PART THREE
THE HAMMER
19
Southampton Row at half-past seven in the morning was already busy. Shops had their shutters half-raised so employees could limbo underneath and start stacking shelves. Upmarket cafés and breakfast bars were packed with early birds heading for the shops and offices of the West End, cheaper ones with tired cleaners and security staff clocking off from night shifts.
Kennedy walked between them, a transient, belonging neither to the night world nor the day. Fatigue and fretfulness distanced her from everything. She felt as though the surface of her brain had been roughly polished up with a scouring pad, and that this process had loosened it enough in her skull for it to jar when she walked.
She’d left Izzy’s the night before with nothing but the clothes she was wearing. Both of her attackers were still profoundly unconscious, and Samal in particular looked like he’d need a lot of medical attention if he was ever going to play the piano again — or form a sentence with more than one syllable in it. But Kennedy’s nerves were shot and she couldn’t bring herself to pack a suitcase with the two men lying there, stepping over their inert bodies as she hunted out her own blouses and slacks from among Izzy’s cocktail dresses and sexy lingerie.
So she just got out of there, locking the door behind her.
She made a quick pit-stop at her own apartment on the floor below, where she threw some underwear and shirts into a shoulder bag.
She’d told Izzy about the need to break her own pattern. When you were being hunted, the worst thing you could do was to stick to known contacts and established habits. Otherwise, sooner or later, at a bend in some familiar path there’d be a tripwire and a pit with sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom. She took her own advice. She walked half a mile from the apartment before grabbing a taxi.
‘Where to, love?’ the cabbie asked.
‘Where did you pick up your last fare?’ Kennedy asked him.
‘Eh?’ The cabbie seemed to find something sinister in the question.
‘Whoever was in here last. Where were they coming from?’
‘Talbot Square, innit. Out by Paddington Station.’
‘Great. Take me there.’
It was a good choice, as far as that went. Talbot Square opened off Sussex Gardens, where every second house was a hotel. Kennedy grabbed some emergency supplies from an all-night mini-market on Praed Street, then checked into one of the hotels, reassuringly named the Bastion, with mildewed pilasters framing the door and a sign jammed into the lower corner of the window that promised FREE WIRELESS INTERN. Presumably an E and a T were hidden by the angle of the frame.
She paid for her room with cash. The desk clerk wanted to see some ID in the name of Conroy, which was the name Kennedy had given, but she deflected his curiosity in that regard with a couple of twenties.
The room was an odd, indented shape, seemingly made up out of pieces cut from other, adjacent rooms. Kennedy snatched a couple of hours of shallow sleep in the narrow single bed, but the pain in her wounded side woke her every time she shifted position. In the end she gave up and just lay unmoving on her back, staring at the mottled plaster of the ceiling and trying to figure out how things had gotten so screwed up so quickly.
Not by accident. Not by serendipity. Not by blind chance. Lightning didn’t strike the same spot twice without a bloody good reason.
The Judas tribe had sent their Messengers, their Elohim, to kill her.
But the girl who’d saved her had identified herself as a Messenger, too.
There were wheels within wheels, and fires within fires.
When dawn filtered through the paisley-pattern curtains, she got up and showered. The water only ran lukewarm, but it was still enough to start the shallow wound in her side bleeding again, marbling the water at her feet with red ripples. Kennedy felt an incongruous sense of relief. The wound had scabbed and was only bleeding now because she’d opened it again. She was lucky that the Messengers used different blades for torture: the ones they used for murder had usually been anointed with a powerful anti-coagulant that made even shallow wounds potentially fatal.
She dried herself, ruining the towel in the process, and then disinfected and dressed the wound. Time to face the day. And to put herself fairly and squarely back in the crosshairs again.
Because her first stop was going to be Leo Tillman.
The Pantheon Café on Montague Street had a frontage so narrow and unassuming that its name had to be intended as some kind of ironic gesture. When Kennedy stepped inside, she found that she was the only customer in the place, but then again it would only have held about eight people when full. Two tables covered with tartan-patterned plastic tablecloths stood just inside the door, to balance the two outside. Beyond them there was a cooler that was too big for the tiny space and blocked half of the tiny counter. On the wall opposite the drinks machine, a much-smeared whiteboard advertised the specials of the day — falafel in pitta bread, dolmades, feta salad. For a Greek café, they didn’t sound all that special.
At the counter, a man with a slim, athletic build, slickeddown hair and a bandito moustache that looked like it had just blown in from someone else’s face was arranging slices of baklava into a crude mosaic on an oval tray.
‘Hi,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m trying to get in touch with Leo. Leo Tillman.’
The man didn’t look up from his work. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And?’
‘And I was told that I could leave a message for him here.’
‘Ah.’
Kennedy waited, but that seemed to be it. ‘So if I leave a message with you,’ she continued, ‘maybe you could pass it on to Leo the next time he comes through. If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.’
‘Ah,’ the man said again. ‘If.’
‘Look,’ said Kennedy. ‘Do you know Leo or not? If it’s not, I’m out of your life.’
The man looked at her for the first time — an appraising, appreciative stare. ‘You are not in my life, my lovely,’ he told her solemnly. ‘I see this man, I tell him you’re looking for him.’ He shrugged and gave her a sad smile. ‘All I can do.’
Kennedy locked eyes with him. ‘So what are you going to tell him? I didn’t even give you my name.’
‘I tell him that a very beautiful woman is looking for him. And I describe your lovely face, your lovely body to him in such detail that he knows who I mean.’
Kennedy’s tolerance for this kind of talk was low. She opened her mouth, already lining up a row of curse words to fire out of it, but then she noticed that the man was looking over her shoulder.
Tillman was behind her, leaning in the doorway, heavy hands deep in his pockets.
‘It’s good to see you, Heather,’ he said. ‘Come on into my office.’
Kennedy thought Tillman meant the diner, but as it turned out, his office was Coram’s Fields — a more or less perfectly X-shaped patch of greenery just west of Gray’s Inn Road. In the days when Coram’s was a foundling hospital, the fields would have been its grounds, awash with urban orphans discovering what grass felt like. These days it was mostly filled with foreign students from London House and solicitors’ clerks on their lunch breaks.
Tillman sat on a bench at the top of a grassy bank and motioned to Kennedy to sit next to him. For the moment, she ignored the invitation. Tillman looked pretty good, she had to admit. Or maybe it was just that the first time she’d met him, he’d been running on empty, twelve years into a mono-maniacal quest that was disintegrating his mind and his body an atom at a time. He still looked like an Irish docker with an anger management problem, but now he looked like an Irish docker on his way to church, instead of on the third day of a suicidal bender. He sat with his huge hands resting demurely on his knees. His sandy hair — now fuse-wire silver at the temples — was combed back into some kind of a shape, instead of spiking and rolling randomly like a freeze-frame of a brushfire.