Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  ‘I wanted him to be best man at my wedding. He could still do it, if he likes.’

  ‘Sorrell,’ he warned, hard and cold. I was almost impressed.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to find a MisPer for a woman called Kara Geenan, probably not her real name. Lippy put her in touch with me. And then she disappeared right after someone tried to brain me, which I thought was interesting, as she gave me the address in the first place.’

  ‘Go on,’ Mawker prompted, as if I had a whole bunch of similar stories to tuck him into bed with.

  ‘She claims that the guy I’m looking for is her brother. Says he’s eighteen years of age.’

  ‘Did she report him missing to the police?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A, because she reckoned he’d gone missing a mere matter of hours after her seeing him last. And B, because I think it was all a set-up. A trap.’

  ‘For you?’

  I smiled at him. ‘What is it you’re at now?’ I said. ‘Detective Inspector? What is it you have to do to get Detective Chief Superintendent? Put a ball through a hoop? Find your bollocks while blindfolded?’

  He ignored me, which was the best way to deal with it, I suppose.

  ‘So you went up to Lava Java to elicit her whereabouts from Liptrott?’

  ‘Yeah, but he wasn’t in. I talked to a friend of his, guy called Dayne. Used to own the place. He didn’t know where Kara was, and he didn’t know where Liptrott was. He was a veritable font.’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘Why me what?’

  ‘Why do you think this guy wants you dead? Apart from the obvious?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘I think the chap who did this tried to do you.’

  ‘Gary Cullen? What’s the link? Why would he suddenly start wanting to go on a killing spree like this?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘No, you tell me. What’s Cullen’s form like?’

  Mawker consulted his notes again. ‘Petty crime, mostly. And then a bit of nastiness five years ago when he bit some guy’s nose off in a brawl.’

  ‘But nothing on this scale?’

  ‘Not till now, no. However, it’s not unknown for bag snatchers and petrol siphoners to graduate to this kind of bad.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it had crossed my mind, although if Cullen did me, he seemed to a bit rushed, a bit amateurish. I mean, he twatted me and fucked off before I was even seeing stars. Doesn’t compare to the character who did this. The cunt who did this hung about to make sure, and then hung about a bit more to admire his technique. If it was Cullen, he’s come on a bit. And fast. But I don’t reckon it was.’

  ‘So what else do you know?’

  ‘I know that Geenan was staying at the Paviours Arms in Westminster for a couple of months, pulling the landlord’s pump, and I also know how to play the theme from Bullitt on a Jew’s harp.’

  I didn’t tell him about her coming from Liverpool, because there was no point in having him wiping his dick all over the curtains in two cities. There was enough going on for him to fuck up down here.

  Bloody footprints had been walked across the floorboards, but it looked as though the killer had been wearing slippers, or polythene bags over his shoes, leaving no prints, only patternless smears. All you could tell from those marks were the size of his feet.

  ‘Been any others like this lately?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Mawker replied. ‘But I’m as eager to find this Geenan woman as you are. Perhaps even more eager.’

  He looked tired. I wondered if he’d been on holiday at all in the last five years, and I doubted it. He was one of those men who took his work home with him, drank with it in the evenings and slept with it in his bed. Mawker lived alone. All of his thoughts were focused on crime and trying to stop it, or on cleaning up afterwards. There was nothing left for fripperies such as new suits, fresh razor blades, holidays. Or women. I’d asked him once, when he was a few pints into an evening, if he was seeing anyone. He looked at me as if I’d offered him his mother in a sandwich. I don’t think he found a spare moment in the day to even begin to consider what he was missing out on. Which I felt sorry about, if only because it meant he was constantly hanging around like a fart in a sauna.

  ‘Well, I’ll make sure I let you know when I find her.’

  ‘You do that,’ he said, tediously.

