Dark Winter

38

It was fifteen past midnight by the dash clock as we hit the elevated section of the A40, past the BBC buildings and White City redevelopment site. Fuck it. I pulled my phone from my bumbag.

Suzy was still focused on the oncoming lights, but knew exactly what was happening. ‘You really want to talk to her, don’t you? Make your last call? You know, just in case?’

I turned the phone on and the welcome screen glowed at me. ‘Sort of.’ I hadn’t thought about it quite like that. I never did: it wasn’t as if I’d be leaving much behind, and right now she probably felt I’d be doing her a favour.

I hit the numbers and got the ringing tone at the Sycamores. It seemed to go on for ever before Carmen answered.

‘Hello? Hello?’ She sounded confused.

Jabbing a finger in my left ear, I leant down once more into the footwell. ‘It’s me, Nick. Listen, I need to talk to her.’

Carmen wasn’t listening. ‘It’s past midnight. I told you, I’m not—’

‘Carmen, please – please wake her up. I really want to talk to her before she leaves. I might not get another chance. You understand, don’t you?’

There was a heavy sigh, and I listened to the rustling as she walked out of her bedroom, on to the landing. ‘I’m turning the phone off after this. We need to sleep, you know, we have a busy day ahead of us.’

I heard some mumbling that I couldn’t make out because of the noise of the car, but to my surprise Kelly answered quickly and sounded quite awake. ‘Where are you? I can’t hear you.’

‘I’m in a car. You’re up late.’

‘Well, yeah, just doing stuff. You know.’

‘I’ve got to drive up north, so I won’t be able to come and see you off. But Josh will pick you up, yeah?’ I carried on before she had a chance to respond. ‘I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I’ll try to get there but, you know . . .’

She was scarily calm. ‘It’s OK, Nick.’

‘I want to see you. I want to say sorry you’ve had such a crap time here, us not being able to spend much time together, not being able to see Dr Hughes any more, but—’

‘Hey, really, it’s OK. Josh called and it’s cool. He’s going to call Dr Hughes on Monday and sort things out with a therapist back home. Everything’s cool. You know, I think coming here really did help me.’

‘He’s talked to you already?’

‘Sure, and we’ve got it all sorted out.’

‘Really? That’s fantastic. Look, as soon as I’ve finished this job I’ll fly over.’

‘Will you call me when I get back to Josh’s?’

‘Try and stop me.’

‘’Bye, then.’

‘OK, ’bye.’

‘Nick?’

‘What?’

‘I love you.’

The antibiotics attacked my stomach again. ‘Me too. Gotta go.’ I hit the off key.

The traffic had built up now we were entering the city proper. Suzy’s eyes were still on the road as we jumped a red. I was curious. ‘You’ve really got no one to call?’

‘No one.’

Her ops phone rang and it went immediately to her ear. ‘Yes?’ There was no reaction in her face as she listened, her eyes still fixed on the road ahead. ‘We don’t give a shit – stay there and watch, we’ll meet at Boots.’

He must have closed down. ‘Fucking slope.’ She put away the cell. ‘He’s complaining this isn’t what he’s here for. Says he could be compromised. Who gives a shit?’

‘Has he seen anything?’

She shook her head.

We passed the British Library on the main, Euston Road, just short of King’s Cross. The roadworks stretched towards us from the station, clogging the late-night traffic. Huge concrete dividers and red and white fluorescent tape channelled vehicles and pedestrians through what felt like a series of sheep pens. I pointed up at a blue parking sign and she turned left, taking us down the side of the library to some roadside pay-and-display parking bays. At this time of night there was no charge.

We double-checked the doors and the inside of the Mondeo, then went back on to the main and turned left towards the station. It was less than a hundred metres away. The fast-food joints were doing a steady trade. Wobbly twentysomethings, with wet jackets and hair, tried to walk in straight lines as they attacked their doner kebabs after a night on the Bacardi Breezers. A couple of hookers in a shop doorway tried to catch their eye, and grimy figures were curled up in blankets and greasy sleeping-bags in every vacant doorway.

Suzy tilted her head and I looked over. The girls had cornered a Breezer boy as he tried to eat from a polystyrene tray. ‘It’s nothing like as bad as it used to be,’ she said. ‘But it’s not as if anything’s been sorted – they’ve just been moved on elsewhere.’

We were almost at Boots, but there was no sign of the source. We had a clear view of the target, maybe sixty metres ahead. The triangle of buildings looked even more like the bow of a cruise liner bearing down on us through the falling rain. It had probably been quite a grand sight when it went up in Victoria’s reign or whenever, but now the ground floor consisted of boarded-up shopfronts, and the three above of smoke- and dirt-blackened sash windows. The bow cut into the small pedestrian area the source had crossed when we followed him out of the station.

