breasts. A grey skirt hiding dirty secrets. The blue gloss door swinging shut, closing on the life she led before. She turns to lock the deadlock. Click. Can’t be too careful these days. Not that it makes any difference. She’s yours – and nothing anyone can do or say will make any difference. She made the only decision which matters years ago. No going back now.
At the kerb she looks up the street and waves at a neighbour. Exchanges a greeting. An au revoir, she’d call it, being a French teacher. You’d call it a goodbye.
The little blue Toyota she gets into matches the colour of the front door. It’s a Yaris. 1.2 sixteen valve. The colour match is a nice touch, intentional or not. It’s little things like that which catch your attention. Simple things. Serendipity. Chance. These days so much else is too complicated to understand.
Like your dishwasher.
The thought comes to your mind even as you know you should be concentrating on the girl. Only you can’t now. Not when you are considering the dishwasher problem.
This morning you came down to breakfast to find the machine had gone wrong. You took a screwdriver to the rear and pulled the cover off, expecting to find a few tubes and a motor, something easy to fix.
No.
Microchips. And wire. Little incy-wincy threads of blue and gold and red and black and green and yellow and purple weaving amongst plastic actuator switches and shut-off valves. Pumps and control units, fuses and God-knows-what.
Except God doesn’t know. Not anymore. That’s the problem.
Once he knew everything. Then man came along and took over God’s throne, claimed to know everything. Now nobody knows everything.
You called the dishwasher repair guy out to take a look. He knows dishwashers. What about TVs?
You asked him as he worked on the machine and he said ‘No, not TVs.’
His words worried you, but then you remembered you don’t have a TV. You never liked the way the bits of the picture fly through the air into the set. That means pieces of people’s bodies are passing through you. Not just their teeth and hair – the nice bits you see on the screen – but their shit and piss, their stomach contents. All of it has to come from the studio to your house and the thought of the stuff floating around your living room makes you gag.
‘Fridges?’ you said, swallowing a mouthful of spit.
‘Yes, fridges. Can find my way around a fridge. At least to grab a tinny or two.’
The way he smiled and then laughed you weren’t sure if he was joking or not. Hope not. You don’t like jokes. At least, not ones like that.
‘Microwave ovens? Specifically a Zanussi nine hundred watt with browning control. The turntable doesn’t work.’
‘Not really, no.’
‘What about chainsaws? I’ve got a Stihl MS241. Eighteen-inch blade. Runs but there is a lack of power when cutting through anything thicker than your arm. Having to use my axe. And that’s not half as much fun.’
The dishwasher man didn’t answer, just gave you an odd look and put his tools away. Drew up an invoice which you paid in cash.
You looked at the invoice and noted the man’s address in case the machine went wrong again. The man left the house and got in a white Citroën Berlingo van with the registration WL63 DMR. Drove off. As the van pulled away, the wheels slipping on the white gravel, you saw it was a 1.6 HDi. 90 hp. Nice. Useful to have a van like that if you need to move something heavy around.
The girl!
She’s driving off too, the blue Toyota disappearing round the corner.
That’s OK. Cars run on roads the way the electricity flows in wires inside the dishwasher. Each wire goes to the correct place and each road does too. The road you are interested in goes left at the end, then straight on through three sets of traffic lights. Third exit on the roundabout. First right, second left and pull up in the car park. Usually she takes the first bay next to the big metal bin, unless it’s taken. Then she’ll have a dilemma and might park in any one of the other fifty-seven spaces. But you really don’t need to worry about that now.
No, you’ll see her again in a few days. Up close. And personal. Very personal.
Chapter Four
Nr Lee Moor, east of Plymouth, Devon. Monday 16th June. 8.37 a.m.
No sign of yesterday’s sun, the air cold, the drizzle getting heavier by the minute. Covert ops, DS Darius Riley thought, meant sitting in a car, dry, if not warm, with a newspaper to read and food and drink on tap. Not this. Not freezing your nuts off on a summer’s day in wildest Devon.
To his immediate left DI Frank Maynard sat grinning at him. The DI pulled the hood on his Berghaus up. Mumbled something about ‘the right equipment’, something else about ‘soft city boys’. The joke was wearing thin, but the fact Riley was both black and from London meant it was open season. In Maynard’s eyes, if you hadn’t grown up shagging sheep on Dartmoor then you were a ‘bloody foreigner’ and open to ridicule.
Riley adjusted his position in an effort to make himself more comfortable. Difficult since he knelt in what he could only describe as a ditch, although Maynard had assured him the pile of stone and earth topped with scrub was in fact known as a Devon hedge. Whatever. The only good thing about the barrier was the cover it provided. Twenty metres farther along the hedge DI Phil Davies stood with a pair of binoculars peering through a gap in the vegetation, his grey hair wet and plastered to the top of his head like sticky rice. His stance suggested to Riley he wasn’t enjoying the outing much either. Chalk and cheese the pair of them, but Riley had to admit a certain grudging respect for Davies. Earlier in the year the DI had likely as not saved Riley’s skin, and although the task involved some very dodgy dealing, Riley owed the man. Even if Davies usually moved in circles something akin to the mud squelching beneath Riley’s knees – the murkiest depths of Plymouth’s underworld, a place of backroom bars, wraps handed over in alleyways and girls standing under street lamps waiting for their next trick. But at least there you stayed dry.
Not here. Not on Operation Cowbell.
No. Operation Cowbell meant getting cold, wet and miserable while waiting for people to turn up and buy illegal red diesel from some farmer who was just trying to scrape a living from a few hundred acres of poor quality land. True, the farmer, a man by the name of Tim McGann, had some connection to organised crime over in Exeter, but Riley thought the whole investigation would have been better left to Customs and Excise.
A rustle came from Riley’s left and he turned to see Maynard unwrapping a foil package containing ham sandwiches. Maynard took one out and munched on the wholemeal bread. He’d not be happy either, Riley reflected. It wasn’t his idea to have Riley and Davies along; their assignment to the case was down to DSupt Hardin. Both Riley and Davies had been involved in a failed
