The Lexus is warm and quiet and smells of new leather. She settles in and lets Sol’s lecture wash over her. He’s telling her that of all consumer goods, drugs are damn near recession-proof.
‘Recreational, mood-altering, mind-altering; uppers, downers, rev-up, wind-down or knock-you-out-cold – narcotics buck the trend,’ he says. ‘But it’s not worth a candle if you can’t get the goods out to your customer base.’
To hear Sol speak, you would think trading in drugs is like any other regular business. He talks about sourcing issues, cash flow and distribution problems. He calculates profit margins and balances them against customer satisfaction, just like a regular businessman – except Sol carries a gun and his competitors have more to worry about than aggressive price-cutting.
‘Sol.’ She has seen a queue of stationary traffic ahead.
He sees it too and pulls in to the kerb because, for once, Sol does not want to draw attention to himself. He turns off the engine and stares in horrified silence through the windscreen. Twenty police officers and Police Community Service Officers are working slowly up the street towards them.
‘Jesus,’ Sol murmurs. ‘No wonder Bug’s been screaming.’
He grips the steering wheel and eyes the mass of uniforms like he’s just uncovered a nest of rats in a dung heap. ‘How’m I supposed to get product out to my retailers with this lot sniffing around?’ Retailers – this is what he calls dealers. ‘This is severely fucking up my distribution channels, Marta.’
They are fifty yards down the street from Bug Nelson’s flat. Bug is one of their mixers – he cuts the imported heroin according to the brothers’ instructions, then his team packages it into small bindles for street sales. Sol and Frank don’t allow trading close to the mixer’s house, but the heroin still has to go in and deals have to come out. Marta can see one or two addicts threading their way through the shoppers; Cheetham Hill Road is on their way to where they want to be – to the street corners and alleys half a mile away, where they know they can buy a fix.
The police are stopping people passing by, handing out leaflets, ducking into shops. ‘The Stars! girl made them take notice,’ Marta says.
He shakes his head. ‘This isn’t taking notice, Marta. This is going through the motions. D’you really think these arseholes actually give a shit?’
She raises her shoulders. ‘I think, maybe, some.’
He snorts. ‘Yeah, and you hire your body out by the half-hour because you want to bring comfort to lonely men. Grow up, girl. This just happens to be what they have to do to pick up their monthly pay packet. Give them a better financial incentive, they’d snatch your hand off.’
She looks at a young PCSO on the other side of the street. The cold has chafed his cheeks apple-red and he smiles at an addict whose skin is so grey it looks like he has been shaped from the dirt in the gutter. ‘You think so?’
‘I know so.’
Ahead, a girl turns the corner onto the main road, sees the mass of uniforms and ducks back the way she came.
Sol groans. ‘This is killing our trade.’
‘You should maybe talk to Rob,’ Marta says.
He whips round so fast she flinches. ‘The fuck d’you mean by that?’
A jolt of adrenaline shoots through her veins. She pouts a little. ‘I make silly joke.’ Normally, Sol responds well to her pouts. Not this time.
‘That wasn’t a joke. I know a fucking joke when I hear one – I got a sense of fucking humour – and Marta? I’m not laughing.’
‘I’m sor—’
He cuts off her apology.
‘What the fuck do you know about Rob?’ The tendons in his neck stand out like ropes.
‘He is customer,’ she says in a small voice. ‘I know only what he tells me.’
‘Oh yeah? And what exactly has he been telling you?’
The situation is spinning out of control. She didn’t mean that Rob told her something, but if she says that now, it will look like she’s denying the truth. It will look like she’s lying. She faces Sol. ‘I only mean that if you have trouble with police, always Rob is the one you go to.’
He glares at her, one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping the leather of her seat back. He could snap her neck one-handed.
‘Sol, I am the one who carries your—’ she glances out of the window at the police and lowers her voice ‘—your goods. Just the other day, you hand me valuable—’ again, she darts a look at the police ‘—package when Rob is standing right next to me. I need to know I can trust him.’
‘You need to know? It’s my product, my fucking money – you just need to do what you’re told.’