  I left just then, before he could think of anything to keep me there longer. I would have liked to have mooched around in the flat on my own for a bit, see what I could have turned up, but there was no chance of that. Mawker and me had never really clicked at Bruche. He had been to university and went in on accelerated, became a textbook copper, did the exams, moved into CID and rose rapidly. I followed my nose a bit more, and I made more collars than he did, but they were messy collars that usually ended up with innocents and back-up getting hurt. After the nth carpeting and the business with Rebecca, I got out. I didn’t see my police career as political; I wasn’t about to become a pawn for the top ranks to play around with. I wasn’t interested in arresting shoplifters who were too skint to buy themselves or their children a bottle of milk. I couldn’t care less if someone was nicking CDs and video games from the local HMV. I merely wanted the hard cases done over: policing was a war as far as I was concerned. There was a lot of scum in the city and I wanted to get it skimmed off. Top brass didn’t like that. I was too rough for them. I was dangerous. They were scared that someone might get killed if I went after a villain, thus bringing down a huge pile of shit on to their desks. So they gave me a desk job, too, and the guy who gave it me is still picking the splinters from it out of his arse.

  Before I reached Seven Sisters Road, I got the shakes bad and had to sit down on a low wall hemming in one of the numerous estates that muscle on to the road leading down to Manor House tube station.

  Where’s your smart mouth now, Joel my lad? Where’s the quipping and the lipping and the gypping now?

  My fat mouth was staying tight shut, because otherwise it was likely to spit my breakfast and a litre of coffee all over the shop. On the food chain, Liptrott might have been several links down from a bucket of runny shit, but he was essentially harmless, and he had died badly. Very badly. I didn’t like to witness death in any of its forms, but I didn’t like to see anyone suffer a violent death, no matter how unpleasant they were. Mainly because it was not nice to look at, but also because it was – strange to say this, but I can’t think of a better way – disrespectful. Violent kills showed a complete disregard for the most basic human connection. One person doing that to another person, it beggars belief. How could you want to unshackle mortality like that, drag it out in the open, steaming and red? How could you yourself face up to that unless you were as far away from being human as it was possible to get without being a different kind of animal?

  I also didn’t like it because it reminded me of the day I’d walked in on my battered, gutted, emptied wife.

  I clutched hard to that wall and quelled the nausea, fought back the hot tears, and watched my hands carefully until they stopped shaking. Resorting to the mouth, I knew, was bad sometimes, but it was my way of dealing with it. Mawker had his treadmill, a routine of steadfast plodding after clues, which reminded me of a machine part performing the same, monotonous act day in, day out. Some people relied on drink or drugs. Some people drove it out of themselves with sport. I had my mouth. My mouth got me into trouble sometimes, too many times, but every time I opened it, it saved my life just a little bit.

  Feeling better, I set off walking, and I discovered two things by the time I reached Finsbury Park. One was that Mawker had dispatched a tail, and two was that the guy was as raw as they come. The thing about following people is that it’s tough to do it well. The best pursuits are all about anticipation. They can even follow you from the front and second-guess your moves. They sense you�
��re going to hang a left into the shopping precinct, or a right into the car park, probably before you do. But this clown…

  I stopped at a coffee shop across from the park entrance and took the only space that was left by the window. Finsbury Park is one of those parts of London that nobody goes to during the day. It’s an in transit place, so nobody hangs around on the streets, unless it’s a tramp with a can of electric soup and the need to shout a lot at his invisible friends. There were no other free tables in the coffee shop, but he gamely followed me in, knowing at least that to hang around outside was to expose himself even further. He stood at the counter with his coffee while people craned around him, to give their ‘to go’ orders to the flustered staff.

  I took my time. After I finished my cup, I borrowed a newspaper from an off-duty garbage-disposal guy and flicked through it in a leisurely fashion. By now my shadow had been sipping from the same coffee cup for the last thirty minutes. A small cup, so what? Hot coffee? Yeah, right. He was starting to look around into the corners of the ceiling now, as if he was some amateur room designer with new ideas for the place. He asked an Italian girl, who was filling a tray of mugs with stewed tea from an urn, what colour the walls were – ‘Is that sunset pink?’ – and was given a look that said ‘No, it’s fuck-you red.’ When he tried to borrow a paper, the builder slid it away from him, saying he hadn’t finished it yet, before going back to a conversation with his companion.

