Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(63)

I didn’t need to tell anyone as well briefed as Carey that Chorley loved a bit of bait and switch.

‘Oh, I get it,’ he said with surprising cheerfulness. ‘We’re the canaries.’

There’s no avoiding the Old Street Roundabout, so I powered up Clerkenwell Road and hoped for the best. Which turned out to be quite good, except for an ancient Ford Fiesta who couldn’t seem to get the hang of how roundabouts worked, and swerved right across our path. Carey swore and wrote down the vehicle index.

Then we accelerated up the eastern half of Old Street, then down Rivington Street, which, in case you don’t know, turns into a one-way street going the other way. But I felt my cause was just, so down the wrong way we went. And luckily only one poor sod was driving the right way. He panicked, swerved and, we discovered later, managed to hit one of the bollards placed on Rivington Street for just that purpose. We squeaked past and went right on Curtain Road.

By now India 99 was overhead and was reporting anything untoward and Nightingale was mobile. I switched off the lights and siren and gently turned into New Inn Yard. Ahead we could see the railway bridge and the faded pub sign.

As we got closer I couldn’t spot any suspicious activity.

‘I don’t see anything,’ said Carey, and reported that to Nightingale, who said in which case he was going to proceed to St Paul’s as we’d planned.

As we pulled up, Carey said that after my driving he was owed a drink. I was just about to say he wanted to be cautious about any pint he drank in that particular pub . . . except that suddenly everything got rather confusing.

As we reconstructed events later, Martin Chorley had obviously got hold of the Virginia Gentlemen’s playbook of total bastardness and started on page one. His packaged evil in a can arrived at the Goat and Crocodile with the regular weekly beer delivery. This was a surprise, not least because I was amazed to find that the Goat and Crocodile had enough customers to justify a regular weekly delivery in the first place.

All Martin had to do was wait outside until he was sure Walbrook had been incapacitated before moving in. He’d obviously learnt his lesson from his abortive attack on Lady Ty, because he came mob-handed just in case things didn’t go strictly to plan. Which of course they didn’t, because me and Carey turned up at just that point.

The first we knew of it was when the front fa?ade of the Goat and Crocodile came screaming across the street and into the side of our car. All I’m going to say is that it was a good thing it wasn’t the Jag.

For a moment I thought it was just us getting closer to the pub, but then my brain registered that the angles were all wrong – and in any case we’d practically stopped. I knew right then that the only suspect who could throw a wall like that was Chorley, and that he must be in the pub. I also knew, in a strange coldly amused way, that that information was totally useless. I think I gave the mental command to my body to duck – but before any useful muscle groups moved, the front of the pub hit the side of my car.

As I said, after that things got confusing.

Suddenly the airbag was as big as an elephant but I’m swinging sideways against my seatbelt as the car flips over. I hear Carey swearing and I’m thinking that thank God the pub was made out of piece-of-shit cement sections and not bricks. I’m also thinking that if he’s smart Martin Chorley’s not going to wait for the car to stop moving before hitting us with his follow-up.

I had thought we were going to roll over, but the roof slammed into the good solid Victorian brick of the railway arch and my head whiplashed in the other direction as the car bounced back onto its wheels. Despite the ringing in my ears, I had my belt off and the door open before the suspension had settled, and I rolled out. I staggered to my feet with a screamer in my left hand and my right extended and my shield up.

Ahead of me the Goat was missing its front fa?ade and the interior was blown to matchwood. Bizarrely, only the solid antique bar remained standing – but it was on fire. I couldn’t see any hostile movement and, more importantly, no casualties. Careful to keep my shield up and angled towards the pub, I threw the screamer down the street and turned and ducked down to see if Carey was all right. The passenger door was open and the seat was empty.

‘David?’ I called.

‘Get under cover, you pillock,’ he shouted back from behind the car.

It seemed a sensible idea, so I dashed around the back and into the gap between it and the archway. Carey was tucked in there with his back against the car, his face grey and his feet against the wall.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked as I joined him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking not.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m fed up.’

I grinned with relief.

‘It’s not fucking funny,’ he said.

I said I’d go and assess the situation if he checked for casualties in the pub.

Carey gave a pained grunt and then said, ‘After you.’

I checked my Airwave and found, amazingly, that it was still working. I told Stephanopoulos, who was currently running the op from Belgravia, about my plan. She told me to be careful and that Nightingale was less than five minutes out. I seriously considered just staying where I was but then I heard a van start up. I shuffled to the end of the car and had a look around the back, just in time to see a genuine antique Mark 1 Transit van resprayed in Prussian blue pull out from behind the ruins of the Goat and Crocodile and make a ponderous turn to the east on New Inn Yard.