to reveal their communal lives. Brick, lathe, gypsum, plywood, plaster, paper, dissolving all along the terrace. Ten houses, at least twenty-five people by her reckoning, most interacting more with their computers and televisions than with their neighbours, because there was too little time and too much uncertainty.
And what would others think of her? The new girl at number 5 arrived with hardly any furniture, her boyfriend lost his job and didn’t stick around, now she watches the world splash past from her misted lounge window. This has got to stop, she told herself, throwing the postcard into the bin, knowing that she would later retrieve it. Pulling a blanket from the sofa, she wrapped herself and, opening the back door, sat on the step to watch the deluge. She had always loved the fulgent clouds, rain-circles in swirling pools, burgeoned leaves releasing droplets, roots drawing sustenance through dense weeds. In London, the ever-present water brought survival and regrowth. The sun only dried and desiccated, making pavements sweat and people uncomfortable.
It seemed as if her trace-memories were entirely filled with water: shops with dripping canopies, passers-by with plastic macs or soaked shoulders, huddled teenagers in bus shelters peering out at the downpour, shiny black umbrellas, children stamping through puddles, buses slooshing past, fishmongers hauling in their displays of sole and plaice and mackerel in brine-filled trays, rainwater boiling across the tines of drains, split gutters with moss hanging like seaweed, the oily sheen of the canals, dripping railway arches, the high-pressure thunder of water escaping through the lock-gates in Camden, fat drops falling from the sheltering oaks in Greenwich Park, rain pummelling the opalescent surfaces of the deserted lidos at Brockwell and Parliament Hill, sheltering swans in Clissold Park; and indoors, green-grey patches of rising damp, spreading through wallpaper like cancers, wet tracksuits drying on radiators, steamed-up windows, water seeping under back doors, faint orange stains on the ceiling that marked a leaking pipe, a distant attic drip like a ticking clock.
She looked through the rain and saw him, a hunched old man with monkey eyes, brown and watchful. According to Sergeant Longbright, the tramp’s name was Tate; that was what everyone had always called him. Now here he was again, waiting, keeping guard, willing something to happen.
Call us if he reappears. She didn’t like to bother them, but they had insisted on her using the number. She punched out the hotline digits on the Peculiar Crimes Unit card.
Meera Mangeshkar looked up from sixty pages of hardcopy, listening to the call-out. She had been trying to absorb city stats for the last two hours, but hated coursework. Forty-three police forces. Around 130,000 officers in UK, just one for every 400 civilians. 20,000 women, only 2,500 ethnic. The Met’s five areas were each the size of a complete force elsewhere in the country, but could still barely cope. Over six million 999 calls a year. 5,000 cars a month stolen in London, figures rising fast. Borough of Camden has the highest suicide rate in London.
What was the point of familiarizing yourself with the figures when you could do nothing about them? Raise the strike rate, drop kids into the criminal-justice system, watch them re-offend, pick up the pieces, console the latest victims. She had been on the edge of leaving the Met before her transfer, and still hoped that this unit would make a difference to the way she felt. The old guys had made her welcome, and John May, in particular, had gone out of his way to spend time explaining the unit’s unorthodox structure, but where were the interesting cases? When the call came through she took it, calling to Colin Bimsley as he was about to go off duty.
‘You can handle this, Meera. She’s seen the tramp before—just give him a warning, find out where he’s staying and take him back there.’
‘I know how to do my job, sonny,’ she yelled back. ‘I thought you might want to come with me.’
In the next room, Bimsley buttoned his shirt and threw his boots into his locker. ‘What, like a date or something?’
‘No, not a date, but you could give me a lift on your scooter.’
‘Only if we get something to eat afterwards, I’m starving. Look at the weather, it’s still pissing down. I could wait for you, then we could grab a takeaway and eat it at my flat . . .’
She could see where he was going with this. ‘Forget it, Colin, you’re so not my type.’
‘ “Not my