Glad of something to occupy me, which had nothing whatever to do with the grim events of the last few days, I took my new old F1 down to Prior Street in Greenwich, and spent three pleasantly dull hours listening to Radio 4 on my car stereo. I sat in the quiet street until seven thirty p.m., when a Volvo pulled up outside the house I was watching and a man of about forty got out, carrying a briefcase. I got a shot of him as he closed his car door. He walked up to his front door and disappeared into his house but was outside again in less than thirty minutes, this time with his wife and two children. The way they were all dressed I reckoned he was taking them out for dinner. I got further shots of the man, and several of his children, some of which also included the wife. Once they’d disappeared round the corner onto Royal Hill I started the car and drove home.
I sent the shots to an old lady in Leicester, who hadn’t seen her son for ten years. They showed a well-off Pakistani man, first on his own, and then holding hands with two very pretty little girls, both in loose, flowery summer dresses. The shots were very similar to the ones I’d taken of him before, except for the age of his children, and the fact that in the intervening two years he seemed to have filled out a little at the waist. He was now at that critical stage between the body he’d always had, and podginess. It could go either way. I sent the pictures with a short note saying that the man looked well and seemed happy as far as I could tell. I also included an invoice and, just like last time, I didn’t include any pictures featuring the man’s wife. They were not wanted. They showed a slim, attractive woman, a shade taller than her husband, wearing a simple black sleeveless dress that was designed to set off her long, very well-cut blonde hair. I threw those shots away.
No other work came up. I was pretty useless as far as the gym was concerned but I went down a couple of times anyway that week for the atmosphere. A young lad I knew was training a lot and it felt good to help him, give him what tips I could. I had a couple of drinks with Sal and some of the boys. I also hung out with Nicky for the first time in a while, telling him all about the Bradleys. Talking about it made me remember the pictures I’d taken of the boy in the alley, and I sent them off to Andy Gold, along with the shot of the man who had waylaid him. I also wrote a note saying when the shots had been taken. What with that, and the club, and knowing where he lived, I didn’t think it would take the police too long to find him. As for finding the person who had killed Lucy, that was another matter. I still didn’t believe it was him, although it was likely that he held the key to it all. But at that point I was happy to let Andy find him and start the chambers turning.
I’d had no contact with the police and I had done my best not to think about Lucy or her mother. For some reason, I half expected Emma to call me, but she didn’t. I banked a few cheques, paid a few bills and tried to relax. I visited Luke. On the Wednesday night I eventually got to see Sharon. We went to a comedy show, catching Lenny Beige’s act at the Talk of London. Sharon had got some free tickets through a friend of a friend, and even though I’d have much rather had a quieter time, with a chance to talk, I did enjoy the show. There was a party afterwards that Sharon wanted to go to, and so we went, and we ended up staying late, far later than Sharon normally wants to stay out on a week night. After that we went back to my place but we still didn’t speak properly. Sharon was in a really good mood, she was vivacious and happy. She’d hardly let go of my hand all night. I found it hard to move the conversation to anything serious.
I’d already told Sharon about cutting my hand on a can, but when we got into bed she saw the scar on my leg and wanted to know the rest. The leg was healing fast, but when I told her about it, it still made her feel guilty.
‘I knew you were being quiet,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t because of that.’
‘I knew there was something the other day on the phone. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was going to, but…’
‘God.’ Sharon rested her head on my chest. ‘That poor girl. And you for finding her. You’ve been going through all that and I’ve been…I’ve been so wrapped up in myself. It’s been three days, you should have told me, you really should have.’
‘Sharon…’
‘Shush, Billy,’ she said.
Sharon and I made love that night for the first time in weeks. To begin with I felt quite separate from her. Really, I wanted to talk, about Luke and his poems, but Sharon seemed focused on my body, she wouldn’t be drawn away from it. Pretty soon, any worries I had were sandblasted away by her passion. I couldn’t help but give way to the love I felt for this brilliant, beautiful girl, full of laughter and energy, who’d had coke-addled media types drooling over their William Hunt suits all night. God but she was incredible. If they only knew the half of it.
The second time Sharon and I made love that night I was totally there with her, and somehow, without realizing it, we seemed to go to a level that we had never visited before. I felt stripped and raw, my whole being gasping for her body like air. We both ended up in tears, gripping onto one another. Sharon wouldn’t let go of me, and though I usually can’t sleep unless I’m in my own world, I soon hit a place so sure and central that I didn’t wake up until halfway through the next morning. I had absolutely no idea what time it was, whether I was at Sharon’s place or mine, and for a second I thought that there would be a slow, heavy body lying beside me, a pool of warm skin to swim into. I stirred and reached out for her, but Sharon had gone to work long ago.
