by Adam Creed
Karl fears that this is not the moment he will die. He fears the last breaths will be long and drawn out. As the white-hot line is drawn around his balls, he sees one last thing – a silver gleam, getting bigger and bigger in his sight. He tries to close his eyes, but fingers force one eye open and the blade comes impossibly big until it obscures all the light and touches him. As he waits for the pain he knows his heart does not beat when it should. You don’t hear it until it is gone. The blood inside him runs up against itself and a choir bellows out. He prays for it to cease.
*******
Staffe looks across at Josie and smiles. They are in the kitchen of the house in Kilburn that he has just finished renovating.
‘You’re not eating,’ she says, putting her knife and fork together on the empty plate.
‘I’d rather cook than eat.’
‘You’re a people pleaser,’ she laughs. ‘Who’d have thought it?’
‘Try telling that to Jadus Golding.’
‘Not pleasing our Jadus doesn’t make you a bad person.’
Staffe spears a scallop with his fork and runs it through the beurre blanc sauce.
She stops eating and takes a slug of wine, watching him. ‘You’ve got big hands,’ she says. ‘Big fingers.’
‘My fingers are too big and I’m too old,’ he says.
‘I like your fingers, Staffe.’
‘Do you want some more wine,’ he says, picking up the bottle, offering to pour.
‘I think I’ve had enough.’ She leans across and picks up her car keys from the middle of the table, spins them round on her index finger like a gunslinger with a revolver.
‘You can stay,’ he says. ‘It’s only early.’
‘You don’t mean that, and anyway…’
‘What?’
‘Just have a good holiday.’ She has a soft, smudged smile. ‘Sir.’
Staffe scrapes the plates into the bin, rinses them and when he hears the front door slam he goes through to the living room. He watches Josie skip down the steps and make her way towards the gap in the beech trees. Somehow, she must know he’s watching her go because she twiddles a wave with her fingers without looking, fixing her tights with the other hand, then slams the gate shut as she shouts at the kids to stop playing kerbie in the road.
*******
Tanya Ford can’t get out of the house quick enough. She did her citizenship homework the minute she got in and has been changing in and out of outfits ever since. The ‘look’ is half fairy-tale princess: half street-corner slut. As soon as the doorbell rings, she scampers downstairs and out, linking arms with her best friend and calling back to her mother ‘Don’t worry’ as she is told not to be late, to be careful.
‘I love you, Tan,’ calls her mother and Tanya wants to call back that she loves her, too. But she doesn’t, just twiddles her fingers and blows a kiss. Her friend giggles.
When they get to the corner of the road, Tanya folds the waistband of her skirt down, once, twice, meticulously. She applies her lipstick and starts texting, feeling the slow rush of love that’s in the air.
Guy Montefiore tips 5 per cent. He always tips 5 per cent. It brings the fare to twelve eighty-five and he waits for the change to come back through, asks for a receipt. The cabbie huffs and puffs, saying he can’t find a pen.
As he waits, Guy thinks about his daughter. Thomasina is fourteen going on nineteen and he worries about how she is getting on with her mother, picking up bad habits. He grimaces and exhales, blows the thought away.
His mobile phone signals that it has received a text message and he begins to palpitate. ‘Forget the receipt,’ he says as he opens the door and climbs out. ‘You should carry a pen. It’s a tool of your trade.’ He slams the door, harder than necessary. But her words appear on the screen and his fury subsides. He begins to compose a response. A smile comes to his face.
He wonders whether the summer will ever burn itself out. He prefers the shorter days of autumn and winter. The longer nights suit him – he doesn’t have to wait two, three hours after work before there’s the darkness to shield him. But the trouble with the long nights is that his loves are tucked up in bed, not out and about.
Not any old love. It’s got to be perfect. The way it never is for most people.
Guy knows her name and her movements, knows her favourite pop star and who her best friends are. He’s been watching so long now he can even guess what she’ll be wearing. Monday night, youth club night, dressing like a tart because that’s what her friends do. It’s not because she wants to be with a boy. She’s not like that. No, Tanya simply wants to belong, and soon she will. Soon, she will be loved and she will be able to love back. The first time.
