As you turn into Holborn, a patrolling policeman glances incuriously at you. You thread your way through the streets until at last you see the brightly lit windows of the Crozier. The pub is painted purple, like a slab of meat, like a bleeding heart.
You turn into the alley. When you reach the square, you drive around it, sweeping it with the headlights. No one is out, but there are lights in the two ground-floor windows of number seven.
You park by the pump and put on the handbrake. The engine stalls and the car bucks. You look at Joseph Serridge. The light from the pub reflects in one glassy eye. You get out of the car and reach into the back for your handbag. You open it and take out the diary. You have come to your decision about it. You drop the diary on the driver’s seat and close the car door. You walk towards Charleston Street.
The pub door slams behind you. There are footsteps. You glance back, ready to run.
‘Hello-ello,’ a man says. ‘It’s my old friend Joe. Shake a leg, old boy. They’re calling last orders.’
The old man is very drunk. He’s looking at the car. He hasn’t even seen you standing behind him.
He opens the passenger door and pats Serridge’s head. ‘Come on, old man, rise and shine. I say – you’re a bit squiffy, eh?’
You walk quietly out of Bleeding Heart Square and into the grey sprawl of the city under a sky without any stars.
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First published by Michael Joseph 2008
Published in Penguin Books 2009
Copyright © Lydmouth Ltd, 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The author thanks the Society of Authors, as the literary representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, for permission to quote from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
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ISBN: 978-0-14-190862-5
Bleeding Heart Square Page 42
