Thicker Than Water

That first clear glimpse gave me a prickly feeling of recognition, although I couldn’t remember where I might have seen the guy before. He had the etiolated skin and painfully slender build of a smack addict, and black hair that hung to his shoulder: a look distinctive enough that I ought not to have had to grope too long for the newsflash from my long-term memory, but nothing was forthcoming. His dark eyes flicked to left and right as though they were following a metronome, effectively solving the problem of not looking fixedly at me by not looking for more than a fraction of a second at anything.

He wore a dark grey flak jacket and a silver-grey scarf only marginally thicker than a necktie - maybe trying to signal that he was tough but in touch with his feminine side.

The memory nagged at me but at first it wouldn’t come clear. Then I got another blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of him reflected in the glass of a swinging shop door as it closed. The tiny dark dot over his right eye was the trigger that loosened my mental logjam.

The guy on the stairs at the Salisbury, with the BO that was probably grave stench. The dead man walking, who’d said he thought he knew me.

In a way, it was good news: if he was a zombie - and particularly, if he was following me away from Imelda’s place - then he wasn’t one of Jenna-Jane’s people. He must have hooked onto my coat-tails at the Salisbury, which was why all my ducking and diving on the way there from Pen’s house hadn’t shaken him off: whoever he was, he didn’t seem to be part of the professional two-man tag-team Gary Coldwood had spotted.

So maybe - just maybe - I hadn’t just blown the secret of Rafi’s current location to the last person in the world I wanted to have it.

I needed answers, though, and in the aftermath of that nasty shock I yielded to an evil temptation. Why not turn the tables on this born-again little scuzzball and see if he had anything to say for himself?

I picked up speed walking across McNeil Road, hurrying between cars and buses as though I was late for an appointment.

I didn’t look back any more: I didn’t want to scare the guy off. nweeI just had to trust that he’d stay on-task until I’d scouted out a good place for an ambush.

Peckham has some of my favourite place names in the whole of London, although mostly the places themselves don’t live up to their billing. Love Walk falls squarely into this category.