The Veteran and Other Stories [antikvár]

THE VETERAN DAY ONE - TUESDAY It was the owner of the small convenience store on the corner who saw it all. At least, he said he did. He was inside the shop, but near the front window, rearranging his wares for better display, when he looked up and saw the man across the street. The man was quite unremarkable and the shopkeeper would have looked away but for the limp. He would testify later that there was no-one else on the street. The day was hot beneath a skim of grey cloud, the atmosphere close and muggy. The hysterically named Paradise Way was as bleak and shabby as ever, a shopping parade in the heart of one of those graffiti-daubed, exhausted, crime-destroyed housing estates that deface the landscape between Leyton, Edmonton, Dalston and Tottenham. When it was opened thirty years earlier with a grandiose civic ceremony, the Meadowdene Grove estate was hailed as a new style of low-budget council housing for working people. The name alone should have given the game away. It was not