Read Online The Black Madonna by Peter Millar - Free Book Online Page A

the girl herself had emerged, looked briskly up and down the street and climbed into a taxi. He had had no choice but to set off immediately in pursuit; the risk of losing them in the London traffic was too great. He had taken the cab’s number automatically, but the streets were full of them and if it gave him the slip, finding the same cab again would be not so much like hunting a needle in a haystack as searching for a particular straw.
    At least the traffic was moving slowly. He tried his colleague’s mobile and got a ringing tone but no answer. He wondered if the old fool even knew how to work it. The taxi edged forward and through the traffic lights ahead of him. Damn! If it turned right into the one-way system around Russell Square Gardens, he would have to guess which exit it might take. Where on earth could the woman be going?
    She appeared to be carrying the same baggage – a ridiculous rucksack – that she had arrived with. Perhaps they had a lovers’ tiff and she had walked out on him. He wished he knew who the man was, but he had no idea, had been given no warning that she wouldbe met at the airport. He had filed away a mental description: tall, well-built, Anglo-Saxon in appearance, English probably or just possibly American although he seemed neither smartly nor sloppily enough dressed for that. Fair to mid-brown hair, and he walked with just the hint of a limp in his left leg. Not that he mattered now. The orders were to follow the girl.
    For the moment the taxi was still visible in the traffic ahead. Then it turned the corner. The lights changed. He pressed the accelerator and took off after it. His mobile burst into life as he turned the corner; the old fool had obviously emerged from the Gents and found out how to work his phone. He ignored it.
    The taxi was still ahead but turned left at the edge of the square, then took a left into Montague Street, the long road that ran down one side of the great neoclassical bulk of the British Museum. Of course, why hadn’t he thought of it. She was an archaeologist. Where else would she be headed but the home of one of the greatest collections on earth? On impulse he grabbed his still ringing mobile from the seat next to him, hit answer and told his perplexed partner to grab a cab, cut around the back of the museum and get out at the main entrance. That way there would be two of them again, enough to tail the woman properly without both having obviously emerged from the same vehicle. Sometimes God indeed moved in mysterious ways.
    Sure enough, he watched with satisfaction as the cab’s indicator signalled right at the end of Montague Street. He slowed at the corner and turned right into Great Russell Street. The museum’s monumental portico and colonnade ran the length of the block, the steps behind the railings crowded with summer tourists, but there was no sign of a taxi in front of him. It wasn’t possible. There hadn’t been time for her to stop and settle up. Unless she had cut and run. But why? And there would have been an outraged cab driver in the middle of the road.
    Nor could they have shot on ahead of him: a little further on the road became one-way in the opposite direction. He edged forward and glanced down the narrow road on his left to see a black cab turning right at the end of it. The same one? He couldn’t make out the number, but it had to be. He had been wrong about her destination . He accelerated to the end of the street and saw it again stopped in traffic edging towards the lights at the end of Bloomsbury Way.
    It made no sense. In a moment they would be back at Southampton Row, which was where they would have ended up if they had not turned at Russell Square. Perhaps she had changed her mind. Could she have realised she was being followed? It was not impossible; he had been as discreet as he could under the circumstances but then the circumstances had been far from perfect.
    The lights changed, the cab turned right again, down