SuperJack

by Adam Baron

  I wasn’t that inventive this time. ‘Cunt,’ I said. ‘Cunt. Cunt’

  I sat with my hands on the wheel. The rain sounded like I was in a tent and I wished to fuck that I was, far away. All of a sudden I laughed. What else was going to happen? Eventually I pulled myself together and dragged myself out, the way you should, keeping my eye on the Renegade, which was manoeuvring to park thirty yards away across the square. Through shafts of rain I could see Draper at the wheel. I thought about the defenders he tormented every week. Was this what it was like trying to get hold of him?

  I stood in front of the man, my palms to the sky. He was tall, young and not that bright-looking.

  ‘Your brake lights, sir,’ he explained. ‘Did you know one of them wasn’t working?’

  He stood there in a mac, seemingly oblivious to the rain crashing down onto his hat and well-protected shoulders. In the car behind him I could see his partner, looking bored, whistling to himself. I had a brief flash of the mechanic, giving me my car keys back following my service. I had a brief flash of what I was going to do to him.

  The rain on my head was cold and hard. I looked at the light then back at the officer. I did my best amazed. I told the officer that I had no idea about the light, and thanked him profusely for bringing the matter to my attention. I’d get it fixed, first thing. He could be sure. Over his shoulder I could see Jack Draper, pushing the buzzer on a block of expensive-looking converted flats. He wasn’t getting a reply. I made to return to my car.

  He wasn’t going to let me do that.

  ‘You also seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, sir. Not very sensible, is it, in this weather?’

  I agreed with him wholeheartedly. Shaking my head I told him, while not attempting to excuse myself in any way at all, that I was tired and just wanted to get home. I went further. I thanked him for stopping me, for letting me know that I was not driving safely, assuring him that I’d take it very easy indeed the rest of the way. He nodded patiently.

  ‘That would be best, sir. You haven’t been drinking at all, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not at lunch perhaps, any time today?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.’

  Unlike mine, his coat was completely waterproof. He wasn’t in a hurry. In less than a minute I was soaked and freezing. Jack was still leaning on the doorbell. Then I saw him reach into his pocket. For an address? Had he got the wrong flat? I asked the policeman if that was all. He didn’t answer. Instead, he checked the Mazda over carefully and methodically, and I had to admire his attention to detail. He certainly took his time, but eventually he was done, having found nothing else wrong with it – except, of course, that it was a piece of shit. I looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Oh, I’m going to have to write you a ticket, I’m afraid, sir.’ He looked quite outraged at the mere idea of letting me off it.

  ‘Mind if we sit in your vehicle to do it, no point in getting wet now, is there?’

  I walked back to the car, pretty sure I could see a smile on his face. I gave up being nice to him. His partner still looked bored. Across the square, Jack was gone. He must have been buzzed in. I unlocked my passenger door. The officer brought at least a gallon of water into my car and wrote me the ticket. Then he left me, my back damp against the seat-back, my jeans tightening round my legs.

  ‘Twat,’ I said, not exactly sure who I was thinking of.

  I sat with my arms folded and watched him in the mirror, getting back in the squad car, next to his chum. Now he definitely was laughing. They both were. I waited, hoping the Sierra would pull away, but they were obviously waiting for me. I revved the engine but they still sat there. Eventually I pulled off and drove round the square with the car behind me. I pulled off onto Coronet Street while the police car made its way towards Old Street. Then I headed back into Hoxton Square and parked exactly where I’d just been stopped.

  By the clock in my car I could see that it was now after two. How had it got that late? I checked my mirror, opened the door and got out. I stepped off the pavement and headed across the road. I was sure as hell going to speak to Jack Draper. And I was going to do it tonight, if it was the last thing I did. I was cold and wet and very pissed off. Not a sense of humour failure. A total meltdown. No longer feeling the rain, I marched over to the apartment building.

