‘What’s your name?’ I asked, sitting on the arm of a leather sofa before realizing this was where Matt’s photo had been taken.
‘Daisy.’
‘Daisy?’
‘Yes. Is that OK?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Nineteen – why do you care?’
‘Just… shouldn’t you be living with your parents or at uni or something?’
Her bony hands were steady as she lit herself a cigarette, and she gave a short laugh. ‘Uni? Whatever. Who has that kind of money? And my mum and dad are a schizo and a dead-end alkie. So thanks for your concern, but I think I’m OK here.’
There was a fierce layer of red lipstick painted across her lips and she wasn’t wearing a bra under the mesh shirt. When she spoke she showed a set of shockingly white and straight teeth.
‘Did you know Meds well?’
‘He was nice. Not always trying to get a piece of you, you know. Total fucking square, but that wasn’t his fault with his condition, you know.’
‘Did you know Emma Dyer?’ I asked on the fly.
Her eyes widened a little. ‘Ems? God, they said she died… Thought she hadn’t been round for ages.’
‘Who said she died?’
‘Oh, Matt told us. Kyle was pretty beaten-up about it, but between you and me, Matt was just as bad. He was fucking head over heels… sucker for a posh bird, you know. She liked her coke but she was a bit of lady, if you know what I mean. Guys love that shit. Anyway… it was pretty sad.’
‘Matt had a thing for Emma?’
‘Yeah, really bad. Almost fucking tragic. He kept all these photos of her from parties and stuff, stuck with her and Kyle like a puppy, but she wasn’t having any of it. She really did like our Kyle, but I suppose Matt—’ As if she hadn’t liked where the sentence was going, she cut herself off and inclined her head suddenly. ‘Eh, do I get anything for talking to you?’
I shrugged. ‘You want money?’
‘Yeah, that would be safe, thanks. Just a thought.’
I glanced around the room again and noticed that the shelf above the derelict fireplace was covered in statues of birds, birds of all different types and sizes.
‘Are they yours?’ I pointed at them, smiling.
‘I put them away for parties.’ She shrugged, but seemed a little embarrassed. ‘I like birds, you know. They’re nicer than people.’
‘So, were you here when Meds died?’
‘Yeah, there was a party going on. Only me and a few girls and their guys, you know. But you wanna speak to Matt about that; I think Matt was the last one to speak to him. Said Meds was doing some smack upstairs, but I haven’t seen him since.’
‘Matt?’
‘Yeah. Matt came by to pick up some stuff and asked if Meds was about. Went upstairs, came down, said Meds was shooting up and… well, rest is history. One of the girls goes up and the idiot has only gone and overdone it. Probably cos he never did it before, you know, too paranoid about his injections and his blood sugar and all that.’
The filthy fucking liar. I saw him looking at his watch, going through the motions of his victim act and lying through his teeth the whole fucking time… I had told Meds not to mention talking to me, but he had had no way of knowing just how much danger he could have put himself in.
‘It’s sad,’ she said, taking a drag.
‘Do you know where Matt is now?’
‘Not a clue. Like I said, haven’t seen him since. Probably doesn’t even know.’
‘Fuck…’
‘Are you OK? I know, it’s sad, right.’
‘I… No. Yeah, it’s pretty sad.’ I felt sick, hungry, thirsty, tired…
‘You’re a nice-looking guy,’ she said, levering herself off the sofa and on to the floor, where she sat cross-legged and started preparing some lines of coke. ‘Nic. You want some coke?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Sorry, I haven’t got anything stronger. This is Kyle’s leftover stuff.’
‘No, I mean…’
She looked up at me as she crushed the powder into lines across a grubby hand-mirror. There were a few millimetres of brunette roots at her scalp, and she seemed endearingly oblivious to the way her nipples poked through the holes in the netting.
‘Fine, fuck it,’ I said, putting my bag down and sitting on the floor opposite her.
She smiled.
My hypocrisy tasted bitter on my tongue, but it felt better than trying to do the right thing by everyone.