  After that we went on a long walk south through the crumbling roadside houses of Holloway. I had a long chat about Liptrott’s death with an off-duty forensics guy I knew called Fentiss, who was trying to flag a cab on a street corner while my tail spent so much time looking into the window of a dry cleaner’s that Fentiss eventually noticed him too. We both turned to watch Mr Green as he rubbed his chin in front of the 3 suits cleaned for the price of 2 deals. Fentiss informed me, on the q.t., that everybody down at Scotland Yard was wetting his pants over Liptrott because Merseyside police had an unexplained death on their files, from five years ago that bore the same MO. Great, I thought, fucking Liverpool again. Of all the cities in all the world, it had to be that one that dunked its chips in my gravy.

  I ended up losing the tail by hopping on a bus as it was about to depart from the bus stop. I blew him a kiss from the rear window as he stood at the same stop, before he checked his watch and then glanced back along the road. There was another bus coming along. I shook my head: Follow that bus. He was out of sight by the time it arrived, so I got off at the next stop, walked behind a wall and waited for his bus to drive by. He was standing by the driver, peering out into the distance.

  I caught another bus and followed his bus into the terminus at Euston. He was nowhere to be seen as I hopped off. I sent Mawker a text message: th@ ws an inslt, knbhd, and then I went into the train station and booked a ticket to my past.

  8

  I didn’t want to travel up north for any number of reasons. Mawker had warned me not to leave London, so I didn’t want to incur his wrath… nah, only kidding. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone for and it would mean that Melanie might go off the simmer for me. Also, I needed to get to Kara Geenan and her so-called brother – Phythian – before anybody else ended up like an entry at a blind butchers’ carving competition. I was pinning my hopes on this Phythian fucker, even though I had yet to be convinced that he actually existed.

  Cullen didn’t sit right with what had happened so far. Mawker had said he’d done a runner from Summerhead, a relatively low-security mental hospital that was based, coincidentally (I hoped), in the north-west of England, which was another reason to head up that way. But what did that mean? How many nutcases slipped their handcuffs and wandered off in search of a bit of fun? If it could happen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it could happen in Summerhead. So I didn’t want to go, but there seemed to be more reasons for me to go than there were keeping me here in the Smoke.

  Kara and her brother would be down here while I was up there, however, and although visiting Liverpool might give me some idea as to why they were in London, it wouldn’t provide me with a map to their front door. But, mainly, going up to Liverpool was also going home, and that was the grit in my Vaseline. It was like continually ripping a plaster from a cut only to find that it just isn’t healing.

  I hadn’t been back to the north-west since coming down to London in 2001. I realised, after buying the ticket, that more than anything else it was because getting out of the big city would be tantamount to marooning Sarah here, although there was no logic to suggest that this was where she actually was. Just because she went missing here didn’t mean she was still missing here. I forced myself to accept that this journey was something I was going to have to do. I thought it was marginally crucial in order to try to save my own life, though many might have disagreed. Listen, I instructed myself, it isn’t London where Sarah’s missing from; it’s somewhere inside you. And that place was always going to be with me, no matter where I went.

  It was getting on for late afternoon, but I didn’t want to go back to Maida Vale yet. I walked down Tottenham Court Road, past all the electrical goods shops with their displays of gadgets that were getting so small you were given a complimentary magnifying glass with every purchase. I had a half of lager at the French House on Dean Street, standing outside because the place was stuffed full of people with portfolios and surfer beards and mobile phones that played the theme tune from Coronation Street in an ironic way.

