5
I hailed a black cab on the Embankment and paid off the driver by the wobbly pedestrian bridge that led from St Paul’s Cathedral to Tate Modern. It showed the city at its sparkling best on a clear night, and I needed some time to think. I also needed to check whether anyone was taking an unhealthy interest in my movements. I’d just left another known location, and that would be the first port of call for any trigger.
The bridge was a great place to start scanning for a follow. It was the only way to get across the Thames at this point, unless you walked on water or were prepared to tab some distance up or down stream. I stopped on the South Bank and swapped banter with a couple of smiley Rastafarians playing Bob Marley songs under a street lamp, not too far away from a sign that said
No Buskers
.
They treated me to ‘Three Little Birds’, competing for a moment or two with the beat of a passing heli’s rotor blades. I lobbed a pound coin into their guitar case and turned back towards the Globe Theatre. The leather jacket, jeans and trainers that had trailed me from the St Paul’s side was still on the bridge, taking a great deal of interest in the view east. You’d come a long way to see the
Belfast
, the Tower of London and Tower Bridge under floodlights, but the wind had sparked up again and it was too cold for sightseeing.
It was definitely time for a warming brew. The Costa joint beside the
Golden Hinde
would be the perfect place. It served big frothy coffees, and was situated at a chokepoint in the riverside walk, which gave me eyes-on in both directions. But I wasn’t going to go there straight away.
I might have been wrong about the jacket. It was like a uniform out there: every self-respecting heavy had to wear one. During my time in Moscow and Moldova I’d been chased around and shouldered aside by so many of these guys I’d started to dream about them. So, at some point in the next hour, I needed to know for sure whether I’d been pinged or he was merely a third party.
Before I went the barista route, I paid a flying visit to the Anchor. It always amused me to be having a drink at the spot where Samuel Pepys had watched the Great Fire of London, and where the locals had once enjoyed a bit of bull-and bear-baiting instead of Grand Theft Auto on the PlayStation, but maybe that just meant I was another mug punter who’d fallen for the olde-worlde PR pitch that yelled at us from every leaflet and beer mat.
Behind the pillar-box-red-painted woodwork was a warren of dark panelled and oak-beamed bars and function rooms. It was also on a corner site, with three or four exits onto the street, one of which faced the archway on Clink Street that ran beneath Southwark Bridge, which made it perfect for what I had in mind.
Glasses chinked and after-work waffle spilled onto the pavement as I pulled open the door closest to Shakespeare’s favourite theatre. The evening crowd were already getting well stuck in. I eased my way through to the nearest bar and ordered a pint of their 1730 Pale Ale, then struck up a conversation with the guy who was best positioned to allow me to keep eyes-on the entrance I’d just walked through.
The fact that he looked like he’d got back from Afghan the week before was a bonus. He wasn’t wearing combats and didn’t have a Bergen at his feet, but there was something in his eyes and the way he carried himself that said he’d recently been teleported from a different planet. A planet where discipline was everything and dropping your guard could have fatal consequences. If you knew the signs, you could always tell.
Sure enough, he’d been with 1 Yorks, bouncing between FOBs in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand with the Danish Battle Group. I wondered whether he’d bumped into my old mate Jack Grant along the way – highly unlikely, but you had to ask. The only Grant he’d come across was an illegal bottle of Scotch. He laughed. Tasted like shit. Give him a Jägerbomb any time.
Someone behind me started boring his girlfriend shitless about the clash of cruelty and high comedy in
Twelfth Night
. Me and Yorkie both rolled our eyeballs, but I didn’t turn and tell the dickhead that clashes like that were an everyday thing in the battle space, because Mr Leatherman chose that moment to poke his head through the door.
6
Yorkie was also drinking the 1730. I asked him if he fancied the other half, keeping Leatherman at the periphery of my vision. I wanted to take a good look at him, but if I was under surveillance, I didn’t want him to know I was aware.
As the barman pulled the pint, the guy in the doorway couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether to join the party or look for somewhere quiet for dinner. He eventually headed back outside, having given me long enough to clock that he hadn’t just been to the same tailor as my Moldovan pursuers, he’d been to the same gym and barber as well, and his skin was as grey as a sunny day in Transnistria.
