Crystal and Candy, their faces smooshed against each other and both grinning for the photographer, who was Harry presumably.
‘Harry’s phone,’ Crystal pointed out unnecessarily to Jackson.
The guy who was covered in tomato soup turned out to be just your common-or-garden idiot, the owner of the pimped-out boy-racer car that Jackson had noticed on the way in. A man had come up to him in a service station, he said – once he was able to speak – and offered him a hundred pounds to drive the phone to Flamborough and throw it off the headland. ‘A prank – a stag-do thing.’ Crystal slammed his head into the table. Jackson glanced around to see how the rest of the café’s denizens were reacting to this, but they all seemed to have quietly disappeared. Jackson didn’t blame them. Wives and mothers, he thought, you never wanted to get on the wrong side of them. Madonnas on steroids.
‘So let me just check this,’ Jackson said to the boy racer. ‘A complete stranger comes up to you, gives you a hundred quid to throw a phone into the sea, and this stranger then disappears and you’re unlikely to ever see him again, but you do what he asked anyway.’
‘I haven’t. I wasn’t going to,’ he said, rubbing his forehead. ‘I was going to keep the phone, change the SIM.’
His head renewed its acquaintance with the table. ‘This is assault,’ he muttered when Crystal yanked him back up by the hair. He was lucky his head was still attached to his body. Boadicea eat your heart out, Jackson thought.
‘I could sue you,’ the boy racer said to Crystal.
‘Just fucking try,’ she growled.
‘Thanks for the help back there,’ she said sarcastically when they got back in the car.
‘I thought you were doing just fine on your own,’ Jackson said.
Babes in the Wood
‘I thought we were staying the night in Newcastle? We’ve left Newcastle, haven’t we?’
‘Change of plan, love. I’m taking you to a B&B for the night – that’s a bed and breakfast to you and me.’
‘Yes, I know what a B&B is, but why?’
Andy was surprised by how good her English was. Better than his own, really. She was the taller of the two. Nadja and Katja. They were smart – smart and pretty. Not smart enough, though. They thought they were going to work in a hotel in London. What was going to happen to them shouldn’t happen to a dog, really. He had a sudden image of Lottie’s poker-face. Did dogs have a moral code? Honour amongst dogs and so on.
‘There was a bit of an incident, apparently,’ Andy said to her. ‘A problem with the Airbnb you were supposed to stay in. A gas leak,’ he elaborated. ‘In the whole building, in fact. Everyone had to be evacuated. No one allowed back in. This B&B we’re going to now means that you’ll get a bit further on the journey, further south. To London. And then, first thing in the morning, I’ll drive you to the station and you can hop on a train at Durham or York. Even Doncaster,’ he added, working his way mentally down the East Coast main line. Newark? Or was that on a different line? Why was he even thinking about it? They’d be going nowhere near a station or a train. ‘You’ll be in London by tomorrow lunchtime. Tea at the Ritz, eh, girls?’
He knew without turning round that they were staring at the back of his head as if he were an idiot. He was supposed to be the smooth operator, but this pair were derailing him for some reason. It was taking a tremendous effort for him to keep the whole show on the road. No one understood what a burden it was.
Yes, there had indeed been an ‘incident’, but nothing to do with gas leaks or an Airbnb, although Andy still didn’t know what the actual nature of it was. Tommy had finally resurfaced on the phone just after Andy had picked the girls up at the airport. He hadn’t sounded like his usual easy-going self and he must have been out of range of a signal because whatever he was saying was lost to a hissing garble of white noise.
Another call had followed swiftly on the heels of Tommy’s. Steve Mellors this time, saying there’d been an incident at Silver Birches.
‘What kind?’ Andy asked, trying to keep his tone nonchalant in front of the Polish girls. He could tell that Nadja was paying