The Wolves of London (18 page)

‘Oh my God,’ she breathed.

It was only when the light came on that I saw that the room had been trashed. The sofa and chairs had been shredded and turned over; books – including Kate’s
Toy Story
colouring book – had been torn apart and strewn about like dead birds; CDs had been dashed to the floor, their plastic casings crunched underfoot; the TV was lying on its back with a saucepan embedded in its glass screen.

Clover’s exhalation had not been a response to the devastation, though. Spectacular though it was, her eyes – and mine – had been drawn almost immediately to the opposite wall. Spray-painted in big red letters on the pale wallpaper were five words:

BEWARE THE WOLVES OF LONDON

C
lover was asleep, breathing deep and long, her dark hair spread over the hotel pillow, and her face, now peaceful and relaxed after the traumas of the day, looking younger than her twenty-odd years. Her closed eyelids were a pale lilac colour and reminded me of butterfly wings in the dim light. One limp hand was resting against her cheek, as if she’d fallen asleep while sucking her thumb.

Looking at her, I felt a protective ache in my belly, an urge to keep her from harm. It was nothing to do with sexual attraction. It was as if my feelings for Kate, with nowhere to go, had latched on to Clover instead.

Although I was exhausted, my head was too busy for sleep. As well as feeling a duty to watch over Clover, I had so much to think about I barely knew where to start.

After seeing the words daubed on the wall of my flat we had decided it was too risky to stay there. So we hit the streets again, sticking to the shadows and looking all around us as we hurried away from the building in case the Wolves of London, whoever they were, were still hanging around. We came to a panting, jittery halt outside the closed, dark entrance to Chiswick Park tube station and called a cab from there. I suggested trying Clover’s place, but it turned out she lived in a flat above the club, so that was a no go. We therefore got the cab to take us back into the West End, where Clover and I both withdrew £500 each from a cash machine. Then we found a quiet little hotel near Bloomsbury Square and took a double room for the night – just somewhere to sleep and, if possible, recharge our batteries. We were so shattered we literally couldn’t think beyond that. A proper, coherent plan would have to wait until the morning.

As soon as we locked the door of the room behind us, Clover staggered over to the bed and collapsed. Within seconds she was asleep, her body shutting down like it was deploying some kind of defence mechanism. I pulled off her shoes – God knows how she’d managed in those high heels all night – and threw the spare blanket from the walk-in wardrobe over her. Then I turned off all the lights apart from the little reading lamp above the desk, made myself a cup of tea and settled down in the armchair.

I thought about taking a shower – I felt grubby and kept getting sharp, sweaty wafts of what was probably the by-product of concentrated adrenaline whenever I shifted position – but thinking about it was as far as I got. Not only did it seem like too much effort, I also didn’t like the thought of leaving Clover in the room on her own, or indeed of making myself vulnerable by standing naked behind a plastic curtain with water running into my eyes. So I did nothing but sit there, drinking tea and trying to make sense of what was going on. It struck me I was turning into a kind of Jonah, insomuch as many of the people with whom I’d been associated these past few days – my daughters, Clover, Barnaby McCallum, the two Japanese ‘businessmen’ – had suffered in one way or another. I wondered for the thousandth time what was happening and what my role in it all was. And I wondered too whether there was still further yet to fall, and how I would cope if there was.

Sitting in the semi-darkness, Clover’s soft, slow breathing filling the room, I had the feeling that I was currently in the eye of the storm, huddled in a protective bubble, while all about swirled chaos and death and destruction. It wasn’t a comforting feeling. I knew that Clover and I couldn’t stay here for ever, and that sooner or later we would have to emerge and face the storm head on.

At my request, Clover had checked her emails on her phone a few times since we’d fled the club, but there had been no further contact from email man. I’d checked my phone too, of course, and continued to do so, obsessively, every ten minutes or so, but zilch. Without realising I was doing it, I began, as I sat there thinking, to trace the outline of the obsidian heart in my breast pocket with my fingers and then to caress it through the material. As soon as it struck me what I was doing I felt uncomfortable, disturbed by my actions. I had the odd sense that the heart was almost like my own heart, or more specifically like a heart that was giving me trouble – burning in my chest, weighing heavily. There was no doubt that it was at the centre of everything that had happened. It was both a curse, in that it had caused so much trouble, and a blessing, because when it came to the question of keeping Kate alive it was my only bargaining tool.