Guy lets himself in the back door of the church hall, turning sideways and shuffling along between the rows of junk waiting to be collected. There is a dull light from the reinforced glass pane above the fire door but he can do this in the dark.
He passes the tiny kitchen and takes a deep breath, feels a swell in his loins. He presses the door to the stairs that go below and the sound of music comes up. The bass vibrates, buzzes up along his legs as he goes down into the dark, running his hand along the rough, unpainted bricks, feeling for the overalls. He takes them off the hook at the bottom of the stairs and undresses himself. He folds his clothes the best he can. They were, when all is said and done, made to touch him just so – at considerable expense.
Guy laments that Tanya has never, knowingly, seen him at his best, but feels a surge at the thought that soon – so very, very soon – that will change.
He makes his way towards the chinks of light that come through the gaps in the stage. As he goes, the music gets louder. He distills the sounds: a hundred teenagers dancing, giggling, scurrying, the deeper voice of a young alpha male as the song peters to an end, demanding what the next one should be. For a moment it is just the soft flesh of voices. Guy stops, mid-step, and holds his breath until the next song cranks up. He crouches down in the usual spot, stage left. It’s where the gap in the sections that make up the stage is greatest. It’s also where she stands. Thank God she’s such a creature of habit.
Guy presses his face to the painted wood and for the first time in twenty-three hours, looking up from just above the level of the dance floor, he sees her. She’s wearing his favourite skirt and a cut-off, silky top that is new. He should be annoyed with her. It shows too much.
Tanya’s legs are impossibly smooth and they have tanned to the colour of milky coffee. Her tummy has the tiniest pod of puppy fat, her hips haven’t quite spread wide yet. She pivots, hand pointing out at someone he can’t see in a gesture of ironic drama. Someone nudges her and her skirt swirls as she turns to see. He can see the finest down in the hollow of the small of her back.
His breathing is deeper, shorter, he feels the knot in the pit of his stomach tighten. Weak in the legs, he falls back on his haunches, lies all the way back for a moment and lets the music wash over him. He can smell the wood of the bare boards. In the dark, he pictures her dancing, her friends drifting away, slowly, one by one, until she’s all on her own.
*******
It takes Staffe fifteen minutes to pack: two T-shirts and two long-sleeved shirts; two pairs of shorts and a pair of Dockers. He’ll travel in his jeans and an old linen jacket. Eight pairs of boxers and socks and Douglass’s History of ETA. And he’s done. He checks his phone, sees the missed call from his sister, Marie, and he tries her but there’s no response. He leaves a message to say he’s going away and he hopes Harry is fine. He deliberates, says, ‘And you, too.’
Staffe first went to Bilbao twenty years ago, to identify what remained of his parents. His sister was off the rails and somewhere in the Far East so he was left to cope on his own. He made the arrangements to bring them back home. He gave up on university and as soon as his share of the proceeds of their estate came through, he bought a flat in South Ken, for cash. A year later, he took out a mortgage to buy another. Then the compensation came t
hrough. Funny, how you can measure the value of two people; put a price on what it might be worth to not have a full complement of parents.
In the ensuing months and years, young Staffe drank too much and made friends too readily, took recreational drugs too much and too often. He got up later and later – and sometimes not at all. And he charmed the birds down from the trees the way he always could – a gift that deserted him for only the briefest period of his mourning. And the lovers became part of his mourning, so an analyst had once told him. Gradually, after he joined the Force, he dropped his vices, one by one.
Three years ago, when he lost Jessop, his partner in the Force, Staffe went back to the Basque country to resume the process of finding whoever left that bomb in the seafront restaurant. Sylvie had left him, too, and he felt as if there was nothing but empty space all around him.
He swore to build up the evidence piece by piece. He would gain a conviction and he would gift the killer justice rather than retribution. In his dreams, he asks the killer to seek forgiveness and, on his parents’ behalf, he grants it. In his darkest moments, he cannot see a way to do this.
