Stevie could still see the lorry in her rear-view mirror, travelling at the slow pace of a funeral cortège. The Scots soldier left his companions by the barrier and walked towards her car.
‘Iqbal, I’m sorry, but I’m about to be moved on,’ she said. The soldier pointed towards the road and mouthed something that might have been straight home. Stevie gave him a nod and gunned the engine into life. ‘I’m going to have to phone you back.’
Iqbal kept talking. ‘Frei was mugged somewhere near King’s Cross Station the night before he was due to meet Dr Sharkey. He was a big guy, a rugby blue, whatever that is. It looks like he tried to fight the muggers off, but it would have been better if he’d just given them his wallet. They stabbed him in the neck, the jugular to be precise. By the time he was found, he’d already bled to death.’
The soldier slapped the roof of the Mini, and she started.
‘Jesus!’
Iqbal said, ‘What was that?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing.’ Stevie was already rolling down the window. ‘I’ll phone you back.’
She killed the call and looked up at the soldier.
He said, ‘You’re free to go. If you take my advice you’ll stick to the main roads.’
Stevie nodded. ‘Good luck.’
‘Same to you.’ The soldier grinned, revealing a set of bad teeth, the bottom row as crowded and overlapping as drinkers in a station bar. ‘Here’s hoping neither of us end up priority traffic.’
Twenty-Nine
It was eerie, driving alone through the violet dawn blush, her car engine announcing her presence to the otherwise silent streets. Stevie took the Scottish soldier’s advice and kept to main roads. She found herself scanning the windows of houses and apartments, trying to fathom life from drawn curtains and lit rooms. She thought about the army lorry. Priority traffic, no one wanted to be; that had prompted the soldiers to bow their heads and remove their caps. She wondered where it would put its load to rest.
Stevie had been fresh from college and working for a tabloid when foot-and-mouth had hit Britain. She was too green to get the assignment, but the crisis had been headline news and she had followed it, impatient for the day when her name would be a byline on the front page. Stevie remembered television footage of bonfires stacked with burning carcasses, plumes of black smoke drifting across villages. She wondered what arrangements Derek was making for Joanie and pushed the thought away. It was better not to dwell on these things. She had her task. It would be her compass through this crisis.
A trio of teenage girls, weighed down with hastily packed carrier bags, were ambling along the pavement. The girls’ languid, after-the-party gait made her wonder if they were sick, or simply worn out by the excesses of the night before. Stevie glanced in her rear-view mirror as she passed and caught a fleeting impression of grey skin cowled in shadows.
A petrol station gleamed up ahead, but when she got closer she saw that its entrance was coned off, its pumps clamped and marked Out of Use.
‘Shit.’
Stevie glanced at her petrol gauge again. The tank was still more than half full, but she thought the dial had slipped a little. There were more cars on the roads now, though still a shadow of the traffic that would usually gridlock them at this time of the morning.
Stevie thought about Geoffrey Frei, the proximity of his death to Simon’s. She wondered if the police knew of the two men’s assignation. There had been a spate of stabbings and Underground station muggings that summer, and the journalist’s death might easily have been another random attack that had ended tragically. But the coincidence remained: Frei and Simon had been due to meet, and now both of them were dead.
Stevie pulled over, turned off the engine and tapped Frei’s name into the Internet search engine on her iPhone. The connection was painfully slow, but eventually a list of options appeared on the small screen. Stevie clicked on an obituary in the Sunday Times. It was as Iqbal had said: the journalist was the author of a regular column exposing scientific misrepresentations and scandals. His most recent book had been a crusade against corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. It had topped the non-fiction charts and he had been in the process of researching a follow-up. Geoffrey Frei was survived by his wife Sarah and twin sons.
She returned to the search engine and found a report of Frei’s death in the Evening Standard. A photo of an open-faced man headed the article. Stevie took in the generous smile, the trendy, heavy-framed glasses and curly hair. Then she scrolled down and read that Frei had been discovered by refuse collectors, slumped between rows of dustbins, at the back of the railway station. The area around King’s Cross bristled with CCTV cameras; the journalist had been captured crossing the station concourse and in the street beyond, but his encounter with the muggers had taken place off-camera. Police were reported to be investigating, and there was a call for witnesses, but once it had disposed of the journalist’s celebrity, the article took on the weary, dead-end air of a much retold story whose conclusions were already known.
Stevie wished that Simon was there to tell her what was going on. She leant back in the driver’s seat and took from her pocket the photograph of the two of them laughing together in Russell Square. She traced a finger around the edge of Simon’s jaw, trying to remember the scent of him, the timbre of his voice.
‘Fuck, Simon,’ she whispered. ‘What were you up to?’
Simon had been a good-looking man, with a responsible job, who had known how to play the fool. He had thick dark hair, a pleasantly broad body and lines at the corners of his eyes that suggested hard work and a good sense of humour. He had been clever too, of course. But it had been his faults, as much as his attributes, which had drawn her to him. The sense of style that had flirted with, but never completely embraced, vanity. The too-fast cars and gregariousness that had threatened to embarrass Stevie, even as it amused her. And then there had been the sex.
At first she had thought Simon’s profession might put her off, that when he touched her she would be reminded of the snap of silicone gloves or the texture of blood. But Stevie had discovered extra assurance in the touch of hands that knew the secrets of flesh and bone.
‘You know how I look inside,’ she had once said to him, lying naked in the middle of his bed. He had traced her organs with his fingertips, here her heart, here her liver, gall bladder, stomach, rolling her on to her front so he could run his fingers around the outline of her kidneys, her lungs, and then trace a line down her spine that ended with his teeth sinking gently into the cheeks of her ‘gluteus maximus’, until she had laughed and turned on to her back; a move that he had rightly taken as an invitation.
Stevie scrolled down the search engine results again. Frei’s death had prompted editorials on societal decay and a feature that charted his background and education against that of a youth convicted of stabbing a stranger to death. Frei had been born to parents who were both doctors. He had attended the same top public school as a former Prime Minister, and then followed in the family tradition, obtaining a medical degree. After he graduated, Frei had worked in a London hospital for a while, and then changed direction, taking a postgrad in journalism at the London School of Economics. A regular column in the Independent had followed. It had formed the basis of his first book.
A movement outside in the street snagged the corner of her eye. Stevie looked up to see a group of dogs trotting along the pavement, so smartly paced that they gave the illusion of keeping in time with each other. She counted five of them, a motley selection of breeds that might have made a cute assortment, had they been drawn by a children’s illustrator. Each of the dogs was wearing a collar, but the pack occupied the pavement with an assurance, a dogged doggyness, that gave them a feral edge. A bichon frise let out a yelp and the rest of the pack set up a frantic chorus of barking. The dogs upped their pace, a slender greyhound at their head closely followed by a sleek Dalmatian. Stevie watched, glad she was in her car, as they dashed around a corner. A tiny chihuahua which was probably worth a lot of money was the last to vanish.