Thicker Than Water

A penny for the peep-show.

‘Are we going anywhere, mate?’ the cabbie asked from behind me. Even on the meter, he clearly didn’t like his time being wasted. Which was a pity, because I would have been happy to draw this out a lot longer."

"But there was nothing else I could do from a mile away, and it was more than time that was being wasted. I got back into the cab.

‘New Kent Road,’ I said. ‘The Salisbury Estate.’

We pulled back into the traffic, and I thought about what I had to do. Promises to break. Innocent people to lie to.

Stupid, blind risks to take while I pretended that I knew what I was doing. Just another day at the office, really. Maybe I should have worked harder at giving the children’s-party entertaining a fair trial.

It took five or six minutes to get to the Salisbury, the air seeming to thicken and congeal around me with every yard we travelled. I paid off the cabbie and walked up the steps to the concrete apron, where I saw with little surprise a small posse of Gwillam’s merry men and un-men waiting to meet me.

The flat-faced man - Feld - was there, but I didn’t know the others. There was a short swag-bellied man in a shabby suit who looked like he might be someone’s fat, jolly uncle, although the Father Christmas effect was slightly spoiled by a horrendous scar that ran diagonally down his face in a bend sinister of rucked and hardened flesh, and a hard case who was dressed entirely in black: ready for night ops, and maybe trying just a bit too hard. He had impressive muscles, though: but then, being around born-again Gwillam’s menagerie would obviously leave an ordinary baseline human feeling like he had something to live up to. Poor sod was probably at the gym all the hours God sent.

‘Mister Castor,’ said the man in black. ‘I’m Eddings, and this -’ pointing to the fat man ‘- is Speight. He’ll brief you as we walk.’ He didn’t bother to introduce Feld: perhaps he knew that we’d already met.

He turned and led the way across the concrete.

Speight fell in beside me as I followed, and Feld brought up the rear. Nobody else was in sight, and the silence was more profound than ever. It wasn’t just that there was no noise from the towers nearby: the voices of the city itself, the noise of the traffic on the road only a few yards behind us, the rumble of trains and shouts of convivial drunks, were stilled as we walked forward. The curtains: we’d passed through them, and they’d fallen closed behind us.