‘And now he’s going down for what he did to PC Sykes,’ Whitestone said. ‘Which is a tragedy for the Sykes family and for George himself. He might have got out from behind that rickshaw and done something with his life.’
‘You never know,’ I said.
‘And how are you doing?’ Whitestone said.
My knee ached when the weather turned cold. My ribs were bruised. My intercostal muscles – the ones that lift the ribcage every time you breathe in and out – felt like they were torn. Some of my nerve ends still rattled and jangled and jumped about with a will of their own, sparking with the afterglow of the 50,000 volts of power that had recently passed through them.
But the last of the summer sunshine was shining on my city. Scout was coming home. Our dog Stan had long, good years to live. And Edie was at her workstation and already packing her bag because it was a slow day at the office. She smiled at me and ran her fingers through her red hair.
‘Never been better, boss,’ I said.
37
We were in Edie’s one-bedroom flat above a junk shop on the cheap side of Highbury Corner. She was all boxed up and ready to go. Today was the day we started living together.
The removal men had just left and we would not see them again until Charterhouse Street, when we met them outside the block of flats directly opposite the main entrance of the old meat market.
Outside our home.
Edie sealed the duct tape on a cardboard box of CDs and books and turned to face me.
‘Are you sure about this, Max?’
‘Let me think,’ I said.
I touched my mouth against her mouth.
The fit was uncanny. I mean, I doubt if there was another pair of mouths in the world that fit together quite so well.
‘But we’ll be one of those families,’ she said, pulling away. ‘We’ll be blended! I know Scout likes me but maybe not so much when I’m at the breakfast table.’
I pulled her close again. Everything fit. Not just our mouths. Sometimes you just know where you belong. And when you know – really know – where you belong, then you don’t need to know anything else.
‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘That’s what we’ll be.’ I kissed her one last time. ‘Now let’s go home, Edie.’
We carried the few remaining boxes down to the old BMW X5.
The street was empty apart from a woman in a full black burka walking down the middle of the road, carrying a pink and purple rucksack in her right hand, an Angry Princess bag, the bright splash of childish purple and pink colours standing out starkly against the funereal robes.
The curve her face – or what I could see of it – was familiar.
Because the woman was Layla Khan.
And I had seen that rucksack before.
I had seen it on that first day in Borodino Street.
And I saw it all clearly at last, I saw what had been there all along, staring me in the face, and I knew it was true even before Layla reached into the rucksack.
‘Max?’ Edie said. ‘That’s Layla, isn’t it?’
She began to walk towards the girl.
And I knew now how the two Croatian hand grenades had left the house on Borodino Street. I knew with complete certainty that Azza Khan had stuffed them into the merchandise of last summer’s Hollywood hit animated movie, and that she had carried them out in The Angry Princess bag through the armed officers ushering them to safety.
‘Get back inside,’ I called to Edie.
But she had already left me and now she was walking slowly towards the figure in black.
They drew closer. They stopped. They faced each other, close enough to reach out and touch.
‘Layla,’ Edie said.
‘We destroy your buildings,’ she said.
There was something in her hands.
In both of her hands.
They looked like death – black, lattice-faced spheres with a gold-coloured handle and ring pull, identical to a key ring. I was not close enough to read the name of the manufacturer on the side. But I knew what it said. Cetinka, it said, on those two grenades that should have been destroyed at the end of someone else’s war twenty years ago.
‘Edie!’ I screamed.
‘But you destroy our countries,’ Layla said.
‘This is your country,’ Edie said, and I saw her wrap her arms around Layla Khan with infinite tenderness, hugging her as Layla Khan removed the pins from first one Croatian grenade and then the other.
The sunlight caught the metal pins as they bounced on the sun-baked concrete of the little street.
Edie held her tight and smiled into Layla’s face, but I no longer recognised that face, it was someone I had never seen, the poison was in her now, and then I was thrown backwards without hearing the first explosion, or the second explosion, only the muffled sound of the air being forced asunder with astonishing violence, and then the echo of the rendering, like the sound of a door being slammed a thousand miles below the earth.
I was on my back.
I could hear what I first thought was falling rain, and then realised it was the sound of breaking glass dropping from shattered window panes the length of the street.
I looked around.
The broken bodies of the two women lay together in the middle of the road. A patch of red hair fell across the ghost white face of Edie Wren. I called her name, and it was a noise that came from a place inside me that I did not know existed, and it was the cry of something that had been smashed beyond repair.
And at last I began to crawl.
38
The hospital was never silent, never dark, never sleeping.
Even in the small hours, long after they had doled out the medication to get us through until dawn, there was the still yellow twilight of the hospital lights coming from the nurses station and the corridor, and there were still the noises that pulled me from my drugged and feverish sleep, like sounds from the underworld.
The moans and the snoring of the sleeping. The groans and gasps of the distressed who were awake or asleep or somewhere in between. The murmured voices and soft laughter of the nurses at their station and the urgent slap-slap-slap of their rubber soles on the polished floors.
And worst of all was the shattered soundtrack inside my head.
I moved my weight to ease the pain in my legs that kept breaking through the fog of morphine and the only way that I knew for certain that I sometimes slept were the dreams that I glimpsed sliding away from consciousness upon the instant of waking.
Fred was there, inside my head, approaching the bed with his long hair pulled up in a topknot, and his wicked pirate’s grin on his face.
‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he said.
And Mrs Murphy was there at some point in the night, when there was unbroken darkness in the world outside with only the soft gloaming of the hospital lights to guide her.
Mrs Murphy sat in the one seat of my small room and she turned her head towards me, Stan asleep at her feet. ‘You’ll have a cup of tea with your dinner,’ she predicted. And Sergeant John Caine came out of the shadows of the Black Museum, Room 101, New Scotland Yard.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.
Then I slept some more and when I came round Jackson was there, the lone chair pulled up to my bedside. He patted my arm and I caught my breath, understanding that my oldest friend was really here and not inside my head.