I went cautiously to the corner and looked out. There were enough people walking past in both directions to ensure that unless anyone was looking for me to emerge at exactly that point they’d take a while to notice me. So I had the luxury of being able to look up and down the length of the street without having to watch my back at the same time.
Nobody lurking around the doorway of the shop I’d gone into. Nobody browsing the windows of the shops to either side of it. I looked across to the other side of the street, bearing in mind that if this guy was any good he’d have chosen a place where a casual glance wouldn’t pick him out.
A casual glance didn’t. But on the second sweep, bingo, there he was. Just opposite the shop I’d gone into, there was a stand selling roasted nuts – the kind of thing that American tourists get their picture taken with, mistaking it for part of London’s rich cultural heritage because it involves both bland food and a cheeky, cheerful cockney. The man in the black coat had positioned himself close to the back of the stand where he’d be hidden from two sides, and from the other two would most likely look like someone patiently waiting to have his nuts roasted. He was a quarter on to me, so I was mostly seeing the back of his neck and I still couldn’t tell whether I’d ever met him before.
Just then, as I was staring at him and willing him to turn around, my phone started to squirm in my pocket like a living thing. There was no noise: I’d set it on ‘vibrate’ a while ago when for some reason silence had been an issue, and now I kept losing my way in the menus when I tried to turn its sound back on. But noise or no, it came out of nowhere and it made me start. And it was as though that minute movement alerted my stalker even though his eyes were elsewhere. His head jerked up and around, abruptly, triangulating on some cue that beat the hell out of me, and then his body swivelled too so that he was facing in my exact direction.
It was eerie and unsettling. So was the face, now that I got a good look at it, because it was Zucker.
Son of a bitch. These guys were tailing me around London with insolent ease. I could understand it if I was wearing a sandwich board like the deranged vegetarian who used to hang out at Oxford Circus (LESS LUST THROUGH LESS PROTEIN), but Inconspicuous is my middle name and I pride myself on the hair-trigger accuracy of my professional radar. Did they have the office staked out? Or the Collective? Where had I picked them up, and how had they got this close to me twice – or three times, counting the Oriflamme – without me spotting them?
It was a conundrum for a quieter moment. Right now, Zucker was staring directly at me across the width of the street, and even with the surging throng turning this into a game of peep-o there was no way he hadn’t seen me. I turned my back on him and fled.
When you’re playing follow-the-leader in what the military would call a broken-ground situation, the leader has all the advantages so long as he keeps his nerve. Weaving in and out of the crowd with my head down, I kept moving fast until I reached another alley, then broke free and sprinted the full length of it, coming out in Brunswick Gardens. The crowds were thicker here if anything, because there was a street market on and the road had been closed to traffic. Tinny music from someone’s wooferless boombox scraped along the air along with scents of almond essence and vanilla pods. The stalls, selling mainly antiques and collectables but also T-shirts, sweets, spices and bootleg DVDs, crowded the kerbs on either side and gave passersby a lose-lose choice between the narrow, obstacle-strewn pavement and the heaving, shop-or-drop chaos in the centre of the road.
Perfect.
I threaded my way between two stalls, crossed the street and continued on the other side. Then, fifty yards further on, I crossed back, legs bent at the knee to keep my head down, squeezing myself skilfully through the mob wherever a gap presented itself, and carried on down to the corner, where Kensington Church Street picks up again after the dog-leg. Here I inserted myself back into the more orderly crowd of antique-hunters. Okay, I’d got turned around a hundred and eighty degrees, and I’d have to go home by a different route, but I reckoned that no one on God’s Earth could have kept me in sight through that manoeuvre.
So it was kind of a bitter blow when I got onto an eastbound train at High Street Kensington and saw, walking down the steps on the other side of the barriers, that now-familiar black coat and slouching, head-down gait. The train was idling, doors open, waiting for a signal to change or for some other, more arcane London Underground augury. Packed in between a whole bunch of other straphangers and their interesting collection of armpits, all I could do was stand and watch. Zucker walked on past me without looking up, and without any sense of urgency that I could see. Then, just like on the street, he looked up – first left and then right, finally locking stares with me just as the doors hissed shut.
Our gazes met. He might have been angry, or embarrassed, or nonplussed, but he wasn’t any of those things. He just smiled, baring teeth that seemed to include a few too many canines. I smiled back, sardonically: then the doors slid open again and the smile slid off my face like lumpy custard.
Zucker took a single step towards me. He didn’t take a second one, because with the strength of panic I grabbed the guy standing next to me – a young Turk from the City, to judge by his splendid suit – by the shoulders and pushed him off the train. He collided with Zucker, who tried to step around him and then, as the young guy staggered and flailed, just flicked him out of the way, one-handed. They were only entangled for a second: then that gorgeous Alfieri homespun was down in the dirt and Zucker was stepping towards me, unencumbered.
But that second had been worth buying. The doors slammed shut again in his face and the train pulled out.
A second later the tunnel’s arch slid like a magician’s cloak across the scene, magicking it away.
I was hunter, and I was hunted. I was missing something. And if these guys were Catholics, I’d eat my tin whistle and fart the Hallelujah Chorus. To tell you the truth, the whole thing was starting to sour my mood.
So did standing on the train – Circle Line first, then Piccadilly ditto – all the way to Turnpike Lane. I felt bone-weary by this time, and there was a sort of itchy heat behind my eyes that I usually associate with the start of a fever. My left shoulder was aching again too, so that I had to grip the handrail with my right arm the whole way. By Caledonian Road it had started to cramp up on me. No doubt about it, I was a mess. I needed to go and lie down in a darkened room until my body decided to let me off the hook for the abuse I’d subjected it to over the past couple of days.
Instead of which I was looking at a dinner date with Juliet followed by tea and biscuits with Rosie Crucis. I didn’t feel up to either one of them.
As it turned out, though, I was worrying unnecessarily, because the evening was about to take a different turn in any case. I went back to Pen’s: found it empty, which was no surprise – she was probably out somewhere having a life. I took a shower to get rid of the sweat and aches, and to put on some clothes that were better suited to a social engagement with the sexiest, most debonaire hell-spawn in town. I went with a plain white shirt, a burgundy tie and a pair of black cargo pants. Oh, and a new dressing on my shoulder wound, which had been weeping slightly: pus-yellow with burgundy was a combination I didn’t think I could carry off.
Then I finally remembered the phone call I’d got earlier on and checked my messages. There weren’t any, but the missed-call alert gave me Pen’s mobile number. I called her back and got no answer, so I left her a message just saying that I’d called and that I was around for the next hour or so. Then the phone rang again about ten seconds later.