Real Tigers by Mick Herron Read Free Book Online

skirting board. The floor, too, was bare—no protection for infant feet—though a thin rug had been laid next to the single bed, and the padlock on the outside of the door was heavy-duty, beyond what even the most mischief-prone child warranted. A nursery no more. Though not the securest of prisons.
    They’d travelled for an hour at least; slowly at first, through the never-empty streets of London, then faster once free of the capital. Less than an hour, she thought, but her watch had been taken from her, and she had lacked the presence of mind to perform a slow count . . . Besides, she’d blacked out on being dumped in the van. Partly the grip Sean Donovan had exerted, a clasping of—was it her carotid—plus the shock and the heat and, crazily enough, a momentary relaxation at knowing the worst had happened, and she need no longer dread its approach. She had grown dizzy, and life had grown dark. So there’d been no running tally of corners taken; no memorising of audible landmarks. If churchbells had rung, she’d missed them. If the van had passed a waterfall, she’d failed to notice.
    There’d been two others. One driving, obviously. Sean himself, who had lifted her from the street like a sack left for recycling; and a third, the soldier she’d seen loitering by the tube. Being spotted, it occurred to her, had not been his error: she’d been meant to notice him, and turn away. What use would their van have been on the underground?
    Here and now, like any prisoner, she checked the window first. Set in an alcove formed by the slant of the roof and mullioned into a diamond pattern, it was closed by a simple latch, and easily large enough to fit through, but there were iron bars set into the external sill which a brief tug told her weren’t going anywhere. Not that she was built for scrambling down the side of a house. It wasn’t the securest of prisons, but didn’t have to be—she was a middle-aged woman who’d never been a joe; a recovering drunk who was PA to a drunk still working on it. Why did they want her in the first place? And who, Sean Donovan included, were they?
    Unsuited for squeezing through them, Catherine settled for leaving the windows open instead, causing a slight adjustment in the air. Nothing you could call a breeze. There was a hum of distant traffic, but she couldn’t see the road from here. It had felt like a motorway, though that didn’t narrow things down much. An hour or so from Central London, somewhere off a motorway . . . A house set on its own in what must be countryside, because it was too dark to be anything else.
    In the van, she’d been blindfolded and gagged, her hands bound, but none of it roughly—it might have been a sex game, a party promise. And that had been it for the rest of the journey. She’d contemplated thrashing about, but to what end? Best to preserve her strength for whatever came next.
    When they’d left the motorway, the terrain had swiftly deteriorated: slip road, B-road—she’d heard bushes swishing the van’s panels. Then the crunching of gravel, and the sudden dips and bounces of rough ground. The van had lurched to a stop; no negotiating its way into a space. They’d untied her but left the blindfold on as they helped her out, one strong arm—not Donovan’s—at her waist until she’d found her feet. Then out of the country air, which was softer, greener, richer than the city’s, and into a house whose floors were wooden, on which her buckled feet sang, and produced a faint echo.
    â€œThere’s stairs.”
    Again, not Donovan.
    There were stairs, yes, and then more stairs; three floors’ worth. And then she was in here, this one-time nursery, and the blindfold was removed.
    â€œYour quarters.”
    It was the second soldier, the one from the tube: chipped from the same block as Donovan. Before she had time for a more detailed