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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Running on Shingle

Perhaps because it was still raining, the Gunner no longer ran. Instead he walked fast and purposefully down Park Lane, keeping the well-lit massif of Mayfair’s western edge on his left shoulder, and the tree-filled void of the park on his right. Even though he wasn’t running, George had to trot to keep up. George didn’t say anything as they pressed on through two more underpasses and into Green Park. He had a head full of questions, but perhaps because he felt bad about leaving the girl behind, he said nothing. He knew if he asked another question right now, it would lead back to her in some way. So he left well enough alone. What he did do was glance back when he thought the Gunner wasn’t looking, and saw that she was trailing them, about forty feet behind.

Edie watched the boy as she trailed them. She noticed him looking back, then turning away in case he was caught looking. He was only a couple of inches taller than she was, but then she was tall for her age and he seemed sort of hunched apologetically in on himself. His hair was longer than most boys his age, and it wasn’t spiked or gelled or anything. His jacket flapped as he hurried along, too big for him—bought to grow into, no doubt—and as if to compensate, his ankles poked out below trousers that had clearly failed to keep up with a growth spurt. She remembered the look on his face as he’d said sorry. It had been an honest face, and he’d looked her right in the eye as he said it. He seemed kind underneath the sadness and fear. Which is why she had hit him.

She followed them into an underpass—only to find the fork in the tunnel, and that she suddenly had no idea which way they’d gone. She headed left, running, deciding if they had gone right she’d sprint back and catch them up.

In the right-hand tunnel, the Gunner had broken into a run of his own. George didn’t catch him until they’d burst back out into the air.

“Why are we running?”

The Gunner jerked his head back.

“We’re losing the baggage. Come on.”

He pulled George through a hedge and ran on.

Under their feet, Edie realized she had taken the wrong turn. She doubled back and took the other tunnel. By the time she made it back out into the evening air, there was no sign of them.

She kicked savagely at the gravel. She did it again. Then she started running, cutting a wide arc through the trees, heading toward St James’s Park and the river beyond. The Gunner had said they were going to the river. Maybe she’d catch them there. As she felt gravel spit under her running feet, she thought of the beach. And why she was running.

Edie knew the Gunner was right about one thing: she was bad luck. The thought caught at her like a riptide, sucking her back and down into a dark place where she found it harder and harder to breathe. The more she tried to run her mind away from the thought, the stronger the feeling grew. She knew the feeling was panic, and she knew giving in to panic was dangerous, because she’d stop thinking clearly. And thinking clearly was how Edie survived. Trying to escape the panic wasn’t easy. It was like running in pebbles, like trying to scramble up a steep shingle beach, when every step forward slides back in a scrabble of unstable stones, and the faster you try and move, the more tired you get.

Edie had got very tired once, running up a shingle beach. Someone had been chasing her. She had run from the water across the sand and up the steep shelving wall of pebbles, hearing him behind her. The pebbles close to the sea started small, and got bigger as the slope rose toward the railway line at the top. Her feet made a crunching noise as she ran up the gravel-size stones; as they got bigger the noise changed to a scrabble, then a clacking as bigger stones cracked against each other, dislodged by her bare feet scrambling toward the top of the mound.

She had heard no noise behind her, so she risked a look. For a moment she could see nothing but the shingle and the gray sand beyond, and in the distance the wind blowing whitecaps across the rollers coming in from the Channel. Then she saw a flash of red as he came over the wooden beach divider, and she turned and ran faster. In panic.

She didn’t see the half-buried tire that caught her foot and sent her sprawling on the very lip of the slope. It sent her crashing to the ground, smacking her cheek on a sea-flattened piece of flint; but it saved her. She found herself looking down into a deep trench, maybe six meters deep. On her side of the trench the pebbles sloped sharply down until they met a wooden wall that rose even higher than where she was. It was new wood, massively cut beams—three times as thick as a railway sleeper bolted together—to make a new beach defense. In the distance she saw yellow bulldozers and a construction shed, but it was too far away and on the wrong side of the wind for anyone to hear her even if she screamed, and there was no one there that she could see anyway.

It was Saturday afternoon, after all, and nobody works on a Saturday if they can help it. She was alone, and behind her she could hear crunching footsteps changing to clacking. She got to her feet, took one step forward—and fell again. Her ankle had turned. In the distance she heard a train approaching. She looked behind her. He was puffing up the last part of the slope, face as red as his anorak, almost as red as the blood staining the handkerchief he held to his cheek. His eyes were hot and angry but he was smiling. He wasn’t smiling like a villain in a film; his smile wasn’t saying “Gotcha.” It was much more frightening than that, given what he’d said and what he’d tried to do, and what she’d done to stop him. It was a smile that said “I’m your friend—we’re pals.” She knew the smile well. Out of that smile came lies and promises and threats and the smell of The Red Lion and the rank stale reek of rolling tobacco. Out of that smile came the sounds and smells of pain and betrayal and fear.

He stopped, and puffed and sucked air. He looked at the blood on his handkerchief. He scowled briefly around at the empty beach and the railway line beyond the deep trench and the beach defense.

“I’m going to have a heart attack, you carry on like this.”

He smiled at her.

“Come on. Stop this nonsense. It’ll be all right.”

Edie would have been a lot more likely to believe him if he hadn’t still been carrying the open lock knife in his other hand.

“Come on. It’s just you and me. Don’t be silly.”

Edie heard the train approaching. It was coming fast. It would pass quickly and be gone, and she would still be here alone with him and the knife and nothing but the wind and the sea and the big heavy stones under her hand.

He spat and put the handkerchief away in his pocket. It’s just us.

The train boomed around the curve and into sight, suddenly upon them. The wire mesh on the rusting fence posts rattled in protest. Edie lurched to her feet and waved at the train—her cries for help drowned by the noise. The train was empty. The only pair of eyes belonged to the driver at the front. He misunderstood, smiled and waved at what he took to be a happy girl and her father on the beach, and was gone. Edie watched the empty windows flash past like hollow sprockets, with no human shape breaking their rectangular uniformity.

With another boom and the thump of empty air closing in behind it, the train was gone—and suddenly she was looking at the sea marsh beyond the rails, and the farewell flash of yellow as the last carriage pulled away, headed for the small town where nobody was expecting her home for tea.

And then she felt three distinct things all at once. She felt his hand grip her hair. She felt panic. And she felt the heavy smoothness of the rounded flint in her hand.

She knew she was bad luck. And she knew all about panic. That’s why she would always do whatever she could to steel herself against it. She would always stare at her fears rather than ever turn and run without thinking again.

She stopped running. She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been remembering. She’d been looking back. She needed to look forward. She stood in the dark and tried to calm her mind enough to think ahead. Her right hand reached unconsciously for the sea-glass in her pocket. It closed tightly around it as she steadied her mind, eyes closed, concentrating on getting her breathing steady and her mind clear. And then her eyes opened as it came to her: before they had seen her, she had seen them, while she was creeping up on them in the underground parking garage; she’d heard them talking.

She’d heard the Gunner say they needed to talk to sphinxes. She hadn’t walked all of the streets of the city, but she knew a lot of them. And she could think of only one place where there were sphinxes.

And it was by the river.