The renovated house smells of fresh plaster and varnished woodwork, new carpets, too. It is too big for him, far too much space. He calls Rosa but there is no response. He decides to go out anyway and makes his way upstairs for what has become a ritual. In the bathroom, he takes out his running gear from the Adidas bag and turns on the shower. The water jets down, hard on his scalp and shoulders; he takes the heat up a notch so it’s almost scalding him and he scrubs and scrubs with the soap. The smell of coal tar gets thicker and thicker, the steam gets more and more dense. This evening, he will run out to Kentish Town and through Islington into the City. Rosa lives in the Barbican. There is a chance, he thinks in more optimistic snatches, that she knows where he’s coming from.
Looking up at her place, it is plain that Rosa has company. Staffe’s lungs are bursting and he is dripping with sweat, happy to be at rest. He goes into the piazza and leans against a raised flower bed. He breathes deep and his chest burns. He runs his hand around his neck and feels the dirt coming away. As the evening comes slowly on, he thinks of Rosa, the first time.
Sylvie had been gone a couple of months and his partner, Jessop, had been shipped out to the Met. Staffe got an assault call – not really his bag, but he was in the area.
Rosa was in her flat, the one he is looking up at now. It was a neighbour who called but Rosa, crying, didn’t want to press charges. Staffe held her and said she didn’t have to and as she drew back her head to kiss him ‘thank you’, he saw her bruised eye up close. To this day, he doesn’t know why, but he held on to her, a hand on each hip. Her body felt so soft, even through her clothes. ‘Let me take you out,’ he said. ‘Help you forget this.’
‘I don’t think you know what I do,’ she said.
‘I think I do. And I don’t think I care,’ he said.
He took her out for dinner and afterwards they went to a place of his in Belsize Park. He told her she was like one of Goya’s women. Later, he had to explain it was young Goya. He showed her and it made them laugh. That first night, they listened to Miles Davis and Bessie Smith and he made her real hot chocolate and he held her and nothing happened. When she went to the bathroom, he rifled through her diary and clocked the name of the guy who was down for that evening. He wanted to go out and beat him to a pulp. But he didn’t.
‘You all right? You don’t look all right,’ she had said when she came back. ‘You look sad.’
‘Don’t I always?’ he had said.
‘Not to me.’ She pulled him towards her and began kissing him. He let her, for a while; then he said, ‘I love somebody.’
‘You deserve to,’ she said.
Three days later, Staffe found out where Rosa’s client worked and went through his police history. The man worked as a money broker and Staffe guessed his employers didn’t know what their young gun had done in his past. So he told them. He felt bad about it for as long as it took him to remember the bruises on Rosa’s face.
A middle-aged man comes out on to the deck in front of Rosa’s flat. He’ll have come straight from work – for a happy hour. Staffe makes his way up there, passes the man on the stairs. He smells expensive, has a kindly smile and a wedding ring. He knocks on Rosa’s door and her face lights up. She kisses him and ushers him in, and they talk, not much more – the way it has always been – and when he gets back to the renovated house in Kilburn, he draws the new curtains against the still bright mid-evening sun and lays back on his sofa, listening to the children playing in the street. He closes his eyes and incants a mantra that lulls him into sleep.
He dozes briefly and fitfully, tossing and turning through visions of Sohan Kelly and Jadus Golding – his family and gang with their smug threats. ‘We’ll kill you, Kelly. We’ll kill you, Wagstaffe!’
And he wakes to the telephone rattle and rubs his eyes. It is still light and he leans down, reaches for the old Bakelite phone – an SOC freebie that was never called as evidence. He could have returned it to its owner but the owner never made it back from intensive care. There was no next of kin.
‘Yes!’ he snaps.
‘Sir?’ says Pulford.
Staffe hears his DS anew – the voice sounding older, more grave than in the flesh.
‘It’s bad, sir. Bad.’ His breathing is short.
