‘Just send me a cheque.’
‘Funny,’ Larry nodded at the clock on the dash. ‘At least you’ll be back in time for this charity lunch thing.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Are you guest of honour?’
‘Ha! Hardly. It’s just a uni thing. Each year they gather up any faculty who’ve written books this year. Then we sell signed copies at inflated prices to raise money for the building. This year they want to build a curling metal slide from the top floor to the bottom.’
Larry curled his lip. ‘Why?’
‘It’s an art thing that gets students from lecture to lecture quicker … that’s assuming if they can get me off it, of course.’ Matt stopped suddenly and reached into his bag. He pulled out a copy of In Our Image and passed it to Larry. ‘Before I forget. One incredible book, as promised. Just don’t tell Father Michael.’
Larry quickly reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.
‘Don’t you dare. It’s a freebie.’
‘Nah … take it.’ He handed over a £20 note. ‘For the slide. For the kiddies.’
Matt laughed and popped the door. ‘You will let me know if anything develops?’
‘Of course. Thanks, again.’
He pushed the door shut and watched Larry pull away. He gave a toot of his horn, then eased back into the Menham slipstream and was gone. Matt waited for a minute. Maybe he could grab a quick coffee to take on the train with him. He could catch up on his reading for the Raelian movement thing and find out why they loved the Swastika so much. But that’s when his mind drifted, because the entire time he’d been considering it, he’d been staring across the street. At those spindly trees he’d seen earlier. They were swaying again, over the metal railings, and he saw the grass that swooped up beyond them, and the winding path lined with lamp posts and litter bins. He could just about make out the roof of something near to a large pond in the distance. A gazebo.
‘Menham Park,’ he whispered, then glanced down at his watch. 12:07. He should probably get going to make this uni dinner thing on time.
It took him about three seconds to decide.
CHAPTER NINE
Home town.
Weird phrase, that. Sort of reminded her of those brands you burn into cattle so the farmer knows which shed that particular animal belongs in: 17b or S6. Something like that. And even if it was a hard-working, industrial, resourceful cow, who managed to scale the farmer’s fence at night, who managed to steal a car and drive to Eastern Europe so they could start a new life as a bartender … even then it’d still have that flap of mutilated skin somewhere near its backside with its shed number on it.
Rachel Wasson had loved Menham growing up. Like really loved it. It was the centre of her world, with a decent school and cracking friends. Best of all, it was just a Tube ride from the South Bank. She’d spent countless hours there with her dad seeing old Hitchcock films at the BFI. But things happen. Situations change. And by the time her dad was dead it was just her and her mum and her sister at 29 Barley Street.
Which, let’s face it, seemed to be what the house preferred. She’d often thought that, back when it all happened. And she’d thought that many times since, actually. That the house had only ever wanted girls there. Until her beloved Menham became sufficiently polluted to make her want to run away from it very, very fast, the first chance she got.
There were a few other girls at school who also wanted to escape Menham. They told her that her best bet was to marry rich. A footballer, maybe. A businessman. These girls were so repellently old school and Disney-warped that they made Rachel both furious and depressed. So she got out of Menham on her own. She studied for her A Levels like her life depended on it. She got a job working at Brodie’s shampoo factory behind Menham Fire Station. Slamming plastic tops on bottles until the raw centre of her palm was nigh-on arthritic because Dad was dead and her increasingly strange mum was skint, so she was flying solo. She passed her exams, bought the car that shampoo built and wheel-spinned out of Menham at warp speed to Exeter Uni. She studied sound engineering there. Got her geek on, but for an actual purpose this time. Found herself, cut her hair short, blagged her way into the audio industry by getting some work experience at a sound library up in Manchester. Which led to an actual, real-life job at the end of it. She’d become that ultrarare breed of creatives. One who got paid for it.
Detail. That’s what Rachel Wasson was known for in the shrinking sound effects industry. Detail and authenticity. Like how a watermelon sounded utterly different to a pumpkin when you drop it on the floor. Such detail was excessive and pointless according to some, but it was going down well with her firm, and with the growing number of radio and TV producers who regularly used her massive library of sounds.
But despite the budding career and the Manchester flat, and despite her presence on a completely different electoral roll, there was a branded bit of her body, lurking somewhere under her new, consciously retro clothes. A label that said: property of Menham, South London.
Home town, she thought, as she pulled her little Fiat off the roundabout and through Roulette Street. That was the name she and the girls always gave to the road that led to the level crossing. Once through, she knew she was now truly moving through the cold, lizard flow of Menham’s bloodstream.
She passed by Menham Comprehensive and noticed something. They’d demolished the old sixth-form block. Twats! The brown, corrugated block where she’d studied her way out of Menham was now a stoopid all-weather pitch. The space where it used to be made her instantly angry, like the
