Catherine lived in St. John’s Wood, but had no intention of heading there yet. Laying a false trail came naturally—alcoholics learn to dissemble. So she walked north, heading vaguely for the Angel; a woman with a destination, but no great urgency about it. Everyone she passed was thirty years younger, and wearing about as much clothing as covered her own arms. Some shot her glances full of wonderment at one or other of these facts, but this didn’t concern her. Friend or foe didn’t cover all contingencies. These strangers were neither, and she had other things on her mind.
Sean Donovan was a foe, because anyone from that time of her life was a foe, but he was a decent man, or so Catherine’s memory suggested. He was a soldier, and while this was in some ways an error of tense—Sean Donovan
For Catherine, this had been a newspaper item rather than a personal shock. She was sober by then, and part of the process of becoming so had been avoiding the company she’d kept when she’d been otherwise. This meant men, of whom Sean Donovan had been one; not a particularly important one, or no more important than any other man from that period, but then again, that was a long list.
She crossed a road. This made her a little dizzy; not the action in itself, but emerging from her memory to concentrate on doing so. It took effort, peering back into her past. It wasn’t pleasant. For some reason an image of Jackson Lamb swam to mind, cloistered in his gloomy office, but it swam away again. Safely over the road, she risked a look back. Sean Donovan was not following. She hadn’t really expected him to be. At the very least, she had not expected to be able to spot him doing so.
He was part of her past, but other than knowing that much, she had little to go on. Of their actual lovemaking, if it could be so described, she had no memory. In those days, two drinks in, her immediate future became a blank slate, with everything scrawled thereon erased within moments of its appearance. He could have written her sonnets, or transcribed arias, and it would all be the same to her. But she knew that was never the case; that it had been fuck-buddy sex like always, because in those days anyone would have done, just so long as she had someone to cling to as she slid into the dark. Poems and operas were not required. A bottle would do the trick.
But while it was true that there were many she’d forgotten, of whom she’d barely been aware even while they were inside her, Sean Donovan had at least been there in the morning once or twice. Fond of the drink himself, he’d done her the false kindness of pretending they were bad as each other.
She wasn’t far from a tube station. From there she would make her way home, but first she took out her mobile and made a call. At the other end a phone went straight to voicemail. She didn’t leave a message.
Phone back in her bag, she continued up the road.
A hundred yards behind her, a black van idled.
Shirley watched Roderick Ho scrambling for his glasses, and wondered whether she should have slapped him like that. A backhander gave you the drop, sure, generally surprising the backhanded, but if she’d made an effort and formed a fist she could have broken the little bastard’s nose. After informing him of her intention in writing, if she’d felt like it. Forewarned wouldn’t have meant forearmed in Ho’s case. Forewarned would have meant being punched in the nose anyway, after worrying about it first.
What was mildly disquieting about the incident, though, was that it didn’t seem to have calmed her down.
