by Clare Carson
‘It said you must try this recipe, so I thought I would. It’s vegetarian, spinach is the main ingredient. I walked over to the Sainsbury’s on Wandsworth Road, bought the ingredients and some other food. You don’t have anything to eat in the house.’
‘You cook a lot?’
‘I had to do the cooking when I was a kid. In fact I had to look after the house. I was a surrogate wife, I suppose, for my father.’ He looked ashamed when he said that.
‘Cooking is a useful skill to have.’ She said it quickly, avoided his eye, didn’t want to show him too much empathy, examined the postcard. The front was an idyllic scene – topaz sea, turquoise sky, whitewashed villas. The message on the back was typical Liz. Lots of randomly underlined words that she undoubtedly thought were incredibly important but the significance of which left everybody else completely mystifed. You must try this recipe. We think it’s lovely. We. Bloody we. She didn’t want to know about any we. Liz and Roger. Spanakopita. Ingredients. Unsalted butter. Flour. Instructions with more random underlinings. Love from Mum. Not underlined.
‘I’m sure it would please my mother to know that somebody bothered to use one of her recipes.’ She said it tersely.
‘I’m sorry. Have I upset you?’
‘No. Not even slightly.’ She handed the postcard back to Sonny, wondered whether he was chipping away at her psyche, searching for the vulnerable spots before he struck. Bushcraft: the hunter had to know his prey. He was back at the stove, tilted the frying pan, allowed the flame to lick its sides, peered at the postcard, reached for a lemon squeezer. The absurdity of it hit her then, her father’s killer preparing a meal for her using a recipe posted from her mother. She cracked. Caught herself off guard with her bottled-up mania. Started laughing and couldn’t stop. Hysterical. Had to lie on the floor. She rolled around wheezing, her sides hurt, she couldn’t breathe. Foetal position. Cheek on lino. Down among the dead matter; hair balls, toenail clippings, sloughed-off skin. Dave’s remains, his last traces. She was slipping, below the earth’s crust, among all the dead people, a danse macabre with her favourite corpses. Everybody was dead. Jim was dead. Dave was dead. Luke was dead too.
*
He must be dead; she could see his bones, his hair down here in the catacombs. She had to get a grip. She turned and lay on her back, breathed deeply, let her eyes travel the cracks in the ceiling, traced the drab edges of the bat-shaped water stain. Bath leak. Normal. She had surfaced, back in the realm of the living. Luke wasn’t dead. There was a lot of muck under the kitchen table, but it was just normal household grime. And yes, she had found a bone and some hair in the Lookers’ Hut, and she had shown them to Dave and he had left them under the urn in his back garden. But they weren’t Luke’s remains. They were a shepherd’s charm left in the hearth to ward off evil. She became conscious of Sonny watching her warily.
‘Are you OK?’
She levered herself upright. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘I thought you were having a fit.’
‘I was. But it was a fit of laughter and I’m over it now.’
‘You looked as if you were crying.’
‘I wasn’t.’ She licked her lips, tasted the salt.
‘Ek verstaan.’
‘I don’t think you do understand.’ Prudish schoolteacher voice. Her head was fuzzy; she rubbed it. ‘Did I bring some bags in with me?’ She was asking herself, still dazed.
‘You put them over there.’ He pointed to the small table in the corner of the room.
She said, ‘Jim’s relics. Nothing very interesting. Couple of old police issue diaries.’
He nodded.
‘And some tomatoes.’
‘Tomatoes? I could make a salad.’
She handed him the bag.
‘From Harry.’
‘The ex-cop who now works for some part of Intelligence?’
‘Yes.’ Sonny didn’t forget details, she noted. ‘I went to see him at his allotment.’
‘Did he have any more useful information for you?’
She detected an edge of nervousness to his voice, she was sure.
‘Yes. The cop who has the file on me is called Crawford. He’s in charge of the investigation into Dave’s death.’
She watched Sonny concentrating on the frying pan, checking the recipe, reaching for the spinach.
‘Do you have a colander?’ he asked.
‘What for?’
‘So I can rinse the spinach.’
‘I don’t normally bother doing that.’
