There wasn’t much pain, to be fair. There were occasional blinding headaches that came from nowhere and vanished just as suddenly, but they were happening less often. But her dreams had altered character, and made sleep bizarre and unrewarding. The bullet itself would appear to her, taking on the shape of a white-suited Belgian with an asymmetrical moustache. It had taken an unfeasibly long while for Sid to deduce that this was Hercule Poirot.
The bullet had been removed from her head in the hours that followed the shooting. But it remained there nevertheless; her deadly passenger, with her for the long haul.
The sky grew darker and the world through the window dimmed. Before coming upstairs she had cut a slice from the loaf River had brought, and wrapped it round a hunk of cheddar. Bread, cheese. She supposed River had other things to do than plan menus, but still. That could be something to tease him about when he turned up, teasing being something requiring forethought now. If she were to re-enter her old life she’d need more than a map of the neighbourhood, which was illuminated suddenly, the neighbourhood not the map, by a pair of headlights slicing crescent shapes out of the dusk, briefly rendering bright the room: its bare painted walls, its curtainless window frame. She stopped chewing. The car wasn’t River’s, but it slowed anyway, and came to a halt on the verge. The engine died. Something inside Sid woke and fluttered. The car would move on soon. It would start up, drive away, and before long River would arrive, and she’d tease him about the bread and cheese.
But the car didn’t move. Instead its doors opened and two people got out, a man and a woman she recognised. They had knocked on her door in Cumbria, dressed as missionaries, and here they were, come to kill her again.
All down the lane the trees shifted as a gust of wind rifled through them. If she were out there she’d hear them sigh as they moved, but from inside the house, it was a silent blessing they bestowed. Their jobs were done, and night had fallen, and it seemed to Sid they were waving goodbye.
THEY CALLED IT SILICON Roundabout, because of the tech firms clustered in its orbit, and from this end of Old Street, at the top of the sloped passage dropping into Subway 3, the landscape it commanded was a familiar London medley of the weathered and the new; the social housing estate and the eye hospital balancing the swollen glass bulb of what Lech thought was a hotel, and the complicated facade of an office block straight from an SF comic. Over the roundabout itself, part-shrouded in builders’ canopy, hung a four-sided video screen, scrolling through an endless cycle of ads for the Pixel 3a, but looking as if it wanted to be broadcasting something more in keeping with the times: cage-fighting, or Rollerball, or a party leadership hustings.
They’d waited out the worst of the evening crush in a nearby pub; one blessed with a good location, relieving it of the necessity of making an effort. Lech’s small red wine lasted forty minutes, during which Shirley had drained two pints of lager and explained, for reasons that escaped him, the various kinds of body-modelling on offer within a two-hundred-yard radius: tongue-splitting, ear-pointing and tunnelling, this last involving opening holes in earlobes large enough to ease a pencil through. Lech wasn’t sure he hadn’t preferred being ignored. Through windows partly obscured by promises aimed at passers-by –
‘So anyway,’ Shirley said, ‘I was thinking of getting my ears sharpened. What do you reckon?’
He reckoned Lamb would love that, possibly to the point where it triggered one of his seismic coughing fits. ‘Sounds cool. Go for it.’
She looked pleased. ‘Maybe I will.’ Then checked her watch: ‘Okay. Time to go.’
Lech decided to give the last mouthful of wine a miss. He stood and, when she didn’t follow suit, gave her a questioning look.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’
