‘She owes me money, and an explanation. In that order.’
Nathan sighed. He dropped his gaze and stared at me. I must have been a bit of a come-down compared to the moon, but I was touched. ‘I haven’t seen her for a couple of days,’ he said, and he sounded like someone glad to get it off his chest. ‘She was staying with me. She got a job here first, serving behind the bar, and we hit it off. Couple of weeks later she had an argument with her landlady about rent, and I said she could stay here. We’ve got some spare rooms. But she didn’t end up using any of them, if you get my drift.’
I nodded. ‘Where was she before she turned up on your doorstep? Did she say?’
‘Liverpool. She wasn’t shitting me, though she’d have been wise to after what she did, little bitch. There was a ticket from Lime Street Station in her bag. And some of the numbers on my phone bill were 0151 jobs.’
‘When was this?’
‘She got a job with me tail end of summer, about three months ago.’
‘And she’s moved out, has she?’
He nodded again, his jaw firm. ‘Without telling me. And she took the folding stuff from the safebox, too. About four hundred pounds, the little cunt.’
I thanked him and tapped on the window of one of the cabs, feeling too drunk to drive. ‘Maida Vale,’ I told the taxi driver, and crawled into the back seat. My head was at that precarious state where only sleep or more booze would placate it. And my cheek was hurting where I’d bit it at the mention of Liverpool. Liverpool, for fuck’s sake.
‘Hey,’ Nathan said. ‘You find her, you let me know where she is, okay?’
‘Of course,’ I lied.
Dr Melanie Henriksen lived in a split-level flat in a smart Victorian terraced house on Oakington Road. The blinds on the front window were shut when I got there, but a pleasant honey-coloured light was edging them and I could hear, as I reached for the doorbell, music playing through a partially open window. As the cabbie pulled over, I looked down at the £3.99 bottle of plonk that I’d bought on the way over. It sat in the plastic carrier bag smirking at me. Fuck, and it was a screw-top. I gave it to the driver – some tip – and got out.
‘Hi,’ she said, after she’d buzzed me in. ‘I was just about to get ready for bed. But, now you’re here, how about a drink?’
Though I was eager for sleep, I said I wouldn’t say no to a vodka, and she went off to the kitchen at the rear of the flat. I followed her languidly, checking out the place as I did so. The living room gave on to a study with a mezzanine sleeping area. There was a tiny Sony Vaio on the desk, and a potted plant that might have come straight out of the Amazon rainforest. There was a window looking on to the sunken garden where a fountain gurgled, but it was too dark to see anything out there. The hallway had a framed print of Simon Patterson’s ‘The Great Bear’ and an arresting painting in sombre oils, by some guy called Walkuski, of Icarus before his feather-duster impression came a cropper.
Mengele was sitting on a large, sumptuous cushion beneath a couple of bookshelves filled with old Penguin crime novels, the ones with green spines. He broke off from cleaning his toes to give me a contemptuous stare. The kitchen was comparatively small (that said, you could have fitted my entire flat into it), but all the cons wore fishtail coats and rode around on Vespas. Boffi units, some very nice Fritz Hansen chairs, and a Barber Osgabi dining table. I was scared to put down the glass she handed me, since there was nothing so retro as a coaster. Maybe she had some courtesy-bots that would scuttle out from under the sink to hold your drink for you when you needed a rest from holding it.
‘Nice pad,’ I said, trying not to sound too impressed. ‘Vets, they earn a wad then, or what?’
‘It can be very rewarding financially,’ she said, over the rim of her glass. ‘I’ve worked hard for what I’ve got. And I’m not wasteful with money. I like nice things.’
I liked nice things, too. And she had a very nice thing leaning against the back of a chair as she sipped her drink. She was wearing a cream Armani trouser suit over a simple white cotton vest top. She was barefoot. She had let her hair down, too. Earlier, it had been kept back off her face by a leather thong; now it hung in brown undulations around her jaw line. She didn’t look away too often, which was fine by me; it meant I got to enjoy those dark green eyes for longer.
‘Where do I sleep then?’ I said, draining my glass.
‘The sofa. You can turn it into a bed.’
