She turned and saw the swinging pub sign above the door: seven gold-painted stars arranged in a circle. The wind was rising. In the windows below, legal paraphernalia had been arranged in dusty tableaux.
‘Wigs and gowns, dock briefs. All that stuff for defending criminals, nonces and grasses.’ He spoke quickly, almost angrily. She couldn’t help wondering if he’d had trouble with the police. ‘I used to meet my girlfriend in pubs like this. After she left me I got depressed, thought of topping myself. That’s why I keep this.’ He dug in his pocket and showed her a slender alloy capsule, a shiny bullet with his name etched on to the side. ‘A mate smuggled it in for me as a reminder. It’s live ammunition. If things get too much I’d use it on myself, no problem. Only I haven’t got a gun.’ He’d soon finished his beer. ‘Get you another?’
She wanted more gin but demurred, protested, pushing her stool back several inches. He seemed dangerous, unpredictable, in the wrong pub. He took her right arm by the elbow and guided it back on to the bar with a smile, but gripped so firmly that she had no choice. She looked around; most of the standing men and women had their backs to her, and were lost in their own conversations. Even the barman was facing away. A tiny, crowded pub, the safest place she could imagine, and yet she suddenly felt trapped.
‘I really don’t want another drink. In fact I think I have to – ’ Was she raising her voice to him? If so, no one had noticed.
‘This is a good place. Nice and busy. I think you should stay. I want you to stay.’
‘Then you have to let go – ’ But his grip tightened. She reached out with her left hand to attract the attention of the barman but he was moving further away.
‘You have to let go – ’
It was ridiculous, she was surrounded by people but the noise of laughter and conversation was drowning her out. The crush of customers made her even more invisible. He was hurting her now. She tried to squirm out of his grip.
Something stung her face hard. She brought her free hand to her cheek, but there was nothing. It felt like an angry wasp, trapped and maddened in the crowded room. Wasn’t it too early in the year for such insects?
And then he released her arm, and she was dropping, through the beery friendship of the bar, away from the laughter and yeasty warmth of life, into a place of icy, infinite starlight.
Into death.
2
* * *
THE FIRST FAREWELL
Early Monday in Leicester Square. On a blue-grey morning like this the buildings looked heavier, more real somehow in rain than in sunlight. Drizzle drifted on a chill breeze from the north-east. The sky that smudged the rooftops looked so low you felt you could reach up and touch it.
John May, Senior Detective at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, looked around as he walked. He saw cloud fragments in lakes on broken pavements. Shop shutters rolling up. Squirrels lurking like ticket touts. Pigeons eating pasta. Office workers picking paths through roadworks as carefully as cats crossing cobblestones.
The doorways that once held homeless kids in sleeping bags now contained plastic sacks of empty champagne bottles, a sign of the city’s spiralling wealth. Piccadilly Circus was once the hub of the universe, but today only tourists loitered beside Eros, trying to figure out how to cross the Haymarket without being run over.
Every city has its main attraction, May thought as he negotiated a route through the dining gutter-parrots in the square. Rome has the Coliseum, Paris the Eiffel Tower, but for Londoners, Leicester Square is now the king. It seems to have wrested the capital’s crown from Piccadilly Circus to become our new focal point.
He skirted a great puddle, avoided a blank-faced boy handing out free newspapers, another offering samples of chocolate cake.
This is the only time of the day that Leicester Square is bearable, he thought. I hate it at night. The sheer number of people standing around, what do they all wait here for? They come simply because it’s Leicester Square. There’s not even a chance they’ll spot Tom Cruise and take his photo on their mobile phones, because everyone knows film premieres only take place on week nights. There’s nothing to see other than a giant picture of – who is it this week? – Johnny Depp outside the Odeon cinema, plus a very small park, the cheap-ticket kiosk and those parlours selling carpet-tile pizzas that you could dry-stone a wall with. At least Trafalgar Square has Nelson.
The scene before him was almost devoid of people, and could not reveal the diegesis of so many overlapping lives. The city was shaped by assembly, proximity and the need for companionship. Lone wolves can live in the hills, but London is for the terminally sociable.