The Man on the Middle Floor

by Elizabeth S. Moore

There hadn’t been a lot of talking, just a lot of really surprisingly good sex and some mutual sleeping, but it had been cathartic, and in its own quiet way also healing. He had felt as if something had been delivered to his door in plain brown cardboard, and on opening had turned out to be something he had always wanted without even knowing it.

  Perhaps that was why he found himself staring down the driveway after her, angry and disappointed, as her car reversed and then drove away without even a backward glance. Fuck it, women – there were plenty more out there. He had tried a new way of looking at things, and it hadn’t worked out. He went back into the flat, which smelt of sex, had a shower and chucked the condoms from earlier into the bin. He took out the bin bag and went out to chuck it away.

  He had been weighing up his work options. There didn’t seem to be many employment opportunities for raffishly attractive men in their forties with a broad pair of shoulders and a good nose for trouble, unless he became a private detective. He walked towards the bins in his bare feet. The drizzle of the day before had been replaced by a weak sun and blue sky, and Tam vaguely contemplated googling ‘How to start up a private investigation business’ when he had finished his chores.

  He lifted the lid and his morning irritation disappeared as he looked inside. The bin had been emptied the day before and now contained only one bag. Again it was white and translucent, and had been laid on the bottom of the spotless receptacle neatly at ninety degrees. Tam decided he really needed a hobby; he was becoming obsessed with his neighbours’ rubbish. He put his bags down, leant in and lifted the bag out carefully. This time, instead of folded clothes, he could make out the shape of a small cat, in a sleeping position, laid carefully on a cushion and another pile of clothes. What the fuck? Next to the bins, with a note bearing the legend PLEASE TAKE THESE THEY ARE FREE, was a pile of cat equipment. He might be frustrated by a lack of police work but bloody clothing plus a possibly dead cat and discarded cat equipment merited further investigation. It would take his mind off Karen, anyway. Maybe it was a toy belonging to her absent kids – not that he had seen much evidence of anything as homely as that when had been up there. His nephew had once had to bring home a pretend baby which cried and needed its nappy changed; maybe it was an animal version of that. He put down his bag and tentatively prodded the cat-shaped object. This was no toy. It was definitely a real cat. He didn’t know what the rules were for disposing of dead animals, but something was very wrong. He thought about the bag in his flat with the clothes inside it. He hadn’t opened it since he had taken it out yesterday morning and dumped it in his freezer and now he was taking a dead kitten on a cushion in to join it.

  He needed to call in a favour. He put the cat bag on the path, dumped his rubbish and carried the white bag, being careful to keep it flat, inside. He even looked left and right. He wasn’t used to being spooked but the combination of so little sleep and coming off a bender, not to mention Miss Marathon Sex Sessions, was starting to mess with his mind as well as his body. He wasn’t eighteen any more.

  Tam opened the door of his flat and carried the cat-containing bag into the kitchen. He opened the lid of his under-stocked chest freezer and put the bag on the worktop. He flattened the bags of frozen peas, which were the only things in there, and laid the bin bag on top. You could freeze DNA and all that happened was that it became easier to analyse. He took out his phone and went through his work contacts. Who did he know in forensics?

  As it turned out, his twenty-three years of work at the Met had left him with just one solid contact. Danny Morris had never been interested in promotion and he had stuck to his own methods of doing things in the face of endless initiatives and faceless chains of custody. He conformed just enough not to jeopardise a case, but still had a nose for trouble. In short, he was a kindred spirit. Tam was pretty sure that a dead cat in the bin and a bag full of clothes was not going to add up to much; it wasn’t as if any crime had actually been committed, but at least this way he could get rid of the bags, and when he dropped them off with Danny he could divert on the way home and do some overdue shopping at Iceland. He had a niggle that wouldn’t go away, and Danny would understand exactly what that meant.

  He picked up the phone and dialled Danny’s direct line. It felt weird tapping out the familiar first seven digits for the Met after all this time. Strange how the everyday could so quickly become the past.