‘You should. You don’t know what it’s been sprayed with.’
She rummaged in a cupboard, located a colander, tipped the dead spider on the floor.
‘You should look after yourself better,’ he said.
She passed him the colander. He walked to the sink, turned the tap, washed the spinach.
She said, ‘Crawford works for the Sewer Squad, this strange unit that investigates the links between terrorism and crime.’
‘Why do you think Crawford is interested in Dave? And you?’ he added.
She stared at his back, bent over the sink, uncertain how much she should tell him. He smiled at her as he crossed to the oven.
She said, ‘Because they think the gun he had came from the Provos.’ She rubbed her neck, blurted, ‘And for some fucking reason I can’t fathom, he thinks I was plotting with Dave to use this gun to hijack one of the nuclear waste lorries from Dungeness as a protest to show how easily it could be done.’ She could hear her voice cracking as she spoke.
‘There’s an informer who has been feeding crap about me to the cops for months, apparently. Reliable unnamed source. What kind of a jerk makes up information and sells it to the police?’ She answered her own question. ‘Drug dealer, I reckon.’
‘Any idea who the informer might be?’
She paused, considered whether she should share her suspicions about Alastair. Better not.
‘No. No idea.’ She changed the subject. ‘I’m going to try the Romney number again, the one for the power station contact. See if anybody is at home yet.’
‘Good idea.’
She picked up the bag of Jim’s leftovers, walked out of the kitchen, closed the door behind her and deposited it in the damp cupboard under the stairs. She dug in her back pocket, removed the scrap with the number she had found in Luke’s bedroom. P. Grogan, Romney. Dialled. The phone rang. And rang. No answer. Not good. She put the receiver down. Took a deep breath. Dialled Directory Enquiries and asked whether they had any telephone numbers listed for the fishermen’s cottages on Dungeness. She knew it wouldn’t work, but she thought she’d give it a go anyway.
‘Sorry, love, you need a surname.’
‘OK, thanks.’
She wasn’t sure what she would have done with the number even if Directory Enquiries had given it to her. She could hardly phone Alastair, demand to know whether he was a police informer and expect a straight answer. She returned to the kitchen. The windows were steamed up. She walked over to a pane, wrote her name in the condensation as she had always done when she was a child. Sam Coyle. She stood back, examined her handiwork, the letters already smudged and dripping. Her father yelled, You shouldn’t have done that, you’ll leave greasy fingerprints on the glass. Why was he always shouting at her, telling her off? It wasn’t her fingerprints that were the problem, it was Jim’s; the traces he had left that could only be seen from certain angles or when the sun was low in the sky. In the pit of her stomach she sensed this mess was Jim’s fault, although she couldn’t trace exactly why or how.
‘Dinner is ready.’
Two plates on the table. She took slow mouthfuls of food, enjoying the taste, perused Tom’s article while she was eating.
‘I was told it was rude to read at the table,’ Sonny said.
‘So was I.’ She carried on reading.
‘What is it anyway?’
‘It’s an article by Tom Spiller.’
‘Who?’
‘Friend
of mine. Journalist. Haven’t heard from him for ages. I pissed him off.’
‘I can’t imagine you pissing anybody off.’ He must have been picking up tips on sarcasm from her.
‘He was offered a job with The Times but he turned it down because of Wapping.’
‘Wapping?’
‘Some of their journalists went on strike last year and they were sacked. Murdoch moved the newspaper offices to a building in Wapping, introduced electronic printing processes and made a lot of the printers redundant.’
‘Where is Wapping?’
‘Docklands. On the north side of the river, opposite Rotherhithe in fact, near where we were the other night. Spyder’s house.’
Sonny nodded.
‘So anyway, Tom turned down a job in Wapping. Although, I suspect it couldn’t have been a particularly good job – he’s not that noble. He ended up working as a stringer for Reuters and he’s been in Afghanistan, reporting on the war with the Soviets.
*
Hanging out with the Mujahedeen, the Afghan rebels. And he’s written me this note, which, typical Tom, doesn’t say much other than he’s had this piece published in some newspaper and he thought I might like to read it.’
She finished the article, folded the cutting. She missed Tom every now and then. She would contact him again. At some point.
