Now. ‘Working with’ is my euphemism for ‘being held at gunpoint by’. And he obviously told us nothing. But persuading Kate that we were genuinely involved with Davy is the only way I can see her divulging any information about what he was up to. And it bloody works. She leans forward.
‘Go on.’
‘We worked at the agency,’ Em says. ‘Harcourt and Wallace.’
‘In what capacity?’ Kate has produced a notebook from nowhere and is scribbling.
‘We were on his mentoring programme,’ Em continues. ‘He told us he had a proposal for a job for the two of us. And he mentioned this meeting. It felt like he wanted us to be here. Almost like he needed witnesses.’
Kate is interested and doing a rotten job of hiding it. ‘Did he say anything about the work he wanted you to do?’
‘No. He invited us the night before he …’ Em’s head drops, and she does a good impression of someone overwhelmed by emotion. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she reaches up and wrings it, painfully hard. I almost believe her in the moment, even though I realise after a second what she’s actually doing.
‘I’m going to get your pills. They’re in your bag, aren’t they? Did you leave it in the cloakroom?’ She nods through her sobs, and I slip from the table before Kate can reply.
I glance around as I make my way across the restaurant. It’s the usual clientele you’d expect at 2.20 on a weekday afternoon: good-timers nearing the end of their careers, a coupleof discreet pairs of lovers doing some preliminary carb-loading before theircinq à sept. But there’s one table that is almost blindingly out of place.
Two men, blending in about as well as Mary Whitehouse at the Notting Hill Carnival. They’re drinking tap water, and they’re dressed in ill-fitting dark suits. They’re even sitting facing the same direction, for God’s sake, so they can both watch Kate at her table. I don’t know why they bothered changing out of their uniforms. As I pass, one turns his head a fraction to see which way I’m going.
It’s no good unfolding the piece of card Em slipped into my hand in the gloom of the restaurant. But under the dim lights of the Gents, I can just about read it.
Go now. I’ll catch up.
A few options present themselves, all of them bad.
The window in the Gents is so small that a big ferret would struggle to get through it. If I stay in here much longer, either of the two coppers outside will come in to scoop me up.
The main restaurant door: well, I could theoretically go that way. But I feel like Em will need a clear path in that direction to get herself out, and if I do escape by the route I have in mind, that might create enough confusion to give her an easier time leaving.Odd, I think.Consideration for another.
So that leaves option three.
I have never escaped via a kitchen before. It’s clichéd, and I wouldn’t touch a cliché with a nine-foot pole. But at least I did all that research. And there’s a trick I’ve always hoped to try. Now seems as good a time as any.
I remove my jacket and bundle it up, take my phone from my jeans pocket, find the right app, and … oh, thank God. Even in a basement surrounded by thick brick, I have just enough signal. As the phone, now cradled in the heart of my bundled jacket, starts playing a YouTube video calledNEWBORN CRYING SIX HOURS NO ADSat full blast, I plunge back into the gloom of the restaurant.
The cop’s head swivels round as he hears the noise, then he sees a torso hurrying by wearing different clothes to the ones I went in with, and hears a horrible shrieking, and just thinks an unwise new dad has tried treating himself to a fancy lunch. He turns his attention back towards Kate and Em. I turn right, head for the kitchen door, and shoulder through it.
Now, in most movies, the kitchen is a hive of activity, right? A maze of gleaming steel and white ceramics, with chefs screaming at sous-chefs, sous-chefs kicking apprentices, waiters yelling for servicenow… Ideally the camera pans the whole place in one single tracking shot, weaving between flames and people bandaging the thumb they’ve just sliced off and a few others racking up lines of cocaine to snort before mopping a rogue dot ofjusoff an eighteen-inch plate because the Michelin man is in and their ass is on the line.
That may be the case normally. All I can say is this: if you turn up midweek at 2.30, after the lunch rush is comfortably over, you don’t get that sort of thing at all. There are three people in here – one presumably cooking our mains, the other two dealing with some late puddings for another table. Thethree of them are, at least, wearing chef’s whites, so that’s one point for the cliché crowd.
One of the two junior ones focusing on the pudding looks up and sees a dishevelled young man holding a screaming bundle. On the plus side, I bet lots of new parents look like slightly tired, wired scarecrows, so really the last several days of stress have just been deep cover.
‘Back door?’
She jerks her thumb.
‘Thanks.’
Before anyone can challenge me, I’m walking confidently through towards the exit. Time and again, that’s the most important rule of all. Take the initiative, and everyone else just … lets you take it. It’s magic, really.
And then, just as I’m at the fire door, about to open it into the little basement courtyard that I know from my research has a stairwell leading up to street level, from where I can get back to the main road … one of the two plain-clothes officers pushes through the door to the kitchen.
Our eyes meet for a second, and then he starts walking briskly towards me. He’s reaching for something at his belt, too. Whatever he’s getting out, I don’t want to be on the other end of it. So, bundle and all, I shoulder through the door and speed up.
Courtyard: check. Stairwell: check. I run up the stairs, trying to fold my jacket as tightly in on itself as possible for what I’m about to do next, and as I get to the top, the policeofficer bursts through the door from the kitchen. He is halfway across the courtyard when I shout a warning, holding the bundle up in front of me. He pauses.
‘Catch.’
