Soft

Minadew Brakes

A week had passed since the lunch in Marble Arch and, though his typed instructions mentioned the word urgency more than once, Barker had done nothing. He couldn’t seem to move beyond the words themselves. Several times a day he would consult the document Lambert had handed him in the vain hope that it might mysteriously have altered, some kind of alchemy taking place inside the envelope while he wasn’t looking. By now he knew both pages off by heart, which, ironically, gave the job an air of utter immutability, as if, like a commandment, it had been set in stone.

He leaned back. The envelope lay on the table, half-hidden by a copy of The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours. Through the doors of the pub, which stood open to the street, he could see the sun beating down, its harsh light bleaching the colours of buildings, people, cars. Sometimes a middle-aged man in a suit walked past, glancing sideways into the gloom. Sometimes a truck sneezed as it braked for the traffic-lights on Crucifix Lane. Inside the pub, on the TV, a race had just started. Half a dozen men sat at the bar with cigarettes burning in their fingers, their eyes fixed on the screen. Barker drank from his pint, then reached for the envelope. He just couldn’t make any sense of it. This girl — Glade Spencer — she seemed such an unlikely target that he began to wonder whether there hadn’t been some kind of misunderstanding, some mistake. For the hundredth time he stared at her photograph. (After tearing it to pieces on the first day, he had carefully stuck it back together with Sellotape, and she now looked as if she’d been through a car windscreen.) 23 years old, 5′9″, single. A waitress. He couldn’t see the threat in her, no matter how hard he tried.

‘Tasty.’

Barker looked round to see Charlton Williams grinning down at him.

Charlton pointed at the bar. ‘Same again?’

‘Cheers.’

While Charlton was buying the drinks, Barker slipped the photo and the envelope into his pocket. He didn’t want Charlton finding out about the job, not with his big mouth, and yet at the same time it occurred to him that Charlton might already know. Ray could easily have mentioned it, just casually, his way of telling Charlton that he was still connected, still a player. After all, he must have phoned Charlton to get Barker’s number. You told me Barker was broke, right? Thought I’d help him out, didn’t I. What? Charlton? You still there, mate? I can’t hear you. Barker’s face twitched with irritation at the imagined conversation. Ray and his fucking mobile.

But Charlton’s mind seemed to be on other things. As soon as he sat down with the drinks he started going on about some woman who had given him the elbow.

‘Shelley,’ he said. ‘You met her, right?’

Barker nodded. She had walked into the kitchen one morning wearing Charlton’s black silk dressing-gown. Red hair, tall, good bones. A bit of a Marti Caine look about her. She asked Barker for a cigarette. He didn’t have any. ‘Just my luck,’ she muttered, and she had sounded so bitter that he thought she must be talking about something else — the situation she was in, the way her life had gone. She opened a few drawers, he remembered, threw some knives and forks around. Then she went back upstairs.

‘Didn’t fuck her, did you?’ Charlton watched him suspiciously across the rim of his glass. He was drinking vodka. His eyes were bleary, his forehead lightly glazed with sweat. He must have had a few already.

Barker shook his head.

‘I took her out to dinner,’ Charlton went on, ‘you know, nice places in the West End. I bought her jewellery — that gold bracelet. We even had a weekend in Paris …’ He gulped at his vodka. ‘I gave her everything, and you know what she said?’

‘What?’

‘We’re getting too close.’ Charlton sat back. ‘Can you believe that?’ He reached for his drink again, but when his hand closed round the glass, he left it there and stared at it. ‘I thought that’s what women wanted.’ He shook his head, sighed tragically and then stood up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘North London. Highbury.’

‘Give us a lift?’

‘Why not?’ Charlton rested a clumsy hand on Barker’s shoulder. ‘Tell you the truth, I could use the company.’

As they drove through Bermondsey towards the nearest bridge, Charlton told him more about the Paris trip. Oysters, they’d had. Champagne and all. It must’ve set him back five hundred quid. Five hundred minimum. ‘And what’s she say? We’re getting too close. How can you be too close? That’s the whole point, isn’t it?’ He sighed again. ‘Who knows any more?’ he said. ‘Who the fuck knows?’

Crossing the river, Charlton was quiet for a few moments. Then he turned to Barker. ‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘You got someone, have you?’ Charlton’s eyes flicked from the road to Barker’s face and back again.

Barker didn’t answer.

‘You’re getting laid, though, right?’ Charlton chuckled. ‘I saw that picture you were looking at.’ He tried to reach into Barker’s jacket pocket, but Barker pushed his hand away. The Ford Sierra swerved. Someone in the next lane used their horn.

Charlton leaned out of his window. ‘Wanker,’ he shouted. Back inside again, he said, ‘That girl, though, she was tasty.’ He gave Barker a sly look. ‘How do you do it, Barker? What’s the secret?’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Barker said, folding his arms.

‘Is that right?’ Charlton sent the car slithering into a roundabout, narrowly missing two men on bicycles. ‘Got to hand it to you, Barker. She can’t be more than, what, twenty-one?’

As they drove northwards through the City’s dark, deserted streets, Charlton turned to him again. ‘I almost forgot. I’ve been asked to give you notice.’

Barker turned slowly and looked at him. ‘Notice?’

‘On the flat.’

Barker didn’t know what to say. His eyes moved beyond Charlton’s face to the buildings flowing in blurred shapes behind him.

‘I told you six months, remember? And they’re giving you two months to get out. Two months — that’s generous.’ Charlton sounded much less drunk all of a sudden.

In that moment Barker knew he should have seen this whole thing coming. Only the week before, Charlton had called, asking him to supervise the installation of a video doorphone. At the time Barker had thought nothing of it. It was just a new security gadget; probably Charlton had got some kind of deal on the hardware. In retrospect, of course, he should have realised that it was being fitted with tenants in mind. A company let, most likely: the papers were full of stories about business people moving to new premises south of the river. Staring at Charlton’s pale lips, his jigsaw hair, Barker could have bludgeoned him to death right there, in the car. He had transformed that flat. He had cleaned it, painted it. He had made it his own. And now it was being taken from him. Every time he put something together, life dismantled it. He turned and stared out of the window. Nothing was his. Nothing ever had been. They were waiting at a set of traffic-lights. Across the pavement stood an office block built out of glass and marble. It seemed to Barker that the building was very far away, that the gap between the building and the place where he was sitting was unbridgeable. To his surprise, he found his anger had burned off. The tension that made it possible had snapped inside him. Like a clutch that no longer functions. You press it, expecting resistance, and your foot goes straight to the floor. You can’t change gear.

‘You’ve had a pretty good run,’ Charlton was telling him. ‘Seven months, it will have been, rent-free —’

Barker couldn’t listen to any more. ‘Could you drop me here?’

‘Here?’ Charlton peered through the windscreen. ‘You sure?’

He pulled over. Barker opened the door and stepped out. The city swirled around him like stirred liquid. A sudden smell of chips. He saw that they had stopped on Pentonville Road, about halfway up the hill. The cafés and arcades of King’s Cross lay to his right, five minutes’ walk away. King’s Cross. The Hammersmith & City line. All in all, it was strangely convenient. It might almost have been planned.

Charlton shouted something about Monday week. But Barker didn’t listen, didn’t answer. As he watched the silver Sierra veer out into the traffic he thought of Jill. Standing on the pavement, he said her name out loud. Jill. He had thought of her often during the past few days. Jill in a black dress with white dots on it, climbing awkwardly out of a car. Jill huddled on the floor, her bra-strap showing. It was always Jill, never any of the others. She was like somebody who had died, but hadn’t gone. She had the eerie clarity, the presence, of a ghost who cannot rest. There was something that still needed to be done, and only he could do it. The responsibility was his.

On reaching the railway station he took an escalator down into the tube. He passed the figures of the homeless, the jobless, placards fastened round their necks like bitter parodies of jewellery. That was him now. That was him. The tiled tunnels echoed with the sound of people hurrying. He had a sense of panic, desperation. Everything was closing in. He stood on the platform, tried to keep his mind empty. He stared at the map on the wall, counting the number of stops from King’s Cross to Latimer Road.

He watched a girl in tight blue leggings walk over to the chocolate machine. When the coins had dropped, she reached into the slot at the bottom. Then turned away, looking for a train. He’d never gone for skinny women, but there was something about this one, something that forced him to look. She wore a leather coat with a fake-fur collar and calf-length boots with high square heels. Oddly enough, she was carrying a furled umbrella. Surely it had only rained a couple of times all summer? He had caught a glimpse of her outside the station, he realised, standing up against the railings. She had been talking to a black man, her face only inches from his, as if the two of them were planning a conspiracy. The man was probably a pimp, he thought. It was King’s Cross, after all. Where would she be going now? A cheap hotel room in West London? Some basement flat with net curtains on the windows and a coloured lightbulb hanging from the ceiling?

The train pulled in. He waited until she chose a carriage, then he followed her. She sat down, crossed her legs. He watched her from where he was standing, by the glass barrier next to the doors. She adjusted her fringe in the makeshift mirror of the window opposite, then reached into her black suede bag and took out a chapstick, which she applied to her lips, running it backwards and forwards at least a dozen times, her head perfectly still, her face composed, expressionless. Her eyes were a pale grey-blue, the kind of colour that, on paint-sample charts, would probably be called ‘Cool Slate’ or ‘Dawn Surprise’. He wasn’t sure why he was noticing her in such great detail. Maybe it was because he had to identify a girl that afternoon. Maybe it was because he was carrying a physical description of that girl in his jacket pocket. How do you do it, Barker? What’s the secret? He let out a short laugh, scornful, scarcely audible.

He left the tube at Latimer Road, half-hoping the girl in the blue leggings would get out too, but she stayed in her seat, touching her fringe again with nervous fingers. If it had been her photo in the envelope, would he have felt the same? Could he have followed her to some dark place? Could he have done what he’d been hired to do?

Latimer Road. It wasn’t an area he had ever visited. The street outside the tube station looked bleak despite the sunshine, the shop windows caged in security grilles, litter scattered across the pavement. An old man shuffled towards him wearing brown flared trousers and a shirt that was open to the waist. A six-inch scar showed on his belly, the skin raised and livid. To the north Barker recognised the concrete pillars of the Westway. He moved in that direction. The roar of cars coming from above his head sounded angry but contained, like wasps trapped in a jar. He opened his A-Z and checked the route. Then he began to walk.