‘Get many visitors?’ I said, wanting to push my luck just a little bit.
As she finished her own drink she sucked an ice cube into her mouth. Her red lips were very moist. She was looking directly at me, so draw your own picture as to how you think my face appeared.
‘I like to make my guests feel welcome,’ she said. ‘And comfortable.’
‘How comfortable?’ I asked, feeling about as comfortable as a peeled baby in a bag of salt. My clothes were suddenly too tight. I wanted to slip into something more comfortable. Like her, for example.
‘Are you flirting with me, Joel?’
‘I am if you hope I am,’ I said. ‘If not, then no, I’m not flirting with you, I’m just seeing what your resistance level is, what load you can take before your temper snaps.’
‘Well, I’m not put out by your little game,’ she said. ‘Carry on testing my resistance.’
If brains were wool, I wouldn’t have enough to knit a Smurf’s scarf, but I’m not colour blind and the only light I could see was green. I went over to her, pressed my thigh between hers, and put my arms around her.
‘This is most unprofessional,’ she said, in a voice that was suddenly thick and lacking its earlier assuredness.
‘I’ve never been accused of that before,’ I said, ladling on the irony.
‘No, me’ she said. ‘Getting involved with a patient.’
‘It’s not quite the same, is it?’ I replied. ‘I mean, I’m hardly going to start coughing up fur balls.’
‘Your leg’s trembling,’ she said.
‘That’s not my leg.’
I kissed her before she could try to get any more smart remarks out of me. She stayed with it for a couple of seconds, then broke off, moved away.
‘Not yet,’ she said, with a little smile. It was still maddening, but I could live with that. I didn’t realise just how beautiful the phrase ‘not yet’ could be. ‘Not yet’ was a ‘yes’ wearing a skimpy negligee and sucking the tip of its finger. She squeezed my hand as she went by me and told me to sleep well, and that there were sandwiches in the fridge if I was hungry. I poured myself a nightcap and sauntered into the living room, with the plate of ham-and-cheese. Mengele had moved to the sofa and I let him stay there. I switched on the TV, pushing the mute button on the remote, and watched BBC News 24 in the dark, while behind me I heard the maddening sounds of clothes coming off and deep duvets being drawn back. As I kicked off my shoes and lay back against the cushions, I wondered if she slept in the nude. Her perfume was on me, and so were Mengele’s eyes.
‘Jealous?’ I asked him, and fell asleep.
* * *
‘Joel? Joel?’
I struggled out of sleep and found it was dark, very dark, but I saw her in the doorway, pale and naked, her arms raised slightly, palms resting on the architrave. The lemon from my spilled drink was perched on my crotch. How classy. But she didn’t seem to mind. She came to me and reached for my hand, and drew me up towards her. She kissed me gently at first, and then more deeply until we found a tempo that was more like desperation, and that didn’t stop until we had stumbled through to her bed, and I was naked too, and inside her, and inside her, and then the panting and the sweat and the soft weight of her breasts on my chest and sometime before it was over I was crying and she shushed me and I don’t know how I returned to sleep but somehow I did and it was good, it had all been good, even the tears.
* * *
Harsh morning light, a cat and a note sitting on my chest. There was about three litres of drool on my shoulder and my h
air, when I reached up to scratch my head, feeling as if it had morphed into something worn by the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls. No wonder she didn’t wake me up. Maybe she was on the motorway by now, in her Audi TT, toeing it for all she was worth in an effort to get as far away from me as possible, while begging for a trans-Atlantic flight on her Motorola. I couldn’t blame her. I unfolded the note:
Couldn’t bear to wake you – you looked so sweet. Help yourself to breakfast. There’s a spare set of keys on the kitchen table. I’ll be home around 8. Maybe we could go out for dinner? Last night was… interesting. Mx
Interesting. I thought about how she had looked rising above me, her head flung back, her mouth open, interesting, very interesting, but I decided thoughts like that could wait. I didn’t want to start getting aroused with Mengele still slouching on top of me.
I booked a table at a smart pizza restaurant on Formosa Street and took a shower. I thought about leaving a note for her as well, but decided that it would all seem a little too cute and cosy, so I simply tickled Mengele under the chin and went out.
