‘I’m here to visit someone.’ She leant across the passenger seat, resting a hand on the hilt of the knife, and raised her voice. ‘Melvin Summers. He lives in this street.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, shaking his head, ‘but there’s no coming and going from here, love.’
His voice was muffled by the scarf tied around his face. It was hard to guess his age without seeing his features, but the leather jacket he was wearing was ten years out of fashion, the body beneath it broad and running to fat.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone beyond this line is healthy. We want to keep it that way.’
The man was still keeping his distance, and Stevie wondered if the improvised mask was intended to block infection rather than hide his features.
‘What happens if someone inside your line gets sick?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge if we get there.’ The stranger paused, as if considering his answer, and added, ‘There’s a quarantine centre in the primary school.’ He pointed to somewhere beyond her car, out into the darkness.
A second man stepped beyond the glow of the fire. He was taller than the first, thin and rangy, and carrying a baseball bat.
‘Are you a journalist?’
The newcomer had a football scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose. It made him look like a terrorist glimpsed on a CCTV camera, an already dead man, located after the fact.
‘I just want to visit Mr Summers. He lives here. He’s a dentist. His wife died recently, his wife and his little girl.’
‘I remember him.’ The baseball bat hung loosely in the second man’s hand. ‘He’s not a dentist no more, jacked it in after his missus topped herself.’
‘Does he still live in the street?’
‘No, love.’ The squat man rested the end of his metal bar against the ground and leant his weight against it. ‘He lives in the boozer, said he was spending his savings on drinking himself to death. The sweats would be a blessed relief if you ask me.’
Now that they were talking the men seemed more relaxed, as if they had decided she posed no threat. Stevie gave them the smile that had won her countless sales.
‘You seem pretty organised. Is there any way to find out if he’s in your quarantine zone?’
‘It don’t make no difference if he is or if he ain’t.’ The man with the baseball bat sounded defensive and she guessed they hadn’t carried out a census of their small kingdom. ‘No one gets in. That’s the rule.’
‘I’ve had the sweats. I’m immune.’ She smiled again. ‘Won’t you let me through? It’s important.’
The man with the baseball bat took a step forward and for an instant she thought he might be about to name a price she wouldn’t want to pay. But the man with the metal bar straightened his shoulders and put a hand on his companion’s arm.
‘Sorry, love. Official advice is to stay at home, have contact with as few people as possible, and that’s what we’re making sure happens. We’re just doing our best to protect our properties and our families. You should go home too. It won’t do you no good to go wandering around at night, even if you have had the sweats. There are some funny people about.’
Stevie thought he might have cast a look at the man standing next to him, but if he did, it was so fleeting she couldn’t be sure.
‘Where does Mr Summers drink?’
‘The Nell Gwynne, back the way you came and then first on the right.’ The tall man swung his baseball bat to and fro, a slow-moving pendulum. ‘He’s more than likely there.’
‘Leave it alone, love,’ the smaller man said. ‘It’s after midnight and Nellie’s isn’t a place for a woman on her own, not tonight.’
Stevie put the car into gear. She saw the man armed with the baseball bat take a bottle of spirits from the pocket of his jacket, as if talk of pubs had made him thirsty. His companion took a step forward, shouting to make himself heard over the noise of the car engine.
‘Even if you find Summers, he’ll be too far gone to know you’re there.’
Stevie turned the car around and drove in the direction of the pub.
Twenty-Five
The hanging baskets decorating the front of the Nell Gwynne had once been impressive, but the pub’s clientele were intent on watering themselves, and the begonias, geraniums and trailing lobelia drooped limp as seaweed at low tide. Stevie pulled the zip of her tracksuit top up to her chin and pressed through the crush of drinkers on the pavement, into the warm tobacco fug of the pub’s interior. She detected the sweet, throat-sharp scent of marijuana beneath the cigarette smoke shelving the air. The pub was low-ceilinged and so noisy that at first it seemed everyone was talking at the tops of their voices. But as Stevie pushed her way to the bar she became aware of drinkers on the periphery, men and women, as limp as the pub’s flower display.
Traces of the cosy pub it must once have been clung to the Nell Gwynne like a light shining in a half-demolished building. A menu was still chalked on the blackboard, offering steak pie, roast lamb, fish and chips and other pub-grub staples. Black-and-white photographs of an older, more rustic London crowded the walls. Stevie noticed a horseshoe pinned above the door, arched end at the bottom, to keep the luck of the house from draining away.
‘All right, love?’ A thin, rat-faced man nodded a gentle, absent greeting in Stevie’s direction and then unzipped his fly and let go a long and hissing stream against the side of the bar.
Stevie stepped smartly backwards, away from the rush of piss.
‘For Christ’s sake, Tony,’ said a man in scuffed jeans and a denim jacket. But no one made a move to throw out the drunk, and when he was finished he zipped up and continued taking steady sips from the beer glass, golden on the bar in front of him.
Iqbal had printed a photograph of Melvin Summers from the dentist’s website. It was a head-and-shoulders shot of a neatly groomed, square-jawed man in a white coat. Stevie took the printout from her tracksuit pocket and cast her gaze around the room.
The drinkers were mainly men, gathered in small huddles or settled determinedly on their own. Pensioners, intoxicated boys and business types mingled with wired-up youths and shell-suited men sporting gold chains and sovereign rings, whose broad bellies suggested long, restful hours in front of flat-screen TVs. A middle-aged cyclist, his flesh squeezed firm by Lycra, shovelled change into the fruit machine, playing with chance as if his life depended on it; a labourer in a fluorescent jacket and work boots cradled his hard hat between his hands; a man with a young face and grey hair talked gently to a standard poodle who stared up at him with rapt attention. There were a few women too. Stevie saw that they were at the centre of clusters of men and knew she would have to watch her step.
The man in denim whispered, ‘Help yourself to a drink, Princess. It’s self-service. John and Doris won’t mind, not where they’ve gone.’
‘A terror against tick, John was,’ Tony said. ‘You remember how he was, Django. Probably spinning in his grave.’
There was an edge of bravado to his voice, as if mentioning graves was a mighty dare.
Django turned his weary gaze on him. ‘Show a bit of respect for the dead.’
Perhaps it was Django’s jeans and denim jacket that reminded Stevie of an urban cowboy, a man unsuited to the times he found himself in. Or maybe it was the casual way he propped himself against the bar, as if he had known all along that life would come to this desperate pass. She showed him the dentist’s photograph.
‘I’m looking for Melvin Summers. I was told this is his local.’