Ho moved to the window and looked out. A hobbit? He couldn’t see anyone. He rubbed his eyes, but that didn’t help. And Lamb, here, at this hour? For half a moment he constructed a world in which Lamb had got word to Kim, warning her to keep clear of the house tonight, and this made things a little happier, but unfortunately didn’t make sense. Maybe it was true, though. Maybe he was on somebody’s list. He stepped back from the window abruptly, in case there was a nightscope trained on him, and felt his foot crack the fragile neck of the discarded champagne bottle. It was starting to feel like things were not going entirely his way.
He wondered if he had clean sheets.
When two rolled round and rolled away again, and nobody came to relieve her, Shirley had a brief moment during which she rained imaginary hellfire down on Louisa and River, and then thought: sod it. Being here was her idea. She could either man the fuck up or head the hell home. And home had its own issues, being haunted this time of night by memories of her ex. Might as well be standing at a bus stop, cold and hungry, keeping a watch over a colleague she had no particular interest in keeping alive. It wasn’t, anyway, the need to save Ho that was keeping her here. It was that she hadn’t been able to save Marcus.
And again she felt the wrap of cocaine in her pocket, and the needle-sharp suggestion it was making to her fingers:
Yes, okay.
But not quite yet.
Something moved.
It was a man, briefly caught by a streetlight, walking towards her on the opposite side of the road. Shirley was cloistered in shadow and didn’t think herself visible. Even so she held her breath as the figure reached Ho’s front door and let itself in using a key.
Ho has a housemate?
Not possible. It couldn’t be possible to share a house with Roderick Ho.
She was already moving towards the door, though the figure had closed it behind him. The house remained in darkness, quiet as a nunnery, but damage required no noise; he might emerge in seconds, leaving silent carnage in his wake.
Lamb should have let me have the gun.
Though actually, it’s not entirely clear how useful it would be right now.
She reached the front door and stood for a moment. She had a set of skeleton keys she’d inherited from Marcus, but not with her. Kick it in?
Yeah, right. And break a leg.
But there was a ground-floor window, and she had a fist. She shrugged her jacket off, rolled it round her right hand and drew her arm back to punch through the glass.
Inside, somebody screamed.
There was someone in his house.
Hadn’t he already had that thought? If so, he was having it again:
There was someone in his house.
Roderick Ho was lying on a makeshift bed of clothes and cushions and wondering why his ear was bleeding. Broken glass, it turned out. Maybe he should have swept that broken bottle up before settling down to sleep. But while reaching for a box of tissues, which for strategic reasons he kept handy at night, he felt the air shift, or a noise being stifled; something, anyway, to indicate a foreign presence on the stairs. Lamb. But why would Lamb be on the stairs when he was already in Ho’s bedroom?
Ho was trying to remember what else he had in his fridge worth stealing when a dark figure entered the room, heading towards him in a crouch, the way Roddy himself moved in his ninja dreams.
He felt like a Pokémon character, about to be bagged and boxed.
‘Kim?’ he said hopefully.
A light went on. The room went white. The figure turned and faced the nightmare in the doorway: Jackson Lamb, teeth bared, naked belly pendulous over a grubby pair of boxers.
And a plastic blue bottle in his hands.
‘Evening, sunshine,’ said Lamb, and squirted bleach in the stranger’s face.
The man dropped whatever he was holding, and screamed.
Lamb swung a hammer-like fist into his chest.
The man staggered backwards, tripped over Roddy’s still-recumbent form, and fell through the big glass window onto the street below.
When Shirley punched the glass a figure crashed to the pavement, as if she’d won a prize at a fairground attraction. She tried to turn, but her rolled-up jacket snagged on the broken window, and before she could tug free a car pulled up. Glass was falling like slivers of frozen rain, and through the large jagged hole it had left the bull-like figure of Lamb appeared, apparently naked, unless she was having a mental episode.
Lamb?
At Ho’s?
Naked?
… Whatever.
