dusthouse!”
“What dusthouse? Where?”
“I don’t know—they just said they’re from the dusthouse, and she went with them, that’s all I know.”
“Why’d she leave her phone?”
“I don’t know! I swear, man, I don’t know!”
A crowd was gathering; even some of the dancers had turned to watch. In a few minutes there’d be phones ringing and police knocking, and then I’d have to deal with Kelly’s innate enthusiasm as she tidied up another political incident. My gaze met the yellow-stained eyes of the man at the back. He was sat bolt upright now, knuckles white around his champagne glass, all sign of laughter gone. And where others wore faces of doubt and fear, his body quivered with pure, deep, personal terror.
I let go. “Thanks,” I muttered. “You’ve been great.”
Then, before the sirens could start to wail, I pushed my way out, into the open air.
A police car did arrive. It came twenty minutes after I’d left, and the nonchalance of the coppers who got out suggested they weren’t rushing into a serious incident. They talked to the bouncer for five minutes, then stayed inside the club for another twenty-five, before emerging to drive away.
I watched all this from an office across the street, having let myself in round the back. I sat on top of the photocopier, that being the only comfortable vantage point, eating peanuts and waiting.
We were not good at waiting.
We were not good at being still.
People came and went from Avalon, unaware or uncaring about the minor incident that had recently happened. Something in what the man in the club had said—the dusthouse—stuck in my mind, though I could not pin it to any explanation. Frustration met boredom and spun a few turns round the pit of my stomach. Hours had now gone by since Meera’s call.
It wasn’t until half past twelve that the group of tipsy men and eager girls who’d sat with Meera came staggering noisily out of the club. One of the men was unable to walk without the assistance of two others, whom he thanked at repetitive length. I let myself back out of the office, wiping salt and peanut fragments off my jeans, and fell in behind them at a thirty-yard distance. They were taxi-hunting, and soon lucky, flagging down a black cab and giving the address of a nearby hotel where no good happened at bad prices. The man with sickly yellow eyes was among them. Their drunkenness made them not just loud, but blind to observation; I heard the address, let them drive away, then hailed my own cab to take the same direction through the sleeping city.
It dropped me off at a hotel on St Katharine’s Dock, a concrete monster surrounded by a maze of locks and quays, yachts and pubs, and apartments stacked high, with balconies of glass looking towards the water. I pulled my collar up, ruffled my hair, and reeled into the hotel lobby.
A single sleepy receptionist was on duty wearing a badge proclaiming that Emilia spoke both French and Italian.
I staggered up to the desk, overdoing the length of my walk, and burbled, “Hey hey hey hey!”
Emilia looked up blearily, and into her sleep-drenched mind I began to spin a little extra fog. The dozing mind is always easier to influence, and I could feel the gumminess of her eyes as if my own were sticking shut. “Hey hey hey,” I repeated. “Yeah, my friends, yeah, they just came in, yeah, there were like, three of them, yeah, and we were like, you know, together but they, yeah, they went ahead of me uh… can you tell me which room they went to?”
She scarcely hesitated, saying wearily, “Were these the three gentlemen and three ladies?”
“Yeah yeah yeah yeah!” I exclaimed. “Well, actually it’s really the three ladies, I know, you know, I mean, like, Sandra, yeah, she’s like, you know…”
I let the thought trail off and smiled what I felt had to be my most winning smile. If she noticed, she wasn’t wowed; nonetheless she looked down at a computer screen, checking for