She could leave it there, but his eyes are dark with suspicion, so she goes on: ‘I think—’ She puts her hand on her chest to stop her heart beating so fast. ‘Maybe, one afternoon, I make delivery and police are waiting.’
Sol laughs. She hides her confusion and relief with annoyance. ‘What’s so funny?’ She backhands his arm. ‘English prison is not funny.’
He laughs harder.
‘What?’ she demands, allowing a little petulance to creep into her voice, knowing that the danger has passed. ‘I’m scared and you laugh at me.’
He plants a kiss on her mouth, but has to break off because he’s still laughing. ‘Let me worry about Rob,’ he says. ‘You just stick to what you’re good at.’
She takes a breath, blows it out between her lips. ‘Men are crazy.’
He takes her hand and kisses the palm, puts her hand to his face and moves in again to kiss her on the mouth, slides his tongue between her teeth and shifts his hand to her thigh, works his thumb into her crotch.
A sharp hammering on the window and they almost leap apart.
It’s the police.
Sol curses softly, winds the window down and cranes his neck to look up at the policeman. ‘Everything all right, officer?’
A bitter northerly wind screams down Cheetham Hill Road, bringing with it the smell of rain. It whips up grit and rubbish and flaps the lapels of the policeman’s jacket. This is a man who looks like he has been rained on one too many times.
‘Take it off the streets,’ he says.
‘What, exactly?’ Sol is smiling, but there are chips of flint in his voice, and such sudden violence in his eyes that Marta can almost smell the blood already. She thinks about the brick of drugs in her handbag at her feet and prays. ‘Just saying goodbye to my girlfriend, mate.’
The policeman looks at Marta in her jeans and sensible coat. She smiles her brightest smile, knowing that her skin glows with good health and her eyes are clear and sparkling, and waits for him to realize he’s made a mistake.
‘Sorry, miss,’ he says and she lifts her shoulder, glances away to show she’s embarrassed to have been mistaken for a hooker. She doesn’t speak, because to a policeman canvassing addicts an Eastern European accent will always create suspicion.
‘You lot are out in force today,’ Sol says.
The policeman sniffs, jerks his chin at the young officer who is trying to press a flyer into the grey addict’s hand. ‘That Stuart Cordwell’s got a lot to answer for.’
Sol laughs; Cordwell is the producer of Stars! He pats Marta on the knee. ‘Off you go then, sweetheart. Give your mum my love. I’ll pick you up later – just give me a buzz on my mobile.’
She swivels in her seat, turning away from the policeman to look at Sol, her eyes wide. Can he really mean her to walk past twenty cops with 6,000 pounds’ worth of heroin in her handbag?
Sol grins, leans past her to make eye contact with the policeman. ‘D’you mind, officer?’ he says pleasantly.
The policeman steps away from the car to give her room to open the door, and Sol reaches into the well and lifts her handbag onto her lap. He slips his left arm around her and pulls her close as if to peck her on the cheek, but his fingers dig into her shoulder, working her collarbone into the socket until she can almost feel it give.
‘I’m a bit soft on you,
’ he whispers, ‘so I let you take a few liberties.’ His lips are so close to her ear that she can feel the heat of his breath. ‘But Frank hears you spouting off about Rob, he’ll cut your fucking tongue out, nail it to his bedroom wall.’ He takes the soft lobe of her ear between his teeth and gives it a painful nip before he lets her go.
Her knees are trembling so hard that the fifty-yard walk to Bug’s place seems like a mile. Bug lives on the third floor above a row of shops. Access is at the back of the shops, through a gate into a back yard, and up the fire escape. This is the only way in or out. The door is plated with steel on both sides. It has a spyhole, and a slide hatch, big enough to admit the kind of delivery Marta is paid to make, one briquette at a time. There is no bell or knocker on the door, because Bug does not admit casual callers, and since an incident involving a fake postman with a special delivery, his post is held at the sorting office, three miles away. There is a rumour that the ‘postman’ was returned to sender by special delivery the day after in twelve separate parcels.