Before too long he found himself in an area of two-storey red-brick houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas sprouted from the small front gardens. There was nobody about. A police car hesitated at a junction, and then moved on. Once, when Barker was in his early thirties, he had been stopped and searched on Union Street. They pulled a pair of scissors out of the back pocket of his jeans — his father’s scissors, as it happened — and held them up in front of him. ‘I’m a hairdresser,’ he said. ‘And I’m Julio Iglesias,’ said the policeman. The name meant nothing to Barker. ‘Julio Iglesias,’ the policeman said while his colleague sniggered in the background. ‘He’s a famous singer. Spanish. Had sex with three thousand women.’ Which meant they didn’t believe him, of course. Barker was charged with possession of an offensive weapon, and forced to pay a fine. That Dodds bad luck again. Looking up, he saw a middle-aged woman standing on the pavement. She wore a floral dress, and she was holding a shopping basket made of straw. Her legs were very white. When he passed her, she looked in the opposite direction. The red-brick houses, the small-mindedness — the quiet. He felt as if he’d strayed into the suburbs. He could almost have been back in Plymouth.

At last he stood outside Glade Spencer’s house. Red-brick, just like the rest. He’d been expecting something better. He didn’t know why that should be, why he should care. Somehow, though, the house seemed tawdry, less than she deserved. He knew that she lived on the first floor and that she shared the flat with a girl called Sally James. The bay window on the first floor was open, he noticed, though the curtains were closed. He wasn’t sure how to interpret this. Did it mean that somebody was in? He stared up at the window until his neck ached. In all that time no sound came from inside the room. He wiped the sweat from his forehead; the heat only seemed to add to the silence. Opening the gate, he walked up to the front door. He couldn’t see through the panes of frosted glass. Instead, he bent down and looked through the letter-box. It was cool in the house, several degrees cooler than outside. He could see into a narrow hallway — the walls off-white, the carpet a shabby turquoise. On the right there was a door, which was closed. The ground-floor flat. Directly in front of him he could see another door, half-open, and, beyond it, a flight of stairs. They must lead to the flat where Glade Spencer lived — and if the door was open, then presumably, yes, someone was home …

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.

Then, as he lowered his eyes, his breath caught in his throat. There, standing opposite him on the westbound platform, was the girl he had been looking for. He didn’t even have to take out the photograph. The flawless skin, the bright-blonde hair. It was her. She wore an ankle-length black skirt that clung to her hips and a shiny orange shirt, and she was carrying a leather bag. Though he knew her height, she was taller than he had imagined, with longer limbs. His heart bounced against his ribs. What should he do?

Before he could decide, her train slid into the station. Flashes of her through the moving windows, her face in profile as she glanced sideways, along the platform. Sweating, he lifted his eyes to the roof, as if in supplication. The leaves darkening against the glass. The leaves. In that moment he decided to let her go. There was no need to cross the footbridge and follow her on to the westbound train. There was no hurry. After all, he knew where she lived, knew where she worked. He could find her any time he wanted. The document he had received from Lambert was his guarantee. And now a coincidence had brought that document to life. It was a good sign — but it was no more than that. Only someone who was desperate would act on it. As her train pulled out of the station, he saw her hunting through her bag for something, one hand lifting simultaneously to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her slightly protruding right ear.

For a few moments he felt an urge simply to be close to her — to travel on the next train going in the same direction, to cover the same ground. But then, just as abruptly, the urge faded. To people watching him rush from one platform to the other, he would look like someone who had got things wrong. They’d think he was a tourist, a stupid foreigner. No, he would take the train he’d been intending to take all along, the train that was now due in one minute. As for the coincidence, he had no need of it, no use for it. He could afford to squander it. Far more professional, he thought, to act as if nothing had happened. And besides, wouldn’t there be a kind of excitement in taking the eastbound train and feeling the city expand between them as they travelled in completely opposite directions?

The tube slid out of the station, swaying slightly, and entered the darkness of a tunnel. He heard Jill’s voice on the phone. Maybe we could spend Sunday together … He had met her at a party in Saltash, empty cider bottles lined up along the bottom of the walls. The following week, he had called her, asked her out. She told him she would like to catch the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe. It seemed strange to her, she said, but she had never been there — at least, not since she was a child. They agreed to meet at ten-thirty in the café on Admiral’s Hard, a narrow street that doubled as a landing slip, its smooth cobbles running downhill, right into the water.

They ate breakfast in the café — poached eggs, hot buttered toast, mugs of strong tea. He noticed that she had an appetite, and he approved of that. Through the window he could see racks of seaweed on the cobbles, abandoned halfway up the street by the outgoing tide.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked, leaning towards him.

He nodded. He had finished work at two-thirty the night before and then he had played a few frames of snooker with Ray Peacock. He hadn’t got to bed till four.

‘You’re tired.’ She looked down. ‘We should have met up later. In the afternoon. I didn’t think.’

‘Jill,’ he said, and put his hand on hers.

She looked at him across the table, the colour in her eyes seeming to heighten and bleach at the same time, as if, in touching her, he’d had some chemical effect.

He hadn’t known her well at that point. He still thought she was one thing when really she was something else entirely. The first time they saw each other, at the party, she’d had a few drinks. Also, she was a sumptuous woman, with full breasts, wide hips and heavy thighs, which only added to the impression he had formed, that she was bold and confident. How could she not be, he had thought, with a body like that? He couldn’t have been more wrong, of course. It had taken him months to realise how shy she was, how many doubts she carried round with her. For example: she could stand outside a clothes shop for twenty minutes before she found the courage to go in — or sometimes, after twenty minutes, she would simply lose her nerve and turn away.

After breakfast they took the ferry to Cremyll, a short ride across the River Tamar. He followed her to a white wooden bench at the back of the boat. As the engines surged and the ferry slid away from the stone jetty, Jill turned her face into the sunlight, closed her eyes and sighed. Sitting beside her, he admired her black hair falling to her shoulders and the strong white column of her throat.

‘Beautiful today,’ she murmured.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw that he had been watching her and she looked away quickly, pretending to take an interest in the naval buildings that occupied the waterfront.

A stretch of densely wooded coastline, Mount Edgcumbe was surrounded on three sides by water, which gave it the feeling of an island. On landing, they visited the gift shop first, then wandered idly through the formal gardens, past fountains and summerhouses, emerging at last on to a wide gravel path that ran along the edge of the park. They sat on the sea wall, its stone heated by the sun. It was hard to believe it was September. Behind them, an ilex hedge rose twenty feet into the air, its sides shaved flat by some meticulous gardener. From a distance it appeared to have cracks in it, like certain kinds of cheese or marble.

Later, outside a temple, they met a man with wild white hair who told them he was a photographer. He was taking pictures of the trees, he said, his voice oddly eager. They nodded, though they didn’t understand why he might be doing that, and they were too lazy to ask. In the end, he hurried on ahead of them, muttering something about the light. They followed the path, which took them up a hill, past clumps of pink and blue hydrangea, then through a wood and up again into a high meadow. The grass was coarse and windswept, faded by its long exposure to the elements. Several cedars spread their stark, flat branches against the sky. Breathing hard from the climb, they rested by a ruined tower that had a view over Plymouth Sound. They watched ships ease past Drake Island and into the docks. As they stood there, leaning on the crumbling, ivy-covered masonry, clouds filled the sky to the west. By the time they began to walk again, the sun had vanished and a soft drizzle was falling. The cedars suddenly looked black.

‘I was hoping we could get to Minadew Brakes.’ Jill opened the leaflet she had bought from the shop and showed it to him on the map. They were less than halfway there.

They walked on, across the bare hillside, into the woods. Gradually the drizzle turned to rain, and soon it was so heavy that they could hardly hear each other speak. Though the overhanging trees formed a kind of roof above the footpath, they were still getting drenched. They had no choice but to retrace their steps. He saw the disappointment rise into her face, making it look crooked.

‘Another time,’ he said. Though he suspected even then that it would never happen.

‘Minadew. It means black stone, they think.’ The crash of the rain, her voice almost lost in it.

Under a beech tree, with big drops bursting through the leaves, he put his arms round her and kissed her. She pressed her body into his until he could feel the whole shape of her against him. He found a place where the ground wasn’t too wet and spread his coat for her. She lay down, skirt plastered to her thighs, eyes glowing with a strange, astonished light. He lay beside her, half on top of her. Under her clothes her body was as warm as bread just taken from the oven.

‘I haven’t got anything,’ he said after a while.

She reached sideways into her bag and handed him a Durex. He looked at it, surprised. This was the beginning of the eighties, before AIDS was talked about in England. You hardly ever saw a woman with a condom.

‘I never carried one with me before,’ she said. ‘Only today.’

He believed her, and was flattered.

While they were lying together on the ground, he saw the photographer hurry past, his wild hair flattened against his head, his tripod wrapped in green plastic so that it resembled a piece of light artillery.

A Sunday, years ago. Her beauty.

And now the very different beauty of a girl he’d seen only once in his life. A girl whose picture he carried everywhere with him, like a man in love.

A girl who didn’t even know that he existed.

He walked out of London Bridge Station and turned right, then right again, into the street that ran under the railway. The sun shone into the tunnel, an almost rancid light, revealing dust and filth. A young woman hurried towards him along the narrow pavement, her shadow thrown down in front of her like a joker that would trump whatever card he played. He supposed she must be frightened by the sight of him — his dark clothes, his scar. She didn’t look at him as he stepped into the gutter to let her pass. He noticed she was muttering under her breath. Prayers. So nothing happened to her.

In the daylight on the far side of the tunnel he stood still for a moment, his eyes adjusting. Late afternoon, the sun dropping in a clear blue sky. He moved on, through a housing estate. Block A, Block B. The screams of children from an open first-floor window, a cat slithering beneath a fence.

The shortcut home.

Update Yourself

Barker had opened the window in the lounge so he could listen to the rain landing in the back yard three floors down. After the weeks of hot dry weather, it sounded unfamiliar, exotic. The TV was on, some comedy show. He was only half-watching, his mind elsewhere. He almost didn’t hear the front door. It was late, after eleven. In Plymouth people often called round on the off chance that you might be in. Not in London, though. Then he remembered Pentonville Road in the bright sunshine and Charlton shouting something about Monday week. He couldn’t face the idea of Charlton. He wasn’t in the mood.

