He caught eyes, made no attempt to look away. He remembered Mike’s demeanour on their previous expeditions to the zones, and aped it.

Be who you are, and fuck ‘em if they don’t like it.

The gun helped.

No one wanted to push it any further than a curled lip. No one came close. No one said anything.

Outside one of the clubs, two crack whores broke his run of luck. They registered the clothes and stumbled across the road towards him like kids wading into cold water on a shingle beach. Their bare legs worked as if badly jointed, their feet were wrenched on ludicrous stiletto heels. They wore push-up bras and black mesh microskirts cinched savagely tight. Their make-up was sweat-streaked and caked, and their eyes looked bruised half shut. One was skinnier than the other, but otherwise the pre-dawn whore’s makeover rendered them uniform, wiped difference away.

They were all of fourteen years old.

‘You want to get sucked?’ asked the skinny one.

‘You got a place we can go?’ The other was clearly the brains of the outfit, the forward thinker.

Chris shook his head. ‘Go home.’

‘Don’t be harsh, baby. Just want to do you good.’ The skinny girl amplified her sales pitch with a finger-licking display. She stuck the wet finger inside one cup of her barely necessary bra and rubbed it back and forth with a fixed little smile. Chris flinched.

‘I said, go home.’ He raised the Nemex where they couldn’t miss it. ‘You don’t want anything to do with me.’

‘Baby, that’s a big gun you got,’ said the skinny girl.

‘You want to put it somewhere warm?’

Chris fled.

He came through the westward cordons at Holland Park, an hour before dawn. The checkpoint detail gave him some strange looks, but they said nothing and once his Shorn card swiped clear, they called him a cab. He stood outside the cabin while he waited for it to arrive, staring back across the barriers the way he’d come.

His mobile queeped. He looked at it, saw it was Carla and turned it off.

The cab arrived.

He had the driver take him to work.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

This early on a Sunday, the Shorn block was in darkness above the mezzanine level and the shutdown locks were still in place. He buzzed security, and they let him in without comment or visible surprise. He supposed, rather bitterly, that it couldn’t be entirely unheard of for a Shorn exec to come in before dawn at the weekend.

He thought briefly about grabbing a few hours sleep in the hospitality suites, then dismissed the idea out of hand. Outside, it was already getting light. He wouldn’t sleep unaided now. Instead, he rode the lift all the way up to the fifty-third floor, made his way through the cosy dimness of corridors lit at standby wattage and let himself into his office.

On his desk, the phone was already flashing a message light.

He checked it, saw it was from Carla and wiped it. He stood afterwards with his finger on the stud for a while, reached once for the receiver but never made it. Reached for the lighting control on the datadown but changed his mind. The grey pre-dawn quiet the office was steeped in had an oddly comforting quality, like a childhood hiding place. Like a pillow under his cheek and a clock in front of his face showing a good solid hour before alarm time. Without the lights, he was in limbo, a comfortable state in which decisions did not have to be made, in which you didn’t have to move forward any more. The sort of state that just couldn’t last, but while it did—

He muted the phone’s ring tone, went to the built-in cupboards by the door and took down a blanket. Crossing to the sofa-and-coffee-table island in the corner of the office, he shucked his jacket, shoulder holster and shoes and then lowered himself onto the sofa. Then he covered himself with the blanket and lay staring at the white textured ceiling, waiting for the slow creep of morning to soak across it.

Back down at reception, the younger of the two security guards made bladder excuses and left his colleague while he went up to the mezzanine. He pushed through the swing doors of the toilets, locked himself in a cubicle and took out his phone.

He hesitated for a moment, then grimaced and punched out a number.

The phone purred beside a wide, grey-sheeted bed in a space lit by hooded blue softs. A massive picture window in one wall was polarised to dark. On a table under the sill, a chess set of ornate figurines stood next to a screen that displayed the state of play in silver, black and blue. Grecian-effect sculpture stood around the room on plinths in the shadows. Beneath the sheets, the curves of two bodies moved against each other as the ringing tone penetrated layers of sleep. Louise Hewitt poked her head up, reached for the receiver and held it to her ear. She glared balefully at the time display beside the phone.

‘This had better be fucking important.’

She listened to the hastily apologetic voice at the other end, and her eyes opened wide. She twisted, struggled free of the sheet and propped herself up on one elbow.

‘No, you were right to call me. Yes, I did say that. Yes, it is unusual, I agree. Of course. No, I won’t forget this. Thank you.’

She cradled the receiver and turned over onto her back. Her gaze was dreamy on the blue-tinged ceiling, her tone thoughtful.

‘Chris just rolled into work on his own. In a cab. Four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Looks like he’s been up all night.’

The slim form beside her stirred fully awake.

Chris was dreaming about the supermarket again, but this time he was watching the whole scene from outside, and the car park was insanely, impossibly full of cars. They were everywhere, every colour under the sun, like spilled sweets, and all in motion, cruising and parking and reversing out like some immense robotic ballet, and he couldn’t get through them. Each time he took a step towards the supermarket and the people in its brilliantly-lit interior, a car rolled into his path and stopped with a short squeak of brakes. He had to go round, he had to go round, and his time was running out. The people inside didn’t know. They were shopping in anaesthetised warmth and content and they had no way of knowing what was coming.

Up on the roof, tube metal groaned and clanked in protest as the reindeer shook its head.

And the cars, he suddenly saw, were all empty. There were no shoppers in them, no one driving, no one loading, no one anywhere. Everybody was inside. Shopping. Fucking shopping.

He made it to the doors and tried to open them but they were closed up with impact plastic boarding and metres of heavy steel chain. He tried banging on the windows, shouting, but no one heard him.

The shots, when they came, rippled the glass under his hands. And as always, they drilled into his ear like something physical.

He yelped and woke up, fists clenched under his chin.

For a moment, he cringed there, curled defensively at one end of the sofa. He’d twisted the blanket up in his sleep and now it barely covered half his body. He blinked hard a couple of times, breathed out and sat up. Dawn had come and gone while he slept, and the office was full of bright sunlight.

He got up from the sofa and found his shoes. Bending to put them on, he felt his head throbbing. He’d drowsed himself into a low-grade headache. He shambled to the desk and opened drawers with myopic clumsiness, looking for painkillers. The phone flashed at one corner of his vision. He fumbled a snarl and checked numbers on the piled up messages. Carla, Carla, Carla, fucking Carla—

And Liz Linshaw.

He stopped dead. The call had come in an hour ago. He grabbed a foil of speed delivery codeine tabs out of an open drawer and hit ‘play’.

‘Chris, I tried you at home but your wife didn’t know where you were.’ A wry curl to the voice - he could see the faint smile that went with it. ‘She, uh, she wasn’t too helpful but I got the impression you might be coming into work today. So listen, there’s a breakfast bar in India Street called Break Point. I’m meeting someone there at eight-thirty. I think you might want to be there too.’