positively relieved to find he was a policeman and not another trigger-happy dealer.
So if the gun could be kept safe until it was wanted again, thatâs what Roly would do. Send it to ground; and not with another Dickens or a known Dickens associate. It could be anywhere. He could have gone out with a trowel and a plastic bag and buried it in a corner of someoneâs allotment. Unless Roly could be persuaded to say where, it would never be found.
Donovan was about to leave when he heard the motorbike. There was an extraordinary déjà vu moment in which he thought it was his bike and therefore him riding down through The Jubilee; though common sense intervened quickly it didnât quite wipe out the absurd chill of that. Shaking his head to dislodge the sensation â he was an imaginative man, born of an imaginative race; a certain amount of creativity was valuable in a detective but not so much that he found himself wondering if he had his own permission to be riding his own motorbike â he turned to see where the sound was coming from.
The machine emerged from George Street into the upper part of Jubilee Terrace. There were enough surviving street lights up there to send a constellation of glints and gleams bouncing off the black and chrome of a Kawasaki 400 in show-room condition.
A bike like that didnât belong in The Jubilee. Not because none of the inhabitants could afford it â rob enough garages and you can afford most things â but because if it had belonged there Donovan would have known. If that bike lived anywhere in Castlemere Donovan would have known. He went to the office window at the sound of a bike engine the way other people respond to the sound of a band in the street.
And if it didnât live here, the chances were â this being The Jubilee â it had been stolen. In London, maybe, and brought here in the belief that no one would know. Donovan might not have noticed if someone had come out of George Street wearing the Crown Jewels, but he always noticed bikes.
The rider was dressed like most bikers, in black leathers with a full-face helmet. He wasnât a big man: if Mikey Dickens hadnât been hors de combat Donovan might have thought it was him. Except that he rode that bike with a finesse which was not the first quality you associated with Mikey or any of his family. Respect, thought Donovan â for the machine, for what it could do.
All the same, the mere fact of its being here raised enough reasonable suspicion for a conscientious policeman to stop it and seek an explanation. And maybe talk grommits and big ends for a while. As the bike crossed Coronation Row and slowed to turn into Brick Lane Donovan stepped out of the shadows into the middle of the road, one hand up in the prescribed fashion.
The Kawasaki was too well-bred for its brakes to squeal but it kicked a couple of little fish-tails as it came to a halt. Muffled by the tinted perspex, the tirade of abuse from inside the helmet may have lost some of its highlights but Donovan still got âcretinâand âboneheadâand (probably) âsuckerâ.
âAll right, sonny,â he growled, âyou want to tell me about the friend of a friend who didnât at all mind you borrowing his wheels while he was in Benidorm?â
âAnd another thing,â snarled the rider, unintimidated, throwing off the helmet so that a river of red-gold hair flowed down one black leather shoulder: â âdonât call me sonny!â
Donovan didnât believe in love at first sight. If asked he would have said he didnât believe in love; though this was nonsense, all Irishmen are romantics, itâs why they write such wonderful songs about all the battles theyâve lost. But either way, a beautiful girl on a Kawasaki 400 was a dream come true. Donovan felt his jaw drop and closed it. He felt his eyes smart and blinked. Finally he remembered he was still standing
So if the gun could be kept safe until it was wanted again, thatâs what Roly would do. Send it to ground; and not with another Dickens or a known Dickens associate. It could be anywhere. He could have gone out with a trowel and a plastic bag and buried it in a corner of someoneâs allotment. Unless Roly could be persuaded to say where, it would never be found.
Donovan was about to leave when he heard the motorbike. There was an extraordinary déjà vu moment in which he thought it was his bike and therefore him riding down through The Jubilee; though common sense intervened quickly it didnât quite wipe out the absurd chill of that. Shaking his head to dislodge the sensation â he was an imaginative man, born of an imaginative race; a certain amount of creativity was valuable in a detective but not so much that he found himself wondering if he had his own permission to be riding his own motorbike â he turned to see where the sound was coming from.
The machine emerged from George Street into the upper part of Jubilee Terrace. There were enough surviving street lights up there to send a constellation of glints and gleams bouncing off the black and chrome of a Kawasaki 400 in show-room condition.
A bike like that didnât belong in The Jubilee. Not because none of the inhabitants could afford it â rob enough garages and you can afford most things â but because if it had belonged there Donovan would have known. If that bike lived anywhere in Castlemere Donovan would have known. He went to the office window at the sound of a bike engine the way other people respond to the sound of a band in the street.
And if it didnât live here, the chances were â this being The Jubilee â it had been stolen. In London, maybe, and brought here in the belief that no one would know. Donovan might not have noticed if someone had come out of George Street wearing the Crown Jewels, but he always noticed bikes.
The rider was dressed like most bikers, in black leathers with a full-face helmet. He wasnât a big man: if Mikey Dickens hadnât been hors de combat Donovan might have thought it was him. Except that he rode that bike with a finesse which was not the first quality you associated with Mikey or any of his family. Respect, thought Donovan â for the machine, for what it could do.
All the same, the mere fact of its being here raised enough reasonable suspicion for a conscientious policeman to stop it and seek an explanation. And maybe talk grommits and big ends for a while. As the bike crossed Coronation Row and slowed to turn into Brick Lane Donovan stepped out of the shadows into the middle of the road, one hand up in the prescribed fashion.
The Kawasaki was too well-bred for its brakes to squeal but it kicked a couple of little fish-tails as it came to a halt. Muffled by the tinted perspex, the tirade of abuse from inside the helmet may have lost some of its highlights but Donovan still got âcretinâand âboneheadâand (probably) âsuckerâ.
âAll right, sonny,â he growled, âyou want to tell me about the friend of a friend who didnât at all mind you borrowing his wheels while he was in Benidorm?â
âAnd another thing,â snarled the rider, unintimidated, throwing off the helmet so that a river of red-gold hair flowed down one black leather shoulder: â âdonât call me sonny!â
Donovan didnât believe in love at first sight. If asked he would have said he didnât believe in love; though this was nonsense, all Irishmen are romantics, itâs why they write such wonderful songs about all the battles theyâve lost. But either way, a beautiful girl on a Kawasaki 400 was a dream come true. Donovan felt his jaw drop and closed it. He felt his eyes smart and blinked. Finally he remembered he was still standing
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