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

Kingsway, a big broad, split-carriageway road which was one of the few in London where traffic could really move. To make matters worse, there was a bus lane; the cab pulled into it and accelerated away. It was illegal for the Mercedes to follow suit, not that its driver gave a damn about the law or the possibility of a fine, but the last thing he wanted was to be pulled over by the police and in any case to have done so would have made certain she knew she was being followed. To catch up he would have to rely on the city’s most dependable attributes: congestion and badly phased traffic lights.
    They did not let him down. The lights at Aldwych turned red before the cab reached them, then green just in time to let him follow it to the left around the great one-way semi-circle. There were two options at the end of its curve: left along Fleet Street towards St Paul’s and the financial district of the City, or sharp right towards Trafalgar Square and the West End. They turned right, but when the Mercedes did likewise, it was facing a wall of identical black cabs spread across the road.
    Almost too late he spotted the one with the girl in it, pulled right over beyond the traffic islands into a left-hand lane that led not ahead but over the bridge. He braked too slowly to avoid being sucked along with the traffic flow down the Strand, and watched the cab turn the corner as the lights changed. Almost immediately the cab was out of sight; he revved the Mercedes hard and threw it at the line of raised kerbing marking the central lane division. There was an agonising scrape of metal on stone as the big car bumped over, and a flurry of blaring horns as he ploughed across the next lane and shot the red lights. He had no idea what damage he might have done to the undercarriage, or whether there would be a police car on his tail any minute. To his right as he shot out onto Waterloo Bridge the great Ferris wheel of the London Eye rotated majestically, transporting its pods of tourists ogling the Palace of Westminster beneath them and distant St Paul’s, but he had eyes for one thingonly: the black cab approaching the roundabout at the other end of the bridge.
    Waterloo, he suddenly realised. Was she heading for Waterloo. A train out of town? Or to somewhere in the southern suburbs? The centre of the roundabout was taken up with the great cylinder of an Imax cinema, blocking the view and as he rounded it once again his field of vision filled with black taxis, but most of them were emerging onto the roundabout from the station pick-up area. The obvious thing was for her cab to have merged in with them on the station approach. It was off-limits to ordinary cars, but he would have to take the risk. And then at the last minute, glancing left to take account of oncoming traffic, he spotted the number plate he had memorised stopped on the right-hand side of the road just beyond the bus stop down Waterloo Road. Facing towards him. The driver had done a typical London cabbie’s U-turn in the middle of the road. Someone was getting in! A pre-arranged meeting? And then there she was, on the pavement, her brightly coloured rucksack standing out from the crowd. For a moment he breathed a sigh of relief, before a wave of angry frustration overcame him as she disappeared into the Underground.
    There was nothing to be done. Even if there had been two of them, it would have been a problem. There were four lines passing through Waterloo. She could have taken any of them. He muttered a few words into his headset in response to the babble of his panicking colleague, and then turned it off. He swung the Mercedes out into the traffic and back onto the roundabout, heading north and east, to Finsbury Park.
    He would have to make his report. But first he would have to say his prayers. Oh yes, he would definitely have to say his prayers.

13
    ‘Believe me,’ Dr Heidi Wenger said, ‘it’s not exactly what we were expecting either. And before you ask: No,