The buildings might be changing, but the streets were still the same. He walked up Globe Road, then cut right onto Cyprus Street, one of the few old streets of terraced cottages that looked like it hadn’t been touched by the twentieth century at all. It was a long straight street, uninterrupted on one side and with a small turning off it halfway along the other—the perfect place for Knox to reassure himself one last time that no one was shadowing him.

Knox was still running on adrenaline but after ten minutes watching the silent, empty street it finally started to wear off. He needed to find somewhere to spend the rest of the night, but before he did he walked the short distance to Sewardstone Road, where his grandmother’s house had stood until it was knocked down five years ago.

Sewardstone Road had been a dirty, narrow street of tenement houses pressed up against the stagnant, filthy water of Regent’s Canal. He could still smell the canal now, but the tightly packed old houses were gone, replaced by modern blocks of flats. Knox stopped for a moment outside the flat that now stood where he’d once lived in a tiny, two-room house with his grandmother. He remembered all the early mornings when he’d creep back in after a night’s wandering the city, and the few times his grandmother had caught him before he’d reached his bed and spent hours screaming at him, out of anger, love, and fear of losing him like she’d lost his mother. Then he thought about how he’d now also lost the only two places he’d ever really called home.

He headed south back towards Roman Road. Next to Bethnal Green tube station he found the grandly and wholly inaccurately named City View Hotel. It was an old Victorian dosshouse that had been turned into the kind of place that rented rooms by the hour as well as by the night.

Knox woke up the night clerk, who was not happy about being disturbed, paid for a room until morning, and had the stairs pointed out to him. His room was at the very top of the building, and he might have been able to see the city through his high attic window, if the walls of a raised train track hadn’t blocked the view.

He locked the door and wedged the back of the chair that served as a bedside table under the handle. Then he pulled off his jacket and trousers, balled the jacket up with the papers and passports under the bed, splashed his face, trousers and socks in the small sink, and lay down on the thin mattress. Even the sound of a freight train passing within ten feet of him, rattling the window and shaking the bed, didn’t stop him from falling asleep almost instantly.

Chapter 43

Chapter 43