The shop on the right had sold kebabs, burgers and chips in a bygone age. Its cheap, luminous handpainted signs told us Jim used to be the boy cutting the finest chunks of meat off the spinning joint, but it certainly wouldn’t have been in this century. It’d been a long time since anyone had raised the metal shutters.

The shop on the left had been called MTC. Its front was covered with sheets of chipboard; the green sign above said it had been a booking office. It must have gone to the wall about the same time as Joe’s: the number to call for the best ticket deals in town didn’t even have an old national prefix.

We joined the three backpackers who were leaning against Boots’ window to shelter from the rain, scratching their heads as they studied an A–Z and got hassled by drunks and drug-dealers. Immediately left, between us and the McD’s over the road, the CCTV camera was pointing towards the ship’s bow, and no doubt had a clear view of the roads each side of it. I looked down at Suzy and she shrugged her shoulders. ‘He isn’t here. So what? His phone comes up without a number. Fuck him, let’s get on with it.’

‘Give it a minute, he could be out there somewhere, making sure we’re clear.’

Topping the bow of the brick ship was a tall belvedere tower, looking a bit like a lead-covered Moulin Rouge without the sails. In its heyday it had probably been the pride and joy of King’s Cross, but now it looked just like the rest of the building, covered in grime and pigeon shit, completely dilapidated. The sooner they dug it out and got on with the gateway to Europe the better.

I could see straight up Birkenhead Street. The CCTV was about 250 metres away, swivelling into a new position. Neon flooding from the fast-food joints glistened on the wet pavement the other side of the road, casting a pool of light across the dodgy-looking characters hanging around outside the amusement arcade. The only place that didn’t seem to have a light on was the police station at the corner of Birkenhead. It didn’t necessarily mean it was closed: who knew what was going on behind the mirrored glass?

I got out my moan-phone as Suzy played the girlfriend and cuddled into me. Two policemen in yellow fluorescent jackets came past and decided it was time to wake up a bundle in Boots’ doorway and move it on.

The Yes Man was as charming as ever, and I could still hear a load of other voices in the background. ‘What?’

‘We’re here. The car’s static along the eastern side of the British Library and we’re at the station looking at the target. The source isn’t here. You want us to lift him after this, find out what he knows?’

‘Negative. There’s no need, he’s not going anywhere. What can you see?’

‘No signs of life yet. We’ll give him another five minutes. Wait . . .’ A group of teenagers with too much illegal substance in them shouted their way past us and the two policemen eyed them knowingly as I got back to the Yes Man. ‘If he doesn’t show, we’ll bin him. Wait . . . is the signal still there?’

‘Of course,’ he snapped. ‘Otherwise I would have told you. Don’t forget, I want sit reps.’

The phone went dead and I powered it down. The Yes Man had to rely on us calling him: he would never make the call in case he compromised us, but it was always best to turn the thing off just in case.

Minutes were being wasted. ‘Fuck it, let’s go.’

As the police started following the teenagers, Suzy nodded and put her arm in mine. We walked out of cover and into the rain towards Pentonville. We weren’t going to cross just yet, but stay this side for the start of our 360 of the target. We’d do two recces: the first to get a general overview, the second for a close examination of locks and other detail.

We crossed the junction to the left of the station, and waded through the McFlurry cups littering the pavement outside the closed McDonald’s. Apart from MTC, the hundred-metre stretch of building was covered at street level all the way down to King’s Cross Bridge with the purple-painted chipboard I’d stood by when we first followed the source and his two mates from Starbucks.

Suzy smiled away at me, as you would that time of night, after a few hours together in a pub and a romantic walk home in the constant but now gentle rain. I looked up to the sky. ‘We won’t be able to get in from this side. You seen the street-lighting?’

She nodded. It was the same height as the tops of the windows on the second floor. They were in shit state, but these huge windows would let in enough light to cast shadows everywhere. For anybody on those first two floors, the street-lighting would provide illumination, but they’d have to keep below the sills, even during the day – especially as I could see straight through the first-floor windows to Gray’s Inn Road. They’d certainly be on hard routine, no smoking, no lights, no cooking.

Any movement would be easily spotted from the buildings on Gray’s Inn. The second- and third-floor windows on this side were a little smaller than the ones below, and I could only see enough of the two upper floors to tell it wasn’t an open space.

There was still no sign of life, no lights, no condensation, not even a window covered with net curtains or sheets of newspaper. Further down Pentonville there was a collection of two-storey buildings that were still being used; they made up the rear of the triangle, the stern of the ship. They probably dated from the sixties, and included a mock KFC and a radio shop. No doubt the owners had their fingers crossed that the developers would buy them out as well.

We crossed Pentonville and walked down to the base of the triangle, King’s Cross Bridge. Maybe there had been a bridge at one time, probably over a canal, but now it was about seventy metres of road linking Pentonville with Gray’s Inn.

We turned right, beneath yet another CCTV, and crossed Gray’s Inn as a police car and van, both full of uniforms, wailed behind us.