She decided instead to walk up to the ExEx building on the Ridge; the weather was fair, which gave her enough of an excuse, and it would be a chance to see some more of the town at ground level. Anyway, she had had something in mind for a couple of days and this would be a good opportunity to try it out.
She walked down Eastbourne Road towards St Stephen's Church. On this crisply cold morning, with the usual traffic edging noisily past, the shops open and a few pedestrians going about their business, it was easy to imagine the chaos that Grove's outburst must have caused on that afternoon. The traffic here would have been brought to a halt by the vehicles that had piled up in the vicinity of the hotel, but the people in the cars would probably not yet have found out what was causing the delay. Teresa could visualize them sitting with their engines idling, waiting for what they must have thought was a temporary traffic holdup ahead to be
cleared. Those people would have presented easy targets to Grove. Six people had actually died inside cars in this short stretch of Eastbourne Road, but many more were wounded. The rest managed to scramble out of their cars, or found cover until Grove had passed.
Teresa reached St Stephen's Church, which was on the corner of a road called Hyde Avenue.
This was one of the alternative traffic routes up to the Ridge, bypassing the narrow streets of the Old Town, and Teresa herself had already driven along it several times on her journeys to and from the GunHo ExEx building. Next to the church Hyde Avenue was an attractive road, with good houses and numerous trees, but further up it was lined with estate houses and a few industrial sites. Near where it Joined the Ridge, the elevation afforded glimpses of the view across the town, and out to sea, but there were better vantage points and better panoramas in other parts of the town.
Looking at her town map Teresa had noticed that a series of footpaths and alleyways ran between the houses in this part of Bulverton; they were known locally as twittens. With a few road-crossings taken into account, the twittens provided a continuous network of paths behind the houses. Teresa had worked out that she could probably walk most of the way up to Welton Road and the ExEx building by this route.
She crossed Hyde Avenue. On the opposite corner was a tandooni takeout restaurant, and between it and the adjacent building was a narrow alley that led to one of the twittens. The alley was bounded by the walls of the buildings on either side, and overhead by the floor of an upperstorey extension of one of them. The alleyway floor was made of stone flags; as she walked through the metaltipped heels of her shoes set up a clacking that echoed around her.
The traffic noise from behind was quietened by the enclosed space.
Almost at once, in the halflight of the alley, she began to feel giddy. An alltoofamiliar display of brilliant but unseeable flashes began in the corner of her eye, and she paused, overtaken by a rush of familiar despair. She should have known that this was a day when a migraine attack was more than possible: she had hardly slept during the night.
She paused, resting one hand on the wall at her side, looking down at the uneven stone floor, trying to rid herself of the nausea. She wondered whether she should give up her plans for the day, return to the hotel for one of her pills and try to sleep.
While she stood there, undecided, a series of shots rang out in the street behind her.
The sound was so close she instinctively ducked. Between shots she could clearly hear the quick, efficient clicking of the mechanism of a semiautomatic rifle, a sound that in spite of everything continued to fascinate her.
Teresa looked back: she could see a stationary car framed in the rectangle of daylight. A wild imagining came into her mind: cars were already backed up along Eastbourne Road while a new gunman prowled, firing at will.
She hurried back towards the road, scraping herself for cover against the rough bricks of the alley wall. Momentarily dazzled by her return to the bright cold sunlight, Teresa put her hand up to shield her eyes, and tried to see what was going on. She stood in the entrance to the alley, careful not to step out into the open. Vehicles coming down from the Ridge along Hyde Avenue were passing through a green light at the Junction with Eastbourne Road, and turning left or right. Their engines and tyres made the usual loud noise as they accelerated away along this narrow, built-up street. There was no sign of panic, or of anyone carrying or using a rifle.
While she watched, the lights at the intersection changed, and traffic began moving off in the other directions. The car Teresa had first seen framed in the entrance to the alley moved away with the others, the driver glancing back at her with a puzzled expression, no doubt wondering why she had been staring at him so intently.
Still on her guard for the presence of a gunman, or more alarmingly a sniper, Teresa stood warily in the entrance to the alley, watching as the cars and trucks went by. The incident profoundly puzzled her: she was obviously mistaken, in the sense that no one appeared to have been firing a weapon in the street, but the sounds she had heard were so close at hand, and so familiar and distinctive, that she knew she had not imagined them.
When a couple more minutes had gone by she decided to continue with her walk, but the incident had made her nervous. As she came out from between the two buildings the path continued with wire fencing on either side she looked from side to side in case her imagined gunman had moved round so that he was behind these houses and able to see her. Where the twitten turned nightandleft between a junction of gardens, Teresa looked back. The path through the alley was clear, and she could glimpse the traffic on the main road still moving past normally.
Then she looked up.
There was a man on the roof of the house next to the restaurant.
Teresa immediately ducked down and moved into cover, even as she realized that he was no threat to her. She looked back. He had fallen, and was lying head down across the sloping tiles. His foot had been caught by a Joint between two scaffolding poles, and was preventing him from sliding any further. He had been shot several times. A stain of dark blood spread out from his head and chest, down the tiles and over some of the planks on the scaffolding.
Teresa felt her pulse racing, her head thumping, her hands trembling. Conflicting instincts ran through her: to call out to the man, to scream aloud, to run away, to shout for help, to dash across to the scaffolding and try to find some way to climb up and reach him.
She did none of these. She simply stood at the Junction of the path, trembling with fear, looking up at the dead man on the roof.
The sirens of emergency vehicles were approaching, and Teresa could hear a man's voice amplified and distorted by a bullhorn. A helicopter was weaving overhead, about half a mile away towards the Old Town. There was another rattle of gunfire, more muffled than before.
Teresa hurried back down the path, and ran through the covered alley. Moving traffic was framed in the sunlight ahead. As she emerged into Eastbourne Road she saw a woman walking towards her, pushing a stroller with two small children inside.