a Nike swoosh on the front that was fooling nobody. Sweatshop chic. Trudie put it on without complaint, and then reached for one of her boots.
‘No shoes, neither,’ said Cheadle. ‘It’s a warm night, love. You’re not going to catch cold. Now let’s have a look at you.’
From a side pocket of the rucksack he took a hand-held electronic reader — to my untrained eye, it looked identical to the ones that the security guys at airports use — and played it over Trudie from head to foot while she stood there with her arms folded, staring at the ground. Her face was carefully blank: if she was feeling humiliated and resentful because of all of this, she wasn’t showing it.
‘Okay, said Cheadle, ‘you’re clean. Let’s go.’
‘I need to bring the boy down,’ I told him. ‘Bic. Did Nicky explain about that part?’
Cheadle shrugged, already turning his back on me. ‘I didn’t ask him to. He told me there was three of you, and to bring something for the kid to lie on. All I needed to know. You do what you have to do, I’ll get our lady friend set up in the back. Come on, love.’
He led Trudie round to the back of the van and threw the doors open. I went upstairs and collected Bic from his parents.
‘You’ll keep him safe,’ Jean said as I hefted him in my arms — her tone halfway between a plea and a warning.
‘Scout’s honour,’ I said. ‘Trust me, Jean. I’m not letting anyone hurt him.’ Or at least, it would be over my dead body — and probably a couple of others.
Bic weighed next to nothing: I could probably have carried him one-handed. But my ribs were reminding me of the hard time they’d had of it lately, and I had to pause and get my breath back when I got to the bottom of the eight flights and came out onto the concrete apron. Cheadle was waiting in the van, Gwillam’s stooges standing in a cluster looking tough because there was fuck-all else they could do.
Cheadle opened the back door of the van for me. I stopped dead, staring inside. Trudie was cross-legged on the floor, her arms handcuffed behind her back. He’d put something over her head that looked very like a bondage rig: a helmet with a rubber face mask attached, the whole thing secured under her chin and around her neck with two thick straps. There were no eyeholes in the mask.
‘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 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 door, having previously removed the wards from it. Trudie was with us: Cheadle had freed her hands, but she still wore the helmet and mask. Rafi stared at us in blank amazement as we trooped into the room: me first, with Bic in my arms: then Cheadle, steering Trudie by her shoulders; and Imelda last of all, her expression somewhere close to hangdog.
More explanations, while Trudie sat like a slightly kinky version of Blind Justice on a chair in a corner of the room, and Bic lay moaning and murmuring on the couch. Rafi was unhappy, and scared. Since he’d moved in here, he’d got used to being the only inhabitant of his own brain, and I was proposing to wake up the sleeping sub-letter with a vengeance.