‘Bad?’ says Staffe.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Pulford is a graduate trainee, resented by practically all his colleagues, and even though Staffe can’t be sure he’ll last any kind of distance, he resists the temptation to hold a person’s intelligence against them. ‘What is it?’
‘I didn’t know whether I should call you.’
‘Well you did.’
‘I can refer it to Pennington.’
‘I said “what is it”!’
‘A murder, sir.’ Staffe pictures Pulford pacing, his ruddy cheeks gone pale, grey. ‘No. More an execution.’
‘Where?’
‘On the Limekiln estate.’
‘Put me through to Janine.’
‘You’re supposed to be…’
‘Just do it!’
Staffe imagines the walk to the scene of crime, up through a guard of honour of ten-to fourteen-year-olds taking time out from running crystal meth and crack. It’s the very bottom rung on the most rickety ladder. One or two will get to have the Subaru Impreza and drink Cristal, have someone else running bags for them. Most will end up using, going down the line, falling by the wayside for ever. It’s as easy as a slow, soft squeeze on the trigger of a gun that’s slipped into your hand by a man with a smile on his face.
As he waits to be put through he stands up, kicks the bed, forgetting his feet are bare. ‘Shit!’
‘What?’
‘Janine? You’re on the Limekiln?’ He thinks he can hear her swallow before she speaks.
‘Been here an hour or so. You’re supposed to be on holiday.’ There’s a quiver in her voice.
‘I’ll be there in quarter of an hour.’
Staffe washes his face and under his arms, then throws on a button-down shirt. He picks up his packed bag and feels himself switch on as the setting Kilburn sun spears into the hall through the stained-glass panel of the front door. It’s a Victorian house and the door is a perfect match. He got it years ago from a reclamation yard up in Southgate. He was with Sylvie when he bought it.
Staffe’s heart sags and he says ‘No’ out loud to himself. He can’t quite stop all the sadness. He wants to have been a better man. He shrugs, even though he’s alone. He’s been alone too long not to value himself as an audience.
He pulls the heavy front door closed behind him and wishes the kids weren’t still playing kerbie in the road. He thinks about telling them to watch themselves but says nothing. Sometimes your spirit is too frail to take casual profanities from the nine-year-old loved ones of your neighbours.
Round the
back, up the narrow lane that his house backs on to, he slips the big fat key into the big fat padlock that tries to ward off evil spirits from his lock-up. He takes two steps back, bringing the doors with him, looking at his two cars. It’s a night for the crap one. It’s almost always a night for the crap one.
There’s an ingrained pall of long-ago cigarettes in the old Peugeot and as he twists the ignition key, Staffe feels a burning yen for a long, slow, drag on a Rothmans. The diesel engine coughs up like a one-lung smoker. The radio comes on of its own accord and he turns it up a notch. Stravinsky, he thinks, and the violins scratch away over the long slow swoon of brass and wind. He thinks it’s the Firebird. He doesn’t mind Stravinsky but he wishes it was Grieg. Something smoother for a night like this. He pictures himself on a Basque waterfront. All alone, watching the Atlantic swell.
Janine is outside the victim’s flat when Staffe gets to the Limekiln. The victim is Karl Colquhoun: thirty-six years old with two conditional discharges. Round here, that makes him an angel.
As Staffe approaches Janine, walking along the decked, concrete access, it looks as if she might be taking in the sunset, leaning on the rusted railing and peering out over the quadrangle of the Limekiln. The crime-scene tape is out: more a curtain going up on a new drama than a shield to keep folk away. The people have come, hanging around in groups. It’s like a bear pit and Staffe thinks what a sick joke it is that it takes something like this to bring a community together.
Staffe leans out and calls down to the uniformed officers to disperse the growing crowd. The officers shrug. They move towards the cluster of small groups and Staffe waits for a reaction, half expecting something to flare. But it doesn’t. One or two women move forward, out of the groups and up to the officers. They start talking, gesturing up to the fifth floor, snarling.
‘What the hell’s going on, Janine?’