I was about to go back to the car when I noticed something attached to another tree, a sheet of white paper, about twenty feet or so deeper into the park. Before I reached it, I knew it was a photocopy of a picture. It was one of the copies that the woman at Stodge had taken of me the other night. He’d been there all along, drinking champagne with the swingers, watching me flap around looking for him. That knowledge turned my balls to ice and my breath came quicker, misting around me like ghosts trying to rub me out of existence.
I took the picture down and there was a photograph Pritt-Sticked to the back of it, along with a message: Hello again.
I didn’t need to look at the date stamp on the photo to know it was freshly developed. It was a colour picture taken from an upper-floor window, showing a large road filled with semi-detached houses. There were cars in some of the driveways and purple wheelie bins parked out on the road waiting to be emptied.
I should have gone straight to the police with it, but my prints were all over it now, and anyway, the police were on my shit list. I can persuade myself pretty quickly about some things, but this was too personal now. This was too much me and him.
I broke down for a little while back at the car. I lost it a bit. I couldn’t think of the dead girls without thinking of my own and I hoped if Sarah had suffered at all, that it hadn’t lasted for long. I called Melanie at her home and she answered me breathlessly. She’d just got back from playing badminton and she was about to jump in the shower. I imagined her naked, smiling at me down the phone, her lithe little body hot from exercise. I almost blurted out that I loved her. Need was rising in me so quickly that I didn’t know how to begin to identify it. Instead, I said I was hoping to see her again very soon.
‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Hey, listen, I’m going to have to go away for a little while, to Devon. My dad’s not well. My mobile might not be up to it – the signal out there is pretty weak – but you can try to call me if you want to.’
If I want to.
‘What about Mengele?’ I asked.
‘I can either take him with me, or get Fiona to look after him, from the surgery. She’s good with cats.’
‘If I’d known that, I’d have dragged you up here with me.’
‘Aw, that’s sweet. If I’d have known that, I might have let you.’
‘This Fiona,’ I said, ‘is she as good as you?’
‘In every respect.’
‘Not every respect,’ I said.
She said, ‘Hurry home, Joel.’
I switched off the phone with a feeling that we’d just made a quantum jump forward. Our conversation had really contained nothing more than the usual jousting we got up to, but it had been underscored with a faint line of desperation. Two hundred miles was drawing it all to the surface. I wanted her; there: I’d admitted it to myself at last. No more stepping back from the line, but time to stride over it.
‘I want you. Melanie, I want you.’ Christ, that sounded good.
I noodled about the roads for a while, driving without any destination in mind, just trying to put Melanie in a warm safe place of my mind while I loosened up the rest of the dross that was stopping me from thinking clearly. Eventually I found a pub. I parked and went inside. It was one of those places where the bar staff give you your change on a little saucer, in the hope that you might leave a tip. I ordered a pint and a bag of nuts. Above me, on a separate deck, people, with kids mostly, were having their dinner. I checked out the menu: simple stuff – pies, burgers, fish and chips – at far from simple prices. Fucking complex prices. Everybody was drinking bottles of Bud or bottles of Breezer. I sat in a corner with my drink and watched the staff take the meaning of apathy to a new level.
The photograph felt warm between my fingers. I imagined him holding it, then pinning it to the post on a misty morning, knowing that eventually I would get around to finding it. I wondered how he felt now. I wondered if he was getting anxious, waiting for me to find him – desperate to work his inhuman magic on me. He was giving himself to me either because he was impatient and wanted to finish things, or because he thought I was too thick to track him down without a few assists.
The wheelie bins. The cars. The houses. I spotted a ginger cat on a wall, now that I was relaxed and had more time to study the full picture. A City FM sticker in a bedroom window. At the bottom left of the photograph, almost cut out of the picture, was a road sign, but I couldn’t make it out. The sign was encrusted with filth and years of exhaust fumes, graffiti filling in any gaps. I took out my Swiss Army knife and, conscious that I looked the kind of saddo twat I always promised myself I would avoid becoming, I picked out its tiny magnifying glass and held the photograph up to the light. My face burned as a couple of sweet-looking girls turned my way and laughed out loud. I was a pair of tweezers and a stamp album away from becoming an Untouchable – one level up from a leper, or a serial killer.
