Bleeding London

Начало книги

It is shortly after midday on one of those slate-grey, mid-January days when it seems never to become fully light, when dusk starts to coalesce in mid-afternoon. The cold, sheer air is pierced with panels of artificial light, and a forty-year-old man in a cashmere overcoat walks beneath a railway bridge in this frayed, nondescript part of east London. Water runs down from the girders overhead. He sees the yard belonging to a car dismantler, some of its stock parked in the road. He sees an off-licence with bars on the windows, a minicab office as narrow as a corridor. It is all alien territory and yet he is not in any ordinary sense lost. He looks pleased with himself, as though he has something to celebrate, as though he might already have been drinking; but above all else he looks out of place. The wrong man on the wrong street at the wrong time; a confluence of errors, of bad luck and hard lines.

Читать дальше →