  Liptrott had been slaughtered, yet there were no signs of a struggle. I think I myself might have put up a bit of a fight rather than just stretch out on the bed and let it happen. That meant he must have known his murderer. Either that or Cullen, or whoever, was in the flat before Liptrott got home. I explored that avenue a little further and – as insane as it sounded because presumably the killer wouldn’t have known how long he would have to wait there, maybe hours – it tugged on my handle more than anything else. He possessed Grasshopper’s stealth; could walk on rice-paper without tearing it, but that didn’t tally with the clumsy approach of my guy in St John’s Way. So what did that mean? An off day, or two men involved?

  The other option, that Liptrott already knew him, surely couldn’t work. Why would Liptrott pretend to me that he was acting as go-between for Kara, if Kara and he both knew that Phythian wasn’t a MisPer? Unless I myself was the point of the whole thing, and they needed Liptrott to be offed because he might become my way in to their world. Liptrott couldn’t have realised that I was in that kind of danger. He was a crim, okay, but he wasn’t hardcore. Violence was to him what a steak pudding is to a vegan’s shopping list.

  If Kara and Cullen were from Liverpool, then it might make sense that they were in it simply to get me, although I couldn’t think of anybody who had held any grudges against me from my days as a trainee copper or, before that, as taxi driver shuttling clients along the East Lancs Road and the M62. Not grudges sufficient that they’d wanted me dead, at least.

  I decided it was time to go and check out my flat. A couple of days had passed since the burglary, and if anybody had been sitting outside in a surveillance car they’d have an arse like two pieces of frozen ham by now, as well as a severe dislike of coffee. Back on my road, I dawdled by the awning of the wine bar on the corner and gave the street the once over. A skip was sitting on the roadway, its tarpaulin cover failing to conceal a riot of broken office furniture, lumps of plaster and an enamel bath. The cars parked along the street were dark and apparently empty, but no, there was a scarred little Golf opposite my door, with a large shadow in the driving seat. I hung back a little and rubbed my mouth. A couple of days’ beard growth rasped like indecision made audible. Then I remembered, with some surprise, that I had a killing machine down the front of my jeans. As well as a gun. I palmed the Glock and edged down the blind side of the row of cars. The driver was kind of hunched over on his side, his head resting on the window. Maybe he was asleep.

  I opened the passenger door,
got in and pushed the barrel of the gun into his ’nads. I said, ‘What’s your fucking door policy on that, fat boy?’

  The bouncer sat up quick and straight, like a classroom pupil hoping to be picked to wipe the blackboard. His eyes were as wet and large as would be the wound in his groin if he didn’t start talking. I said as much.

  ‘Knocker sent me,’ he said. ‘He wanted me to beat some info out of you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Liptrott’s dead.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Knocker wants to know if you had anything to do with it.’

  I shook my head. ‘Do I look like a killer? I mean, do I? Christ, everybody wants to know if I had something to do with it.’

  The bouncer was looking at the gun nestling deep in his pods. ‘I didn’t know you had a gun,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I hate guns. So if you’re nice to me, I’ll put it away.’

  ‘I’m just doing my job.’

  ‘No,’ I said again. ‘Errol, isn’t it? Your job is to punch the spines out of people who try to get into Lava Java wearing trainers. Your job is to lift weights all day until you look like you put your jacket on but forgot to take the coat hanger out. Your job–’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he said, relaxing now that he knew I wasn’t the hard case I was making out. ‘Shoot me. You’ll be doing me a favour.’

  Just then I saw a shadow fall across the oriel window set into the top-floor landing where my flat is. There was a wink of light, a cigarette maybe, and then it was all back to normal.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked Errol, withdrawing the Glock from his sack and pushing it back into my waistband.

  ‘Off and on, about twenty-four hours. With piles.’

  ‘I’ll send them a Get Well card if you do me a favour.’

  ‘Why should I do anything for you, other than stave your face in?’

  I licked my lips. I could feel my mouth going dry, the way it always goes when violence is only minutes away.