Sonata of the Dead (26 page)

Solo.

She was getting in touch. Presumably she’d caught wind of the shitstorm and was trying to make contact with allies. I ran my thumb over the dimpled surface of the typed note and my mouth went dry. She had written this. She had delivered this. WTFIGO? She used to say that when she was a kid: ‘What the Figo?’ I’d always assumed it had something to do with the Portuguese footballer, until Rebecca explained to me.

I snapped my head up, convinced she was here, that she was watching. I peered into every knot of bushes, every nest of shadows, and pareidolia tricked me into thinking there were faces there when there weren’t. I pocketed the note and after a moment’s pause, decided to leave one of my own.

I’ll be there
, I wrote. I couldn’t sign it. I didn’t want to risk scaring her off. I only hoped she didn’t recognise my handwriting.

Praed Street, just shy of midnight. Little traffic, fewer pedestrians. Lights on everywhere. This city knows no darkness. Not any more. Not the literal kind, anyway. I hurried past St Mary’s Hospital – the place gives me goosebumps for all manner of reasons (Sarah was born here; much later I met a monster within its walls).

The slip road down to the Paddington Station entrance is like a throat. You got a sense of how huge the floor space was way before you stepped upon it. The roof gave you a clue, as did the wide way in. Shadows stretched off, dense and palpable. The breath from that yawning mouth was every kind of hot: grease, diesel, resentment. Spent tickets shifted around the threshold in eddies of wind. I heard footsteps – brief, hurried – and they sounded like high heels. A woman rushing to make a last train. A lover hurrying into the arms of one who had waited for her arrival. There was a sense of the station winding down. You could hear its fatigue in the creak of the shutter doors and the tick of cooling engines. The smell of a thousand travel-weary bodies hung in the air, and I grew tired just getting the slightest hit of it; the pall clung to the shed roof, all the humours of a busy day in a London hub.

I stood just inside the entrance for a while, watching the shadows and light. Staff in dark blue uniforms clustered on a platform. I heard laughter. I saw sodium light glance off spectacle lenses. About a dozen people were staring at the departures board. I scanned the faces. I strained my eyes looking for the shape or the gait or the posture of a girl I no longer knew. I kept out of the pools of light and edged towards the escalators. The statue of Paddington Bear was just alongside. I stared at that little bronze creature for a while, remembering childhood afternoons watching the TV incarnation.

This wasn’t right.

It was gone midnight, but that wasn’t the problem. It just didn’t feel right, in the way that Peter Pan had. Yes, things had changed. There was imminent threat now, blood on the ground, but the dead letter drop was designed to neutralise that. Only the Accelerants knew about its location.

Something had gone wrong. I wondered if there had been any kind of danger sign agreed, an abort code of sorts, should a meeting not look likely to be fulfilled. I stared down the platforms. I remembered when I first moved to London you could drive right in to the station from the north end. I’d dropped Rebecca off here once, when she had to catch a train to Bristol for some symposium or other. It had been noisier and smellier back then. Farting trains. Taxi fumes. Smoking on the platforms. Overly loud tannoy announcements by real people rather than today’s pre-recorded digital robot voices.

Getting on for ten past. Just me and Padders.
Please look after this bear, thank you
.

She wasn’t coming. Perhaps she had seen me and melted into the night. I’d do the same thing if I’d been in receipt of a message written in a hand I didn’t recognise. Do a recce, leg it if I wasn’t happy. Maybe I was early and she was late. I moved, fast, and found a spot behind one of the ticket machines near the ticket office. A guy wearing headphones came through buffing the floor with an orbiter. A teenager with a large backpack was asleep on a bench.

She wasn’t coming. Nobody was coming. Nobody I wanted to see, at least.

All the lights went out. The departures board stuttered and died.

I felt my back bristle. I moved out from behind the ticket machine and heard the consternation of staff on the platforms, and passengers cheated of their information. A fire alarm went off. People began moving towards the exit. I stayed put, shrinking into the deep shadow of an entrance corridor. I heard the clatter of roller shutters as they crashed down.

