Something You Are Page 5

‘I don’t think so.’ The kid glanced at his friends and actually dared to smirk, looking him up and down again. It wasn’t his fault, really. He had no idea how much danger he was in.

  ‘Put it down.’

  I glanced downwards and saw Pat’s fists shaking by his sides. I wanted to warn him off but I was too conscious of the crowd.

  ‘Put it down,’ Pat repeated.

  ‘Now look here—’

  Pat took him by the collar and yanked him away from the bar, ignoring the stunned expressions following him out. The drink hit the floor by my foot and vodka and orange flew over my shoes.

  I pushed through the mass of people.

  ‘Pat!’ I shouted as I fought my way out of the front doors. ‘Pat, leave him! Leave him!’

  Pat threw the kid to the pavement and stamped on his arm until I heard it snap.

  The kid was screaming so loud that it drowned out the traffic. There was a collective gasp behind me from the windows and the doorway and I froze, loath to get involved.

  Pat kicked him once and then lifted the kid up by his shirt and punched him, again and again and again until there was so much blood I couldn’t watch any more.

  ‘Pat!’

  I caught his arm and was dragged forwards with the momentum of the next blow. My feet left the ground for a moment and I was whirled around in mid-air. When I hit the deck I stumbled backwards over the kid on the pavement. I landed on my back and a car passed behind my head close enough to make everything blur with adrenalin.

  As I scrambled to my feet Pat pushed me away, almost sending me back into the road. His eyes were black. ‘Fuck off!’

  I punched him across the face, hoping that the shock would be enough to make him stop.

  He held his jaw for a moment, not taking his eyes off me, but when he straightened up I could see it was over.

  I backed away slowly and crouched down to help the kid to his feet. There was blood everywhere, distorting his facial features, and his arm was held at a strange angle across his chest.

  ‘Come on, come on, up you come.’

  The screaming had stopped and been replaced with gasping. When I took his other arm around my shoulders I could feel him quivering.

  No one had followed us outside. No one had dared.

  I walked the kid inside and ordered him an Irish whiskey from the same barmaid, who regarded me with wide eyes. I couldn’t resist smiling at her as I took the drink.

  ‘Drink that,’ I ordered as I sat him down at the back of the room.

  He took a gulp and started coughing. ‘Fuck… fuck, he broke my fucking arm!’

  ‘Calm down and call 999. You got off lucky.’ I leant in slightly across the table, so that no one else would hear. ‘If you press charges and fuck with him again in court, I doubt you’ll be so lucky next time.’

  I patted him on the cheek, straightened my coat and left with my head up. It wasn’t as if anyone here knew who I was.

  It didn’t take long to spot the silver Mercedes and I crossed the road after a hundred yards. It was only then that my breathing started to return to normal and my muscles began twitching from the sudden action.

  I brushed ash and rainwater off the back of my jeans

  Pat was sitting with his hands around the wheel, unmoving, and I got into the passenger seat beside him.

  Silence.

  ‘So, your place or mine?’ he said.

  ‘You can’t drive like this.’

  ‘I can do what I like.’

  ‘You’ll kill someone.’

  ‘You care? Ironic.’ He looked sideways at me, smirking. ‘Can’t believe I let myself take a punch from a guy with a mullet.’

  ‘It’s not… Ah, fuck it.’

  I sighed and leant my elbow against the window. When I looked at Pat again he was observing the blood on his knuckles, hands still around the wheel.

  ‘Give me the keys, I’ll drive you back.’

  ‘Like fuck—’

  ‘Shut up and give me the keys.’ I held out my hand.

  After a small hesitation he got them out of his pocket and opened the door. ‘Should have known you’d be a tricky cunt with a surname like yours.’

  By the time I had returned to Victoria to pick up my car dusk was falling. It was only four o’clock. Brinks had sent me a text so I took a detour on my way home and parked a little way up his street.

