deliveries. It’s got its own car park and it’s way over on the other side of the building and we just weren’t thinking.’
‘But you’ve got it covered now?’
‘Oh yeah. We were lucky that the driver was an idiot: he didn’t think to switch off his headlights, so someone saw the van coming and we got there in time to head them off.’
She tugged listlessly at the grass between her feet. ‘But it’s only a matter of time now. They’ve been trying to get a court order telling us to cease and desist. That magistrate up in Barnet – Runcie – he’s bumped it up the docket somehow and they’re going to get a verdict tomorrow morning. Mulbridge must have slipped him a bribe or something.’
‘Not J-J’s style,’ I observed. ‘She’d much rather put a knife to your windpipe than a tenner in your back pocket. It’s all a matter of nuance.’
Pen looked at me with glum resentment. ‘I’m not appreciating the nuances right now, Fix. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s all I can do to keep up with the logistics. Can you spell me? I haven’t slept since the last time I saw you.’
‘Sleep now,’ I suggested. ‘They’re not going to try anything in broad daylight – especially not if they’re expecting the courts to give them a thumbs-up to throw you out tomorrow.’
She blinked in slow motion, her shadow-rimmed eyes not wanting to open again once she’d let them close.
‘But you’ll stay?’ she pressed, the words forced out of her. ‘I can’t sleep unless I know someone’s watching. Someone who cares about him.’
It wasn’t what I wanted to do: I was thinking of the fight I had ahead of me; of Myriam Kale riding Doug Hunter back out into the world when I still hadn’t made a single move against the real enemy – when I didn’t even know who or how many they were, and wouldn’t begin to find out until I’d raided Maynard Todd’s office and turned over his files. Time wasn’t on my side. It was hard to just sit here and feel the odds getting longer.
But I could see that Pen’s natural resilience had reached its limits: she looked brittle, strained, liable to break in pieces at any moment.
‘I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘Put your head down. I’ll wake you in an hour.’
As things turned out, I gave her four and some odd minutes. The shadow of the Stanger clinic reached out towards us and then spilled over us while she slept. The Breathers ebbed and flowed, celebrating the oneness of all life, on both sides of the grave, with chants and gestures of defiance that nobody except themselves was listening to.
I gave them one out of three.
I killed the time while I was waiting by looking over the sheet music again, reading it as Luke/Speedo had told me to, and trying to sound the rhythms – the beats and the pauses, the overlaps and elisions – inside my head. I was imagining a tune that you could build to clothe that percussive skeleton: trying to translate a symphony for drums into something else. It was hard work, and it sucked me in hypnotically, taking me out of my flesh again into the void where my weird talent operates. I was hardly aware of the passage of time, and it was only when Pen stirred on the grass beside me that I came to myself again – bringing back with me a few more crumbs of possibility, a few more twisted ribbons of not-quite-music. John’s symphony, to a non-drummer, was like a five- thousand-piece jigsaw where you had to put all the pieces in at once by pure guesswork and then see if what you got made any sense.
‘What time is it?’ Pen asked muzzily
I looked at my watch. ‘After five,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling? A bit more human?’
‘Like a limp biscuit,’ she muttered. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. ‘But go, if you need to. I’ll manage.’
I wasn’t sure what cues I’d been giving off that told her how much of a hurry I was in to leave: we’ve known each other long enough that stuff like that reaches the level of telepathy.
‘Okay,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘Hold out for tonight. Tomorrow I’ll be back in force.’
Pen stared up at me, shielding her eyes against the setting sun that hung over my shoulder.
‘If you’re back at all,’ she said.
‘I didn’t say that,’ I protested.
‘Yes, you did.’ She stood up too and took a step towards me almost against her will. I thought for a moment that she was going to embrace me, because she seemed to bring her arms up in synchrony but then stopped, retreated, and folded them instead.
‘I’ll never forgive you for what you did to Rafi,’ she said.
‘I’m not looking for forgiveness, Pen. But if I do, I’ll look elsewhere.’
‘But I don’t want you to kill yourself working some stupid case. Werewolves can eat you. Demons can blind you and rape you and suck out your soul. Almost everything out there is faster than you, and all you’ve got is that stupid whistle. Whatever it is you’ve got it in your head to do, Fix, don’t do it. I can see from here that you don’t think it’s going to work.’
I mimed a dealer at a blackjack table. It’s a gesture I’ve used on Pen a lot of times, when she seemed to be trying to give me a tarot reading without her deck in her hands. It always irritates her, and it always pushes her away – which was where I wanted her right then because she was way too close for comfort.
‘Fine, then,’ she snapped. ‘Go and kill yourself. Don’t worry about the shit you’re leaving Rafi in. Let someone else pick up the bill. That’s the default setting, isn’t it?’
‘Reckless hedonism,’ I agreed. ‘Devil take the hindmost.’
‘Which devil, Fix?’
‘Next time I pass by, I’ll bring you a catalogue and some colour swatches.’
I walked away quickly, before Pen could get over the irritation and tackle me from a different direction. I didn’t want to explain any more than I already had, and even more than that I didn’t want to go into this whole exercise with the feeling that there was another way that I was too stupid to see. That just gets you second- guessing yourself, and that just gets you dead. I wanted to live.
But that’s always been my problem. I set my sights way too high.
22
Stoke Newington after dark: the Lubovich Hasidim and the scallies from Manor House wander the streets in feral packs, but I was in a bad enough mood by this time to take on anything I was likely to meet. God was in a bad mood, too: a strong wind was getting up, harrying plastic carrier bags and scraps of paper along the pavements, and the sky was filling up with pregnant clouds.
The offices of Maynard, Todd and Clay were in reassuringly total darkness. I circled the outside of the building looking for the likeliest way in, deciding at last to go in from the back and on the first floor. I had my lockpicks with me and I could have taken the street door inside of a New York minute, but there was too much chance of being seen by people walking past: I couldn’t afford the time I’d lose in any brush with the forces of the law.
On the side street behind the office there was a blind alley full of wheelie bins and old fridges, its high walls topped with broken glass set in very old cement. The only door was bolted from the inside rather than locked, but the brickwork to either side of it was old and frost-pitted and offered pretty good purchase. I shinnied up the doorway itself, using footholds in the brickwork where I found them and just bracing myself against either side where I didn’t.
The top of the door was a couple of inches below the top of the frame. I stood on the door, wadded up my coat and laid it down on the glass. I only had to stand on it for a moment, using it to step across to a shed roof. Then I leaned out and hooked the coat across after me, only a little the worse for wear.
The coat came into play again almost immediately. I wrapped it around my fist to break a single pane of the window at the other end of the shed and then – with gingerly care – to knock the broken glass out of the frame. It was handy that the building had never been double-glazed – although if it had I could always have dropped down into the yard and tried my luck with the back door. Safely out of view, I could have taken my time.
As it was, though, things seemed to be going my way. Even groping around in the dark and at an odd angle,
