two Boeing 747-700s, painted in the eggshell blue livery of the President of the United States; but no sign. Perhaps they had been tactfully concealed in a hangar.
After the airport the wailing host of outriders and motorbike voortrekkers took the red route that runs from Heathrow to London. They shovelled the taxis aside and cowed the cursing commuters.
One woman tried to see into the tint-windowed limos and crashed her Nissan Micra into the back of an expensive but vulnerable Alfa 164. The ensuing delay added an average of fifteen minutes to the journeys of more than 1,000 motorists.
As the traffic thickened down the Charing Cross Road, it occurred to Roger that this security business would be no joke. What if he couldn’t even get into his office?
Cameron. That was the answer.
Cameron would have all the passes necessary.
He reached into his breast pocket for his mobile, since he was all in favour of using his bike as his office.
Damn. Oh yes. He’d thrown it away the other day when it rang at the wrong moment. Straight out of the car window, as it happened, on the M25, landing safely in some buddleias in the central reservation.
He negotiated the Palio of Trafalgar Square and howled round into Whitehall. And here it was.
A fence. Ribbons of aluminium fences, and policemen in fluorescent yellow, sprouting like dandelions in the grey of the stone and the tarmac, and the whok-whok-whok of a helicopter in the distance.
‘I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to dismount.’
‘But I’m a Member of Parliament.’
The policeman looked at him with open disgust.
‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of Sheba, sir.’
And so it went on as Roger was shunted in a ludicrous arc westwards of the place to which his electors had sent him. Every time he attempted to penetrate the cordon of fencing he was sent off again in search of some mythical entry point.
‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t take your bike through here.’
At one point, to his shame, he snapped at the men in blue.
‘What’s wrong with my bike?’
‘It’s a lethal weapon, sir.’
‘You can say that again. It’s almost killed me several times.’
‘Now don’t try to be funny, sir. I’ve seen these things packed with explosives. I’ve seen what they can do. Look, I know it’s annoying, sir,’ said the copper, seeing his expression, ‘but please try to bear with us. We’re all doing our best, but the whole caboodle has been agreed with the Americans.’
And so Roger Barlow tacked ever round and west, until he found himself in Pimlico and puffing up Tufton Street.
Where he saw Dragan Panic standing by the tiplift of his Renault 150, heaving some large white vehicle aboard.
‘Come on, droogie moi, come on, my friend,’ said Dragan to himself in Serbo-Croat.
In theory the Renault could lift 4,450 kilos, but the hydraulics were puffing a bit and the stabilizing rods were biting into the tarmac the way a heart attack victim clutches his chest.
Dragan wanted to take this bleeding ambulance, and then he wanted to scarper. Personally, he thought Eric the parkie was mad.
OK, so it was dangerously parked. But you didn’t lift an ambulance. Nah, not an ambulance. Since fleeing Pristina in 1999 Dragan had slotted in nicely in the East End. His knuckles were richly scabbed and crusted with doubloons, and he dressed in trackie bums. At Christmas he sold Christmas trees on the street corner, thumping his mittened hands together. He did a bit of gamekeeping for some toffs out in Essex, place called Rayleigh, and he did like a high bird.
But lifting an ambulance – well, it was like shooting a white pheasant, wasn’t it? He wasn’t on for that. And above all he didn’t like being in the company of Muslims. That wasn’t just because he was a Serb killer from Pristina, and a former member of Arkan’s Tigers.
It was also because he was as big a coward as ever set fire to a Muslim hayrick in the dark, and experience had taught him that you had to keep an eye on the sneaky bastards. Speaking of which …
A couple of them seemed to have vanished. Now there was just the young kid and the spooky-looking fellow, and the parkie taking his time.
Eric Onyeama was struggling with the urge not to burp.
This man was rude, and Eric had to maintain his poise and dignity. It was impossible to do this while burping.
‘Please … Oh you bastard,’ said the man called Jones. ‘Just do what I say or I’ll …’
‘I must warn you that it is the policy of our company to take legal action against anybody who uses the verbal or physical ab—’
As when scuba divers find a pocket of stale air in a sunken submarine, and the bubble rises to the surface in a distended globule, so the garlic vapours were released from Eric’s stomach.
‘Abuu—’
They passed in a gaseous bolus through his oesophagus, and slid out invisibly through the barrier of his teeth.
‘Abuse,’ he said, and a look of mystification, and then horror passed over the face of the man called Jones. He staggered back.
Ah yes, thought Roger Barlow, a classic scene of our modern vibrant multicultural society, a group of asylum seekers in dispute with a Nigerian traffic warden.
Poor bleeders, he thought. What were they? Albanians, Kosovars, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Martians? Now their day was wrecked. They would have to find the thick end of £200 just to spring their motor. How many windscreens would they have to wash to earn that back?
He composed a sorrowful speech in his head, to the effect that the law was cruel, but that its essence was impartiality. Hang about, he said to himself as he drew nearer. That’s bonkers. They can’t take an ambulance.
Barlow rescues ambulance, he said to himself reflexively. Have-a-go hero MP in mercy dash. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ said Mr Barlow last night. The Mail asks: Has the world gone mad? He was thinking Newsroom Southeast, he was thinking Littlejohn. He was thinking Big Stuff. Well, this was a story, all right. That should get that awful Debbie woman off his back.
He saw the traffic warden say something to the olive-skinned man, and the olive-skinned man reeled; and no wonder he reeled, poor dutiful fellow. He could imagine that they were already late for a mission.
Across London, the mere act of getting up was taking a terrible toll. People were braining themselves in the shower, slicing their nostrils with Bic razors, brushing their teeth with their children’s poisonous
