Up ahead, a door gave on to a room awash with blood. Her mouth filled with drool.
“She’s fresh,” said Gleave. “She helped bring you to us.”
Cheke moved away from him. Her eyes much more comfortable in the false night of the room, she was able to see the woman immediately, slumped in her own juices, moaning, flapping a hand.
Cheke didn’t make a sound as she surged over the dying woman, wrapping her up in a seamless embrace. Her eyes flickered spastically in closing, a reflex of pleasure as she felt the flesh beneath her succumb to the grateful opening of her mouths.
WILL RAN.
The fire escape held him well enough, but he wasn’t sure that his sanity would follow suit. He had kicked out at the hand holding the gun when Trantam was rubbernecking the freak that had come tottering out of his bathroom. Catriona was dead or as near as damn it. He knew that, and the knowledge helped him run faster. If he was to go back he would be dead too, and how would that have made Cat feel? He tore along streets that now possessed a comic familiarity. Usually he would pad back along this lane with the Sunday papers, or cut down this alleyway on his way back from O’Henery’s pub, kicking a can against the wall. Now he scarred these roads of his with fear. He’d not be able to retrace his route in the future without a bad taste in his mouth.
He chanced a look over his shoulder as he fled down Finchley Road, but nothing was coming his way. Traffic was a still concertina, cars aiming for the motorway or fruitlessly attempting to nose south towards the auto graveyard that the city centre had become. Cursing the fact that he didn’t have his mobile on him, and the lack of a police presence in an area usually teeming with them, he jogged to a phone box whose guts had been ripped out. His eyes followed the broken obliques of rain on the glass, splintering the coming and going of white and red lights. He wondered if this numbness was a part of shock; he had never in his life suffered a traumatic moment. No broken bones. His grandparents dead long before he was even aware of what death meant. No operations, no burns, no car accidents…
He tried the phone even though he knew it couldn’t work. He was sitting on the floor of the kiosk, snot and tears dribbling into his mouth as quickly as he could lick them away. He raised his face to a boy in a school uniform slowly obscuring the glass space between them with a can of spray paint. The boy was looking down at him and shaking his head.
MOTION. CHEKE FELT it rolling through her, under her. Warmth seeping into her. She sat next to Gleave who looked dead and grey, flickering in and out of the light that pulsed at the windows. She felt the anger drift off him in similar waves. One eye was lost to a slice of shadow; the other stared flatly at the back of Trantam’s head. She had flinched before the stinging rebuke Trantam had received.
Cheke shifted in her seat, moving against Gleave, and was glad for the arm that enfolded her. The smell of his coat was almost animal. It reassured and encouraged her. She watched the houses stream by the window as they rushed to a place that Gleave had called home. She was like the colour that might otherwise play along these streets; she knew how to lose herself at night, become anonymous, although she couldn’t put her finger on where the knowledge came from, being unable to remember anything beyond what had happened in the last few hours. The illogicality of it distressed her only mildly. Her belly full, her head cushioned by the sublime beating of a friendly heart deep beneath this musky coat, she slept, and dreamed of her abilities as they quickened within her by the second; of what she would be capable when she woke. Of whom she would be capable.
CHAPTER SEVEN: KITCHEN SYNC
HE PREPARED A percolator of coffee while she bathed.
“Don’t you want to know my name?”
The flat was warm, if a little shabby, but the way her shoulders relaxed as she went in before him told him that if she had been feeling any anxiety it had dissipated at the sight of his sofa with a blanket thrown across it, or of the lamp on the table spilling warm colour across the wooden floor, the tired rug in front of the fire. How could anybody feel threatened when there was a picture on the wall of a view from Waterloo Bridge? Where was the danger in a flat where a bag of dolly mixtures was sitting on top of the fridge?
“I’ll guess it. Give me five guesses.”
He shared out the coffee and thought of the way she had stepped over the threshold of each room, her hand moving out to gently grasp the doorjamb, relaxing against the wood as though returning to a pose she had practised many times. Sean had stood behind her while she inspected the rooms. He liked the way he could see her eyelashes when she was in three-quarter profile; her short, brown hair and the fringe that flopped about her forehead; the blended, slightly plump curves of her cheekbones and mouth. She looked boyish and soft, but a hardness danced in her quick green eyes. He found himself wanting to show her his maps of cities from a hundred and fifty years ago and play her a piece of music that he adored in the hope that it would move her too.
“Hannah?”
“No.”
Light bled from a deep crack between the bathroom door and its frame. Carrying her cup, he was halted by the movement of her naked figure across the gap. She was a blur of pink, the flurry that fills a moment of space, but she passed through his mind in intimate detail.
“Fiona?”
“No.”
At the table in a kitchen with a tap that wouldn’t stop dripping, wrapped up in his towelling bathrobe, her hair slicked back, she sipped coffee and listened to him talk about London. It was nice to be in a room with a man and not have him want to wave his dick in her face. And then she surprised herself by opening up to him, telling him things that she could barely acknowledge to herself.
“Mildred?”
“Ugh. Piss off. No.”
For the last six years, since her grandmother had suffered a stroke and needed to be cared for, she’d walked a rut into the backstreets of the town. If she thought about the reams of men and women that had paid her dirty money to sign off her body for a few hours, she’d go mad. So she never thought of them. Well, hardly. Sometimes they’d dip into her sleep, these none-faces, these black ghosts, bruising the meat that they’d hired for a while, emptying themselves across the map of her body, scattering seed across a barren land that could sustain nothing of any warmth or significance any more.
“Isobel?”
“No. Last chance.”
Most of her friends were dead. She’d beaten the odds, staying alive on the streets for this long; life expectancy for prostitutes in the Northwest was dwindling all the time. Tonight it had seemed her turn had come. A saviour was rare, but she wondered how self-seeking his heroics might prove. She studied his face while he took up the conversational baton. He did not judge her; his face had not fallen when she revealed her true colours. It was a good face: angular and tough but something about his eyes and the shape of his lips hinted at vulnerability. It looked like a face that might cry while its owner was killing you.
Sirens looped across the night. A police helicopter, its belly loaded with cameras, striped the night with an acid-white spotlight that stabbed into the ruined flesh of the town, picking over the remains like a glutton at the bones of a roast.