work where he could get cash in hand and no one would want his National Insurance number. Finding somewhere to live where paying the rent in advance would save him having to prove who he was. His name was Nicky Horn. But that wasn’t the name the world knew him by. It wasn’t even one of them.
All the lies he told—the mislaid driver’s license, the stolen passport, the pink slip that got lost in the post—would never have stood up to serious scrutiny. But they never had to. Before anyone got sufficiently interested to start checking him out he’d packed his bag, thrown his tools in the back of the car and moved on. He’d been doing it for nearly as long as he’d been back in England. It worked pretty well on the whole. It was months since he’d felt death breathing on the back of his neck.
And that was a problem too. The better he got at this, the more distance he put between himself and pursuit, the greater the risk of complacency. Complacency can be the biggest killer of all. Bigger than hatred, bigger than love. As perilous as sunshine on snow. He was stronger, fitter and faster than his pursuers, and he wanted to live even more than they wanted him dead. The biggest danger was not that they’d wear him down, although one day they might; or that they might get lucky, though that too was always a possibility. The biggest danger was that one day he might dare to think he was safe. To relax and let down his guard. He’d never be safe. He knew that now. If he ever allowed himself to entertain the idea, even for a moment, even as a daydream, he might as well cut his own throat. Cut his own rope. It would be a cleaner end, and no more certain.
The other thing was, he was getting tired. Physically tired—the constant moving, the broken nights, the fact that even when he slept he did so with one ear cocked, might be considered a natural part of a young man’s life, but they took their toll when extended over four years—but also mentally and emotionally. The things he’d done, the lies he’d told. He was sick and tired of the whole sorry business. Sometimes in the long hard watches of the night he thought it might be better to stop running, to let events take their course. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He’d never been afraid of dying. But he used to have more to live for.
He gave himself a shake. He couldn’t afford to think like that. You don’t give up; you never give up. There’s always a way down the mountain—you just have to find it. Tommy Hanratty wasn’t a young man. He could die. And he wasn’t a good man—someone could kill him. Horn knew it was a long shot. But when it’s the only kind you’re likely to get, you take the long shot and hope for the best.
Sometimes that was the hardest part of all. Keeping hope alive.
Despite the spring rain he left his car a street away and walked the last hundred yards. He wasn’t sure but he thought it was a good idea. If he found himself cornered one day, Hanratty’s hirelings would find it harder to predict his actions if they weren’t sure where his car was. He could sneak out the back way and circle round with some confidence that they’d be watching the house where he was lodging, not the next street. The people where he lived didn’t even know he had a car. Sometimes he made sure they saw him using the bus. Psychologists call it compartmentalization. You build barriers between the different parts of your life, in the hope that when the shit hits the fan there’ll always be somewhere clean where you can hide.
Nicky Horn believed he’d become an expert in compartmentalization. In fact he was wrong about that. The shit had hit the fan before he knew he needed barriers, and the smell tainted every aspect of his life. He’d just got used to it.
A couple of cars he didn’t recognize were parked on the corner. Probably it meant nothing. Since he got here two months ago someone had opened a sandwich bar. Which was handy for a man whose idea of cooking was to reheat a pot of coffee, but it made it harder to spot the faces that didn’t fit, the strangers with