Dead Men's s Boots

Pressing the RECENT CALLS button I found the number I’d dialled the night before – the one John had written down on the matchbook cover – selected it and called it up.

A second. Two. Then I heard the tinny, boppy, tooth-jangling strains of the Crazy Frog sound from right ahead of me.

The skinny guy’s head jerked in a belated double take. His hand snaked into his jeans pocket to turn his phone off and he turned to look back at me, locking eyes with me for the first time. He must have had the phone set to vibrate, too: either that or there was no music on his headphones in the first place.

Abruptly, without warning, he bolted.

I sprinted after him, instinctively bearing right to cut him off if he headed for the station concourse: if he got inside there with even a few seconds’ lead on me, I’d never see him again.

But he wasn’t trying for the station: he sprinted straight out across Bridge Place, almost getting sideswiped by a bus which cost me a second or two as I slowed to let it pass.

Then he plunged into a side street.

I was almost thirty feet behind him now, and by the time I got to the corner of the street he was already out of sight. I kept running anyway, scanning the street on both sides to see if there were any clues as to where he might have gone. Only one turn-off, on the left. I took that, and was just in time to see him vanish around another corner away up ahead of me.

Maybe I don’t exercise as much as I should. I know health experts recommend half an hour a day: I did half an hour back in 1999 and then sort of fell behind, what with all that excitement about the new millennium and all.

I was already feeling winded when I reached the next corner, while the guy I was chasing seemed to be accelerating if anything.

I got a lucky break, though, when a door opened ahead of him and a woman came out into the street leading two children by the hand. They turned towards us, forming a pavement-wide barrier and giving him the choice between trampling them underfoot or making a wide detour.

He skidded to a halt, almost slamming into the startled woman, then swerved across the street, past a skip full of someone’s defunct living-room furniture and into an alley.

I took the hypotenuse and won back enough time to snatch the base unit of a standard lamp from the skip as I passed it. Aerodynamically it was piss-poor, but this was no time to be picky.