Reaching for the remote, he pressed MUTE. He watched a comedian lift his eyebrows, round his mouth into an O, then smile smugly. The door buzzed again. Barker switched the TV off, walked out into the corridor and picked up the entryphone. The small screen flickered on — a grainy picture, black-and-white. The man from the Lebanese restaurant appeared. Lambert, as he called himself. Well, perhaps it wasn’t such a surprise. In a way, Barker supposed he must have been expecting it. Two men stood in the background, only parts of them visible. Shoulders. An ear. Hair. He remembered what Andy, the man who had fitted the entryphone, had said. There’s only two kinds of people who go in for them. Rich people, and people like you. And then he’d said, No disrespect or nothing.

‘Dodds?’

Lambert was standing too close to the camera. The sides of his face sloped away into the darkness. He looked like a fish. Or a plane.

‘Are you there, Dodds?’

‘What is it?’

‘I’d like a word with you. A chat.’

‘There are three of you.’

‘Well, I’d hardly come down here alone, would I. Not to this neck of the woods.’ Lambert smiled, which looked awful, horrific. His mouth bent backwards at the corners. No chin. ‘I just want to have a little chat with you,’ he was saying. ‘Show you a video.’

‘What video?’

Lambert held up a cassette. ‘I thought you might be interested. I thought it might help.’

Barker stood back, thinking.

‘It’d be nice if you let us in now,’ Lambert said. ‘We’re getting wet out here.’

Barker pressed the entry buzzer and watched the top of the men’s heads as they passed beneath the camera’s steady gaze. Then just darkness, the crackle of the rain. He had about a minute and a half before they knocked on the door. He walked into the kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept his cutlery. He didn’t like the kind of people who used knives. Still, this was no time to get precious. He heard three pairs of feet on the stairs. He went to the front door, the knife in his left sleeve, its blade lying flush against the inside of his wrist. Though he had known something like this was going to happen, he hadn’t bothered to prepare for it. He wondered how bad it was going to be.

When he opened the door, Lambert was staring at the floor. Two men stood behind him, running their hands through their hair, shaking the water off their coats.

‘Sorry to keep you standing outside like that.’ Barker listened to his voice. He didn’t sound sorry. ‘I have to be careful.’

‘Don’t we all, Barker,’ Lambert said.

The three men moved past him, into the flat.

‘The lounge is on your left,’ Barker said, closing the door.

He followed them into the room. They were already sitting down, Lambert in the armchair by the gas fire, the other two on the sofa. All three seemed oddly comfortable, at home. They were staring into the fire, as if it had been lit, and Barker could suddenly imagine winter — the curtains drawn, a row of small mauve flames.

‘Anyone fancy a beer?’ he said.

Lambert looked up, but didn’t say anything. The other two didn’t react at all.

Barker fetched himself a beer from the kitchen. When he returned to the lounge, nothing had changed. The air smelled strongly of wet cloth.

‘So what’s the video?’ he said. ‘New release?’

Lambert leaned forwards, his elbows on his knees. ‘We have a problem,’ he said.

Barker waited.

‘It’s been two weeks and nothing’s happened. Two weeks since you received the envelope —’

‘I’m working on it.’ Barker lifted the beer bottle to his mouth and drank. It occurred to him that he was holding a weapon in his hand. He wondered if it had occurred to Lambert.

‘You read the material?’

‘Of course.’

‘There was talk of urgency, if I remember rightly.’

Barker nodded.

‘Two weeks,’ and Lambert looked up and a gap opened between his hands.

‘There was also talk of being discreet,’ Barker said, ‘if I remember rightly.’

He sensed something flash through Lambert, invisible but lethal, like electricity in water: the suspicion that he was being taken too lightly, that he was being mocked. In future, Lambert would be easier to remember. For the first time Barker was worried. He knew what kind of situation he was in. Usually you only saw a man like Lambert once. Twice was almost unheard of. And certainly there would never be a third encounter.

‘She went up north,’ he said, in his own defence. ‘It took me by surprise.’

On Saturday morning he had followed Glade to Victoria Coach Station, of all places, and he had stood in the queue while she paid for a ticket to Blackburn. When he tried to buy a ticket for the same bus, they told him it was full. There would be another bus in two hours’ time, they said — but that was no use to him, of course, no use whatsoever. He had been forced to watch from the shadows as the bus lurched past him, the girl out of reach, maybe for ever, her face sealed behind a sheet of tinted glass.

‘Is she back now?’ Lambert asked.

Barker nodded. ‘She came back yesterday.’

‘You’ve got twenty-four hours.’

Lambert rose out of his chair and walked over to the video. At the same moment, one of the men on the sofa took out a pearl-handled penknife, opened the blade and started carving something into the surface of Barker’s coffee table.

‘Zero, isn’t it,’ Lambert said, ‘for videos?’

‘Not on that machine,’ Barker said. ‘It’s eight on that machine.’

‘Old, is it?’

Barker nodded.

‘You ought to modernise,’ Lambert said, ‘update yourself.’

He pushed the cassette into the slot, then picked up the video remote. When he was sitting on his chair again, he held it out in front of him and pressed 8. The man who wasn’t carving the table loosened his coat and leaned his head back, his eyes fixed on the TV.

The screen flickered, flared white, then a room appeared. Yellow-and-orange-striped paper on the walls. No carpet, just bare boards. Half of a window visible. There seemed to be a council estate outside; Barker could just make out a block of flats, some dusty trees. Sitting on the floor, with both hands chained to a radiator, was a man of about forty. Black side-whiskers, a squashy nose. He reminded Barker of one of the men who worked in the salvage yard on Tower Bridge Road. The sound quality was poor, but Barker could still hear the man’s voice. Pleading.

‘… there’s no need for this … no fucking need …’

Probably it was not for him to say.

A second man stepped into the picture. He was dressed in jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and he wore a visor over his face, the kind of visor welders wear. Barker heard a sudden roaring sound, controlled but fierce. At first he couldn’t make any sense of it. Then he saw the man’s hand holding a blowtorch, the cone of hot blue flame.

‘Funny thing is, his name’s Burns,’ Lambert said. ‘He’s from —’ He paused and looked across at the man who was carving Barker’s table. ‘Where’s he from?’

‘Aberdeen,’ the man said without looking up.

Barker watched Burns adjust the flame until it was small and sharp. The roar it was making had intensified. The man chained to the radiator was shaking his head from side to side like a dog with a jersey. He was still talking, but it didn’t sound like language any more. And now Burns leaned down, aiming the tip of the flame at the man’s right hand. The skin seemed to shrink. Then it blackened and began to bubble. The man was screaming, his face twisting away from the camera. A vein stood out on his neck, thick as a middle finger. Barker thought of Bruce Springsteen. He was all right, Bruce Springsteen. That song about it being dark on the edge of town, that was a good song. Sometimes, as the man screamed, he ran out of breath. His mouth still hung open, though. Drool spilling from the corners, spilling down his chin.

‘He used to be a snooker player,’ Lambert said. ‘Quite good, he was. Quite well known.’ He spoke to the man with the penknife again. ‘Beat Hurricane Higgins once, didn’t he?’

The man nodded. Then, bending low, he blew some loose wood shavings off the table. So far he had completed three characters: a 2, a 4 and an H.

In the video the Scotsman was facing the camera, asking what he was supposed to do next. Should he do an eye, for instance? Barker didn’t hear the answer.

Two hands reached into the picture and began to undo the man’s trousers. The man was shouting in a high-pitched voice that no longer seemed to belong to him. Somebody was explaining that this wasn’t torture, it was punishment, and that, because it was punishment, there was no way round it. It had to be gone through, had to be endured. Barker had the feeling that it was Lambert who was doing the talking. The voice had the same anonymous sound to it, the same instantly forgettable quality. By now, the man’s trousers and underpants had been removed. His T-shirt was pulled up into his armpits, revealing a pot belly and a thin dark trail of hair. The camera closed in slowly until the man’s head filled the screen.

‘We thought it might be a bit unpleasant to show the whole thing in detail,’ Lambert explained. ‘A bit,’ and he paused, ‘gratuitous.’

The man’s agony was such that his face seemed to have changed shape. Once, he passed out, his chin sinking down on to his chest. He was still chained to the radiator. One hand burned black, a tendon showing …

Then, suddenly, they were looking at a man with a bushy seventies hairstyle. He was standing in an office with his trousers round his ankles. A girl with no top on was kneeling in front of him. He was holding his dick in his right hand and she was licking it. ‘Yes,’ she was saying when she could get a word in, ‘oh yes. Give it to me. Yes.’

Lambert stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We must have used an old tape.’ He pressed STOP and switched off the TV. Walking over to the video, he bent down and pressed EJECT. The tape slid out.

‘Did you kill him?’ Barker wanted to know.

‘Oh no.’ Lambert seemed put out by the idea, almost offended. ‘He won’t be fucking anyone in a hurry, though.’ He fitted the tape back into its case and closed the lid. ‘He won’t be playing snooker either.’

Barker watched as the two men rose from the sofa and filed out of the room. He heard the front door open. Lambert tucked the tape into his coat pocket.

‘This time tomorrow,’ he said.

Twenty minutes later Barker carried his coffee table down the stairs and out on to the pavement. The rain was still falling steadily. The street shiny, empty.

He walked to the corner and threw the table into a skip. He knew it wouldn’t be long before it caught somebody’s eye. It wouldn’t be long before they noticed the carved inscription either. 24 HRS. He wondered what they’d make of it.

19 Hrs

It was four in the morning before the rain slowed down. Barker lay on his back with his head turned towards the window. Light from the streetlamp slanted across the top half of the bed, across his hands. He had dreamed about Jill, who was also, somehow, the girl in the photograph. He had seen her on the video entryphone, on that grainy screen, night lapping at the edges of her face. Her skin so white, there could have been a lightbulb glowing behind the thin shade of her skull. She spoke to him — or, rather, her mouth moved — but her voice was lost in a storm of interference. He rolled on to his side, his eyes still open. His weights glinted in the corner of the room. The carpet looked dark-grey.

He had lied to Lambert, of course. In all sorts of ways. Since first setting eyes on Glade Spencer in the tube station, he’d had countless opportunities to do what had been asked of him; if he’d done nothing, he could only think it was because he was waiting for his own version of the instructions to reveal itself. Almost a week ago, for instance, on Tuesday, he had sat behind her on the top deck of the night bus. It was one-thirty in the morning and she was on her way home from the restaurant where she worked. There had been a moment when she took hold of her hair in both hands and dropped it behind her shoulders. In one gleaming torrent it splashed over the chrome rail that ran along the back of the seat and hung in the air in front of him, just inches from his knees. As the bus swung round a corner, he reached out to steady himself and a few strands brushed the back of his right hand. He had touched her, and she hadn’t even noticed. He had come that close. But still he had done nothing.

