“OK.”
“And could you put it all on a tray? With lots of napkins?”
“Sure.”
“And then could you shove it up your arse?”
I nodded. “You want fries with that?”
“Oh, just piss off.”
She stood up forcefully, as if she expected the chair or the table to go flying, or both, preferably. But of course they were screwed to the floor and she just winced as she bounced between them. I made sure she noticed me notice.
“Thanks for coming to Max Snax. Have a great day.” I heard myself deliver the line with exactly the amount of patronizing insincerity, and a processed-cheese grin of exactly the width that the Max Snax staff training videos specified. She looked at me with even more contempt than I felt for myself at that moment, glanced down at my beige polyester shirt with its fetching perspiration stains under the armpits and down the sternum, and walked out. Even as I watched her go, my skin prickling with embarrassment and humiliation, I wanted to follow her. She had that sort of walk.
And then the place was empty again. An empty plastic cell. Even with me standing there, stinking of sweat and stale fat, the place was empty. Just the little black plastic dome of Andy’s CCTV camera watching me. I couldn’t even give it the thumbs-up and flash it a mock-triumphant grin; I’d had enough irony for one day.
I went back behind the counter, grabbed a damp cloth and started wiping down the counters, the cash register, the menus, everything in sight. Trying to keep busy so the urge would subside and pass—the urge to rip off this stiff nylon blouse and these shapeless, pocketless trousers and run home in nothing but my tatty briefs. Leaning time is cleaning time. Thanking time is wanking time. Frying time is dying time …
Andy was back. He was wearing his blazer, the one with the brass buttons and the shiny elbows. He wore it at the Friday morning Max Snax staff training sessions, or when he announced the month’s sales figures, or whenever he gave someone a new pip on their plastic name badge.
He was offering me one now.
“That was exemplary, Finn. Really well-handled.”
“It’s OK, Andy. Don’t bother.” He wanted to reward me for getting rid of customers?
“Come on. Three more of these and you’re a Max Snax Star. That’s a six per cent pay rise.”
If I turned it down he’d know I hated Max Snax, and him, and the uniform, and the job, and he’d hire some other school dropout. But I needed the money. I couldn’t drive, and I could barely read. What else was I going to do?
“Thanks, Andy.”
I took it off him. The first hole on my name badge already had a golden stud—you got that on your first day at work, just for turning up. I snapped the new one into the second little hole, and it didn’t hurt much more than punching it into my forehead.
“Keep this up, you’ll have a branch of your own someday.”
The rest of my shift was a deep-fried blur, and as usual I showered and changed before I left. The workplace shower was another reason I stuck the job. Our shower at home was like being peed on by an old bloke with a prostrate problem, but this one at work fired out scalding hot water that came down like a tropical storm. I was the only one who ever used it, and it felt like the one time and space in the world that I ever had to myself.
I stooped in front of the washroom mirror—it wasn’t quite high enough for someone as tall as me—combing my mousy-brown hair with my fingers. I generally kept my hair short, or it would spring up in spikes I could never control. The rest of my reflection I tried not to look at. It wasn’t that I minded how I looked; apart from the kink in my nose where a sparring partner had broken it, it wasn’t such a bad face, according to my dad—triangular, with a big chin that currently needed a shave and a kind of girly mouth. My teeth were pretty straight and even, and my pale skin was clear (this week anyway). But I could never meet those washed-out blue eyes because they always seemed to ask how they’d got here, and whether they’d spend the next twenty years looking out from behind the counter at Max Snax, and I never had the heart to answer.
I stuffed my uniform into my backpack—planning to wash it at home—laced up my running shoes and headed out across the car park, dodging pedestrians as I built up speed. Pushing my pulse to 140, I pounded along the backstreet pavements, heading home.
The street lights were flickering on as I pulled up, panting, outside the house. I stretched as I got my breath back, glad to see I was still supple enough to touch my knees with my forehead. But as my pulse slowed and my breathing found its resting rhythm I realized something was bugging me. The house was dark, as if Dad had gone out. But he usually worked on his writing till I came in from work—my coming back in was his excuse to knock off for the day.
The curtains were already closed. Had they ever been opened? I fished my keys from my backpack and opened the door. As I reached for the light switch I registered something about the silence.
“Dad?”
It was too deep, as if the house was empty; but it didn’t feel empty.
Our house was small—the door opened straight into the living room. The light came on dimly, brightening as it warmed up. Dad disliked the overhead light, and only switched it on when he had one of his fits of tidying-up. Now it flooded the room in the way he disliked, cold and harsh, and fell on him where he sat at the table. Not sat, so much as slumped, the way I’d seen him once or twice when he’d been to the pub and somebody else was buying.
I paused in the doorway, certain something was wrong, trying to figure out what exactly. “Dad?” It was too cold in the room. He couldn’t hear me—he still had his earphones in.
I’d found him like that before a few times, early in the morning. He’d be resting his head on his folded arms. Now his arms were pinned underneath him, at an odd angle, and he wasn’t breathing. I knew that, even before I consciously worked it out, even before I registered properly that the crown of his head was a sticky mass of blood, and something heavy and bulky lay on the floor by his chair, itself stained with red, with bloody hairs sticking to it.
