Suspect

by Michael Robotham

  Lenny knew about his wife’s indiscretions, according to Bert. She flaunted her infidelity—dressing herself in miniskirts and high heels. Dancing every night at the Empire Ballroom and the Grafton.

  Without warning, Bert windmills his arm as though wanting to punch something. His face twists in pain. “He was too soft—soft in the heart, soft in the head. If it were raining soup Lenny would be stuck with a fork in his hand.

  “Some women deserve a slap. She took everything . . . his heart, his house, his boy . . . Most men would have killed her. Most men weren’t like Lenny. She sucked him dry. Drained his spirit. She spent a hundred quid a month more than he earned. He was working double shifts and doing the housework as well. I used to hear him pleading with her over the phone—‘Are you staying in tonight, pet?’ She just laughed at him.”

  “Why didn’t he leave her?”

  He shrugs. “Guess he had a blind spot. Maybe she threatened to take the kid. Lenny wasn’t a wimp. I once seen him throw four hooligans off his bus because they were upsetting the other passengers. He could handle himself, Lenny. He just couldn’t handle her.”

  Bert falls silent. For the first time I notice how the bar has filled up and the noise level has risen. The Friday night band is setting up in the corner. People are looking at me; trying to work out what I’m doing. There is no such thing as anonymity when you’re the odd one out.

  The red lights have started to sway and the wooden floorboards echo. I’ve been trying to keep up with Bert, drink for drink.

  I ask about the accident. Bert explains that Lenny sometimes used the engineering workshop of a weekend to build his inventions. The boss turned a blind eye. The weekend buses were running, but the workshop was empty.

  “How much do you know about welding?” Bert asks.

  “Not much.”

  He pushes his beer aside and picks up two coasters. Then he explains how two pieces of metal are joined together by using concentrated heat. Normally the heat is generated in two ways. An arc welder uses a powerful arc of electricity, with low voltage and high current generating temperatures of 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Then you have oxy-fuel welders, where gases such as acetylene or natural gas are mixed with pure oxygen and burned to create a flame that can carve through metal.

  “You don’t muck around with this sort of equipment,” he says. “But Lenny was one of the best welders I ever saw in me life. Fellas used to say he could weld two pieces of paper together.

  “We always took a lot of precautions in the workshop. All flammable liquids were stored in a separate room from the cutting or welding. We kept combustibles at least thirty-five feet away. We covered the drains and kept fire extinguishers nearby.

  “I don’t know what Lenny was building. Some people joked it was a rocket ship to send his ex-wife into outer space. The blast knocked an eight-ton bus onto its side. The acetylene tank blew a hole through the roof. They found it a hundred yards away.

  “Lenny finished up near the roller doors. The only part of his body that hadn’t been burned was his chest. They figure he must have been lying down when the fireball engulfed him because that part of his shirt was only slightly singed.

  “A couple of the drivers dragged him clear. I still don’t know how they managed it . . . what with the heat and all. I remember them saying afterward how Lenny’s boots were smoking and his skin had turned to crackling. He was still conscious but he couldn’t speak. He had no lips. I’m glad I didn’t see it. I’d still be having nightmares.” Bert puts his glass down and his chest heaves in a short sigh.

  “So it was an accident?”

  “That’s what it looked like at first. Everyone figured a spark from the welder had ignited the acetylene tank. There might have been a hole in the hose, or some other fault. Maybe gas had accumulated in the tank he was welding.”

  “What do you mean ‘at first’?”

  “When they peeled off Lenny’s shirt they found something written on his chest. They say every letter was inch-perfect—but I don’t believe that—not when he was writing upside down and left to right. He used a welding torch to burn the word ‘SORRY’ into his skin. Like I said, he was a man of very few words.”

  9

  I don’t remember leaving the Tramway. Eight pints and then I lost count. The cold air hit me and I found myself on my hands and knees leaving the contents of my stomach over the broken rubble and cinders of a vacant block.