With a practised motion, she snorted two of the lines and handed me the mirror. As I looked at them, trying not to think about what Harriet would say, she stood up and walked past me to turn on a battered CD player in the corner.
‘Do you like Nirvana?’ she called back.
I snorted the other two lines and grimaced as they burnt the insides of my nostrils. ‘They’re all right…’
‘“Grandma, take me home,” ha!’ She turned it on, and when she came to sit back down she collapsed gawkily across my lap. ‘Oh, and this, right here, this is gonna cost you a couple of hundred. You got a problem with that?’
She weighed barely over a hundred pounds. Fuck knows how many other guys she had slept with.
‘Nope, no problem.’
‘Groovy.’
The coke kicked in a few minutes after that, when we were naked and fucking on the living-room floor. Up close and on her hands and knees in front of me, I noticed that she had a sparrow tattooed on the back of her neck. She turned on to her back, spreading her legs, and there was the heart on her pelvis. Nothing written across it; just a blank heart.
Daisy was a pretty name.
Afterwards, when she had let me come across her chest and she had wiped it off and we had snorted another two lines of coke, she told me that her mum was in another psychiatric ward. She also told me that she used to know where Matt’s parents lived and that the way to tell the difference between common city pigeons and wood pigeons was the heavier build and the white collar around the wood pigeon’s neck.
‘They don’t have the collars when they’re younger… it’s like they earn them. They’re like the priests of the bird world, you know,’ she said, laughing to herself as I lay there trying to forget anything that existed before and after my trip to this house. ‘I’d like to come back as a bird, you know, if we come back after we’ve died. My dad used to put food out for the birds every day… we had finches and crows and stuff, and he’d never miss a day. Huh, never gave a shit about us, but no matter how drunk he was he never missed a day for the birds. Even when they did things like crap all over his car he’d never stop putting the food out.’
‘So you’d come back as a bird, yeah?’
‘Totally. What would you come back as?’
‘Someone religious,’ I said. ‘Or a cat.’
‘Haha, good one.’ She laughed. ‘Just try not to kill me, yeah? It would really put a downer on my flying around and sitting on feeders all day.’
I snorted. ‘It’s a deal.’
‘Pinky swear?’
‘What the fuck?’
She held out her hand and linked her little finger around mine. I didn’t know whether it was the coke making me laugh, but at that moment I couldn’t remember finding anything so fucking funny.
24
At Mark’s request I stopped at a Tesco on the way home to pick up some food, or as he put it, ‘Something other than vodka, port and that bit of Brie you’ve been living on. Maybe something green that’s not mould or jelly? Ta, Nic.’
Painful air whipped around the corners and up the ramps, catching us all in the wind tunnel.
I dumped a load of shopping bags in the boot and failed to notice the Mercedes approaching up the ramp of the car park until I reversed out, and it cut me up with a wail of brakes.
‘Christ! Fuck’s sake!’
Fuming, I stormed out of the car, praying for the opportunity to get in someone’s face. It wasn’t until I saw him getting out of the driver�
�s seat that I realized it was Pat’s Mercedes.
‘Hey! What the fuck?’
‘You,’ he snarled, coming around the car.
Something feral in his expression made me stop in time to lessen the blow when he tried to punch me in the stomach. I grabbed his wrists as I was thrown onto the back of the car.
‘Jesus, Pat…’
‘You think I’m fucking stupid? Is that it?’
‘What?’
‘I said to keep an eye on her, but from what I hear you’ve been getting a bit too fucking involved.’
I forced his hands away from my throat and kicked him in the shins, making him step back. My ribs ached a little but it would be an easy lie to tell, even with the constant replaying of the night before behind my eyes: Clare grinding against me, gripping my hand between her legs as she made herself come…
‘She was off her head at a nightclub and I took her home, what the fuck’s your problem?’
‘I had someone watching the house! You didn’t leave!’