  In a modern porch-way up four broad steps I stared at two columns of big, round, silver buttons, thirty-two in all, trying to decide which flat Jack Draper had entered. Number thirty-two was at the bottom of the last column and there was a droplet of water on it, with a few splashes on the silver underneath. It had to be that one. The steps were wet beneath it, just where Draper had been standing. I pressed it, and waited. Nothing. I pressed it again. I was just wondering if I could have got the wrong one when I heard a noise behind me. A very well-dressed but very drunk woman, trying to keep hold of an umbrella, was waddling towards the steps. Using the rail to steady herself she made it to the door, seemingly oblivious to me. As if I were not there, she searched her purse for her keys, finding them remarkably quickly. I followed her through the door and towards the lift, stepping round her when she turned to enter one of the ground-floor apartments. There were four buttons, plus a basement. I hit the top one and waited.

  That’s when I should have gone home. As the lift set off I could hear the lift to my left, coming down. The lift was very slow, and I could feel the cold, the rain having got right through to my tee-shirt. I was glad when it slowed and stopped, at four. I stepped out into a brightly lit lobby, with two corridors leading directly away from each other. Not corridors, really, but an open, covered walkway. A sign pointed towards thirty-one and thirty-two, but I wouldn’t have needed them because a muddle of wet footprints on the cement floor led to them just as well. With the gait of a farmer walking up to a cornered fox I started to add to them.

  But I stopped almost immediately. I heard a blip, a blip I recognized. A lot of people have car alarms but somehow they tend not to sound alike. I turned. There was a window in the lobby, next to the lift, and I stepped towards it, a frown forming on my forehead. I heard an engine being gunned into life and a set of tyres squalling against wet tarmac. I took the last step quickly and was just in time to see the top of the Renegade, lurching away from the pavement below, swinging towards the line of cars parked opposite it, just managing to compensate in time. In a second it had swerved away from them. Then it was out of the square.

  I stood still for a second, my hands by my sides, nothing on my face. Slowly, I turned back to face the harshly lit corridor, leaning back on the wall. No. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t happening. I took a step to my left but the thought of chasing Jack Draper back out into the rain came and went faster than he had. It just wasn’t worth it. I stood still for a moment, my mouth open. Less than an hour ago I’d been in bed. Now I was cold and soaked, standing in a block of flats I had no business being in, with a fine to pay and my documents to produce within the week, documents I wasn’t sure were absolutely up to date. Marvellous. I scraped my nails back over my scalp and shook my head. I glanced up at the corridor. It was a short passageway broken up by two doors and I didn’t pay much attention to it until a shiver ran down my entire body like a king snake hurrying down a rock face. It was nothing to do with the rain.

  There were two doors ahead of me and I looked at them. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. One of them was ajar. I didn’t have to be told that it was number thirty-two. I stood a second longer, just looking at it. It was only open an inch, maybe less. A light was on but I couldn’t see inside. I couldn’t see anything. But I knew. Sometimes you just do. Sometimes it just settles on you, or rather in you, settles in your stomach and in your bowels, an ice-cold sheet, lead heavy. And then you are bound to it. Bound to it because you’ve sensed it, bound to it because you recognized it before you saw it, bound because you’re the sort of person who could recognize it. And it sickens you. It sickens you because of what it is, and becaus
e you’re the sort of person who knew it. My throat turned over. My stomach pulled like a lurcher on a short lead.

  And that’s when I really should have gone home. Because I knew it. But I didn’t. Instead I moved forward along the walkway, my eyes on the crack in the door. Instead I pushed the door open with my sleeve, and looked into the apartment.

  It was a pleasant apartment, kind of golden, with more fake wood flooring and a thick cream rug, uplighters and lamps spreading a soft glow over smooth yellow walls. There were two inviting armchairs facing me from across the room with a coffee table separating them from a broad, high-backed putty-coloured sofa. And over the back of the sofa was a mess of hair, of golden hair to match the light.

  I didn’t bother with a hello. It was too quiet. Even the furniture looked too static, as if it were tense, scared to move. Instead of going home I walked round the sofa and looked at her. She was leaning back, her arms by her sides. The wounds she had were in her stomach, all over her chest and on her breasts, on her arms and her shoulders, her thighs and on her face. Many, many of them. Some slashes, some short some longer, puncture marks mostly. There was a lot of blood. Her open dressing gown was soaked in it and the cushions beneath her and the cream rug. One of her nipples had been torn, nearly torn right off. It hung to the side by a thread, like an open bottle cap.

