Private London

Chapter 42

Half an hour later I was in a holding cell.

It was painted a sickly pale lime green. An inset concrete bed with a thin pallet on it. No windows. I had checked the door – it was locked.

Kirsty hadn’t said a single word to me on the journey over. It would have been hard to – she’d been travelling in a separate car. I had been bundled unceremoniously into the back seat of a modified Range Rover with caged partitions. It felt like I’d been picked up by the police dog-handling unit. Maybe I had been.

I’d taken my jacket and shirt off. Kept my white cotton T-shirt on to spare the blushes of any visitors, and was doing press-ups. I had done about a hundred and twenty when I heard the viewing hatch slide open and a voice announce, ‘You got a visitor, Carter.’

I got a faint hint of perfume, something floral and musky, and considered moving on to finger-and-thumb press-ups, but thought better of the idea.

Was I any fitter now than I’d been before an Iraqi roadside bomb and a couple of well-aimed insurgent bullets had seen me hospitalised for two months all those years ago? The truth was that I probably was.

I didn’t take my immortality for granted any more, that was for damn sure. And I kept my body in as fit a condition as I could manage. Doing press-ups in the cell gave me something to do other than think of Hannah and Chloe. Didn’t work, but when you get dealt a crap hand you’ve got to play it the best you can.

The door opened and I stood up.

It was Alison Chambers. Black suit, white silk blouse. Her make-up perfectly applied and the perfume as heady as that from a field of poppies.

‘What the fuck have you done now, Dan?’ she said, kind of spoiling the moment.

I shrugged as the thickset uniform shut the door on us. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t offer you tea,’ I said as I sat down on the pallet and patted the space beside me for her to join me.

She folded her arms and gave me the kind of look my beloved ex had given me earlier. You know the kind – the sort a judge might give you before slamming down the gavel and sending you off to the colonies for fifteen years’ hard labour.

‘Just tell me what’s going on,’ she said.

‘Alison,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

And I honestly didn’t.