Die With Me by Elena Forbes Page B

don’t get something now.’
    He looked at his watch, realising that he had also had little to eat that day. It would be a while before everyone was back from Ealing and there should be time to nip out for a quick bite. It would probably be the only break he’d get for a while. ‘I’ll see you in the Bull’s Head in twenty minutes. I’ll order for you. What do you fancy?’
    ‘Don’t mind. Just make it large.’
    Stopping off in the main office outside to tell DC Dave Wightman about the computer, Tartaglia grabbed his jacket from his old office and went downstairs. He walked through the car park at the back of the building and out of the main gate onto the street. It was close to freezing and a mist was rolling up in thick drifts from the Thames. The air was wet on his face and smelled of rotting leaves mixed with wood smoke, someone burning a proper fire nearby. As he turned down Station Road, he could just make out the black wilderness of Barnes Common in the distance, a long string of orange streetlights marking the perimeter.
    When he’d first come down to London from Edinburgh shortly after graduating from university, he had felt swamped by its size, lack of cohesion and frenetic pace of life. He remembered having an argument in a pub with some jolly Londoner who had tried to persuade him that the city was really only a friendly series of villages joined together. Having lived in Edinburgh all his life, it was something he failed to see, there being no village-like qualities about Hendon, where he’d done his training as a police cadet, or Oxford Street and its environs, where he had walked his first beat. London seemed just a grey, filthy, sprawling, unfriendly mass and he wondered whether he had made a mistake leaving home. Gradually, as he got to know the city better, he started to realise that most areas had their own distinct personality and community, which made life more tolerable. Nowhere was this more true than in Barnes, picture-postcard pretty and so rural that it could almost be in the country, even though it was only a few miles from the centre of town.
    He passed the village green with its pond, barely visible in the mist, a couple of ducks quacking from somewhere near the edge of the water, and followed the road around into the narrow, brightly-lit high street. Unusually for London, it was free of chain stores and retained an old-fashioned feel, offering instead an exotic range of small shops, expensive boutiques and restaurants, along with the myriad of estate agents, reflecting the fact that it was a popular, if expensive, place to live. Cut off from central London by the river Thames, Barnes seemed to be in a world of its own. If the wealthy local clientele, which included several well-known faces from theatre and television, wanted something functional like a pair of socks or underpants, they had to make the trip over Hammersmith Bridge into the smoke.
    Approaching the river, the fog became dense and he could barely see in front of him. Swathed in a veil of white, The Bull’s Head sat at the end of the High Street, overlooking the river embankment, next door to what had once been Barnes Police Station, the old building now converted into expensive flats.
    Walking into the large, open-plan bar, Tartaglia was greeted as usual by loud music coming from the back room. The pub was famous for its daily sessions of live jazz, occasionally boasting musicians even he had heard of, such as Humphrey Lyttelton and George Melly. Jazz wasn’t his cup of tea in any shape or form and often the music was so loud it was difficult to hold a conversation. But tonight the sounds drifting into the bar were half decent, someone with a voice like John Lee Hooker singing the blues, accompanied by a guitar. There were worse places to drink and it was certainly a lot better than the watering holes around Hendon.
    He bought a pint of Youngs Special for himself and a half of their ordinary bitter for Donovan, who tended