The box, about the size of a shoebox, was a switch for about seventy optical cables carrying data from points and signals between London and Land’s End. The explosion, achieved by drilling a hole into the switch’s casing and then pouring in gunpowder obtained by opening up fireworks, was so discreet that it was only discovered the following morning when engineers located the cable break and went to repair it. At roughly the same time, a very vague and barely-literate press release claiming responsibility for the outrage began to make the rounds. Hardly anyone had ever heard of the culprits before, and no one ever heard of them again.
The signal break didn’t stop trains altogether, but it caused delays for an hour or so until a workaround was sorted out, and that caused a knock-on effect which meant that the six forty-five from Padstow, due to arrive in Paddington at ten o’clock, did not actually get into Paddington until almost midnight. Seth, lugging his weekend bag down the platform with the rest of the disgruntled passengers, avoided the enormous scrum at the taxi rank, left the station altogether, and walked down to the big hotels near the bottom of the Edgware Road, where there were always taxis aplenty. He waved one cab down as it made to pull into the rank beside the Marriott, slung his bag inside, and settled back against the seat with his eyes closed.
IT WAS VERY nearly one in the morning when Seth paid off the taxi outside his building in Farringdon and dragged his bag tiredly up the stairs. Kids from the local council estate had managed to bypass the street door’s lock again and they’d smashed all the lightbulbs on Seth’s landing. He could feel the glass crunch under his feet as he walked along by the dim light of his phone’s screen, and he made a note to tear a strip off the building’s security in the morning.
Outside his door, there also seemed to be something sticky mixed up with the glass. Seth grumbled to himself and unlocked the front door and stepped inside and immediately fell over something lying on the floor in the hallway.
Swearing at the top of his voice now, Seth got up and tried the hall light switch, but it didn’t seem to work so he took his phone out again and turned on its screen and by the light from that he saw Lewis lying on his back on the floor, his eyes open, a little black hole in his forehead and his face distorted as if it had been badly inflated. Under his head and shoulders was a big puddle of a dark liquid, which had run out under the door and onto the landing.
Seth’s mind refused to process any of this.
Nor would it process the hunched figure lying half in and half out of Lewis’s bedroom doorway, the barrette which had once been in its hair now tumbled against the skirting just outside the kitchen.
He heard glass crunch, behind him.
He turned and saw a dark figure detach itself from the shadows of the doorway opposite. By the light from his phone he saw that it was wearing tight-fitting dark clothing and carrying what appeared to be a pistol with a very long barrel. The figure raised the pistol and gestured with it and Seth raised his hands above his head. Another gesture, and Seth took a step back down the hallway as the gunman reached the doorway and raised the gun and pointed it at his head.
There was a soft coughing noise, and the top third of the dark figure’s head fountained off in a pattering spray of droplets and bits of bone and tissue. For a fraction of a second, the body remained upright, then its knees unlocked and it crumpled to the floor.
Seth stayed where he was, hands above his head, face spattered with gore.
After a few moments, another figure moved into the doorway. This figure was also holding a gun.
“Anyone else?” the figure asked.
Seth shrugged.
“I didn’t see anyone else about.” The figure stepped into the flat and nudged the gunman’s body with a toe. “Jesus Maria,” he said. “What a mess.” Now Seth could see him properly, he could see he was of medium height, quite unremarkable-looking. Unlike the gun he was holding, which looked like something knocked together in someone’s shed from bits and pieces of garden equipment, bits of hose and short lengths of two-centimetre copper piping.
He looked at Seth. “Put your hands down,” he said, and he closed the door behind him. “Is there anything in here you absolutely can’t live without?”
Seth shook his head and lowered his hands.
“Okay. Get changed, wash your face and get a coat. And hurry.”
Seth tipped his head to one side. “And you are…?”
His unremarkable-looking saviour looked at him. He shrugged, and that weird improvised-looking gun seemed to disappear into the folds of his coat.
“Call me Leo,” he said.
THERE WAS A battered old Espace parked around the corner, and Leo had the key. Seth allowed himself to be put into the front passenger seat, watched himself do up the seat belt, watched through the windscreen as the early-morning streets began to unroll in front of him. He felt as if his life had suddenly become something he was watching from outside. He was faintly aware that he was trembling.
“That shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry it did,” Leo said, navigating them around the tricky one-way system and late-night pavement-diving drunks of King’s Cross.
Seth turned his head to look at the unassuming young man, found that he was quite unable to speak.
Leo glanced at him, then had to perform an emergency stop as a cab launched itself from the kerb without signalling in front of them. He did not, though, hammer the flat of his hand on the middle of the steering wheel in order to sound the horn, as another driver might. He muttered a few words Seth didn’t recognise, and let the cab go.
“One day,” he said to himself, “I’m going to come back here and revenge myself on the fucking drivers in this town.” His English was excellent, almost Received Pronunciation, but he had a faint accent Seth couldn’t place.
Seth said, “I’m going to be sick.”
Leo got the car stopped at the side of the road and helped Seth out and over to the mouth of an alleyway, where Seth threw up what felt like everything he had ever eaten and then knelt with his cheek pressed against the rough brickwork of a wall, sobbing while the world yawed and pitched around him.
Then he was in the car again, without remembering getting back in, and unfamiliar streets were opening up ahead of him in the streetlights and the red lights of vehicles ahead of him stretched up into a terrible unknown distance and Leo was talking again.
“I tried,” he was saying. “I tried to keep you all away from the flat, but I was having to improvise and it didn’t work. Your friends… I’m sorry. It didn’t work.”
Seth opened his mouth to say something, but all that emerged was a hopeless exhalation. He wondered if he would ever stop shaking.
“I owe you an explanation, at the very least,” Leo said, but then he seemed lost for words because he didn’t say anything for quite a long time. They reached a large traffic junction with a big pub in the middle of it and Seth realised they were at Archway. Leo navigated them around the junction and onto the Archway Road, up onto the long hill northward out of London towards Highgate.
“I’ve become involved in something… complicated,” Leo said as they passed under the great iron bridge that carried Hornsey Road high above the Archway Road. “I don’t know what it is, and in order to make any sense at all of it I need to get back to mainland Europe. And I need a legend.”
Seth turned his head and looked at Leo.
Leo glanced at him ruefully. “I used to date the Rokeby Venus,” he said. When Seth just stared at him he said, “I’m afraid this whole thing is a bit off-piste.”