…IE AVENUE L9.
How hard could it be? I put the knife away and took out my A-Z.
‘What else have you got in there, mate?’ A voice carried to me from the next table, where a couple of blokes were fighting over a woman in an Abercrombie top. ‘A bleeding flask and sandwiches?’
He had that kind of seriously overhanging jut of forehead that screams of an IQ so low you could use it to scoop up worm shit. ‘No,’ I said, speaking slowly so that he wouldn’t have to move his lips to follow me, ‘but I’ve got something for you.’
I reached into my pocket and dug around for a while. Then I pulled out my fingers in the shape of a V and flourished them at him. The girl shrieked. I went back to my map and flipped to the pages containing Allerton, while he tried to engage me with some more of his gentle Scouse wit. I spent another thirty minutes and the best part of a tenner on another pint and a bowl of chips before I found what I was looking for.
I got myself outside and slid behind the wheel of the rental car, started her up. And then I was thinking about Rebecca. Not abstract thoughts of the warmth and humour that had cocooned us in the years after we met, but the blunt edge of her death, recalled in dirty, bleached detail. The claws of that death dug into my shoulders from time to time, but I rarely looked up to scrutinise the face of what occasionally had come home to roost. Now I did. Every so often, you have to, to remind you of who you are, where you came from and, grim knowledge though it maybe is sometimes, where you’re heading. I looked up into its unblinking black eyes and it placed me back in the Saab when the car was a little younger, its engine sound a little smoother and sexier. I’d been out all day, but had called Becs at lunchtime to find out if I needed to bring anything home for dinner.
‘Grab some steaks,’ she had said. ‘Sarah’s at the school disco. We’ll listen to some music, and you can try out some moves on me.’
On the seat next to me was a bag of CDs from HMV. As usual, I’d shelled out on too many – there was a Stina Nordenstam album, I remember, and a Jeff Buckley live in concert, a couple of old Pixies albums that had seen me through my college days and which I thought I now needed in the more up-to-date format, some early Simple Minds before they wanted to conquer America. Some Curve, because I liked their barely controlled hysteria. Other stuff, too. And to make me feel less guilty about indulging in such a blow-out, I’d bought Becs a CD, too. Zbigniew Preisner’s ‘Requiem for my Friend’, because she loved the Three Colours trilogy, and I felt it was a thoughtful present, something to distract her from my featherweight wallet, sure, but something soothing we could both listen to with the lights out.
In the end, it was just me listening to it with the lights out. Because, when I got home, the front door was off its hinges and someone had painted the hallway radiator red. On one corner of it was a pulpy mass of bone, tissue and hair. Splashes of blood were up the wall and across the hallway carpet. I followed the smears of blood into the living room, which smelled of spilled whisky and cigar smoke. Whoever had killed Rebecca had thrown her on to the sofa. Her breasts were exposed, scooped out of her bra. T
hey were latticed with slashes. Her knickers were torn and still clinging to her left ankle. There was blood on them too. There was blood everywhere. Her head had a great pile of gore dangling from it. I approached her, thinking how I shouldn’t be likening my wife to a Portuguese Man-of-fucking-War.
I stood and looked down at my wife, the bag of steak growing warm in my fist. Whoever had killed Rebecca had stubbed his cigar out in her eye sockets.
* * *
Brodie Avenue was a large thoroughfare that bisected Allerton, so large that I had completely missed it as I scoured the tiny surrounding roads. By the time I got there, it was turning dark and I was shaking, so it took longer than I was expecting to match the buildings in the photograph with those on the street. Maybe it was because the cat had fucked off. More likely it was because I couldn’t focus properly, with my memories burning up what was left of my mind.
