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* * *
Maggie was serving two steel-haired ladies a skinny latte and a cappuccino when it began. It was eleven thirty in the morning, there was only a scattering of customers and Nico had gone off to the bank.
‘Oh my God!’ said the one with the dangling earrings.
For a millisecond or two Maggie thought she was referring to the coffee. She knew how rude some customers could be.
But the woman was staring out through the window. She pointed. Smoke was pouring out of the 24/7 shop opposite and Maggie saw two women staggering out, coughing and screaming.
For a big woman Maggie could move fast. She was out of the door before most of the people in the restaurant were even aware of something being wrong. Outside, however, panic had taken hold. A car had pulled up and a Good Samaritan was clambering out to help. But the car behind swerved out and overtook, horns blaring, its driver desperate to put distance between herself and any danger. Maggie coughed as a gust of smoke eddied around her and that was when she realised there was another fire, in the bookshop right next door to her restaurant. The next minute or so was a blur of activity. She charged straight back into the café, bellowing ‘fire!’ at the top of her voice. She grabbed the woman with the dangly earrings by the upper arm and dragged her outside. Her companion needed no help. Maggie went back into the café. Nico was the boss, but since he was absent she felt responsible. There was no sign of any fire in the restaurant itself and the room was already clear of people. The kitchen area was empty too. She pushed through the swing doors at the back and banged open the two toilet doors. No one there either. Only then did she go back out onto the street, where she bumped into a small boy in a red football shirt and shorts.
‘Sorry!’ she said.
‘Sorry!’ the boy replied, and thrust something into her hand. And then he turned and jogged off down the pavement, jigging left and right like a miniature Ryan Giggs. In the distance Maggie heard the sirens of police cars and fire engines. She looked down at her hand and saw a small piece of neatly folded paper. She didn’t open it, merely slipped it inside her blouse and down into her bra. She was pretty sure who it was from and she was also damned certain that there was no danger of anyone being burnt alive. She almost laughed out loud. These were smoke bombs, not fire bombs. Sam did confusion and distraction, not death.
* * *
It took an hour for the police to satisfy themselves that there was nothing more to worry about. In the meantime, with the street cordoned off, Nico and Maggie went to another Italian café two streets away. The owner was a friend of Nico’s and she insisted on giving them each a glass of wine and a double espresso to counteract the shock. Then she sat down with her own glass of wine and chatted to Nico in animated Italian, which was a blessing for Maggie because she had no desire to talk. When the all-clear came, they returned to Nico’s Café and tried to carry on as if nothing had happened. But that was hard to do. For a start, journalists and photographers kept coming into the café, ostensibly for coffees and cakes, but really in the hope of a lurid first-hand account. ‘Tell me how it felt?’ one guy asked, eyes gleaming. ‘Was there a moment when you thought you were going to be burnt to death?’
Maggie played dumb and told him to talk to Nico. The last thing she wanted was to have her words and her photo splashed across the media.
Lunchtime came and went in a whirl of customers in a hurry and by mid-afternoon Maggie was beginning to flag. At four o’clock she said goodbye to Nico as usual and made her way to her father. It was important to maintain a routine. She spent an hour and a half there, making his supper and doing a bit of tidying and cleaning, before heading for home when Pointless came on the TV. Often she stayed and watched it with him, but she thought she’d rather watch the news in the privacy of her own flat.
As it turned out the story didn’t get any coverage. Graphic images from the Syrian civil war, the disappearance of a child up north and the continuing economic crisis all proved more newsworthy, it didn’t even make the local news. Smoke bombs that had caused no damage to property or people were not that exciting — unless you had happened to be there at the time.
After watching the news, Maggie cooked herself a supper of leftovers. Various bits of vegetable, some dried-up cheddar and two eggs a day past their sell-by date became an omelette. She removed two slices of bread from the freezer, toasted them and decided to eat one of the two purple yoghurts at the back of the fridge. The other would do for breakfast.
Normally she ate with the TV or the radio on, but tonight she opted for silence. Her plan was coming together in her head. She slipped her hand into her bra and pulled out the piece of paper the boy had given her. She had looked at it already, in the bathroom at her father’s flat, so she knew what it said — nothing but a string of numbers. It hadn’t been a surprise. In the old days that was how Sam, Ellie and the others had always communicated. There were twenty-two digits. The first twelve made up a map reference — a six-digit x-coordinate and a six-digit y-coordinate. Except that it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that. It never had been with Sam. He had always been paranoid about security, so even the twelve digits had to be scrambled. There was no intrinsic logic to it, merely a system which Sam had devised and then drummed into the few of them that needed to know.
The remaining ten digits were a date and time. According to the note, Sam wanted to rendezvous the following day at 19.03. But he didn’t mean exactly 19.03, merely round about seven o’clock in the evening. As for the map reference, the easiest thing would have been to enter it into Google Maps, but she wasn’t so stupid as to do that. If they weren’t monitoring her internet activity by now, then she was the Queen of Sheba. She still had some paper maps and she had dug these out of the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. They weren’t detailed enough to give her a precise location, but they were enough to take her pretty damned close and that was good enough for her because she knew the area. Sam had met her there once before. It was why he had chosen it. Maybe she’d drop by the library in the morning and double-check on one of the public computers.
* * *
Elgar waited until Bridget was three mouthfuls into her hamburger before he asked her the question that had been bothering him.
‘So what do you think that was all about then?’
Bridget raised her eyes so that they momentarily met his, then returned her attention to her food. T
hey were sitting at the back of the joint in the corner, so that they had a good view of everyone coming in and going out. Not that they were expecting anyone significant to come in. It was merely second nature. Always make sure you could see what was going on, that there was no possibility of someone sneaking up behind you and that an exit route was available if required. Elgar had already scouted that out. There was a corridor past the toilets which led out into a small yard at the back.
‘Well?’ Elgar prompted. His voice was lower than it needed to be. There wasn’t anyone within easy earshot and there was some tuneless music blaring overhead. ‘You don’t set off smoke bombs just for the hell of it, do you?’
Bridget took another bite and continued to ignore him.
‘I mean, was it one of them who did it? If so, why? Or if it wasn’t one of them, who the hell was it?’
Bridget set the remains of the hamburger down on her napkin and took a long suck of cola via a straw.
‘He’s got a history of it, hasn’t he?’ she said, fixing Elgar with an icy stare. ‘You’ve read the background on them, haven’t you? He likes messing around with things like that.’
‘But there wasn’t any point to it.’ In a parallel world, Elgar would have been shouting, and very likely shaking her by the shoulders too. But in reality he lowered his head and dropped his voice even further. ‘It’s not as if she tried to do a runner in the confusion. And we didn’t even see him.’
Bridget laughed. It was her dismissive, patronising, what-a-stupid-man laugh. ‘He was pissing into the air and hoping we were standing downwind.’
Elgar considered this for several seconds as he wiped his final chip through what remained of the tomato sauce. As well as being extremely unpleasant, Bridget was smart. Not that he would have admitted it to her. That was why he had asked her the question. But somehow this time her answer didn’t satisfy him.
‘So we just keep watching them, do we, until they do make a move?’
