Started Early, Took My Dog Read Online Free

Germanic for my liking, of course,’ Steve said, as if the entire portfolio of European real estate was at his disposal.
    ‘Maybe that’s something to do with the fact that we’re in Germany,’ he said.
    Steve said, ‘I’ve got nothing against the Germans. Had a couple in the Deuxième. Good lads. Good beer,’ he added after several seconds’ contemplation. ‘Good sausages too.’
    Steve said he’d been in the Paras, came out and found he couldn’t handle civilian life, joined the French Foreign Legion. You think you’re hard and then you find out what hard really means .
    Right. How many times had he heard that? He’d met a few guys from the legion in his time – ex-military guys escaping the flatline of civilian life, deserters from divorces and paternity suits, fugitives from boredom. All of them were running from something, none of them quite the outlaws they imagined themselves to be. Certainly not Steve. This was the first time they’d done a job together. The guy was a bit of a gung-ho wanker but he was OK, he paid attention. He didn’t smoke in the car, he didn’t want to listen to crap radio stations.
    Some of these places reminded him of gingerbread houses, right down to the icing-sugar snow that rimmed their roofs and gutters. He had seen a gingerbread house for sale in the Christkindl market where they had spent the previous evening, strolling around the Marienplatz, drinking Glühwein out of Christmas mugs, for all the world like regular tourists. They’d had to pay a deposit on the mugs and on that basis he had taken his back to the Platzl, where they were staying. A present for his daughter Marlee when he got home, even though she would probably turn her nose up at it, or, worse, thank him indifferently and never look at it again.
    ‘Did you do that job in Dubai?’ Steve asked.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I heard everything went tits up?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    A car rounded the corner and they both instinctively checked their watches. It glided past. Wrong car. ‘It’s not them,’ Steve said, unnecessarily.
    On the plus side, they had a long driveway that curved away from the gate so that you couldn’t see the house from the road. And the driveway was bordered by a lot of bushes. No security lights, no motion-sensor lights. Darkness was the friend of covert ops. Not today, they were doing this in daylight. Neither broad nor bright, the fag end of the afternoon. The dimming of the day.
    Another car came round the corner, the right one this time. ‘Here comes the kid,’ Steve said softly. She was five years old, straight black hair, big brown eyes. She had no idea what was about to happen to her. The Paki kid , Steve called her.
    ‘Egyptian. Half,’ he corrected Steve. ‘She’s called Jennifer.’
    ‘I’m not racist.’
    But.
    The snow was still fluttering down, sticking to the windscreen for a second before melting. He had a sudden, unexpected memory of his sister coming into the house, laughing and shaking blossom off her clothes, out of her hair. He thought of the town they were brought up in as a place devoid of trees and yet here she was in his memory like a bride, a shower of petals like pink thumbprints on the dark veil of her hair.
    The car pulled into the driveway and disappeared from view. He turned to look at Steve. ‘Ready?’
    ‘Lock and load,’ Steve said, starting the engine.
    ‘Remember, don’t hurt the nanny.’
    ‘Unless I have to.’

     
    Wednesday
‘Watch out, the dragon’s about.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘There. Just passing Greggs.’ Grant pointed at Tracy Waterhouse’s image on one of the monitors. The air in the security control room was always stale. Outside, it was beautiful May weather but in here the atmosphere was like that of a submarine that had been under too long. They were coming up to lunchtime, the busiest time of the day for shoplifters. The police were in and out all day, every day. A pair of them out there now, all tooled up, bulky waist-belts,