But at last, I had it. Behind me, above a row of shops, was the flat where, presumably, this guy Phythian had lived, or still lived, when he wasn’t trying to put holes in me during his trips down to the capital.
I judged the window as being one of two immediately above a hairdresser and a Chinese takeaway respectively. When I tried the bell to the flat, there was no answer, which was no huge surprise. I tested the door’s strength by leaning against it with my backside, while I pretended to do up my shoe. It rattled in its frame, about as secure as a spun-sugar nappy. I waited for a couple of cars to drive by, and an old man to come out of the Chinese with his bag of chicken chow mein, and then I slipped the lock with a credit card.
I smelled it straight away. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s only one thing in the world that makes a smell like it. Death doesn’t wear perfume.
I waited on the stairwell, holding my breath, listening for sounds of occupancy. But I wasn’t really, since I knew the place was empty. I was just putting off something that I knew was going to slowly unveil itself in my dreams for the rest of my life. It wasn’t as if it would be alone in there.
Up the stairs, weary as a climber making his push for the summit of Everest. The carpet’s pattern was like an object lesson in vomit. I had to retrieve my handkerchief from my pocket as I reached the landing. Light from the main road spilled through the window, thought turned into something granular and uncertain by the net curtains.
How could the smell have gone unnoticed? But then a harsh blast of garlic and onions and sesame oil shot past me from the kitchens downstairs, and I understood. I inched forward to the room at the front of the flat and stopped when I saw, through the crack in the half-closed door, a figure standing very still in the centre of it. Its face was edged with light, wet light as greasy-looking as a woman wearing too much slap. There was no point in saying anything, because whoever it was, she was long past hearing me.
I got into the room and closed the curtains. When I threw the light switch, I didn’t look directly at her; instead I took my time, at first concentrating on the shadow that she cast. At least it’s not summer, I told myself, more times than was necessary. There was something about her shadow that just wasn’t right, but I was too pumped up to understand. Until I looked at her directly. I took in what was left of her for maybe a second, if that, then I turned off the light and sat in an armchair, just me and her in the darkness. Me and her and the ghosts of violence thickening in my mind.
15
I can’t say for sure whose head it is,’ I said, ‘but I think it might be Kara Geenan’s, the real Kara Geenan, not the psycho I’m trying to find. Or else Georgina Millen’s, the girl they found on Otterspool Road five years ago.’
But for a second in there I’d even convinced myself it was Sarah – I’d wanted it to have been Sarah – as crazy and unlikely as that would have been. I didn’t want to consider how close I had come to punching that failed face in, once I was sure that it was not my daughter. Her mouth had carried enough of a smile to make me feel she was mocking me. It was a pinched smile, the kind of smile you might see on an old dear as she fends off a tramp begging for coppers. The thin reek of preservative fluid almost shut out the smell of decay.
‘You have to give me the address, Joel,’ Ian Mawker was saying. In the background I could hear the skitter of nails against a keyboard, the voice of someone asking who had ordered the coffee without. I could also hear the hunger in Mawker’s voice. He was too long without a big collar, and he was going to be all over this like snot on a kid’s blanket.
‘Ian,’ I said, ‘I need you to give me some space.’
‘We’ll fuck you over in more ways than you can imagine, if you keep this back any longer.’
But that was going to happen anyway, once the smoke had cleared. I was now so deep in shit, I needed a snorkel. It didn’t matter what I did any more, since Mawker and the rest were going to use my bollocks for catapult practice no matter what choice I made now.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just do me a favour, then. Have someone watching Melanie Henriksen’s house for me.’
‘Who?’
‘Woman friend of mine. She’s away at the moment, but she’ll be back, maybe in a couple of days. I’d feel better if you could keep an eye on her.’
‘All right,’ Mawker said wearily. ‘What’s the address?’
I gave her Melanie’s details, and he sighed again. ‘No, fuckwit, the body. Where’s the fucking body?’
