able to match him to a picture, no matter how much he’d changed in the meantime. More than that, I hoped to get another look at the boy. I needed to know if he would provoke the same reaction in me. I needed to know if I was imagining things that weren’t there.
Putting the composite of the woman with frizzy hair to one side, I laid the images of the three men onto the passenger seat. The bald guy with the hamster cheeks seemed to be of a similar age. Trying and failing to remember whether or not Keith had hair, I moved on to the second man, the one with the goatee. He had a slim, almost gaunt face. I thought of Keith’s hip jowls. Maybe he’d spent the intervening years gaining weight? It was possible. Finally, I studied the man with the shaved head and pierced eyebrow. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, whereas I remembered Keith as more around the forty or fifty mark.
Memorising their faces as best I could, I left the photofits in a pile, locked the car and was about to cross the road when a portly man holding a clipboard appeared in the off-licence doorway, a middle-aged couple in tow. I watched as the man with the clipboard pointed at the shop’s exterior. He seemed to be showing the couple around. I lifted my gaze up, to the blue and red Wine City sign. There, fixed on the wall above it, was a large LEASEHOLD AVAILABLE board.
I felt a twist of anxiety. After only nine months in the job, Keith Veitch was moving on.
Still watching the estate agent, I stepped into the road. I didn’t see the van.
I put out my hands to break my fall. As the road’s gravel made contact with the soft, private skin of my palm I twisted and hit the floor side-on. When I looked up I could see something black, its surface grooved with zigzags. It was a tyre. The tyre of a parked car on the street. Beyond the tyre I saw the scattered contents of my handbag, my business cards flapping in the wind.
I must have been in pain, but all I could think was how spongy the van’s bumper had felt against my thigh bone and how surprising that was.
The driver ran round to where I lay.
‘She came out of nowhere,’ he kept saying as people started to gather. ‘I braked just in time.’
I became aware of someone kneeling over me.
‘Don’t move her. She might have hurt her back.’
There was a growing murmur of voices. I looked in their direction. Trainers, flip-flops and slip-on leather shoes filled my vision.
I knew I had to convince everyone I was OK, otherwise an ambulance and the police would be called. They’d contact my next of kin, Jason. It wouldn’t take him long to figure out why I’d been here, on this street.
‘It was my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.’
It hurt, but I forced myself to sit up.
‘I think we should call someone.’ This was the driver again. ‘My insurance.’
‘I’m OK, honestly.’ I mustered a smile.
‘Are you sure?’ asked the man at my side. I looked at his face. He seemed genuinely concerned. In his fifties, with blue eyes, and cheeks crevassed with acne scars (most of which were hidden by a brown beard). His chest and shoulders were bull-solid, his arms thick with muscle.
‘I don’t want any fuss,’ I said, wincing at the searing sensation in my hip.
He didn’t seem convinced. Still, he nodded and stood up.
‘I’ll take care of her,’ he said, addressing the driver and small crowd on the pavement. ‘You can all go on your way.’
He began gathering the strewn contents of my handbag. I watched until I saw him retrieve Lauren’s silver compass and then set about finding my shoes. Somewhere during my tumble, my stilettos had fallen off.
‘How about something to warm you up?’
I looked at my arms. I was shivering.
‘And maybe a plaster for that knee?’
I let him help me to my feet and into a café a few doors down from the off-licence.
‘She’s had a bit of a bang, that’s all,’ he declared to nobody in particular once we were inside. He sat me on one of the fixed red plastic two-seaters that furnished the place. ‘Kimberley, can you bring a mug of tea?’
A chubby girl at the till responded with a nod.
The man crouched on his haunches and moved in close to look at my