Two Weeks Earlier
Travelling into London with eight fourteen-year-olds was a little like being a circus master. Gray could only assume that these children went on trains in their out-of-school lives, that they walked on pavements and past members of the public, that they saw advertising hoardings depicting scantily clad human beings, but in the context of a school trip it was as though they’d all just been released from a sensory-deprivation capsule. They touched things, they swung from poles, they shouted – oh, how they shouted. And these were his brightest students, the top stream, virtual genii in a couple of cases, on their way to the semi-finals of an inter-school maths competition being held at a university.
It was a windy, heavy-skied day, on the brink of rain. He had the remains of a hangover and longed to grab a coffee from one of the dozens of coffee shops they’d passed since they got off the train at Victoria. But he was chained to these children; he couldn’t afford to take his eye off them for a moment. Finally they approached the hall where the competition was being hosted. The grandeur of the place – towering domed ceiling glazed with stained glass, half-ton chandeliers, marble statues and burnished mahogany panelling – seemed to still the children as they entered. Gray registered them while they stood, quiet and awed. Then he herded them into their allocated section of a room filled with the territorial bristle and edge of children from different schools forced into close proximity. He set them all up with cups of water and practice papers and headed back to the registration desk. ‘Is it OK if I pop out for a minute or two, to grab a coffee?’
‘Is everyone in your group registered?’
‘Yes, they’re in the prep room.’
The registrar nodded and Gray fled.
The wind was wild now, sending sheets of newspaper and city dust into the air. He pulled his coat hard around him and headed in the direction of a Costa he’d seen on the way in. He ordered an extra-strong Americano and a chocolate muffin and it was as he left the shop and turned back towards the university building that he saw him.
His peripheral vision faded away into interference and his heart filled up with too much blood. The stale alcohol that he’d been trying to hold down all morning rose up his gullet and for a moment Gray thought he might be sick. He stood on the spot, his coffee in one hand, the muffin in the other, and he watched the man moving along the pavement opposite. He was still very slim, in a pink shirt with a striped tie and tight-fitting suit trousers. He looked cold and windswept, in need of a jacket or a coat. His hair was longer now – he’d kept it very short back then – and it was being blown out of shape. He seemed preoccupied by this and kept trying to pin it back with his fingers, only for it to be blown asunder again. Gray knew it was him by the angle of his jaw, the sharpness of his nose. He’d been a handsome boy and now he was a handsome man. A stranger passing him in the street might well think he was younger than his years, but Gray knew exactly how old he was. The last time he’d seen him he’d been a cocky, snake-hipped nineteen-year-old. Now he must have been pushing forty-one.
Gray’s fingers lost their grip on the rim of his coffee cup and it fell to the ground; steaming coffee pooled around his feet and trickled away into a drain cover.
He looked quickly in the direction of the university and then back in the direction of the man across the street. He was turning the corner. Gray picked up his pace and followed him, stopping as he saw him run through a revolving door and into an office block.
He swayed for a moment in the buffeting wind, made a note of the name above the doors and then headed back to his students, his hangover now a distant memory, his thought consumed by only one thing.
Mark Tate was alive.
And if Mark Tate was alive, did that mean that Kirsty was alive too?