  He got an answering machine message, which he had been expecting on a Saturday. Danny wasn’t the kind of guy who would have answered his phone at home. He would call back, though. At least Tam felt that he had taken control of the situation, and now all he could do was wait.

  Tam was bored. Itchy feet, that was what this felt like. He should probably sit down and make a plan for starting a business or getting a start-up loan, but he had always hated the admin that came with any job, and that had been part of the problem. He pulled on his jacket, put on his shoes, and tried not to wonder what time Karen would be home.

  As he opened the door, he realised that the pavement-jumping guy from upstairs who was now apparently Karen’s pet project was hunched over the table by the door. He had taken a couple of days to put two and two together, and was embarrassed that he could have been living in the same house as someone he didn’t even recognise on the street. The commissioner would love that, after all his talk of community and traditional policing. Tam waited as he scooped up the letters and flyers from the doormat and bundled them together, then methodically straightened them into a pile and moved the biggest to the bottom and carried on until they made a neat pyramid. He put them on the table below the clock, centred them, looked at them again and seemed satisfied. In one hand he held the red elastic band that had bound them together, plus some takeaway menus and a couple of flyers. He opened the front door, ignoring Tam completely, which wasn’t difficult as Nick’s eyes were on the movements of his feet and avoiding the cracks in the path as he headed for the bin.

  Tam watched as he took a folded recycling bag from his pocket and dropped the rubbish into it. He folded it over neatly and laid it on the top of the bin. For a moment Tam held his breath. It had to be him. The cat and the clothes… there couldn’t be two anally fixated OCD nutters using these bins. Nick seemed to notice nothing, not the missing bag nor Tam watching him from the front door. He put the lid down carefully, and walked off down the path, carrying the tower of items that had been next to the bins. A travelling basket, two cat bowls, various cat toys and the note Tam had seen before taped to them, saying, PLEASE TAKE THESE THEY ARE FREE. Tam watched as Nick put them down carefully by the gate and then turned left and out of sight.

  Tam had a long day stretching ahead of him, and as he had already done the hardest bit, dressing, he decided to practise his rusty detecting skills and see what this strange guy with his letter-tidying habit and strange relationship with the bins was up to. There was definitely something going on here and he was the man for the job. Perhaps this could be his first case as a private detective and the guys at the Met would see that he had cracked a mystery using nothing but his nose and the instincts honed over years of being a copper. This was exactly the type of thing that just never got investigated any more. There were no policemen on the beat, no curious neighbours, no concerned citizens.

  He followed Nick at a discreet distance – probably unnecessarily discreet as it turned out, as the younger man seemed completely locked in his own world – and waited to see where the afternoon would take them.

  It was not a challenging few hours of sleuthing. Tam was able to keep up easily, and when it came to Tube stations he just hesitated for a couple of minutes at the top of the stairs while Nick made his way a stair at a time down into the depths. It was a lengthy procedure and getting on a Tube was interesting as sometimes Nick let three or four trains go without getting on them and there didn’t seem to be any logic to this process because they were all going to the same place. When he eventually jumped on to one, it was at the last minute, and Tam started to
wonder if there was a cunning plan to evade him, but as Nick’s eyes never strayed in his direction he decided something else must be at play.

  It was equally baffling working out when Nick was going to get off. Tam tried to combine looking at yesterday’s Evening Standard casually with being poised to exit at the last minute. At one point they had gone from Victoria to St James’s Park, then back past Victoria in the other direction to Sloane Square. Baffling. Maybe he was a spy with a really good cover. It was as if he couldn’t decide whether to go home or carry on, and the more times they changed trains, the more agitated he got.

  Two hours after Tam had ambled off after Nick down the path, they arrived at Putney Bridge station. Nick had finally jumped on to a District line train heading from Sloane Square to Wimbledon, and Tam had sat poised on the edge of his seat for six stops. Putney was always busy and Tam had to concentrate to keep track of Nick, as he ducked between oncoming bodies, and zigzagged the cracks.

