Read Spy hook: a novel for Free Online

things. I never knew what he was talking about. “Where did she say she’d meet me?”
    “She’d put the car on the pavement, sir. I had to ask her to move it. You know the regulations.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    “Car bombs and that sort of thing.” No matter how much he rambled, his voice always had the confident tone of an orderly room: an orderly room under his command. “Where did she say she’d meet me?” I asked yet again. I looked out through the glass doors. The snow had started and was falling fast and in big flakes. The ground was cold, so that it was not melting: it, was going to lie. It didn’t need -more than a couple of cupfuls of that sprinkled over the Metropolis before the public transportation systems all came to a complete halt. Gloria would be at her parents” house by now. She’d gone by train. I wondered if she’d now decide to stay overnight at her parents”, or if she’d expect me to go and collect her in the car. Her parents lived at Epsom; too damned near our little nest at Raynes Park for my liking. Gloria said I was frightened of her father. I wasn’t frightened of him, but I didn’t relish facing intensive questioning from a Hungarian dentist about my relationship with his young daughter.
    Gaskell was talking again. “Lovely vehicle. A dark green Mercedes. Gleaming! Waxed! Someone is looking after it, you could see that. You’d never get a lady polishing a car. It’s not in their nature.”
    “Where did she go, Mr. Gaskell?”
    “I told her the best car park for her would be Elephant and Castle.” He went to the map on the wall to show me where the Elephant and Castle was. Gaskell was a big man and he’d retired at fifty. I wondered why he hadn’t found a pub to manage. He would have been wonderful behind a bar counter. The previous week, when I’d been asking him about the train service to Portsmouth, he’d confided to me - amid a barrage of other information - that that’s what he would have liked to be doing. “Never mind the car park, Mr. Gaskell. I need to know where she’s meeting me.”
    “Sandy’s,” he said again. “You knew it well, she said.” He watched me carefully. Ever since our office address had been so widely published, thanks to the public-spirited endeavours of “investigative journalists’,- there had been strict instructions that staff must not frequent any local bars, pubs or clubs because of the regular presence of eavesdroppers of various kinds, amateur and professional.
    “I wish you’d write these things down,” I said. “I’ve never heard of it. Do you know where she means? Is it a cafe, or what?”
    “Not a cafe I’ve heard of,’ said Gaskell, frowning and sucking his teeth. “Nowhere near here with a name like that.’ And then, as he remembered, his face lit up. “Big Henry’s! That’s what she said: Big Henry’s.”
    . “Big Henty’s,” I said, correcting him. “Tower Bridge Road.
    Yes, I know it.”
    Yes, I knew it and my heart sank. I knew exactly the kind of “informant who was likely to be waiting for me in Big Henty’s: an ear-bender with open palm outstretched. And I had planned an evening at home alone with a coal fire, the carcass of Sunday’s duck, a bottle of wine and a book. I looked at the door and I looked at Gaskell. And I wondered if the sensible thing wouldn’t be to forget about Lucinda, and whoever she was fronting for, and drive straight home and ignore the whole thing. The chances were that I’d never hear from the mysterious Lucinda again. This town was filled with people who knew me a long time ago and suddenly remembered me when they needed a few pounds from the public purse in exchange for some ancient and unreliable intelligence material.
    “If you’d like me to come along, Mr. Samson. . .” said Gaskell suddenly, and allowed his offer to hang in the air. So Gaskell thought there was some strong-arm business in the offing. Well he was a game fellow. Surely he was too old for that