And I ran for my car, that big Bavarian tank, as if it was my only hope of walking away. The scaffolding lorry was gaining on me, the driver leaning on the horn, one long scream of blue murder, but I threw myself behind my old BMW and then it was tearing past me and gone, hurtling out of Borodino Street.
I slowly got up off my knees, the smell of diesel in the back of my throat.
All at once the street was full of vehicles and people. The world had filled with blue lights. Edie was climbing out of the bush and numbly staring at Sir Ludo Mount.
At first I thought he was roadkill. But then Edie was on her knees, pumping his chest, pushing out the thirty compressions before lifting his chin and tilting his forehead and pressing her mouth against his mouth as she blew air into his lungs.
The fire had burned itself out in the police van. Most of its white paint had curled and dissolved, revealing the steel beneath. But you could still just about read the message.
EXODUS 20:13
‘What does it mean?’ a woman’s voice said beside me.
I turned to look at Scarlet Bush.
‘It’s the Sixth Commandment,’ I told the reporter. I knew them all by heart now. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
Then Edie was there. Paramedics were all around Sir Ludo Mount, lifting him on to a gurney and loading him into the back of an ambulance.
She hugged me. I looked at her face. Her fabulous face.
We broke away from each other.
Scarlet Bush had approached the back of the ambulance and started taking photographs of Mount’s mangled body being secured for transportation to hospital. One of the paramedics furiously cursed her and she backed off, checking her phone to see what she had.
‘Get any good shots?’ Edie said, her voice ripe with contempt.
‘A few,’ Scarlet said. She lowered her phone and looked at us. ‘Sir Ludo was really hated, wasn’t he? Because he stood up for the Khan family after the brothers killed all those innocent people. Because he went after the Met after Alice Stone died.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sir Ludo Mount was hated.’
She held her phone nearer to me. There was a little red light that told me she was recording.
‘And would you say he was the most hated man in England?’
I nodded. ‘There’s your story, Scarlet,’ I said, and she hurried off to write it.
Edie was staring at me. ‘But they weren’t trying to kill Mount, were they?’ she said. ‘They were trying to kill you. He just got in the way. Exodus 20:13. Who do they think you killed, Max?’
Ray Vann, I thought. Someone thinks I have to answer for Ray Vann.
But I said nothing.
‘Look,’ Edie said, and we stared up at the house on Borodino Street.
Mrs Khan and the man who called himself husband were watching the street from the top floor.
And from an unlit window at the other end of the house, Layla Khan also looked down at the street. I hardly recognised her because the girl’s head and face were now covered by a hijab. And I understood that the bald young man from Islamabad was not here to marry Mrs Khan.
He was here to marry Layla.
Then Layla Khan turned her head, as if someone was calling her name, and she stepped away from the window and Edie Wren and I saw her no more.
29
It was high summer now, the blazing days of August, and Stan and I were on Hampstead Heath, making our way up Parliament Hill, ascending the steep climb to one of the highest points in the city when all you can see ahead of you is hill and sky, and there’s a tingle in your blood because you know that the moment you reach the top all of London will suddenly be displayed below you.
And then I realised that Stan was no longer by my side.
I jogged back down the hill to the wood, calling his name, waving a pack of Nature’s Menu treats, and feeling a sense of rising panic. And then deep inside all the bright greens of summer, I saw a smudge of ruby-coloured dog concealed in the bushes and then those shining black eyes.
But my smile fell away as I went deeper into the bushes.
Stan was not moving.
I got out some treats, still calling his name, but the most food-motivated dog in the world did not budge. He was not interested in food.
‘Anaphylactic shock,’ a passing dog walker said as his elderly Retriever gambolled on Parliament Hill. ‘Something stung her or bit her.’
Strangers always thought that Stan was female. There was something about the extravagant curls of his ears that made him look like a girl. I retrieved him from the bushes and held him to my chest. He was a dead weight in my arms. The dog walker looked at me impatiently.
‘Get her to a vet,’ he said. ‘Now.’
I stumbled from the bushes with Stan in my arms.
And then I ran.
Christian, our vet, confirmed the dog walker’s diagnosis.
‘But anaphylactic shock covers a lot of ground,’ he said as Stan closed his eyes and curled up on his examination table, wanting only to sleep, wanting only for the world to go away. ‘He’s certainly had some kind of extreme and rapid allergic reaction.’ Christian’s hands searched the red fur for clues. ‘I’m guessing it’s a sting from a bee or a wasp.’
I clutched Stan’s worn old leather lead like it was a set of rosary beads.
‘Anaphylaxis is as serious in dogs as it is in humans,’ Christian said. ‘Leave him with us for forty-eight hours. We’ll give him epinephrine to get his heart rate up, antibiotics to prevent infection and some fluids to kick-start his blood pressure.’
Stan looked at us with mournful eyes. They were not completely black, I saw, but etched with a thin ring of deepest brown. And those eyes were round as marbles and as huge as the eyes of a hero in a Japanese comic. I felt my own eyes flood with tears and lightly touched his red fur.
There was nothing to say.
‘He’s a fit young dog with a thin layer of fat,’ Christian said. Then he looked at me with a kind of clear-eyed compassion. ‘But as you know, they’re a delicate breed,’ he said.
I nodded. Stan was not moving. There was nothing more I could do. I left him with Christian. And this dog who hated to see anyone he cared for walk away did not even look up.
As I walked to the door of the examination room, he was as still as when I found him hiding in the bushes on that hill between the city and the sky, like a creature who had all at once had enough, like an animal who had crawled away to die.
I called Scout at nine o’clock sharp.
She answered the phone herself. I was relieved that I did not have to talk to anyone else. And no doubt everyone else was happy that they didn’t have to talk to me.
‘Ready to rock and roll?’ I asked her.
‘Indeed,’ she said.
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
‘I’m sitting on the stairs by the landline.’
‘Then I’ll begin. ‘High Flight’ by John Gillespie Magee. He was a pilot in the war.’
‘Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies of laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence …’
And nothing but silence on the other end of the line.
‘Are you all right, Scout?’
‘I’m listening very carefully.’
So I continued.
‘Hovering there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung