I was still staring blankly at those two words when the phone rang. Actually, it was more like I became aware that it was ringing: a sound that had been going on for some time underneath Internal Bleeding’s relentless bass beat and the equally unremitting noises of my neighbours dismantling their flat. Not my mobile: Ropey’s phone. I picked up by reflex, even though I couldn’t remember ever giving the number to anyone.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Mister Castor?’ A man’s voice, slightly breathless and thin: not a voice I recognised.
‘Yes.’
‘Inter-Urban Couriers. Can you come down and sign for a package?’
‘A package?’ I echoed, slightly false-footed. ‘Who from?’
A short pause. ‘Well, the address is E14, but there’s no name.’
The only guy I knew out that way was Nicky Heath, a data rat who sometimes ran searches for me: but he wasn’t working on anything for me right then, and he wouldn’t be likely to use a regular courier service. Being both paranoid and dead, he has his own specialised ways of working.
‘Mister Castor?’
‘Yeah, okay. I’ll be right down.’
I got up and went to the front door of the flat, unlocked it and stepped into the corridor. A few steps brought me to the lifts: I pressed the buttons until I found the one that was currently working – the council tenant’s equivalent of the ‘find the lady’ game. It was on the fifth floor, only three floors below me, but instead of going up it went down. Someone else must have pressed the button at the same time.
As I waited for it to make its stately way back up the stack, I listened – since there wasn’t any other choice – to the shouting and swearing echoing from further up the corridor. It amazed me that the other residents on this floor weren’t poking their heads out to add their own shouts of protest to the overall row: judging by their prurient interest in my comings and goings, it couldn’t be out of an exaggerated regard for other people’s privacy.
Something snapped in me at long last, and I walked back up the corridor to give my psychopathic neighbours’ door a dyspeptic kick. ‘Turn it in, for Christ’s sake,’ I shouted. ‘If you want to kill each other, use poison or something.’
A door opened at my back, and I turned to find the woman in number eighty-three glaring at me.
‘Noise was getting to me,’ I said, by way of explanation. She just went on glaring. ‘Sorry,’ I added. She slammed her door shut in my face. While I was still staring at the NO CIRCULARS sign, I heard a ping from back the way I’d come, followed by a muffled thump: the lift warning bell, and the sound of the doors opening.
I jogged down the corridor, determined to catch it before it changed its mind. I stepped inside, found it empty, and pressed G. Then just as the doors started to close I saw through the narrowing gap the front door of Ropey’s flat standing open. In the five minutes that I was downstairs, the neighbours could have the TV, the stereo and the three-piece suite. Irritably, I hit DOOR OPEN with my free hand and the doors froze, jerked, froze, with about a foot of clearance still to spare.
But before they could make up their mind whether to close again or slide all the way open, the entire lift lurched, the floor tilting violently. Taken by surprise, I staggered and almost lost my footing. From above me came a sound of rending metal.
I had half a second to react. As the lift shuddered and lurched again, grinding against the wall of the shaft with a sickening squeal, I fought the yawing motion, barely keeping my feet under me, and flung myself through the half-open doors back out into the hallway. An explosive outrush of air followed me: I snapped my head round to look behind me – and saw the lift drop like several hundredweight of bricks into the shaft. Some buried survival instinct made me snatch my right foot back across the threshold just as the roof of the car whipped past like the blade of a guillotine. The sole of my shoe was torn off completely and my ankle was wrenched so agonisingly that I thought for a moment that my foot had gone too. I didn’t scream, exactly, but my bellow of pain was on a rising pitch: I think we’re probably just talking semantics.
This time, all the doors along the corridor opened and everyone on the whole floor came out to see what all the noise was about. Well, all except two. My neighbours stayed behind their own closed front door and went right on calling each other obscene names at the tops of their voices. They probably had a quota to fill.
And as I sat there staring into the darkness of the lift shaft, the asinine, obvious thought echoed in my head: well, fuck, that was close. But it was followed by another thought in a different register.
All right, you bastards, you called it.
Let’s dance.
5
I took the stairs three at a time, limping only slightly, until the last flight which I cleared in a couple of frenzied bunny hops.
In the block’s front lobby, just to the right of the door, there was a full-sized red fire extinguisher. Red means water, so the damn thing weighed a good forty pounds. I hefted it in both hands, kicked the door open and walked out onto the street.
The blue van was still there. I trudged around to the front of it and peered in. The light from a street lamp overhead shone full on the glass, so all I could see was a couple of dim, more or less human shapes inside. But one of them, the one in the driver’s seat, gave a visible start of surprise as he saw me hefting the fire extinguisher. Maybe in the dark he mistook it for a bright red field mortar.
That’s what it became a second later when I flung it at the van’s windscreen.
It didn’t go through – not quite – but it made a noise like a roc’s egg hitting a concrete floor, and the entire windscreen became instantly opaque as the shatter-proof glass gave up the ghost and sagged inwards, transformed into a lattice of a million fingertip-sized fragments.
The driver and passenger doors slammed open simultaneously, and the two men leaped out onto the street, howling with rage. They were young and they were fast. When it came to handling themselves in a fight, though, their education had been sadly neglected. The first guy to reach me, the one coming from the passenger side, threw a punch that he might as well have put in the post with a second-class stamp on it. I sidestepped and kicked him in the crotch. He folded in on his pain, his universe shrinking to a few cubic inches of intimate agony.
By that time the gent from the driver’s side had come to join us. He got my elbow in his face while he was still bringing his guard up. Then I barged him and tripped him, landing heavily on top of him with my knee on his chest in case he had any more fight left in him.
He didn’t, though. He made a noise like the last gasp from an untied party balloon, then opened and closed his mouth a few times without managing to get out another sound.
I had my fist raised to deliver a knockout – which, with the assistance of the pavement, was virtually assured – but I hesitated. These guys had folded so quickly it was frankly embarrassing. In my mind’s eye I’d had an image of Lou Beddows’s bat-wielding thugs, which was why I’d gone in so hard and so fast: belatedly, I began to wonder if this time I’d got the wrong end of the baseball bat.
I reached into the guy’s corduroy jacket and searched the inside pockets, coming up with his wallet on the first pass. Flicking it open I found an NUS card in the name of Stephen Bass of University College, London. Wolves in sheep’s clothing? How hard could it be to fake an NUS card?
A glance over my shoulder showed me that the first guy – the one whose sex life was likely to be theoretical for the next few weeks – was still down. The one I was kneeling on was trying to speak again, but only the first syllable – ‘My – my – my –’ – was making it out as he gulped for air.
I removed my knee from his chest, backing off and standing up. He rolled over onto his side and drew a few shuddering, raucous breaths.