Yorkie and I carried on waffling about soldier shit as the guy behind me moved on to the Problem Plays, whatever the fuck they were. I glanced around the room and caught sight of the girlfriend’s expression in the process. That one look told me it was the Shakespeare expert who had the problem: he definitely wasn’t on a result.
I gave it another half-hour before downing the last of my beer, shook Yorkie warmly by the hand and went through to the Southwark Bridge exit. A small crowd had gathered by the Clink Street arch to take photographs of an old boy in a top hat playing ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’ on a giant flaming tuba. Not many of his admirers seemed to be throwing coins into his collection box.
I joined them for a minute or two, then moved on in the same direction. The posters outside the Clink itself proudly claimed that it was ‘the prison that gave its name to all others!’ It was past closing time, so I was too late to join in ‘the rodent hunt for kids’. Not that I needed to: I had one all of my own.
I stayed at Costa long enough to get a brew down my neck and catch up on the newspaper reports of David Cameron’s recent meeting with President Karzai at Chequers, ‘where they signed an enduring strategic partnership between the UK and Afghanistan’, which must have given both of them a nice warm glow.
Leatherman seemed to have melted away. But then again, he didn’t need to walk past the big plate-glass windows I was stationed beside. He knew which pipe his rat had gone down. Maybe he was just waiting to zap me at the other end of it.
You didn’t have to try too hard to switch into holidaymaker mode along here – this part of Bankside always did it for me. I eased myself to the front of the throng oohing and aahing at the
Golden Hinde
. No one could pass it without being gobsmacked by how Francis Drake and his crew had sailed around the world, nicking doubloons from Spaniards, in a hunk of timber not much bigger than a stretch limo. And that gave me plenty of opportunity to check for the presence of men in leather jackets from three different approaches.
I took a right immediately after a line of Boris Bikes and a sign that invited me to become part of the London Bridge Experience – London’s Scariest Attraction! There was no sign of a shadow as I walked through the station towards Guy’s Hospital and the Shard, using the construction-site stuff as cover. By the time I emerged on the other side of the medical students’ hall of residence, I had two.
My mate from the wobbly bridge was behind me again, and his cousin was about fifty to my right and closing. He could have been heading for the Leather Exchange on Weston Street – this part of town was Tannery Central – but I doubted it. He was working so hard to ignore me that my internal alarm bells started ringing big-time.
I heard the heli rotors again as I ducked into Southall Place, and glanced up at the blinking light five hundred feet above me. I lengthened my stride, then jinked half-right onto the edge of an estate that was still in the queue for the Tabard Gardens facelift and hadn’t yet tuned into the concept of the motion sensor.
There were no straight lines here, and no security lights to let the Leathermen monitor my progress from the ground. I sprinted down a stretch of pitted tarmac between a row of garages and balconies hung with washing. Satellite dishes sprouted from the brickwork like fungi and TV sets glowed and flickered behind the net curtains.
This was my turf. I’d take them through a series of bottlenecks and see how they liked it. Then, if I couldn’t split them up and take them one by one, I’d disappear.
7
A monster wheelie bin had spewed garbage across the mouth of the alleyway that zigzagged left and right at the end of the row of garages. I took the corner at speed and nearly lost it as my Timberlands hit something slimy that I hoped wasn’t dog shit. I had enough on my plate without the stench of that stuff following me around for the rest of the night.
I bounced off a wall and a stretch of wriggly tin hoarding before I levelled out again, and jarred my right shoulder. It sent my central nervous system an immediate message of complaint and I told it to go fuck itself. These boys weren’t going to wait for me to call for a masseur and a tube of ibuprofen gel. I gave it a quick rub and carried on. I couldn’t hear footsteps behind me, but the wriggly tin had clanged like a gong and I needed to make distance.
I turned right and looped through Empire Square, staying within the shadow of the trees, past the Marlin Apartments, an upmarket development for business and leisure guests, who’d scratch their heads if you mentioned the words ‘Premier’ and ‘Inn’ in the same sentence.
