then pulled away.
The streets were dead. She reached the end of the lane, putting on the blinkers to indicate she was turning right. She couldn’t see any policemen outside the museum, though she had half expected a guard to have been posted.
Alongside the building where her Land Rover had parked she saw a white van.
She pulled out into the road, driving slowly and straining to catch a glimpse of the writing on the side of the van: a twenty-four-hour locksmith. She smiled. Typical—shut the stable door after the horse has well and truly bolted.
She followed the road as it arced right, curving around a big old Gothic school building, and took her beyond the police station. There was no sign of anyone coming or going. Any panic or rush of excitement at the break-in and the resultant flurry of activity had died down and life had settled back into the normality of its daily routine.
Awena turned left at the end of the street and followed the road through a series of villages that fed one into the next. Eventually, she picked up a faster road and was able to put her foot down on the gas.
She allowed herself to laugh as she felt the rush of speed and the excitement of her plan falling into place. She’d done it. Simple as that. She’d won. She couldn’t wait to show Geraint her trophy, even if he still had doubts about what it was that she had stolen. She’d just have to convince him. Awena desperately wanted to call her brother, even though the digits on the dashboard reminded her that it was barely 7:00 a.m. He wasn’t an early riser.
She’d almost forgotten that he’d stayed the night in London.
She was going to enjoy the look on his face when he laid his eyes on the treasure.
Like the old commercial said...priceless.
Chapter 5
The Welsh seemed intent on charging Annja to enter their country—or was it the English charging her for the luxury of leaving theirs? She wasn’t entirely sure, but it was the first time she could remember being charged to cross a border. Signs at the side of the sweeping bridge that carried traffic over the River Severn warned that tollbooths lay ahead, clearly marked with the cost for each type of vehicle. It’s highway robbery, she thought, and grinned at her own dumb joke.
Brake lights glowed in the distance; there was a long queue to the control booths taking the money.
Annja reached for her purse as she joined the back of one of several snakes of cars that had formed and pulled out a crisp ten-pound note fresh from the currency exchange office.
A quick glance to the left confirmed she was already on the far side of the river. To her right she could see the supports of a second, older-looking bridge.
Cars edged forward slowly, and as was the way with queues, some moved faster than others—which really meant all of them seemed to be moving faster than hers. As she neared the front, she realized that some of the booths were actually automated, self-service barriers while the queue that she was in relied on someone giving change.
The guy in the next car flashed a smile across the lanes to her, but Annja was more interested in the car ahead. It wasn’t that she didn’t like drawing grins from strangers; just like everyone else she found them flattering, and his smile did draw a smile from her, but she didn’t want him to see it and think he’d somehow made her day. She was contrary like that. Plus, his queue was moving faster than hers. He’d have another driver to flirt with in a moment.
Eventually her turn came. She smiled to the tired-looking teller, trading money for less money, and he raised the barrier with a snatch of something she didn’t understand but assumed was the Welsh equivalent of Have a nice day or Drive safe.
She pulled away as cars raced into the bottleneck of decreasing lanes, each driver looking to secure one of the three lanes ahead of them before it became a mad scramble. The merging was surprisingly smooth, all things considered, with cars