  Her left eye was open. I couldn’t tell if her right eye was open or shut. I turned away. A long thin knife had been rammed into it up to the hilt.

  Chapter Six

  At seven next morning I was sitting in a small cafe on Rosebery Avenue called Zack’s Snacks, a place used at that time of day by cab drivers and postal workers. I was squeezed on a table next to two middle-aged women just off the night shift in the sorting office opposite. I was drinking coffee and waiting for a couple of slices of toast I was never going to eat. Images were running through my head like luggage through an airport scanner. Photographs, a cat’s head, a woman leaving with her baby. A body. A face, streaked with blood and tissue. The images were completely separate from each other, with no connection that I could see, each one more disturbing than the last. I looked into the shining black surface of my coffee instead.

  I felt hollow and flat, my insides pulled like a sturgeon’s. I drank the coffee but I could hardly taste it. I ran a hand over my face and it didn’t feel like mine. A man sitting opposite me was reading the Sun. I watched him, his mouth moving slowly, a piece of egg flapping from his bottom lip. When he’d finished he left the paper face down on the table between us, got up and left. I pulled the paper towards me and, because it was the Sun, didn’t bother with the front page, turning straight to the back. There’d been a few games last night. It would be something to read, to look at. I read the whole of the back page, taking nothing in, and that’s why I didn’t see the caption to begin with, the caption on the front page telling me to turn to the centre – if I wanted to read about the latest goings-on in the life of a man that I knew.

  * * *

  I stayed in the room Jack Draper had fled from about three minutes. Three minutes that felt like forty. The feeling I’d had was right, but it didn’t keep out the shock. Everything stopped in me. It seemed strange to think it, but even though she was dead she looked so vulnerable. Naked, hurt. There were marks on her hands, she’d obviously tried to defend herself. I wanted to cover her, to keep her warm. To draw that knife out of her face. I had an impulse to pull her gown closed. I couldn’t do it, but I wanted to, if only to keep myself from imagining the frenzy, the rush of violence that must have left her like this. I turned my head away from her. To the door. Then the feeling of horror, of a nauseating, clock-heavy grief, gave way to something else.

  I wanted to get out of there. The impulse rushed through me like a short espresso but I fought it, moving over and pushing the door shut instead. I’d been stopped in the area by the police. Nothing in itself, but someone bright might not take too long to make a connection between myself and Jack Draper. I knew I might have to face some questions later and if that was the case I needed to get some answers first.

  The door clicked shut, a sound far too loud in that quiet. Again I fought the panic, the impulse to simply get out as quick as I could. I turned and looked back into the room. Then I went through the place, quickly, but as slowly as I could make myself. I stayed long enough to discover the name of the girl on the sofa, long enough to take a look in a couple of drawers and a longer one at a photographic collage hung behind glass in the flat’s small kitchen area. There were lots of pictures, some of a little girl, some of teenagers on a beach, some of a middle-aged man I took to be her father. Most, however, were of groups of people, smiling, huddling into frame, drinks in their hands, having a good time. I focused on one shot, the most recent-looking and also the clearest I could see. It was of a golden-haired girl with an oval face, a rash of freckles like spilled rice running over and around a nose so perfect I wondered if she’d had help with it. She was dressed in a sleeveless silver sheath, at what looked like a pretty swanky party, with a lot of men around her, none of whom I recognized. The men looked happy. So did the girl. I stared at the girl’s face. I wanted to know what she looked like, to fix her in my mind. On the sofa, it wasn’t easy to tell that.

  Back in the living room I took a very quick skirt around the sofa, looking for anything that might have been left. I checked beneath the sofa and on top of it, lifting a couple of cushions, spattered with whirls of red as though Jackson Pollack had killed her. I didn’t see anything. Finally, I must have spent ten seconds simply looking down at her. I tried to look at a corpse, a matrix of events, of clues that could help me reel back the threads that had unravelled to leave her there. Not at a girl, a young woman lying dead and stupid-looking with a knife in her eye socket, the cheek below it covered in blackish blood and whatever it is that makes up the creamy, effulgent mess that is usually on the inside of someone’s eye. I blinked away, having seen something clear and gelatinous clinging to the hilt of the knife.

