Things were not normal.
There were two locked gates into the central garden, one opposite the path I was on, and one on the far side, opposite my house. Standing in shadow, I sorted out the resident-allocated garden key, went quietly across the circling roadway and unlocked the near gate.
Nothing moved. I eased the gate open, slid through and closed it behind me. No squeaks. I moved slowly from patch to patch of shaded cover, the half-lit tree branches moving in a light breeze, yellow leaves drifting down like ghosts.
Near the far side I stopped and waited.
There could be no one there. I was foolishly afraid over nothing.
The streetlight was out.
It had been out at other times…
I stood with my back to a tree, waiting for alarm to subside to the point where I would unlock the second gate and cross the road to my front steps. The sounds of the city were distant. No cars drove into the cul-de-sac square.
I couldn’t stand there all night, I thought… and then I saw him.
He was in a car parked by one of the few meters. His head — unmistakably Gordon Quint’s head — moved behind the window. He was looking straight ahead, waiting for me to arrive by road or pavement.
I stood immobile as if stuck to the tree. It had to be obsession with him, I thought. The burning fury of Monday had settled down not into grief but revenge. I hadn’t been in my flat for about thirty hours. How long had he been sitting there waiting? I’d had a villain wait almost a week for me once, before I’d walked unsuspectingly into his trap.
Obsession — fixation — was the most frightening of enemies and the hardest to escape.
I retreated, frankly scared, expecting him to see my movement, but he hadn’t thought of an approach by garden. From tree to tree, around the patches of open grass, I regained the far gate, eased through it, crossed the road and drifted up the alleyway, cravenly expecting a bellow and a chase and, as he was a farmer, perhaps a shotgun.
Nothing happened. My shoes, soled and heeled for silence, made no sound. I walked back to my underground car and sat in it, not exactly trembling but nonetheless stirred up.
So much, I thought, for Davis Tatum’s myth of a clever, unafraid investigator.
I kept always in the car an overnight bag containing the personality-change clothes I’d got Jonathan to wear: dark two-piece tracksuit (trousers and zip-up jacket), navy blue sneakers, and a baseball cap. The bag also contained a long-sleeved open-necked shirt, two or three charged-up batteries for my arm, and a battery charger, to make sure. Habitually around my waist I wore a belt with a zipped pocket big enough for a credit card and money.
I had no weapons or defenses like mace. In America I might have carried both.
I sat in the car considering the matter of distance and ulnas. It was well over two hundred miles from my London home to Liverpool, city of my birth. Frodsham, the base town of Topline Foods, wasn’t quite as far as Liverpool, but still over two hundred miles. I had already, that day, steered a hundred and fifty — Chichester and back. I’d never missed Chico so much.
I considered trains. Too inflexible. Airline? Ditto. TeleDrive? I lingered over the comfort of TeleDrive but decided against, and resignedly set off northwards.
It was an easy drive normally; a journey on wide fast motorways taking at most three hours. I drove for only one hour, then stopped at a motel to eat and sleep, and at seven o’clock in the morning wheeled on again, trying to ignore both the obstinately slow-mending fracture and India Cathcart’s column that I’d bought from the motel’s newsstand.
Friday mornings had been a trial since June. Page fifteen in The Pump — trial by the long knives of journalism, the blades that ripped the gut.
She hadn’t mentioned at all seeing Tatum and me in the Le Meridien bar. Perhaps she’d taken my advice and pretended we hadn’t been there. What her column said about me was mostly factually true but spitefully wrong. I wondered how she could do it? Had she no sense of humanity?
Most of her page concerned yet another politician caught with his trousers at half-mast, but the far-right column said:
Sid Halley, illegitimate by-blow of a nineteen-year-old window cleaner and a packer in a biscuit factory, ran amok as a brat in the slums of Liverpool. Home was a roach-infested council flat. Nothing wrong with that! But this same Sid Halley now puts on airs of middle-class gentility. A flat in Chelsea? Sheraton furniture? Posh accent? Go back to your roots, lad. No wonder Ellis Quint thinks you funny. Funny pathetic!
The slum background clearly explains the Halley envy. Halley’s chip on the shoulder grows more obvious every day. Now we know why!
The Halley polish is all a sham, just like his plastic left hand.
Christ, I thought, how much more? Why did it so bloody hurt?
My father had been killed in a fall eight months before my birth and a few days before he was due to marry my eighteen-year-old mother. She’d done her best as a single parent in hopeless surroundings. ‘Give us a kiss, John Sidney…’
I hadn’t ever run amok. I’d been a quiet child, mostly. ‘Have you been fighting again, John Sidney…?’ She hadn’t liked me fighting, though one had to sometimes, or be bullied.
And when she knew she was dying she’d taken me to Newmarket, because I’d been short for my age, and had left me with the king of trainers to be made into a jockey, as I’d always wanted.
I couldn’t possibly go back to my Liverpool ‘roots.’ I had no sense of ever having grown any there.
I had never envied Ellis Quint. I’d always liked him. I’d been a better jockey than he, and we’d both known it. If anything, the envy had been the other way around. But it was useless to protest, as it had been all along. Protests were used regularly to prove The Pump’s theories of my pitiable inadequacy.
My mobile phone buzzed. I answered it.
‘Kevin Mills,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Where are you? I tried your apartment. Have you seen today’s Pump yet?’
‘Yes.’
‘India didn’t write it,’ he said. ‘I gave her the info, but she wouldn’t use it. She filled that space with some pars on sexual stress and her editor subbed them out.’
Half of my muscles unknotted, and I hadn’t realized they’d been tense. I forced unconcern into my voice even as I thought of hundreds of thousands of readers sniggering about me over their breakfast toast.
‘Then you wrote it yourself,’ I said. ‘So who’s a shit now? You’re the only person on The Pump who’s seen my Sheraton desk.’
‘Blast you. Where are you?’
‘Going back to Liverpool. Where else?’
‘Sid, look, I’m sorry.’
‘Policy?’
He didn’t answer.
I asked, ‘Why did you phone to tell me India didn’t write today’s bit of demolition?’
‘I’m getting soft.’
‘No one’s listening to this phone anymore. You can say what you like.’
‘Jeez.’ He laughed. ‘That didn’t take you long.’ He paused. ‘You might not believe it, but most of us on The Pump don’t any more like what we’ve been doing to you.’
‘Rise up and rebel,’ I suggested dryly.
‘We have to eat. And you’re a tough bugger. You can take it.’
You just try it, I thought.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘the paper’s received a lot of letters from readers complaining that we’re not giving you a fair deal.’
‘How many is a lot?’