Horse With My Name by Colin Bateman

Author:Colin Bateman [Bateman, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780755302406
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

I was certain that I was not followed. Nevertheless I spent the entire night by the fly-smeared window of my tiny bed-and-breakfast refuge, watching every car, studying every drunk, turning only to listen to every creak from the landing outside. Death was my shadow. A young man had been killed by mistake, in mistake for me. I was alive because I’d been accommodating, and needed to use the gents. It was Coke proving that it really did add life.

My stomach rumbled incessantly. There was nothing to eat. Kebab smells filtered through from a carry-out down the road, but I was too frightened to go out. Someone had stabbed the guy in the throat in the middle of a crowded café and nobody had noticed. I was not walking down a cracked-pavemented barely lit street to satisfy mere hunger. I would suck the hairs out of the manky sink for sustenance before I crossed the threshold of this matchstick fortress in the hours of darkness.

They, he, she, couldn’t have followed.

I had crossed and crissed so much on the way back that even I got lost for a while.

I also tried to convince myself that I would not have been followed because there was no need for it. Whoever had killed the Star Wars fan had presumed it was me, and must thus have been satisfied that he had carried out his task. The only way he could have tracked me down was by somehow hacking into the messages I’d left with Hilda and backtracking them to the specific computer console I was operating in the internet café. A fortuitous slash and I was still alive. Star Wars fan’s last view was of Ewan McGregor, his last thought of distant, equally violent galaxies.

Fuck.

I slipped out of the bed and breakfast shortly after eight the next morning. Not that there was any breakfast on offer, and the bed only just qualifed.

Traffic was already gridlocked. It was quicker, although scarier, to walk. He, she, they would probably be aware by now that the man they believed to be the Horse Whisperer was still alive. He, she, they would be looking for me. I was fairly certain that whoever had tried to kill me wasn’t connected to either Oil Paintings, Chicken or the dry-cleaning man. Neither was he, she, they avenging the late Chinese bookies. Their interest was in keeping me alive. Their motive was money, and they were all still looking for me as well.

Popular guy.

There was a newsagent’s on the corner with papers hanging up outside. The Irish Times led with it. Internet Murder, the headline screamed, and I felt like screaming back. There was a description of me, the killer. It was fairly accurate, but it could just the same have fitted ten thousand men in the city. Police had closed down the café and impounded the computers. I knew that they would track my e-mails back to Hilda, and perhaps beyond that to the Horse Whisperer, but there was nothing in either of them to specifically identify me.

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