that today can only be used in parody:
‘Balham: Gateway to the South!’
Balham — last chance to turn back, last chance to escape and get back into the city. Last place where the Underground meets the overland, last chance at least to pretend you live in the centre of town.
Balham. A place where all good Woolworths go to die; suburbia that just wishes it was something more.
I was bleeding.
As we staggered out of Balham station I turned to Oda and said, “My stitches have torn.”
She looked at me, and for a moment, I was scared again. Then she took me firmly by the wrist and dragged me like a child across the street to the nearest chemist. She bought a thick pile of bandaging and a first-aid kit, and hurried me into the nearest passport photo booth.
It wasn’t a unit designed for two, but I wasn’t about to complain. She said, “Coat!”
I pulled off my coat.
“T-shirt!”
I pulled off my shirt. “What a mess,” she tutted, and started mopping. After a few minutes, a security guard pulled back the curtain to enquire what we were doing. Oda told him to call the police, or an ambulance, or both, and to get stuffed. Paralysed by the wide range of choices available, he just hovered, and when the bandages had been applied and my Jesus T-shirt pulled back on, he hustled us out as quickly as possible and snuck away to call the police.
Oda propped me against the glass window of a supermarket and ran across the road to a charity shop. A minute later she came back with a black T-shirt in a paper bag. It said, “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT”.
I said, “Please. No.”
She said, “Shut up and put it on.”
This time we used a coffee shop. She bought two strong coffees that turned out to be brown hot water in a cardboard cup; but I appreciated the gesture. It was something to wash the painkillers down. I changed in the toilets. By the time we emerged, cups in hand, the sirens were starting nearby. She said: “Can he follow us?”
“Who?”
“Mr Pinner.”
“I don’t know. Let’s keep moving.”
We took a mainline train to Clapham Junction, sitting in silence by the window. I couldn’t face the Tube; just couldn’t face it.
From Clapham, we took the mainline train to Waterloo.
She didn’t look me in the eye, just stared out of the window in silence and dug at the dirt under her nails. It was black and red from dry blood. She still didn’t look at me.
At Waterloo she said, “Do we need to find you a doctor?”
“Eventually,” I said. “I want to see the river.”
Down into the subways that ran beneath the roundabout before Waterloo Bridge; a loop past the Imax and then north. I could smell the river, taste its old magics on the air, they cooled down the burning in my skin, eased some of the weight from my legs. The rain had stopped, the pavement gleaming with clean washed darkness, the tide low, with soft, perfectly smooth sand peeping out from beneath the high walls of the embankment. I slid gratefully down on a bench in front of the National Theatre, beneath the leafless branches of the fairy-light-hung trees. The wooden bench was still damp from the rain, the city a faded grey behind a monotone haze. It was quiet and beautiful. Somewhere behind all the walls a million people were doing whatever it was people did after their lunch break in offices like these. And I didn’t need to know about a single one of them, but could sit at the centre of the universe and listen to the river, flowing just for me, just mine.
Oda stood behind me.
Bang, I thought.
Bang, three to the chest, two to the head.
Bang; bang bang.
Public place — cameras, CCTV, always CCTV, eyes in the windows of the cafés of the theatre, buying tickets, reading books, walking by the river, tourists with little kiddies holding balloons.
I slipped my fingers beneath my “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT” T- shirt and felt the sticky seeping of blood through the bandage Oda had wrapped round my shoulder. The blood that came away on my fingertips was thin and red. I wiped it unconsciously on my trousers and breathed a little deeper the smell of the river.
Then, because Oda didn’t seem to want to talk to me, I stood up, walked to the edge of the embankment and climbed over the railing. A stair, practically frictionless with thin green slime clinging to it, led down to the soft almost-entirely-sand of the river’s edge. I climbed down, walked to where the Thames water slid over the bank, washed my hands in it, then walked back to the sand. Oda had come to the top of the stair. She looked . . . nothing. Folded arms and nothing in her face. Not speaking, not doing, just watching.
I prodded the sand with my toe, saw thin clear water ooze out from the surface, and very carefully with the end of my shoe wrote,
“Is that smart?” asked Oda from the top of the stairs.
I looked up at her. “Oda?”
“Yes.”
“I think I know what’s going on.”
“Do you.” Not a question, not wanting an answer. But I had one to give, and the novelty kept me talking.
“Oda?”
“Yes?”
“I think I know how to kill Mr Pinner.”
Now, and for the first time, Oda started to look interested.
Legwork.
I loathe the Aldermen, but it is nice having someone else’s legs to do the working.
We went to Aldermanbury Square.
Earle said, “You’re still . . .!”
“Not dead, no. I noticed.”
Still behind that desk. Still in an immaculate suit, still unfluffed, still not rattled. Still drinking coffee. No wonder the man never seemed to sleep.
“Forgive me, I did not mean to sound so . . .”
“The good thing about my party trick, is that it is
His face darkened. “You found . . .”
“Dead. They’re dead. And the kid . . . and Mo . . . dead.”
Loren.
I hadn’t thought but
what would we say?
“But you appear to be . . .”
“Still not dead, yes, I know. Funny, isn’t it? I have a theory, Mr Earle. Actually, I have a whole fat bundle of plausible hypotheses which, taken together, may make one great whompha of a theory. Wanna hear it?”
He shrugged. “If it’s relevant to our current dilemma.”
“Mr Earle, does it worry you that, if I
“It is conceivable that you are a villain rather than a prat, Mr Swift.”
“You want to hear this theory or not?”