My dad was dead. He had been sitting at his desk, plugged into his music, and someone had crept up behind him holding his award for Best Newcomer 1992, and hit him over the head with it, and kept hitting him until he died. His eyes were open and his glasses had fallen off. There was blood coming from his mouth and clotting in his beard, and pooling on the table, and he was dead. And the house was empty and silent.
two
The wall of the interview room was a regulation blue-grey, but I wasn’t really aware of that, although I’d been staring at it for what seemed to be hours. I was running through everything that had happened since I walked into the house; how the cold silence had been broken by sirens, faint at first but gradually growing louder and louder, one becoming two and then three, their shrieks overlapping into a cacophony. I was still standing there, mobile phone in hand, when blue lights started flickering through cracks in the closed curtains, illuminating the room in flashes like LEDs on a Christmas tree. Someone, probably me, had responded to the insistent rapping at the front door, and opened it. Two enormous coppers, stab vests over their jackets and peaked caps pulled down over their eyes, asked me to identify myself.
Our narrow street was one-way, but when I was eventually led outside by a female copper I found police vehicles had come in from both directions and jammed the street solid. There were so many flashing lights it was like a rock concert, and the air buzzed and crackled with radioed conversations. Underneath it all, like the murmur of the sea, were the hushed conversations of neighbours craning their necks to see past the barricades of police vehicles and speculating about what had happened at our house, holding up phones to snap pictures of the chaos to stick on their Facebook pages. I knew most of them by sight, and they knew me, I presumed, but none of them were friends. Dad and I hadn’t had that many proper friends. Just each other.
Hours passed in the police station as I sipped endless plastic cups of oily tea, made a state
ment, then went over the statement again. All the time experiencing the same weird calm sense of detachment, as if the most important thing was to be clear and cold and logical, and to remember every detail, without putting them together to look at what they meant, or to figure out how I should feel about it. I had entered a house and found a man at a table with his head bashed in. The coppers, uniformed and plain-clothes, had come and gone, polite, soft-voiced, solicitous, sympathetic …
Footsteps had paused in the corridor outside. I blinked back into the present, turned my face away from the wall and watched the door open. Two plain-clothes officers entered, one well-fed and heavyset, the other lithe and wiry. They were followed by a uniformed PC, possibly one of the uniforms who had turned up on my doorstep earlier, but the stab vests and crew cuts made them all look alike. The older, beefier detective was white, in his mid-fifties I guessed, with craggy features and thinning brown hair going grey at the temples. His suit had a slightly rumpled air, like it had once been classy and sharp but had been worn too often. The younger one was black, with skin so dark it shone. He could not have been much older than thirty, and his head was shaved bald. He carried himself like an athlete and his suit was impeccable, his tie crisp and neat and symmetrical. If it wasn’t for his deadly serious expression you’d think he’d fallen out of an expensive menswear catalogue.
“Mr. Maguire,” said the older one, “I’m DI Prendergast, and this is DS Amobi. Are you up to answering a few questions? We’ll try to keep it short.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“We just want to go over your statement again. Would you like something to eat, or a drink?” Amobi’s caring tone was convincing. His voice was deep, with a faint African twang—Nigerian, maybe. I shook my head as they pulled the chairs out from under the table and settled down opposite me.
“Are you warm enough?” asked Amobi, glancing at my paper boiler suit. My clothes had been taken away for forensic testing as soon as I’d arrived at the station.
“I’m fine,” I said.
The room was too warm, in fact, and it was stuffy. There had probably been a succession of suspects and victims in here throughout the day, stumbling or sobbing through their stories. And now me. There were no windows in the room and the door gave onto an internal corridor; there was a ventilator in the ceiling, probably part of an air-conditioning system, but I guessed it was switched off in the evenings to save money.
Prendergast ignored my response to Amobi’s question and waded straight in. “You found the victim’s body when you came in from work, and dialled nine-nine-nine on your mobile, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Prendergast glanced briefly at the clipboard on his lap. I presumed it held a copy of my statement. “The victim was your father?”
“My stepfather. He married my mother when I was three.”
“What about your real father, your natural father?” asked Prendergast. “Where’s he?”
“No idea,” I said. “I’ve never met him. My dad was my dad.”
Prendergast chewed his lip and rolled his pen between his fingers. “And your mother, where’s she?”
“In the States somewhere. She left us, about five years ago.”
“So it was just you and your stepfather who lived in the house?”
“Me and my dad. Yeah.”
“Anyone else have keys, anyone else have access?”
“No. He said something about losing his keys. Last night.”
“Right,” said Prendergast, as if this didn’t really interest him. “Were you aware before you entered the house that there might be something wrong? Any sign that someone had broken in, anything out of place?”
“I noticed the curtains were closed. Dad liked the curtains open, for the light.”
“Were they open when you left this morning?”
“Yeah. He opened them while I was in the shower.” Prendergast made a silent, brief note; Amobi glanced at him, his expression composed and neutral, but I sensed he thought Prendergast already had a theory he wasn’t sharing.
“Take us through this morning, from when you got up till you left for work.”
