He returned to Victoria Station where I almost lost him in the crowd. But instead of boarding a train south back to Wandsworth Common, he took the Underground to Green Park and then walked east, along Piccadilly.
Shakespeare was an uncouth, greasy-looking fellow, tall, and swarthy like a Greek. So I was surprised when he paused in front of a bookshop and went inside. The strangest people seem to read books these days. One hardly expects a fellow like that to be literate. But he had no sooner entered the shop than he had left it again, crossed over onto the south side of Piccadilly and gone into St James’s Church. Was he, I wondered, interested in architecture perhaps? This was, after all, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s great designs. Or had he spotted his tail and was now cutting through the Jermyn Street exit in an effort to lose me? Leaving what instinct told me wasn’t a decent-enough interval between us, I went after him.
Through the heavy glass doors separating the main part of the church from its vestibule I could see him sitting in a pew close to the altar. But for him, the place was empty.
I walked inside and occupied a pew only a few rows behind Shakespeare. His head was bowed and he seemed to be praying. Perfect for my purpose. No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize. Steeling myself with the thought that Charles Darwin had considered Shakespeare so dull as to make him feel nauseous, I reached inside my coat to get my gun. But before my hand was even on the handle, he was up and out of his pew and walking towards the door and then stopping beside my pew and then grabbing both lapels of my coat and hauling me onto my feet. He was a big man and extricating my hand from inside my coat, I struggled to prise his two meat-porter’s hands off me.
‘What’s your game, mate?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve been followin’ me all afternoon. Haven’t you? Haven’t you?’ With each repeated question he pushed his unshaven mug closer to mine, until I was close enough to taste the garlic on his breath. ‘Ever since I left Wandsworth.’ He nutted me gently on the bridge of my nose several times, as if indicating what was in store for me if I didn’t answer him to his satisfaction.
‘I’m a tourist,’ I said weakly, pointing to the A-Z on the church pew as if to confirm my story.
His bristly face turned several shades of red on the way to becoming something darker.
‘Shit,’ he snarled. ‘That’s just shit, mate.’
‘You’ve made a mistake,’ I protested, still trying to reclaim my coat’s lapels.
‘No, you’re the one who’s made a mistake,’ he said. ‘Wandsworth Town, Victoria, Green Park, and now here. You tryin’ to tell me that you lost your fuckin’ coach, or something?’ He nutted me again, only this time more deliberately. His head may have been deficient in the small matter of a ventro medial nucleus, but it lacked for nothing in solidity. ‘Come on, you bastard, or I’ll really give you a kiss. Why you followin’ me?’
I really don’t know what I would have told him. That I found him attractive perhaps? Who knows? But at that moment a couple of people carrying musical instruments came into the church, and my assailant, momentarily embarrassed, it seemed to me, unclamped his greasy paws from my coat. I needed no more articulate invitation to freedom and took to my heels.
‘Bastard,’ he yelled after me but, to my relief, he did not give chase. Even so, running out into Jermyn Street and down the hill to St James’s Square, I did not stop until I reached Pall Mall.
When finally I recovered my breath and then my nerve I found myself laughing once again. That was always what was so interesting about Shakespeare, I said to myself. Right until the very last minute you never knew if it was going to end in comedy or tragedy.
Still keeping an eye out for him, I walked across Trafalgar Square and into the bar on the corner of Charing Cross Road where I ordered a beer and tried to think how best I could salvage something of the day.
While tailing Shakespeare I had been giving some thought to Policewoman and the promise I had made to contact her. Perhaps if I had been concentrating more on following Shakespeare... Now seemed to be as good a time as any to buy the equipment I needed to fulfil this undertaking. I already knew exactly what I wanted and where was the best place to get it. So I finished my beer and, via the nearest twenty-four-hour bank where I picked up some cash, I caught a bus up Tottenham Court Road.
TCR was much the same as always: dirty and disgusting, with rubbish strewn along the pavements from the piles of fastfood refuse sacks torn apart by the city’s many rats. Some of these, bigger than cats, lay dead in the gutters, poisoned with their warfarin takeaways, their bodies flattened by the passing traffic and dried like biltong in the early spring sun. About the only thing that swept TCR was the wind blowing south from the Euston Road to Oxford Street.
Stepping smartly into the shop I was met with the usual sea of brown faces. What is it about Indians and Pakistanis that so attracts them to the retailing of electrical goods? It’s the same the world over, from New York to Vienna. The Japs may have manufactured the equipment that now runs the world, but it’s the Asians who sell it. Is it that the profit margins are just so good? Or is it that they find something sexy in the obvious consumerism of all those switches, knobs, dials, and flashing lights? Or perhaps it is electricity itself that they so admire: Islam has always had a fascination for power.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a portable phone.’
‘Standard or video?’
‘Neither,’ I said, flatly. ‘I want a sat-phone.’
The man rippled his sovereign-ringed fingers nervously and then smiled a combination of apology and amusement. ‘These are illegal, sir,’ he announced. ‘We are not allowed to sell them.’
It was my turn to smile. I followed it with a hundred-dollar note.
‘Cash,’ I said. ‘And you can swear you never saw me before.’
He told me to wait and went to fetch the shop manager, a tubby, bumptious little man with thick glasses and as many gold necklaces around his fat, bhaji-coloured neck as his minion had rings.
‘The sort of phone you are requiring, sir, is not permitted,’ he said, still holding my C-note. ‘Please, what would happen to me if you were some fellow from the Home Office who was to catch me selling such a thing? I would be in court pretty damn quick and no mistake.’ He glanced around the shop, which was empty of any other customers, and moved closer to me.
‘What the hell are you wanting this kind of phone for anyway?’ he asked in lower tones. ‘If it’s the avoidance of a telephone bill you are requiring then I can sell you a black box dialer. You can use this anywhere and pay nothing for your call whether it is Bombay you are telephoning or merely Birmingham. And much cheaper than a satellite phone too.’
‘I’m going abroad,’ I said. ‘South America. Up the jungle, or what’s left of it. I want to be able to phone home.’
The Indian shook his head ruefully. ‘If this was me the last thing I should want to take would be a phone. What an opportunity you are having, to get away from the wife for a few weeks.’ He laughed.