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The Six Horseshoes Pub, Cheltenham – The Next Day
This certainly counted as a f**k-up, Eli thought as he sat in the Cheltenham pub where he was supposed to meet Red Cap. But please God, only a minor one. Agents missed meetings all the time. That’s why there were fall-back arrangements, sometimes two or three with different times and locations. It was only because Red Cap was unfailingly precise and had always turned up at the right place, at the right time, that Eli had been lulled into a false sense of security.
Eli nursed his lager shandy and watched the stand-up comedian set up. As the man positioned his box of props, Eli almost had the sense that no time had passed in the pub since he’d last been there. Everything was the same; the scarred table, the ring spots, even down to the