  A procession of charity workers, a woman with five or six little ones, was moving down the road from door to door. The smallest kids, who looked about four or five, were dressed as angels, probably to take advantage of December being so imminent. I watched them for as long as social appearance would allow before getting out of my car, thinking about what Pat had said. I found the idea of my life being so dangerously intertwined with someone else abhorrent.

  Brinks was smoking outside his back door when he saw me appear in his garden.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ He hastened away from the door to the side of the house where I stopped and loitered in the drizzle. ‘She’ll see you if she looks out of the window, you know.’

  ‘Aw, you’re ashamed of me?’

  ‘Fuck off.’ He ushered me back into the alley beside the house, where we stood beside a muddied yellow tricycle.

  ‘I got your message saying you wanted to meet,’ I said.

  ‘And you thought you’d come to my house again?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ Hands in my pockets, shivering. ‘What have you got for me?’

  Brinks’s indignation didn’t last long. It never did.

  ‘I couldn’t get you much. We’ve interviewed the girl she was meant to be meeting, Jenny Hillier, and her story checks out. Her grief seemed genuine enough; we don’t think she’s lying.’

  ‘What was her story?’

  ‘That she was meant to be meeting Emma outside Tottenham Court Road tube station so they could go to a friend’s house. Emma never turned up and her mobile was switched off so she assumed she was ill and went to the friend’s house on her own. She didn’t know anything about the situation until Pat called her in the evening looking for Emma.’

  ‘Anything else crop up from the post-mortem?’

  ‘She hadn’t been drinking and there was no evidence of drug use either.’ He blew smoke into the wind, into my face. ‘There were two semen samples.’

  The silhouette in my mind became two. It was a horrible image.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mm, sick fuckers. Doesn’t fit with the taxi driver though, if there were two. There’s been no sign of an accomplice with this guy.’

  ‘Can I have his name yet?’

  ‘Ha! No way.’ He made a smirk look painful. ‘Another thing, there have been investigations into officers taking backhanders recently and there are a couple of eyes turned in my direction. It’s a hot subject in the press and I know the superintendent is looking for someone to make an example of.’

  It was a tired story, one I heard at least once every few months.

  ‘Do you want more money?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t want anything.’ His face was drawn, cheeks sunken above the cigarette. ‘I just want to stop.’

  ‘You can’t, I’ve already paid you.’

  ‘You can have it back!’

  If I wasn’t mistaken he looked on the verge of tears.

  ‘You can’t,’ I said, perturbed by his expression. ‘You’ve made your choice. I can’t afford the hassle of finding someone else connected with the case.’

  He opened his mouth as if to say something else and thought better of it.

  There was nothing else he could say, in the dark and the yellow glow filtering through from the pavement, in the wind and the grey rain and blood on both our minds.

  ‘Still,’ he said eventually. ‘The best we can do is hope she was shot first.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’ll be a consolation for her parents… No fingerprints?’

  It seemed futile now, this endless asking of questions.

  ‘Yeah, but nothing that gives u
s any leads. Unless we have suspects we have nothing.’

  ‘Someone must have seen something.’

  ‘No, no.’ He shook his head with a wry smile, and slowly kicked the tricycle away, as if we were contaminating something innocent. ‘People turn the other way.’

  I knew what he meant. That wall of silence. That huge fucking insurmountable wall of silence and the closed curtains when I’d stabbed that kid. Banging my forehead against bloody bricks and lies and self-preservation…

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ I said.

  ‘Mention it.’ He stubbed his cigarette out against the wall. ‘Don’t come to my house again.’

  I walked away through the side gate and across the road to my car.

  Eight o’clock, four weeks before Christmas and the road was silent. Nothing but a few sad wreaths hung in doorways, the rain and silence.

  Too much silence.

  6

  My flat was empty. I dropped my bag by the door and fell back on to the sofa. It was too big for one person, too sparse and full of blacks and whites, but there were rarely two of us.

  After a while I got up, made a cup of tea, remembered that I should eat something later, and sat down with a notepad and pencil. I hadn’t been allowed to keep the photo of Emma and my head hurt with all the names and faces crammed into it. I could feel the dull, deeply embedded ache at the front of my skull.

  ‘Emma Dyer’, I wrote.

  ‘Pat Dyer’.

  ‘Clare Dyer’.

  I paused.

  ‘Jenny Hillier’.

  ‘Danny Maclaine’.

  I tore off the list, ran my palm over the next page to remove any dust and sharpened the pencil. From the image of the photo in my memory I traced the outline of her face first, the clearest thing in my mind, then down to her neck and the mole on her collarbone. Her jawline was delicate and defined, like her mother’s. Her hair came down over her right shoulder and was brushed behind her left ear.

  It was something I had been aware of from a very young age: the ability to remember images in infinite detail and replicate them in pencil or charcoal. This usually wasn’t necessary and was relegated to a hobby, but at times like this it was useful. It was also nice to know I would never need to carry around a notepad, like some hippy arts student.

  My mind went blank and I sank into a semi-conscious trance as I spent the next two hours filling in the white space with her eyes, nose and the chip in her front tooth that made her smile just less than perfect. She had very defined eyebrows.

  A few times I realized that something was wrong, that her eyes were too wide, too sad, and erased them.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket, bringing me back into the room. I rubbed my eyes and read, SO VERY, VERY FUCKING COLD. BACK IN A FEW DAYS, DON’T DO ANYTHING I WOULDN’T DO. SCHASTLIVO! M XXXX

  I couldn’t help but smile at the prospect of Mark breaking the silence in here again, especially so close to Christmas. I opened the laptop and quickly Googled the Russian. It meant ‘Be happy!’ He had used it before but it was hard to remember.

  My phone started vibrating again and I glanced at the clock before answering it. I recognized the number.

  ‘Hi, Mackie. What’s up?’

  ‘Five grand if you get over here right now.’

  Despite being quite a reputable drug dealer in his time, Mackenzie Woolstenholme’s voice had never lost the nervous and hyperactive edge of a teenager talking to adults he didn’t know.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Can’t call anyone else over, this is a fuck-up, Nic, a real bloody fuck-up…’

  ‘Slow down, what’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t say over the phone, please, I just need someone I can fucking trust—’

  ‘Jesus, all right. Give me a vague idea?’

  ‘Please, please, I’ll explain… I can’t… Fuck, ten grand! Ten grand, if you like, just get the fuck over here!’

  It was going to be horrific, I could tell. When you had seen the worst of what could push people to this kind of undignified desperation it became fascinating to see how it differed from person to person.

  The image that immediately came to mind was a few months old. I’d sat in the corner of a lock-up smoking and waiting for Mark to finish pulling a paedophile’s toenails out for a job, so that we could make it to the cinema in time for the trailers. I finished three cigarettes and the man didn’t make a sound, enduring and resigned. Even Mark had looked impressed.

  ‘OK, I’ll come over now.’

  ‘Oh God, thank you, thank you so much… I’ll meet you outside.’

  I ended the call and made sure I’d packed the boot of the car for all eventualities before I left: tape, hacksaws, gloves… I tried to remember the man’s name as I drove, the man who had stayed so terminally silent, but it escaped me, like the rest of them.

  Mackie appeared outside his house in the glare of my headlights, loitering at the side of the pavement with his hands clasped across his chest like a hitchhiker seeking penance. He was an unfortunate-looking man in his early fifties, but had always made up for his lack of aesthetic value with inane chatter and an ability to call anyone and everyone ‘mate’.

  I got out and he was at my shoulder, lip trembling through the stream of justification. ‘Don’t judge me, Nic, mate, please. There’s no one else I could’ve called.’

  ‘Ah, I’ve seen it all before.’ I smiled, masking my curiosity as best I could. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I went to work and…’ He led me up the front path and inside the doorway, looking up and down the road before shutting the door on us. ‘When I came back… I can’t go in there, I can’t.’

