But while Eleven was briefly airborne, Trainers made his move: nipping in, throwing a punch. It contained more energy than finesse but caught her on the shoulder all the same, and as she quick-stepped backwards, the ground disappeared beneath her foot—only a two-inch depression; the scrabbling of a fox or a dog, but enough to rob her of balance. Bad shit happened in the dark: next moment she was on her back, Green Trainers on top of her, his hands on her throat, his face too close. He snarled something, its gist clear. Those headlights weren’t arriving fast enough, and she was dimly aware that Number Eleven was getting to his feet; soon they’d both be on her, and that would be that. She tried battering Trainers’s head, but made no impact: his hands were squeezing, hard. Stars popped in her eyes as her left hand went scrabbling for something—anything—that would work as a weapon. A gun would be nice. An event took place out of sight, a thud followed by a sigh and a slump, and meanwhile her hand, bless it, found an object, plastic, hard, her headtorch? Her headtorch. She mashed it, bright and hot, into Green Trainers’s left eye. This did the trick. He screamed, though he’d have a more macho word for it, and pulled back, allowing her to breathe once more. The night air tasted of blood. While she sucked in as much of it as she could Green Trainers slid sideways, all cohesion leaving his features. She must remember how she did that. And then a goggle-faced blonde woman was crouching beside her. “Are you all right?”
“。 . . I think so.”
Though she felt like a jellyfish must feel: all nerves on high alert, but a distinct absence of muscle-tone.
Doctor de Greer was holding a brick. Where had Dr. de Greer found a brick? Maybe she’d ordered it from somewhere, Louisa’s jangled brain suggested. It was, after all, just what the doctor— To her left, Green Trainers was struggling to his feet. She pushed herself upright, ready to kick his teeth in, but this proved unnecessary. He stumbled away into the dark. Number Eleven had already made tracks. As double dates went, you couldn’t call it a big hit.
De Greer started to say something, but at precisely that moment the approaching car hit level ground, allowing its headlights to stare directly at them, and as she raised a hand against the glare, Louisa caught sight—like an image from a pinhole camera—of a stick-like character trapped in the twin beams. It had its arms raised, as if alerting the oncoming driver to its presence, an action it seemed to undertake in slow motion though in actual fact happened at the speed of reality, which in this case was about twelve miles an hour. Which felt a lot faster to Roddy, attempting to steer his bouncing bronco over the dark common, and an awful lot faster to Lech, whom Roddy clipped on his way past. For a second Lech was a blur in his own mind, his sense of self dissolving like the wisp of a dream upon waking, but shortly afterwards he was definitely corporeal once again, and every square inch hurting. Roddy wasn’t aware he’d hit anything, because one bump feels much like another. Besides, he could make out two waiting figures at the far reach of his headlights, and was pretty certain one of them was Louisa. The second was also a woman, which was fine by him. There was nothing like making a good first impression, and who wouldn’t want to see Roddy Ho turning up in the nick of time, dispensing whatever justice was required?
Louisa, realising it was Roddy, and who he must just have run over, said to de Greer, “Still got that brick?”
“Are you a spook?”
“What’s a spook?”
“That’s right,” de Greer replied. “I thought you probably were.”
Roddy rolled to a halt while, a hundred yards away, Lech lay on his back and swore at the moon. Even further away, Shirley was being encouraged to put the iron down by a pair of commendably unflustered police officers. All in all, just another day in and out of the office.
Louisa looked at de Greer, who seemed pretty composed for someone who’d just bopped a pair of second-division thugs on their heads with a brick.
“We’d better talk,” she said.
Intermission
“Piss break,” said Lamb.
He stood and stretched, releasing a dandruffy shower of ash, then shambled towards a nearby clump of bushes.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Diana said, and turned away, head reeling. It hadn’t been a proper flashback—Lamb hadn’t even been there—but he’d evidently debriefed those involved. Sophie de Greer, a Russian plant? The daughter of a former KGB colonel, hired by Number Ten’s foremost advocate of disruption? Sparrow would have a rueful little chuckle about that, once he’d beheaded everyone in sight. Assuming, that was, he’d had no prior knowledge of her actual identity.