Page 1 of Ticket Out

chapterone

London: Summer 1963

It was early.

Not early enough that Gabriella had the streets to herself—not that that was possible in London. The city seemed to always be humming, no matter what time you stepped out into it.

But most of the traffic, both on foot and by car, was light.

She didn’t mind the early shift.

She’d worked in her mother’s bakery in Melbourne, and sometimes that meant being up before four am. Starting the day at seven was a luxury.

It also meant less interaction with the public.

She preferred to write parking tickets and fix them to windscreens without ever having a face-to-face with a real life person.

Most of them weren’t very happy to receive what she had for them, and they took one look at her, in her neat black uniform and black satchel, hair pulled back in the regulation bun under her cap with its yellow band, and thought they could intimidate her.

Gabriella had a philosophical objection to being intimidated. She didn’t like it. She always pushed back.

She had a feeling that was why Mr. Greenberg had decided to put her on the early shift.

He couldn’t fault her for standing her ground, but he seemed to think there was a polite way to deal with someone screaming obscenities in your face. Gabriella had asked him what that way was, and he had looked at her for a long beat, and then put her on mornings.

Kensington this time of day was just stretching awake, what with the sun already up.

It was summer, and the faint stink of rotting food scraps puffed out of narrow alleys as she walked past them. It was still cool enough, this early, but yesterday had been a scorcher, and she wrinkled her nose at the smell, aware that as the day heated up, it was only going to get worse.

She turned the corner, into Clematis Lane, with its upmarket collection of boutiques, restaurants and cafes.

The boutiques had names like The Cat’s Meow, and Glamour Girl, and Gabriella enjoyed looking at the dresses she couldn’t afford in the windows.

There was no one parked in the few spaces available, not at this hour, but up ahead, like a deliberate insult, she saw the yellow Ford Sunliner parked once again in the loading zone outside the Horatio Gallery.

“Never make it personal,” Mr. Greenberg said to all of them, a reminder each morning before he sent them out from the Kensington and Chelsea Traffic Warden Centre. “It will feel personal, sometimes, but be professional. Be the bigger person.”

Johnny McLad, as she had chosen to name her nemesis, was making it very difficult to be the bigger person.

She was walking at a fast clip as she approached the car, feeling her cheeks heat, even with the cool morning air on them.

He had refused to give her his name, had ripped up all three FPNs she’d issued, each one for the very same infringement—parking in a loading zone. She’d caught him in the act of destroying the second one and he’d laughed in her face as he’d shredded the ticket and then thrown it on the road and ground it under his booted heel.

He was crass, dressed like some kind of wannabe cowboy—if cowboys wore every crazy pattern and color on the spectrum—and he was a sexist pig.

This was the fourth time he’d flouted the rules.

Four times too many.

She already had her ticket book out by the time she reached the car, but she slowed when she noticed the passenger door was slightly ajar.

Maybe he’d just stopped quickly to drop something off, and hadn’t even bothered to close the door.

Although it was the passenger door that was open, not the driver’s side.

And he had always claimed not to have anything to do with the gallery. She’d asked him politely, the first time, in case he was genuinely using the loading zone for its correct purpose, and he had sneered at her, told her he had never set foot in the gallery in his life, and for her to feck off and mind her own business.

Well, thiswasher business.

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