But what exactly was it? Where had it come from? Was it
only
a weapon or something else? Thinking of the tall man and his menagerie of half-organic, half-clockwork creatures, I even found myself wondering whether the heart was of this world or whether it was from… where? Outer space? Some secret world within our own where things existed that had managed to keep themselves hidden for hundreds, maybe thousands of years?

Though outwardly I was calm, inwardly my thoughts were still raging, my mind crippled with anxiety for Kate, and struggling to come to terms with what it had seen tonight, trying to fit square pegs into round holes. I took the heart out of my pocket and began to pass it from hand to hand, playing with it the same way someone might play with a set of worry beads. My fingers moved restlessly over the knobbly, veined surface as if feeling for a hidden catch, a secret opening, a way in. Funnily enough, it never occurred to me that the thing might be dangerous, that what had happened to McCallum might happen to me too. Maybe I was so beset with worry and confusion that I simply didn’t care, though I don’t think that was it. It was more a sense, almost a conviction, not only that I was the heart’s protector, but that it somehow
knew
that I was.

I leaned to one side so that the yellow light from the lamp beside me shone on the heart’s gleaming surface. I went over every millimetre of it with my fingers and eyes, looking for cracks or… I don’t know; just wanting it to give up its secrets, in the hope that I might better understand what was going on. At one point I even held the heart up in front of my face, like a jeweller examining a diamond. But nothing happened. Just as in Incognito, the heart stubbornly refused to become anything other than what it appeared to be, an egg-sized human organ carved out of black stone.

At last I sighed and sat back, the seat creaking beneath me. On the bed, Clover gave a little moan and half-turned over, then settled again. For once London was silent. I could hear nothing outside the room but the faint background hum of the universe. I looked at the heart for a couple of seconds longer, then curled my fingers around it and squeezed.

‘Come on,’ I muttered. ‘Come on.’

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. The room was the same as before. The heart was still a rock-like lump in my hand, unmoving, unyielding.

‘Fuck you then,’ I whispered, and slipped the thing back into my pocket. Needing a piss, I leaned forward to push the dead weight of my weary body out of the seat. I looked across at the half-open door of the bathroom, at the wedge of darkness between door and frame.

The darkness moved.

My own heart leaped like it had been jump-started and my hands gripped the arms of the chair. My brain told me I should be on my feet, leaping into action, but I couldn’t move. I watched as the bathroom door opened slowly and soundlessly, not all the way, just enough to reveal the silhouette of a figure. The figure was slight, and beneath its black bulb of a head it seemed to glimmer like a ghost. Then it stepped out of the shadows and light fell across it, and I gasped in recognition.

It was Lyn, the mother of Kate. But Lyn was in a psychiatric hospital on the south coast; had been there for five years. Her presence here now was astonishing, not only because she was here at all, but also because this wasn’t the raddled, reduced Lyn I now visited on an irregular basis, but the beautiful, gentle, radiant Lyn I had first known and loved years before. And what pushed the visitation from astonishing into the realm of the impossible was the fact that this was also
pregnant
Lyn, five or six months gone, before all the trouble had started. I stared in amazement at the bulging belly beneath the knee-length nightshirt she wore.

I remembered that nightshirt. I might even have bought it for her. It was white with a repeated cherry design on it, and it had short sleeves edged in lace trim. I noticed that Lyn was even wearing the bangles and rings she wasn’t allowed to wear any more, and her fingernails and toenails (her feet were bare) were painted a bright candyfloss pink. She was smiling at me, that old mischievous smile that exposed her dimples, her eyes wide and blue beneath her ash-blonde fringe.

I opened my mouth, but no words came out. It wasn’t until she shimmered that I realised I was crying.

She looked at me for several seconds, and on her face was compassion, love even. Then she spoke, and her voice was not the cracked mutter or the barbed-wire screech I was now used to. It was soft and warm and sexy, like it used to be.

‘Take care, Alex,’ she said. ‘The wolves are coming.’

