“And?”
Nero shrugged. “That was about it. He said you needed a bolt-hole and job, then Tom mentioned the coppers were being dick bags. I don’t know how important the details are, but if you being scared as shit of the outside world is anything to go by, I’d say you were hiding from something or someone, like you said before.”
“When did I say that?”
“When you took up residence in the fridge.”
“Oh.”
Oh, indeed. Nero sucked in a breath. “Are you in trouble with the old bill?”
“The police?” Lenny laughed humourlessly. “I wish they were that interested.”
Nero’s lip curled up before he caught the instinctive snarl in its tracks. This wasn’t about him. “Who you running from, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Lenny shook his head. “I can picture every line and blemish on his face, smell him, feel his eyes on me, but I’ve got no idea who he is.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in, for Nero’s mind to piece it all together. Hitman? Nah, too far-fetched, but the alternative idea rattling his brain felt just as bad, perhaps worse. “Are we talking about a fucking stalker or some shit?”
Lenny blanched, and with a dose of stomach-churning horror, Nero knew it was true.
“Fuck.” He swallowed and imagined the terror he’d seen so often in Lenny’s hypnotic gaze. “How bad?”
“Bad enough to drive me from Croydon to Camden, to squatting on your couch like a sparkly hobo.” Again, there was no humour in Lenny’s bleak tone. He looked down at his hands and twisted his fingers in a cruel tangle. “He’s everywhere, Nero. He’ll find me soon enough. He always does.”
“How long?”
“What?”
“How long has this been going on?”
“A year, give or take. The worst of it started last summer when I was working at Shades in Brent Cross.”
Nero nodded. The gay dance club was—thanks to some rowdy staff parties—one he knew reasonably well. “I’ve been there a few times. You worked the bar?”
“Nah, I was a podium dancer.”
Nero pictured the colourful dancers who lit up that particular club with their wild routines and flamboyant clothes—or lack of clothes, depending on the dancer—and tried to marry them with the Lenny who had pushed himself so hard against the brick wall behind him that he had to be scraping skin off his spine. It was tough, but Nero’s gut told him there was far more to Lenny than he’d seen so far. “Keep talking.”
Lenny crumbled a half-eaten custard tart between his fingers, showering the fire escape with pastry flakes. “I don’t know where to start, really. I guess it should be the first time I saw him, but that feels weird because it was a while after that before I realised something was wrong.”
“Has he hurt you?” Nero’s palms itched, his heart, as ever, making a bid to escape through his broken hands.
Lenny shook his head. “He’s never touched me, never got close enough, but that makes it worse. I can’t explain it, but I’d honestly rather he kicked the shit out of me than lurked in the shadows.”
The logic made an odd kind of sense to Nero. How often had he wished his finger was still attached to its stump so he could twist it off all over again? “So he harassed you at the club?”
“Yeah, in the beginning . . . little things like buying me drinks and waiting outside for me after work. It was nothing I couldn’t handle, but then I started seeing him other places too, like the shop by my flat, the pub, even the lobby of my building. I thought that we just lived in the same place, but then the letters came.”
“Letters?”
Lenny nodded. “Yup, full-on clichéd newspaper clippings at first, like some dodgy remake of The Bodyguard, then he got bolder and used his own hand, which was worse, you know? It felt more personal and invasive, and it didn’t matter what he’d written.”
Nero brushed the pastry crumbs from Lenny’s hands. Conscious, rational thought told him to leave it at that, but he wove his fingers between Lenny’s, twining them together. “What did he write?”