  Nick kept his head down the whole way to the High Street, and walked quickly until the pavement emptied out as they went up the hill, and Nick turned right on to Putney Heath. There was hardly anyone around at all, and Tam hung back, wishing he had a dog to help him blend in more. If anything Nick seemed even more in his own world now, muttering to himself and pulling at his sleeves. He seemed to know where he was going, and almost marched towards the wooded area ahead and down the hill. He had replaced dodging the cracks in the pavement with searching for dry patches of ground and almost jumping from one to the next. Tam kept well behind him as they were pretty much the only two making their way through the thick woods.

  The walk ended where the Heath ended, with the A3 in front of them, six lanes of speeding traffic. Tam was very out of breath and had long ago stopped wondering where they were going. Instead, he could feel a burning in the back of his calves, and the shock of change from woodland to motorway was disorientating. They weren’t done yet, and Nick turned left and walked along the pavement until he hit the Asda superstore and the underpass.

  Once they were on the other side of the road, Tam now struggling for breath, Nick turned left, and with a gait somewhere between demented dancer and uncoordinated puppet he reached the gates to Richmond Park. Tam hung back as Nick went forward towards them, stepped back a few paces, went forward again and stopped. He repeated this strange ritual half a dozen times, after which he turned abruptly back towards Tam. Was that a moment of recognition, Tam wondered, or was he used to people staring at him?

  Nick walked up the road a few yards and sat down at the bus stop. Thank fuck, they were getting the 190 bus back to Hammersmith. Why the hell couldn’t he have taken that on the way here?

  Tam sat at the back of the bus and waited to see whether Nick acknowledged him or showed any signs of recognition, but all he seemed to be doing was talking to himself. This private-eye business wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Between Karen and the route march this afternoon, though, at least he had kick-started his fitness plan.

  He let Nick get off the bus first, then hung back at the bus stop until he saw him turn on to their road. He gave it five minutes, walked after him and bought himself a bottle of single malt at the off-licence then turned for home and let himself in. His flat no longer looked tidy, and he had only spring cleaned yesterday. Getting rid of his cleaner had been a mistake, although now he could make a fresh start with someone who wasn’t an alcoholic. He would advertise; if his flat was clean he could concentrate on sorting out the rest of his life. He looked out of the window. Karen’s car still wasn’t outside. Tam poured himself five fingers of malt, decided against ice as the only bag he had was now under a part-frozen cat and some peas, chucked his sweaty shirt on the floor, and sat down to write a note for the newsagent’s window.

  CLEANER WANTED. START ASAP. LOCAL. TWO MORNINGS A WEEK.

  He added his number, and turned the news on. Still no leads in the case of the couple bashed over the head in broad daylight. He should have used his sleuthing skills there; he had been at the gates of Richmond Park earlier. He sipped his whisky and watched the families of the young couple appealing for information. The niggle in his brain was turning into a really nasty itch.

  8 | Nick

  ‘About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.’

  — Ernest Hemingway

  Sunday morning

  I had made a new list, just for the job days. I needed to because some days were full up now, and I tore up the old one and put it in the bin. Things would be different from now on, and I had to be on top of my routine. I was so happy that the cat wasn’t here any more. I had tried to imagine getting ready, with the cat and all its stuff around me and the smell of the tray.

  It made me feel like retching. I had put the kitten in the bin and the flat was back to normal except for the litter tray outside on the window sill. I just wouldn’t look at it until I was ready to touch it.