It was cold again this morning. The sky was slate-grey, and, on the fringes of the city, huge boulders of cloud were piling up. The wind slashed in under my jacket and made my nipples feel like a couple of scabs.
I caught a tube at Warwick Avenue and headed back to Westminster to pick up the car. Luckily I got to it before the traffic wardens did. I dropped it off back at my flat and caught another train at Edgware Road, stopping by at a sandwich bar to buy a couple of pastries and a coffee. On my way out, on Chapel Street, I thought I saw the actress Rachel Weisz hefting her shopping towards the bus stop, but that very scenario disproved it. It was a tortuous journey to Archway, via the underground, but I didn’t want to put the poor Saab through a fate worse than scrap heaps.
While I was sitting there, in-between a man trying to do the day’s Guardian crossword and a girl in a flowery frock and black biker jacket playing Fifa on a DS, I mused on the fact that I had never seen anyone famous while I had been here in London. I thought I had spotted that guy Foxton, the bass player from The Jam once, on a Northern Line tube train, wearing glasses and a bushy hairdo (Foxton, not the train), but I couldn’t be sure. And in Selfridge’s, a couple of years previously, I thought I saw Helena Bonham Carter in the Food Hall, checking out the fish while picking her skirt out of the crack in her arse. Neither sighting had been confirmed. Jimmy Two was always seeing celebrities. Within an hour on one occasion, Hugh Laurie had asked him the time, and Mariella Frostrup had apologised profusely to him for stepping on his foot as she came out of Rasa on Charlotte Street. It made me wonder if I was lucky or not.
Daylight made St John’s Way appear more agreeable, but not by much. I located the house and stood outside for a while, checking the neighbouring curtains for twitchers. There was no blood on the paving stones where Nev had discovered me. The rain, or maybe someone worried that the value of their flat might nosedive, had cleaned it away.
I went up the path and tried the door. It was locked. I rang the bell but nobody came to answer. Round the back of the terrace, I picked my way down an alleyway that was remarkably free of rubbish, but for a supermarket shopping trolley and a punctured football. It was almost tear-inducing not to see a stained mattress or a television with its cathode tube punched in. I had a peek over the wall and saw that the rear door of the flat belonging to this so-called Gary Cullen was swinging open on its hinges. I forced my way through the flaky gate and beat a path to it through the brambles, sun-bleached plastic toys and forgotten, mildewed washing hanging on the line in his wasteland of a backyard. Ancient plastic cider bottles were grouped together next to a bundle of sodden Mirrors tied up with string. Gardening tools leaned against the wall – a hoe, a rake, a spade with a deep crack in its blade – and all of them had seen more rust than soil during their lifetimes. There was also a stubby little garden fork with some nasty-looking tines, which I picked up, and a few lengths of rotten timber with bent, badly hammered nails sticking out of them.
I cupped my hands and, pressing them against the window, stared into the kitchen; it was looking much as I’d left it the last time I was here. I could smell Melanie on my fingers, an emboldening fragrance, so I closed the door behind me and called out hello. No answer. Well, I’d had no answer last time, and paid for relying on the silence. Gripping the fork, I padded along the corridor, where there were still some fragments of crockery from the plate that had been dropped, and poked my head into the living room. The same nest of Pot Noodle cartons and copies of Swank. Maybe a few extra Heineken empties. And there were some nappies, some used, some waiting to be used, in a pile under the window, which I’d either missed last time or had recently been introduced to bolster the grime factor. I went to the window and checked outside, then shut the curtains, switched on the light and gave the room a full cough-and-drop examination.
The sofa was fucked. Even a throw couldn’t disguise the slashes in the cushions and the monumental stains – paint, foodstuffs, any number of bodily fluids – that had Jackson Pollocked it to kingdom come. The carpet was pockmarked with threadbare patches, some so pronounced that you could see through to the floorboards. The wallpaper was rearing back from the walls, and who could blame it? A cupboard yielded a few cans of lager and a maxibag of Walker’s salt-and-vinegar crisps, a chipped mug filled with screws, nails and washers, and a couple of Scart leads and aerial cables wrapped in polythene.
