As he pounded up the stairs of the flats, North had one thing he needed to do. Open the bottle in his room and drink the Japanese whisky in it. All of it. He wouldn’t leave a drop – could already taste the peaty drips on his tongue, his head back, the upended bottle. He would drink to the point of annihilation. He swore under his breath. The long walk home and the caffeine hadn’t done him any favours, because he was too awake and nothing good would come of that.
Come back to London and work for me. Hone couldn’t walk in a straight line. As for Derkind, North was tech-savvy enough, but he was a soldier, not a scientist. And he had better things to do – like drink. The corridor was dark but noisy with the laboured conversation of early-morning TV, crying babies and raised voices. Turning the key, he leant his shoulder against the peeling door and pushed. It jammed. It always jammed on the way in, catching on the turned-up patch of grey linoleum. He should tell the landlord, but somehow he didn’t think the landlord would care. Every Tuesday, a man in a vest knocked on his door and North gave him 150 euros. Neithe r party spoke. And he liked the fact the door jammed – it gave him time to brace himself against the misery that leached from the damp, tobacco-coloured walls inside.
It was the definition of a cockroach-infested dump. He held his breath as he crossed the threshold. Something dead mouldered under the floorboards – he suspected a rat and he hated rats. If he shut the door, he kept out the worst of it. The worst – but not all of it.
North headed for the window, unlocked it, and hauled it open. The air rising from the alley was warm and steamy from the early shift in the laundrette below, and he breathed it in, enjoying the sudden smell of soap. He leant on the windowsill with his palms spread. He was on the fourth floor – there should be a fire escape. The fact there wasn’t was one of the reasons he’d taken the room. He had plenty of money – millions. But this was everything he deserved. In the event of a fire he would die, and that was a good thing. He could die quicker if he leant a little too far. Out into the air that smelled of clean sheets. He lifted a hand, straightening a finger to pop a rising iridescent bubble, but let it go on its way; leant a little further as he stared at the concrete beneath. Into the void and the end of things. Felt his balance shift, rock, catch, and he pulled himself back – away from temptation.
The bottle then. Because there were any number of ways to fall to your death.
He reached for the whisky standing on the table by the wall. The tin screw-cap sliding round and round on the thread of the bottleneck, before he finally managed to free it and fill the glass.
The whisky was at his lips before he noticed the postcard. He leant over. It was of the Tyne Bridge.
North put down the glass.
Tenants had mail slots downstairs – he glimpsed his neighbours sometimes sighing over bills. North never bothered checking his slot, because no one knew he was here. This door had no letterbox and it was locked. He was sure of it. To open it, he’d turned the key. Put his weight against it.
Moreover, the window was locked. And anyway, there was no way up or down. But somehow, someone had let themselves into his apartment to deliver a postcard.
He picked up the card and flipped it over. ‘Wish you were here, moron-person.’ No name. No address. Not even a stamp, and of course, no postmark. There was only one person in the world who considered him a moron, and that was Fangfang Yu – a Geordie teenager with a bad attitude and a brilliant mind. They had nothing in common apart from the fact they both knew she was a genius and she was all the family he had, or at least what passed for family.
First Hone and now Fangfang. He raised the glass to his lips again, his eyes returning to Fang’s message. He didn’t believe in coincidences either.
North swore. He was off-grid with no phone, and living on cash. Yet somehow, Hone tracked him down to the bar and Fang tracked him down to this fleapit. Hone had the full force of the British security service behind him. North was willing to bet Fang had known where he was all along. God knows what she’d done to keep tabs on him. Run facial recognition software? Hacked flight records? Berlin’s CCTV network? The fact she’d broken any number of laws wouldn’t have given her a moment’s hesitation. Fang, he reminded himself, searched for the unexpected, for connections that shouldn’t be there, for answers.
He picked up the card again, stared at the image, flipping it back and forth, turning it this way and that, holding it up to the light, then turned off the light and shrouded himself in his jacket to see if anything showed in the dark. Nothing. At least, not yet. He crossed the room and, kneeling, eased up a floorboard. Lying flat against the floor, his arm fully extended, he groped around the space. Slipping his hand between a pair of rusty copper pipes, his fingers brushed against the fur of a passing rodent, the naked tail passing over his knuckles. He swore again, but made himself keep searching until, finally, his fingertips found the plastic bag and he hauled it up.
A mix of dollars, sterling and euros spilled across the floorboards, along with three passports in different names he’d picked up on a day trip to Amsterdam, and half a dozen credit cards. Still sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, he sifted out the euros he thought he’d need first, folding them in two to push them into his pocket. Then bundled together the sterling.
Wish you were here, moron-person. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Fang wasn’t one for sentiment or cliché. She needed him. She was a fourteen-year-old kid and she needed help. Something was wrong.