noisy spring.
The car was a decent-sized sedan, and its trunk was pretty deep and wide and long, big enough for a bunch of suitcases, or two or three golf bags, or whatever else a person might want to transport. And it was full.
But not with suitcases or golf bags.
It was full of handguns, and boxes of ammunition.
The handguns were all Glocks, at first sight, all brand new, all wrapped in plastic, neatly stacked, mostly 17s, the original classic, some 17Ls, with longer barrels, and some 19s, with shorter barrels. All nine-millimetre, which matched the Parabellum ammunition stacked alongside, in boxes of a hundred.
Casey Nice got out of the Skoda. She took a look, and she said, ‘Sherlock Homeless.’
I said, ‘The 19 will fit your hand better. You OK with the short barrel?’
She paused a beat and said, ‘Sure.’
So I unwrapped a 19, and a regular 17 for myself, and I loaded them from one box of ammunition, and took two more boxes unopened. We left the hoist down and the trunk lid up, and we got in the Skoda, with Nice driving. We backed up and turned and headed for the exit.
‘Wait one,’ I said.
She braked, and came to rest with the hood in the bar of daylight coming in the door. I said, ‘Where are we?’
She said, ‘Wormwood Scrubs.’
‘Which is like where else, comparatively?’
‘The South Bronx, probably.’
‘But the British version. Where they don’t hear gunshots every day.’
‘Probably not.’
‘In fact when they do, they still call the cops. Who show up with SWAT and armoured vehicles and about a hundred detectives.’
‘Probably.’
‘And I never trust a weapon I can’t be sure will work.’
‘What?’
‘We need to test-fire the Glocks.’
‘Where?’
‘Well, if we did it here, the cops would come, and they would get ambulances for those who need them, and then they would gather enough red-hot evidence to put a serious dent in this whole Serbian thing they seem to have out here. Which all in all might be considered a public service.’
‘Are you nuts?’
‘Aim for the cars. I always wanted to do that. Two rounds each, and then get the hell out.’
Which is what we did. We wound down our windows, and we got our shoulders out, and we aimed behind us, and we fired four spaced shots, crashingly loud, through four separate windshields, and before the last echo came back off the bricks we started rolling, slow and sedate, completely ordinary, just a local minicab, properly booked by phone.
We found the main road in from the west, and we headed for the centre of town. Less than a mile into it, we were passed on the opposite side by a fast little convoy, led by a big black Bentley coupé, which was followed by four black Jaguar sedans, and bringing up the rear was a small black panel van.
THIRTY-FIVE
WE PARKED IN a no-parking zone in a side street near the Paddington railroad station. The plan was to lock the car and walk away. It was a very busy area. There were plenty of onward transportation options. There were buses, and black cabs, and two subway stations nearby, and the regular trains. On foot we could head south to Hyde Park, or north through Maida Vale to St John’s Wood. We would be caught on camera, for sure, no doubt many times, but it would take hundreds of hours of patient viewing to figure out who we were, and where we had come from, and where we had gone, and why.
I checked my appearance, to make sure I was fit for public consumption. My jacket was made of thin, stretchy material, no doubt good for all kinds of freedom of movement on the golf course, but it clung to the shape of whatever I had in my pockets. Which might have been OK with golf balls, but which wasn’t OK with the Glock. I wanted it on the right, and it barely fit. Mostly because there was something else in there already.
It was the main man’s cell phone. It was a drugstore burner, pretty much the same as the pair we had found in the Romford Boys’ glove compartment. I passed it to Casey Nice and said, ‘See if you can find the call log.’
She did something with arrows and a menu, and she scrolled up and down, and she said, ‘He made a thirty-second call to what looks like a local cellular number, and three minutes later the same number called him back, for one minute. That’s the last of the