  Karen my neighbour was making me want to scream. A long time ago, when I was little, I used to scream when I wanted something because I couldn’t find the words and if someone tried to put a scratchy jumper on me, or a stiff coat, all I knew to do was throw it on the floor and scream. She was making me feel like that again. I didn’t like being this close to someone who knew me. She was making me feel invaded. She was outside fighting with her children’s father yesterday, and I could hear all their horrible words, then the policeman had come in his out-of-work clothes and taken her inside, and they had sex in his flat. It was obvious, moaning like in the park and then banging on the wall below me, just when I wanted a peaceful day and had got rid of the cat and all its mess. It was like having my mother living in the same building even though I had made it clear she couldn’t just knock on the door, and she must have read it because she had posted me a note saying, Be downstairs tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.

  She had told me this twice already and I am always on time, and I could easily get down there by setting my alarm. I was glad she was giving me a lift as long as I didn’t have to talk to her or listen to her talk, or have the radio on. I would be able to work out how to go on public transport after I had been in her car once. I was very good at remembering directions, I had a visual brain and that was not a guess; a doctor had told me that as a diagnosis.

  It was a good time to get a job now that the cat was gone. I was doing my best to get things back to normal but now even watching television was ruined by the story of the sex people in the park, so being out of my flat would be good. In the evenings I could watch other programmes but in the day the sex couple seemed to be there every time I turned the television on. No one seemed to be pointing out that they deserved it. It was against the law to have sex in the open air when other people were there and didn’t want to see it. I had googled it.

  When Karen couldn’t take me, the journey to the hospital would involve walking and a bus ride. I didn’t get on trains often as the smell of other humans was horrible. They pressed against you and I hated that so I always waited until there was a train or a bus with very few people on it. Mother and Grandpa were happy about the job. Mother didn’t like the idea of a morgue because she doesn’t like anything to do with death since my brother died. I still think it’s a good job, and I am still starting tomorrow which is Monday. Grandpa was so happy that he had hardly asked about the cat. That was a closed book, as my grandpa would say.

  I sat by the window and waited for Sunday to pass. I had to sit by the window on the right now, so that I didn’t see the litter tray. It had filled up with water, and the grey litter had swelled up, full of germs. I had locked the window and checked that it was tightly closed. I would have to ask Mother to help, or my neighbour. I didn’t want to ask either of them but I couldn’t do it, I knew that much. I watched television but not the news channel, and I had fish and chips for supper which I only ever had on Sundays and I had to walk round the corner to get that and I finished it all. I would work very hard t
omorrow to burn it off. Grandpa said it would make me fat round my middle, and strangle my heart with fat. Visceral fat that you can’t see from the outside. It was still my favourite meal, but I only had it as a treat. Having a job in the morning, I gave myself a treat and Mother had told me to. She wanted to come and eat some with me, but Sundays are a quiet day.

  ***

  The alarm went off at six a.m. I lay there as always for five minutes to wake up properly, then I got out of bed and put my slippers on to go to the bathroom and do my stretches. I put my slippers on the mat outside the bathroom, had my shower and dressed in my clothes, a white shirt and beige trousers. I combed my brown hair into a side parting and brushed my teeth until the buzzer went on the toothbrush. If you brush them longer you can hurt your gums.

  Walking down the stairs, carefully putting two feet at a time on each step, I felt less happy than I thought I would. My hands were in balls by my side, and I couldn’t get my heels on the floor. I was not good with change. I had a lot of change at the moment, which made me very stressed and I had to use my special techniques to cope with it. Usually my routine held me together, but it wasn’t my routine any more. The last week had upset me. Changes never happened without this feeling coming with them. My head felt as if a mini-earthquake was happening. I nearly turned round and went back upstairs but Karen was waiting at the bottom. I could see the top of her head. It was only 6.50, so I didn’t really know why. I wasn’t late. Grandpa always says punctuality is the politeness of kings.

  As I went down I decided that this had been the worst week since I moved into the flat. I didn’t understand why any of this was happening to me. I had been given rules to live by and I had stuck to them. I was going to stick to my job and my flat only from now on until I felt settled again. If I couldn’t go to the park without seeing sex, or carry on living the way I always had without a pet, feeling like this would keep on happening.