8

She wasn’t there.

Manville double-checked, walked both ways along the Mall, frowning at the people at the tables in other open-air cafes, and she was at none of them. He’d been right the first time; there was where he’d left her, at that table in the middle of that particular cafe, where the young couple now giggled together like the newlyweds they no doubt were.

Where was she? She wouldn’t just leave. That didn’t seem right. Did something spook her?

Whatever had happened, there was nothing for Manville to do but wait here. Wherever Kim had gone, she would certainly come back to this spot to find him.

There was an empty table in the second row. He took it, waited a couple of minutes for the waiter to arrive, ordered a cappuccino, then looked off to the right, the long way down the Mall. All those bobbing heads, all those people, in random movement, no rhythm, no pattern. Would Kim suddenly appear among them?

Movement made him turn his head, and there was now somebody seated next to him. He was in his forties, heavyset, a bruiser with a large round head, thick bone above his eyebrows, a broken nose. Manville had never seen him before, but he knew at once that this man was connected to the killers on the ship. And that something bad had happened to Kim.

The man leaned forward, as though he wanted to deliver a secret. “George Manville,” he said.

Manville looked carefully at him. The man’s large bony hands rested on the table, empty. He didn’t act threatening, he was just there. “Yes,” Manville said.

The man nodded. “If you look out there,” he said, his voice raspy but soft, his accent showing him to be a local, “you’ll see a fella that isn’t walking. He’s looking at you. He’s got his hands in the pockets of kind of a big raincoat.”

Manville looked. “I see him.” It was another stranger, cut from the same cloth as this one.

The man said, “If I stand up and walk away from this table, and you don’t stand up and follow me, that bloke’s gonna take a machine pistol out of his pocket and blow your head off. And probably a few other heads around here, too. He’s got rotten aim.”

Manville said, “Where’s Kim?”

The man smiled. “You wanna talk to her? Come along.”

“She’s all right?”

“Sure,” the man said. “Just a little out of breath, that’s all.”

Manville had no idea what he meant by that, except that Kim must still alive. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

“I thought that’s what you were gonna decide,” the man said, and patted the table. “Leave some loot for the waiter, there’s a good chap.”

Manville did as he was told, and the man stood and walked away, without a backward glance. Manville got to his feet and followed, aware of the other man trailing along behind.

Down at the end of the Mall, on the corner with George Street, stopped illegally at the curb was a large black Daimler limousine. The man ahead of Manville walked directly to it and opened the curbside rear door. “Get in,” he said.

Manville did, and the man followed him, as Manville saw, seated in the rear of the limo, the leader of the killers from the ship. From the corner of his eye, he saw the man with the machine pistol get in the front, next to a liveried chauffeur.

Manville was in the middle of the rear seat, the leader to his left, the other man to his right. Kim wasn’t here.

The chauffeur started the Daimler purring away from the curb, and the leader smiled at Manville’s profile, not in a friendly way. “And now,” he said, “the rematch.”