[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.He’ll do anything for her, and he’ll make the same sacrifice he did before.He’ll save her from the bad guys, and then he’ll save her from himself.Thieves like us‘So this is what it feels like to be a crook,’ she says, as they sit in a ‘stolen’ van, parked in a secluded side-street from which they are observing the Provence Troisième Arrondissement evidence repository on the outskirts of Toulon.‘Now don’t you start with that shit,’ Zal replies.‘I was an ex–criminal until you showed up, officer.What kind of a cop do you call yourself? I hadn’t committed a crime in five years, then I’m in your company forty-eight hours and you’ve got me carrying out a heist on a high-security police facility, on top of grand theft auto for boosting our ride.’‘Don’t be melodramatic: we haven’t stolen anything.’‘Are we, or are we not, sitting in a stolen van?’‘Taking refuge in pedantry, very masterful.I’m just saying: this is giving me a worthwhile insight into the criminal mind.’‘And you’ll learn what it feels like to be in lockdown pretty soon.Just be thankful it’s solitary.’They hired the van in Barcelona and drove up overnight.Zal had reported the van stolen first thing that morning in Toulon, telling the police he had gone to grab some breakfast and come back to find it missing.The vehicle itself was not a big worry, it being a hire van and covered by insurance, but the contents were irreplaceable.While he was doing this, Angelique had been parking it in a secluded spot not far from where they sat right now.It had been a long drive north, ought to have been a time to catch up, but she didn’t feel like talking.Zal seemed to understand, though he talked enough for both of them, and she was happy just to listen.Zal had dropped everything for her: let the ship sail without him and cancelled all shows for that leg of the trip.‘It’s not like they can fire me – I’m out of contract in a couple of months anyway.Plus I’ve never dicked them around before: barely took a day off in four years.Why the hell would I? To travel?’‘Just don’t burn any bridges,’ she warned him.It was one thing to help out with the job in Toulon, but there was no timescale for dealing with Darcourt.He could (and this was the thought that threatened to paralyse her by day and steal her rest at night) simply disappear again, decide he’d had his fun.Maybe there was no game-plan, no grander scheme.Look how many years had passed between his previous surfacings: the Baker kidnapping, the Lombardy massacre and now his stark-reality-TV abominations.If he went to ground again, then all was lost.Zal told her he’d decided it was time to move on anyway, though as he didn’t elaborate, it sounded like another line to make her feel better.Making her feel better was his second great talent, one he was exercising to regular and very welcome effect; she just couldn’t work out what was in it for him.With Zal, there was always an angle, and his inscrutability meant that you would never see it until it was too late to make your own move.Back in Glasgow, he had played her, more than once.Whatever else passed between them, she had been left with her doubts as to whether it was all part of his scheme.She knew that, in the end, his motives had been decent.She knew he was a decent man.Whether he was, more simply, a good man had remained a hazier question.Here, however, there was no way of playing her, no unseen motive.The very end of that song – their song – plays in her head: a girl asking, ‘Can this be for real?’; a male voice yelling: ‘Noooo!’Discreet inquiries through her French police contacts revealed that Bouviere’s files were being protected by more than mere medical ethics.The late surgeon having rendered his services throughout a certain unsavoury but influential and highly motivated constituency, the clean-up of his premises and the ordering of his effects had not been left to a few lowly gendarmes and janitors armed with carpet-sweepers and bin-bags.Lawyers acting for anonymous parties had brought pressure to bear through medical and judicial channels in order to procure – or at least secure – any files pertaining to their clients [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]