Then the chase swung in my favour.
The kids I’d spotted earlier had moved their game of football further up, closer to the flats. As he looked around again, one of the kids ran across in front of him. The two of them collided. The kid went spinning, almost pirouetting on the spot, before collapsing to the floor. The man tried to avoid him but failed, falling over him, his body hitting the floor hard. For a couple of seconds, he was dazed. He scrambled on to all fours, on to his feet, then his shoes slipped in the mud.
He went down again.
As I came at him, he jabbed a boot up into my stomach. I staggered backwards, losing my footing, but managed to cling on to his coat. I pulled him towards me. He jabbed at me again with a foot, catching the side of my face. The impact stunned me for a moment. I dropped the knife. Blinked. Tried to refocus. He looked between me, the knife and the fencing. The tiny delay worked in my favour: I grasped the front of his coat and landed a punch in the side of his head.
He pushed back and grabbed my arm, trying to snap it. Wriggling free, I pumped a fist at his face, and missed. Then did it again. He rolled to the left, my fist slapping against the ground, then used my weight transfer to push me off. When I swivelled to face him again, he was already on his feet, caked in mud.
‘Stop!’ I shouted.
But he didn’t stop. By the time I was on my feet again, he had made it to the metal fence, then dropped to his knees and quickly crawled through a gap. As he stood up, safe on the other side, he pulled up the hood on his jacket so I couldn’t see his face properly, and jogged away.
I got to the fencing and pressed against it. He was halfway along a narrow alleyway that led from the opposite side of the road, moving more slowly now to prevent himself from losing his footing again. Puddles were scattered around him, reflecting the sky. I watched him all the way to the end. When he got there, he stopped and looked back at me.
Then he disappeared for good.
On my way back to the car, about twenty feet from where the kids were playing football, I spotted something: a mobile phone. Mud was caked to it, the display face down, wet grass matted to the casing. I knelt, picked it up and wiped it clean. As soon as I unlocked the keypad, it erupted into life. I hit ‘Answer’.
On the phone: silence. Then the sound of cars in the background.
‘You’re gonna wish you hadn’t picked that up,’ a voice said.
I paused. Stood. I could see my knife about six feet across the grass from me. I walked over and scooped it up, then glanced towards the fence, back to the flats and out to the main road again.
I was being watched.
‘Did you hear me?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Did you hear me?’
‘Yeah, I heard you,’ I replied, and looked around again. ‘Who does the flat belong to?’
‘You just made a big mistake.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve made them before.’
‘Not like this.’ The line crackled and hissed. ‘Listen to me: you get back in your car and you drive back to wherever the fuck it is you’re from, and you forget about everything you’ve found. You don’t ever come out of your hole again. Is that clear?’
I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the display. Another withheld number. ‘Who does the flat belong to?’
‘Is that clear?’
‘What’s the Calvary Project?’
‘Is that clear?’
‘Where’s Alex Towne?’
‘You’re not listening to me, David.’
I stopped. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘One chance.’
‘How the fuck do you know my name?’
‘This is your one chance.’
Then the line went dead.
15
The restaurant overlooked Hyde Park. At the windows were a series of booths, dressed up like an American diner, with mini jukeboxes on the tables playing Elvis on rotation. Above me on the wall was a clock showing 10.40, Mickey Mouse’s arms pointing to the ten and the eight. Three booths along were a French couple and, beyond them, a group of kids eating toast and jam. Apart from that, the place was empty.
On the table in front of me, I had the pad I’d taken from the apartment and the mobile phone I’d picked up off the grass outside. Just like the phone in the flat, there were no contact numbers in the address book, nothing on the ‘recent calls’ list and no saved messages. Maybe they’d never used it. Or maybe they really did wipe it clean after every use.
A waitress came over carrying my breakfast. An omelet, some toast and lots of coffee. She set it down and wandered off again. I loved coffee, sometimes even lived off it. It was probably as close as I got to an addiction. Food didn’t appeal to me in the same way as it had once, mainly because eating on your own wasn’t fun, but also because I’d become lazy during marriage. Derryn had been an incredible cook, and it had been safer, and tastier, for us both if she made the meals. Since she’d been gone, I tried to have a good breakfast and then usually didn’t worry too much about lunch. Maybe a sandwich from a packet, or a salad in a tub. Always a coffee. In the evenings, I ate small and late, usually in front of the news or watching something on DVD.
I filled my mug and, while I waited for the food to cool, started going through the phone again. Dropping it had been a mistake, but a mistake they could probably live with. There was nothing on it that would lead back to them. No incriminating evidence. No numbers. Nothing traceable. But whatever their connection to Alex, they were still warning me off something. Perhaps I was close, perhaps I wasn’t, but it was clear I’d made some inroads.
I pulled the pad towards me.
When I’d been inside the flat, the light from the windows had been shining across the surface of the paper. It had highlighted the scars and grooves left from notes that had been made on previous sheets. I asked the waitress for a pencil and gently rubbed the tip of it across the pad. Slowly, words started to emerge. In the top right: Must phone Vee. In the middle, lighter and less defined, a series of names: Paul. Stephen. Zack. Towards the bottom, barely even legible until I held it right up to the window, was a telephone number.
I picked up my phone and dialled it.
Eventually, someone answered. ‘Angel’s, Soho.’
I waited, could hear people talking in the background.
‘Is this Angel’s pub?’
‘Yeah.’
I waited some more, then hung up.
I gave directory enquiries the number, and they told me the address that was listed for it. It was a pub on the edge of Chinatown. But I knew that even before I’d made the call. During my apprenticeship, I was paired with an old guy called Jacob, an experienced reporter who covered the City. Angel’s was his local at the time. He stopped going a couple of years later, after retiring to the Norfolk countryside.
But I didn’t.
I continued going right the way up until Derryn got ill.
My car was on the other side of the park. I entered at Hyde Park Corner and headed towards the Serpentine. Everything was quiet. The trees were skeletal and bare; the water in the lake dark and still. The only movement on its surface were two model boats, gliding and drifting, their sails catching the wind. I carried on walking, taken in by the smell and sounds of the place; of the grass covered by a blanket of fallen leaves; of the oaks and elms stripped bare as winter approached.