Hampstead, London
There was, it turned out, a worse feeling than being homeless in your hometown. It was sitting in a caff only yards from your own front door, waiting for your wife to go out to a coffee morning or some such, so you could sneak into your own home like a burglar.
He sat in Il Barrino on the corner of Perrin’s Lane, where he’d a good view of anyone coming out of Perrin’s Walk. He’d been there about twenty minutes when, right on time, Judy appeared with the twins in their double pushchair—Molly chattering away, Joan looking at everything as though directing her first film.
They turned left up Heath Street and left again into Church Row.
11:00 a.m. Coffee with Lucinda Troy, sister-in-law of the Troy in Prague. Judy would be there an hour at least.
The cistern on the upstairs loo came off the wall easily enough. Inside the little safe was his entire stash from the Finnish rackets, a few hundred in white fivers, about five hundred dollars acquired in various dodgy deals he’d rather his wife never knew about, another clutch of passports from half a dozen countries in half a dozen names but all bearing his photograph, and the Baby Browning with which he’d killed the KGB agent in Vienna. He left the gun. He left the sterling—his once-upon-a-time, running-away-from-home fund. He’d never run away from home. Until now.
He was in and out of the house in less than twenty minutes—all bathroom fittings back in place. He’d swept up the dust, mopped up the small splashes of water with his handkerchief—Irish linen, a real honker of a hanky, a red J embroidered in one corner, a Christmas gift from his mother-in-law. He dropped it in a bin in Heath Street. And then—and then … temptation struck and nailed him to a chair in the corner caff. Rationality and irrationality went mano a mano inside his head. He wanted to see Judy come home. He wanted to see his girls come home.
Three-quarters of an hour later they did. On the opposite side of the street, moving slowly as the girls peered in every shop window from patisserie to estate agent.
Joan was still looking around. Her eyes turned to the caff, and to him. Then her hand came up, pointing at him. She said something—her vocabulary was huge but her pronunciation could still be babyish. She might have said “Daddy,” she might not.
All the same, Judy tucked her into the pushchair, folded her arms back into the blanket, and Wilderness was pretty certain her lips had said, “It’s rude to point.”
Then they rounded the corner into Perrin’s Walk and vanished from his sight.