charges against the condemned man. Another man, dark-skinned and powerful, stepped forward. He carried a long, flat sword. He stood behind the kneeling man. Everything froze between one second and the next.
Then time seemed to jump as the bowed man jerked upright and the sword swung round on the indrawn breath of the crowd. The blood was a red fountain from the neck and poured from the severed head on to the tarpaulin.
Allah Akbar! The roar from the crowd. God’s will is done.
His stomach contracted. His legs could barely hold his weight. The square seemed to darken in front of him, and the edges of his vision faded to blackness. He couldn’t pass out. Not here. Not now. He let his shoulders slump, breathed slowly and deeply until his head began to clear.
He knew, even though he had only seen the weapon and not the hand that wielded it, that he had just witnessed a murder.
London, April 2004
Tuesday was a bad day. It started out quite promisingly, but after that it was downhill all the way. When Roisin’s alarm clock went off at six thirty, the sky was leaden and heavy with clouds. By the time she had showered, the first spatters of rain were already hitting the window.
She went through to the kitchen and tipped some muesli into a bowl. The cramped kitchen still contained the original fittings from when the flat was built in the early sixties, a fact that would probably add enormous value when the taste for retro cycled through a few more years. The pots of herbs she kept on the window sill contrasted with the red of the formica tops to make it look like an old-fashioned Italian restaurant, and her eclectic collection of pans, the bottles of oil and the usual half-full bottle of red wine added to the effect. She didn’t much like the flat–a box in an ex-council block–but the kitchen always felt warm and homey.
A year before, she had been in Warsaw. She and her then partner, Michel, had been about to open their own language school. They planned to teach English and Spanish through the year, and offer summer schools to students from all over the world.
Roisin had provided the start-up costs, sinking her savings and a small legacy from her father into the venture. Michel was to provide the financial backing for the first year of running the business until they had got themselves established in what was a competitive market. But the whole enterprise had gone sour.
She made herself stop thinking about it–there was no point in wasting energy in futile anger. She dumped her bowl into the sink and ran some water over it. She blasted her hair with the drier, which turned it into a blonde tangle. She swore and attacked it with the comb then pulled on her jogging gear and hurried down the stairs of the apartment block, wanting to get out before the rain began in earnest, before traffic really got going and tainted the air with fumes and noise. She knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat directly below hers.
There was a flurry of barks, and she heard grumbling as someone shuffled to answer her knock. A warm fug drifted out, a mix of dust, mildew and unwashed dog. George, the old man who lived in the flat, observed her without obvious enthusiasm.
‘Rosie,’ he said. He yawned and scratched his chest. ‘Thought I heard you banging about up there. Suppose you want a cuppa, now you’ve got me up?’ His dog, Shadow, scratched at the wall behind him and tried to push his muzzle past the old man’s legs, whimpering with excitement. ‘Geddown,’ he said.
‘I’ll make it.’ George’s tea was a bright orange brew that he sweetened with condensed milk. She went into his kitchen before his ‘I can do that, thank you, missy,’ could stop her.
The kitchen was small–a mirror image of hers–and spartanly neat. A loaf of Mother’s Pride was on the worktop next to a carton of margarine, a bag of sugar and a tin of milk. She filled the blackened gas kettle–he refused to have anything to do with the brand new electric one his niece had bought him–and lit the hob. Then she waited interminable minutes for the kettle to boil and made them both tea.
He spooned in enough sugar to make her teeth ache and retired to his chair. Shadow laid a pleading chin on his knee. ‘Geddown,’ he said again, carefully tipping some of his drink into the empty dog dish by his chair. Shadow’s plump sleekness contrasted with his master’s thin frame. George, who was in his eighties, looked more frail now than when she had first met him six months ago when she had knocked on his door to sort out a mail mix-up caused by the postman’s inability to tell the difference between 13 and 31.
‘I’m going for a run. I thought I’d borrow Shadow, if that’s OK.’
He surveyed the day outside the heavily netted window. ‘Running in this? You daft or what?’ He shrugged. ‘He may as well make himself useful.’ Shadow’s tail thumped on the ground. She and George kept up the pretence that he was doing her a favour by letting her take the dog when she went running. His knees were arthritic and their walks were sedate affairs. She waited as he finished his drink, listening as he gave her his take on the day. He probably wouldn’t talk to another person before she came back from work and dropped in to say hello. Then she clipped on the dog’s lead and left.
With the excited mongrel dragging her along, she went past the rows of front doors and stepped out into the chaos that was King’s Cross. The rain had stopped for the moment, but its fall had left the air smelling fresh, even in this polluted corner of the city. The traffic was starting to build up, people were heading towards the bus stops and the stations, and she could hear the rumble of heavy machinery and the shouts of the workmen from the building site. She walked down St Pancras Road, restraining Shadow until she reached the canal, then she let the eager dog off the lead and followed him down the steps on to the tow path.
Silence closed round her. She could smell the dankness of the water and the musty fragrance of leaves that had lain rotting since autumn as Shadow pushed through the undergrowth. He came bounding back with a stick in his mouth and deposited it at Roisin’s feet, shaking the wet off his coat. Then he cast his eye in the direction of the canal, and began gathering his muscles for the leap. She issued a sharp instruction. He gave her a sideways glance, as if trying to decide whether to obey her, but maybe he, too, thought the water looked uninviting, and he danced away up the tow path.
The grey coldness of the water reminded her suddenly of the Tyne as it ran through her home city of Newcastle. The river had been the backdrop to her teens. When she was seventeen, she and her best friend Amy, high on pills, had climbed through the metal girders of the Tyne Bridge so Roisin could take a photograph of the mist on the water. She couldn’t remember now why they had decided to do such a thing, but she could remember Amy gripping her arm and bracing herself against a stanchion as Roisin leant out over the dizzying drop so she could angle her camera to get the picture she wanted. The memory made her laugh and a man, passing the other way, gave her a worried sideways glance and quickened his pace.
Shadow was running ahead now, so she broke into a slow jog, letting her mind wander as the rhythm took over. The tow path in the early morning was like a club. The same joggers and dog walkers used it every day, and the London convention of avoiding eye contact and not acknowledging fellow human beings didn’t operate down here. She nodded ‘Good morning’ to familiar faces as she passed them, calling to Shadow as he got involved in the rituals of dog greeting that her father in an uncharacteristic moment of crudity had dubbed ‘ring-a-ring-a-arses’. She suppressed another laugh at the memory.
The tow path was wide and well paved here, overlooked by offices, expensive apartment blocks, and tall, red-brick buildings that rose an improbable height from the water. When she reached Camden Lock she stopped
