by Tim Adler
Three hours later, Kate was collecting their suitcases from the baggage hall at Gatwick.
The taxi dropped her outside their block of flats. Struggling in through the front door with Paul's ashes and both suitcases, she caught her upstairs neighbour on his way out. She didn't think she'd ever said more than two words to the elderly gentleman, who was always so immaculately dressed. He lived on the ground floor with his dog and was, she had always assumed, a widower. He held the door open and, as she struggled past, she had the most peculiar feeling, as if somebody had walked over her grave.
The entrance door slammed shut and Kate paused in the entrance hall, wondering what had just spooked her. She had seen the man before somewhere. Of course you have, she told herself, he's your downstairs neighbour. No, somewhere he shouldn't have been, someplace else.
Closing the front door behind her, the first thing that struck her was the silence. So far she had managed to keep herself busy, signing forms and speaking to hospital staff. It gave her the illusion of movement – at least she was doing something. Now, though, alone in the stillness, everything reminded her of him. Paul making breakfast as they chatted about what they were doing that day, watching television together curled up on the sofa, and making love in the shower, his hands on her hips as she placed her palms on the tiles. She would never have him inside her again.
Kate dumped their carry-on luggage in the bedroom, unable to face unpacking it. His ashes she slid on top of the bookshelf in the sitting room. Their wedding photo was on the cupboard beside the fireplace, in a tortoiseshell frame. Her head was resting on Paul's shoulder and he was smiling. Colin, Paul's best man, had done the reading: "For now we see, through a glass darkly." Well, now she saw things as they bloody well were all right, oh yes.
Kate made herself a stiff gin and tonic and swallowed one of the Temazepam the hospital had prescribed for her. The first thing she needed to do was tell everybody what had happened. She sat down on the sofa, telephoned her mother and told her the dreadful news. "Oh my God, darling. And you had no idea something was on his mind?" Kate felt the solid wall of the painkiller take hold. By the time she hung up, Kate had promised to spend this coming weekend with her mum. No, she didn't want her to come and stay, she needed to be alone.
Kate felt restless, still wanting to make telephone calls.
Colin, Paul's second-in-command at work, was the next person she spoke to. It was Colin who had introduced them at her degree show, and she'd had the distinct impression he was showing her off as a prize to be won. He was quadriplegic and had been wheelchair-bound for the past twenty years – he'd had an accident on a university skiing trip, mistiming a jump that had left him almost paralysed from the neck down. When he woke up, he couldn't move his arms or legs. What he was, though, was a brilliant programmer, and he was the one who oversaw coding while Paul went out and hustled for business. Ha, what business? That was one of the reasons Paul had committed suicide, she told herself. Orders had pretty much dried up.
"Colin, I've got some bad news. Paul had an accident in Albania. I don't know how to put this. He's dead." She found herself laughing as she said this.
"What do you mean, he's dead?"
"I mean he fell from our top-floor balcony. He's dead, Colin. Dead." Her chin wobbled, and she could feel herself losing it again.
"Jesus Christ, Kate. Are you okay? Tell me what happened."
"You know we went to Tirana on Thursday night for his uncle's funeral. He'd been in a strange mood all day. Withdrawn. There was something on his mind, something he wasn't telling me. He got back from his uncle's wake, we were talking, and the next thing I knew, he'd fallen or jumped, I don't know which. Our room was on the seventh floor. There was no way he could have survived."
Colin waited before speaking again, his mathematical brain calculating all the possibilities.
"He jumped off the balcony?"
"It all happened so quickly. Why would he do something like that? Why would he leave us?"
"Did you have an argument? Did he leave a suicide note?"
"No, nothing like that."
"I know he was worried about the business, but this–"
"There's something else you should know. I was convinced there was somebody on our balcony, that Paul had surprised a burglar. It sounds stupid now, I know. The police arrested a man who worked in the hotel, but he didn't do it. He had an alibi to say he was watching a street parade. It was all in my mind. I thought I'd seen something in a photo I took on my iPhone, a trick of the light, the way the wind blew on the curtains."
She was gabbling, vomiting up everything that had happened.
"Good Lord. Do you want me to come over? You shouldn't be alone."
"I'm fine, Colin, really. I need to be on my own tonight, I don't know why."
"What about funeral arrangements? When will they fly Paul's body home?"
"He's already here. In fact, I'm looking at him." She laughed unnaturally and took a swig of her gin and tonic. "Albania's a Muslim country. His mother wanted him buried in the family plot where his uncle is, but I said no. I wanted him here. Paul always said that coming to England felt like coming home."
"Christ, Kate, I am so sorry." Colin paused. "What does this mean for the business?"
