Never read Dickens when you’re in a state of alarm, it doesn’t go in. Having glimpsed something of a city I’d ignored for so long, I now felt restless indoors and wanted to see more, but I could tell by the unnatural flatness of the river that it had started to rain. From the window at the end of the sixth floor corridor, the car park and the dug-up green in front of the lobby were visible. The reduced height meant that I could now see through the plane trees to the roads facing away from the river. Stefan’s yellow steel container was the brightest thing on the ground, but his door was closed. While I waited for Azymuth to report back, I tried to imagine what everyone else was doing on a wet Saturday afternoon in September. No-one was simply out for a walk; they all had destinations and looked as if they were running late. I thought of the taxi driver on his break; London seemed to be filled with pockets of the past, crossroads and alleyways truncated by postwar road layouts that had sealed them into history.
