He heard a cough. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a dog cock its leg against a tree. The man holding the dog’s lead was staring at him furtively. Suspiciously. He stared back. After all, there were any number of perfectly valid reasons why he might be peering into a house. Even so, he realised that, to most people passing by, he would look like somebody who was about to commit a crime. Yet there was nowhere to hide, no cover … Then he remembered the man who’d appeared outside his flat a few months back — Will Campbell’s father. Suppose he pretended to be trying to trace a friend. It was plausible; it happened all the time. He felt in his pocket, found a biro and an old tube ticket. On the back of the ticket he wrote his brother’s name, Gary, and, underneath it, the address of the house directly opposite. He crossed the road. The same privet hedge, the same black plastic dustbins. The same frosted-glass panels in the front door. He rang the bell and waited. Through the glass he watched a figure walk towards him from inside the house. The door opened on a security chain. An old woman squinted at him through the gap.
‘Yes?’
‘Gary in?’
‘Gary?’
‘Yeah.’
‘No one called Gary here.’
Barker looked at the ticket in his hand, then stepped backwards and studied the number on the door. ‘He told me his address over the phone. I wrote it down.’ He showed the woman his ticket.
She took it from him, peered down at it. Her hand trembled slightly. Behind her the house seemed to sigh, its breath sour and damp. She shook her head and handed the ticket back. ‘You must’ve heard it wrong.’
Barker stared out into the silent, sunlit road. Like Will Campbell’s father, he seemed disinclined to move.
‘You better try some other numbers,’ the woman said.
Strange: she was feeding him lines, a strategy.
He nodded. ‘Sorry to bother you.’
She closed the door.
He watched the shape of the woman shrink and wrinkle in the frosted glass. He could relax now. If the police questioned him, he knew what to say. He would show the officer his tube ticket, claim he was looking for a friend. He could even call on the old woman to vouch for him, if he needed to.
After working as a bouncer for so many years, you’d think he would have been used to standing around. But you didn’t need patience when you worked for a club — at least, not that kind of patience; your time was filled. You had to read faces, make predictions. You had to be a clairvoyant of violence, seeing it before it actually began. And when it began you had to put an end to it. Outside a club, there was always something happening, or about to happen. Outside Glade Spencer’s house, the reverse was true. He stood on that street for three and a half hours, and they were probably the slowest three and a half hours of his life. Once, a movement in the bay window startled him, a glimpse of something white, but it was only a cat. He knew its name. Giacometti. If there was a cat in the house, he reasoned, then it seemed unlikely Glade Spencer could have gone away. Or, if she had, she wouldn’t be away for long. On the strength of the cat’s presence he waited for another hour.
The cat stared at him with yellow eyes.
Nothing happened.
At last, he turned and walked off down the road. He had the distinct feeling that Glade would only appear after he had left. He took a deep breath, let it out in stages. It was a lovely evening, a wind blowing gently against his back. Every now and then he saw a cloud glide past the rooftops. A new energy flowed through him now he was moving. On St Mark’s Road he saw a taxi go by and caught a glimpse of blonde hair in the window. Was that her? He stood still, watched the taxi’s brake-lights flashing as it slowed for a roundabout. It took a right turn, into Chesterton Road. If it had been carrying Glade Spencer, surely it would have turned left.
At Ladbroke Grove he bought a ticket to London Bridge. The tube journey was long and hypnotic, full of inexplicable delays. Opening his book, Barker read a passage about the war between Clovis, who was a famous Merovingian king, and Alaric, the King of the Goths. This took place in 507 AD. After killing Alaric in battle, Clovis wintered in Bordeaux. The following year he rode to Angoulême, a place he wanted to recapture. Because he had the Lord on his side, the walls of the city collapsed the moment he set eyes on them. Angoulême was his. Barker closed the book. If only things could be that easy. Or perhaps it was simply that he had no one on his side.
It was after nine o’clock by the time he reached his flat. Once through the door, he leaned against the wall, the lights still off, the rooms in darkness. From the far end of the corridor came a pale glow, almost a phosphorescence, light from the city filtering through the window in the kitchen.
Sunday night.
Above the sound of people shouting in the distance, above the ghostly siren on Commercial Road and the high-altitude rumble of a plane, he could hear the voice of Charlton Williams. You’ve had a good run, after all.
The next day Barker stood outside Glade Spencer’s house for almost five hours. The trees that lined her street had all been pruned — the foliage had been cut away; only stumps and swollen knuckles remained — and he could find no shade. He could feel the sunlight on his face, his neck, his arms. In films, the detective always has a car. He parks opposite the house, smokes endless cigarettes. In the morning he wakes up slumped behind the wheel, unshaven, bleary. Then, just as he’s yawning, the front door of the house opens and his quarry conveniently appears. Films. It occurred to Barker that he didn’t really have a plan. No chloroform. No rope or twine. No gun. He was waiting until he saw her and when that happened he would know. But he saw nobody. He noticed that someone had closed the bay window and opened the curtains, and the knowledge that such things could change sustained him through the dull, uncomfortable hours. Once, he peered through the letter-box, just for something to do. One door was open, the other closed. As before. When he put his ear to the gap and listened to the inside of the house, he could hear nothing — no radio or TV, no footsteps, no running water. Sometimes he took out his tube ticket and looked at it, sometimes he walked up the street a little way, trying to believe in the fiction he’d invented the previous day, but his heart wasn’t in it. He supposed that, by now, he must have aroused suspicion in the neighbourhood. He no longer cared. By three in the afternoon he could stand it no longer. His skin stung, as if it had been lightly brushed with nettles. The outside of his forearms was pink, the inside white, reminding him of a barbecue at Jim’s a few years back, everyone too smashed, the sausages half-cooked. He decided to walk over to Portobello Road, which he had heard about, but never seen. After the hours he had spent in silence, on his own, the crowds of people were a surprise to him. Pushing through the crush, he saw stalls piled high with brooches, bathtaps, shoes. Rubbish, really. Junk. Before too long, he’d had enough. He wandered away from the market, into the narrow streets surrounding it. At last he reached Notting Hill Gate. With a huge sense of relief, he walked down a flight of steps into the cool, grimy atmosphere of the tube, following the sign that said District and Circle Line Eastbound.
He stood close to the edge of the platform, the toes of his boots just touching the white line. The next train was due in seven minutes. Looking up, he noticed the panes of reinforced glass in the roof. Beyond the glass there was a tree, its foliage colourless and blurred. Every now and then, the wind pushed the branches down, pinning them against the glass. Yawning, he watched the branches sink down on to the roof, lift away, sink down again. There was something soothing about it — something familiar too, though he couldn’t think what that might be. It had nothing to do with the station itself. He had never been to Notting Hill before.