And even if it wasn’t Berg’s game, he felt that if he could get to Berg he’d at least have some chance of freeing himself up. If it was the whole organization out to get him it would be harder, but except in the minds of the paranoid it was never the whole organization, only factions, and factions could be dealt with.
So for now at least, on a strangely aggressive high after killing Esther, he felt almost like he had the upper hand, that if he kept going there wouldn’t be much they could do to take him down. He felt more the hunter than the hunted, fighting in his own anonymous environment, as far away as it was possible to be from the place where Holden wanted him, and no need for his help either.
He was back at the photo shop early, hyped on the low-level exhilaration that was creeping through him, eager to see what information the films yielded. He waited surrounded by a group of Japanese girls who spoke to each other in quiet tones, talking like they were trying to make sense of all the minor mysteries they were encountering there.
They got their photographs first and looked through them straight away, enthusiastic, talking in rapid bursts punctuated by gasps of enlightenment, like the key to understanding the city was hidden in those pictures.
When JJ got his photographs, he too looked through them in the shop and was struck after half a dozen or so by how mystified the Japanese tourists would have been by the sight of them, all of the same nondescript house, the people caught in them equally hard to differentiate.
There were quite a few people in suits, himself included, a smaller number in casual clothes, the long-haired boyfriend going out for the paper, none of Esther herself. Most of the suits he recognized as other people who worked for Berg, people like Hooper, Elliot, Parker-Hall, a skinny Kiwi guy whose name he couldn’t remember.
In among them though was a bigger fish, Stuart Pearson, someone who was at least on a level with Berg and maybe farther up the food chain still. It was unmistakably him, the cropped sandy hair, bald on top, the small silver-rimmed glasses, the look about him of a doctor or lawyer, of someone working within some tightly defined professional structure.
JJ had never spoken to him, but he’d seen him a couple of times, knew where he lived too. And he knew that out of all the people in the pictures, Pearson would be the one with answers, about how far it all went, whether he could stop it by getting to Berg, maybe even where Berg was hiding out.
He didn’t know enough about the guy to know whether it would be easy to get that information, but he was in the mood now to get it whatever it took, angered, feeling full of poison. And he seemed to remember Pearson had kids too; so as long as he got him at home it was just a matter of finding his threshold, JJ free to operate without restraint, answerable to no one but himself, to a conscience which had long been reduced to the role of passive observer.
7
Pearson lived in a redbrick Victorian terrace that in any other city would have been home to students but in London was undoubtedly worth a fortune. JJ was thinking about it as he stepped from the cab, how people could live in places which had nothing attractive about them except the financial value of the property itself.
People worked hard, long hours, fighting their way across the city and back each day, worrying about crime and their kids, paying vast amounts to live in houses which would have been shunned by their own class at the time they’d been built. His place in Geneva wasn’t perfect but he was in no doubt as to who had the better deal.
It was only as the cab eased away and he started up the steps to the door that it occurred to him Pearson might still be at work. Even worse, if he had kids maybe his wife had given up work and JJ would have to spend time with her before Pearson got back.
He rang the bell and listened. He could hear children inside, and a woman who sounded foreign, a nanny probably. Then much louder and closer he heard another voice, Pearson’s he assumed, calling to the nanny that he’d get the door.
JJ drew his gun quickly and as the door opened stepped immediately into the gap, denying Pearson the obvious defense of slamming it again. So by the time Pearson’s thoughts had caught up JJ was already in the hallway with the gun easily visible.
“You people,” JJ said then, shocked by the way both Esther and Pearson had flung their doors open unchecked, “doesn’t security mean anything to you?”
Caught off guard Pearson reacted with a look of scorn and said, “What are you doing here?” The tone was wrong, like JJ was some social outcast gate-crashing a party, making him wonder whether, despite his visit to Esther, Pearson fully appreciated what was going on. More likely though, he simply hadn’t seen the gun, so JJ closed the door behind him and pointed it casually at Pearson’s stomach.