Eventually, he came out onto a main road that looked as if it might run due east. Between the buildings on his left he thought he could make out the vaulted march of the M40 inrun converging from the north, which suggested he was somewhere near Ealing. Or Greenford, if he’d miscalculated how far out Carla had dumped him. Or Alperton. Or
Or you’re lost, Chris.
Fuck it, you don’t really know this part of town, so stop pretending you do. Just keep moving. Pretty soon the sun’s got to come up, and then you’ll damn well know if you ‘re heading east or not.
Keep moving. It had to be better than thinking.
He started to see signs of nightlife. Clubs and arcades at intervals along the street, in various stages of turnout. Junk food carry-outs, most of them little more than white-neon-blasted alcoves in the brickwork. The low-intensity stink of cheap meat and stale alcohol, laced once or twice with acid spikes of vomit. Little knots of people in the street, eating and drinking, shouting at each other. Turning to stare at him as he passed.
It couldn’t be helped. He lengthened his stride, kept the Nemex lowered but clearly in view. Kept to the centre of the street.
In theory, he could have tried to call a cab. He had landmarks now, identifiable club frontages and, if he was prepared to look hard enough in the gloom, street name plaques. In practice, it was probably a waste of time. The companies his mobile knew numbers for mostly wouldn’t come more than a few hundred metres the wrong side of the cordons, especially at this time of night. And those few that would tended to follow an esoteric driver’s mythology on exactly which streets were safe to pick up from. Get the wrong configuration in this tarot of zone codes, and you could wait all night. Hearing a location they didn’t like -better yet hearing some idiot raving about the comer of Old Something Smudged street, some nameless club and a pink neon rabbit with tits and a top hat - individual drivers were going to chortle grimly, ignore the controller and shelve the fare. There just wasn’t enough zone custom to push things the other way. You went to the zones, you drove. Or you walked home.
He caught eyes, made no attempt to look away. He remembered Mike’s demeanour on their previous expeditions to the zones, and aped it.
Be who you are, and fuck ‘em if they don’t like it.
The gun helped.
No one wanted to push it any further than a curled lip. No one came close. No one said anything.
Outside one of the clubs, two crack whores broke his run of luck. They registered the clothes and stumbled across the road towards him like kids wading into cold water on a shingle beach. Their bare legs worked as if badly jointed, their feet were wrenched on ludicrous stiletto heels. They wore push-up bras and black mesh microskirts cinched savagely tight. Their make-up was sweat-streaked and caked, and their eyes looked bruised half shut. One was skinnier than the other, but otherwise the pre-dawn whore’s makeover rendered them uniform, wiped difference away.
They were all of fourteen years old.
‘You want to get sucked?’ asked the skinny one.
‘You got a place we can go?’ The other was clearly the brains of the outfit, the forward thinker.
Chris shook his head. ‘Go home.’
‘Don’t be harsh, baby. Just want to do you good.’ The skinny girl amplified her sales pitch with a finger-licking display. She stuck the wet finger inside one cup of her barely necessary bra and rubbed it back and forth with a fixed little smile. Chris flinched.
‘I said, go home.’ He raised the Nemex where they couldn’t miss it. ‘You don’t want anything to do with me.’
‘Baby, that’s a big gun you got,’ said the skinny girl.
‘You want to put it somewhere warm?’
Chris fled.
He came through the westward cordons at Holland Park, an hour before dawn. The checkpoint detail gave him some strange looks, but they said nothing and once his Shorn card swiped clear, they called him a cab. He stood outside the cabin while he waited for it to arrive, staring back across the barriers the way he’d come.
His mobile queeped. He looked at it, saw it was Carla and turned it off.
The cab arrived.
He had the driver take him to work.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
This early on a Sunday, the Shorn block was in darkness above the mezzanine level and the shutdown locks were still in place. He buzzed security, and they let him in without comment or visible surprise. He supposed, rather bitterly, that it couldn’t be entirely unheard of for a Shorn exec to come in before dawn at the weekend.
He thought briefly about grabbing a few hours sleep in the hospitality suites, then dismissed the idea out of hand. Outside, it was already getting light. He wouldn’t sleep unaided now. Instead, he rode the lift all the way up to the fifty-third floor, made his way through the cosy dimness of corridors lit at standby wattage and let himself into his office.
On his desk, the phone was already flashing a message light.
He checked it, saw it was from Carla and wiped it. He stood afterwards with his finger on the stud for a while, reached once for the receiver but never made it. Reached for the lighting control on the datadown but changed his mind. The grey pre-dawn quiet the office was steeped in had an oddly comforting quality, like a childhood hiding place. Like a pillow under his cheek and a clock in front of his face showing a good solid hour before alarm time. Without the lights, he was in limbo, a comfortable state in which decisions did not have to be made, in which you didn’t have to move forward any more. The sort of state that just couldn’t last, but while it did—
He muted the phone’s ring tone, went to the built-in cupboards by the door and took down a blanket. Crossing to the sofa-and-coffee-table island in the corner of the office, he shucked his jacket, shoulder holster and shoes and then lowered himself onto the sofa. Then he covered himself with the blanket and lay staring at the white textured ceiling, waiting for the slow creep of morning to soak across it.
Back down at reception, the younger of the two security guards made bladder excuses and left his colleague while he went up to the mezzanine. He pushed through the swing doors of the toilets, locked himself in a cubicle and took out his phone.
He hesitated for a moment, then grimaced and punched out a number.
The phone purred beside a wide, grey-sheeted bed in a space lit by hooded blue softs. A massive picture window in one wall was polarised to dark. On a table under the sill, a chess set of ornate figurines stood next to a screen that displayed the state of play in silver, black and blue. Grecian-effect sculpture stood around the room on plinths in the shadows. Beneath the sheets, the curves of two bodies moved against each other as the ringing tone penetrated layers of sleep. Louise Hewitt poked her head up, reached for the receiver and held it to her ear. She glared balefully at the time display beside the phone.
‘This had better be fucking important.’
She listened to the hastily apologetic voice at the other end, and her eyes opened wide. She twisted, struggled free of the sheet and propped herself up on one elbow.
‘No, you were right to call me. Yes, I did say that. Yes, it is unusual, I agree. Of course. No, I won’t forget this. Thank you.’
She cradled the receiver and turned over onto her back. Her gaze was dreamy on the blue-tinged ceiling, her tone thoughtful.
‘Chris just rolled into work on his own. In a cab. Four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Looks like he’s been up all night.’
The slim form beside her stirred fully awake.