‘I slept on the sofa – she’d taken a bad fucking E! What, you’d rather I left her there and let her over-drink or pass out or choke to death, is that what you’re saying?’
He was breathing hard, but I seemed to have got through enough to make him think twice before punching me again.
‘Nic, I’m not an idiot,’ he said. ‘You want her and you think she wants you, but the thing is, with her, everyone thinks that. That’s why she’s so great, isn’t it? That’s why everyone falls for her. She makes you think she’s there to be fucking rescued and I hate to piss all over your parade, but that’s just how she is. If you’re smart you’ll watch, fucking observe, but do anything else and I swear—’
‘Why do you care?’ I snapped. ‘Every time I come round there she’s beaten up in some way, you think I haven’t fucking noticed?’
‘God, you’re so fucking dense.’
‘Well, explain it to me!’ I shouted, taking a step forwards. ‘Everyone’s telling me I don’t understand or that I’ve got the wrong idea, so go on, Pat, explain it to me! Explain why she’s always got bruises and she’s covered from head to toe in scratches and cigarette burns, and why she’s had you charged with assault, and that time you put her in hospital with—’
‘I what?’
‘Yeah, I know. I talk to people. I’m not the only one who’s noticed.’
He didn’t seem able to find the words. There was nothing he could say when he was faced with the image of himself through everyone else’s eyes.
‘She dropped the charges, after she gave her statement. She dropped them.’
‘Well, good for you,’ I sneered.
‘So… what?’ he said. ‘So you came to find out who killed my little girl, and on the way you’ve decided your fucking mission is to save my wife?’
I didn’t say anything but I started to shiver again.
Pat shook his head at me. ‘You don’t think, after seventeen years, that I might have worked out how to do that for myself?’
‘No,’ I said, no longer caring that he was my employer or that I was letting my petty dislike get in the way of basic professionalism. ‘You know what I think? I think you’re the fucking problem.’
I expected anything else, but not laughter. He had to turn away, venting his hysterics into the back of his hand. It wrong-footed me, made me feel as if, again, some crucial point had just soared a thousand feet over my head.
‘Jesus… I’m her problem? That’s it? Trust me, I fucking wish that I was. In fact, I wish that she only had one fucking problem! I’m her problem… God, how much sweeter life would have been.’
‘If you love her so much then how can you talk about her like that? How can you fucking do it?’
‘Yes!’ He lurched forwards, taking hold of my arm with a fist hovering in front of my face. ‘Yes, that’s right, I fucking love her. You have no idea how much, or how much fucked-up shit I’ve had to deal with, but I love her and I know her.’
I was readying myself for the blow, but it didn’t come. He just hissed at me.
‘I’ll believe you when you say nothing happened last night, because she’s too good for you and she knows that… She’s screwed up but she’s got standards.’
I refused to let him see that I was stung by the element of truth in his words.
‘But…’ he said. ‘If I find out that anything’s happened, that you’ve overstepped, then I will fuck you up. I will fuck you up even more than she will.’
He let me go and smoothed down the cuffs of his jacket. I didn’t know whether I entirely hated him; I hated him, but I also hated him because he had her. That was what bothered me most of all.
Pat leant against the bonnet of his car for a moment and sniffed. ‘She’s not all right, is she?’
‘She was just wasted.’
‘No, but she talks to you, I know she’s talked to you.’
‘She’s…’ I ended up shrugging, wishing, as ever, that I knew enough to say more. ‘I don’t think this is the best time to try and judge what’s normal and what’s not. I think… she’s getting by, but she needs help. Maybe she should talk to someone, someone like—’
‘She’d never do it. I tried before when—’ He cut himself off. ‘She won’t.’
I zipped my coat right up to my chin. ‘Did she not become a ballerina because she was too tall?’
‘Freakishly tall… She told you that?’ He nodded. ‘Yeah. When she was nineteen, before we had Emma. That’s when they said that to her.’
I shrugged.
‘I can’t go back to the house yet,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna try calling. Are you…? Has anything happened?’