On Thursday he had followed her to a party in Covent Garden. From where he was standing, in the doorway of the building opposite, he could hear the music — the bass notes, anyway. He stared up at the open windows, then at the sky beyond. Stars showed like moth-holes in the darkness. Once or twice a half-smoked cigarette came somersaulting down into the street. He stood in that doorway until his knees and hip-bones ached. At last she stepped on to the pavement with two other girls. A kind of damage. She kissed them both and waved, then walked off in the opposite direction, westwards, into Soho. She was wearing a mini-dress. At first Barker thought it was silver, but when he drew closer he realised that it was made from bits of mirror-glass. It reflected a shattered version of everything around her. She waited at a set of traffic-lights and he watched her change from green to red. Later, on Bayswater Road, she stopped in front of a hotel’s neon sign, spinning slowly, drunkenly, in the orange light. She seemed to be admiring the effect. Once, a man shouted at her from the window of his car. In the shadows Barker tensed — but Glade didn’t seem to notice. She had a curiously absent quality, which gave her the appearance of being alone, even when she was standing on a busy street; it should have made his job easier — after all, he only had to take that absence to its logical conclusion — and yet she existed in a place so much her own that he could find no way of approaching her. Though he had touched her, she remained untouchable. Still, if there was any trouble, he was ready to step in. He would be the stranger who just happened to be passing. When she turned to thank him, he’d be gone.

He followed her west, into Notting Hill, where she paused for a long time outside a big white house, then north, through Ladbroke Grove. He followed her, unnoticed, all the way to her front door. It took almost an hour and a half. Afterwards, he realised that he had walked her home. Though he had no children of his own — and never would have, not now — he felt towards her the way he imagined a father might feel, an emotion that was both fierce and clumsy, difficult to name. He seemed to take a kind of pride in her. It was unthinkable that somebody might do her harm.

Yet here he was, with nineteen hours left. He looked at the clock on his bedside table. Yes, nineteen hours. And then the Scotsman would arrive with his blowtorch. And later, when the agony was over, the job would be given to someone else. He slept in snatches, his mind swept by plans that all, inevitably, failed. Finally, at a quarter to six, he reached up and switched on the light. Blinking, he felt his way into the lounge. She would still be asleep, her bright-blonde hair tangled on the pillow.

He lifted weights for twenty minutes. His blood woke up. Through the open window he could hear trucks braking on Crucifix Lane. He showered and dressed. There was no sunrise, no colour in the east, only a gradual lightening of the sky. The absence of strange weather surprised him. He put the kettle on, fried some bacon. Twenty-five-past six. He watched his hands spoon coffee grounds into the chipped enamel pot. It was Tuesday. When he tried to think of Wednesday, he found that he could not imagine it.

At ten to seven he locked the door to his flat and set off down the stairs. All the evidence had been destroyed. He had burned Lambert’s document in a metal basin on the roof outside his kitchen. The cool air would scatter the ashes across the narrow gardens behind the house. A funeral of sorts … Smiling grimly, he stepped out on to the pavement and pulled the door shut after him. In his hand he held a small parcel that was addressed to Harold Higgs. He had scrawled a note to his employer, explaining that he had been forced to leave suddenly, for personal reasons. He enclosed £700, which ought to be enough money to pay for a hip replacement. He told Higgs to forget the NHS, go private; the sooner he got it sorted, the better. Also in the parcel he had enclosed two letters, already addressed. He asked Higgs to send them by registered post. One contained £500 and a two-line note: Charlton — something to help you get over that redhead — Barker. The other, to his mother, had taken him more time. He told her to spend the money he was sending her on something nice. A new TV, maybe. Some furniture. He signed off by saying that he missed her. When he reached the corner of the street, he pushed the package through the slot into the letter-box. He hoped he’d put enough stamps on it; he didn’t want all that money to go astray. He couldn’t wait until the post office opened, though, and he couldn’t risk carrying the package around with him either, in case it fell into the wrong hands.

He walked down Morocco Street, which was a dead end, and crossed the area of wasteground beyond it, then cut through a housing estate and circled round behind Guy’s Hospital. It was an eccentric route to take to the station, but he wanted to make sure he wasn’t being followed. What was about to happen should happen in private, unobserved. He heard a clock strike seven, the notes wobbling in the cool, glassy air.

Sixteen hours.

Waiting in the tube at London Bridge, with rush-hour just beginning, he thought of Glade again, her orange shirt, her long black skirt clinging to her hips. The way she looked when he first saw her.

That first sighting, a coincidence. Dark branches held against the glass roof. Flashed glimpses of her through the windows of a train. And then the distance between them widening as he deliberately let her go …

Before he left the flat that morning, he had called Jill. It was the first contact in more than a year. A woman answered. Jill’s mother. He asked if Jill was up yet.

‘Who is this?’ she said.

‘Barker Dodds.’

‘Oh.’

She had never approved of him, wanting something better for her daughter. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she had told him that Jill was away on holiday, he wouldn’t have blamed her for lying, but instead, after a moment’s hesitation, he heard her put the phone down and call Jill’s name. Through the kitchen window he watched Lambert’s instructions burning. He saw how the flames seemed to taste the air around the edges of the bowl. He must have waited minutes. At last he heard footsteps, faint at first, but growing louder.

‘Barker?’

She sounded just the same. It was strange how the sound of someone’s voice could close a gap. As if the last fifteen months had never happened.

‘How are you, Jill?’

‘OK. Tired.’ She yawned.

‘You working?’

She smiled into the phone. You can hear somebody smile. ‘Same shitty building society …’

He smiled too. She was just saying that. She loved her job.

‘Have they promoted you yet?’

‘Not yet. The end of the year maybe.’

The end of the year. How far away that sounded. As far away as the Dark Ages he had recently been reading about. In fact, in some ways, the Dark Ages seemed closer, less mysterious.

‘Barker?’

‘Yes?’

‘What about you? What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing much.’

In the silence he heard the scratch of the flint on a cheap lighter as she lit a cigarette, the faint kiss of her lips separating from the filter as she inhaled. She had always liked to smoke when she was on the phone.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to ring you up.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Well, I should be going.’

‘Will you ring again?’ She seemed to be saying she would like it if he rang but, at the same time, she didn’t want to pressurise him into anything. Also, perhaps, for her own sake, she couldn’t risk putting it that bluntly.

‘I don’t know,’ was the best that he could manage.

Silence fell between them once again. He could hear her breathing out, almost the same sound as when you blow into the red part of a fire to get it going.

‘You never came for me,’ she murmured. ‘I thought you’d come for me.’

He didn’t speak for several seconds. He couldn’t.

‘Barker? Are you there?’

‘I think about you, Jill,’ he said at last, then he hung up.

She couldn’t phone him back, of course; she didn’t know the number. She probably didn’t even know that he had moved to London — and by the time she found out, he’d be gone.

The tube hurtled into the station, startling him. Just for a moment he had forgotten where he was.

The Northern Line. A pungent smell of cinders and scorched rubber, a smell of wires short-circuiting …

His phone-call to Jill — he wasn’t sure it had been such a good idea. That hesitation in her voice, that generosity. Once again, he had come away with the sense that it had all been his own doing: some inability, some lack, some failing on his part that he could not explain, not even to himself. He glared at the people sitting opposite, as if he might shift some portion of the blame to them. A thin man in a pinstripe suit stood up suddenly and moved to the far end of the carriage. Now the seat was empty, Barker could see himself reflected in the dark glass of the window, his forehead stretched and bulbous, the sockets of his eyes filled to the brim with shadow. It was a distortion, but it didn’t seem untrue.

He changed trains at Elephant & Castle. Caught in a surge of commuters, he found himself wedged into the corner of a carriage with his head turned sideways against the roof. He was staring at a man’s ear from a distance of about six inches — a fierce bristling of ginger hairs, the lobe like something botched, vaguely thalidomide. The man seemed to be trying to work one hand down the side of his body, but the carriage was so crowded that he was having difficulty even moving his arm. At last he succeeded, and his hand appeared in the pocket of air below his chin. The hand opened cautiously, revealing two Maltesers. They rolled across his palm, first one way, then the other, reminding Barker of one of those infuriating games where you have to try and fit small silver balls into even smaller holes and keep them there. Just before Charing Cross the man lowered his head and, reaching out with his lips, drew the Maltesers deftly into his mouth. Then he turned and pushed towards the doors.

Four stops later, Barker changed to the Hammersmith & City line. The train emptied a little. At that time of day most people who had jobs were travelling into the centre. He should have been on the way to work himself, of course, but the idea only occurred to him remotely, like the light issuing from a distant star. He hadn’t thought of calling the shop, for instance, even though he was aware that Higgs might feel let down. It would have been too much of a distraction. And besides, his letter would arrive soon enough. In the meantime, he was overtaken by a kind of confidence, a surprising absence of responsibility. He had the feeling he was flying on automatic pilot. As obstacles presented themselves, so adjustments would be made. He wouldn’t even really be involved.

Which was just as well, perhaps. Though he had a plan now, he had no idea where it had come from or whether it was going to work. Plans depend on your ability to predict the unpredictable. You have to prepare the ground, allow for every eventuality. He had notes on Glade Spencer, and he had watched her, followed her — but how much did he really know? It seemed quite possible that he had underestimated the difficulty of the task that lay before him. Maybe he was even living in a dreamworld. At the very least, he could expect a few moments of violence. He would have to instil a sense of fear. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. And then? Should he tell her the truth? If he did, how would she react? From that point onwards he would be entering the unknown.

Standing outside the tube station at Latimer Road, he checked his watch. Just under fourteen hours left. He looked around. A black cat crouched beneath a parked car, its eyes as bright and flat as sequins. A woman in a shell-suit wheeled an empty pushchair out of a paper shop. There was the smell of drains. A sudden irritation ran through him: one of his hands flew upwards, skimming his forehead, as if to brush away a fly.

