There wasn’t much pain, to be fair. There were occasional blinding headaches that came from nowhere and vanished just as suddenly, but they were happening less often. But her dreams had altered character, and made sleep bizarre and unrewarding. The bullet itself would appear to her, taking on the shape of a white-suited Belgian with an asymmetrical moustache. It had taken an unfeasibly long while for Sid to deduce that this was Hercule Poirot. Your little grey cells, non? he would twinkle. So many of them, how you say, smeared on the pavement. Tt Tt Tt. This vowelless admonition would recur during her waking hours. It was her fault, was what he meant. You got in my way. Tt Tt Tt.
The bullet had been removed from her head in the hours that followed the shooting. But it remained there nevertheless; her deadly passenger, with her for the long haul.
The sky grew darker and the world through the window dimmed. Before coming upstairs she had cut a slice from the loaf River had brought, and wrapped it round a hunk of cheddar. Bread, cheese. She supposed River had other things to do than plan menus, but still. That could be something to tease him about when he turned up, teasing being something requiring forethought now. If she were to re-enter her old life she’d need more than a map of the neighbourhood, which was illuminated suddenly, the neighbourhood not the map, by a pair of headlights slicing crescent shapes out of the dusk, briefly rendering bright the room: its bare painted walls, its curtainless window frame. She stopped chewing. The car wasn’t River’s, but it slowed anyway, and came to a halt on the verge. The engine died. Something inside Sid woke and fluttered. The car would move on soon. It would start up, drive away, and before long River would arrive, and she’d tease him about the bread and cheese.
Tt Tt Tt, said Hercule Poirot in her head. Tt Tt Tt.
But the car didn’t move. Instead its doors opened and two people got out, a man and a woman she recognised. They had knocked on her door in Cumbria, dressed as missionaries, and here they were, come to kill her again.
All down the lane the trees shifted as a gust of wind rifled through them. If she were out there she’d hear them sigh as they moved, but from inside the house, it was a silent blessing they bestowed. Their jobs were done, and night had fallen, and it seemed to Sid they were waving goodbye.
Part Two
Chasing Tails
7
THEY CALLED IT SILICON Roundabout, because of the tech firms clustered in its orbit, and from this end of Old Street, at the top of the sloped passage dropping into Subway 3, the landscape it commanded was a familiar London medley of the weathered and the new; the social housing estate and the eye hospital balancing the swollen glass bulb of what Lech thought was a hotel, and the complicated facade of an office block straight from an SF comic. Over the roundabout itself, part-shrouded in builders’ canopy, hung a four-sided video screen, scrolling through an endless cycle of ads for the Pixel 3a, but looking as if it wanted to be broadcasting something more in keeping with the times: cage-fighting, or Rollerball, or a party leadership hustings.
They’d waited out the worst of the evening crush in a nearby pub; one blessed with a good location, relieving it of the necessity of making an effort. Lech’s small red wine lasted forty minutes, during which Shirley had drained two pints of lager and explained, for reasons that escaped him, the various kinds of body-modelling on offer within a two-hundred-yard radius: tongue-splitting, ear-pointing and tunnelling, this last involving opening holes in earlobes large enough to ease a pencil through. Lech wasn’t sure he hadn’t preferred being ignored. Through windows partly obscured by promises aimed at passers-by – Good Food! Happy Hour 5–7! – he watched office workers heading for bus stop or underground. There’d been a touch of rain in the air, a dampness on the pavements, and he wondered whether his raincoat was still on a hook in the flat he’d shared with Sara, and whether falling in with Shirley’s mischief was a wise idea, and whether doubling the length of an hour made it twice as happy, or only half.
‘So anyway,’ Shirley said, ‘I was thinking of getting my ears sharpened. What do you reckon?’
He reckoned Lamb would love that, possibly to the point where it triggered one of his seismic coughing fits. ‘Sounds cool. Go for it.’
She looked pleased. ‘Maybe I will.’ Then checked her watch: ‘Okay. Time to go.’
Lech decided to give the last mouthful of wine a miss. He stood and, when she didn’t follow suit, gave her a questioning look.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’
But she wasn’t, or not that Lech could see. Collar upturned, he strode down the passage towards Subway 3 and turned into the underground complex that always felt to him like a colosseum, though whether that made its commuters gladiators or lion fodder was open to question. Down here, a few timid retail premises huddled; the kind that looked like they’d not survive ten minutes in the open air. On the other hand, stranger weeds flourished in London’s cracks and crevices. He walked past bookshop, card shop, coffee shop, key cutters; skirted a postbox-sized screen reeling through the same ads as its monster parent overhead, and noted without pausing a sign announcing Subway 2’s refurbishment. What had been its entryway was boarded over, and he could hear drilling. There were still people around, mostly heading into the Tube station, but he carried on by, veering right towards Subway 1 – the Hoxton/Shoreditch exit – past sandwich shop and flower shop, whose brief fragrance was a shower of light in the dark. At the far end he took the stairs up to ground level, where he doubled back past the gated entrance to the housing estate then, without looking behind, made a 180-degree turn onto the slope heading back to the subway. Overground, underground. Nobody paid attention that he could tell, but he was careful not to check. He didn’t see Shirley anywhere, either.
And what were the odds, he wondered, back in the underground colosseum, that this was some bastard prank; that the others had already joined her in the pub, where they were busting a gut over his gullible goose chase?
… Fuck them, he thought.
But not quite yet. Fuck them in ten minutes; maybe fuck them in twenty. Because he didn’t have anything else to occupy him, and he’d always been a walker after dark, Lech Wicinski; a long-time stroller of the empty streets.
And if these streets weren’t exactly empty, or entirely streets, they’d do for now.
I suppose you’re wondering why you’re gathered in the library.
That was Hercule Poirot speaking: the memory of her bullet, deep inside her brain.
And she was indeed gathered in the library, if that was what hiding in the study amounted to. But other suspects were nowhere. It was just Sid alone, and whoever was outside.
She’d come downstairs while they were on the garden path, and now sat with her back against the closed study door, the doorbell dying away. Nothing sounds louder than a bell in an empty house. Her heart was fluttering, her insides clammy. The study was in darkness. Nobody here. The bell rang again, then once more. And then the flap on the letterbox jangled, and she imagined the pair taking it in turns to drop to one knee and peer into the hallway.