“What you need,” Tim told me, “is a wig. And wear a scarf. It's getting cold anyway, it's hardly surprising.”
It was the next afternoon. I was sitting on one of the bean bags in the kitchen, and Tim was leaning against the edge of the table, holding a cigarette in his hand but not smoking it, just waving it around while he talked. We were both wearing thick jumpers, both of them his. No central heating here and if it they could get away with it, Charley had told me that they preferred not to use the electric heater so as not to put the power drain up to any sort of noticeable level.
I'd first seen Tim an hour ago when he'd emerged from the improvised shower they had set up in the toilet, wrapped in towels and shivering. A tall, wiry guy in his early thirties with a big shock of spiky blond hair, slightly flattened.
“You must be Elboy... nice to meet you, sorry, I'm just going to put some clothes on, it's freezing out here, see you later,” he'd said, shaking my hand briefly, then disappeared into a bedroom.
“Where am I supposed to get a wig?” I said.
“I got you one already. Plenty of wig shops round here. I'll help you put it on. At least you're better off than Tomas – he's got to cut off his dreads if he wants to make sure.”
“And that's why you're bloody doing it,” Tomas shouted from the next room.
“Bastard, cut the dirty things off,” I shouted back.
“You know, it's probably not going to be as much of a risk as you think. I doubt they had good pictures of you anyway. You said the helicopter wasn't near you, and I doubt they will have got much from the hospital cameras – there aren't very many in Garnier Memorial and they're pretty old.”
“Well, I'd rather not risk more than I have to here.”
“I know, I'm just saying... don't worry about it so much that you make it worse.” Tim made as if to put the cigarette to his lips, but pulled his hand away at the last minute. “I know people who've been in this sort of situation, you'll be fine. It's not like you killed anyone.” I'd seen the incident on the news – “one policeman injured but stable in hospital”.
Great – now I don't just have to worry about disguising myself, I have to worry about not being calm enough. I tapped irritably on my freshly-shaven scalp. Why did I have to go down to bloody Croydon? I'd managed to get in touch with some of the barricade group, via Charley and encrypted email, and had been told that I could meet up with one of them called Petra, who was for some ridiculous reason in Croydon. In a shopping centre. Point one: I remembered Petra, and she was one of the most annoying of all of them. Perpetually sneering at any sort of “mainstream” behaviour yet spending most of her time watching spy shows on TV; calling the public “ignorant sheep” but not knowing that there had actually been two Gulf Wars. A nasty little over-made-up ball of condescension, with a finger perpetually up one nostril. The prospect of meeting her again hadn't exactly thrilled me.
As Tim started applying glue, I thought about point two: why would anyone send her out to a shopping centre? Why would any of them go from Seven Sisters to a shopping centre in Croydon? There are a fair number of shops in Croydon, but none you can't find better versions of anywhere else, or at least versions that you can get to without kicking away children scavenging for fag butts. Perhaps it was some sort of test, a ritual ordeal she'd been sent on. Buy and wear two items from the Gap, eat an actual burger at McDonalds, have a drink in an O'Neills without sneering once. A test most of that lot could have done with frankly.
The thought of Petra wandering around Croydon seething made the worry about what the hell Young was up to sending here there a little more bearable, as well as the annoyance of having Tim glue the remains of half a dozen squirrels to my head. “They only had women's wigs there, I'm afraid, but I did get you the most masculine-looking one. Take a look. There's a mirror in the bathroom.” I had sprouted a small shagpile of reddish fur.
“Make sure you keep it down over your forehead,” Tim said, looking over my shoulder. “The hairline's not perfect.”
“I can't say it's exactly something I would have chosen to wear, but it certainly doesn't look much like me at all.” I smoothed my fingers through it gently and turned my head from side to side. “Thanks. You've done a really good job there.”
“Dunno about that, my hands are still a little shaky, but it should see you through.”
I paid him for the wig out of our cash wad. Tomas had said he wanted to stay with Gad, and I couldn't really blame him. I was going to get the train down to West Croydon and make my way to the Florentine Centre somehow. Tomas had offered me his gun, but quite apart from the fact that I hate guns, the major use for it there would have been shooting myself, and I didn't want to leave the temptation open.
I went down to Seven Sisters tube station again, bought a Travelcard. As we crawled across the city towards Kings Cross where I could change onto the Thameslink, I opened up one of the files that Charley had put on my phone. I hadn't talked to him today, I'd just found my phone on the kitchen table when I got up. Tim had told me that he worked Saturdays at a volunteer place in Camden. I therefore wasn't sure whether he'd managed to get me any extra credit, but I'd noticed some scratching on the back of the case and when I first turned it on, it showed me a picture of a penguin in a beret, so I assumed he'd made one or two modifications.
The screen on the cheap Nokia was too small to read text on comfortably, and after scrolling through a few pages of Young's biography (born in Tunbridge Wells, boarding school, university in Bath) I gave up and started playing phone games, at about the same time as I started to hit the centre and the crush of people with shopping bags and tourists with backpacks.
Kings Cross Thameslink manages to combine the fun of a normal train station with the added joy of not being able to smoke on the platform and, just to top it off with an extra sprinkle of delight, no proper seats. At least there weren't any soldiers there any more, as there had been all last year. I huddled in a corner against a pillar trying to avoid the wind that had started up just as I entered, bit my nails and tried not to scratch my head, which was really starting to itch now. A family next to me were having a discussion about the weather, or more accurately the two kids were repeatedly telling their dad how cold they were and blowing their noses on their sleeves, and he was repeatedly telling them the train wouldn't be long and to stop doing that or their mum would kill them.
I was at West Croydon by 4pm. I sent a message to the number I'd been given for Petra, telling her I was there, raised the collar of my jacket and and started walking towards the Florentine Centre, head hunched down, convinced everyone was noticing my terrible hairpiece. A few minutes later I got a reply telling me to meet at the clock tower.