Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(20)

And so Lewis came back into her life.





“ARE YOU USING an unsecured phone?” Lewis asked incredulously. “I can’t believe you’re... are you using your own phone? Jesus f*cking Christ, hang up.”

“I am not going to f*cking hang up and I don’t give a flying f*ck who can hear me,” Gwen said.

“Have you been drinking? You’ll get us both arrested.” Lewis sounded on the verge of panic. Gwen could hear, at the other end of the connection, a background noise of traffic. Then Lewis hung up.

“Oh, you twat,” Gwen muttered. She dialled Lewis’s number again, but this time all she got was an unavailable tone.

She looked around the bar. This was not, she had sensed the moment she walked in, one of those bars popular with tourists or business people. It was dark and roughly-furnished. Most of the other patrons had the look of career drinkers. A lot of the older ones had tattoos and lots of bling, and attack dogs slumbering watchfully beside their tables. It was really not a place for a lone Englishwoman, and she suspected that if she hadn’t been so obviously and monumentally pissed-off one of the other drinkers would have tried to hit on her.

Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen and saw a text from an unfamiliar number. Buy a disposable phone and call me on this number, it read. I’ve had to ditch my sim you stupid bitch.

“Oh, do f*ck off,” Gwen muttered. But she finished her beer – her third in the past hour or so – and got up and wandered back into the street. There was a tobacconist’s kiosk a little further along, its windows piled with sun-bleached packets of condoms and bubble-packs of porno HDs. She bought a pack of disposable phones and stood in the street while she took one out and went through the interminable setup process. The phone was about as thick as an old-style credit card, printed on cheap resin stock, and the screen was almost unreadable.

Finally, she got it up and running and dialled the number Lewis had texted her on. He answered almost immediately.

“Do you want to get me arrested?” Lewis demanded. He sounded a little breathless, as if he’d been running. He’d probably just done what Gwen had done, gone down to the newsagents on the corner and bought a pack of phones. Lewis was out of condition.

“I don’t know what you’ve got me involved in, but I’m finished,” Gwen said. “If I ever see you again I’ll f*cking punch you.”

“What? What’s happened?” The phone’s speakers were fragile and tinny; Lewis’s voice kept breaking up.

“My contact’s been arrested and the police were at the hotel.”

A long silence at the other end of the connection. So long that Gwen would have thought Lewis had hung up and thrown the phone away, if it weren’t for the sound of cars and buses in the background.

Finally Lewis said, “What?”

Gwen looked around to make sure nobody was paying her undue attention. “I went to the meet,” she said, “and as I got there the police were marching the contact away.”

“How did you know it was him?” Lewis interrupted.

“Lewis, I knew. All right? I knew. I went back to the hotel and the police were there too.”

Another long silence. “Where are you now?”

“Somewhere in Luxembourg City. I don’t know where. Lewis, all my stuff is at the hotel. I can’t go back there. I’ve got no clothes.”

“Fuck your clothes,” Lewis said in a sullen, distracted voice. “Did you see where they took the contact?”

“No, because I was going in the opposite direction,” Gwen said with exaggerated patience. “Lewis, will you listen? Something’s gone wrong. I’m on the run from the police.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What? Okay, come on, Lewis, you tell me. You think about what I just told you and you tell me what’s really going on.” Gwen suddenly realised she was shouting. She glanced around, but she was still not attracting attention, which she thought was pretty good going, considering. She said quietly, “They’ll be watching the airport and all the border crossings. I’m stuck here, Lewis.”

“Did you leave any ID at the hotel?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter. I booked the room in my own name.”

“You did what?”

“How the f*ck else was I supposed to do it?”

“You f*cking amateur!” Lewis roared at the other end of the connection. Then the phone went dead. Gwen took it from her ear and looked gravely at it. Oddly enough, she found she felt rather better for having vented at Lewis. Of course, it hadn’t improved her situation at all, but still. If there were going to have to be Famous Last Words, f*ck you would have to do.

She snapped the phone in half, extracted its SIM, snapped that in half as well, and dumped both in a nearby bin. She looked around her. It was late afternoon, and the street was full of workers making their way home at the end of the day. Most of them were business-suited and carrying document cases. None of them paid her any attention at all. Gwen turned her collar up against a spit of cold rain, put her hands in her pockets, and started walking.





SHE WALKED FOR hours. Night fell and the temperature plummeted. Around eleven she found an all-night café. The bar from which she’d called Lewis had served food, and she had tucked into a local dish of smoked ham and chips, but she was hungry again and her blood sugar was low and her feet hurt, so she sat down in the café, ordered coffee and something described on the menu as Judd mat Gaardebounen, and tried, for the hundredth time that day, to work out what to do.