Claire North Touch (epub)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.In a few minutes police would shut down the line to Sanayii.In a few minutes someone would see the blood on my clothes, observe the fading red footprint I left with every step.It wasn’t too late to run.I watched the man in the baseball cap.He too was running, though in a very different manner.His purpose was to blend with the crowd, and indeed, hat pulled down and shoulders curled forward, he might have been any other stranger on the train, not a murderer at all.I moved through the carriage, placing each toe carefully in the spaces between other people’s feet, a swaying game of twister played in the busy silence of strangers trying not to meet each other’s eyes.At Osmanbey the train, rather than growing emptier, pressed in tighter with a flood of people, before pulling away.The killer stared out the window at the blackness of the tunnel, one hand grasping the bar above, one resting in his jacket, finger perhaps still pressed to the trigger of his gun.His nose had been broken, then restored, a long time ago.He was tall without being a giant, hanging his neck and slouching his shoulders to minimise the effect.He was slim without being skinny, solid without being massy, tense as a tiger, languid as a cat.A boy with a tennis racket under one arm knocked against him, and the killer’s head snapped up, fingers curling tight inside his jacket.The boy looked away.I eased my way around a doctor on her way home, hospital badge bouncing on her chest, photo staring with grim-eyed pessimism from its plastic heart, ready to lower your expectations.The man in the baseball cap was a bare three feet away, the back of his neck flat, his hair trimmed to a dead stop above his topmost vertebrae.The train began to decelerate, and as it did, he lifted his head again, eyes flicking around the carriage.So doing, his gaze fell on me.A moment.First stony nothing, the stare of strangers on a train, devoid of character or soul.Then the polite smile, for I was a nice old man, my story written in my skin, and in smiling he hoped I would go away, a contact made, an instant passed.Finally his eyes traced their way to my hands, which were already rising towards his face, and his smile fell as he saw the blood of Josephine Cebula drying in great brown stripes across my fingertips, and as he opened his mouth and began to draw the gun from his shoulder holster I reached out and wrapped my fingers around the side of his neck andswitched.A second of confusion as the bearded man with blood on his hands, standing before me, lost his balance, staggered, bounced off the boy with the tennis racket, caught his grip on the wall of the train, looked up, saw me, and as the train pulled into Sisli Mecidiyekoy, and with remarkable courage considering the circumstances, straightened up, pointed a finger into my face and called out, “Murderer! Murderer!”I smiled politely, slipped the gun already in my hand back into its holster, and as the doors opened behind me, spun out into the throng of the station.Chapter 4Sisli Mecidiyekoy was a place sanctified to the gods of global unoriginality.From the white shopping arcades selling cheap whisky and DVDs on the life of the Prophet Muhammad to the towering skyscrapers for families with just enough wealth to be great but not quite enough to be exclusive, Sisli was a district of lights, concrete and uniformity.Uniform wealth, uniform ambition, uniform commerce, uniform ties and uniform parking tariffs.If asked to find a place to hide a murderer’s body, it would not have been high on my list.But then again –“Murderer, murderer!” from the train, voice ringing at my back.In front confused shoppers wondering what the commotion might be and if it’ll get in their way.My body wore sensible shoes.I ran.Cevahir Shopping Centre, luscious as limestone, romantic as herpes, could have been anywhere in the world [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne