Chronicle: The Grey Umbrella — The Torn Coat

Twelve hours before Dave and Poppy started examining the stain on his cuff in the basement, Nigel Fitzgerald was lying flat on his back on the concrete floor of an unfinished office block on the edge of Shoreditch, thinking that at some point in his vigilante career he really ought to have invested in sturdier footwear.

"Get up, pretty boy," said the man looming over him, in the specific tone acquired by men who spend years as bouncers before deciding to switch to something rather less legal. "Or don't. Makes no difference to me."

Nigel got up. Not because he was following orders, but because lying on concrete in March, even in a good coat, was simply cold, and cold was the one thing he'd never built up an immunity to in two years of practice.

There were three of them, which, in Nigel's experience, was very nearly the ideal number: enough to make a problem, not enough to make it unsolvable. One already sat slumped against a concrete pillar, nursing a wrist where the umbrella had caught him off guard a minute earlier. A second loomed above him, all threat and not quite enough backing muscle behind it. The third — the quietest, and for that reason the most dangerous — stood off to one side and, Nigel noted with rather more interest than the punch to the ribs that followed a moment later, was filming the whole thing on his phone.

He doubled over, not because the blow had been hard — it was, if anything, fairly weak — but because doubling over gave him access to the inner coat pocket, where a second, less conspicuous tool of the trade was kept: a small but remarkably potent aerosol canister Marlon had once sourced "as a favour," the origins of which Nigel had learned not to ask about.

What happened next took roughly forty seconds and cost Nigel a fresh tear at the shoulder — a sharp edge of a steel girder he clipped while dodging the third man, the one with the phone — but ended with all three sitting on the floor with the specific streaming eyes that reliably crush morale for the next half hour, and the third man's phone in Nigel's coat pocket instead of his own.

"Who's paying you?" he asked, brushing down his coat and trying not to wince at the ache in his ribs.

The answer was the particular kind of silence Nigel had learned to identify without fail: not the silence of ignorance, but the silence of fear — fear of whoever was paying more than any honesty owed to a stranger in a grey coat was worth.

"Fine," he said, picking a length of rebar off the floor and tossing it aside with philosophical calm. "Don't answer. I'll take the phone anyway. I'd wager there's something on it more interesting than your names."

He was right. The next morning, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the phone's contents spread in front of him, Nigel found a message thread in which someone signed simply "B.G." was discussing "a word with the residents who keep asking too many questions about the roofing estimate."

B.G. The name had come up before, more than once over the past month. And, worse, judging by the phrasing, "a word" wasn't limited to talking.

He rang Marlon.

"You were right about Grimshaw," he said, without preamble, the moment Marlon picked up. "Only it's worse than we thought. He's got people. Proper people, not just a couple of heavies for show."

"Told you," came the reply, with the mix of smugness and anxiety that was Marlon's signature response to any situation whatsoever. "I texted you yesterday about it, but not on the phone, because—"

"Because you're a paranoid conspiracy theorist, yes, I gathered."

"Because I have reasons, Nigel. That's different."

Nigel leaned against the wall, rubbing his ribs, and glanced at the coat, now hanging neatly on its hook beside two identical ones — no longer any spares, though, since this third one was torn badly enough that even he, famously frugal about maintaining his cover wardrobe, had to admit: time to throw it out and buy a new one.

He thought about Dave — about the fact that lately Dave kept turning up nearby too often, asking too many questions, staring at him in the lift for too long with the look of a man solving for an unknown variable — and, for the first time in two years, felt not annoyance but something closer to a different kind of worry.

If Grimshaw was hiring people to have "a word" with residents asking too many questions, and Dave, judging by the last few weeks, had become the resident asking the most questions in the entire building — just about entirely the wrong thing — then this was ceasing to be an amusing misunderstanding and starting to become a problem Nigel felt personally responsible for.

He sealed the phone in an evidence bag — another thing he kept under the floorboard, alongside the notebook — and texted Jean: "Got material. Need to meet. Not urgent, but important."

The reply came almost instantly: "It's always important when you put it that way. Tomorrow, usual spot."

Nigel put the phone away, poured himself more tea, and thought that it would be nice, for once, to get through a single quiet week. Given that his calendar for the coming days already included a meeting with a journalist, a conversation with a jumpy informant, and, judging by the noises from the stairwell, another round of questions from the neighbour upstairs, a quiet week seemed, for the foreseeable future, off the table.