while he was around, he’d given Will a taste for starlight.
He’d finished his mouthful some time ago, and Beaumont was looking at him with a raised eyebrow. Will made himself smile. “Sorry. There was someone a bit ago. Didn’t work out.”
“That’s a shame. Wrong girl, or right girl, wrong time?”
“Oh, everything wrong. Absolutely everything, right from the start. I should have known.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Beaumont said with startling vehemence. “We don’t think about what’s wrong when we meet someone special, do we? When you find someone who’s absolutely, utterly right except for that thing that makes it wrong, you’d have to be some sort of plaster saint to resist, and why the devil should we? We’ve only the one life and we damn near lost that in Flanders, you and I. Why shouldn’t we live now?”
Will gaped at him for a second, bewildered at what he could possibly know, before he realised. “You mean you’ve met the wrong girl? Or is it the right one?”
“The utterly right girl, at the worst possible time. Oh Lord. What am I going to do?”
Will gave a small internal sigh, but there was only one thing he could say. “Do you want to talk about it?”
HE WALKED HOME TO STRETCH his legs. It was cold and wet in the drizzly way of London Februaries, but the exercise was a relief.
He hadn’t spent time with an old comrade in while, and he rather thought he might not seek that out again. Beaumont was a reasonable sort of chap, if a bit inclined to moan, but they had nothing in common except their service and they’d both known it. He’d taken the opportunity to pour out his heart precisely because he expected not to see Will again, much as a man might confess all to a stranger on a train.
Will could see the appeal of that. He’d have loved to have someone nod along to his own complaints and agree that Kim was a disgraceful unreliable swine who was entirely at fault for the whole thing. He couldn’t do that, so he’d played the sympathetic ear for Beaumont and got the expected story: an affair with a married woman who couldn’t divorce her husband for reasons Will hadn’t listened to. His mind had been elsewhere. It was both enraging and predictable where his mind had been.
Kim had disappeared from his life by choice. He’d decided Will was no longer interesting or useful or whatever it was, and he’d gone without troubling to say farewell. And if Will had been able to spill that out to Beaumont, he’d doubtless have sounded every bit as pathetic as his old lieutenant, whining about what might feel like a grand passion to the participants, but looked to anyone else just like every other sordid affair. It was a good thing for his self-respect that caution and the law had kept his mouth shut.
He was nearly home, and he didn’t feel like going home. He surely deserved some sort of redress for what had been a rather disheartening evening, so he nipped into the Black Horse on the corner of May’s Buildings. A pint, a game of darts, and a chat about the football scores would be just what the doctor ordered.
It did indeed make him feel better, so much that he stayed for another pint and didn’t head down May’s Buildings till past ten. The alley where his bookshop lurked was an obscure little passage off St. Martin’s Lane, still not blessed by street lighting. Will let himself in the front door by feel and didn’t put on the electric, not being made of money. He made his way through the maze of shelves and books to the back room, let himself into the yard to use the outhouse, locked the door again behind him, and headed up the stairs.
And stopped on the first turn, because there was a light on in his bedroom.
Zodiac, was his first and instant thought. He retreated three silent steps backwards, giving that urgent consideration.
Zodiac was behind the trouble he’d had in November, an organised criminal gang operating at a disturbingly high level. He’d killed one of their members and been instrumental in putting a stop to a very nasty scheme. They hadn’t sought vengeance yet, but the thought they might was never far below the surface of his mind.
There was no reason they’d come for him now. It might just as well be burglars, except that his front and back doors had both been