knocked the van off course and she was heading towards a greenhouse.
She slammed the brake, but had yet to work out that the engine would stall if you didn’t press the clutch pedal before stopping. The van came to a clattering halt, with a front wheel that had carved a rut through a line of cauliflowers.
‘Shit!’ Fay cursed.
An hour later she was doing better. Tyres crunched gravel as Fay switched deftly from second to third and corrected her steering when a bump threw her off course. The main paths through the allotment formed an uneven rectangle and she slowed for a tight corner, dipped the clutch and dropped back to second before accelerating away.
A bump she’d not previously encountered gave Fay a little jolt, but she smiled as she accelerated to twenty miles an hour and confidently selected third gear.
Two hours of intense concentration left Fay numb and groggy. She parked up by the shed, found a can of Red Bull inside and sucked it down as she squatted on her mattress playing with the maps app on her phone.
It was four miles from the allotments to an address in Finchley. Hagar tried to keep his living arrangements secret, but Fay had met a guy on the street who’d put her in touch with a heroin addict who claimed that she’d babysat Hagar’s sons. Fay had paid three hundred pounds for the address, and knew she hadn’t been ripped off, because Google Street View showed a black Mercedes she’d seen Craig driving parked out front.
Fay hadn’t wanted anyone to see her practising with the van, so she put the headlights on for the first time as she stopped at the allotment’s main gate, directly opposite the vast mound of three-pound-a-sack manure.
She had a key for the lock on the gate, but it had been in the shed for so long it had rusted badly and Fay had to fight to undo the lock and get the gate open. Once the van was on the outside, Fay closed the gate and felt queasy with nerves as she got back behind the wheel and pulled out on to the road.
She got into second gear OK, but then she accidentally selected first instead of third, making the engine race and the van lurch. A BMW coming up behind blasted its horn as the driver swung into the opposite carriageway.
The sat-nav spoke: ‘Three hundred metres, straight ahead at roundabout, second exit.’
Fay didn’t like the idea of a roundabout, and she stopped at a red light, directly behind the BMW that had sped past a minute earlier. Two more cars rolled up behind and Fay was alarmed to find that the van started rolling backwards when she took her foot off the brake.
An alarmed driver behind blasted his horn as the van almost rolled back into him. Fay frantically braked, which stalled the engine, and she got moving just as the light went back to red. She didn’t like the idea of starting on the hill again, so she jumped the light and clipped the middle of the roundabout before taking the second exit.
The rest of the journey was a similar mixture of anxious driving and near misses, but somehow she made four miles without crashing or getting stopped by the cops. Hagar’s road sloped steeply downwards and Fay had to keep squeezing the brake as the van skimmed past, clearing the cars parked on either side by less than thirty centimetres.
‘You have reached your destination.’
Fay sighed with relief as she stopped the van in front of number fifty-seven. Hagar’s house was a grand Edwardian job, built in honey-coloured Bath stone with massive sash windows. The left side had a modern extension. This mirror-glass box rose two storeys, with a steeply sloped driveway leading down to a quadruple garage at its base.
There was no way of knowing who was home, but it was likely Hagar had a permanent security guard, so Fay moved quickly. After turning out the headlights, Fay walked around the van and opened the sliding side door.
The black bags of marijuana plants gave off a pungent smell as she reached inside and grabbed a metal can filled with petrol. After unscrewing the cap, Fay sploshed petrol about until all the bags were coated.
She gasped for air as she stepped back into the street and left the sliding door open as she got behind the wheel for one last ride. After picking up her phone, which she’d been using for navigation, from the