So I did. I jabbed the guy with the wrench again, and he swung his tyre iron to fend it off, with a jarring clang, and I jabbed again, and he parried again, by that point putting all his focus on our respective above-the-waist activities, which was exactly where I wanted it, because it meant I was able to step in and kick him in the nuts with absolutely no impediment at all.

And it was a good kick. Mass and velocity, like baseball, like everything. The guy dropped his tyre iron, and folded forward and down, and tipped on to his knees, gasping and retching, hanging his head, kneeling there right in front of me. Which gave me plenty of time and space to pick my spot. I tapped him hard on the side of the head with the wrench, serious but not deadly, like a tennis player just warming up, and he rolled over on his side and lay still.

Then I hustled back to the boxed-off room, to see how Casey Nice was doing.

THIRTY-FOUR

THE FIRST GUY was lying mostly on his back with a footlong shard of glass in his eye. Dead, for sure. I could tell by the limp shapelessness of his body. Unmistakable. Life had recently departed. There wasn’t much blood. Just a slow trickle, now stopped, hanging on his cheek like a fat red worm. Plus a thick clear liquid, which might have been the inside of his eyeball.

It was the second guy who was whimpering. The guy I had hit with the chair. He was on the floor in the doorway. His hair was all matted with blood, and there was a decent pool of it under his head. His eyes were closed. I didn’t think he was about to get up and give us any trouble. Not any time soon, anyway.

Casey Nice was backed up against the desk, looking somewhere halfway between shaky and resolute. I had asked Shoemaker, Has she operated overseas before? Has she operated anywhere before?

She had now.

I said, ‘You OK?’

She said, ‘I think so.’

‘You did a good job.’

She didn’t answer.

I said, ‘We need to search this place.’

She said, ‘We need to call an ambulance.’

‘We will. After we search. We need guns. That’s what we came for.’

‘They won’t be here. It was a decoy.’

‘How many secure locations do they have? I think the guns are here. I asked the last guy, and he got all worried.’

‘We don’t have time.’

I thought about Little Joey, in his Bentley. Nosing through the traffic. Red lights and gridlock. Or maybe not. I said, ‘We’ll be quick.’

She said, ‘We better be.’

We started by searching the main man’s pockets. I figured if he had a key, then we might be able to tell what kind of a lock we were looking for, and therefore where we might find it. A safe key would look different than a door key, which would look different than a locker key. And so on, and so forth. But all he had was a car key. It was a grimy old item on a creased leather fob that had Ealing Taxis printed on it in flaking gold leaf. Possibly one of the battered sedans in the shop was his. He had cash money too, spoils of war, which I added to our treasury. And a cell phone, which I put in my pocket. But he had nothing else of interest.

We had already searched the boxed-off room, so we moved out to the main workshop floor. There was a toilet in the far corner, with nothing in it except basic facilities and about a trillion bacteria. It was like a huge three-dimensional petri dish. But it was hiding nothing except contagious disease. It had no hidden panels, and no opening sections in the walls, and no trapdoor in the floor.

The rest of the space was one big open area, full of cars and clutter, as we had seen. Complete visual chaos, but conspicuously lacking in obvious hiding places. There were no doors in any of the walls, no closets, no large square boxes, no locked compartments. There was nothing thrust down the centres of the stacks of tyres.

‘No guns here,’ Nice said. ‘It’s an auto repair shop. What you see is what you get.’

I didn’t answer.

She said, ‘We have to go.’

I thought about Little Joey, in his Bentley. Already through the city centre, by that point, probably. Out the other side, going fast on a wide road heading west.

‘We have to go,’ she said again.

In his Bentley.

‘Wait,’ I said.

‘For what?’

No large square boxes, no locked compartments.

Bullshit.

I said, ‘The main man wouldn’t drive a rent-a-wreck. Why would he? Karel Libor had a Range Rover. The Romford Boys use premium brands. Wouldn’t the Serbians too? They wouldn’t want to look like poor relations.’

‘So?’

‘Why was the guy carrying the key to a clunker?’

‘Because they fix clunkers here. That’s their job. Or their cover.’

‘It’s not the boss man’s job to look after the keys.’ I went back to the boxed-off room, to the guy’s pocket, and came back with the key. It had a metal shaft and a plastic head, but not a big bulbous thing like a modern car has. No battery, no transponder, no security device. Just a key.