  It seems to be a makeshift car park for the pub. The country-and-western band is still playing. They’re doing a cover of a Willie Nelson song about mothers not letting their children grow up to be cowboys.

  As I try to stand something pushes me from behind and I fall into an oily puddle. The four teenagers from the bar are standing over me.

  “Ya got any money?” asks the girl.

  “Piss off!”

  A kick is aimed at my head but misses. Another connects with my abdomen. My bowels slacken and I want to vomit again. I suck in air and try to think.

  “Jesus, Baz, you said nobody gets hurt!” says the girl.

  “Shut the fuck up! Don’t use names.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Leave it out, you two,” argues the one called Ozzie, who is left-handed and drinks rum and cola.

  “Don’t you start, dickhead.” Baz stares him down.

  Someone takes my wallet out of my jacket.

  “Not the cards, just the cash,” says Baz. He’s older—in his early twenties—and has a swastika tattooed on his neck. He lifts me easily and pushes his face close to mine. I smell beer, peanuts and cigarette smoke.

  “Hey, listen, toss-bag! You’re not welcome here.”

  Shoved backward, I land against a wire fence topped with razor wire. Baz is toe to toe with me. He’s three inches shorter and solid like a barrel. A knife blade gleams in his hand.

  “I want my wallet back. If you give it back to me I won’t press charges,” I say.

  He laughs at me and mimics my voice. Do I really sound that frightened?

  “You followed me from the pub. I saw you in there playing pool. You lost the last game on the black.”

  The girl pushes her glasses up her nose. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick.

  “What’s he mean, Baz?”

  “Shut up! Don’t fucking use my name.” He starts to hit her, but she shoots him a fierce glance. The silence lingers. I don’t feel drunk anymore.

  I focus on the girl. “You should have trusted your instincts, Denny.”

  She looks at me, wide-eyed. “How do you know my name?”

  “You’re Denny and you’re underage—thirteen maybe fourteen. This is Baz, your boyfriend, and these two are Ozzie and Carl . . .”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Baz shoves me hard against the fence. He can sense he’s losing the initiative.

  “Is this what you want, Denny? What’s your mum going to say when the police come looking for you? She thinks you’re staying at a girlfriend’s house, doesn’t she? She doesn’t like you hanging out with Baz. She thinks he’s a loser, a no-hoper.”

  “Make him stop, Baz.” Denny covers her mouth.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  No one says anything. They’re watching me. I take a step forward and whisper to Baz. “Use your white cells, Baz. I just want my wallet.”

  Denny interrupts, on the verge of tears, “Just give him his fucking wallet. I want to go home.”

  Ozzie turns to Carl. “C’mon.”

  Baz doesn’t know what to do. He could carve me up like a wisp of smoke, but now he’s on his own. The others are already disappearing, loose-limbed and hooting with laughter.

  He pushes me hard against the fence, pressing the knife to my neck and his face next to mine. His teeth close around my earlobe. White heat. Pain. Ripping his head to one side, he spits hard into a puddle and shoves me away.

  “There’s a little souvenir from Bobby!”

  He wipes blood from his mouth and tosses my wallet at my fe
et. Then he swaggers away and kicks at the door of a parked car. I’m sitting in water, braced against the fence. In the distance I see navigation lights blinking from the top of industrial cranes on the far side of the Mersey.

  Slowly, pulling myself upright, I try to stand. My right leg buckles and I fall to my knees. Blood leaks in a warm trail down my neck.

  I stumble to the main road but there is no traffic. Glancing over my shoulder, I worry about them coming back. Half a mile down the road I find a minicab office with metal grille over the door and windows. The inside is saturated with cigarette smoke and the smell of takeout food.

  “What happened to you?” asks a fat man behind the grille.

  I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window. The bottom part of my ear is missing and my shirt collar is soaked with blood.

  “I got mugged.”

  “Who by?”

  “Kids.”

  I open my wallet. The cash is still there . . . all of it.