‘I’ve got some solid leads. It’s just gonna take some time.’ I was glad he had finally asked something I could give a stock answer to.
‘OK.’ He stood up and opened up the driver’s door again. ‘Look… I meant what I said. You won’t come out the other side, I fucking mean it.’
I nodded.
As he got into his car, it struck me what an odd thing that had been to say.
I will fuck you up even more than she will.
Pat’s Mercedes pulled away and turned left to exit the car park. I watched it go and got back into my own car, thinking about the webcam videos and how many I would be able to watch before I had to answer Mackie’s voicemail.
I let myself in with the tonne of shopping bags and listened for any signs of life, but Mark didn’t seem to be home.
The message from Mackie told me he had scheduled a meeting with Felix Hudson tonight at the Underground. I knew it would be fucking about with Ronnie, and had a good chance of getting back to Edie, but I was in a reckless mood and decided to find a way around that at the time. All I needed was a decent visual and hopefully a car to follow.
With an hour or so to spare I sat down with the laptop and the photos and papers I had taken from the house.
For one stupid moment I considered calling Harriet and telling her I had spent the morning snorting lines of coke off a hooker’s hand-mirror, just to make her feel better, but I didn’t think she would appreciate the humour.
As my desktop loaded I took a pile of photos and shuffled through them. There were a few family photos, from holidays and Emma’s Holy Communion. Then there were some older ones.
I stopped at a photo of Clare, posing outside the Royal School of Ballet. She looked older than Emma had been; she must have been about eighteen. She was wearing jeans and a simple white top, and had more weight on her face. When she smiled she looked softer, sweeter somehow. She was beautiful now, I thought, but she had been far more beautiful then, when her beauty hadn’t deformed her, when she didn’t look as though she had learnt to use it to break other people down.
In another photo she was with Pat, looking the same age and surrounded by people. When I turned it over the familiar handwriting said ‘Jenny’s party ’94’. She was wearing a silver masquerade mask over a black party dress. Pat was wearing one too. I cou
ld only see their eyes, and their arms around each other.
‘Emma’s 1st birthday ’95’. Clare was sitting on a living-room floor that I didn’t recognize, feeding Emma from a bottle. Her hair was in plaits and she wasn’t looking at the camera; she was looking down at Emma in her lap with an expression similar to the one I had seen when she was dancing. Probably love, I thought. I had to put the photos down.
I fired up the internet and logged in to the storage site, wanting Mark to come home and provide some sort of objectivity.
Starting from the most recent, I opened the video and waited. Part of me was excited, too excited for my liking, and part of me was filled with dread.
I heard a key in the front door and scrambled forwards to pause it.
‘Honey, I’m…!’ Mark spotted the shopping bags in the hallway as he shut the door. ‘Ooh, vegetables. Halle-fucking-lujah.’
‘Hey, shut up and come watch this!’
‘So demanding.’ He leapt over the back of the sofa and landed neatly next to me, still wearing his coat and shoes. ‘Wow, you got the laptop then?’
‘Copied all the video files, just watching them back in reverse.’
He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Can I put the frozens away?’
‘There’s no— No, shut up and fucking watch.’
‘No popcorn? No—’
I punched him in the leg and pressed Play while he was still laughing. As I leant forwards to see the screen better he took the wad of photos off the table and started flicking through them.
This video was set in the same dance studio as the first one she had sent me. I assumed that it was where she worked. The date was only a few days ago.
‘She was prettier when she was younger, wasn’t she?’ Mark said.
I smiled to myself.
‘I don’t mean that in a “because she’s younger” kind of way,’ he added. ‘But she looks nicer, she looks like…’
‘Think you mean happier.’
‘Yeah, that’ll be the one,’ he said, sounding downcast.
Clare entered the frame with a graceful twirl, her hair flying about her and wearing a red dress and white tights that looked designed for dancing. I wondered if this was what she did in the gaps between teaching other people, created these fantasies so that she could take a look at them afterwards and pretend she was performing for someone other than herself.
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