About a hundred metres away, a figure moved out of a thick darkness that was wadded up against the far wall. I kept losing it in the gloom. It wasn’t Sarah, that was for sure. It was like a magnet shifting through iron filings. It coalesced and disintegrated. The absence of light, or of anything on the figure that might have reflected it – glasses, belt buckles, polished leather – meant that it sometimes shrank from view. I couldn’t track it. And then it would be over there to the left, a little closer now. It was ranging from side to side. I had the horrible feeling that it was trying to sniff me out. I imagined something blind, something monstrous with unhinged jaws sucking in the flavour of my warm body, homing in. But now I did see something gleaming, and it was a broad blade. I thought it might be a machete, but that could have been fear enlarging it. I was torn between running for my life and sticking around in the hope that I might catch a clearer glimpse of my stalker and put a face to the threat, level this playing field. Maybe even disarm him, finish it tonight.

But fear was a series of tiny eggs hatching in my gut. The last time I’d fought a man with a blade, I’d almost ended up with a new mouth. I felt weak and tired, the comedown from a jag of adrenaline at the thought of being reunited with my daughter once again. And maybe this wasn’t about me. Maybe this was a guy coming to rob Paddington Station. With a machete. Yeah, right. The shakes intensified when I thought of that weapon piercing Gower, Treacle and Taft, making steaks of them, life spraying in trajectories created by a millimetre-thick edge of steel.

I got moving myself, but not before I decided to match the figure’s trickery. I slid my watch off my wrist and into my pocket. My wedding ring too. Buttoned my jacket and turned up the collar. I headed for the edge of Platform 1 and dropped on to the tracks as quietly as I was able. Hugging the wall under the lip, I made for open air, crouched low alongside the rails.

I passed under Bishop’s Bridge Road, and waited for a while in its shelter. The space under the roof of the station was utterly black. How hard could it be to replace a fuse? And then a footfall on track ballast; the harsh music of crushed stone. The weapon was fully brandished now; it swept the air before it in broad, slow arcs. I backed away, ready to run if need be. The sight of the steel made the scar on my face ache.

I was relatively new to violence. That realisation bit deep, and I felt my confidence dissolve, as if the puddles of oil beneath this bridge were draining the vitality from me. I’d made up for it in the intervening years since that callow fifteen-year-old was kicked to a shrivelling pile of snot and tears outside a fish-and-chip shop in Childwall. I couldn’t remember the name of the thug who’d attacked me, nor the reason for his assault. An askance look? A spilled drink? One of the two, or something else equally pointless. A girl, a car, a gesture.

I remember getting into the bath that night and my whole body felt raw, as if I’d been dragged along the road until my knees and elbows and knuckles had been skinned. I’d got out of bed like a guy who’d just had a hip operation. Bruises had opened up beneath the skin in science fiction colours. I was convinced that he’d loosened some of my teeth, but it was transitory. When you’re a teenager, you heal fast and forget quicker. I got fit. I got fleet. I learned some moves. A bit of judo, a bit of boxing, a bit of karate. I picked up some krav maga later on. Just enough to know when something was coming, how to block it, create space, counterstrike and get away. Fists and feet and knees and heads I could cope with, despite the blunt force they provided. Sharp steel, though, and firearms – all of that was above my pay grade.

If I kept still, kept in these dark shoals, shrank, buried my head in my arms, slowed my breathing and listened to the sedate crunch of stones as he approached, he would walk right past me. I could grab a handful of aggregate, fling it in his face when he turned back, gain a split second, enough to unleash hell upon the soft parts of his body before he could reposition himself, bring the machete into play. Or I could just watch him go. Follow him to his lair. Either way I could end it. If I ran, he could sedately plot his route to my daughter’s doorstep. But I’d been trying to do that for five years and she’d been a step ahead all the way. I had to believe that I was the professional PI here. He might know more about slice and dice, but I was the tracker. If I couldn’t find my daughter in all that time – and my need was greater than his – then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that she was in any kind of immediate peril. She was not stupid. She had become even more of a ghost since Martin Gower died. She understood the danger and was concealing herself from it.

