Silver Read Free

parked up against the curb. It looked like a relic from a better, nobler age, surrounded by the corporate uniformity of the Volvos, Fords, BMWs and Citroëns lining either side of the street. The Austin’s side panels were beige, finished off with gold and black piping. The black leather soft top was down. He had fallen in love with the car when it was a wreck up on cinderblocks in a wrecking yard by Clapham Common. There was just something about it. It was like the proverbial bullet with his n it; they were destined to be together eventually.
    The registration papers listed its original date of sale as March 27, 1966. He liked the idea of the car being “born” on the same day Pickles found the old Jules Rimet trophy under a hedge in South London. Noah had spent thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours restoring the car. In truth, the car was the one constant in his life; the one thing he loved. No doubt a shrink would point to a loveless childhood and a lack of hugs when he scraped his knee, either that, or every time he entered the car he was thinking about his mother in some Oedipean way. Sometimes, though, a car was just a car, and that man-love was just man love for the wire rims and the walnut dashboard.
    He gunned the engine and peeled away from the curb.
    London at night was a strange beast. It was alive with the pheromones of danger, adultery and random acts of senseless violence. Like Sinatra’s New York, it was his kind of town. On the corner he passed a three-legged dog trying to piss up against the wall without falling over. Ahead of him two girls walked, arms linked, down the white line in the middle of the road. He honked once, then swept around them, accelerating from a crawl to sixty in a couple of seconds and back to a dead stop at the first set of red lights. Noah loved the illusory freedom the wind in his hair gave him, even if it was short-lived.
    This part of London existed on three levels: the underground; street level, with its instant gratifiers of fast food joints, discount clothes shops, electronics stores and florists; and overhead, with its amazing architecture that everyone down below was too preoccupied to notice. Windows were hidden behind steel shutters, the steel shutters hidden beneath inventive graffiti and spray-painted gang tags. He could never get used to the sheer emptiness of the city at night. It wasn’t that the city was dead. It wasn’t. It was vampiric. Come midnight the only people out were those who for one reason or another were afraid of sunlight.
    Bracing the wheel on his thighs, he reached down for the rack of CDs lined up beside the gearstick and picked the one he wanted. Ignoring the lights, he took the left onto Belgrave Road at seventy-five and chased it down through Pimlico, hitting Vauxhall Bridge Road just shy of ninety miles per hour.
    As he crossed the Thames, James Grant’s melancholic voice wondered who in their right mind would want to live in this city of fear. It was a fair question. Noah loved London almost as much as he loved Grant’s voice. Both had that lived-in quality that made them immediately comfortable, familiar but not so much so as to breed contempt. Both of them were so much more than they appeared to be when you scratched away at the surface. The voice and the streets were steeped in hidden subtleties. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. He was a London boy to the core. He lived and breathed the city. He grinned, knowing full well that no one would be in a rush to accuse him of being in hisht mind.
    The needle on the speedometer only dipped below ninety twice on the thirty-mile drive out to Ashmoor and Nonesuch Manor. He cranked the volume up louder as the road opened up and lost himself in the music. Noah left the main road a mile short of Ashmoor proper, and took a bridle path up that jounced and juddered along the side of the grazing land toward the trailing avenue of lime trees that marked the way to Nonesuch. Out of the city