The Walking Dead

Banks took the magazine from the Glock, then the magazines that were housed in the holdall. He began, carefully and methodically, to empty them. He laid the bullets out on the back of his shirt, beside his trousers, made four little piles of them. It was a therapy, of no purpose but to clear his mind. Then he reloaded the magazines, pressed each bullet down against the spring. It was the routine of his working life, what he did each morning before going on duty. Unthinking, hands moving mechanically, Banks filled the four magazines and placed three in his holdall, and one in his pistol. He worked a bullet into the breach, checked the safety, put the Clock into the holster.

It was worth doing. The procedure was not so that he was proof against a jam of the firing mechanism but to clear his mind. Through the curtains, not closed completely, the dawn was coming. Later he would read the last page of the notebook, but he had succeeded, had lost sight of the sniper's finger that whitened as the pressure on the trigger grew.

The room was lighter, but Banks slept.

* * *

Also waking that morning and preparing for the coming day…

In the second bedroom of his mother's housing-association home, out in the Leagrave district of the town, Lee Donkin shivered as he dressed. The tremors were not from the cold: he had not injected brown into his veins last night, or the last day, not for fucking near a week. He did not pad to the bathroom, did not wash and had not run a brush across his teeth. He dragged on yesterday's sweatshirt over yesterday's vest, and yesterday's jeans over yesterday's pants, and yesterday's socks. From the floor he took his anorak with the hood and slipped into it, then prised his feet into his trainers. He could not control the shake and shouted an obscenity, but was not heard. He did not know where his mother was, from which pub she had been taken home by a punter. If she had been there she would have yelled back a curse from her room for waking her…She was not often there. He went to the kitchen, took bread from the bin, ignored the pale green mould on the crusts, and wolfed it down, but it had little effect on the shivering. He heard the couple who lived above them already rowing, and the baby next door was crying. He lifted up a chair from beside the kitchen table, and banged against the ceiling with its legs. Now he went to the bathroom and wrapped his hand in his anorak's sleeve. He stood on the lavatory seat and stretched himself up to the old cistern high on the wall and reached inside. He retrieved a short-bladed knife from the hiding-place in which it was taped. It went into his pocket. Later, before he left, he would rummage in the debris — clothing, fast-food plastic plates and syringes — on the floor of his room for his gloves, lightweight leather. His hands would never touch the handle of his favoured knife. He was too smart, too switched on, to give prints or DNA if he was done on the street with a stop-and-search. Just found it, hadn't he, just picked it up in the street and just going to hand it in, wasn't he? They had an operation going, the police had, and called it Failsafe, but they hadn't netted him, too smart and switched on. Because he craved the brown, Lee Donkin needed a snatch that morning — on the way to the shopping centre in the square and the sale when purses were loaded — needed it bad.

Avril Harris crawled from her bed, stumbled to the bathroom. All through the night, she had festered the anger that she had been sold short, had bought a car that was already broken. She had been out the previous evening for a curry with three of the other girls from A and E, and she'd been the one who hadn't drunk a beer or three and had given two of them a lift back. Every time she'd slowed at the damn lights, the backfire had gone. A hell of a noise. Hadn't frightened the others, with beer inside them, but had made them laugh hysterically. They had laughed at her car, when it should have been her pride and joy. In the bathroom, under the shower, her anger slackened. She thought through her day ahead…Up and out and into the car, bloody thing. A drive into the town and at the multi-storey car park around nine, and into the shopping centre a few minutes after Wasn't going to hit the mad rush for the opening of the doors. Into work by eleven. If it hadn't been for the car — sluicing herself under the shower's rose — it would have been a day to look forward to.