Daniels buys himself a mug, holding it in his stiff hands, allowing the steam to condense on his cheeks. Evie stands behind him, trying to make herself inconspicuous but nevertheless attracting the attention of the horse which startles her by putting its whiskered chin on her shoulder and breathing over her face.
‘Maisy’s curious about you, Miss,’ the man says. ‘Sure you won’t be fancying a wee tot yourself?’
Evie shakes her head, nervously stroking the horse’s rough mane and patting his firm, warm neck. She has never touched an animal before and the vigour of life throbbing under its skin leaves her feeling like a sham.
‘You’ve made a friend there, you have!’ the man says, as the horse licks her cheek. ‘She likes sweet things.’
The last stage of their journey is along a canal.
Her energy levels are at critical. A small light which had been flashing amber in the corner of her vision turns solid red and she holds Daniels’s arm as she walks, resting against his side.
It is a heavier cold in the shadows and he uses his free hand to draw his scarf up around his ears. ‘This is Limehouse Cut,’ he says, ‘we’re on the last leg. We’ll soon be in Bow. Think you can manage?’
She nods weakly, while the nursery rhyme – ‘I do not know, says the great bell of Bow’ – rings in her head.
The towpath, no more than six or seven feet wide, gives straight onto the water. She peers over nervously. The bright algae coating the surface casts a phosphorescent glow over the snow heaped on the bank.
In places, narrowboats are moored to posts, twisted barbed wire protecting the occupants from incursion.
Buildings line the towpath. Many were once apartments but are now derelict, boarded up and covered in graffiti.
‘Why does no one live in them any more?’ she asks. The place would be less scary, less ghostly, if there were signs of human occupation, a curtain at a window, the occasional light.
‘Oh there’ll be people living there all right, you just can’t see them, but they’d not be the sort we’d be wanting to meet!’
Occasional road bridges cross over the water, the low headroom forcing Daniels to bend. Evie limps beside him, dragging her feet through the snow.
A loud siren on the road above sounds and they look up sharply but it as quickly dies. Daniels sucks in a deep breath and glances over at her. ‘Not far now,’ he murmurs.
She doesn’t have much more to give. Simon has not spoken for an hour and even then he was almost too faint for her to understand. All of her secondary systems are in standby.
The morning light illuminates the upper walls of the buildings but at ground level, the air remains below freezing and the snow bears a brittle crust which cracks under her shoes.
‘What will you tell your daughter as to why we are here?’ Evie asks.
‘I’m not sure. It’s unfair to involve her more than we must. Less she knows the better.’ His breath clouds around his face, the wasteful warmth of it another of those little signs of being alive.
‘How long will we stay?’
‘Just time for you to rest. Is till evening long enough?’
She nods. Rest, she thinks, what a pleasant notion. ‘A few hours will be sufficient,’ she says. Then after a pause, ‘You think they will come looking for us out here? You think they really want me so much?’
‘Having gone to the lengths they’ve gone to, I can’t see them giving up now. I think they will try to find Iz’s as somewhere I might take you. She’s fetched herself off-grid but no one can disappear completely. I guess it depends who they really are and what access they have to government databases.’
‘But he was police,’ she says.
‘He may have been, if the card wasn’t forged. But if he’d been properly on police business, he wouldn’t have come on his tod.’
‘Maybe he was working alone and now that he’s dead, the threat is over.’
‘It’s possible. But then how would he have known about you, if others weren’t in on it?’
Evie is still struggling to comprehend how it is she has become so important to whoever these people are, but the evidence is abundant and she trusts Daniels’s judgement. Simon’s fear that she would end up under the auctioneer’s hammer was way off the mark; rather she realises that she is a black-market commodity like illegal ivory from an extinct elephant or rhino. Better for her if she’d been slain in the apartment. Got it over with. Better for her if she could have climbed onto her husband’s funeral pyre like an Indian princess and been burned to ashes beside his body. ‘Where is Matthew’s cottage?’ she asks, making an effort to lift her spirits. Talking consumes only a little energy and distracts her from the demons inside.
‘Out near a village called Little Wotton.’
‘Little Wotton,’ she says. ‘It sounds quaint.’
‘It’s quaint all right. It’s small and basic and the roof leaks but it has solar power and a well and it will give us time to decide our next move.’
‘It doesn’t strike me as his sort of thing.’ She can only imagine Matthew in the climate-controlled apartment and its well-ordered garden. And now laid out as a corpse on his own mattress.
‘It wasn’t. He bought it as a gift for Evelyn because she was so taken by the country around those parts. He was going to present it as a wedding gift, but then that didn’t happen and the only person who has gone there since is myself to make sure it doesn’t fall down.’
While they talk they completely miss the small boys, a pair of twelve-year olds, following. Evie hears the faint snap of a twig under the snow. Looking behind, she squeezes Daniels’s elbow and they turn to face them.
The boys are dressed in oversized jumpers belted at the waist, and torn jeans tucked into army boots. Their pale, malnourished little faces are fringed with soft curly hair. For a moment she wonders if they are girls dressed up.
‘Got any money, mister?’ one says, the voice scratchy and high-pitched. She would have felt pity for them, having a soft spot for Dickensian orphans, but she has spied that they are hiding behind their backs lengths of wood.
Daniels shakes his head. ‘Get lost, lads,’ he says, drawing himself up to his full height, ‘we’ve nothing for you.’ Gripping Evie by the wrist, he takes a step back.
The boys glance at one another. Surprise has been lost and they need to adapt their plan. They bring their weapons around – pieces of two by two, one with nails in the end and the other wrapped with some kind of electrical tape to form a primitive cattle prod. One of the boys puts his fingers to his lips and whistles. The shrill sound pierces the damp air, rebounding off the blank windows of the abandoned apartments.
Daniels pulls her against him and, half-turning so that he can keep an eye on the boys, leads her away along the canal path. She leans on his arm like a cripple, her feet dragging in the snow, slurring a channel. If it comes to it, she could achieve a final burst of energy. She has her fast sprint – one respect at least in which she is superior to Evelyn. But she’d not make it much beyond fifty yards before she was spent.
Three more boys slip from a doorway of the dilapidated block ahead. Two are a similar size to the ones behind and armed likewise with handmade weapons. The third is older – tall and gangly with a pillar-box mouth – and carries a pole topped with a serrated spike like a harpoon. He tilts his head and the group fans out, blocking the path in front and behind. He folds his arms and grins, leering at Evie, licking the gaps in his teeth. There is something wrongly developed in his lumpish jaw and swollen lips.
The smaller boys close in, holding their weapons out in bony fists.