Die Twice by Andrew Grant

ghosts. So I decided to give it a try. The only thing I hadn’t considered was their hours of business. I arrived at the door on the stroke of four thirty. But they didn’t open till five. And that left me with a dilemma.
    I decided to wait. Not on the doorstep, obviously. But in the general vicinity. In the nearby maze of backstreets and alleyways. Where you can get right under the skin of the city. Or lose yourself in the genuine, unadorned areas that the guidebooks don’t tell you about. Away from the shop windows and neon signs and office facades, and into the parts where real people get their hands dirty making deliveries and emptying Dumpsters and busying themselves with their ordinary, everyday lives.
    Places that people like Fothergill might have gone to, once. But I couldn’t picture him there now.
    Most of the buildings on that street seemed to be offices, but the place on the left of the restaurant looked like some sort of shop. I couldn’t tell what kind. It was closed. There were no signs, and the door and windows were obscured by heavy, gray blinds. A passageway led down the side, separating the two businesses. It was paved with cracked, square slabs. They were shiny and well worn. Obviously in frequent use. Almost calling for me to follow them. It seemed like an interesting enough place to start.
    The passage led straight to the back of the buildings. There were no lights. No doors or windows opened onto it, and it was too narrow for anything to be stored there. I made my way to the far end, then paused to check the lie of the land. I could see I’d reached a kind of grubby, cobbled courtyard. It was about twenty feet square. To my left was the back of the shop. It had a single window—lined with cardboard and heavily barred—and one exit. The outside of a fire door. Neither showed any name or number. The buildings on the far side were much deeper, reaching almost to the ones from the next street, leaving just enough room for another narrow passageway. That was handy. It would be a second way out of the place, if needed. And a third possible route stretched away to my right, beyond the back of the restaurant, where the space remained wide enough for a medium-sized vehicle to pass through.
    It was the restaurant side of the courtyard that caught my attention. Orange plastic packing crates had been arranged in a horseshoe shape outside the double kitchen door, like seats. There were six. Cigarette butts lay scattered all around them. Maybe two hundred altogether. Around a quarter had lipstick marks on them, and I could see at least four different brands. The doors themselves were standing open a couple of inches, and I could hear the murmur of voices and the clash of metallic items banging together from inside. But it wasn’t the sights or the sounds that grabbed me.It was the smell. Frying meat. Onions. Garlic. Carried straight at me by the clouds of steam that were pouring relentlessly from four stainless-steel vents, lined up in the back wall at head height. It made me think that the couple on the plane had been right. Which again reminded me of Tanya. And made me fear that the next few minutes were going to pass very slowly.
    There was nothing else of interest in the courtyard so I crossed behind the restaurant and started down the broader alley on the far side. I was planning to outwalk my memories and kill the rest of my waiting time by making a broad loop back around to the main entrance on the street. But I’d only gone about nine feet when I heard a noise behind me. A loud crash. Something heavy had connected with the brickwork. I stopped in the shadows and turned to look. It was the fire door at the back of the shop. Someone had thrown it open, all the way, so that it banged into the wall. A woman staggered through the opening. Her arms were flailing and she was teetering wildly on transparent plastic stilettos. They were at least four inches high. She finally caught her balance after another