‘I’ve got to hand it to him,’ she said. ‘It’s quite well written. He can be a bit of a tosser, though.’
‘You don’t believe in stroking men’s egos, do you?’
‘No.’
She glared at him, attacked the spanakopita with her knife. ‘The food is good.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’
He finished his food, lit a fag. Something twinged in Sam’s gut. She rummaged in her pocket again. ‘Here’s a newspaper cutting that might interest you.’
She handed him the folded report about Flint’s murder that Harry had given her.
‘What’s it about?’
‘A dodgy ex-cop, an old woman, a Westie and a haloed killer.’
He stubbed the not even half-smoked fag out on the ashtray.
‘Why are you giving it to me?’
‘Dunno.’ She wasn’t lying, she didn’t know. Instinct. ‘Thought you might find it entertaining.’
*
She was woken by a noise. She sat up, urban semi-darkness, the street lamp shining through the curtains. The house was heavy with an empty silence and the whiff of mildew. She heard the noise again, outside. Car engine starting – the camper van. She leaped out of bed, ran to the window, yanked the curtain, headlights fuzzy in the streaked pane as the van performed a nifty three-point turn. She banged on the glass. The van’s orange behind trundled along the street, heading east. Keys. The spare van key was on the ring with the one from the front door she’d handed him that morning. She stormed down the stairs, out the front door, shouted. Too late. The van turned north on the main road, to Vauxhall Bridge. Sonny had pulled a fast one on her. A warm prickliness made her look down, she was standing in a puddle, sludge lapping around her bare feet. She kicked the oily water, stubbed her toe on the pavement, yowled with pain. She had been duped by his bloody spanakopita. What an idiot. Trust nobody, least of all a hitman. She knew next to nothing about Sonny, except for the fact that he had killed her father and god knows how many other people too. He was a monster. A psycho. Yet she had let him into her life. Her home. How stupid was she? She ran back into the house, slammed the door, up the stairs, into Dave’s bedroom. The duvet had been straightened in an anal military way. She spotted his bag, tidied away in a corner. Green canvas rucksack with leather straps, like the one Jim used to carry. She rummaged, removed its contents. Thick grey socks, rolled in a pair. Couple of white tee shirts. Boxer shorts. Cassette with LOVER’S ROCK written in red felt-tip capitals on one side. Two books: the King James Bible and Linda Goodman’s Love Signs. Linda Goodman’s Love Signs? What was he doing with that? She rummaged in the bag again. The Firebird was at the bottom, wrapped in a rag. She unwrapped and examined it. Loaded. She laid it on the bed, tipped the bag, shook. Nothing left. The Browning was missing. Wherever he was going, he had taken the Browning with him. She ran back to her room, pulled on her jeans, moth-eaten jumper, overcoat, was about to run down the stairs when she changed direction, swerved into Dave’s room, grabbed the Firebird, double-checked the safety catch, stuffed it down the waistband of her trousers.
*
She caught the scent of damp again as she ran through the hall, realized the door to the cupboard under the stairs was open and Sonny had removed the bag of Jim’s belongings. She flicked the kitchen light switch; Jim’s broken aviator glasses lay on the floor, the rest of his remains emptied on the table. The soft black police diaries unbundled and fanned out as if Sonny had picked them up, one by one, examined them. She selected one, pressed its soft cover in her hand, retraced her steps back to the day at Jim’s graveside, the remembrance ceremony, her failed attempt to draw the line. The diary left by his tombstone. She had neglected to ask Sonny whether he had tailed her to the church but, of course, it had to be him who had moved the diary, replaced it open at the pages for the week at the beginning of June. An image flashed into her brain. Sonny holding another small black notebook in his hand, identical to Jim’s police diaries. That evening they had broken into Luke’s place; while she was in her boyfriend’s room, Sonny had rummaged around in Spyder’s. He had found a black diary alongside Spyder’s needles. Spyder the junkie dope dealer. She screeched with frustration, rapped her knuckles against her head. Sonny had worked out the obvious and she had missed it: Spyder was the tout. Spyder was a small-time jerk of a drug dealer who had been selling any old information to the Force about her and Dave. Spyder had set her up, probably for some petty cash. She should have guessed, it was so fucking, fucking obvious. And now Sonny had taken her van and driven over to Rotherhithe to deal with Spyder, the informer.
