experience and walk away. Might as well finish my coffee first, though.
And while I did that, I scanned the faces at the bus stop again. Most of them were new, but one of them had been there the whole time, while half a dozen buses came and went. He was a skinny guy in his late twenties or thereabouts, in an LL Cool J T-shirt, black jacket and jeans. His nose was the size and shape of a rudder, and made the rest of his face look like it had been arranged around it in a space that wasn’t quite wide enough. He had a sallow, unhealthy complexion, and the trailing wires of a pair of headphones dangling from his ears: his crisply ringleted head nodded gently, double four time, as he soaked up the vibrations of whatever was playing on his iPod. He still hadn’t looked at me: or if he had, I hadn’t caught him at it.
I finished my coffee, paid up at the counter and walked out onto the street. The guy at the bus stop moved off at the same time, still – as far as I could tell – without glancing in my direction. I followed him at a medium-fast stroll, crossing the street as he tacked away to the south, towards Bridge Place.
We were in the maze of bus lanes and bollards in front of Victoria station now, and I thought he might veer off to the right and go inside. He didn’t, though, and he didn’t look behind him. He just kept ambling along, his head still bobbing slightly in time to his personal soundtrack. I kept pace with him, only ten feet behind now. I slid my hand inside my coat, found my mobile and took it out. Almost out of charge, I noticed: already showing empty, in fact, but there ought to be enough juice for this. Pressing the RECENT CALLS button I found the number I’d dialled the night before – the one John had written down on the matchbook cover – selected it and called it up.
A second. Two. Then I heard the tinny, boppy, tooth-jangling strains of the Crazy Frog sound from right ahead of me.
The skinny guy’s head jerked in a belated double take. His hand snaked into his jeans pocket to turn his phone off and he turned to look back at me, locking eyes with me for the first time. He must have had the phone set to vibrate, too: either that or there was no music on his headphones in the first place. Abruptly, without warning, he bolted.
I sprinted after him, instinctively bearing right to cut him off if he headed for the station concourse: if he got inside there with even a few seconds’ lead on me, I’d never see him again.
But he wasn’t trying for the station: he sprinted straight out across Bridge Place, almost getting sideswiped by a bus which cost me a second or two as I slowed to let it pass. Then he plunged into a side street.
I was almost thirty feet behind him now, and by the time I got to the corner of the street he was already out of sight. I kept running anyway, scanning the street on both sides to see if there were any clues as to where he might have gone. Only one turn-off, on the left. I took that, and was just in time to see him vanish around another corner away up ahead of me.
Maybe I don’t exercise as much as I should. I know health experts recommend half an hour a day: I did half an hour back in 1999 and then sort of fell behind, what with all that excitement about the new millennium and all. I was already feeling winded when I reached the next corner, while the guy I was chasing seemed to be accelerating if anything.
I got a lucky break, though, when a door opened ahead of him and a woman came out into the street leading two children by the hand. They turned towards us, forming a pavement-wide barrier and giving him the choice between trampling them underfoot or making a wide detour. He skidded to a halt, almost slamming into the startled woman, then swerved across the street, past a skip full of someone’s defunct living-room furniture and into an alley.
I took the hypotenuse and won back enough time to snatch the base unit of a standard lamp from the skip as I passed it. Aerodynamically it was piss-poor, but this was no time to be picky. Putting on a last desperate spurt of speed, I held it out beside me like a vaulter’s pole: but then I flung it like a javelin.
It didn’t have the balance of a javelin, and the heavy end dipped at once towards the ground as it flew. Another couple of feet and it would just have hit the pavement and spun away, end over end. But I was riding my luck and it stayed with me: the shaft went squarely between the guy’s pounding feet and he tripped, smacking down heavily on the stone slabs.
He was winded, but he managed to scramble up again and limp forward another couple of steps. By that time, though, I was on him. I knocked him down again with a shoulder charge: then I jumped on top of him, planting one knee into the small of his back to pin him to the ground. He squirmed and tried to get up, but I had the advantage of weight and position.
‘What the fuck!’ he spluttered. ‘Let go of me! Are you frigging insane?’
‘We haven’t met,’ I panted, my pulse pounding and my breath coming in ragged hiccups. ‘Well, except on the phone. But I’m hoping we can be friends. I’m Castor. Who are you?’
‘I’m gonna scream,’ the guy snarled, still struggling. His head snaked around to glare at me, his nose looking like a raptor’s beak. ‘You think you can do this in broad daylight? Out on the street?’
‘I think,’ I said, still breathless, ‘that you wanted to take – a look at me without – committing yourself. And for some reason you got cold feet. I told you, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just a friend of John’s.’
‘Then let me up!’
I did. He looked to be in even worse shape to run again than I was, but in any case I could see now that the alley was a dead end: there was nowhere for him to run to. I stood up and stepped back, letting him climb slowly to his feet.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him again. ‘And tell me the goddamn truth. I was in a bad mood when I got here and it’s not getting any better.’
He rubbed his knee, favouring me with a sneering grin. ‘Yeah, I’m not surprised,’ he sniggered. ‘Sitting there in the café, like you’re waiting for a blind date. Should’ve worn a white carnation in your- Chesney,’ he added hastily, as I took a step towards him. ‘Vincent. Vincent Chesney.’ He threw up his hands to protect himself.
I grabbed the right one, much to his surprise, and shook it hard. It probably looked absurdly formal given the fact that I’d just chased him down like a dog chases a hare, but I didn’t give a damn. I was here to collect information, and one way was as good as another.
Sometimes the impressions I pick up from skin contact are fleeting and ambiguous: other times they’re so sharp and immediate it’s like a movie with five-point surround sound. Vincent Chesney didn’t have any psychic barriers to speak of, and his emotions just arrived in my head unmediated, with almost painful clarity.
The grin was just bravado: underneath it, he was afraid. Afraid of me, mostly, but not just of what I might do to physically damage him. There was something else in the back of his mind: something else at stake.
I released his hand and he snatched it back, suspicious and faintly indignant.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Yeah. I did want to get a look at you first. What’s wrong with that, man? Calling me in the night. You could have been frigging anybody, seen? I’ve got to watch my back. I’m in a delicate position here.’
‘Are you?’ I asked politely. ‘Why is that then, Vincent?’
‘Vince.’
‘Question stands.’
‘Okay,’ he said again, hesitant, unhappy. ‘You’ve come for the items, right?’ He put the same sort of heavy, loaded stress on the word that the till assistant in a chemist’s would put on ‘something for the weekend’.
‘The items that John left with you?’ I hazarded. Chesney nodded, looking even glummer.
‘They’re one of the things I’ve come for,’ I lied.
‘Well, okay. Yeah. That’s what I thought. It’s just around the corner.’
The switch from plural to singular threw me. ‘What is?’ I demanded.
‘The place where I work. I can get you the stuff, right? It’s just around the corner. But you’ll have to wait here while I-’ He broke off, because he could see from the look on my face that I wasn’t going to buy it. ‘Well, if you come up with me,’ he snapped sullenly, ‘you follow my lead, yeah? I mean, back me up, whatever I say about you. This is gonna look bad enough anyway. I don’t want to lose my frigging job, seen?’
‘I’ll follow your lead,’ I promised. I stepped aside and let him walk past me, back onto the street. Then I followed him – not back towards Bridge Place, but further south. I was getting my breath back now, and Chesney was getting back some of the cocky cool I’d heard in his voice when he picked up the phone the first time.
‘So what are you?’ he asked me as we walked. ‘You said you worked with Gittings. Does that make you