She stands at the top of the steps and looks into the small black eye of a camera above the door. After a few seconds, she hears the rasp of metal on metal and waits for the hatch to open. But the entire door opens outwards, forcing her to take a step back. A hand snakes out and seizes her wrist, and she is dragged inside.
She gives a small yelp of protest and Bug slams her against the wall.
‘Shut up!’ He holds her still while he slides four bolts across, one after another with his free hand.
Steve Nelson was called ‘Bug’ as a kid, Sol had told her, because he was small and the bigger kids bullied him and stamped on him so many times, they used to say he looked like a squashed bug. ‘He was my mate. I protected him, when I was around, but I wasn’t always around, and Bug was a daydreamy sort of kid – he just didn’t have the instincts that keep you safe on the street. D’you get me?’
Marta had told him she did, and meant it.
‘Those lads got too cocky. Maybe they didn’t notice him getting bigger, or maybe they didn’t think it was important, because they got bigger an’ all,’ he’d said. ‘Bug was just shy of his thirteenth birthday when five of them started in on him – shoving, punching, kicking – you know, Bug-baiting. Out of nowhere, he starts swinging at them with two copper pipes. Now, he’d filled those pipes with ball-bearings and they were heavy. The boys who survived said his eyes bugged out like they were on stalks. So now he doesn’t mind being called Bug.’
Bug pins Marta against the wall and shoves his face into hers.
Her muscles jump and twitch; she has no control over them. Sol must have called him from the car. Her ear throbs from the bite, and darkness pulses behind her eyes, threatening to overwhelm her.
‘Where’s the gear?’
His eyes remind her of the brown clay in her mother’s garden, but the colour shifts constantly and she sees flashes of something dangerous, like lightning in a dust cloud. She can’t hold his gaze. ‘It’s in m-my …’
‘Speak the fuck up!’ He slams the wall with the palm of his hand and she feels the vibrations through her body.
‘My bag. It’s … it’s in my bag.’
He lets go of her and snatches the bag from her hand. He is wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His arms are lean, the muscles under the skin twisted together like steel cables. His upper arms are a mess of blurred prison tattoos – crosses and spiderwebs – but on his right forearm he has a crisply rendered image in black and red – an executioner with an axe slung over one shoulder. The blade drips blood at the executioner’s feet and a grotesque bug feeds on the blood.
She presses herself against the wall, and he unzips the centre compartment and thrusts the handbag back into her hands.
‘Come on then.’
‘I … I don’t understand.’
‘Well, I’m not gonna root round in a tart’s handbag, am I? What the fuck you take me for?’
Marta forces down a wild urge to laugh. Men really are crazy. She fumbles in her handbag, spilling tissues, lipstick, keys onto the grey floorboards, and finally brings out the briquette.
He takes it from her. ‘About fucking time. Been waiting for this since yesterday.’
‘Police are everywhere,’ she says.
‘Don’t need to tell me. Fucking dibbles.’ But he’s almost forgotten her. He carries the block of powder away, holding it in both hands, as if he’s afraid to drop it.
Marta realizes for the first time that they are not alone. Three women – two young, one middle-aged – are seated around a long glass table; all wear dust masks. Next to the middle-aged woman is an electronic kitchen scale. None of them look at her, and their silence feels like an interrupted argument.
One of the women is tearing strips of paper and cutting them into squares, ready to make the bindles, another is breaking open capsules – some orange and white, some brown and grey – and pouring the white powder from them into a growing pile. The empty shells lie scattered around her chair, like the empty cockroach egg-cases. There are two windows, both closed. The room is overheated and the air smells sharp – slightly acrid – like burnt matches.
Bug jerks his chin and the middle-aged woman stands and takes the block from him. ‘Stick to the recipe, yeah?’ he says.
She nods, shifting her gaze from the drugs in her hands to Marta for the briefest instant. Then she returns to the table, places the briquette down carefully, and picks up a craft knife.
Bug paces to the window and stands watch there.
The women hunch over their work, avoiding eye contact; to Marta it seems that the walls echo with this man’s rage, and she feels their lack of spirit beginning to infect her.
