Milgrim crossed the road, hearing the van start behind him, drive away. He kept walking. Through grass, across a paved walk, into more grass. Such a peculiar, slightly ragged emptiness, the grass uneven. None of the landscaping, the deep architecture, the classical bones, of this city’s parks. Waste ground. The grass was wet, though if it had been raining earlier, he hadn’t noticed. Dew, perhaps. He felt it through his socks, though Tanky & Tojo’s brogues were better for this than pavement, the black lugs digging in. Walking shoes. He imagined walking somewhere with Fiona, somewhere as wide as this but less spooky. He wondered if she liked that. Did motorcycle people like walking? Had he ever liked walking? He stopped and looked up at London’s luminous, faintly purple sky, all the lights of Europe’s largest city caught, held there, obscuring all but a few stars. He looked back, across the wide, well-lit road, to an ordinary, orderly jumble of housing he didn’t culturally understand, houses or flats or condos, and then back to the oddness of these Scrubs. It felt as though you could score here. He couldn’t imagine that a city this size wouldn’t conduct drug traffic in a place like this.