I was the stupid one, prepared to seize upon the first dodgy lead as having been authored by her. I’d fallen into a trap more crude than the one I was plotting with Mawker. I’d gone to it with open arms, never once suspecting that he knew more than we gave him credit for. He’d been ahead every step of the way. Slowly, sedulously, he was cutting down his targets, no matter the Accelerants’ cute little codes and curfews. If I died here, she was alone. I had to make sure that when the confrontation did come, I had a definite, immediate reason to face it. I had to be between him and her. I couldn’t risk a cold and lonely death, a pointless death, out here. Not tonight.

I pushed myself upright and began inching away. Once I was on the other side of the bridge I intended to find some way to shimmy up to roadside if at all possible. But I wasn’t given the chance. I saw him stiffen and turn his face in my direction. It was in the cowl of a hood, pale and oval and stitched with shadows and intent. I had no idea of this guy’s physique – it was locked up inside a heavily padded jacket – but if he was stocky, it didn’t affect his speed or grace, because he came for me, hitting full pelt within seconds. I stared at him for a moment, shocked by his acceleration, and then took off myself, all thoughts of concealment gone.

I raced past closed security gates and doors and generator housings containing multiple warnings of death and trespass. Padlocks winked at me. I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to in order to know that he was gaining, despite that unwieldy machete.

A light up ahead. A train slowing for the buffers. If I could somehow get that train between me and my pursuer… but that wasn’t going to work. Someone had obviously alerted the driver to the power failure because the train was coming to a stop way before the tracks split for the platforms. It would be stationary before I reached it. Maybe I could alert the driver? But at this rate, The Hack would be upon me way before I became visible to any staff in the cockpit.

I picked up my pace, but it was hard to run in the darkness on such unstable ground. I had to hope The Hack was suffering the same difficulties, although it didn’t sound like it. The crunch of the stones was nearer, and had a confident rhythm about it.
Turn your fucking ankle
, I thought.
Trip and spear yourself on your own fucking weapon
.

A distant tannoy made an announcement nobody could hear. Westbourne Bridge was coming up. Across the tracks on the Westway side, I could see an area of flapping plastic net, where new constructions and refurbishments in the Basin abutted the railway. I angled right, hurdling the rails carefully. If I tripped I was dead.

I got to the fence and rammed through it, stumbling into a cordoned-off building site filled with Portakabins and orange plastic barriers. The structures were wrapped in scaffolds and brick nets. Harsh sodium lights blazed on brackets high up on concrete pillars. I tried a couple of the Portakabin doors but they were locked. I could hear him at the fence, the gritting of the blade against the wall as he hoisted himself up. I ran along a blind alley, casting covetous glances at a scooter parked by a service hatch. No keys in the ignition. Not enough time to hotwire. Didn’t know how to do that anyway.

I came out into a polished quadrangle of high rises and a token postage stamp of green space to keep the office workers happy. There was a hairdressers and a deli, a noodle bar and a mini supermarket tucked into a rank of shops under a walkway. Behind me was a coffee shop and a pizza restaurant. I ran along a corridor studded with lights, flanked by plane trees in the direction of an office block with rounded corners and ice-blue lighting recessed in gills that ran up the side of the edifice. It was like being on a science fiction film set after shooting has stopped for the day.

I’d lost him. I was a couple of minutes away from Little Venice. I’d lost…

He came up out of the dark and the machete moved so quickly it left a trace of where it had been, like a swipe of motion in a comic book. In that moment, before I felt it connect with the side of my head, I saw another figure shifting in the near distance. It raised its hand and cried out. I tried to scream at it to go, to run, to get away, but my mouth was filling with blood. The black outlines of the trees, like spiders’ legs frozen against the sky, began to twitch and move and grow. The thin black boughs swelled and blocked out all the interstices where there was light, until there no longer was any, and no longer any colours or smells or sounds. And I thought,
What a ridiculous way to die.

They were coming for her – the Shadow Walkers – eating up the ground, showering plumes of oily, dark soil/flesh behind them, stabbing the overcast spears forged from disease, catching the red rain on tongues reeling with foulness.