The good news was that if it had been dog shit on the sole of my boot, it wasn’t there any more. The bad news was that the Leathermen were still together, and sticking to me like a cheap suit. The heli had lifted away, but as I left the west side of the development they appeared three hundred behind me, shoulder to shoulder, the far side of the trees.
I legged it across Tabard Street and worked my way around the back of Tabard Gardens, slaloming through a bunch of pub-goers as I went. When I reached the block where me and my mate Gaz had spent what the psychopath-detector shrink would call our formative years, I reckoned I had about a five-hundred-metre lead. I hoped it would be enough.
I hung a left past the refuse bunker by the Audi convertible’s parking space and up the main stairwell, triggering a chain of motion sensors as I went. Too bad. Maybe they’d be on a short time lapse to help save the planet. No such luck. The lights were still blazing away as I belted towards the neat plywood boarding that encased Gaz’s flat while the developers worked their magic, but by then I’d realized they could operate in my favour. If I was stranded on the walkway when the Leathermen turned the corner, I was in the shit. If I’d managed to get up the fire escape, I’d be back in deep shadow.
There was going to be a big difference between a skinny eight-year-old scrambling that final length of cast-iron pipework on a summer afternoon and his older, chunkier self trying to pull the same stunt on a cold winter night, but I didn’t have a choice.
Somewhere nearby I heard a yell, followed by what sounded like a plate smashing. At first I thought it might be some drama on the TV but then a door burst open on the walkway immediately below me and a male voice said the dinner was shit anyway and he was going down the Oak. A female one told him not to bother coming back any time soon.
I couldn’t have asked for a better diversion. I moved Sam’s Browning from my waistband into the right pocket of my bomber jacket, zipped it tight, swung my leg over the rail and started to climb.
8
The metal rungs of the ladder chilled my fingers to the bone. They were also slippery as fuck. When I reached the top one the security lights were still going strong and the Leathermen were either keeping to the shadows beyond them, or hadn’t been putting in enough hours on the treadmill.
Keeping a tight hold on the fire escape I grabbed the far side of the waste stack with my right hand and wedged my right boot on the bracket that strapped it to the wall. I reminded myself that Jesus Christ was here yesterday, today and for ever, and brought my left hand and boot across to join them.
The guttering was cast-iron too, and mounted on the rafter tail fascia eighteen inches above my head. Me and Gaz hadn’t thought twice about swinging from it when we were kids, but the waste stack was the only route I could take now. The thing had put up with sixty-odd years of shit and was still there to tell the tale.
I slid all my fingers behind the pipe and prepared to shimmy up it, a bit like Ken Marabula and his Fijian mates would have climbed a coconut palm when they were kids. The trick was to go hand over hand and place even pressure on the mortared recess above each course of bricks with every upward toehold. If I just scrabbled around and hoped for the best, I’d end up wrenching the whole thing off its anchors.
The pipe left the wall at a 45-degree angle then straightened again once it had cleared the eaves. My shoulder ached and my calf muscles started to burn as I hauled myself past the overhang. I pushed the sole of my right Timberland against the final strap and felt the top of the stink pipe bend even further outwards. The bracket shifted and one of its screws popped out of its fixing.
Flying blind, my left foot managed to find enough purchase on the junction for me to be able to launch first my torso and then my right knee over the edge of the roof. I lay there for a moment, face down, going nowhere, with my left leg and some of my arse hanging into space.
The pantiles were textured, so their surface friction stopped me sliding straight off them, and because they were constructed from interlocking ridges and valleys, I was able to grip them firmly enough to pull my whole body out of sight of the parking area.
When I’d put some space between my feet and the gutter, I slowed my breathing, opened my mouth and listened. A couple of dogs started a barking competition somewhere near the Nature Area. All they needed was for a couple of urban foxes to join the party. Behind me, a police siren whooped its way along the Old Kent Road. In the silence that followed, the cold and damp started to eat through my jeans and bomber jacket and into my flesh.