  The fat man rolls his eyes, no longer concerned about me. I’m just a drunk who got into a fight. He radios for a car and makes me wait outside on the footpath. I glance nervously up and down the street, looking for Baz.

  A souvenir! Bobby has some charming friends. Why didn’t they take the money? What was the point? Unless they were trying to warn me off. Liverpool is a big enough place to get lost and small enough to get noticed, particularly if you start asking questions.

  Slumped on the backseat of an old Mazda 626, I close my eyes and let my heart slow. Sweat has cooled between my shoulder blades, making my neck feel stiff.

  The minicab drops me at University Hospital where I wait for an hour to get six stitches in my ear. As the intern wipes the blood from my face with a towel, he asks if the police have been informed. I lie and say yes. I don’t want Ruiz knowing where I am.

  Afterward, with a dose of acetaminophen to dull the pain, I walk through the city until I reach Pier Head. The last ferry is arriving from Birkenhead. The engine makes the air throb. Lights leak toward me in a colorful slick of reds and yellows. I stare at the water and keep imagining that I can see dark shapes. Bodies. I look again and they vanish. Why do I always look for bodies?

  As a child I sometimes went boating on the Thames with my sisters. One day I found a sack containing five dead kittens. Patricia kept telling me to put the sack down. She was screaming at me. Rebecca wanted to see inside. She, like me, had never seen anything dead except for bugs and lizards.

  I emptied the sack and the kittens tumbled onto the grass. Their wet fur stood on end. I was attracted and repelled at the same time. They had soft fur and warm blood. They weren’t so different from me.

  Later, as a teenager, I imagined that I would be dead by thirty. It was in the midst of the Cold War when the world teetered on the edge of an abyss, at the mercy of whichever madman in the White House or the Kremlin had one of those, “I-wonder-what-this-button-does?” moments.

  Since then my internal doomsday clock has swung wildly back and forth much like the official version. Marrying Julianne made me hugely optimistic and having Charlie added to this. I even looked forward to graceful old age when we’d trade our backpacks for suitcases on wheels, playing with grandchildren, boring them with nostalgic stories, taking up eccentric hobbies . . .

  The future will be different now. Instead of a dazzling road to discovery, I see a twitching, stammering, dribbling spectacle in a wheelchair. “Do we really have to go and see Dad today?” Charlie will ask. “He won’t know the difference if we don’t show up.”

  A gust of wind sets my teeth chattering and I push away from the railing. I walk from the wharf, no longer worried about getting lost. At the same time I feel vulnerable. Exposed.

  At the Albion Hotel the receptionist is knitting, moving her lips as she counts the stitches. Canned laughter emanates from somewhere beneath her feet. She doesn’t acknowledge me until she finishes a row. Then she hands me a note. It has the name and telephone number of a teacher who taught Bobby at St. Mary’s school. The morning will be soon enough.

  The stairs feel steeper than before. I’m tired and drunk. I just want to sink down and sleep.

  I wake up suddenly, breathing hard. My hand slides across the sheets looking for Julianne. She normally wakes when I cry out in my sleep. She puts her hand on my chest and whispers that everything is all right.

  Taking deep breaths, I wait for my heartbeat to slow and then slip out of bed, tiptoeing across to the window. The street is empty except for a newspaper van making a delivery. I touch my ear gingerly and feel the roughness of the stitches. There is blood on my pillow.

  The door opens. There is no knock. No warning footsteps. I’m positive that I locked it. A hand appears, red-nailed, long-fingered. Then a face coloured with lipstick and blusher. She is pale-skinned and thin, with short-cropped blond hair.

  “Shhhhhhhh!”

  A person giggles behind her.

  “For fuck’s sake, will you be quiet.”

  She’s reaching for the light switch. I’m standing silhouetted against the window.

  “This room is taken.”

  Her eyes meet mine and she utters a single shocked expletive. Behind her a large disheveled man in an ill-fitting suit has his hand inside her top.