Then, her hands cupping her pregnant belly, she stepped back into the bathroom and was swallowed by the shadows.

‘No!’ I croaked, and that was when I felt my body jerk and my eyes tear open, and I realised, with a mixture of despair and relief, that I had been dreaming. The dream had been so vivid, though, that I stood up, the heart rolling off my lap and on to the floor with a thump. I rushed across to the bathroom, wrenched open the door and turned on the light. I was half-thinking that if I was quick enough I might still catch Lyn before she went back to wherever she had come from. But the bathroom was empty, and the harsh light reflecting off the white tiles was like fingernails scraping down the blackboard of my brain.

I don’t know whether it was this, or the dream, or simply a delayed reaction to everything that had happened that night, but suddenly, for about the fifth time in as many hours, I got a fierce attack of stomach cramps. This time I knew I wouldn’t be able to will it away, and so I threw myself down on the floor in front of the toilet and stuck my head in the bowl. A second later I hurled up everything I had eaten and drunk since killing the old man, which wasn’t much – tea, toast, a couple of shortbread biscuits that had been on the tea tray in the hotel room. It took several good heaves to get my stomach empty and then I was retching up foul-tasting bile which burned my throat.

Eventually my guts stopped cramping and I slumped away from the vomit-spattered toilet and on to my back. The light on the ceiling looked impossibly high and impossibly bright, like an icy sun glaring down on a cold, white desert.

My last coherent thought was that I had to go back into the other room, protect Clover and safeguard the heart.

Then the light above me seemed to flare like an exploding sun, and I remembered nothing more.

W
hen I offered to buy her a drink, she laughed tipsily and said, ‘I’ll have something cheap and tarty.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Something with sambuca in it.’

I knew she was teasing me. Testing me, even. Matching her grin with my own, I said, ‘I hope that’s not what
you
are?’

‘What?’

‘Cheap and tarty.’

She looked at me again –
properly
looked at me this time – and despite the fact that she was a little drunk, I saw intelligence, shrewdness and humour in her eyes. ‘Do you
really
?’ she asked.

‘Yes I do.’

And that was how it started. At the end of the evening Lyn wrote her phone number in bruise-red lipstick on the inside of my forearm and made me promise to call her.

2003, that was. June. I was twenty-six years old and two months out of prison. I had a master’s degree in psychology and had enrolled in teacher training college. I’d been told that because of my criminal record it was ‘unlikely’ I would ever be allowed to work with impressionable minors, but that – depending on how ‘enlightened’ my potential employers were – there was a possibility I might eventually find work in further or adult education. I knew it was going to be tough, but I was optimistic and determined. And on the night I met Lyn, in a packed pub called The Punch and Judy in Covent Garden, I was still reeling with joy at the sheer novelty of being able to do my own thing for the first time in over six years – of being able to go where I wanted to go, to eat what I wanted to eat, of simply being able to stand under a vast open sky, and to walk for miles and miles.

Those first few years with Lyn were the happiest of my life. We were ridiculously loved up, soppy for each other; she was my soulmate, or so I believed. Her dad, Terry, owned an accommodation agency and fixed us up with a nice little flat in Shepherd’s Bush, just round the corner from the Empire. He was a good bloke, Lyn’s dad. Originally from Plymouth, he talked with a West Country drawl that made him sound like a bumpkin, even though he was anything but.

When Lyn told me she was pregnant in November 2006 I thought my life was complete. By this time I had gained my level 4 further education teaching certificate, and was teaching night classes four evenings a week and loving it.

I can’t remember exactly when Lyn started cutting herself, but it must have been around May or June of 2007. She started on the backs of her wrists, and then moved on to her upper arms and thighs. Round about the same time, or maybe just before that, came the nightmares and the sleepwalking. Lyn could never remember the full details, but she became convinced that someone was watching her, someone who wanted to harm her baby. She talked about ‘the dark man’, or sometimes ‘the man from the shadows’, but whenever I asked her to elaborate she became confused and upset. Doctors put it down to depression, hormonal imbalance, and the first few times I took her to A&E after she had slashed her arms, they simply patched her up, gave her some anti-depressants and sent her back home.