I didn’t answer, just leaped on the bike and turned the key. The engine spluttered without catching. I yelled, ‘No way!’ so loudly a woman pushing a shopping trolley full of newspapers past the garage turned around. Not knowing what to do, I stuttered the bike forward three angry paces and turned the key fiercely again, hard enough to bend it. I doubt that in itself made any difference, but this time the tired old engine grumbled awake. I let out the clutch instantly, gunned the bike round the woman, missing her trolley by an inch, and fired straight through a gap in the rush-hour traffic, heading Amelia’s way. She was only a couple of hundred of metres up the road. I wove between two slower motorbikes, dipped around a cyclist and sped past a taxi on my way to pick her up. Catching sight of her running towards me on the verge, I cut towards her and hit the brakes. She swung herself up onto the seat hard before the bike had quite stopped, almost knocking me off. But I held it together and opened up the throttle so fiercely she had to clutch my chest to stop herself flying off the back of the bike as we accelerated away, weaving through the traffic again.

All that happened very quickly indeed, but I was still certain we’d lost the truck. A howl rose within me. It had been a stupid plan. Dad would have laughed at it. In that second, the fact of swerving and the smell of the traffic fumes and the sense of Amelia and I accelerating, on the edge of control, turned into a Mark-shaped warning, and just as I backed off Amelia shouted, ‘There!’ pointing frantically ahead of us, at Langdon’s SUV, cruising unhurriedly into the sunset.

Two heads were silhouetted in the cab. I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed a fair bet we were tailing my uncle and his bandy-legged driver. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said to nobody in particular, and dropped back a car or two behind the truck. The job now was not to lose them.

60.

That turned out to be easier than expected, partly because they didn’t go far. We were only travelling for about fifteen minutes. Still, it was time enough for the sun go down. I didn’t turn on the bike’s headlight. This was helpful, since when the truck pulled to a stop in a half-built neighbourhood made up of what looked like factories or warehouses, I was able to drift to a standstill behind a van parked on the other side of the road without attracting attention.

‘Check that out,’ said Amelia.

I was shutting down the bike, rocking it onto its stand. ‘What?’ I said, peering round the back of the van.

‘Them.’