Page 2

Two years later.

Hyde Park, London.

Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is the oldest and most famous free-speech platform in the world.

Karl Marx, George Orwell and Winston Churchill have all mounted soapboxes to debate the great issues of the day.

So did Lenin, Vanessa Redgrave and Harold Pinter.

Noteworthy figures all.

The unhinged, foam-flecked ranter currently occupying the soapbox was not noteworthy.

He was called Derek Bancroft, and he passionately believed that Denver International Airport was the secret headquarters of both the Illuminati and the New World Order.

He claimed the artwork, sculptures and engravings in the airport were secret messages to those in the know.

And Derek was in the know.

He was less clear on why the Illuminati and the New World Order had revealed their secrets to a chicken sexer from Brixton, but if you were searching for lucid, well-constructed arguments at Speakers’ Corner on a Sunday morning, you were in for an unrewarding wait.

Nonetheless, the enthusiastic Derek was being cheered on by a growing and not-a-little-hungover crowd.

Enthusiasm was everything at Speakers’ Corner.

Derek was the warm-up act, though.

The person everyone was waiting for was a prominent flat-earther.

Maybe it was the irony of someone asking you to not believe your own eyes in the very place the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four had spoken, but the flat-earthers always attracted a good crowd.

People would heckle and challenge and argue and throw eggs, and that was as it should be in a healthy democracy.

One of the people watching Derek was a well-dressed woman called Margaret Wexmore.

She was in her mid-sixties but looked older.

She was as thin as a pencil and fish-belly pale.

Her hair was gunmetal grey.

Margaret watched Derek with enjoyment.

She seemed glad to be outside, as if it had once been an everyday occurrence but wasn’t any more.

While Margaret watched Derek, two Romanian pickpockets watched her.

London had a problem with Romanian gangs.

It had started with the 2012 Olympics.

Organised gangs had brought in pickpockets and prostitutes and beggars to take advantage of the massive influx of visitors.

Now pickpockets worked Speakers’ Corner all year round.

The Romanians watching Margaret were called Darius and Alexandru.

They had been pickpockets their entire lives, but they weren’t like the loveable scamps found in Dickens’s novels.

Darius and Alexandru were mean and aggressive and carried douk-douks , French-made pocketknives.

They were usually assigned to Oxford Street.

They hadn’t worked a static crowd for a long time.

They were used to fast-moving, inattentive shoppers.

People in a hurry.

A crowd like this made them nervous.

That they’d been given counterintuitive instructions hadn’t helped.

Usually, they knew what they were looking for. People brandishing new iPhones. Men with Breitling watches, women with Prada handbags. Overt signs of money.

This time they had a photograph.

They were after a who , not a what.

Darius double-checked the photograph on his phone.

The woman looked older and frailer now, but it was a good likeness.

She was where they’d been told she would be, and she was alone.

Darius deleted the photograph as instructed, then checked his watch.

It was nearly time.

He glanced over his shoulder and checked if anyone was watching.

Undercover cops sometimes prowled Speakers’ Corner.

There was no one there.

Just a homeless woman.

Darius frowned.

He didn’t like being watched.

He glared at her, but she continued to stare.

Her shoulders were stooped like a month-old daffodil, and she kind of shuffled without moving anywhere.

She wore so much clothing she bulged.

She could have been overweight, or she could have had the physique of a ballet dancer. It was impossible to tell. She wore a coat with a hood. The coat was stained with what looked like egg but was probably vomit. The bottom half of her face was covered with a surgical mask. It was blue and it was grubby. It looked like the kind of mask that started global pandemics rather than ended them. She held a carrier bag in each hand. Darius wasn’t interested in what was inside them. Homeless people collected all kinds of shit and hung on to it like it was treasure.

The homeless woman continued to stare.

Or maybe she was watching the crazy guy talking about the airport.

It was hard to tell where she was looking underneath the mask and the hood.

Darius put her to the back of his mind.

Margaret Wexmore was important.

The homeless woman wasn’t.

Even if she saw what was about to happen, she wouldn’t go to the police.

Homeless people never did.

It was nothing to worry about.

He turned back to Margaret Wexmore.

Underneath her mask, the homeless woman smiled.

But not in a nice way.

Resignation, not happiness.

As if she’d decided to do something unpleasant.

And when Darius and Alexandru made their move, the homeless woman made a move of her own . . .