He moved north, covering the distance between the station and her house as quickly as he could. At eight-thirty-five he was turning the corner into her street. That was good. One girl would already have left for work, the other would just be waking up. Above his head a plane moved with slow, hydraulic force towards the airport fifteen miles to the west. The grey sky crackled in its wake. This was it. He walked up to the front door and pressed the bell. After a moment he heard footsteps on the stairs. Through the frosted glass he watched her float towards him, her identity disguised, scrambled, reduced to a shifting pattern of abstract shapes and colours.

There was no security chain in place, no suspicious eye appearing in the gap. Instead, the door swung open, drawing air into the house, and there she was, Glade Spencer, standing right in front of him. When she saw him, she smiled.

‘I thought it was you,’ she said.

He stood on the doorstep, clumsy now, and utterly bewildered. The strangest sensation. He felt as if he was wearing what old-fashioned deep-sea divers used to wear — a helmet like a goldfish bowl, a pair of lead-soled boots.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

She closed the door behind him and then led him up a flight of stairs. He followed her, his eyes fixed on her bare feet, the frayed hem of her dressing-gown. Halfway up, she stopped and looked at him, over her shoulder. ‘You know, you look completely different from what I imagined.’ She noticed the confusion on his face and laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be so rude.’

She showed him along a narrow corridor and into the front room. He recognised the bay window, the red curtains. This was her room. He couldn’t resist moving towards the window. He stared past the curtains and down into the street. He had watched the house for so many hours that he felt he must have left an impression on the air. He could see his own ghost standing on the paving-stones below. That puzzled look, which he knew from the mirror. A man who had been placed in an impossible position. A man with the odds stacked against him. Something seemed to have changed since then, just in the last few minutes, though he couldn’t have put his finger on what it was.

He stepped back into the middle of the room and looked around. A tiled fireplace, its grate heaped with pale ashes. The double bed unmade. He could see the shape of her head preserved on the top pillow, an oval indentation in the cotton. At last his eyes reached hers. She was still smiling. He realised he hadn’t spoken to her yet. Words seemed to have deserted him.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you’ve got theories …’

He had no idea what she meant by that.

She took a step forwards and her voice softened, as if he was slow in the head, or fragile. ‘Perhaps this is the wrong place to do it,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should do it somewhere else.’

She seemed to know exactly what he had in mind. All he had to do was agree with her. Could it really be that simple?

‘Well?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

Super Saver

‘I think you’re right,’ Barker said. It was so long since he had spoken that he had to clear his throat. ‘I think we should do it somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s a long way.’

‘How will we get there?’

‘By train.’

None of this disturbed her in the slightest. If anything, she appeared pleased. ‘Do I need to take anything with me?’

‘I don’t know. A jacket, maybe.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Yes.’

The ease of the exchange unnerved him. She didn’t seem to have any doubts, either about his identity or his intentions. Who did she think he was? This was a question he found himself trapped into not asking — but he thought that if he listened carefully enough, then perhaps she would supply him with the answer. He had so many questions, though, even at the most basic level. He wanted to ask about her hair. Why had she dyed it? And why orange, of all colours? He couldn’t risk that either. It would imply that he had seen her before, that he had some prior knowledge of her and, judging by what she’d already told him, this was the first time they had met.

All of a sudden, her hand lifted to her mouth. ‘The kettle. I forgot.’ She ran out of the room. Before he could follow her, she ran back in again. ‘Would you like some tea?’

He glanced at his watch. Twenty-past nine. Almost half an hour had passed since she opened the front door and he walked in. Time was beginning to speed up. He saw clock-hands spinning, a calendar shedding its pages like leaves in a gale.

‘Is there time?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’s time.’

He stood by the kitchen window while she rinsed two cups under the tap. He couldn’t help noticing the sticky patches on the table, the dust and rubbish on the floor. It surprised him that she lived in such squalor. He watched her open a box of tea-bags. She used one in each cup, dropping them in the sink when they had yielded their flavour.

At one point she turned to him, steam from the kettle rising past her face. ‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said. ‘Charlie was really worried about you.’

Charlie? He managed a smile. He still had no idea who he was supposed to be, but he thought that if he played along with her, then it would make the whole thing easier — easier than he could possibly have imagined. When she spoke to him, he held his tongue and tried to look as though she was only telling him what he already knew.

She stood in front of her wardrobe, one hand on her hip, the other covering one corner of her mouth. The dull tingle of hangers on the rail, the sprawl of discarded clothes across her bed. She couldn’t decide what to wear. She was even slower than Jill, who often used to take an hour to dress if they were going out, and perhaps because of this odd, skewed sense of familiarity, a feeling of nostalgia, really, he didn’t try to hurry her. Instead, he sat on a chair with his back to the window and sipped his tea, which had long since cooled. He felt the sun reach into the room and touch his shoulder. Gradually, he found himself relaxing. So much so, in fact, that when she finally appeared in a black skirt and a denim jacket and told him she was ready, it caught him unawares and even, for a few brief moments, disappointed him.

Yes, it was easy in the flat, and walking up the road, that was easy too, but as they entered the tube station, a change came over her. She began to mutter under her breath, and her words, when he could hear them, made no sense to him. On the platform he tried to talk to her, to calm her, but she seemed to be listening to something else. There was a buzzing in her ears, no, a fizzing, which she didn’t like at all. Further down the platform a guard’s head turned slowly in their direction, expressionless but inquisitive. Barker began to wish he’d thought of a taxi. What they needed now was to be hidden from the world, invisible.

At Baker Street a middle-aged woman stepped into their carriage. She had a page-boy haircut, which heightened the bluntness of her features. Barker sensed trouble coming the moment he saw her. Some people, you just know. He watched her sit down opposite. Watched her eyes. How they drifted idly towards the two of them, then tightened into focus. She wasn’t frightened of his size or his tattoos or the scar on the bridge of his nose. In fact, she hardly seemed to notice. She just leaned over, concerned, and said, ‘Is something wrong?’

Glade stared into the woman’s face, then she began to shake her head. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t hear you.’

The woman looked across at Barker. ‘Is she ill?’

‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just leave us alone.’

‘Are you sure?’ The woman studied Glade again. ‘She looks as if she needs some help to me.’

Barker lifted his eyes towards the roof. No corners, just curving metal. Cream-coloured. Shiny. In a loud voice, he said, ‘Maybe you’d like to mind your own fucking business, all right?’

Several people shifted in their seats, but he knew they wouldn’t interfere. People don’t, in England.

The woman sat back, her eyes fixed on some imaginary horizon, her lips bloodless, pinched. Barker nodded to himself. That was more like it. If only he’d been paid to get rid of her. Come to think of it, he probably would have done the job for nothing.

At last they arrived at King’s Cross. He took Glade by the arm. ‘Our stop,’ he told her.

She looked at him, narrowing her eyes, and then she nodded. It was a habit of hers, making him wonder if she might be short-sighted.

As they left the carriage, Barker looked round, saw the woman watching them through the window. She would remember the encounter. She’d be able to say, ‘You know, I thought there was something strange about them.’ Only it would be too late by then. Yes, when she heard the news, she would remember. And then she’d probably blame herself. If only she had done something. There’d be guilt, huge guilt. But after what she’d put him through during the last ten minutes, Barker couldn’t pretend that he was sorry.

Upstairs, in the station, he asked for two singles to Hull. The man at the ticket counter told him it would be cheaper to buy returns. Super Savers, he called them.

‘But I’m not sure when we’re coming back,’ Barker said.

‘Still cheaper. Even if you never come back.’ The man watched Barker patiently, waiting for him to understand.

‘Super Saver,’ Glade murmured at his shoulder. ‘I like the sound of that.’

Barker looked down at her. She nodded, then drifted away from him, drawing glances from the people standing in the queue. Her height, her slenderness. Her bright-orange hair. He turned back to the man behind the counter.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Two Super Savers.’

The tickets in his hand, he crossed the station concourse, stopping under the departures board. The train to Hull didn’t leave for another three-quarters of an hour. With Glade behaving the way she was, he thought it might be wise to delay boarding until the last minute. In the station, with all its freaks and misfits, all its strays, a girl muttering would be less likely to stand out.

Then Glade was pulling on his sleeve. ‘Have you got any money?’

‘Yes, I’ve got money,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Can I have some?’

‘What for?’

‘I’d like something to drink.’

‘I’ll buy you something.’

She looked at him knowingly, half-smiling, as if he was trying to trick her and she had seen through it. ‘I’d better come too,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’ She led him into the newsagent’s and down to the back where the soft drinks were kept. He watched her scan the cooler, her eyes jumping from one row of cans to the next.

‘That,’ she said, pointing.

‘Kwench!?’ He remembered noticing the same bright-orange cans lying on the floor in her kitchen.

‘Six of them,’ she said.

‘Six?’ He stared at her, over his shoulder.

She nodded. ‘I’m thirsty.’

He was looking into her face, which had an earnestness, a seriousness, that he had seen in children, and he realised, in that moment, that he would find it impossible to deny her anything.

‘Six,’ she repeated. In case he hadn’t heard her. In case he had forgotten.

He reached into the cooler, took out six cans of Kwench! and carried them up to the till.

‘I hope that’ll be enough.’ She was staring anxiously at the cans. She seemed to be making some kind of calculation.

‘You drink all these,’ he said, ‘we’ll get you some more.’

The cashier smiled at Glade indulgently. ‘Maybe you should buy the company.’

‘Sorry?’ Barker said.

The cashier turned to him. ‘You know, like in the advert.’

Barker had no idea what she was talking about.

Taking his change, he steered Glade out of the shop. The murmuring of voices, the distant drone of a floor-polisher. For one disconcerting moment he felt that he could actually see the sounds mingling in the air above his head like birds. Glade stopped and slid one hand into the plastic bag that he had given her to carry. She took out a can of Kwench! and opened it, then stood still, drinking fast. Her eyes glazed over, her body strangely disconnected, in suspension. It was as if swallowing the fizzy orange liquid required every ounce of concentration she could muster.

With twenty minutes still to go, he led her through the gate and out along the platform. They walked side by side, in no great hurry. He watched other passengers limp past with heavy cases, one shoulder higher than the other. Towards the front of the train he found an empty carriage. They sat at the far end, by the automatic door. There was no one opposite. Though Glade had quietened down since he had bought her those soft drinks, he had no way of knowing what she might do next. She had already started on her second can. She was drinking more slowly now and looking out of the window.

‘Is this Paddington?’ she asked.

‘No, it’s King’s Cross.’

‘Couldn’t we go from Paddington?’

‘The place we’re going to,’ he told her, ‘you can’t go from Paddington.’