"Paul would have wanted you to carry on. You know the business made a big loss last year. The bank had called in its loan. I saw the letters. Paul couldn't think of a way out apart from selling up. There's some value left in the lease. But he didn't want to let everybody down."
Colin waited again for her to continue, and she noticed she had already finished her drink. It hadn't even touched the sides.
"What do you want me to tell everybody?"
"Just tell them the truth. I'll come into the office, explain everything."
"Paul dead. Jesus. You mean you saw it happen?"
There was nothing she could say to that. Yes, she thought, and I even caught it on camera.
They rang off, with Kate promising to speak to everybody first thing Tuesday. By now she felt utterly drained. It was all she could do to get up off the sofa and crawl into bed. There was still one more thing, though. Opening up her MacBook, she connected her iPhone and dragged her Albania photos onto the desktop. Double clicked on the folder. There was Paul, looking haunted with the curtains blowing behind him. Here were the photographs of the fireworks exploding over the hotel. More photographs of architectural features that had caught her eye. Looking closer, she noticed a man standing in shadow in a room across the square. His balcony faced theirs. He was in darkness, but he was clearly there, probably watching the fireworks along with everybody else. She kept going backwards. Kate wasn't quite sure what she was searching for, but whatever it was, she could feel it wriggling away, and she had to trap its tail between her fingers. Something was nagging at her. There. The photo of the café lit up at night, the waiter darting between tables and customers wrapped up against the cold. She zoomed in on the photo until it became almost abstract, a meaningless collage of pixels, zoomed out until the image returned.
There, seated at a café table, was her downstairs neighbour.
Chapter Eleven
Hashim always knew he was capable of murder. There was a side of himself he didn't like. He could become devoid of feeling for others. Unemotional. He knew what he was doing was wrong, but he went ahead and did it anyway, as if he couldn't control himself. It was like watching somebody else in a movie.
The Peckham gymnasium was at the top of a steep flight of steps off the street. Hashim wondered what the girl on reception saw as he came up the stairs. Did she see a murderer? Or did she just see a hollowed-out, mournful-looking man with a teardrop tattooed beneath one eye? The girl looked up from her gossip magazine. "I'm looking for Sammy," he said. "Is he in?" She told him to try the changing room.
A few Muscle Marys were straining with weights while Seventies disco thumped from the speakers. The place looked like a cross between a nightclub and a prison exercise yard.
Hashim remembered that clang of dropped weights so well. So many hours spent in the prison exercise yard when it was too stifling in the cells. Even the guards took pity on them sweltering in that oven with three other men. So they sat in the shade watching other prisoners lift weights in the searing heat.
An older man was standing over a younger man while he struggled with the bench press, spotting him in case he collapsed. "I wouldn't eat that muck she gives me. I'd rather eat here," the older man was saying as the young one agonised the weight up. Hashim's eyes flicked to the older man.
Men were padding about in towels in the changing room. No sign of Sammy. There was a sharp smell of bleach and chlorine, and Sammy's bucket and mop stood propped beside a door with a strip of electric white-blue light beneath it. So the vain little fucker was getting himself a suntan. Hashim tiptoed in. Ghostly bluish light seeped out from around the sunbed, and there was the whoosh of cooling fans above the powerful hum. Hashim pulled the coffin lid up without warning. Lying there in an absurdly tight pair of briefs, Sammy would've looked almost normal if his legs had been longer. Hashim suspected that one of his grandparents had been a dwarf. It took Sammy a moment to figure out what was going on, and he almost hit his head on the fluorescent tubes as he sat up.
"Çfarë qij?" he said. "Oh, it's you. You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack."
"Zogaj has another job for us."
"What, another delivery? That's two in one week."
"No, just one woman. Zogaj wants to meet her. We're to bring her to Tirana."
Sammy still had little brass cones stuck to his eyes. "What does Zogaj want her for?"
"Zogaj wants something from her. You know, they never tell us anything."
"If she doesn't want to come with us, can I force her?" There was a touch of wheeziness in his voice, as if the idea excited him.
"Only if we have to. Zogaj wants to interrogate her personally."
"How much?" Sammy asked, peeling the cones off.
"Five thousand euros upfront and another five thousand on delivery. That's ten thousand each."
"Zogaj must want her pretty bad. When do we start?"
"Tomorrow. Zogaj has told me where she lives. We're just to keep an eye on her and, when the time is right, snatch her. The thing is, there can't be any witnesses. We'll smuggle her out through the usual route."
"What if somebody does see us?"
Hashim shrugged, and Sammy grinned like a badly carved Halloween pumpkin.
"I'll need to get things," Hashim said, thinking of duct tape and a strong knife.
