The Saab pulled out. I followed. Maybe a thirty-yard gap. When it turned into the busy Fulham Road I was almost nudging its bumper, anxious not to lose contact at the very start.
At night it’s not so easy to follow a car. If you slip back, all you have are the tail lights—looking like anyone else’s tail lights.
By the same token, of course, it’s harder to tell if you’re being followed. If that ever entered their minds …
Lillie Road … Fulham Palace Road to Hammersmith. Then the A4 for the M4: the route to Heathrow. Five-thirty: heavy and slow traffic to Hammersmith, which meant I could be close enough, often, to see the crowns of their heads.
And read their thoughts? If they were heading off into the night together—if they were about to make their escape—there would surely be a tingle, a pulse between them detectable even in the attitude of their heads. Whereas if they were about to say goodbye …
Fulham Palace Road. Past Charing Cross Hospital, where he worked—where he saw his women.
And would still work? Did his head turn, just for a moment, in spite of himself, or did he make himself look rigidly ahead?
When you follow two people—when you follow anyone—and they don’t know you’re there, it’s hard not to feel a flutter of power. As if you can decide their fate. Your foot over the scurrying beetle.
The mysterious urge to protect.
The roundabout at Hammersmith. They swung left onto the A4. Now the traffic quickened: harder to stay close. But he didn’t drive fast, he kept to the slow lane—two steady red lights. He didn’t drive like someone eager to be far away.
I think I knew it even then. She was going. She was going to leave. Some things you piece together, some things you know in your bones. He hadn’t told Sarah any lies. He was eking out the moments.
The A4, then the M4.
Even so, even so. The thing was still in his power, there behind the wheel. He might do something mad, as the exit for Heathrow approached. He might step on it suddenly. He might put his foot down, exceed all limits, for the sake of not letting her go.
A last wild hope. His hope? Mine? He was brooding on it, I was brooding on it—an ex-cop who’d done six months, once, on cars. Okay, sonny, if you want a race … Not a surveillance, a chase (wasn’t that why you really joined?). In the end it’s just hunting, it’s the lawlessness of the hunt.
Dyson’s face when I had to tell him: I’d exceeded limits.
And Kristina was going back—if she was going back—to where they’d ditched all the rules.
Three exits, on the motorway, before Heathrow—not counting the one for Terminal 4. The options close off rapidly, the moments whittle down. Then you get sucked into the mesh of a huge airport.
He kept to the slow lane. Indicated for the exit to “Terminals 1, 2 and 3.”
Even so, even so. Things can still happen, they can turn right round at the last minute. And there was always Plan B: that they’d pass through the departure gates together—as always intended. They’d flash their boarding cards and be gone. Why should he have driven anything but steadily and calmly if that was the plan?
The link-road from the motorway to the airport entrance. The roar of a low jet.
In my bones I knew it, they were going to part. The way the black Saab seemed to drive as gravely as a hearse, down into the tunnel under the runways, as if there was no way out.
Part of me—my bones only?—must have rejoiced. The rest of me begging to be wrong.