Chapter Twelve
Sitting in the traffic coming out of Hampstead, I couldn’t help but think about the Bradleys and their daughters. It struck me that their relationship was almost exactly opposite to that of my own parents. Mrs Bradley was so strong, so direct, so different to my mother, whose spark and energy, if she ever had any, had been ground out of her like flour from a husk, leaving only a distant, wistful regret. My dad was the strong one. He had the Protestant Canadian drive, which was usually directed against my mother, but often enough against Luke and me. Mostly Luke. I wondered whom it was that Lucy had resented most, who had made her run away. It was probably the mother who never valued her like she did her twin, but it might not have been. When I was a kid I never blamed my father for what he did. I just wanted him to approve of me. Instead I blamed my mother. It was her fault, all of it. He didn’t want to act like that, but there was something in her that brought it out, that awoke it in him like the bees round the lion on the syrup tin. When I grew up a bit I realized that this was crap, but it didn’t change the fact that it was still all down to her. All of it. For the simple reason that she was still there. She didn’t leave him. She stayed, and she took it, which meant we stayed too. She let him do what he did to her and, worse, she let him do it to us.
* * *
Andy Gold was already in Cafe Kick when I got there. He was nursing a bottle of French beer and watching two guys playing table football. I’d called him after leaving James Bradley, and asked him if he would meet me the next day at my office. He told me that Bradley had informed him of his intentions and he’d been waiting for my call, but as a meeting place he suggested Exmouth Market’s temple to the beautiful game, miniature version, instead of my office. It was nothing to me, but he sounded oddly reluctant to come over to Highbury, even though he was always looking for an excuse to check up on me. I couldn’t understand the man.
Andy downed his beer on seeing me and ordered two more, surprising me by also paying for them. After telling me that I looked like I worked in a frigging clothes shop he stood for a while, watching two guys playing, before turning to me.
‘You come here a lot?’ he asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Right,’ he said. He moved over to the middle table, dropping a fifty-pence piece in the slot before I could stop him.
‘I’ve got a rather nasty cut on my hand,’ I told him.
‘Bollocks. Put your beer down.’
‘OK, but Andy?’
‘Come on. Get on with it.
What?’
‘No spinning,’ I said.
Andy did spin, and he also swore when I scored four goals in a row, before shouting very loudly when he managed to get one past me. The two guys on the other table looked sideways at him. I had the front view. There’s a cliché that some coppers just look like coppers, and in Andy’s case, in that hip bar, loosely populated with laid back out-of-work actor types and well-dressed city women on their lunch break, Andy’s occupation didn’t seem to me to be too hard to guess. All that I did wonder was if he did it on purpose, the way Ken Clay did, a sort of fuck-you bravado meant to make people feel uncomfortable about their secrets. Whatever, I was glad. As long as there were coppers out there who looked like coppers out there, there would always be room for me, someone to slide between their machinery unnoticed, their obvious assault on a world of people a lot more subtle than they are.
After realizing that Andy wasn’t going to stand down from the table until his masculinity was no longer in doubt, I let him win the third game. After that we took one of the Formica tables by the bar, both ordering sandwiches and a couple more beers. When we’d finished eating Andy asked me how I’d been. I mumbled something, and then he thanked me for the photographs.
‘And?’ I said.
‘And anything we learned from them is strictly police business. All announcements will be made through the press at the appropriate time.’
I sighed. ‘Don’t be any more of an arsehole than God made you, Andy,’ I said. ‘You know you’ll get the usual.’
‘Just want to make sure you’re not taking me for granted, Billy love. Just making sure.’
We sat for a second. I knew what I wanted to ask Andy but I couldn’t quite get round to it. Instead, I asked him about the boy, and he said that in spite of the picture they still hadn’t found him. They didn’t even have a name.
‘It shouldn’t be long though, not with this new missing persons database. That’s if he’s on it. We’ve also got prints from the house, and the car.’
‘I take it it wasn’t registered?’
‘You take it correctly.’
‘What about the man?’ I asked. ‘In the alley.’
Andy reached in his pocket then flipped through his notebook.
‘A Mr George Curtis,’ he said, after finding the right page. ‘Owner of the kebab place you saw him down the side of. He seemed very surprised when I showed him a picture of his very self getting rough with our mystery boy.’
‘And?’
‘And he didn’t deny it. Said he remembered it very well. Claims he’d never seen the boy before and hasn’t seen him since. Says he walked into the kitchen and found him in there trying to rob his freezers. Said he’d nearly called the police, but as the kid hadn’t taken anything he let it go.’
‘Believe him?’
‘No way of knowing for sure till we find the boy, but it sounds plausible to me. The back door was open when we showed up and I can imagine it looking tempting to a fly young kid on the make. As far as it goes I’m sure he’s on the level, but we’ll probably visit him again to make sure. I made some noises about possible assault charges just to scare him, but he didn’t seem fazed by it. He went on about his right to protect his property etcetera etcetera. Can’t say I disagreed with him as a matter of fact.’
‘He was doing a lot more than protecting his property when I saw him.’
‘Whatever. You can understand, when you’re trying to run a business. There really isn’t anything to do about him until the boy shows up. I really wouldn’t worry about him if I were you.’
