‘Doug mentioned spraining his ankle,’ I said. ‘Was that something that really happened?’
‘Yes.’ Jan sounded surprised. ‘A few months ago. He was coming down a ladder and his foot slipped. He was in agony. The stupid bastards who are running that site didn’t even have a first-aid kit. And that meant they wouldn’t let anyone call an ambulance, because they didn’t want anyone to twig that they weren’t up to code. Doug had to limp around the corner – two of his mates carried him part of the way – so he could make the call from somewhere else and not get them into trouble. Sodding cowboys. He’s always worked for sodding cowboys!’
I looked at my watch. It was half past eleven and I really needed to be hitting the road. I told Jan, very quickly, what Juliet and I were going to try to do, and I told her I’d let her know how it came out. Then I hung up and went underground.
The Reflections Café Bar turned out to be on Wilton Road, directly opposite the front entrance to Victoria Station and offering a really top-notch view of the bus shelter.
The name promised something eclectic and cosmopolitan. The reality was a narrow glass booth jutting out onto the pavement, containing a coffee machine, a fridge full of Carling Black Label, a counter top and six chairs. A teenaged girl in a maid’s uniform that looked as though it had to have been ordered from a fetish shop took my order for a double espresso with a nod and a smile, and I sat down. She was the only person in the place apart from a stocky, balding man in a drab-looking mid-brown suit, who had a film of sweat on his face as he worked through the Times sudoku – as though sudoku was an illicit thrill of some kind.
I sat down well within his field of vision, but he didn’t react and didn’t seem to see me at all. It was five past twelve by this time, so there was a chance that my man had already been and gone. That seemed more likely when my coffee came and he still hadn’t showed. Taking a sip of the tepid liquid, I stared out of the window at the bus shelter across the street and idly scanned the faces of the people waiting for the number 73. None of them so much as glanced at the window of the café: none of them looked as though they were trying to pluck up the courage to step inside.
The waitress was lost in the intricacies of cleaning out the coffee machine’s drip-tray. The bald guy was working on his puzzle. Nobody seemed to want to make contact with me. Probably time to chalk this one up to 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.
The usual place. Maybe I’d jumped to conclusions. Maybe the late Mister Gittings had out-paranoided me yet again. Leave the matchbook, yeah, and the phone number: but don’t quite join the dots, because then everyone else will see the shape of what you’re making. Maybe the usual place was somewhere you could watch from the Reflections café.
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?’