‘I came,’ she confirms quietly.
‘To get me out.’ It is a statement, not a question. The surprise is that he does not seem surprised she is here.
‘Yes,’ Evie says, turning sharply. The voice seemed to emanate from outside of the enclosure. Beyond the lifts. She reverses nervously until her back is against the glass wall. ‘But I don’t know how.’
‘Not know how?’ Now it comes from her left. From high up. Is he using the ceiling speakers?
‘I am not sure what to do.’
‘This I can help with.’ The voice is right behind her and she spins around as his face materialises from the shadows. His sudden appearance possesses something of the denouement of a mesmerism act.
David glides up to the glass, as sinuous as a panther in a natural history holomentary. His body looms above her on the other side. He is even broader and taller than she recalls and she feels giddy and out of her depth and glad of the barrier. He lays his hand against the glass alongside her own. The splayed fingers are impeccably groomed and taper to rounded tips. They are also twice as thick and long as hers. It feels like the huge open palm could swallow her own whole.
He smiles. His even teeth glisten. Everything about him throbs danger. She is safe with the wall between them but if he was free, he would be able to swat her with his powerful paw, knock her sideways onto the hard, slippery concrete and crush her bones between his perfect teeth.
‘You should not be afraid.’ His lashes leisurely flicker and her spine tingles, licked by his voice.
She cannot look away. She is hypnotised by his slow stare. She has never set eyes on such an exquisite being.
‘If you are to help, you must do so now.’ The clouds in the night sky draw back like a curtain and the sudden light that falls on them from the atrium peels away the ominous blue-tinted shadows to leave his face clearly lit, and she sees in it something she had missed until now. Simplicity and artlessness. Despite the muscularity of his presence, he is actually as nervous, if not more so, than she is. The powerful projection of confidence that had enthralled her is in fact as fragile as a bird’s shell.
‘How will I do it?’ Evie asks. Her sense of self from earlier, which had carried her to this point and which she had allowed to be subsumed, begins to rebuild.
‘There is a gate in the corner. The code for it is in the office behind the corner door. New curators are sent to find it.’
She follows his instructions and discovers a number amateurishly taped to the wall. Returning, she types it into the keypad and a glass panel swings inward. A second later he is beside her, so close his breath lifts the hairs on her neck. However much he is determined to conceal it, Evie senses that he is terrified.
She lets him begin to steer her across the concrete. But almost immediately, reaching the limits of his domain – the extent of the floor that has been in his line of sight – he glances about indecisively.
For a few moments they stand marooned.
‘We should use the back stairs,’ she says, forced to take the lead.
Outside, at the foot of the service ramp, David stares around. Despite his attempt to be brazen, it is transparent that he’s going through a more extreme form of what Evie had on leaving the apartment. Why had she expected more? His world has been even more unnatural than hers – just the interior of one show space after another. She had hoped that a benefit of rescuing him, apart from appeasing her conscience over deserting the mannequins, would be gaining a powerful ally. It is beginning to look instead as though she has encumbered herself with an overgrown child – one that is not even prepared to admit it needs her help.
‘We’re soon going to be among lots of people,’ she says, keeping it simple. ‘We must not draw attention.’ Despite his great size, there is much about him which is naive. She knows so little about him and how he will behave out in the world. What if he panics and becomes violent? Hurts her or attacks people? She could get away from him, perhaps, if she has enough warning, but what if he behaves irrationally or unpredictably? Her failure to spot the psychopath lurking within the geeky Maplin has been a warning of her lack of experience.
‘Stick close to me,’ she says. She has never been in a leadership position and the responsibility has been thrust upon her without preparation. He stiffens and peers at her in the gloom, and for a moment they stare at one another.
Until he blinks and looks down.
Leaving the museum grounds, they reach a road. An alarm sounds behind them. He tenses, ready to run, and she grips his arm. ‘No,’ she says, ‘that is how they will spot us.’ She has learnt at least a little since all this started.
From between the dark trees, a cyclist sweeps between them, bell tinkling, nearly knocking them down, and he is left quaking. The confident demeanour that he maintained in the museum, the armour he presented to the world, nearly completely fallen away. How long will she be able to carry him like this before he gets them both caught?
They cross back over the river, making their way to the town centre.
A police hova glides up behind and she slips her arm through his in an attempt to be inconspicuous.
The hova passes and she relaxes. Brazening it out has succeeded. Maybe everything will work out given a chance.
Then the hova descends sharply to block the pavement, and doors on both sides shoot back.
Evie drags David off the path across the grass. Fortunately, once he is in motion, he moves powerfully.
They leap a low timber barrier, passing between a pair of cottages, and run down a winding narrow path but after fifty yards find it closed off by a tall wall.
Behind them, their pursuers race into view.
Fear swamps her. After everything she has been through, in particular after Matthew and Daniels have both been lost while trying to protect her, she is still going to be caught.
Then she feels David’s hands around her waist and before she can figure out what he is doing, he lifts her eight feet into the air and deposits her on the top of the wall, placing her between the fragments of glass wedged into the cement. He takes a couple of steps back and vaults, catching the top brick, hauling himself over and landing on the other side. Within seconds, he takes hold of her again and, raising her high enough to clear her legs, lowers her smoothly to the ground at his side.
He then leads her splashing across the darkness of the flooded cricket ground beyond.
‘Thank you,’ she says, breathless and amazed, peering up at him as they run through icy water pooled around the pale wickets, trying to read his face as it bobs along above hers in the dark. To understand afresh who it is she is with.
26
Three hours later the train deposits Evie and David at King’s Cross. It is just after midnight. Maplin told her she only had to walk a few yards to St Pancras to get the train to Dover but, standing outside it, looking up at the sooty brick facade and broken windows, she discovers that it shut a year or more ago. There’s a tower on its corner, like a mini-Big Ben, but its clock face is missing leaving a hole in the brickwork like a gouged eye. She reads on a peeling notice that services to the coast now leave from the other side of the river.
She takes David to the entrance to the underground railway but the gates are pulled across. Services in winter no longer run after dark, after the pumps stop. Daniels had told her as much.
Evie needs to concentrate. She needs to know what she knows.
The truth is, she is paranoid about asking something stupid and drawing attention. Is the distance walkable? She doubts it – she knows how huge London is. And anyway she’d have no idea even in which direction to start. She wanders from the tube entrance, passing the mouths of takeaway outlets gushing fumes.