presence. ‘Meet me halfway, Asmodeus. If this is something you really want, make it possible for me to say yes.’
The hand stopped its restless movement and lay still for a few moments on the paper. Then Rafi, with a wince, lifted it to head height and massaged the wrist with his other hand.
‘That fucking hurt,’ he said.
Pen was at his side in a moment, embracing him fiercely. Imelda turned to me, her face hard. ‘What did we miss?’ she demanded. ‘What trick did we miss?’
I shrugged. ‘We didn’t miss a thing. I think he’s been building up to that. Keeping a piece of Rafi under his control so he could pull a little coup when the right time came.’ And why would that be now? I wondered but didn’t say. Why had he shown his hand?
Because he felt pretty damn sure that I’d be taking him up on his offer, either now or later.
Rafi disentangled himself from Pen’s consoling arms and stood.
‘You’ve got some more work to do,’ he said to me and Imelda, a tremor in his voice.
‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘You’re right.’ I took out my whistle and blew a low, sustained note while Imelda clamped her strong hands to either side of Rafi’s skull. We got busy.
Again.
11
I made the tail after I’d seen Pen onto the train at Peckham, and my feelings passed quickly from terrified alarm through consternation to a sort of dogged puzzlement. This guy was at best an enthusiastic amateur, making himself obvious by keeping his movements broadly in synch with mine, keeping his shoulders hunched and his head lowered as if he was afraid of looking anyone in the face, and once stopping dead when I turned and looked back the way I’d come.
That first clear glimpse gave me a prickly feeling of recognition, although I couldn’t remember where I might have seen the guy before. He had the etiolated skin and painfully slender build of a smack addict, and black hair that hung to his shoulder: a look distinctive enough that I ought not to have had to grope too long for the newsflash from my long-term memory, but nothing was forthcoming. His dark eyes flicked to left and right as though they were following a metronome, effectively solving the problem of not looking fixedly at me by not looking for more than a fraction of a second at anything. He wore a dark grey flak jacket and a silver-grey scarf only marginally thicker than a necktie — maybe trying to signal that he was tough but in touch with his feminine side.
The memory nagged at me but at first it wouldn’t come clear. Then I got another blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of him reflected in the glass of a swinging shop door as it closed. The tiny dark dot over his right eye was the trigger that loosened my mental logjam. The guy on the stairs at the Salisbury, with the BO that was probably grave stench. The dead man walking, who’d said he thought he knew me.
In a way, it was good news: if he was a zombie — and particularly, if he was following me
I needed answers, though, and in the aftermath of that nasty shock I yielded to an evil temptation. Why not turn the tables on this born-again little scuzzball and see if he had anything to say for himself?
I picked up speed walking across McNeil Road, hurrying between cars and buses as though I was late for an appointment. I didn’t look back any more: I didn’t want to scare the guy off. I just had to trust that he’d stay on- task until I’d scouted out a good place for an ambush.
Peckham has some of my favourite place names in the whole of London, although mostly the places themselves don’t live up to their billing. Love Walk falls squarely into this category. There’s nothing about it you could love unless you were a dog looking for somewhere new to piss. But it has a feature I remembered from previous visits — somewhere just off it there’s an even narrower street that straddles the railway line before Denmark Hill station, and at that point there’s a flight of steps leading to an elevated pedestrian footbridge, narrow enough so that two people have trouble passing each other on it. Actually, maybe that’s where the place gets its name from: anyone you pass on the footbridge you’re going to get to know quite well, so maybe love has been known to blossom there.
I didn’t have love in mind: I just wanted me and my shadow to meet up in a place where there was nowhere to hide and where even turning around was going to be problematic. Then we’d see what we’d see.
Still walking briskly, I got to the wooden steps and went on up them at a jog. It was important that he shouldn’t get too much time to think about this: I wanted him to commit himself right at the outset and then repent at leisure.
I walked out across the wooden footbridge, my footsteps echoing loudly. Overhead was an arched tunnel made out of steel loops and torn wire mesh. Once upon a time it had been there to stop suicidal passers-by from ending it all, or at least to move them along a little way and make them someone else’s problem: now there were so many gaps and rents in it that it couldn’t even do that. I made as much noise as I could, bringing my feet down heavily on the wooden planks. All part of the show: I wanted my tail to feel safe closing the gap, under cover of the racket.
Casting a furtive glance back and down through the gaps between the heat-warped planks, I caught a glimpse of his grey jacket and the top of his head as he climbed the steps in a hurry, trying to match my pace because he’d lost the line of sight. Great stuff.
At the far end of the walkway I scooted down a second, identical set of steps. Then I just ducked to the side, behind a narrow parapet wall maybe three inches taller than my head, and waited. Now I could hear him coming, because he was out on the bridge and there was no way to cross those echoing boards both quickly and quietly: and by the same token I was hoping that, because the noise he was making drowned out the noise I wasn’t, he didn’t know that I’d stopped.
I tensed, getting ready to jump him. He hadn’t looked too hefty, but it was probably still better to hit hard and ask questions afterwards. I had plenty of questions I wanted to ask.
But the sound of footsteps died away above me, just as they reached the top of the stairs. Had I blown my cover somehow? I glanced up, saw nothing between the slats.
The moment stretched, way past the point where it could have been explained by the guy tying a shoelace or pausing to catch his breath. From where he was, he presumably had a good view both up and down the street: maybe he’d waited up there to see which way I went: in which case he had to have twigged by now that I hadn’t come back into view, so unless he was a peerless moron my pathetic ambush stood revealed. I was just about ready to jump out of hiding, sprint back up the steps and see if I could catch the guy before he bolted. But before I could, the sound of footsteps resumed. Someone was coming down the steps towards me: coming down slowly, with long pauses for thought or reconnaissance.
Reverting to Plan A, I got myself into a tackling crouch. The steps at my head height creaked one by one, in descending sequence — an arpeggio of protesting wood.
But maybe on some level I’d already registered that there was something wrong with the footsteps. At any rate, when the old man came out at the foot of the steps, sighing audibly as he paused to get his breath back, I was able to check my forward lunge in time and I didn’t actually punch him in the head. He walked on down the road, weighed down by two bulging bags in Sainsbury’s livery: he hadn’t seen me at all, which might have seemed odd if he hadn’t been wearing glasses as thick as the portholes on a bathysphere.
Stifling an obscene oath, I went back up the steps at a run, but I was locking the stable door when the horse was already at the airport with a false passport. The walkway was empty: my tail must have waited for the next pedestrian to come along, lingered just long enough to watch me from above as I stepped out of cover, and then — having verified beyond any doubt that I’d made him — done a quick fade back the other way. The old gent’s footsteps coming down the stairs would have covered his heading back the way he’d come.
I was chagrined — and frustrated. I’m too constitutionally lazy for real detective work, and I’d found the
