Just Last Night(64)

The moment is interrupted by a seriously peculiar and unfamiliar sensation. All of a sudden, the car’s lurching and bunny-hopping down the road, with a nasty clanging sensation, as if the underparts are banging directly on the tarmac. “Underparts” is the extent of my automotive expertise.

“Ah fuck, I think we’ve got a blowout,” Fin says. I brace my palms on the dashboard in front of me as he signals and moves rapidly across the road, his expression not flickering as he checks the mirror.

I’m glad he’s in charge because if I was driving, and this sickening pitching had started, my response would likely involve high-decibel screaming.

We clank down the slow lane, onto the slip road, and into services, the car handling like we’re in a cartoon. When Fin pulls to a halt near the entrance to Burger King, I heave a huge deep breath, and can feel a high tide of moisture at my hairline.

“Overall, I didn’t enjoy that,” Fin says, sounding typically composed, but when I look at him, he’s as ashen as a lunar landscape. I’m glad I didn’t realize he was as frightened as I was, until now.





26


“Any minute now, they promise me,” Fin says, pushing his mobile in the pocket of his coat as he approaches me. “Though that’s probably the cab company’s ‘Just ’round the corner.’”

I’m perched on a cold hard curb by the petrol pumps, under guise of “guarding the luggage,” eating Haribo Sour Cherries, as BreakdownGate enters its ninetieth minute. I crumple the bag and stand up, wiping sugar from my hands, to try belatedly to look efficient and involved.

The “dismayed inspection of the vehicle” and the “lengthy technical conversations with people on the other end of a phone” phase has been run entirely by Fin. I initially sat in the car feeling useless, then stood around by our luggage feeling useless, then dawdled off to buy sweets.

I gathered it was worse than a tire blowout, and our Audi was in fact, to quote a passing mechanic who’d given us his off-duty opinion for free: “fucked.”

“Mini break was it? Hope it’s not an anniversary,” he added cheerfully, as Finlay and I stared blankly, there being no acceptable social shorthand to describe what it actually is. We have formed an uneasy temporary alliance to hunt down a senile senior citizen.

The car has been towed away in disgrace.

“Ah, wait, could that be . . . ?”

Another gleaming set of wheels, this one silver, sweeps onto the forecourt. Fin strides over and has a brief consultation with the driver. He accepts keys and a piece of paper and there’s lots of exclamatory head-shaking, palms-up gestures from the hire car man and what can you do shoulder shrugging from Fin, presumably discussing the fate of the last one.

I pick up Fin’s duffel bag with one hand and the handle on my suitcase with the other, and roll it noisily across the concrete, toward what I notice is a Mercedes-Benz.

“Is this . . . an S-Class?” I say, hairs prickling on the back of my neck.

“. . . I think so?” Fin says. “Why?”

I stare some more. I mean—it’s nothing, is it? It’s a daft coincidence. “No reason.”

“Never had you down as a petrol head,” Fin says, with a smile, taking my bag from me. “If it gets us to Edinburgh in one piece, that’ll do me.”

I’d obviously never mention Susie in reference to anything supernatural, but I climb in wondering how much mentioning of Susie is either tactful or astute, full stop. I have no idea what’s going on inside Finlay, what’s behind that attitude.

I can hear Susie in my head:

Less than you think. True of all men. It’s so very Eve to be scriptwriting them vivid inner lives.

“Another car to get used to,” Fin says, as we crawl onto the slip road. I push back against the head rest and Fin turns the radio on.

“Wheels feel good and solid,” I say.

“We’re getting a free ride out of them trying to kill us,” Fin says. “Just so you know. I’ll put the proceeds toward choc ices at the zoo.”

I guffaw. “Wait, you’re serious? We’re going to the zoo?”

“My father said in his note he was doing the tourist stuff first, so I guess so.”

“Right.” It’s hard to imagine how we’ll find one man in a sightseeing throng but perhaps it’ll be like Denholm Elliott standing out like a sore thumb in his panama hat in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

“Choc ices,” I say. “Britspeak.”

“Oh yeah. In American it’s Popsicle.”

I smile and we settle into a courteous quiet, with New Order’s “Regret” filling the space.

Observing Finlay’s alleged psychopathy up close is a disorientating business. I don’t sense menace, as such, but Finlay has a motive to keep me onside.

As we flit past beautiful mountains to Scotland, Fin says, apropos of nothing:

“I appreciate you doing this. I know it’s a lot to ask. Thank you.”

“Oh . . . it’s alright,” I say, caught off guard.

“I don’t want you to feel like we have to be adversaries, because we had a rocky start,” he says. “OK for me to put the traffic news on?” He reaches out and prods at the radio, and I nod.

I’m reassured, but I’m also spooked. What if this is a ploy? What if this is key to Finlay’s particular menace? He plays at being a nice, adjusted, kindly human being for a time, then when it suits him, rips the rug from beneath you? So when he does something whiplash-nasty, it makes you feel ridiculous for having trusted him? What if trying to get along well with Finlay Hart is like trying to walk backward in heels on a travelator, holding a martini? Like watering a plastic plant?