The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries by Maxim Jakubowski

cabbie was checking his watch to make sure he hadn’t turned up early. Had pulled out his sports bag from the
cistern where he’d stashed it and bust the lock on the attache case by the time the cabbie turned the engine off and stepped out of the car to take a look around. Dougie’s deftness of
touch was undiminished by his years on the other side. He counted the bundles of cash roughly as he transferred them into his sports bag, eyebrows raising as he did. It was quite a haul for a
weekly skim off a clip joint. He briefly wondered what else they had going on down there, then chased the thought away as excess trouble he didn’t need to know.
    By the time the cabbie was standing over the crumpled heap in the alleyway, he had put the attache case in the cistern and taken off the blue hood, rolling it into a ball as he nipped out of the
side door of the pub. He junked it in a bin as he came out onto Charing Cross Road and hailed himself a ride up to King’s Cross.
    Dougie looked up from his racing pages. As if struck by electrodes, he knew Lola was in the room. She walked towards him, green eyes dancing, clocking amusedly his stupid cap and the bag that
lay between his feet. Sat down in front of him and breathed: “Is it enough?”
    “Aye,” nodded Dougie. “It’s enough.”
    He hadn’t wanted there to be any way in which Lola could be implicated in all this. He’d had her phone in sick for two days running, told her just to spend her time packing only the
essentials she needed and gave her the money for two singles up to Edinburgh.
    The night train back to the magic city, not even the Toon Army could ruin that pleasure for him.
    “You ready?” he asked her.
    Her grin stretched languidly across her perfect face.
    “Yes,” she purred. “I’m ready.”
    Dougie gripped the Adidas bag, left his floppy fries where they lay. As they stepped out onto the road, St Pancras was lit up like a fairytale castle in front of them. “See that,” he
nudged her shoulder, “that’s bollocks compared to where we’re going.”
    His heart and his soul sung along with his blood. He was leaving the Big Smoke, leaving his life of shadows, stepping into a better world with the woman he loved by his side. He took her hand
and strode towards the crossing, towards the mouth of Kings Cross Station.
    Then Lola said: “Oooh, hang on a minute. I have to get my bag.”
    “You what?” Dougie was confused. “Don’t you have it with you?”
    She laughed, a low, tinkling sound. “No honey, I left it just around the corner. My friend, you know, she runs a bar there and I didn’t want to lug it around with me all day.
She’s kept it safe for me, behind the bar. Don’t vorry, it von’t take a minute.”
    Dougie was puzzled. He hadn’t heard about this friend or this bar before. But, in his limited experience of women, this was typical. Just when you thought you had a plan, they’d make
some little amendment. He guessed that was just the way their minds worked. She leaned to kiss his cheek and whispered in his ear: “Ve still have half an hour before the train
goes.”
    The pub was, literally, round the corner. One of those horrible, bland chain brewery joints heaving with overweight office workers trying to get lucky with their sniggering secretaries in the
last, desperate minutes before Closing Time.
    He lingered by the door as Lola hailed a bored-looking blonde behind the bar. Watched her take a small blue suitcase from behind the bar, kiss the barmaid on each cheek and come smilingly back
towards him.
    A few seconds before she reached him, her smile turned to a mask of fear.
    “Oh, shit,” she said, grabbing hold of his arm and dragging him away from the doorway. “It’s fucking Steve.”
    “What?”
    “This vay,” she had his arm firmly in her grasp now, was propelling him through to the other side of the bar, towards the door marked TOILETS , cursing and talking a million miles an
hour under her