  “You scared the crap out of me,” she says, pushing his hand away. He gropes drunkenly at her breasts again.

  “How did you get into this room?”

  She rolls her eyes apologetically. “Made a mistake.”

  “The door was locked.”

  She shakes her head. Her male friend looks over her shoulder. “What’s he doing in our room?”

  “It’s his room, ya moron!” She hits him in the chest with a silver diamanté clutch bag and starts pushing him backward out of the room. As she closes the door she turns and smiles. “You want some company? I can piss this guy off.”

  She’s so thin I can see the bones in her chest above her breasts. “No thanks.”

  She shrugs and hikes up her tights beneath her miniskirt. Then the door closes and I hear them trying to creep along the hall and climb to the next floor.

  For a moment I feel a flush of anger. Did I really forget to lock the door? I was drunk, maybe even partly concussed.

  It is just after six. Julianne and Charlie will still be sleeping. I take out my mobile and turn it on, staring at the glowing face in the darkness. There are no messages. This is my penance . . . to think about my wife and daughter when I fall asleep and when I wake up.

  Sitting on the windowsill, I watch the sky grow lighter. Pigeons wheel and soar over the rooftops. They remind me of Varanasi in India, where the vultures circle high over funeral pyres, waiting for the charred remains to be dumped in the Ganges. Varanasi is a sorry slum of a city, with crumbling buildings, cross-eyed children and nothing of beauty except the brightly colored saris and swaying hips of the women. It appalled and fascinated me. The same is true of Liverpool.

  I wait until seven before calling Julianne. A male voice answers. At first I think I’ve dialed the wrong number but then I recognize Jock’s voice.

  “I was just thinking about you,” he says in a booming voice. Charlie is in the background, saying, “Is that Dad? Can I talk to him? Please let me.”

  Jock covers the receiver, but I can still hear him. He tells her to fetch Julianne. Charlie complains, but obeys.

  Meanwhile, Jock is full of chummy bonhomie. I interrupt him. “What are you doing there, Jock? Is everything OK?”

  “Your plumbing still sucks.”

  What does he know about my fucking plumbing? He matches my coldness with his own. I can picture his face changing. “Someone tried to break in. Julianne got a bit spooked. She didn’t want to be in the house on her own. I offered to stay.”

  “Who? When?”

  “It was probably just some addict. He came through the front door. The plumbers had left it open. D.J. found him in the study and chased him down the street. Lost him near the canal.”

/>   “Was anything taken?”

  “No.”

  I hear footsteps on the stairs. Jock puts his hand over the phone.

  “Can I talk to Julianne? I know she’s there.”

  “She says no.”

  I feel a flush of anger. Jock tries to banter again. “She wants to know why you called her mother at three in the morning.”

  A vague memory surfaces: dialing the number; her mother’s icy rebuke. She hung up on me.

  “Just let me talk to Julianne.”

  “No can do, old boy. She’s not feeling very well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. She’s feeling a bit off-color.”

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “No. She’s in good order. I’ve given her a full physical.” He’s trying to wind me up. It’s working.

  “Give her the fucking phone . . .”

  “I don’t think you’re in any position to give me orders, Joe. You’re only making things worse.”

  I want to sink my fist into his hundred-sit-ups-a-day stomach. Then I hear a telltale click. Someone has picked up the phone in my office. Jock doesn’t realize.

  I try to sound conciliatory and tell him that I’ll call later. He puts the phone down, but I wait, listening.

  “Dad, is that you?” Charlie asks nervously.

  “How are you, sweetheart?”

  “Good. When are you coming home?”

  “I don’t know. I have to sort out a few things with Mummy.”

  “Did you guys have a fight?”

  “How did you know?”

  “When Mum’s angry at you I should never let her brush my hair.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s OK. Was it your fault?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you just say you’re sorry? That’s what you tell me to do when I have a fight with Taylor Jones.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be enough this time.”

  I can hear her thinking about this. I can even picture her biting her bottom lip in concentration.