Free Why We Die by Mick Herron Page B

dreamed she was cuffed to the steering wheel of an embarrassing German car, while Bob Poland watched through its windscreen . . . Poland was a man best left under his rock. She woke with that thought in mind, and couldn’t sleep again.
    On bare feet she padded to the kitchen; with a glass of water padded back, but found herself instead in her study: big word, small room. Small cluttered room, stacked with books she no longer needed and would one day shed, along with a filing cabinet full of Joe-related documents she supposed she’d keep forever. Zoë stood by the window, and looked out on the night-time world. A mist had fallen. No houselights shone. If she believed in ghosts, now would be the time to see them: pale spectres over the rooftops, barely distinguishable from the air they occupied. But all that carried to her was the sound of distant traffic. The dead don’t drive, Zoë. There are no ghosts. There was, though, a fat cat from next door, scrambling over the fence with a noise like a John Bonham drum solo, only rhythmical. She let the curtain drop.
    No ghosts, but haunting remained possible. Bob Poland, a man who by his own reckoning owed her harm, had threatened her life. How frightened should she be about that? It was true that he was not impressive: in the flesh or on the phone. She had cut bigger threats down to size; had once shot a man who could have crippled Poland with an elbow. Bob had the heart and mind of a stalker, and Zoë had encountered a few stalkers – all shared the same drab profile: middle class underachievers with hygiene problems. But Poland, an ex-cop, had a vicious streak, and it would be wise not to forget that. Besides, he didn’t have to be brave or interesting to cost her money. He’d proved that already.
    She went back to bed in the end. She didn’t dream again, but on the other hand, she didn’t sleep either.
    Back on stakeout next morning, she thought through the robbery again. It involved neat moves. The BMW hadn’t been discovered in the station car park until Tuesday evening, once the commuters’ day was over, and their vehicles had dispersed. It was probable that the robbers had had a second car waiting, but always possible they’d simply boarded a train . . . Westbound they might have been noticed, but there was never a shortage of people heading for London. They might have lost themselves in the crowd. Or it could have been double bluff: they could be local. Either way, they knew their ground; had checked things out in advance. Only that pointless use of the crossbow suggested amateur status, and the more she thought about it, the more they sounded like a professional trio incorporating a loose cannon. Perhaps her time would be better spent scanning the papers, waiting to read about some minor thug being hoisted from a river, medicine ball welded to his ankle. Crooks with ambition didn’t carry passengers. Unless something else bound them together, of course, but it was pointless speculating further.
    No: her best bet was getting a line on Sweeney’s ‘trade contacts’, and since he wasn’t likely to tell her who they were, watching his shop in the hope of a personal appearance was the obvious move. It was a long shot but so was everything else, and she stood to win five grand. The most she had to lose right now was a bag of apples.
    She was back in the charity shop before long.
    ‘Are you collecting lots of data?’
    ‘Masses of it.’
    ‘Only you don’t seem to be doing very much, dear.’
    Which just went to show that sooner or later, long observation resulted in a conclusion or two.
    The rest of the morning crawled. Lunchtime was a meaningless punctuation mark consisting of a cheese sandwich. If she still smoked, the car would be a death chamber by now: her skin, her fabrics, even the windows, would be suffused with dead tobacco. It had been something Jeff had checked on before he’d agreed to lend her the car.
    ‘I figured you for giving up around when