“Dr Anthony Markham?” the police officer asked in the loud, flat voice that almost abolished any need for his uniform.” He and his colleague stepped through the doorway. They looked at me, overlooking Pakeshi, who’d come out of the bedroom with me, and now had vanished straight into the kitchen.
“I thought more of you would be coming,” I said vaguely. “Still, you won’t be needing the boxes.” I nodded towards the kitchen, then paused. “But I think I’d rather wait for Inspector O’Brien to come round,” I added. “I’d like to explain things to him in person.” Indeed, I would. For the first time, I’d be the one to do all the talking. One of the officers turned to close the door.
“Inspector O’Brien has been taken off the case,” he said reassuringly. He turned to his colleague and opened his mouth to speak. Suddenly, they’d frozen, and were looking past me.
“Goodness gracious me, my dear officers!” Pakeshi said in his most bubbling Indian accent. “You cannot possibly take my patient before his tests are complete.” He’d come out from the kitchen, and stood framed in the doorway. He looked at me and then with professional disapproval at his watch.
“And you might be, Sir?” the officer who’d spoken to me asked. Was there a slight tension in his voice—or just annoyance? Pakeshi’s voice was bubbling away with the insistent lilt of a sub-continental carpet salesman.
“I am Dr Markham’s neighbour and physician,” he said with another glance at his watch. “He told me you would be coming for him. But I cannot possibly allow him to leave without completing my examination. Considering the shock of the past twenty four hours, I cannot speak with any surety about the state of his heart.” He took my arm. “Come, my dearest patient,” he said. “The nurse and my colleagues await you in my consulting room next door.” I gave him a confused look and tried to break free. But he had me as if in a steel vice. He led me briskly over to the front door.
“I assure you, officer,” he said, looking back, “my examination will be the work of a moment. Once mine are complete, your own duties may once again be paramount.”
“What, in the name of God, are you about?” I muttered once we were out in the hallway. “I told you—these men are here for the documents, not me.” Pakeshi’s answer was to pull me though his own front door. He closed it softly and put on the main lock.
“My dear Anthony,” he said with a chilly smile. “Since when have the most excellent police of this country gone about in brown suede shoes? Since when have their pockets shown the most suspicious bulges that I saw in your flat?”
“What are you talking about?” I gasped. “Have you gone mad?” There was a sudden rap on the door. Pakeshi propped a chair against the door just under the handle and pulled me into his bedroom.
“Those men are here to kill you,” he hissed with cold passion. “The reason I’ve saved your worthless life is that they would have killed me as well the moment they entered your kitchen. Now, if you want to stay alive, you’ll come with me.” Even before I could see the red flashes, my stomach had turned to ice. He took an overcoat from one of the wardrobes and threw it at me. “Put that on.” He ordered. “Forget about the slippers.”
There was a heavy thump on the door, and then another. This was followed after a few seconds by the crash of a bullet through the door lock, and then a renewed thumping on the door. Pakeshi got the window open and pushed me out onto the fire escape. His own flat was at the end of the corridor, and the bedroom looked over a side street. I stood there alone for a moment, looking down through the painted steel grating at the empty street. As my body warmed its thick cloth, I began to smell the curry on my borrowed overcoat. Then Pakeshi was beside me, a leather briefcase in his hand. He paused for a desperate look back into his flat, as if he’d left something. He might have been about to dash back in, when there was another sound of shooting through his front door. With a mutter of something unpleasant in Hindi, he took my arm and hurried me down the steps. He swore wildly as he strained to get the rusted ladder down to the ground. We’d just got down into the street, when I heard a shout from two floors up. There was another gunshot, and I heard the bullet ricochet from the cobblestones.
“Keep against the wall, you fool!” Pakeshi shouted as he pushed me along towards the opening into Chamberlain Street. There was another gunshot and another ricochet. Then I heard the frantic crash of shoes on the fire escape.
We ran down Chamberlain Street. No surprise that I ran like the wind. But, for all his age and probable weight, Pakeshi more than kept pace with me. As we turned into Westbourne Grove, we hit a group of about a dozen market traders who were rolling out from one of the all night pubs.
“Watch out! Watch out!” one of them shouted as we pushed our way through. “Oh, you bleeding yids and niggers—no manners!” Pakeshi shoved him hard in the chest and his hat fell off. One of his friends bent forward to pick it up, and we hurried through the gap. We raced about twenty yards along the mostly deserted street. A trolley bus was just pulling away as we reached the request stop. Pakeshi jumped onto the open deck and lifted me clean on behind him. If the conductor had bothered looking back, or the driver had looked in his mirrors, two apparent police officers would have been obvious on the road behind us. That would have brought us all to a sudden halt. But neither did look. The men ran heavily after us, shouting and waving. We came to another request stop, but no one flagged us down. The trolley bus hurried along Westbourne Grove towards the eighty floor monstrosity of the Pemberton Tower. I looked back. Far behind us, out pursuers had managed to stop a taxi and were arguing with the driver. The lights we were passing changed suddenly to red, and there was a build up of traffic as if from nowhere.
I reached within the overcoat to the breast pocket of my pyjamas and took out a now crumpled cigarette pocket. I begged a light from the conductor, who gave a funny look at my pyjama trousers. I breathed in the smoke, and waited for the tightness in my lungs to relax and my heart to come back to something approaching normal. Good for me that Pakeshi’s talk of a bad heart was a lie. I slumped into the long seat we’d taken at the back of the trolley bus.
“Who were they?” I asked. Still on his feet, Pakeshi was looking intently back. Without taking his eyes off the still busy road behind us, he pulled out a few coppers and gave them to the conductor.
“Who they are doesn’t presently matter,” he whispered. “What does matter is the guns they seem willing to use even on the streets of London.” He reached over and pulled on the bell cord. “We need to put far more distance than we so far have between them and ourselves.”
We got off by the entrance to George Street Underground Station and hurried down the steps. Pakeshi announced in a purely English accent that he was a doctor on emergency and pushed his way to the front of the queue at the ticket office. With two threepenny tickets, we jumped onto a departing Coronation Line train. I begged another light and smoked in silence all the way to Euston, where we got off.
Euston Road was reassuringly crowded. Dressed in smart hats and coats, the office workers scurried about to coffee bars or to late 9am starts. It wasn’t a cold morning, but the pavement heating was on at full blast, and I could feel its warmth through the soles of my slippers. Keeping close by Pakeshi, I hurried along in the crowds. Far over on the right, obscured by second hand bookstalls, was the entrance to Orwell Street. So far as I did look about, it was to my left. The redevelopment was finally over, and the scaffolding had come down from the gleaming neoclassical facades. On both sides of the road, from Portland Street, all the way to King’s Cross, the new buildings ran in a blaze of magnificence that even a Roman Emperor might have envied. The boundary between the twenty foot pavements and the road was lined with plinths, most already filled with toga-clad statues of the famous dead. One of the new buildings would soon house the offices of Richardson & Co. The Old Man, no doubt, would have been happy to sit forever like the bloated spider he was in the dingy courtyard behind Southampton Row. But Vicky had nagged him into moving, and my second Churchill volume would be their first launch from the new premises.