  I stared at her other eye, open, still wide, empty but for a little picture of me, looking down at her from a thousand miles away. Then I blinked again and bent down, my eyes pressing into her wounds. I didn’t touch her. I didn’t try to check for rigor or feel for her temperature, to see how cold she’d become. I did take a breath, quite consciously, getting urine, then blood, and excreta. Not old. I looked at the wounds she had, and tried to estimate how tall she was. Not more than about five four. In almost all of the cases the blade had come down on her.

  The last thing I looked at was her hair, spread out on the back of the sofa, almost as if she were preparing for a photo shoot. In the kitchen there was a shot of her lying on an armchair, her hair splashed out like that. A little girl, dressed as a nurse, a square plastic case in her hand with a bright red cross on. There was a look on her ten-toothed face of pure, unrestrained glee.

  I turned away. Now it really was time to go. I walked across the room and stood by the door until I was sure I couldn’t hear anything, then turned the handle. I looked back at her one more time, now just a mess of gold over the sofa back. I found it hard to leave, as though I were abandoning her. Eventually, though, I turned, and stepped out into the hallway. I used the stairs. I left the building by the rear door and took the long way back to my car, entering the square from the furthest corner to the flat. I didn’t pass anyone. I got into the Mazda, shut the door and let out a breath. I started her up and pulled away, trying not to drive on my brakes. It didn’t take me long to get back. My bed was there waiting for me but I didn’t sleep. I didn’t even try. Instead I stood beneath the shower, scrubbing every inch of my body. At seven the sun still hadn’t risen but I walked down onto the market anyway.

  * * *

  My eyes moved over a report of a Man U defeat in the second group phase of the Champions’ League. There was a big picture of Roy Keane with his head in his hands, after what was a very expensive miss – in every sense of the word. It didn’t matter, though, the
report stated, because two teams qualified to go on to the knockout competition and United were bound to be one of those. I looked at the table. So far there had been two stages of group matches in the European Cup and it seemed to me that it was almost impossible to get knocked out of the damn thing. Just more games that didn’t matter for the TV companies to sell.

  Zack and his staff were inundated and the toast I didn’t care about was taking a while. The women to my left were talking about their supervisor, who they both fancied doing a bit of sorting with. They were laughing and joking, tired and easy after work, but to me their voices sounded like they were coming out of a radio. Nothing around me was real. I drained my coffee and held my cup up for another. I was strung out and tired, with cramps in my belly and an electric hum singing in my head. I wanted the women to shut the fuck up. I wanted to scream don’t you know what has only just happened? Don’t you know what I have seen? Zack filled my cup in passing and I sat it down but didn’t touch it.

  Next to the Man U report was a piece on the latest record wage demand from the current hot-shot striker in the Premiership, which made Roy Keane’s weekly take home look like pocket money. I went backwards through the paper until I got to the racing, which is a foreign language to me. My thoughts jerked back like a sprung door to Alison Everly, still staring into nothing. My one regret was leaving her there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I’d called it in. I’d decided against 999 because they recorded all calls, as well as giving the caller’s location. Instead I’d left a short, heavily muffled message on the machine of an old police colleague of mine, who would think it was one of his snitches. With any luck he’d find the message when he got up for his early shift.

  Just as I hadn’t been able to go home without telling someone about her, I couldn’t imagine being able to sit back and do nothing about what had happened to Alison Everly. I didn’t plan on making it a personal crusade, but I did wonder how I felt about telling the police that I’d seen Draper going into her building. I knew I would do it, if time went by and they didn’t come up with anything. I didn’t care whose friend he was. I didn’t know that Draper had done it – he’d been there, yes, but then so had I, and it wasn’t me – but he had to have some sort of link to her. What the hell could she have done for him to kill her? I pictured what Nicky would say when I told him that I was going to turn his friend in.