  The hallway smelt of smoke and dimly of incense, along with something else. An African mask leered down from a wall.

  I followed the direction of his gesture to the living-room door and left him standing there, breathing through his teeth. The faint faecal smell became stronger.

  I had an idea of what I was going to see. Whether it was an accident, suicide or the meticulous arrangement of a psychotic, they all looked the same after a while. There was rarely any identity. Body parts became no more than pieces of DIY shelving. You could see what they could have been and what they used to be, but we were all just wood and polystyrene.

  ‘Jesus!’ I opened the door, retched and had to look away for a moment, a hand over my mouth and bile burning the back of my throat.

  Behind me Mackie was watching through his fingers, shaking his head.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ…’

  The naked thing sitting on the right side of the leather sofa was the same shape as a man, but so much liquid strained the skin that every limb had become misshapen and balloon-like. It was riddled with broken blood vessels, shimmering where too much pressure had forced splits and caused unnameable fluid to ooze its way out.

  Over its head was a plastic bag, misted and grey with death rasps, and on its feet, ankles bulging over the chic lines, was a pair of black stiletto heels.

  ‘That…’ I said, swallowing. ‘That is quite fucking disgusting.’

  ‘You can’t tell, I fucking mean it, you can’t tell anyone!’

  ‘Why would I? I don’t know who he is,’ I said, dragging my eyes back to Mackie, who was shuddering with his hands over his eyes. ‘Damn, it’s not the most dignified way to go.’

  ‘No, I mean you can’t…’ He was almost in tears; a hideous sight on any man. ‘You can’t tell anyone about me, about this.’

  When it dawned on me what he was saying I couldn’t help but laugh. Between this and the stilettos I was beginning to feel as though I was on a twisted hidden-camera show. But it was a refreshing novelty; it wasn’t often I was faced with something I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a dead fucker in heels in your living room to clean up and you’re more worried about people knowing you’re gay?’

  ‘It’s not fucking funny!’ he spat, jabbing a finger. ‘You think this is a joke?
’

  ‘Well, Mackie, come on…’

  I sighed, eyeing the thing on the sofa and trying to gauge just how much mess the decapitation was going to make. It was too big to heave into the car in one piece. The smell of excrement overriding the copper and semen was bad enough.

  ‘He’s been here all day, has he?’

  Mackie nodded. ‘He was sleeping, so I just left. I don’t know when it happened.’

  ‘OK, can you go into the kitchen and put your clothes in a bin liner? All of them.’

  It had clearly been here for days. Fuck knows what had actually happened, and fucked if I was going to ask. I turned, desperate to get outside.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I opened the front door, grimacing. ‘To get some tools.’

  *

  Mackie stood, naked and shivering, in the kitchen to avoid getting forensic over any more of his clothes, while I sawed off the most ungainly limbs in the living room.

  The majority of the floor around the body was covered with sheets of plastic and duvets from upstairs, but I knew it was going to be daylight by the time we stopped scrubbing every surface with chemicals. Every time I pierced the skin more liquid seeped out and to make things even more fun Mackie had vomited all over the hall when the shock had caught up with him.

  I wrapped an arm in more bin liners, put it in the suitcase behind me and tried to blow my fringe off my forehead. His left hand had swollen over a wedding ring, I noticed.

  My back ached from being hunched over for so long and the extra layer of the clear poncho was making me unbearably hot.

  ‘Eh, Mackie!’ I called, sitting back on my heels to take a few breaths and eyeing one of the stilettos. His feet had swollen so much that I was unable to get them off. ‘You don’t want to keep the shoes, do you?’

  Silence.

  I regretted making the joke. ‘You guys properly involved?’

  ‘Don’t take the piss out of me!’ he shouted back, his voice drenched in fear and humiliation.

  ‘I’m not! Just… making conversation.’ I put down the saw and leant back on my arms, sitting back up when my muscles complained. ‘I’m not taking the piss, accidents happen to everyone. I’ve seen all sorts, I could tell you some stories…’