The pigs looked happy, though—and big, too. And intelligent in a sly, cunning kind of way, as if they knew full well they had the upper hand out here and they couldn’t wait for you to miss a step so they could prove it. They stopped wallowing and tunneling long enough to watch our halting progress across the field, past their corrugated iron arks to a dilapidated wooden shed.
Close up, the shed was a lot more solid than it had first appeared, with a shiny new padlock on the door. Inside, it stank of its last occupants, to the extent it made your eyes water. Blondie’s face showed her disgust.
“This isn’t over,” she said, her voice flat and buzzing slightly from the busted nose. “This isn’t anywhere close to being over.”
“Any time you feel up to a rematch,” I said, meeting her gaze, “you let me know.”
Her lips twisted into a grimace that might have doubled as a smile. “You have no idea, do you,” she said, “who you’re dealing with?”
“Perhaps you’d care to enlighten us?” Sean said. He gestured to the pigs, who’d edged nearer like they were hoping to pick up gossip. “Might make all the difference to the company you keep.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Blondie said, closing down. “I think they’re probably better than yours.”
Gleet’s sister gave her a shove backwards and bolted the door to their temporary cell behind the pair of them. It was only then I let the bravado fade from my face.
“Don’t worry, they’ll be fine,” Gleet said. “May and me’ll look after them.”
I realized with some surprise that I’d never known his sister’s name before. I turned to her and, aware of the listening ears, asked casually, “Are you still handy with that crossbow of yours?”
“Don’t need to be no more,” May said darkly, with the faintest glimmer of a twinkle in her dull gray eyes. “Them daft buggers at t’local council gave me my shotgun license back.”
CHAPTER 11
We spent the night down in Cheshire. A phone call on the way back had Madeleine arranging seats for the three of us on the first available return flight to New York, but it didn’t leave until the following morning so there was nothing we could do except sit tight overnight. I called ahead to warn my mother of the schedule. The conversation was brief and when I rang off she was fretting about canceling the milk and the newspaper delivery at such short notice.
For the rest of the journey, we speculated about Blondie’s and Don’s purpose, employer, and identity—mostly fruitlessly.
The only thing that was obvious was that they were both Americans. Accents aside, their clothing was all U.S. chainstore brands. No need to cut out the labels, because hundreds of thousands of each item were sold every year.
Sean and I had been through their belongings meticulously, but they were real pros and they’d carried nothing incriminating. No passports, no ID, no personal mementos or convenient books of matches, no credit cards. Just a stack of cash in a plastic envelope from an airport exchange bureau, and a pay-as-you-go mobile phone with the call register purged.
They’d arrived by taxi, my mother had told us, but in Blondie’s handbag we’d found a ticket for parking at Manchester airport, dated the day of their arrival, and a set of car keys. The keys were for a Citroën, so they obviously didn’t belong to Blondie’s own vehicle in the States, where Citroëns weren’t imported. That meant they were from a rental, which they’d picked up and almost immediately abandoned in one of the sprawling car parks. They’d carefully removed the key fob identifying which company it was hired from.
“I suppose that’s where they’ll have stashed their personal stuff,” I said. “Hire a car as soon as you land, leave everything you don’t want found on you inside, then dump it in long-term parking and pick it all up again when you leave.”
“It’s good operating procedure,” Sean said. “These days, the authorities are too nervous to let you leave luggage at the airport.”
They’d stuck to protocol over communication, too. My mother had never heard them make any outgoing calls, and they had always been very careful to take incoming ones well outside her earshot. Apart from Don’s increasingly creepy behavior, they hadn’t given any sign that things weren’t going according to whatever plan they’d devised.
“Interesting that they had no weapons on them,” I said, “but I suppose if they flew in they couldn’t exactly bring anything with them.”
“Mm, still, they’re not difficult to pick up over here—particularly so close to Manchester. Perhaps it’s fortunate they didn’t think of that,” he said with a wry smile. “But they must have known they didn’t need them. There were two of them against an untrained woman in her fifties, and they had the additional threat of doing something nasty to her husband if she didn’t play ball. They knew she wasn’t going to try anything.”
“But … she did,” I said, a little blankly as the realization hit. “She warned us.”
“Yes, she did,” Sean agreed. He threw me a little sideways look. “There’s more to your mother than meets the eye.”
“Well, let’s face it,” I said, unwilling to be impressed, “there could hardly be less.”
He smiled openly at that, reaching into his jacket pocket without taking his eyes off the road and pulling out his mobile phone.
“Here,” he said, handing it over. “Before I started asking those two any difficult questions, I took a couple of mug shots of each of them. They’re not very good—I’m no David Bailey, and they weren’t exactly willing subjects—but if you e-mail them across to Parker, he might be able to ID them.”
“You’re right,” I said critically when I’d scrolled through the menus and found the shots. I peered closer at the small view screen. “This one of Blondie’s so bad she ought to be using it on her passport.”
He glanced across. “I don’t think she trusted me to capture her best side, so she would keep shutting her eyes.”
After some fiddling, I managed to send the photos on, then called Parker to check they’d come through. I heard the rattle of computer keys in the background.
“No … nothing yet,” he said. “How’s your mom—she okay?”
“She is now,” I said.
“Ah. Trouble?”
“No more than we were expecting.”
“That bad?” Parker said grimly. “Ah, hang on … yes, the pictures have just landed. Let me just check that they open okay … . Jesus! Is this woman actually dead?’
“No, she’s faking it.”
“I guess she’s faking the blood all over her face, too, huh?”
“Ah, no, that was me,” I said, and he laughed at the cheeriness of my tone.
“Okay, leave it with me. I’ll e-mail these to a guy I know who works with the Feds. He should be able to run them through a database or two and at least tell us if they’ve got any history.”
“The guy—Blondie called him Don—seemed to have some fairly distinctive behavior quirks,” I said, and summarized my mother’s halting admission. “That might help nail him down.”
Parker’s voice hardened. “Damn right he oughta be nailed down,” he said. “She must have been terrified.”
She’d certainly had a taste of the grim realities of life, I reflected, where previously her only brush with the dark side had been somewhat vicarious.
“Yeah, well, she bounces back pretty quickly.”
“Oh,” Parker said, sounding a little nonplussed but, at the same time, cynical. “So that’s where you get it from.”