She stared out into the draughty, half-lit spaces of the station. One of her hands rested on the table, holding her new can of Kwench!. The other rose into the air from time to time and traced the outline of her right ear, a gesture he remembered from the day that he first saw her.

‘There used to be a mountain in Paddington,’ she said after a while. ‘I don’t know whether you ever noticed it …’

He shook his head.

‘It’s another story you could have investigated,’ she said. ‘Another mystery …’ She sighed.

He looked across at her, her face turned to the window, her eyes staring into space and, once again, he wondered what she could possibly have done to warrant the attentions of a person like Lambert. He saw Lambert sitting in that restaurant near Marble Arch, his hands folded on the pale-pink tablecloth, the spotlit shrubbery unnaturally green behind his head, and suddenly he felt grateful to have been chosen. Yes, chosen. In a curious way, it was a blessing — a relief. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been somebody else, and he had known a few of them. They weren’t people who should be allowed anywhere near her. His job, as he now saw it, was to keep them away. For good. There was a sense, then, in which you could say that he was protecting her. He glanced at his watch. In less than eleven hours Lambert would be arriving in Bermondsey with a Scotsman and a video camera. Barker leaned back in his seat. He’d be far away by then. They both would.

Almost imperceptibly, the train began to glide out of the station. Thin sunlight filtered into the carriage. They passed signal boxes that were shedding paint, the flakes of white lying among the weeds and stones like brittle petals. They passed thickly braided electric cables, a workman with a spade balanced on his shoulder, a high brick wall the colour of a copper beech. Houses were visible against the sky. Their cream façades, their roofs of shiny, dark-grey tile. Parts of London he had never known, and couldn’t name …

Glade shifted in her seat, her face close to the window, one hand closed in a fist against her cheek. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘No mountains here.’ She lifted the can to her lips and drank. She hardly seemed to taste the stuff as it went down. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was a long time ago.’

The train picked up speed, beat out a rhythm.

It was a long time ago. Empty cider bottles lined up along the skirting-board, unfurnished rooms, the music turned up loud. Ray had driven Barker to a house in Saltash. Over the Tamar Bridge, with alternating bars of light and shadow moving through the car. He could still see Ray in his black chinos and his red satin shirt with the ruffles down the front.

‘What kind of party is it? Fancy dress?’

Ray stared at him. ‘Why?’

‘Because you look like a Spanish waiter, Ray, that’s why.’

‘One of these days,’ Ray said, ‘you’re going to push me too far.’

Barker shrugged and lit a cigarette.

As a rule he didn’t go to parties — they were too much like being at work — and when he walked in through the front door that night and saw two girls in ra-ra skirts trying to tear each other’s hair out by the roots, he almost turned around and left.

But Ray wouldn’t let him. ‘Give it five minutes, all right?’

‘What,’ Barker said, ‘the fight?’

He found a beer and swallowed half of it, then climbed the stairs. On the first floor, outside the toilet, he ran into a DJ he knew. The DJ had some speed on him. Did Barker want a line? No, Barker didn’t.

‘Fries your brain,’ he said.

The DJ put his index fingers to his head and made a sound with b’s and z’s in it, then grinned and walked away.

Ten minutes later Barker looked through a half-open door and saw a woman dancing. It was dark in the room, one cheap lamp in the corner, forty-watt bulb, and some glow from the street, no curtains on the windows, there were never any curtains. He could still remember the song that was playing, an old Temptations number, vintage Temptations, before Eddie McKendrick left the group. The woman was dancing with a small man who swayed backwards and forwards like one of those bottom-heavy toys — it doesn’t matter how many times you push them over, or how hard, they always right themselves. Barker waited until she was facing him, then he called out to her.

‘Over here a moment.’

The music had changed by now, it was Smokey Robinson, and though she was still dancing, she was looking across at him, trying to understand what he was saying.

He waved at her. ‘Over here.’

She bent down, put her mouth beside the short man’s ear, then she stepped away from him and walked over, her eyes lowered. She had looked good from a distance. She looked even better close-up, black hair to her shoulders, a wide mouth, her body ungainly and voluptuous. He thought he had seen her before — though he wasn’t about to use a tired line like that. Yes, on Herbert Street. She had been climbing out of a car parked halfway up the hill. There was something about her awkwardness that had excited him. In the bright sunshine, her black dress had looked almost shabby, as if it had been washed too many times, and the whiteness of her legs showed through her thin black tights. He put his drink down, glanced over her shoulder.

‘That bloke you’re dancing with,’ he said.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s too short.’

She wasn’t sure what to think, whether to laugh or be insulted; her face remained perfectly balanced between the two possibilities, like a cat walking along the top of a fence.

‘He’s not your husband, is he?’

‘I’m not married.’

‘Are you going out with him?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s just a friend.’

He paused for a moment, but then he saw that she was waiting for him to say something else.

‘You shouldn’t be dancing with a short bloke like that,’ he said, ‘not someone as good-looking as you. It doesn’t look right …’ She was keeping a straight face, as if he was giving her advice, but they both knew it was just talk. ‘I work in clubs,’ he went on. ‘I see people dancing all the time. I know what looks right.’

One song finished, another began. She glanced at her friend, who was standing by the window with a drink, then, after a while, her eyes returned to Barker again, a smile below the surface, shining, like treasure seen through water.

‘You’re not short, though,’ she said, ‘are you?’

Three weeks later she moved in with him. She worked in the day, at the local building society, and he worked on Union Street, six nights a week, so they didn’t see as much of each other as they would have liked. She would come home at six in the evening, half an hour before he had to leave. The moment she walked in, he would start undressing her — the crisp white blouse with the name-badge pinned to it, the knee-length sky-blue skirt. They would have sex just inside the front door, on a bed of autumn leaflets and junk mail. That same year she got pregnant. She wanted an abortion, though. She was only twenty-two, and she’d just got the first decent job of her life. She didn’t want to give it up, not yet. And, after all, she said, they weren’t exactly pressed for time, were they? He told her that he would find it hard to forget about the child — a remark that now seemed ominous, prophetic — but she wouldn’t change her mind and in the end, because he loved her, he agreed.

He peered through the smeared window of the train. Fields flew past. Then a row of houses. Then more fields.

He should never have agreed. No, never. If there had been a child, she wouldn’t have been able to leave so easily. If there had been a child, he wouldn’t have been able to let her go.

‘I don’t feel very well.’

It was Glade who had spoken. Her skin looked chilled and damp, as though a fever had taken hold of her. Cans of Kwench! rolled stupidly across the table, a hollow tinny sound each time they collided. He counted six of them, all empty.

‘You drank the lot?’

She nodded miserably. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

He took her through the automatic door and into the gap between the two carriages. He had to support her, otherwise she would have fallen. He could feel her rib-cage under her T-shirt; the curve of her right breast touched the back of his wrist through the thin fabric. This wasn’t something he could think about. He pushed her into a vacant toilet and closed the door behind her.

Standing by the window, he could hear her vomiting. It sounded like water being emptied out of a bucket. He watched the landscape rushing by with nothing in his mind. At last the door opened and she appeared, her lips a pale mauve, her orange hair matted, sticking to her forehead.

‘Feel better?’

‘A bit.’

He looked past her, into the toilet. She hadn’t flushed it. The stainless-steel bowl was full of frothy orange liquid. It looked no different to the way it would have looked if she’d just poured it out of a can. He stepped past her, pressed the flush button with his foot. The liquid vanished with a vicious roar.

Back in her seat, she started muttering again.

‘Glade?’

Her eyes flicked sideways, but she didn’t stop. The swaying of the train, the rolling of the cans.

‘Glade!’ He reached through the debris and gripped her by the wrist. She stared at his hand with its big chipped nails and its misshapen knuckles, then her eyes shifted to his forearm, which was tattooed with swords and flags and coiled snakes. At last she stared levelly into his eyes.

‘Look out of the window,’ he said.

She did as she was told.

‘What can you see?’

‘I don’t know,’ she murmured, narrowing her eyes. ‘Everything’s kind of … kind of orange …’

‘There’s nothing orange out there.’ He tightened his grip on her wrist. ‘Are you listening to me? There’s no orange there at all.’

‘No?’

‘There’s fields. Green fields.’

‘Fields.’ Her bottom lip quivered.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Despairing, he pushed one hand savagely into his hair. What did he think he was doing? This linking of himself with her, it was, just a fantasy, wishful thinking, as bright and hollow as the cans that were still rolling this way and that across the table.

‘I’m trying,’ she said. ‘I really am.’

He leaned forwards, thought for a while.

‘Where the fields are,’ he said, ‘there used to be trees. Can you imagine that?’

She turned to the window, her eyes wide, the lashes dark and wet.

‘That’s how it was,’ he said, ‘all trees. Oak, ash, thorn —’

‘When was that?’

‘Hundreds of years ago. The time of the Romans.’ He looked out. ‘One book I read, it said a squirrel could travel from one end of the country to the other without touching the ground once.’

‘Really?’

‘That’s how it was. Back then.’

‘It must have been nice.’

He turned to her again, and saw that she was crying.

‘Sometimes I see things,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if they’re there or not. Sometimes there are sounds. I don’t know why.’ The tears spilled down her face in fast, thin lines. ‘It’s like the drinks.’ With one trembling hand, she reached for an empty can. ‘I don’t want to drink it, I really don’t. It makes me ill.’

She was crying harder now. He sat opposite her, his hands resting on the table. He didn’t think he could touch her again. His wrist still remembered the weight of her breast. He could feel the place without even looking at it. Like a burn.

‘Glade,’ he said quietly, uselessly.

The crying shook her whole body.

‘Is everything all right?’

A conductor had appeared at Barker’s elbow. He was a man in his sixties, with veins glowing in his nose like tiny purple filaments. Barker saw that he was different to the woman on the tube. He wasn’t the interfering kind. He only wanted to know if he could help.

‘She’s just upset,’ Barker said. ‘She’ll be all right in a minute.’

‘In that case, perhaps I could see your tickets …’

The old man sounded tentative, almost apologetic, and Barker thought he knew why. For most of his life Barker had looked like someone who was travelling without a ticket. And if you asked him for it, he would swear at you. Or threaten you. Or maybe he’d take out a Stanley knife, start slashing seats. He handed the two Super Savers to the old man, who punched holes in them and handed them back.

‘Change at Doncaster,’ the old man said and, touching the peak of his hat, he moved on down the train.