After that, I put the phone down and found that I was rubbing my other hand over and over against the side of my jeans. It was getting late as I dumped the car back at the rental place and posted the keys through the door. I had forty minutes to kill before the train was due to depart, so I killed them – and a couple of million brain cells – in the bar on the station concourse, along with a few men in suits who were drinking as though programmed to do so by a hacker who only knew a code that contained the word Grolsch. The beer on its own wouldn’t take away the shakes, so I conscripted a double vodka to help out.
She was gone from the neck down, her head rammed on to a fence post that had been secured in the centre of the room by a porridge of mortar and blood. I had tried to find the rest of her but there was nothing else in the bedsit bar a raft of unsigned Mother’s Day cards arranged on every available surface. I didn’t look too hard, though, it has to be said.
The fucker had applied lipstick and mascara to the face, but the make-up wasn’t staying where it ought to. There was the heavy, chemical smell of embalming fluid or varnish, or both. She looked like a clown in a steam room. Now I think of it, although she was grinning, she looked sad. Sadder than sad.
* * *
There were a couple of other drunks on the train with me when we got underway, half an hour late because the train driver had called in sick. Yeah, right. He was plum deep in his missus, if he had any sense. Nobody in their right mind wants to ride the last train back to London. Well, nobody except me, because I’d had my fill of Liverpool. Any shred of hope I’d clung to that it might fill my heart with love and warmth from fondly-remembered days of growing up there had evaporated like dog piss off a hot radiator.
I’d begged the barman to sell me a couple of miniatures before leaving the pub. I sucked on them now as the train eased away from the platform, my fellow drunks eyeing me enviously; the nervous, sober passengers wishing all these pissheads would fall asleep or that they themselves had had the common sense and decency to get tanked up beforehand, too.
I drifted in and out of sleep all the way back to London. I dreamed a little: foggy, confused dreams powered by alcohol, in which I had been crushed into the corner of a room in a bleak Liverpool bedsit. The only light came from the pulse of a neon sign through a naked window, sickly yellow blows that lit up thousands of masks dangling from the ceiling on differing lengths of string. You couldn’t have moved in that room because of them. The only problem was that the masks were still attached to the faces they were trying to conceal. The linoleum was tigered with blood. All I could hear was the patter as red rain fell from the masks on to
the floor. I couldn’t look away, because my eyelids had been clipped off, or else stapled to my forehead. I felt as though my eyes were bulging in their effort to see the masks, to take in every grain of detail; and that if I didn’t, mine would be the next face up there, spinning for ever along with the others, waiting for something unspeakable to come and try it on for size.
I woke up with Sarah’s name vying for space with the bile and spittle in my mouth. We had come to a stop ten miles shy of Euston, and it was gone one-fifteen in the morning. I’d been on that train for nearly four and a half hours. Wind buffeted the carriages, making them lurch. Beyond the window, darkness spread like an infection. A woman in the seat behind me said ‘He’ll not have waited for us. We’ll have to take a cab, and what then?’
Eventually the driver felt like sharing the bad news with us. There had been a fight on a platform at Euston, a big one, and someone had been pushed under a train. All incoming passengers were being diverted to St Pancras. Naturally, it was going to take time for this to happen. Sleep pulled me down again.
A cold morning as autumn dwindled, frost making the streets seem clean. The newly laid carpet in the hallway and living room still had that slightly rubbery smell. The radiator had been cleaned, the old paint scraped off it. I was considering taking it off the wall and throwing it away, but I was scared that there would still be blood that I had missed on the wall behind it.
I called upstairs to Sarah and asked her what she wanted for her breakfast. No reply.
The sofa in the living room was gone, chopped up and burnt to cinders in the garden, replaced by wooden chairs until I got round to buying something new. I’d taken down all the pictures of Becs because I couldn’t hack it, walking into the house every day to have her looking at me and to find myself thinking her eyes aren’t brown; they’re black and full of ash.
Dust and Desire Page 18