The word admirer struck him as comically inappropriate. He didn’t believe anyone had ever admired him.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
“London postmark, I see,” she said. “Only been here five minutes and already he’s breaking hearts. I’ll have to watch myself.”
“You do that,” he said.
Mick went into the street and began his day, his work. Things were a little strange at the moment. Since dealing with Justin Carr he had hit a slight hiatus. Revenge on Carr had been so sweet and so appropriate that Mick now wanted to deliver equally fitting acts of vengeance to the four men remaining on the list. Simply tracking them down and giving them a good kicking was no longer enough for him. He had not lost his sense of urgency but there were some things that couldn’t be rushed. They had to be done right.
Days and nights were therefore spent in what Mick liked to think of as reconnaissance. He knew all his victims’ addresses. It was simply a matter of checking them out, seeing how they lived, following them sometimes, seeing how they came and went, what time they left for work, when they got home, seeing what they did in the evenings, determining whether they were married or single, seeing whether they were gregarious or solitary. Sooner or later he knew that in each case the proper opportunity and occasion would present itself, and he’d be there, ready to take it.
The four victims lived some way from each other, one in Chelsea, one in Fitzrovia, one in Docklands and one in Islington, so he found himself covering many miles of the city going from one location to another, still avoiding public transport whenever humanly possible. And he was surprised to discover that he was starting to know his way around parts of London. Sometimes he’d find himself in a place he’d heard of, a famous place, with a recognizable name, familiar from the news or Monopoly, or just from a pop song (Walworth Road, Pentonville Road, Baker Street), and he’d feel simultaneously disorientated and at home. He couldn’t quite square the fact that these places, which to his eyes looked so ordinary, so workaday, also carried such a weight of history and fame with them, and yet he felt good to find himself using such famous streets in his daily wanderings.
Already certain routes through the city were becoming his own. He was discovering the logic and connectedness of the streets, discovering short-cuts, but he would still have been lost without the map he’d bought from Judy. At first he had hated it, had hated having to carry it. Either he tried to cram it into one of his pockets in which case it destroyed the lines of his suit, or he carried it in his hand in which case he looked like a hick from the sticks. But what was the alternative? Wandering around lost.
So he carried his map and soon he didn’t feel too bad about it at all, largely because he saw so many others like himself, also carrying maps. Some of them were obviously tourists and out-of-towners, but he’d see quite ordinary people, people who looked like they belonged here, who looked like Londoners, who also obviously needed to use maps in order to get around. He saw van drivers driving along with maps held open across the steering wheel. He even saw a black-cab driver consulting an A — Z.
Because he was carrying a map, people would sometimes stop him and ask for directions. Suspicious and irritated at first, he gradually took some pleasure in being able to help. People tended to be friendly and open towards him because they wanted something from him and he responded decently to them. Occasionally he found he could help with directions simply from his own knowledge of the city. It was strange how these passing, issueless encounters with strangers could produce an enduring feeling of well-being. Helping people to find their way made him feel oddly at home and accommodated.
On one bizarre occasion, as he was approaching Covent Garden tube a woman, also carrying a map, greeted him with a big smile and asked him if he was Emil. He shook his head and quickly said no, but when he thought about it later he realized he’d been needlessly honest. The woman was attractive, and he reckoned she must have been meeting a blind date or a lonely heart, and the map had been some kind of signal. From the way she’d approached him she obviously didn’t mind the look of him, had obviously hoped that he was Emil, and if he’d said yes, then she’d probably have happily gone off with him. It would have been a laugh. Then he remembered he wasn’t in London to have laughs.
He was standing in Chelsea, outside the house of a man called Jonathan Sands, the next most likely candidate on his list, when someone asked him for directions to Hackney. Mick offered the use of his map but the enquirer, a Turkish immigrant by the look of him, saw the length and complexity of the journey and walked off in a mean sulk as though it was Mick’s fault.
Mick was reminded of his own journey home. It was mid-afternoon, cold and dank. His shoulders were soaked with rain. He knew very little about Jonathan Sands, but he knew that despite having a wife and young child he didn’t come home much. He knew that he had a lot of magazines delivered, mostly about things maritime, and that he kept a boat moored in Chelsea Harbour. At present the house was dark and uninhabited. A cleaning lady had come and gone an hour or so earlier but now there was nothing. The wife and child were out. It would be hours before Sands came home from work. Mick decided to return to the Dickens. He knew there’d be better days than this.
He got back to Hackney in late afternoon. It was already dark and he had a long evening ahead of him. These winter days were short and they disappeared all too quickly but sometimes the nights seemed endless and torturous.
As he got close to the Dickens he saw a skip full of building rubbish on the other side of the street. He crossed and dug around in it until he found a big piece of discarded hardboard. It was jagged-edged and irregular and spotted with tacky stains, but it was good enough for what he wanted, for what he now felt he wanted rather badly; a flat surface on which to do a jigsaw.
He took the wood up to his room, laid it on the bed and started the puzzle. He found it totally impossible at first. It entirely dispelled the sense of belonging he had begun to feel. All the streets and place names were suddenly foreign to him. They sounded simultaneously alien yet quaint: Hatch End, Barking, Tooting Graveney. They did not belong to the London he knew. And when he came to locations he’d heard of, places he’d been to, he no longer had any idea where they were in relation to anywhere else. The map was even more confusing than the reality.
But he persevered and gradually found that bits of the completed map were starting to coalesce. The edges were the easiest, followed by the river, and these fixed points seemed to offer clues as to how he might proceed. He put together large patches of recognizable green space, then motorways and arterial roads. He made some progress. But when it came to assembling networks of short, dense city and suburban streets, he had to rely on trial and error and occasional strokes of good luck.
It might have been frustratingly, maddeningly difficult, yet he enjoyed the difficulty. He was glad it wasn’t the child’s play he’d first thought it was going to be. The act of joining up the city, making it complete and solid, gave him more pleasure than he would have thought possible. As the map came nearer to coherence and completion he felt oddly proud of himself, as though he was gaining mastery over this once wholly unfamiliar territory.
He worked on diligently into the evening, and London took shape before his eyes, but eventually a terrible moment came when it dawned on him, with a kind of aching deflation, that there was a piece of the jigsaw missing. He could see there were a dozen holes remaining in London and only eleven pieces left with which to plug them, and as he slotted in each of the eleven, it became clear that the missing piece was the one that had Park Lane, Hackney, on it; his street.