A little after nine forty in the morning, a mid-grey, mid-range, and almost middle-aged Ford saloon nosed its way somewhat uncertainly into a newish housing estate on the western outskirts of Salisbury.
Almost as soon as the vehicle had left the main road, the driver, who in many ways resembled the vehicle he was in charge of, being both greyish and middle-aged, drew the car to a halt and looked closely at the screen of the satnav attached by a sucker mount to the windscreen to the right of the steering wheel, the power lead running untidily across the dashboard and terminating in the cigarette lighter socket. At the top of the small screen were a couple of virtual buttons labelled with plus and minus signs, and the driver tapped the minus sign twice, expanding the screen display to show more of the tangled network of roads in front of him.
The problem he had was that the satnav was old and he had ignored the messages the unit generated on an irritatingly frequent basis telling him that the map badly needed to be updated. For an occasional and, more than occasionally, incompetent, driver the unit had worked well enough, providing accurate directions to most of the destinations the man had selected. But the housing estate was so new that, even if the latest available map update had been installed, the street the driver was looking for would probably still not have been included.
So he already knew that the road he was looking for would not be shown but the good news was that Google maps did possess enough detail. Google had inexorably become the font of all knowledge and wisdom for most of the population of the world, and the newly-minted verb ‘to Google’ was passing easily into everyday conversation.
The driver switched on the Ford’s hazard flashers so that the driver of any other vehicle approaching him would realise the car was stationary and pulled a sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket. He unfolded it to reveal a printed map that his laser printer at home had spat out the previous night and held it up beside the satnav display. Every street displayed on the satnav’s screen was also printed on the sheet of A4 paper, along with about a dozen that were not. One of these had been indicated by yellow highlighter, and it only took a minute or so for the driver to identify the streets he would need to drive down in order to reach his destination.
‘Easy enough,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Along this road to the end. At the T-junction I turn right, take the second left, then the first right and then the first right again. Right, second left, first right, first right.’
He dropped the paper on the seat beside him, angling it so that he could glance at it while he was driving, then put the car into gear and lifted his foot off the clutch. The sudden blare of a horn from close behind him caused him to stamp on the brake as a small Vauxhall, painted a notably hideous shade of yellow and with flared arches covering unnaturally wide wheels and tyres, swept past him, far too close and far too fast. He caught a brief glimpse of the driver, a clearly young male with particularly prominent ears, their appearance emphasised by the ‘fashionable’ haircut the youth affected, the lower part of his head shaved almost bald to leave what amounted to a prominent and rounded bird’s nest arrangement on the top of his skull. From behind, the combined effect looked something like a giant erect circumcised penis, which made the driver’s verbal response to the young man not only predictable but also visually accurate.
‘Dickhead,’ he muttered.
This time, he checked the rear-view mirror before he pulled away from the kerb, making sure that the road behind him was clear. As he shifted up into second gear, he became aware of a ticking sound coming from the dashboard. He realised that the hazard flashers were still working and switched them off.
Charles Vernon was not a natural driver and never felt comfortable behind the wheel, a sensation almost invariably shared by all of his infrequent passengers.
He saw no other vehicles driving around the estate as he worked his way towards his destination, though there were cars and the occasional van and motorcycle parked in the short driveways or, just as commonly, on the street in front of the houses, sometimes partly on the pavement. Vernon wondered briefly, as he weaved his way through the greatly reduced width of the road between two cars parked against opposite pavements, why their owners didn’t park their vehicles in the garages of the houses, but the simple reason was that in most cases they couldn’t.
The estate had been built down to a price rather than up to a specification, and wherever the builders had identified the merest hint of a corner, they had immediately done their best to cut it. The garages appeared to be the normal size but could in fact accommodate only the very smallest vehicles on the road. It looked as if the architects had assumed that all the property owners were still driving original Austin Sevens or the like.
Vernon stopped the Ford once more to check the printed map before making the final turn into the street – actually a cul-de-sac – where the house was located. He drove slowly down towards the end of the road, checking the house numbers as he went. He stopped the vehicle outside a property on the eastern side of the road, a house that appeared virtually identical to its neighbours.
There was a small black leather briefcase resting in the passenger foot well. It had originally been on the passenger seat but had shot forward a few minutes earlier when Vernon did his emergency stop as the small Vauxhall had overtaken him. He picked it up, walked to the front door of the semi-detached house and rang the bell.
A minute or so later the door swung open. A heavily-built black man stood in the opening and stared at Vernon, who extended his right hand and murmured a few words. The man shook his hand and Vernon stepped inside the house.
Almost two hours later the front door opened again and Vernon stepped out, shaking the other man’s hand as he did so. He walked across to his car, then glanced back at the house and raised his left hand in salute as the front door closed.
Most drivers could have turned the car on the street quite easily by doing a three-point turn, but as usual Vernon made something of a hash of it, a five-point turn being nearer the mark, and even then, he managed to kerb one of the Ford’s front wheels, and ran over the pavement on the opposite side of the road when he finally straightened the vehicle.
He stopped the car and chose a new destination on the satnav. It was a place he’d been to before, albeit only a couple of times, but even without the directions that would be provided by the somewhat overbearing woman who lived deep in the device’s digital heart he knew it would not be a difficult route. There would be signposts everywhere once he got within about twenty miles of his objective and his biggest challenge would be avoiding the other vehicles on the road, something that he didn’t always manage. But this time he needed to do just that, because it was important to him that he left no trail that could be followed. Or at least not one that could be followed easily.
But first Vernon had another brief stop to make, for which he didn’t need any directions because he already knew the way. He steered the Ford east towards Salisbury, where he left it in a large supermarket car park, just one more grey car in a tarmac field full of similar vehicles, while he spent about ten minutes inside the building. When he returned, he had another task to complete in the car park, which took him about ten minutes of furtive activity using a screwdriver. Nobody saw what he was doing or even noticed him, as far as he could tell.
Finally, he spent about another ten minutes in the far corner of the same car park, busying himself in the back seat of his Ford using an electric air pump that he plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter, an old jacket, a couple of other items of clothing, and the contents of a box that had been delivered to his house in a plain wrapper just over a week earlier.
Then he drove slowly out of the supermarket car park and headed broadly north-east, doing what the satnav woman told him. He had time in hand, and not that far to go.
Britain’s roads are studded with traffic cameras, installed to alert the police to accidents or other problems and to detect vehicles whose drivers are committing some kind of offence, everything from speeding to having a disqualified driver at the wheel, the latter functions being handled by ANPR – automatic number plate recognition – cameras. The advances in technology had enabled the British police force to concentrate most of their crime-fighting efforts on the easiest of all targets – motorists – rather than getting their hands dirty combatting genuine criminals who might fight back.
Vernon’s Ford was entirely legal in all respects apart from one, a deception that was an important, though not immediately obvious, part of his exit strategy, and his steady progress in the general direction of London triggered no alerts.
Not that an ANPR hit would have had any effect upon what happened next. All it might have done would have made tracing his progress and identifying where he had gone slightly quicker and easier.
But it really made no difference.