Mike Shevdon - Sixty-One Nails

My eyes were gritty from insufficient sleep and the rough stubble over my chin was like sandpaper. Running cold water over my hands in the sink, I scrubbed my face and then dried it with a hand towel as best I could. I felt the train lurch and breathed a sigh of relief. We were moving.

I left the toilet and went through the connecting door into the next carriage, taking an aisle seat and scanning constantly down the corridors for signs of a search taking place. No searchers appeared, though a train attendant came and relieved me of more of my cash. It was a small price to pay to get away from the search at Heathrow.

The train was clean and brightly lit and the day outside had yet to dawn. I sat nervously in the corner of the carriage with half an eye on the corridor and wondered what would become of me. I was sure Jim, the police officer in my back garden, had been killed. The memory of him screaming, "Get it off me! Get it off me!" would haunt me for the rest of my life. My warning had come too late. I should have tried earlier, even though it would have labelled me as a lunatic. Briefly I wondered what had happened to the Untainted in my garden. Would it attack the other officers? Blackbird said that sometimes they just relish the mayhem they could cause.

One thing was certain now, though. With the strange mould in the flat and at least one officer dead, the police would turn the city upside down looking for me. My only advantage was that they still thought I was somewhere out near Heathrow.

Would the police go to Katherine? If they did, she couldn't tell them very much. Only that her perfectly ordinary ex-husband was having a paranoid episode and thought someone was trying to kill him. I only hoped she had taken my advice and booked a trip away somewhere for her and Alex.

Where else would they look for me? If the police went to my office and started interviewing my work colleagues then Blackbird's concerns about my going back to work would be unfounded. I wouldn't have a job to go back to. My company would call it redundancy and I was sure I would receive a generous settlement in return for my silence, but the organisation traded on its reputation for honesty and integrity. With my sudden failure to turn up for work, one whiff of a police investigation and my career would flat-line.

I stared out of the window as the lights of West London whipped past and contemplated a life in tatters.

The train slowed as we reached Paddington and drew to a halt in a stately fashion. I waited until the doors had opened and took a long look down the platform. There were no policemen checking people coming off the train. They had placed their cordon at Heathrow and so did not expect me to arrive here.

I considered trying to use glamour to disguise my exit from the station. Even before the last terrorist attacks, London was one of the most monitored cities in the world and I was sure there would be closed-circuit television cameras. The trouble was that without some immediate threat to focus the magic I wasn't sure I could control my glamour. Having it fall apart on me in the middle of a public place would attract attention I badly wanted to avoid. I would just have to hope they weren't looking for me here.

I walked as calmly as I could down the platform and out onto the concourse. It was still too early for the mass of commuters and the people around me were either the last dregs of last night or the real diehard early-morning lot.

Getting a taxi was easy as there was a big queue of them waiting for the early rush-hour. I settled into the back of a black cab and asked him to take me to Waterloo Station. If the police ever traced the cab then they might believe I was getting a train south from there. The Eurostar service to Paris from Waterloo was one of the ways of getting out of the country without flying. I had no doubt if I were to present my passport to United Kingdom customs then my name would flash up in large red letters on the customs officer's screen. That meant the police would know I hadn't left that way, but Waterloo also had trains to Kent and I had grown up in Kent, so there was yet another trail to follow if they got that far — when they got that far.

We breezed through the streets unhampered, taking routes that would be choked with traffic in a few hours time. As we crossed the river at Westminster Bridge, I asked the driver to pull over and drop me off at the far side. I told him I needed the fresh air. I paid him, giving him an unremarkable tip, and he drove off.

I walked away from the bridge until the taxi was well out of sight, then turned back and returned to the steps that led down to the Thames embankment. I walked along the river bank past the giant wheel of the London Eye where it stood, silent and empty, waiting for the long queues of tourists who would ride its capsules around the wheel for a panoramic view of the city later in the day. From there I passed under the iron-braced railway bridge and climbed back up the steps and onto the footbridge back over the river to Embankment Station and Charing Cross.

As I crossed the dark flow of the Thames, I paused above the murky water as it swirled out towards the sea beneath me while the orange glow from the underside of the dense cloud layer faded to a sullen grey. There was no flaming dawn, but the sky in the east lightened. The broken sunshine of yesterday had been replaced by the half-light that represented the majority of autumn days.

As I crossed to the centre of the bridge I realised the clocks would soon be changing over to winter time, and the days would get shorter and shorter until we were all like Kareesh, living underground. I had all this to look forward to, assuming I lived that long.

And yet the threat over me lent the day a new flavour. I found myself standing over the river in the misty dawn tasting the drizzle that drifted on the breeze, feeling truly alive for the first time in months. It smelled of salt and ozone and I understood that this was an easterly wind, rather than the prevailing westerly, and that it brought a little of the sea with it.

Taking my time, I meandered to the far side and took the steps down to the roadway where I could make my way through the open ticket hall of Embankment Station and up the hill to the Strand, turning left past the front of Charing Cross station and along the pavement to Trafalgar Square. I walked up the hill, past the pale portico of St Martin-in-the Fields to the tables where I had sat with Blackbird the previous day.

The coffee shop showed no sign of life and, after the brief elation at having made it this far, I found myself empty and hollow. I had reached my destination and there was no one there. The pavements were empty and the coffee shop was dark. I walked across towards the National Gallery and down into Trafalgar Square, taking the steps down into the open square. I found a dry spot on the wall of the fountain upwind of the spray carried by the fickle breeze and sat, lulled by the sound of the water and the peace there. A couple of speculative early pigeons came and pecked at the debris around me and I wondered whether Gramawl was foraging nearby, finding titbits for his mistress. Probably it was too light for him now.

As I sat there, the traffic built slowly and steadily to the everyday muted roar. The cars, buses and taxis intermingled until they became mere background noise, indistinguishable from the whole. That brief period in Trafalgar Square gave me the strength to continue. It wasn't that the stone lions inspired me, though they were very grand, or that I borrowed strength from Nelson, the tragic hero dying in the arms of his friend. I had no intention of dying, honourably or otherwise. What leant me strength was the peace I found there, amid the maelstrom. The traffic revolved around me but didn't stir me, the buses roared and the motorcycles barked, but to no effect. The pigeons came and went and the drizzle faded. I felt like I was standing in the eye of a storm.