A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [124]
28
Cohen
I see the black Volkswagen in my rearview mirror three times on the way home: once at the lights coming on to King’s Road; again on Holland Road, which is where I start to get suspicious; and finally on Goldhawk, when it sweeps behind me as I make a right turn on to Godolphin Road on my way back to the flat. I can’t, of course, be sure that it was the same car every time; my mind has been wandering, and the second sighting was obscured by a night bus heading east along Kensington High Street. But it would be wrong to write off the reappearance of the same car - same colour, same lines - to mere coincidence. Someone might have been tailing me from Cheyne Walk.
So I don’t take any chances. I park about a hundred and fifty metres short of my front door, which is on the corner of Uxbridge and Godolphin Roads. This is further away than I need to be - there are several spaces nearer to the flat - but I want a good clear sighting of the street. Now I wait, inside the car, staring out through the windscreen, waiting for the Volkswagen to reappear. The rain starts up again and an old man appears at a bedroom window high up to my right, closing curtains in a dirty white vest.
Nothing happens. No cars, no pedestrians, no cyclists. After ten minutes I get out and lock up, convinced that there’s nothing more to worry about: it’s just the play of my paranoid mind, the cautious proddings of self-preservation. So I begin walking towards the flat, relaxed and ready for bed. An animal - but not a cat or a dog - darts across the road in front of me, sleek and wet. Just as it vanishes behind some broken fencing a car turns into the north end of the street directly ahead of me. I halt beside a wall. The headlights are so bright that I can make out neither the type of vehicle nor its colour: it might be the black VW, it might not. The car stops directly opposite my front door, one hundred metres ahead, engine still running.
The driver remains there for several seconds and then moves off, coming towards me now, creeping malignly down the street. Slowly I move forward, edging away from the wall, walking through the pools of orange light thrown on to the road by street lamps. I halt again almost immediately, pausing under the shadow of an overhanging bush. The car stops, fifty metres away, and I hear the gearbox shift into reverse. The driver is backing up into a parking space.
I can see the make now. It’s a Vauxhall, like mine: a bottle-green, four-door B reg with chafed hub caps and a sprig of heather threaded through the radiator. I move out of the cover provided by the bush.
Driver and passenger get out just as I am walking past. They catch me looking at them in a split, nervous instant, and I recognize their faces: I’ve seen them buying newspapers in the neighbourhood, watched them walking to the Tube. They live in the next street - Hetley Road - a young couple with a kid. They look startled, wary with mugging nerves, and we do not greet one another.
I walk on, relieved, reaching into my trousers for keys, now just a few paces short of the front door. There is loose change in my pocket, tiny balls of laundry fluff and an old packet of gum. I look up, tugging the cold keys in my fingers, pulling them free.
He comes directly at me, moving quickly with a flat, focused walk. He’s wearing a heavy brown corduroy jacket, gloves and a black scarf.
Cohen.
He stops, feet scuffing on the pavement as he