Thicker Than Water

‘You’ve got some more work to do,’ he said to me and Imelda, a tremor in his voice.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘You’re right.’ I took out my whistle and blew a low, sustained note while Imelda clamped her strong hands to either side of Rafi’s skull. We got busy.

Again.

11

I made the tail after I’d seen Pen onto the train at Peckham, and my feelings passed quickly from terrified alarm through consternation to a sort of dogged puzzlement. This guy was at best an enthusiastic amateur, making himself obvious by keeping his movements broadly in synch with mine, keeping his shoulders hunched and his head lowered as if he was afraid of looking anyone in the face, and once stopping dead when I turned and looked back the way I’d come.

That first clear glimpse gave me a prickly feeling of recognition, although I couldn’t remember where I might have seen the guy before. He had the etiolated skin and painfully slender build of a smack addict, and black hair that hung to his shoulder: a look distinctive enough that I ought not to have had to grope too long for the newsflash from my long-term memory, but nothing was forthcoming. His dark eyes flicked to left and right as though they were following a metronome, effectively solving the problem of not looking fixedly at me by not looking for more than a fraction of a second at anything. He wore a dark grey flak jacket and a silver-grey scarf only marginally thicker than a necktie - maybe trying to signal that he was tough but in touch with his feminine side.

The memory nagged at me but at first it wouldn’t come clear. Then I got another blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of him reflected in the glass of a swinging shop door as it closed. The tiny dark dot over his right eye was the trigger that loosened my mental logjam. The guy on the stairs at the Salisbury, with the BO that was probably grave stench. The dead man walking, who’d said he thought he knew me.

In a way, it was good news: if he was a zombie - and particularly, if he was following me away from Imelda’s place - then he wasn’t one of Jenna-Jane’s people. He must have hooked onto my coat-tails at the Salisbury, which was why all my ducking and diving on the way there from Pen’s house hadn’t shaken him off: whoever he was, he didn’t seem to be part of the professional two-man tag-team Gary Coldwood had spotted. So maybe - just maybe - I hadn’t just blown the secret of Rafi’s current location to the last person in the world I wanted to have it.

I needed answers, though, and in the aftermath of that nasty shock I yielded to an evil temptation. Why not turn the tables on this born-again little scuzzball and see if he had anything to say for himself?

I picked up speed walking across McNeil Road, hurrying between cars and buses as though I was late for an appointment. I didn’t look back any more: I didn’t want to scare the guy off. nweeI just had to trust that he’d stay on-task until I’d scouted out a good place for an ambush.

Peckham has some of my favourite place names in the whole of London, although mostly the places themselves don’t live up to their billing. Love Walk falls squarely into this category. There’s nothing about it you could love unless you were a dog looking for somewhere new to piss. But it has a feature I remembered from previous visits - somewhere just off it there’s an even narrower street that straddles the railway line before Denmark Hill station, and at that point there’s a flight of steps leading to an elevated pedestrian footbridge, narrow enough so that two people have trouble passing each other on it. Actually, maybe that’s where the place gets its name from: anyone you pass on the footbridge you’re going to get to know quite well, so maybe love has been known to blossom there.

I didn’t have love in mind: I just wanted me and my shadow to meet up in a place where there was nowhere to hide and where even turning around was going to be problematic. Then we’d see what we’d see.

Still walking briskly, I got to the wooden steps and went on up them at a jog. It was important that he shouldn’t get too much time to think about this: I wanted him to commit himself right at the outset and then repent at leisure.

I walked out across the wooden footbridge, my footsteps echoing loudly. Overhead was an arched tunnel made out of steel loops and torn wire mesh. Once upon a time it had been there to stop suicidal passers-by from ending it all, or at least to move them along a little way and make them someone else’s problem: now there were so many gaps and rents in it that it couldn’t even do that. I made as much noise as I could, bringing my feet down heavily on the wooden planks. All part of the show: I wanted my tail to feel safe closing the gap, under cover of the racket.

Casting a furtive glance back and down through the gaps between the heat-warped planks, I caught a glimpse of his grey jacket and the top of his head as he climbed the steps in a hurry, trying to match my pace because he’d lost the line of sight. Great stuff.