‘I haven’t got anything,’ he said after a while.
She reached sideways into her bag and handed him a Durex. He looked at it, surprised. This was the beginning of the eighties, before AIDS was talked about in England. You hardly ever saw a woman with a condom.
‘I never carried one with me before,’ she said. ‘Only today.’
He believed her, and was flattered.
While they were lying together on the ground, he saw the photographer hurry past, his wild hair flattened against his head, his tripod wrapped in green plastic so that it resembled a piece of light artillery.
A Sunday, years ago. Her beauty.
And now the very different beauty of a girl he’d seen only once in his life. A girl whose picture he carried everywhere with him, like a man in love.
A girl who didn’t even know that he existed.
He walked out of London Bridge Station and turned right, then right again, into the street that ran under the railway. The sun shone into the tunnel, an almost rancid light, revealing dust and filth. A young woman hurried towards him along the narrow pavement, her shadow thrown down in front of her like a joker that would trump whatever card he played. He supposed she must be frightened by the sight of him — his dark clothes, his scar. She didn’t look at him as he stepped into the gutter to let her pass. He noticed she was muttering under her breath. Prayers. So nothing happened to her.
In the daylight on the far side of the tunnel he stood still for a moment, his eyes adjusting. Late afternoon, the sun dropping in a clear blue sky. He moved on, through a housing estate. Block A, Block B. The screams of children from an open first-floor window, a cat slithering beneath a fence.
The shortcut home.
Update Yourself
Barker had opened the window in the lounge so he could listen to the rain landing in the back yard three floors down. After the weeks of hot dry weather, it sounded unfamiliar, exotic. The TV was on, some comedy show. He was only half-watching, his mind elsewhere. He almost didn’t hear the front door. It was late, after eleven. In Plymouth people often called round on the off chance that you might be in. Not in London, though. Then he remembered Pentonville Road in the bright sunshine and Charlton shouting something about Monday week. He couldn’t face the idea of Charlton. He wasn’t in the mood.
Reaching for the remote, he pressed MUTE. He watched a comedian lift his eyebrows, round his mouth into an O, then smile smugly. The door buzzed again. Barker switched the TV off, walked out into the corridor and picked up the entryphone. The small screen flickered on — a grainy picture, black-and-white. The man from the Lebanese restaurant appeared. Lambert, as he called himself. Well, perhaps it wasn’t such a surprise. In a way, Barker supposed he must have been expecting it. Two men stood in the background, only parts of them visible. Shoulders. An ear. Hair. He remembered what Andy, the man who had fitted the entryphone, had said. There’s only two kinds of people who go in for them. Rich people, and people like you. And then he’d said, No disrespect or nothing.
‘Dodds?’
Lambert was standing too close to the camera. The sides of his face sloped away into the darkness. He looked like a fish. Or a plane.
‘Are you there, Dodds?’
‘What is it?’
‘I’d like a word with you. A chat.’
‘There are three of you.’
‘Well, I’d hardly come down here alone, would I. Not to this neck of the woods.’ Lambert smiled, which looked awful, horrific. His mouth bent backwards at the corners. No chin. ‘I just want to have a little chat with you,’ he was saying. ‘Show you a video.’
‘What video?’
Lambert held up a cassette. ‘I thought you might be interested. I thought it might help.’
Barker stood back, thinking.
‘It’d be nice if you let us in now,’ Lambert said. ‘We’re getting wet out here.’
Barker pressed the entry buzzer and watched the top of the men’s heads as they passed beneath the camera’s steady gaze. Then just darkness, the crackle of the rain. He had about a minute and a half before they knocked on the door. He walked into the kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept his cutlery. He didn’t like the kind of people who used knives. Still, this was no time to get precious. He heard three pairs of feet on the stairs. He went to the front door, the knife in his left sleeve, its blade lying flush against the inside of his wrist. Though he had known something like this was going to happen, he hadn’t bothered to prepare for it. He wondered how bad it was going to be.
When he opened the door, Lambert was staring at the floor. Two men stood behind him, running their hands through their hair, shaking the water off their coats.
‘Sorry to keep you standing outside like that.’ Barker listened to his voice. He didn’t sound sorry. ‘I have to be careful.’
‘Don’t we all, Barker,’ Lambert said.
The three men moved past him, into the flat.
‘The lounge is on your left,’ Barker said, closing the door.
He followed them into the room. They were already sitting down, Lambert in the armchair by the gas fire, the other two on the sofa. All three seemed oddly comfortable, at home. They were staring into the fire, as if it had been lit, and Barker could suddenly imagine winter — the curtains drawn, a row of small mauve flames.
‘Anyone fancy a beer?’ he said.
Lambert looked up, but didn’t say anything. The other two didn’t react at all.
Barker fetched himself a beer from the kitchen. When he returned to the lounge, nothing had changed. The air smelled strongly of wet cloth.
‘So what’s the video?’ he said. ‘New release?’
Lambert leaned forwards, his elbows on his knees. ‘We have a problem,’ he said.
Barker waited.
‘It’s been two weeks and nothing’s happened. Two weeks since you received the envelope —’
‘I’m working on it.’ Barker lifted the beer bottle to his mouth and drank. It occurred to him that he was holding a weapon in his hand. He wondered if it had occurred to Lambert.
‘You read the material?’
‘Of course.’
‘There was talk of urgency, if I remember rightly.’
Barker nodded.
‘Two weeks,’ and Lambert looked up and a gap opened between his hands.
‘There was also talk of being discreet,’ Barker said, ‘if I remember rightly.’
He sensed something flash through Lambert, invisible but lethal, like electricity in water: the suspicion that he was being taken too lightly, that he was being mocked. In future, Lambert would be easier to remember. For the first time Barker was worried. He knew what kind of situation he was in. Usually you only saw a man like Lambert once. Twice was almost unheard of. And certainly there would never be a third encounter.
‘She went up north,’ he said, in his own defence. ‘It took me by surprise.’
On Saturday morning he had followed Glade to Victoria Coach Station, of all places, and he had stood in the queue while she paid for a ticket to Blackburn. When he tried to buy a ticket for the same bus, they told him it was full. There would be another bus in two hours’ time, they said — but that was no use to him, of course, no use whatsoever. He had been forced to watch from the shadows as the bus lurched past him, the girl out of reach, maybe for ever, her face sealed behind a sheet of tinted glass.
‘Is she back now?’ Lambert asked.
Barker nodded. ‘She came back yesterday.’