Bryant & May by Christopher Fowler

Author:Christopher Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

On the other side of the city, someone else was thinking of the same October night.

Sleep eluded Sparrow Martin. Rain spattered the window of the ground-floor flat she had taken over from her parents in the Barbican. Visitors found the maze of postwar concrete tunnels gloomy and confusing, but she loved living there. Tonight, though, the rooms felt claustrophobically overstuffed with her family’s old furniture. She went to an armchair and sat with the new Kate Atkinson propped in her lap, but when she read her mind drifted back to the night the four of them met. She had started to think of it as ‘The Event.’

Sparrow had booked a carpool taxi from the Strand because she couldn’t cope with the home-going conviviality of the night tube. The people carrier was already occupied when it pulled up. Augusta Frost said she was relieved to be sharing with another female because she’d been surrounded by idiot men all night. She’d been to several bars in Covent Garden, where she and a girlfriend had hooked up with a couple of ridiculously tall Dutch lads on a birthday weekend.

For Sparrow the night had unfolded with all the desperation of an unplanned New Year’s Eve: a party in Maida Vale with the lights up and the music down, and a club in Charing Cross Road as crowded as rush hour. She had been talked into staying by a woman who worked part-time in the bookshop.

When the driver picked her up, he explained that they would probably stop to pick up more passengers. Sparrow’s finger had traced spangles of rainlight on the car windows. She looked out at the lamp-yellow streets lined with randomly ordered shops: nail bar, electronic repairs, noodles, coffee shop, fried chicken, pub. A limited choice, she’d thought, rather like men. Once she would have seen how they looked at girls like Augusta and felt a twinge of jealousy. Now she watched them from an anthropological viewpoint, like observing monkey troops.

‘This creepy media guy was talking about his daughter as if she was his girlfriend,’ Augusta had told her. ‘How was yours?’

‘A TV producer described his vinyl collection to me in great detail and offered to get me on a quiz show,’ said Sparrow.

The driver checked his rearview mirror. ‘I am picking up passengers here,’ he had said, pointing through the smeared windscreen.

Sparrow peered out but saw nothing but dead offices, building sites, tall halogen lights. ‘Where are we?’ she had asked. ‘I can’t see where we are…’

‘The back of Tufnell Park,’ said Augusta. ‘There are always murders around here.’

‘Murders,’ Sparrow had repeated. ‘I think I read something…’

It could only be because of that night. She needed to talk to someone. Augusta said she never slept. Sparrow reached across the bed for her phone.

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