Lauren sifted through documents. Anything that looked interesting got put into a pile for Kerry to copy with the handheld scanner.
The other eighty per cent got stuffed back into the cupboard. The sorted pile was twice the size of the unsorted when John Jones called from his car at the top of the road. Kerry grabbed her mobile.
‘I don’t know what you ladies are still playing at, but Mrs P. has turned into the top of the road.’
‘Roger that John, we’re out of here.’
Kerry snapped her phone shut, jumped up and began stuffing the document scanner into her pack. Lauren kicked the papers around the room, upended the coffee table and stole a couple of DVDs. They were about to step out through the bay window when they spotted Patricia pulling up the driveway in a silver BMW.
‘Tits,’ Kerry said. ‘We’ll have to go out the back.’
The girls sprinted through to the kitchen. Kerry pulled down on the back-door handle, but the door on to the garden was deadlocked, just like the one at the front. Lauren reached across a kitchen cabinet and swung open a window as Patricia Patel screamed at her daughter:
‘Charlotte, no, sharp. Please don’t touch that, baby, it’s broken glass.’
Lauren glided across the kitchen cabinet, passed through the open window and dropped on to the Patels’ shabby back lawn. Kerry followed a couple of seconds later. The garden was surrounded by overgrown bushes and a high wooden fence, which meant the only easy way out was around the side of the house.
As the girls moved, they could hear Patricia sobbing into a mobile phone. ‘… I don’t know, honey. I daren’t go inside, they might still be in there. I can see paper all over the living-room and I think I heard some noise … OK, I’ll call the police. But you’re coming right home, aren’t you, Michael?’
They poked their heads around the front of the house. The sight of Patricia crying and the bewildered toddler staring up at her mother made both girls feel rotten. Patricia hung up on her husband and dialled 999, as Kerry leaned against the side of the house and whispered to Lauren:
‘I don’t think she’ll chase us. She’s can’t abandon the kid.’
Lauren nodded. ‘OK, let’s run for it.’
The two tracksuit-clad girls sprinted out from the side of the house, passing within a couple of metres of Patricia’s grasp.
‘Oh my god, they’re right here,’ Patricia yelled into the phone, as Lauren and Kerry turned left and began sprinting towards the top of the road. ‘Can you send a car quickly? They’re two girls with long black hair, and they’re running towards the top of Tremaine Road, right now.’
John was parked around the corner in the next street with the back door of the car open. The girls clambered inside.
‘That poor little girl,’ Kerry said sadly, as John pulled away from the kerb. ‘I know we had to do it and I know it makes it realistic if we trash the place, but her mum was crying and she looked really worried.’
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Lauren said, repeating a phrase that often came up during CHERUB training; though she now felt guilty about the amount of fun she’d had trashing the bathroom.
‘So what did you get?’ John asked. ‘You were in there for long enough.’
‘Financial stuff mostly,’ Kerry said. ‘About four hundred pages’ worth. It took ages because nothing was filed. Half of it was still stuffed inside envelopes.’
‘And the computer?’
Lauren nodded. ‘I copied all the data, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything useful, unless you get a sudden urge to play Jimmy Bear Learns His ABCs.’
28. CONCLUSIONS
John was now working the Tarasov mission full-time. He had no intention of driving between London and campus every day, so he’d booked a two-bedroom suite at a hotel overlooking the river Thames.
Lauren and Kerry were on attachment, which meant they were assigned to the mission, but would go back to campus when they weren’t needed. John picked up swipe cards at the hotel reception, stepped into a glass-sided lift and went up to the seventeenth floor with the two tracksuited girls.
A vanload of paperwork and equipment had beaten them to the scene and Chloe Blake – an ex-cherub who’d recently taken a job as an assistant mission controller – was busy stacking papers into filing trolleys and setting up the laptop computers and the satellite link to campus. Kerry and Lauren unpacked a few personal items in