Out in the hall, the stairwell led up to a black throat. The doors to the other flats failed to lock in the stale stench of fast food and booze they contained. Whispers of it came down to me from the landing. There was a door under the stairwell with a padlock on it. I tried it anyway. The door rattled in its frame, and a dead echo fell away into the cellar.
My mobile chirruped in the stuffy closeness of the flat, causing me to jump. My voice sounded too surrounded, too hemmed in.
‘Sorrell? Is that you?’
‘Detective Inspector Ian Mawker. You know that an anagram of your name is I’m a Wanker?’
‘Don’t think you’re the first to fill me in on that little gem, Sorrell. It’s not clever. What are you doing out of hospital?’
‘Freeing up a bed for some poor sod who needs it more. But I’m touched that you’re checking up on me.’
‘I’m doing anything but checking up on you. I want you somewhere – like, here. And now.’
‘What if I’m busy?’ I said.
‘Put it off, Sorrell. I’m serious.’
He gave me an address in N16, adding, ‘Be there within the hour.’ And then he killed the line.
I went for a cup of coffee at one of the less offensive fast-food dives on Junction Road, then I had another. After that I strolled down Holloway Road and waited ten minutes for a 253 on Seven Sisters Road. The bus dropped me off on Amhurst Park, opposite a natty little terrace called The Trees. It had a gravel forecourt and mock-brass plaques announced its name. The other houses and synagogues and blocks of flats sneered at it. Mawker was leaning against the bonnet of a squad car, pouring coffee from one of those super-sleek brushed-steel flasks. Yellow police tape blocked off both the entrance and the exit to the parking area, and a police constable stood guard at one of the large red doors leading into the terrace. As I crossed the road, three men in white lab coats came out of the same door.
‘I told you to be here within the hour,’ Mawker said. I put on a horrified expression and pointed at the roof; when he snapped his head that way, I plucked the cup out of his fingers.
‘I did everything I could, everything, to make sure I was here later than you asked,’ I said. The coffee was weak, and what flavour it might have had was now masked with too much sugar. I handed it back.
Mawker was wearing the same coat and tie as when he’d been to visit me in hospital. The collar of his shirt was fraying, and shadowy with sweat and grunge. He looked irritated by me already. ‘Where are you living these days, Ian?’ I said.
‘Eal
ing,’ he said wearily. ‘Right, now that we’ve enjoyed our cosy bit of chit-chat, come with me.’
The PC stood to one side to allow us in, and we went up the stairs to the third floor. The smell hit us on the first landing. At the top of the stairs, another PC was standing just outside the only door, doing his best potted-plant impersonation. He was sucking extra strong mints to keep the smell from getting to him.
It was a small flat, but there was a lot of blood. Most of it was confined to the bedroom, although whoever had begun spilling it had walked it into the bathroom, the kitchen and the living room afterwards.
‘Why am I here?’ I said.
Mawker cocked his head at the bedroom, so I went to have a closer look. The body was still there, naked, erupted, strewn across the sheets like something from Professor Gunther von Hagens’ shed.
‘You know him?’ Mawker said. ‘Name of Liptrott.’
‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘He seems to have lost a bit of weight.’ Mawker looked at me with a pitying expression, as if I was a kid showing off at a party.
Liptrott had been unzipped. His face meanwhile bore the expression of someone who has just been given a key to the room marked Hot Pussy only to find a cat in a microwave.
‘How long’s he been dead?’ I asked.
Mawker looked at one of the lab coats. The lab coat said, ‘Two days.’
Mawker said: ‘Two days.’ Then he said: ‘Where were you oh, I don’t know, let’s say two days ago?’
‘Fuck off, Ian,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t he smell a bit rank for a two-dayer?’
‘Heating’s been on full blast,’ the lab coat remarked.
Mawker pulled out his notebook and made a great play of opening it to the relevant page. ‘We’ve got a statement from an Errol Bewsey, who works as a doorman at the Lava Java Dance Club in Vauxhall. Said you turned up looking for Barry Liptrott, and that your attitude…’ he paused to consult his notes ‘…“minged”.’
‘So lock me up and throw away the key.’
‘Why did you need to see Liptrott?’
Dust and Desire Page 7