She speaks loudly, deliberately, into the silence: ‘I go now.’
The one who is shelling the capsules convulses with shock, drops a pill into the mound of powder and shoots a look at Bug to see if he has noticed.
Bug remains at the window, arms folded, looking down into the street. He doesn’t reply and Marta draws back the first door bolt.
‘Touch the next one, I’ll break your arm.’ He doesn’t move, doesn’t even look at her, but Marta lets her hand fall.
‘You might as well make yourself comfortable.’ He tilts his head to indicate a sagging blue sofa at the far end of the room. ‘Bathroom’s through the door to your right.’
Marta doesn’t move.
He shrugs. ‘Please yourself. But you’ll never get all three of them bolts open before I get to you.’
Three more bolts. Even if she did get them open and out of the door, she would have to make it down the fire escape, out through the back gate, down the alley, forty yards or more to the street; she wouldn’t stand a chance. But Sol wouldn’t kill her for saying one stupid thing, would he? No – even Frank wouldn’t do that. Her scalp prickles, thinking of other things – unsaid things, secret things – that would get her killed for sure, if they knew. But she has been so careful – how could they know? She checks the bathroom and discovers it has no window, drifts past the bedroom door and sees bars bolted to the inside of the window frame.
Sol’s words come back to her; he said he could buy anyone’s loyalty, it was only a matter of finding the right price. Bug Nelson continues staring down at the street, the women go about cutting and mixing and bagging the deals, and a black, terrifying thought lodges itself in Marta’s mind. That if she disappears, she has told so many lies no one will know where to look for her. She is invisible. Already gone.
11
‘We want to make sure the thing you’re looking for is on Google 100 per cent of the time.’
ERIC SCHMIDT
The girl in the picture has dark brown hair, grey eyes, like her mother’s. Her face has lost its childish roundness, the dimple in the left cheek; her nose is longer and narrower than in the earlier versions, her hair a shade or two darker. The mouth is fuller, but it still has a slight upturn, a readiness to smile.
The door flew open and the pap
ers stacked on Fennimore’s desk lifted and settled again like birds rudely flustered.
‘Nick, I think I’ve found something.’ It was Josh Brown.
Fennimore’s desk was placed at ninety degrees to the window so that he could look out at the crossroads and gain the widest view of sky. It was 2 p.m., and the sun was already low, bathing his office in pink light. He turned to give the student his attention but Josh looked past him, staring at his laptop monitor.
‘Are you on Photoshop?’ Josh asked.
Fennimore swivelled to face the screen again and reached for the mouse.
‘Wait a minute,’ Josh said, coming further into the room and leaning over him to get a better look. ‘Are you using age-progression software?’ He snapped upright. ‘Oh, shit, sorry – is that your daughter?’
Fennimore closed the screen carefully and swung round in his chair to face the student. ‘What the hell do you know about my daughter?’
‘Nothing. I don’t know anything.’
Fennimore stared into Josh Brown’s face, and felt adrenaline rip through him so fast his fingertips burned.
The student held up his hands. In his left, he carried a bundle of papers, in his right a laptop. ‘I swear, I wasn’t snooping. I was trawling for your research publications.’
‘What’s wrong with using Athens, like everybody else?’
‘I did.’ His eyes kept darting away. ‘But there was a two-year gap, and I wondered why. Look, what can I say? It’s all over the web. Google Professor Nick Fennimore, you get a hell of a lot more than an academic CV.’
Fennimore was sharply aware of what Josh Brown had been too diplomatic to say: Google Nick Fennimore, you get ‘disappearance’ and ‘kidnap’ and ‘murder’.
‘So, Google Josh Brown, what do you get?’
Josh shrugged. ‘A couple of actors, a kicker with the St Louis Rams, a born-again rock star. I’m not there, Professor. Like I told the Chief Inspector – I haven’t got a web profile, and I don’t want one.’ The hot, itchy embarrassment was gone from his eyes, replaced by something unfamiliar. Anxiety, perhaps.
Everyone Lies Page 9