The First Stakeout

Thursday started full of promise and ended predictably: at six in the evening, an hour before our long-awaited catch-up, a message came in from Nigel — "Dave, I'm so sorry, can't make it again, something's come up, I'll explain when I see you" — cancellation number eight in my table, and this time I didn't even feel the usual sting of hurt, because I was too busy instantly ringing Poppy.

"He's cancelled," I said, the moment she picked up. "Eighth time. Urgent, no details."

"Dave, that's not exactly cause for celebration," said Poppy, though there was more curiosity than judgement in her voice, to my quiet satisfaction.

"It's the perfect opportunity," I corrected. "He'll be out somewhere all evening, doing whatever it is he does. If we follow him, we'll finally see where he actually goes, instead of guessing from newspaper clippings."

The pause on the other end lasted long enough for me to come up with three additional arguments in favour of the stakeout, none of which, I'll admit in hindsight, would have survived even the loosest test of basic legality.

"Fine," she said at last. "But I have conditions. One: we just observe, we don't get involved in anything. Two: if it gets properly frightening, we call the police, not play detective ourselves. Three: you're buying me dinner afterwards, because I absolutely did not plan to spend my Thursday evening tailing a neighbour purely for your emotional satisfaction."

I agreed to all three conditions with the readiness people usually reserve for terms they're about to break within the hour.

We took up position by the building's entrance at a quarter to seven — me in a dark jacket I'd specifically chosen for its unremarkable colour, though, in hindsight, a dark jacket among a crowd of people in ordinary going-home-from-work clothes stands out about as much as a ninja costume at a children's birthday party — and waited.

Nigel came out at twelve minutes past seven, in his usual grey coat, buttoned up to the top, and set off briskly towards the bus stop. We followed at what we considered a safe distance — about fifteen metres, which, based entirely on our shared understanding of professional surveillance gleaned exclusively from films, seemed more than adequate.

"He's walking too fast," Poppy whispered, nearly breaking into a jog to keep up.

"People who are rushing to commit a crime always walk fast," I noted, with an authority I did not, in fact, possess.

"Or people who are late for a bus," Poppy countered, but from the moment Nigel actually did board bus number 38, rather than melting sinisterly into an alley, her sarcasm subsided somewhat in favour of the practical problem: we needed to catch the same bus without drawing attention to ourselves.

We scrambled aboard a second before the doors closed — a manoeuvre that, I'll admit, drew exactly as much attention as two out-of-breath adults could reasonably attract, one of whom dropped his umbrella straight into the aisle — and took seats at the very back, from which we had an excellent view of the back of Nigel's head, eight rows ahead.

"This isn't observation anymore, Dave," Poppy hissed, watching me surreptitiously photograph the back of his head on my phone. "This is stalking on public transport."

"This is documenting the route."

"You've got fifteen photos of the back of his head."

"For the timeline."

Nigel got off at a stop near an old tenement block three streets from the High Street, and we, after allowing what felt like a professionally appropriate few seconds' delay, got off after him, doing our best to blend into the thin crowd of evening commuters — which proved especially difficult given that Poppy was wearing a bright yellow coat, which, by her own admission, she'd only put on because she hadn't given a moment's thought to blending in when she agreed to this whole scheme twenty minutes earlier.

Nigel stopped at a newsagent's kiosk, bought something — a chocolate bar, judging by the shape — and, turning round, very nearly walked straight into us, which forced me to react in the only way available to me in that instant: I spun sharply round, grabbed Poppy's arm, and pretended we were both deeply absorbed in admiring the shop window we happened to be standing in front of, which, as luck would have it, belonged to an undertaker's.

"We are standing here admiring coffins, Dave," Poppy whispered through gritted teeth, stretched into an unnatural, strained smile for the benefit of any passing onlooker. "This is the single most suspicious thing either of us has done all evening."

"Better than being spotted."

"We are standing pressed against the window of a funeral parlour at twenty past seven in the evening. We've already been spotted. The whole street's spotted us."

Luckily — or, as it turned out later, not luckily at all — Nigel didn't seem to notice us and carried on, turning into a narrow alley between the old tenement block and a disused printing works, its windows boarded up and a faded sign still clinging to the brickwork whose name I didn't manage to make out.

We gave him a twenty-metre head start — Poppy insisted, citing sensible caution — before following him into the alley, which, looking back, was exactly the sort of alley two adults with no experience of surveillance, no means of self-defence, and no plan whatsoever for unforeseen circumstances should never, under any conditions, have entered.

The alley turned out to be empty. Nigel had vanished — either round a corner, or through one of the few unboarded doors, of which, admittedly, there weren't any to be seen.

"He's disappeared," I whispered, glancing around with a mixture of disappointment and the sort of primal dread that washes over you when you suddenly grasp that a plan which felt brilliant half an hour ago had, in fact, consisted entirely of improvisation and a dangerously thin supply of common sense.

"People don't just disappear, Dave," Poppy said, though her voice had lost its usual confidence, because at that exact moment, somewhere above us, on the fire escape of the disused printing works, came the sound of footsteps — quick, light, receding — which stopped us both dead.

We stood there for a good minute, staring up into the darkening sky above the alley, before it dawned on us both, simultaneously, that if Nigel really had gone up the fire escape of a disused printing works, then Poppy's martial-arts-in-disguise theory from the week before was now officially out of the running.

"We could go up after him," I suggested, eyeing the rusted ladder with an enthusiasm that, in hindsight, was entirely unwarranted given my complete lack of experience climbing fire escapes on abandoned buildings in the dark.

"We could not," Poppy said flatly. "Dave, look at that ladder. It's held together by rust and good faith. I am not falling off a third-floor fire escape to prove your superhero theory."

"Then what do you suggest?"

"I suggest we accept that tonight's surveillance has officially failed, and go home," she said, rubbing the ankle she'd twisted dashing across the road fifteen minutes earlier, trying to keep pace with Nigel's purposeful stride. "Or, if you absolutely can't bear it, we go and get a curry, because I am starving, and unlike stalking, curry is guaranteed to end in a result I'll actually be happy with."

Curry turned out to be a surprisingly sensible plan. We sat in a small place on the corner, finishing off the last of the samosas, and Poppy, finally warmed up after the cold evening, at last voiced the thought that had clearly been troubling her all night.

"You know what actually scares me?" she asked, pushing her plate away. "Not that he might be a superhero. Not that he might be a criminal. But that the two of us, two grown, generally sensible adults, just spent an hour and a half chasing a neighbour across the city, hiding in an alley next to a funeral parlour. At what point did that become a normal Thursday evening?"

I thought about that question rather more seriously than I expected of myself.

"Probably," I said finally, "the point where I realised I'd spent the last six months waiting for my life to be something other than a report on customs delays in Dover."

Poppy looked at me for a long moment, a mix of understanding, mild sympathy, and something else I didn't quite place at the time, too busy chewing on the last of a cold naan.

"That," she said finally, "is either the most honest thing you've ever said to me, or the saddest. Possibly both at once."

We went our separate ways home late, empty-handed, but oddly in good spirits — that particular mood shared failure brings, which somehow bonds people more tightly than shared success ever does — and I, climbing the stairs past Nigel's flat, noticed that his lights still hadn't come on, though it was well past midnight.