There was a loud bang as the gun in her purse went off. The purse exploded and a Chambers bolt hummed off down the street. Ed jumped in surprise and shot Evie in the side of the face. She went rigid and backed into her sister’s hand, so that Bella shot her too, in the back of the head. Ed let Evie fall, stepped away and got the Hi-Lite under Bella’s chin.

“I hope it was a cultivar, Bella,” he said. Then he warned her: “Drop the pistol unless you’re running one too.”

Bella looked down at her sister’s body, then at Ed.

“You fucking cunt,” she said. She let the pistol fall. “You won’t be safe anywhere now. You won’t be safe anywhere ever again.”

“Not a cultivar, then,” said Ed. He shrugged. “Sorry.”

He waited until he was sure that Tig and Neena Vesicle had escaped. Then he collected up all the weapons and ran off down Straint in the opposite direction to the one they had taken. He had no idea where he was going, and the snow was already turning to rain. Behind him he could hear Bella Cray screaming for the gunpunks. When he looked back she was trying to get her sister to sit up. The remains of Evie’s head flopped backwards like a bit of wet rag in the streetlight. Point-blank, he thought. Shot right in the eyes.

16
The Venture Capital

The day he got back to London, Michael Kearney closed the Chiswick house and moved into Anna’s flat.

There wasn’t much to move, which was lucky because Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts. The place was a warren to start with: linear in plan, but each room sized differently or acting as a passage between two others. You never knew where you were. There wasn’t much natural light. She had reduced it further by doing the walls a kind of Tuscan yellow then rag-rolling on top of that in pale terracotta. The kitchen and lavatory were tiny, and the latter had been painted with blue-gold fishes. There were masks everywhere, streamers, Chinese lampshades, bits of dusty curtain, chipped glass candelabra, and large dried fruits from countries to which she had never been. Her books spilled off their bowed softwood shelves to drift across the molasses-coloured floor.

Kearney had planned to use the futon in the back room, but as soon as he lay on it his heart raced and he was racked with inexplicable anxieties. After a night or two he began sleeping in Anna’s bed. This was perhaps a mistake.

“It’s as if we’re married again,” Anna said, waking up one morning and giving him a painfully bright smile.