Peter May - Coffin Road

But, as the hours wore on, her fear had slowly dissipated, and she saw all the negatives of her life, self-pity, blame, anger, exposed like dead fish washed up on a beach. And she realised that she had simply wasted the last two years.

Fear, gradually, had been replaced by quiet determination, so that by the time she stepped on to the platform at King’s Cross she was focused and clear on exactly what it was she had to do.

Still, her sense of being alone, and in a strange and dangerous place, at first nearly overwhelmed her. London. It had only ever been a name. A place she had seen on TV and in movies. Edinburgh seemed tiny by comparison, and the sheer scale and volume of noise in this conurbation of eight million people was daunting. Her parents, she knew, had lived somewhere just outside of London when she was a baby, but she had no recollection of it, no affinity with it, and beyond an initial sense of awe, found herself disappointed. It was really just another big, dirty, ugly city. Same shops, same people, same cars, same ads on the billboards.

In the Underground, people squeezed into small, noisy, over-lit capsules that rattled through the bowels of the city. There was no Underground in Edinburgh, and Glasgow’s Clockwork Orange simply didn’t compare. Passengers sat or stood in bubbles of isolation, lost in their private worlds, oblivious of the sweaty, over-scented and indifferent hordes of humanity travelling with them in these dark, smelly tunnels. And when finally they reached their stations, they emerged blinking in the daylight on to blackened pavements shiny with discarded chewing gum, and streets choked with traffic belching poison into the air. For the first time in her life, Karen felt invisible. And in a strange way there was a comfort in that.

The offices of OneWorld were tucked away in a crumbling building in an alley off Dean Street in Soho. Karen had taken the Tube to Leicester Square, and used her phone to navigate her way through Chinatown to Shaftesbury Avenue. Rusted railings and bars on the windows characterised the dirty little backstreet where OneWorld had its headquarters. Scaffolding made the street almost impassable, stone cleaners at work, blasting away decades of grime and repairing the decaying stone and brickwork beneath it. Despite its decrepitude, Karen knew that this was a prestigious and expensive address, and she wondered how much of the money raised by OneWorld went on maintaining its image here, however illusory.

She pushed open a black-painted door with shining brass hardware, and found herself in a gloomy hallway with stairs climbing steeply to a first-floor landing mired in darkness. On her right, a sign on a darkwood door revealed this to be the Office . Opposite was the Conference Room . She knocked, and stepped tentatively into the office.

A girl who looked not much older than Karen sat behind a desk in front of a computer terminal. The wall behind her was pasted with OneWorld campaign posters on GMOs, oil pollution, clean water, CO2 emissions, whale hunting. She had dyed-blond hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a black OneWorld T-shirt and skin-tight jeans tucked into calf-high leather boots. The window that looked out on to the alleyway was barred on the outside and opaque with grime. Ed Sheeran leaked almost subliminally from her computer speakers, and she was speaking animatedly on the phone. She glanced at Karen and raised a finger indicating that she should wait. There were three chairs lined up against the back wall, and a coffee table groaning with magazines. Karen sat down and inclined her head to read the cover of the magazine on top of the pile. It was a copy of the New Internationalist , and its headline screamed ‘TTIP — Now It Gets Political’. Karen had no idea what TTIP was, and she suddenly felt very ignorant and insignificant. A country girl arriving in the big city for the first time, foolish and naive.

When the girl finished her call, Karen stood up. ‘I’d like to see Mr Deloit.’

But still the girl held up a finger, and scribbled something on a notepad before looking up. ‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘No.’

‘Then, I’m sorry, you’ll have to make one and come back another time. Mr Deloit is a very busy man.’ She opened up a desk diary. ‘If you want to leave me your name and number, and preferably an email address, I can get back to you. What is it you want to see him about?’

Karen stood her ground. ‘Just tell him Karen Fleming is here. He’ll see me.’

The girl shook her head. ‘He won’t. Now, either you can give me your details or you can leave.’

Karen sat down. ‘I’m not leaving till I see him.’

The girl sighed. ‘He’s not here.’

‘I’ll wait till he comes back, then.’

Karen could see the workings of the girl’s thought processes revolving behind dark brown eyes. ‘He won’t be in today.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I don’t care what you believe. He’s not going to see you without an appointment.’

Karen stood up again and crossed the room to the desk. She leaned over it, aware that with her cropped black hair and face full of holes she was probably quite intimidating. She knew, too, that the Scottish accent sounded aggressive to the English ear. ‘Just tell him I’m here, alright?’

If the girl was intimidated, she wasn’t going to show it. She glared back at Karen and there was a momentary hiatus. Then she lifted the phone and pressed a button. After a moment she said, ‘There’s a very hostile young lady here who refuses to leave without seeing you.’ A pause. Then, ‘Karen Fleming.’ Karen could hear a man’s voice raised on the other end of the line. The girl flinched, and coloured slightly. She hung up as she hoisted herself out of her chair, and said in a voice that could have turned salt water to ice, ‘Come with me.’

Karen followed her up the stairs into darkness, and as they neared the top, a light came on, triggered by a sensor. There were unmarked doors at either end of the landing, and the stairs went up into yet more darkness. The girl knocked on the nearest door, then held it open for Karen, waiting until she had entered, and then closing it behind her.

It was an old-fashioned room with wood-panelled walls and a high ceiling. A thick, dark red carpet soaked up every sound and movement, and there was a sense of hush in the room. Daylight spilled in through layers of filth on a large window that looked down into the lane, and a green glass and brass lamp on Deloit’s desk cast a pool of bright yellow light on the surface of it all around his laptop. It was a large, leather-tooled mahogany desk, and Deloit eased himself out of a matching captain’s chair.

He was heavier, Karen saw, than he looked in his press photographs, a jawline deformed by jowls and a paunch that stretched the lettering on his OneWorld T-shirt. His platinum curls grew almost to his shoulders. Perhaps natural once, but dyed now. He had probably been a good-looking man in his youth, and in some ways still was. But the ravages of time and good living were starting to show, and his face was ugly with anger as he rounded his desk towards her.

‘You stupid little bitch! Which part of never call me again did you not understand?’

‘I’m not calling you, I’m calling on you. And don’t you call me a fucking bitch!’ Which took the wind out of his sails, at least for a moment. Karen used that moment to her advantage. ‘My father’s still alive, isn’t he? And you know where he is.’

He regained his composure, and his anger, and took two steps towards her, grabbing her arm and pushing his face into hers. ‘You fool! You’re risking everything. Were you followed here?’

Karen was startled. ‘Followed? Who by? Who would want to follow me?’