But she wasn’t, or not that Lech could see. Collar upturned, he strode down the passage towards Subway 3 and turned into the underground complex that always felt to him like a colosseum, though whether that made its commuters gladiators or lion fodder was open to question. Down here, a few timid retail premises huddled; the kind that looked like they’d not survive ten minutes in the open air. On the other hand, stranger weeds flourished in London’s cracks and crevices. He walked past bookshop, card shop, coffee shop, key cutters; skirted a postbox-sized screen reeling through the same ads as its monster parent overhead, and noted without pausing a sign announcing Subway 2’s refurbishment. What had been its entryway was boarded over, and he could hear drilling. There were still people around, mostly heading into the Tube station, but he carried on by, veering right towards Subway 1 – the Hoxton/Shoreditch exit – past sandwich shop and flower shop, whose brief fragrance was a shower of light in the dark. At the far end he took the stairs up to ground level, where he doubled back past the gated entrance to the housing estate then, without looking behind, made a 180-degree turn onto the slope heading back to the subway. Overground, underground. Nobody paid attention that he could tell, but he was careful not to check. He didn’t see Shirley anywhere, either.
And what were the odds, he wondered, back in the underground colosseum, that this was some bastard prank; that the others had already joined her in the pub, where they were busting a gut over his gullible goose chase?
… Fuck them, he thought.
But not quite yet. Fuck them in ten minutes; maybe fuck them in twenty. Because he didn’t have anything else to occupy him, and he’d always been a walker after dark, Lech Wicinski; a long-time stroller of the empty streets.
And if these streets weren’t exactly empty, or entirely streets, they’d do for now.
That was Hercule Poirot speaking: the memory of her bullet, deep inside her brain.
And she was indeed gathered in the library, if that was what hiding in the study amounted to. But other suspects were nowhere. It was just Sid alone, and whoever was outside.
She’d come downstairs while they were on the garden path, and now sat with her back against the closed study door, the doorbell dying away. Nothing sounds louder than a bell in an empty house. Her heart was fluttering, her insides clammy. The study was in darkness.
Life went quiet again, the only disturbance the faint rattling of a doorknob.
In a perfect world, they’d have gone away. But in a perfect world, Sid wouldn’t have been shot in the head.
There was a shelf in the study devoted to objects rather than books. This had struck Sid as strange. She hadn’t known the O.B. – which was what River had called him, so it was hard for her not to – she hadn’t known the O.B., but had known who he was, and it was difficult to imagine the Service legend, the man who’d steered the ship during the captaincy of various First Desks, as collecting knick-knacks. A glass globe; a hunk of concrete; a lump of mis-shaped metal. But that was how lives worked, as a slow accretion of private detail, and what mattered more was whether these objects would make useful weapons. She supposed they might, if the wielder was in decent shape. Which she wasn’t, but this didn’t stop her taking one in her hand, a pleasingly heavy glass globe, with just the thinnest slice removed to allow it to stand. It contained nothing. She might have expected a butterfly wing, or a whispered fragment of autumn – a leaf, a pebble – but it was only glass and weight. Crouched against the door, she cradled it in both hands, allowing herself to believe that it anchored her to the world.
Which worked up to a point, but that point was reached when she heard the tapping on the back door.
