Geoffrey nodded, but his eyes belied the gesture. He stroked his wife’s hair gently, kissed her on the cheek and let her lead him from the kitchen.
8
Edgware Road. Ten o’clock, Friday night
THE WHISKY WAS doing the trick now.
It always did, when he could get enough of it. And that was bloody rare. Sodding London! Too many fake immigrants with dogs and babies messing up the game. Only for him it wasn’t a game. People took him for a scammer too, though. Bloody Eastern Europeans — he’d spit on them. He’d blood their noses! Them and the bloody Big Issue nonces. Spoiling it for Bible. Spoiling it for all the real people. The civilians didn’t know better now. They couldn’t tell the Pharisees — the separated ones — from the Pharaohs, and who was to blame them! But it was he and the rest of them who suffered. Separated, right enough. They might be beloved of God, but you couldn’t tell it on the streets of London.
‘For I tell you,’ he shouted and waved his grimy fist in front of him, the people on the streets parting around him like waves before a prow, ‘that unless your righteousness exceeds that of scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven!’
He slumped against the window of McDonald’s and took a ragged breath. There was a buzzing in his head building now, and he half-mumbled, half-sang along to the rhythm of it. He moved his head slightly from side to side as he did so, bloodshot eyes peering through nearly closed eyelids. He liked it when his head buzzed. It blocked out his thoughts and his feelings, such as they were. Truth to tell, Bible Steve, as he was known on the streets, didn’t feel a great deal any more. Except cold. The last couple of winters had been brutal, and this one looked like it was going to be no better, before it was done with him. Maybe would do for him, because the worst of it still lay ahead, if he was any judge. He tilted his head and looked up at the night sky, his singing turning into a gurgle as he took another sip of medicine and grunted as he stumbled further down the road, heading in the direction of Marble Arch. The snow that had been promised all week might come at last. Which at least meant it would be warmer than it had been for a good long while. Last week it had been too cold to snow, people had said — a ridiculous thing, but seemingly true. And cold it had been right enough, cold so that friends of his had died right there on those very streets. Frozen solid and immobile where they lay in doorways and alleys. Curled up like rimed leaves, their eyelashes white and brittle, their lips blue.
Not that Bible Steve had friends, as such. Just people like him. Living rough. Inner-city flotsam and jetsam. Human beings washed up on the tide of indifference, to seek shelter where they could and oftentimes finding none. Their bodies like the frozen statues in Narnia, only no shaggy lion’s breath was going to bring them back, thought Bible Steve. Then he blinked and the notion had gone from his mind. He shook his head again angrily and grunted, looking behind him suspiciously as if some thief of thoughts had stolen his memories.
‘Wassat?’ he said, but there was no reply. Steve looked forward again, but no one was there, and the person who had been speaking to him in his thoughts was from a time long before. A lifetime ago.
He shivered his shoulders a little to generate some warmth and took another hit from his bottle.
The whisky helped. The whisky always helped Bible. Some said it made him violent, but if it did, he could never remember anyway. Maybe it was the wild Celtic ancestry in him as much as the rough liquor? Sometimes he did feel himself getting angry for no reason, rageful. The buzzing in his head turning from a melody into a storm of locusts, their wings chittering and chattering. It would come out of the blue, the anger building in him like steam in an engine, so that he would explode if he didn’t do something. Maybe that was why he drank? Maybe that was why he turned to the stuff in the first place? Did it dull the rage or fuel it? He couldn’t remember. What he did know was that the alcohol made him oblivious, untouchable, eventually blissfully unconscious. He held the cold bottle to his lips once more and felt the harsh liquid burn down his throat like a cleansing fire. He coughed and shivered, the shiver turning into a trembling that he couldn’t stop. He dragged the rough fibre of his coat sleeve across his mouth and sat down on the pavement, his back propped against the cold brick of an empty building.
‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’ he said and took another sip of whisky, but it did nothing to stop the tremors of his battered body, and even less to stem the darkness that was building now in his mind.
‘Vengeance,’ he said again. Then he looked up at the moon and shook his fist at it. ‘Vengeance!’ He shouted it a third time and then stumbled to his feet once more. ‘An eye for an eye, a life for a life!’
9
White City Police Station, west London. Ten-fifteen, Friday night
DR LAURA CHILVERS was a striking-looking woman.
She was just under five foot nine inches tall in her flat-heeled shoes. She had her hair cut in a platinum bob, with a muscular, fit, but womanly figure; she wore little make-up, but didn’t need to. She had a luminescence to her skin and a natural beauty that shone. Her eyes were Nordic blue and her smile dazzled. When she walked into or out of a room all eyes turned on her. If she was aware of it she made no sign. Few men dared to ask her out and, if they did, they were wholly unsuccessful. Laura Chilvers was gay. One hundred per cent all-the-way sister. The waste of it was often the subject of frustrated speculation by most of the male policemen at the station (never the bastion of political correctness), over their breaktime cups of tea and bacon sandwiches. And by quite a few of the women too, but not all.
As it was, Dave Matthews, a happily married man, just smiled warmly at Laura when she handed some paperwork over to him as he stood behind the custody desk. ‘Busy night again,’ he said.
‘Friday as well,’ agreed the police surgeon. ‘Which means it is only going to get worse. A lot worse.’
‘How late are you on?’
‘Couple of hours, then off.’
‘Home to bed?’
Laura circled her fists and shimmied her hips a little. ‘On a Friday night? You’ve got to be joking, Sergeant!’ she said. ‘Friday night is down-and-dirty night, it’s clubbing night. You better believe I’ll be seeing the dawn in.’
‘Who’s she, then? The new girlfriend?’
‘That’s funny, Dave,’ she said, deadpan. ‘You’re not a clubbing man, I take it?’
‘What, with these bunions? Why do you think they put me behind a desk so often? Too many years pounding the streets. Tough on crime — tough on feet!’
Laura laughed. ‘Rubbish! You play rugby for the Met. I bet you could still work the dance floor.’
‘I wouldn’t be putting your mortgage on it. The last disco I went to was at school when I was sixteen and copped off with the future Mrs Slimline. You couldn’t pay me to dance.’
‘You wouldn’t want to,’ said Kate Walker, laughing, as she came into the custody area holding three mugs of tea. ‘You didn’t see him at the talent contest a few months ago.’
‘This the one when Smiling Jack Delaney did his Johnny Cash impression?’
‘That’s it.’ Kate smiled herself at the memory. ‘Dave here was trying to bust some moves on the dance floor. Ended up busting the table he landed on!’
‘I was not dancing, I was being jostled by a group of overexcited WPCs! Quite a different matter.’
Laura laughed as her mobile rang. She fished it out of her pocket and answered it. ‘Laura Chilvers?’ she said and her smile vanished. ‘No! I can’t do that. Look, I’ll see you later, okay?’ She snapped the phone shut.