could ruin everything. I see the way you’re thinking, I see where this is heading…’ He smiled again. ‘Please don’t go down that road, Mr Black.’ There was no entreaty in his voice, but Lorimer was impressed – he was very nearly convincing.
‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss my report with you, Mr Rintoul. Like you, we just try to do our job as professionally as possible.’
Lorimer drove away from the meandering mean street that was the Old Kent Road, his head busy, away from the giant new petrol stations and the unisex hair salons, the cash ‘n’ carrys, the tyre and wheel depots and the karaoke pubs. ‘Houses cleared’ signs told him, and he saw the evidence in the landscape everywhere. Timber merchants, panelbeaters, lorry parks and closed-down electrical goods merchants behind dusty diamond mesh grilles passed by until he drove beneath the river and emerged on the north bank, swerving east through Limehouse and Poplar and Blackwall towards Silvertown. Lorimer put in a call to the office to book an appointment with Hogg. Janice told him when he could come in, then added, ‘I got a call from Jenny, PR at the Fort, about that advert. They think the name you’re looking for is Malinverno. I’ll spell it: Flavia Malinverno. F-L-A-V-I-A–’
Lorimer stood in his empty sitting room looking at the view through curtainless windows. He had a clear sight of the City Airport across the choppy blue-grey waters of Albert Dock and beyond that, dark against the sky, the industrial alp of the Tate & Lyle sugar factory, wisps of steam emanating from various pipes and funnels, a steel Krakatoa threatening to blow. To his right, in the distance, stood the immense obelisk of Canary Wharf, its blinking eye on its summit flashing at him like a beacon across Canning Town, Leamouth and the Isle of Dogs. The light was cold and harsh, the horizons bulldozed flat, bereft of houses, crisscrossed by the elevated concrete ribbons of the spine roads and the MII link and the stalky modernity of the tracks and stations of the Docklands Light Railway loftily picking its way from Beckton to Canning Town. Everything old was going here, or being transformed, cast out by the new. It seemed a different, pioneering city out here in the east, with its emptiness and flatness, its chill, refulgent space, its great unused docks and basins – even the air felt different, colder, uncompromising, tear-inducing – not for the faint-hearted or uncertain. And further over to the east, beyond the gas and sewage works, he could see the full mass of a purple and gunmetal cloudscape, a continent of cloud bearing down on the city, gilded with the citrus clarity of the estuarine light. Snow coming, he thought, all the way from Siberia.
His house was small and detached, and was set in the centre of a raked rectangle of mud, part of a tentative development called Albion Village established by an optimistic builder. On the ground floor there was a garage, kitchen and dining room, and above, a sitting room and bedroom with a bathroom off the landing. Another atticy bedroom with an en suite shower lurked under the roof tiles, lit by skylights. The place smelt of paint, putty and builder’s dust and the honey-coloured cord carpet had been recently laid, strewn with offcuts. On either side of him, forming a rough arc, were the six other houses of Albion Village, all of similar but, tastefully, not identical design, some occupied, some with the builder’s tape still crisscrossing the windows. A small, pseudo-community, awaiting its members, with its newly sown green grass and spindly wind-thrashed saplings, purpose-built on the very eastern fringe of the city, another small encroachment on the wastelands.
And it was all his, bought and paid for. His little home in Silvertown… He began to note down the very minimum he would need to make it habitable – bed, sheets, pillows, blankets, sofa, armchair, desk and chair, TV, sound system, pots and pans. The kitchen was fitted, no dinner parties were envisaged, so a few tinned and frozen foods would suffice. Curtains? He could live awhile with the complimentary roller blinds. The odd table lamp would be welcome but they, by definition, required tables and he wanted to have the house ready as quickly as possible, with as little fuss and distracting choice. Why did he need another place to live? Good question, Lorimer. Insurance, he supposed. Same old story.