When Barker stepped on to the platform at Hull two hours later, he thought he could smell the North Sea, a mixture of rotting kelp, crab claws, and discharge from the trawlers. A man in a donkey jacket was sweeping the floor of the station, his broom-strokes slow and regular, as if he was trying to hypnotise himself. Two porters stood outside an empty waiting-room, their uniforms ill-fitting, and shiny at the cuffs and elbows. A group of teenagers leaned against the soft-drinks machine, one chewing his thumbnail, another sucking hard on the last half-inch of a cigarette.

Barker took Glade by the arm and led her through the barrier and out towards the exit, following a sign that said TAXIS. As they passed a bank of pay-phones, Glade hung back.

‘I need to make a call,’ she said.

‘Not now,’ Barker said.

She looked at her watch. ‘I should ring the restaurant and tell them I’m not coming in. I should ring the hospital as well …’

‘What hospital?’

‘My father. He’s in hospital.’

Barker shook his head. ‘We haven’t got time.’

‘It won’t take long. I know what they’re going to say, anyway —’

‘So why bother?’ He hauled on her arm, but she was still resisting.

‘I’d like to talk to Charlie, then.’

‘Who’s Charlie?’

‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of yours.’

Barker hesitated, but only for a second. ‘I told you. There’s no time.’ He hauled on her arm again. ‘Maybe later,’ he said, just to keep her quiet.

They had to wait in a queue for a taxi. The air in Hull was damp and sticky, and Barker felt a prickle of irritation. Every few seconds Glade glanced over her shoulder at the row of phones.

‘There would have been time,’ she murmured.

‘Those phones don’t take money,’ he said. ‘You need a card.’

She looked at him suspiciously.

‘Was that true,’ she said, ‘all that about the squirrels?’

She waited until a taxi had pulled up to the kerb, then she told him she was hungry. She had eaten nothing all day, she said, only two gherkins and a piece of chocolate. He looked at her hard to see if she was lying and decided she wasn’t. Actually, now he thought about it, it wasn’t such a bad idea. He could eat something himself — and certainly he could use a couple of beers. Also, if he went along with her in this, then maybe she’d forget about the phone.

In the taxi he leaned forwards and asked the driver to take them to a restaurant, somewhere quiet.

‘Everything’s quiet this time of day,’ the driver said.

Ten minutes later they stopped outside a restaurant that had a gloomy fudge-brown glass façade. The something Tandoori. It was cheap, the driver said, but it was good. Or so he’d heard.

Six-thirty was striking as they walked in. A dozen empty tables, their white cloths spotless, undisturbed. Barker stood inside the doorway, hesitating. He could hear the hum of the air-conditioning, the jaunty bubble of the fish-tank on the bar. Suddenly, from nowhere, an Indian man sprang eagerly towards him, eyes gleaming, and, just for a moment, Barker felt the urge to defend himself, to sweep the Indian aside with one effortless, poetic movement of his arm. In his mind he saw the man fly backwards through the air, land silently among the glittering cutlery and artificial flowers. Ray would have been proud.

‘Anywhere,’ Barker said, ‘right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He ushered Glade towards a table in the corner. As soon as she was sitting down she opened her menu, her lips moving as she read through the list of dishes, her face stained green and purple by the coloured spotlights set into the ceiling. A waiter asked them what they’d like to drink. Barker ordered a pint of lager. Glade wanted Kwench! but the waiter didn’t have any. She had to settle for water.

‘Don’t you ever drink?’ Barker asked her.

She thought about the question for a moment. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘If I’m happy.’

Barker looked down at the tablecloth. It seemed he either knew too much or too little. Their conversation always faltered.

The waiter appeared with a pad and took their orders.

‘This is a nice place,’ Glade said, smiling up at him.

The waiter bowed.

She turned to Barker. ‘Thanks for bringing me.’

He could think of nothing to say. Instead, he watched the ugly, melancholy fish drift through the weeds inside their tank. A woman’s voice wailed from a speaker above his head. He supposed they called that singing. When he looked at Glade again, she had lifted the silk flower out of its cheap metal vase and was examining the petals.

‘I thought you were going to ask me questions,’ she said.

He tried to keep his face expressionless.

‘There must be things you want to know.’

‘Things I want to know,’ he repeated thoughtfully, and nodded.

She looked at him with a faint smile. ‘I suppose you don’t want to hurry it,’ she said. ‘You’ve probably got your own methods.’ She lowered her eyes, gazed at the flower she was holding. ‘Do you remember things in your head,’ she said, raising her eyes to his again, ‘or do you take notes?’

‘In my head,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I haven’t seen you writing anything.’ She paused. ‘Unless you do it behind my back …’ and her smile widened, becoming mischievous, almost seductive. When she looked at him like that, he had to empty his mind of everything except the plan.

Their food came. Though she had told him she was hungry, she ate very little. She picked at her curry, searching through it with her fork, as if she was looking for something she had lost. When they had both finished, Barker asked the waiter to order a taxi. In less than five minutes a white car was pulling up outside. Barker paid the bill, then followed Glade out on to the pavement. He opened the door for her and watched her climb into the back. Once he was sitting beside her, he gave the driver the name of a pub.

‘That’s in Hessle, isn’t it,’ the driver said, ‘out near the bridge?’

Barker nodded. ‘I think that’s the one.’

He glanced at Glade, but she didn’t seem to be listening. She sat quietly beside him, examining her hands as the lights passed over them. For the first time he noticed that she wore no jewellery, not even a ring, and thought it odd, a girl who looked like her.

They drove through the city centre — bleak, dark streets that reminded him of his entire life. He saw chip shops, night-clubs. He saw girls standing in a chilly cluster outside a pub. Their snow-washed jeans, their blow-dried hair. He saw the spaces between streetlamps, between buildings, the places where fights started. He thought of the sounds that fists and bottles make. A police car glided by, white with an orange stripe along the side, like something from the fish-tank in that restaurant.

Then all the buildings disappeared, just strips of scrub grass at the edge of the road, hedges looming dimly. In the distance, high in the darkness, he could see a string of orange lights that signalled the presence of a bypass or a motorway …

They stopped in a yard that was deserted except for a few cars parked in a row against a low brick wall. Barker climbed out first, Glade waiting on the gravel while he paid. She was clutching her elbows and shivering a little. He could hear voices and laughter in the pub behind her. He could have done with another drink, but he just couldn’t risk it. No, they’d been to all the public places they were going to. His heart seemed to lurch against his ribs. He wetted his lips.

‘So we’re not going to the pub?’ Glade said.

He turned and stared at her. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find out she could read his mind. She had the kind of eyes psychics have. She had the same strangely vacant manner. Maybe that was why she’d been so calm when she saw him standing on the doorstep. Maybe she had seen him coming.

But suddenly she altered her approach. ‘I thought you told the driver we were going to the pub.’

‘And I thought you couldn’t hear anything,’ he said. ‘All that hissing in your ears.’

‘Fizzing.’ She scraped at the gravel with the edge of her boot. ‘It comes and goes.’

‘That’s convenient.’

‘So we’re not having a drink?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He let his breath out fast in sheer exasperation and walked away from her, fists clenched. He could feel the veins pulsing on the backs of his hands. He let his head drop back, stared up into the sky. There was nothing there. No moon, no stars. No God. Just air, September air. The slightly bitter smell of leaves.

He faced the girl again.

‘Have you taken a look at yourself?’ he said.

Her eyes widened. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe we could go,’ he said. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t be a problem, if you weren’t acting so fucking mad.’

‘I’m not mad.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Ask Charlie.’

Charlie again.

‘You know Charlie,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of yours. He sent you.’ She looked over towards the pub. ‘Maybe they’ve got a phone in there. Maybe it takes coins.’

Thinking she might be mocking him, he felt a sudden anger flash through him. Like lightning, it lit up the dark places for a moment. He didn’t like what he saw. Slowly he walked back to where she stood. She didn’t flinch. Staring down into her face, he could find no trace of guile or deception. No trace of fear either. It didn’t mean she wasn’t guilty, of course. Perhaps it simply hadn’t crossed her mind that he could hurt her.

He took a step backwards and pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘We’re not going to the pub,’ he said, ‘and that’s the end of it.’

‘But I’m thirsty —’

‘So you want me to buy you six more cans and watch you throwing up again. Is that it?’

She was looking at the ground. The wind moved her hair against her cheek; in the darkness of the car-park it seemed to have regained its natural colour.

‘I am thirsty, though,’ she said in a quiet voice.

He took her firmly by the arm and led her away from the pub. This time she didn’t resist.

‘You’re supposed to be helping me,’ she said.

He chose not to speak. Though he wasn’t thirsty, his throat felt dry.

‘All these things I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘you’re supposed to be explaining them to me …’

She was staring straight ahead, her face pale and glowing.

‘And afterwards,’ she said, ‘everything will make sense. Everything will be all right.’ She turned to look at him. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

He had to stop listening to her.

They walked along an unlit road until they reached a dual carriageway. Streetlamps stretched away in a long, lazy curve. The tall grey poles had stooping necks like creatures from another world, the slightly oval lights arranged in pairs like eyes. An unearthly landscape. And in the distance, above the trees, he could see some red lights, six in all. He felt the skin tighten at the back of his neck.

The bridge.

Glade was muttering again, words that had no meaning for him. He asked her how she felt. She didn’t answer. He hadn’t really expected her to. There was a sense in which they were both now talking to themselves. He wondered if this hadn’t been true of them all along.

You never came for me. I thought you’d come.

His mind drifted back to Jill, as if she was its natural resting-place. She had always doubted him, feeling she loved him more than he loved her. He remembered one of the first times they slept together and how she had touched the tattoo on his chest, lightly, with just her fingertips. She must have meant a lot to you. From his point of view, the tattoo looked like a number — 317537 — and he thought there was something fitting about that: his feelings for Leslie had, for a while, at least, imprisoned him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing in those days. Had one too many drinks, got a tattoo.’ He shook his head. Jill lay back against the pillows. If he had said yes, she would have been upset. Saying no, though, that upset her too, of course. He had married Leslie and now, a few years later, she meant nothing. He had shown Jill a flaw in his character — a lack of constancy, almost a fickleness; he had shown her what he was incapable of. And anyway, she didn’t believe him. There are certain women who always think they’re less than the woman who came before, and you can’t tell them any different. It’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or anorexia.