Shit. She had to find Sonny, stop him before he annihilated Spyder. She hated the jerk, but she could do without another gruesome death haunting her. And anyway, she wanted to talk to him, make him confess, torture him, extract any information he had about Luke. She jammed her plimsolls on, pelted out into the steamy night, down the street and hailed a black cab trawling the main road.
Through the backstreets of Southwark, beyond London Bridge, roads disembowelled for gas pipes and sewers, red no entry signs looming in the dark. Sam clambered out of the cab, its rear lights dissolving in the steam as it pulled away. The odour of rotting river vegetation hung in the air. She heard a whistle, the familiar tune, caught sight of a figure melting into the darkness of the embankment, started down the road to investigate, stopped halfway. Stupid. No time for chasing shadows. She inhaled, wiped her face, retraced her steps, walked to the front door of Spyder’s house, knelt down, lifted the flap of the letterbox, peered inside. Murky, silent hallway. Empty. She walked around the side of the house. The back door leading to the fire escape was open. She called Sonny’s name softly. No response. She backed away and stepped along the cobbled road running parallel to the river. Three pigeons tiptoed along the kerb. Why weren’t they roosting? Disturbed by something, or somebody. Sonny had chased Spyder down this road waving his Browning. She paced a few feet, spotted a black rectangle lying in the gutter. Police issue diary. Spyder’s. She scooped it up, stood under the nearest street lamp, drizzle drifting through its haze, and turned to the latest entries in the diary. S called to ask about L’s whereabouts. S came to nightclub to ask about L’s whereabouts. Said she knew about D. Agitated. Said he hadn’t turned up at Dungeness. Seemed to think it was something to do with planned Dungeness protest.
She flicked back, January was full of Ss, Ds and Ls too. She remembered now how he had sauntered up and chatted to her last September, when she started working at the Ballroom, told her he could supply her with dope, good stuff, cheap, asked her what she did in her spare time, where she lived, with whom. Casual chat.
Innocuous pieces of information, she thought. The fucking bastard. Reliable unnamed source. He was about as reliable as a... as a junkie who needed a fix. She stuffed the diary into her pocket. In the distance she heard a shout – Sonny’s voice – quickened her pace, the grey high tide waters of the river visible through a break in the derelict wharves and houses. The rain slashed harder as she paced the street. Through the downpour she could discern the rusting metal supports of an old pier, jutting out into the water, a perilous platform high above the river. Two figures danced along the jetty. A rubbish barge slid past, the backwash slapping the river walls. As she neared, she could hear Sonny ranting. ‘To every thing there is a season...’ His words were drowned by the barge horn sounding as it approached London Bridge. Through the long note she heard a splash. A click, then two cracks. Seagulls squawked.
She sprinted, arrived breathless – the pier gate padlocked, a sign warning Danger. Keep out. Sonny was standing alone on the far point of the jetty. A cormorant came in to land on the upstream end, then pulled skywards at the last possible moment when it caught sight of the gun-pointing man standing there, staring into the water.
‘Sonny, what the fuck have you done?’
He turned to face her, hesitated, replaced the Browning in his jacket pocket, picked his way back along the rickety jetty, feet sliding in the wet, vaulted across the gate. He was soaked. He put his hands up, palms outfacing.
‘He jumped.’
‘Jesus. Don’t lie.’
She craned over the embankment wall, studied the choppy Thames. A disco boat appeared around the bend, ploughed a middle furrow, ‘Stayin’ Alive’ blaring from its speakers, tipsy deck-top dancers doing John Travolta moves oblivious to the river’s dramas. Flashing lights – red, green, blue – illuminated a dark hump in the water. The river boiled, glugged and swallowed the body. Sonny came and stood by her, steam rising from his torso.
‘That’s some big fucking rat,’ he said.
‘Spyder. He’s dead.’
‘He’s a fucking tout. He’s a – what do you call it – a nark. A copper’s nark.’