I talked about that morning, again. It didn’t take long. But I noticed Prendergast was writing nothing down, and trying not to smirk. I began to see where this was going, but got to the end of the story before my anger bubbled up to the surface. Amobi sat there, relaxed and attentive; he hadn’t made up his mind about anything from what I could see. When I finished speaking, Prendergast let a few seconds tick by. Eventually Amobi leaned forward.
“Finn—did you notice anything missing? Had anything been taken?”
“Dad’s laptop.”
“Any idea of the make?”
“A MacBook, about six years old.” Amobi slowly took a note. Dad had bought it from a bloke in a pub a few years before. Maybe it had been nicked, I never asked. It was already pretty clapped-out when he got it, but it was reliable, and it did enough of what he wanted: browsing the Net for research, soaking up the endless writes and rewrites and edits and rewrites.
“He must have been using it when … when he was attacked. Listening to music. He did that while he worked. He wouldn’t have heard a thing.”
Prendergast nodded as if this all made sense. Amobi noticed me frown.
“What?” said Amobi.
“His notes were gone too,” I said. “He used to write stuff longhand before he put it onto the computer. He had loads of printouts and cuttings and background stuff. Whoever killed him must have taken them.”
“We found another laptop upstairs,” said Prendergast.
“If it’s an old Dell, it’s mine.”
“Why do you think this intruder left that behind?”
This intruder. I shrugged. “Because it’s a piece of crap?”
“Was there any money in the house? Anything valuable?” Amobi was taking notes of his own. Slowly, not in shorthand. I caught a glimpse of his handwriting; beautiful copperplate.
“No. Nothing. We’re not exactly loaded.”
“Was there anything that might have attracted the attention of a burglar?” asked Prendergast.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Drugs,” said Prendergast. He had sat back in his chair with his hands crossed on his belly, like a bloke listen-ing to a story he’s heard a hundred times before but is too bored to interrupt. His fake-relaxed pose conveyed its own sense of menace, as theatrical as cracking his knuckles.
“No.”
“Would this intruder have had any reason to think there might be drugs in the house?”
“Why don’t you find him and ask him?”
“Maybe we already have.” Prendergast’s smirk had vanished, and in its place was anger and indignation, as if someone had murdered his father and was giving him the runaround.
Amobi cleared his throat and cut in, “Perhaps we should take a break. You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat, Finn?”
“I’m OK, thanks,” I said, still staring at Prendergast. His smirk was back. Amobi stood up and pulled back his chair, and eventually Prendergast lumbered to his feet. He was overweight and out of condition, and the way he kept finding things to do with his hands suggested they weren’t happy unless they were holding a cigarette. But he was a big man and I could sense a deep dangerous current of bitterness and anger surging underneath that soft muscle.
Prendergast and Amobi left. The uniformed PC stayed in the room, but took a seat, saying nothing. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation anyway. I was still trying to figure out what it meant, the scene in our downstairs room, my dad slumped over the table, his headphones plugged into nothing, his laptop gone, his notes gone. The laptop was an ancient piece of crap, but some smackhead might have thought it worth something. But how would a smackhead have got into the house and crept up on my dad without him noticing, even with earphones in? And what would a smackhead have wanted with all those pages of scribble and ancient dog-eared photocopies of news cuttings?
; My dad once mentioned a writer he’d known from Northern Ireland whose gritty tales of Protestant extremists got him bullets in the post and death threats over the phone. He’d fled to England, to an undisclosed address. “I’m pathetic,” Dad had said. “For a minute I actually envied the poor bastard. Someone gave a shit about what he wrote.”
Is that what my dad had done? Pissed someone off with his script? Was that why all the notes were taken, and his laptop? I didn’t even know what the story was about—he’d changed it so often I’d stopped listening. It started off being about a guy under witness protection, then it had turned into a cop drama, then been about bent bankers and politics …
With the laptop gone, how was I going to find out? He’d backed up the stuff onto a memory stick, yeah, but last time I’d noticed, it was still plugged into the laptop, and now it was gone too.
The door burst open again, and Prendergast entered, a manila folder in his hand. He stood there staring at me, then jerked his thumb at the PC. “Coffee, milk, no sugar. You want anything?” This last to me. I shook my head. The PC hesitated, and Prendergast glared at him. “And take your time, all right?”
Reluctantly the PC left the room, and Prendergast shut the door behind him. He sighed as he slipped off his jacket, draped it over the back of one of the chairs and sat down heavily opposite me. His grey-green eyes were red-rimmed; they looked as if they’d had a sense of humour once, but had become pickled in cynicism.
“So, what was it about?”
“What was what about?”
“This bust-up you had with your stepfather.”
“We didn’t have a bust-up.”
“Pull the other one. You’re a bloody teenager. They argue about bloody everything. Drugs, was it? You were dealing again, and he found out?”
“I don’t deal in drugs.”
“Come on, Finn. Three months’ youth custody, expelled from school, it’s all in your record.” He tapped the folder. “Weren’t doing very well there anyway, from what I’ve read. Failed every exam you ever took. Not surprised you turned to dealing, it’s the only way you’ll ever make a decent living.”
Crusher Page 2