The day Jill was taken into the clinic for her abortion, Barker had walked along the promenade that looks out over Plymouth Sound. The sea lay below him, sluggish, pale-green. The sky was heaped with clouds the colour of charcoal and lead. It had rained earlier and, once, just for a few seconds, a shaft of sunlight reached from beneath the clouds and turned the wet path into a sheet of gleaming metal. Looking westwards, Barker was almost blinded. Down on the seafront he noticed a car parked at an angle to the pavement. Two teenage boys sat inside, sharing a cigarette. Music thudded from the open window. Closer to him, on the promenade, a man stood beside a wooden bench, a pair of binoculars dangling on a leather strap around his neck. Then the clouds covered the sun again and the promenade was cold and windswept suddenly and Barker was alone. An old man with binoculars and him — and that was it. He remembered the feeling of walking, his feet on the path, his breath snatched by the wind, but he couldn’t remember a single thing that he had thought. Perhaps he had thought nothing.

A car flashed by, a rush of air.

A girl beside him, murmuring.

‘Is that where we’re going?’ she asked.

The two-pronged tower that stood at the north end of the bridge rose out of the surrounding darkness like the horns of some huge animal, the red lights glinting, jewels embedded in the bone.

Barker nodded. ‘Yes.’

He realised that if they approached the bridge by the main road they would have to pass a manned toll-booth. Thinking it might be wiser to remain unseen, he led Glade down a curving cycle-path on to a smaller, two-lane road. They walked beneath a flyover, their footsteps echoing off the walls.

Before too long they reached a notice that said HUMBER BRIDGE COUNTRY PARK. Barker stood still, looked around. Two or three lorries, but no sign of any drivers. The wind had risen. The trees that had been planted to divide one section of the car-park from another were being thrown about in the wild air above his head, their leaves tinted yellow by the strange, dim streetlights.

They both saw the phone-box at the same time. Glade turned to him, her lips parted, her fingers lifting towards her chin. What harm could it do, he thought, now they were almost there?

‘OK,’ he said.

Inside the phone-box he gave her a handful of loose change. She dialled the number, then stared into the darkness, biting her lip. He was standing so close to her that he could smell her hair.

When the hospital answered she asked for Ward 15. Barker only heard one half of the conversation that followed: ‘How is he?’ and ‘Really? On Thursday?’ and ‘Give him my love.’ It seemed that her father was asleep, and couldn’t speak to her. While Barker waited for her to finish, he read the small framed notice above the phone. Instructions, warnings. Codes. You could call The Falklands from this lonely car-park. You could call Zaire.

‘So how is he?’ Barker asked when she had replaced the receiver.

‘He’s comfortable.’ She frowned. ‘They always say that.’

‘Anybody else you want to ring?’

She shook her head.

Outside again, they began to walk. In the absence of any cars, the fat white arrows painted on the ground looked pompous, absurd, but also faintly sinister. Behind his back, trees swirled and rustled in the wind.

‘You could have called your boyfriend,’ he said after a while.

‘I haven’t got one,’ she said, ‘not any more.’

‘Is that why you don’t wear any rings?’

‘That’s not why. And anyway, he didn’t give me any rings. He didn’t give me any jewellery at all.’ She spoke with a kind of wonder, as if she had only just realised.

‘What did he give you?’ Barker asked.

‘Tickets.’

‘Tickets?’

‘Plane tickets.’

Barker nodded, remembering. ‘To New Orleans.’

‘Once.’ Her face floated towards him through the grimy yellow light, floated somewhere below his shoulder, and she took hold of his elbow. ‘How did you know?’

It was something he couldn’t possibly have known, of course, but looking into her face, he saw that she wasn’t disconcerted, not in the slightest. Not suspicious either. Only curious. She was waiting for his answer, whatever it might be. He had the feeling that she would accept almost anything he said. Because of who he was.

‘Someone must have told me,’ he said.

She smiled, as if this was exactly the kind of answer she had expected, then she nodded and walked on.

They passed the Tourist Information Office, which was closed. Across the tarmac stood a café, also closed. Barker noticed a hand-written sign on the door: CAFÉ OPENS 10:15 A.M. The morning — it seemed so far away, beyond imagining. Glade came and stood beside him, pressed her face to the dark window.

‘They sell jam,’ she said, and laughed.

When you first step on to a suspension bridge you feel you still have some connection with the land. Gradually, though, you realise you’ve left one element for another. Earth’s gone. Suddenly there’s only air. And far below, of course, the water. Like something waiting. In the early sixties Barker used to cycle up to the Tamar Bridge at night, just him and a friend of his called Danny and a younger boy whose name he couldn’t now remember. For years, it seemed, he had watched the bridge being built; it had formed a kind of backdrop to his childhood. How thrilling, then, to be able finally to walk out to the middle, his mind sent flying by the tiny lethal bottles of Barley Wine that Danny used to steal from the off-licence. Looking west, he could see into the next county, the scattered lights of Saltash and Wearde. Along the east bank black-hulled barges would be lying in neat rows of three. To the south he could watch the water swirling round the stone columns that supported the old railway bridge, the patterns on the surface intricate and whorled, like fingerprints. He had spent hours on that bridge, always at night and always drunk, and he could still remember it shaking as the cars passed over it. There was something reassuring about the way it shook; it had reminded him of a voice reverberating through a body. This bridge was different, though. The sheer scale of it. The isolation.

To reach the bridge they had to climb a flight of wooden steps that scaled an embankment. When they were halfway up, a man appeared above them, outlined against the sky. The man was carrying a camera, and holding a small boy by the hand. Barker nodded at the man, but didn’t speak to him. At the top of the steps he turned right, past a series of huge, ridged concrete blocks. He paused, waiting for Glade to catch him up. Over his shoulder he could see the toll-booth, which, from a distance, resembled an aquarium, men moving slowly through its dingy, greenish-yellow light. As he walked on, with Glade beside him, the wind grew stronger, more deliberate, and he could feel the ground opening beneath his feet. Although the bridge weighed many thousands of tons, it felt delicate, almost fragile in the face of the great black emptiness that surrounded it. Those heavy cables stretching up towards the towers — if he looked at them for too long, he had the feeling he was falling. There was a railing, but it didn’t seem enough. You could be holding on and then it would give. He had the same feeling in dreams sometimes. In nightmares. It was all he could do not to crouch down, close his eyes. He looked at Glade. She was walking slightly ahead of him, strangely eager, as if she was on her way to something that she didn’t want to miss. He couldn’t predict her, not even from one moment to the next.

They were about a third of the way across.

One feature of the bridge that surprised him was the fact that the road was raised above the walkway. When a car passed by, his eyes were on a level with the dark blur of its tyres. He felt this might work in his favour. At first he had been worried that somebody might stop. He could imagine a well-meaning stranger leaning out of his car window and asking if they needed help. When he said no, the stranger might become suspicious. Might even report them. People are funny about people on bridges. And if the police came, of course, well, that would be the end of it. But because they were walking below the cars, and the light was going, he now thought it unlikely anyone would notice them.

It took half an hour to reach the middle. Glade was talking to herself — or she might have been singing, he couldn’t tell; he could see her lips moving, though he couldn’t hear her above the constant, muted whining of the wind. She seemed happy on the bridge. Sometimes she stopped and stared up at the huge, looped cables and her face filled with a breathless quality, a kind of awe, and he thought of how his own face must have looked a quarter of a century before.

All the way across he had been aware of the railing that stood between him and the river. He had been sizing it up, trying to determine the nature of the obstacle. In a way, he was taken aback by the absence of discouragement. He had expected something far more daunting. But there was no anti-climb paint, no barbed wire. Just a metal railing five feet high. Beyond it, a ledge or lip, no more than six inches wide. Beyond that, nothing. It seemed too easy. He stood still, thinking. The wind roared in his ears. The river gaped below. Was there something he had missed?

He turned round, looked both ways. No cars, no people. He took Glade by the arm.

‘We’re climbing over,’ he said. ‘Both of us.’

Her eyes moved towards the railing. ‘Over?’

He nodded.

She wasn’t sure that she could do it. Her skirt, she said. Her shoes. He would help her, he said. He would thread his fingers, make a step. Then he would lift her. He told her not to worry. He’d be there.

‘I used to climb trees when I was young,’ she said doubtfully.

‘This is the same thing,’ he said. ‘The same thing exactly.’ Glancing one way, then the other. Still no cars.

He kneeled. She placed a foot on his two hands and took hold of the railing. He caught a glimpse of the crease behind her knees, the long curve of a thigh. He almost gave up then. It would have been a kind of weakness, though. It wouldn’t have done her any good. They had reached their destination. There was nowhere else to go.

Still, he felt something collapse inside him, as if all the air had been drawn out of his body. I never want another day like this. Shaking his head, he smiled grimly. Everything he thought of now amused him. Who would he be remembered by? The man at the ticket counter? That woman on the tube? Would the Indian waiter remember him? Would anyone? His last moments lay in the hands of strangers.

A voice called out to him and he looked up. Glade was half-sitting, half-lying on the top of the railing. She clung on with her hands and knees, almost as if she was riding a horse bareback.

‘It’s windy up here,’ she said. ‘It’s very windy.’

‘I’m coming,’ he said.

He hoisted himself over the railing, feeling for the ledge with the toe of one boot. The metal was cold. He felt it bite into his fingers. The wind pushed at him with such force that he imagined, for a moment, that he was trapped in a crowd.

Then he was on the other side and reaching up for her. She slithered backwards, feet first, hair whipping into his eyes. Somehow he managed to guide her down, gather her in …

They were facing outwards now, into the dark. Their backs to the railing, their hands gripping the bars.

Wind filled his mouth each time he tried to speak.

He thought he heard a car go past. He couldn’t feel it in the metal of the bridge, though. It didn’t register. The sound of the engine blended with the wind.

If it was a car, it didn’t see them. Didn’t stop.

He tried to concentrate on the horizon, but sometimes there was a movement in the corner of his eye, a slow, blind movement, like some great creature turning in its sleep. The body of the river. Currents twisting ninety-eight feet down.

‘Are you afraid?’ he heard her say.

He looked into her face. Her pupils black, with discs of silver in the middle. Her hair blown back behind her shoulder, flattening against the pale metal of the railing. He thought of sticks washed by flood-water on to a drain and stranded there. He thought of stubborn things.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You look afraid.’

He attempted a grin. ‘What about you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m just cold, that’s all.’