Andy ordered another beer but I wasn’t finished with my second. I asked him if he’d spoken to the Bradley family himself and he said he had. He hadn’t got much out of them, other than the fact that Lucy had always been the tearaway, had always been drawn to low-lifes and scumbags. He said that Emma had given him a list of names from Arundel where the family came from, some guys Lucy had been seeing over the last few years. He’d sent some men down there to talk to them but none of them were in London when Lucy was killed. So that, in Andy’s opinion, just left them with the boy. Andy was sure that the semen sample would turn out to have come from him.
‘Now that we know it didn’t come from you,’ he smiled.
I didn’t respond to that, and a silence settled between us for a second as our minds both moved on to the next obvious subject. Andy looked serious all of a sudden as though, actually, he might be a human being after all. He had a briefcase with him, which he’d left on a chair near the football tables, and without my having to say anything he went and fetched it before setting it down on the table. He produced a folder. Making sure that no one was paying any attention to us he laid the contents of the folder out on the table. I picked them up and went through them quickly, setting them down where they had been, making sure that none of the photographs I had been looking at were face up. As it was, in that part of town, we could have been an art director and a photographer going through prints. You wouldn’t, however, see pictures like that in Arena.
It had been over a week since I’d found Lucy Bradley’s body, and looking at the pictures in front of me didn’t make me feel sick, not the way I’d felt when I finally realized she wasn’t moving, or even when I’d seen the ambulance taking her away. They just spread a wave of pure greyness through me.
‘So,’ I said, resting my hand on top of the prints. ‘What actually killed her?’
‘Difficult. She received at least one blow to the back of the head. It could have been that, or that could have just knocked her out. It was a severe blow though and it might have done it. Time of death three to six hours before discovery. Difficult to tell with this heat apparently.’
‘Where?’
‘In the bedroom, top of the stairs. We think she was sitting down, by the angle of the wound. Her skull was fractured, probably by a hammer, definitely coming down. We found blood on the back of a chair and more on the carpet.’
‘Right,’ I said, jotting notes down in my book. ‘Then what?’
‘She was suffocated. Burg thinks a bag, after she was unconscious. Burg also found bruising on the neck, so some kind of ligature was used, probably a belt. We didn’t find one, or a bag with any blood inside, but that doesn’t mean anything. Neither would be difficult to remove. The boy, was he carrying anything?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe. He could easily enough have had the belt round his waist and the bag in his pocket, though.’
‘He could,’ Andy said.
‘So, she was hit over the head and then suffocated?’
‘Suffocated or strangled. Difficult to know which or whether she was dead anyway from the hammer. We don’t think it matters that much as long as we have the sequence of events.’
I could see his point. ‘No.’
‘The doctors care though. Anyway, we’re pretty sure that whatever the actual cause, she died upstairs. Then she was dragged down and dumped under the garbage, and then the belt was untied and the bag removed from her face.’
‘How do you know it was removed then, not in the bedroom?’
‘There was no blood on the stairs,’ Andy said. ‘Or anywhere else, which meant that the bag was still on. It must have been.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And then she was dragged outside, and left, not quite completely covered by bin bags.’
‘That’s right.’
I thought for a second. I wondered if leaving her foot exposed was intentional or a mistake. I figured a mistake.
‘She could have been there for days,’ I said. ‘She could have lain there for days before—’
‘Weeks,’ Andy said. ‘The boy wouldn’t have reported her missing, not if he killed her. And there was no sign of anyone else living there. As for the smell, she wouldn’t have made a lot of difference, I don’t think. It was pretty rank out there anyway.’
I thought about the newspaper reports, the scant space they’d given Lucy. Her murder didn’t make a lot of difference
there either. It was on the same page as a story about a minor soap star cheating on her husband. I had another thought.
‘Why would she have been sitting on a chair naked?’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It’s just not what you do really. She was definitely naked when she was killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘There weren’t any bloodstained clothes, simple. So she must have been. Unless he took those too. But why should he?’
‘No reason’, I said, ‘that I can think of.’ I tried to see the bedroom, to see Lucy there. If she was naked with her back to someone then surely she must have known them. It very probably was the man whose semen was on her, but was it the boy I’d seen?
‘So, run me through it.’
‘Through what?’
‘Through what you think happened. With the boy.’
Andy laughed. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Patronize me,’ I said.
Andy opened his hands and spoke slowly. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘They’re in the club. She wants to leave. He agrees and goes with her.’ I saw Donna. I didn’t say anything. ‘Then they come home with you following but, unfortunately for Lucy, you get mugged.’
‘Then what?’
‘They arrive home, oblivious to your interest in them. After a while they go upstairs. They start getting it on.’
‘Was she consenting?’
‘Nothing to suggest she wasn’t, no bruising or anything. Anyway, they get down to it but he shoots his bolt too soon and feels like an idiot. Probably his first time or he’s really stuck on the girl. Anyway, Lucy gets out of bed.’
‘Why?’
Hold Back the Night Page 12