‘I’m not a slut,’ Izzy said.
‘No.’
‘When I don’t have a partner, I still have a need to get laid every once in a while. I don’t think that’s a crime.’
‘When you don’t have a partner,’ Kennedy said, ‘then no, it isn’t. But you’ve got me.’
‘And it was a shitty thing to do, and I cried, and I said I was sorry — and I kicked the poor guy out without his shoes, if I remember right.’
‘But on the upside, he got to keep his balls.’
Izzy grinned faintly at that, although Kennedy wasn’t joking. If she’d still had her ARU licence, still had her gun, she might have done something stupid. She could picture it very easily. More easily than she could get her head around what actually happened, which was that she stood there like a deer on the freeway and watched the knock-kneed little jerk haul his pants on, looking from her to Izzy and back again like he was trying to work out some equation in his head and he kept getting the square root of huh?
‘I don’t know what else I can do,’ Izzy resumed. ‘If you would’ve just unfrozen and let me back in, I think maybe I could have convinced you that I really do love you — and that a roll under the duvet with Shoeless Joe Jackson wasn’t ever going to change that. But you didn’t, so I couldn’t, and here we are.’ Her eyes were bright with tears by the time she finished this speech. One of them was starting to roll down her cheek.
‘Wherever here is,’ Kennedy said.
‘Babe, we both know exactly where here is.’
Kennedy stood. They both had unfinished drinks, but the thought of having to carry on with the conversation just in order to finish them was suddenly unbearable. ‘I’ll sleep downstairs tonight,’ she said, like someone saying the time of death was 11.43 p.m. ‘I’ll come and get my stuff tomorrow.’
‘Or else we go back right now,’ Izzy said, ‘and I screw you so hard your brain melts and you don’t remember what you were even mad at me for.’
‘I …’ Kennedy couldn’t find any words. ‘Izzy …’
‘No,’ Izzy said, holding up her hands in surrender. ‘No need. No worries. I just thought it needed to be said. Do what you feel, Heather. And you hold that moral high ground against all comers, okay? You’ll be fine so long as the oxygen holds out.’
The last words were hard to make out because she was crying so hard. Izzy turned and headed quickly for the door, ricocheting off an empty chair, then barging a guy whose expansive gestures put his almost-full pint directly in her path. The man’s arm shook and beer slopped onto the floor.
‘Clumsy bitch!’ he shouted after her. ‘Don’t bloody drink it if you can’t handle it.’
It was the sort of blunt-edged insult that Kennedy normally found easy to ignore. Normally, but not tonight. She took hold of the top of his glass and tipped it so that the rest of the pint was dumped over his END OF THE ROAD T-shirt. Then she brought her face up close to his. ‘Words to live by,’ she said.
The guy was still yelling as she left the pub and she half-expected him to follow her, but the look in her eyes as she stared him down had probably been a pretty scary one. There were no footsteps behind her.
And no Izzy up ahead.
Kennedy looked around, bewildered. She’d only been twenty seconds behind, and the street was clear in both directions. To the left, where Izzy should have gone, scaffold sheeting flapped around the fascia of the Windsor Court Hotel, whose SOON TO OPEN UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT sign was itself now in need of renovation. To the right, silent Georgian terraces extended into the middle distance, their doors raised above street level by steep arcades of steps, like a chorus line of dancing girls lifting their dresses to do a can-can.
The scrape of a heel on stone made her turn back towards the hotel, and this time she saw what she had missed. There was a body lying on the ground there, half-under the scaffolding that covered the whole front of the building.
Kennedy cried out and ran. In seconds she was kneeling beside the still form. It was Izzy, lying on her back, arms and legs asymmetrically sprawled. Her head was in deep shadow, but Kennedy knew her by a hundred other signs.
Don’t move the body, she told herself. And the implications of that thought broke over her like a wave. The body. Oh shit. Oh shit. She felt for a pulse, found one, though it seemed weak. She looked for wounds and saw nothing.
‘Izzy,’ she babbled. ‘Sweetheart, what happened?’ She was rubbing Izzy’s hand between hers, trying to wake her. ‘What happened to you?’
Izzy didn’t move or speak. She was deeply unconscious.
Kennedy got out her phone. She was dialling 999 when the scaffolding behind her head rattled, giving out a tinny music in the way that the vibrating rails next to a Tube platform announce the imminent arrival of a train.
She looked up. Over their heads, something black and angular was growing to eclipse the baleful street-lamp glow against which it was defined.
There was an instant in which to act, not time enough, really, except that Kennedy suddenly knew what this was and saw the punchline coming from a thousand Warner Bros cartoons. She threw herself on top of Izzy, gripped the lapels of her shabby-chic Marc-Jacob-alike leather jacket and rolled them both sideways with a furious, simultaneous shrug of every muscle she could enlist.
They did one complete roll, Izzy on top of her, beside her, then under her again. Right next to them, something struck the pavement like a colossal fist, the slap of impacted air hitting Kennedy full in the face. She gasped and her mouth filled with something thick and soft like talcum powder. An instant blizzard enveloped them both.
Through it, eventually, she heard voices. ‘Holy shit.’
‘My God, did you see?’
Kennedy tried to wave away the drifts and roils of white that were blinding and choking her. It had a bitter taste and it stung her eyes. As she levered herself upright, she felt a fine cakey dust crunch under her fingers. Hands came from both sides, helping her to her feet. People she vaguely recognised from the pub supported her arms, dusted off her clothes. ‘Your friend,’ someone exclaimed. ‘Is she …’
‘I don’t …’ Kennedy coughed, spat, tried again. ‘I don’t know how badly she’s hurt. Call an ambulance. Please!’
There was a flurry of cellphones, everyone rummaging in bags and pockets and then drawing at once like the climax of a bad western.
Freed from the grip of the good Samaritans, Kennedy knelt again to examine Izzy, careful not to move her spine. The white powder, whatever it was, was settling on her face. Gently brushing it away, Kennedy found the contusion on Izzy’s temple, already swelling, where she’d been hit. Horror filled her, and then white-hot anger.
She looked at what had fallen on them — or almost on them. It was lying a scant few inches from Izzy’s head: a builder’s pallet, with twelve sacks of cement piled on it, loosely tied with a single loop of rope. Some of the bags had ruptured. That was what was floating in the air and insinuating itself into their lungs.
It was the sort of thing that could look like a terrible accident, but clearly it was nothing of the kind. It was an ambush, hastily but efficiently improvised. Presumably the original plan had been to catch the both of them as they left the Cask and walked home together. But Izzy had left first, and the fact that she’d been enlisted as bait made it absolutely clear that Kennedy herself was the real target.
She looked up at the scaffolding above their heads. Nothing moved there, and it seemed unlikely that whoever had dropped the pallet had stayed to watch the after-effects. There was a ladder running up the side of the scaffolding to the first floor. That was probably how their unseen attacker had got up there. But he certainly hadn’t come down again that way.