"What's the hurry? Now you're here, you might as well relax a bit. Get some sun."
"Sunbeds give you cancer."
"Have a swim, then. Use the steam room or the sauna."
"I don't have any trunks."
"Come with me."
Sammy climbed into his cleaning-staff outfit and Hashim followed him down the corridor. His office was really the laundry room, with folded towels piled high on the shelves. He rummaged in a plastic box and handed over a pair of Speedos.
"There, those should fit you."
"Have you got any heat with you?"
Sammy waddled over to a pile of towels and lifted one corner. Not for the first time, Hashim thought about how powerful his squat legs were and wondered if his insane rages came from all the steroids he skin-popped. There, bedded in-between the towels, was a Glock handgun.
"Stupid place to keep it," Hashim said. "Put it under the spare wheel in the van."
Hashim unlaced his workman's boots and hung his leather jacket and grey hoodie in the locker.
The swimming pool stank of chlorine, and the water was too warm as he dived in. Warm like blood. The soft life was getting to him, he thought, as the cloud of bubbles cleared and he came up to breathe. His head plunged down as he began a powerful crawl up to the far end. The water felt like a cleansing, an absolution for everything he had done. If indeed a believer sins, a black spot will appear on his heart. If he stops from his sin, and seeks forgiveness from it, his heart becomes clean again. But if he persists, it increases until it covers his heart. Was his heart rotten-black with cancer? He could picture it, shrivelled and fibrous with stumps for ventricles. The water was absolving him of his sins, washing them away, like that time–
Zogaj had told him to go and clean up the mess. His cousin had arranged a sit-down with the Petrela brothers, saying it was better to stop all the violence and grow the pie rather than all these fire-bombings and shootings. The government was putting pressure on the mayor to do something. Everybody knew he was on the take and that his officials were corrupt. It won't do any good, Zogaj said, the brothers are ignorant people.
Something must have gone wrong. Hashim was only one block away when Zogaj called him on his mobile: your cousin lost his temper and now there's a big mess you've got to clean up before the cops get there.
People were leaning out of their windows as he approached the garage. A fucking dog was howling inside.
Brick dust was still hanging in the air along with the smell of cordite. A bit of weak winter sun filtered through the grimy back window. You could see motes of it dancing, and that damn dog had been tied by a leash to the axle of a lorry and it just kept on howling – Hashim wished somebody would just shut it the fuck up. The two brothers were lying on the floor of the cold, dark garage. Or rather one of them was lying on his back with blood pooled round his head and a surprised look on his face. Blood dark as motor oil oozed across the concrete floor and slid thickly down the drain. The other brother had crawled up against a table as if trying to get away. Somebody shut up that damn dog. My God, he thought, if this is what he's capable of, God help us all when he really gets angry. It was the savagery of the attack that shocked him, like a dog that turns on you without warning. One day Hashim would have to put that dog down, he now knew that.
It was hard work getting rid of the bodies. You'd be surprised how much blood there is inside a human being. Eventually he had to use a hacksaw, and fed the body parts into an incinerator. As he watched the head through the observation window, the heat lifted up the corpse's hair and opened the older Petrela brother's eyes so he was staring right at him. That freaked Hashim out.
Hauling himself out of the water, Hashim walked back to the changing room, dripping. Oh yes, he was a bad man, he wasn't a nice person. Every moment was a fresh beginning, though, wasn't it? The man he'd spotted earlier with the moustache was watching from the Jacuzzi with his arms draped over the sides. The water foamed away. At the last moment, Hashim turned and slid in beside him. The water was so hot, dizzying in fact. Neither of them said anything, and Hashim luxuriated in the water jet massaging his back. Sure enough, he felt the other's man's hand brush his thigh. Blood roared in his head, and all he felt was this overwhelming lust. Why can't you control yourself, you mustn't give in, you mustn't.
The other man got out of the Jacuzzi and headed for the sauna. The message was unmistakable. Hashim waited for a moment to see if anybody was watching.
The older man was sitting in a corner wearing a towel. The wooden bench was almost unbearably hot, and Hashim kept on looking straight ahead. His throat had gone quite dry. The stones hissed sharply as he poured water over them, and a wave of heat fell across their backs. Sweat popped on his skin. He ran his hand along his tattooed forearm, wiping the sweat and tasting the salt on his forefinger. He was conscious of this other man's body so close to his, and wondered what it would be like to lick his chest and drop his hand to his balls. His lust was so overwhelming, he thought he was going to faint. The older man had dropped his towel and was now touching himself in a muzzy cloud of pubic hair. "Feels good," he said. "Want some?"
Monday
Chapter Twelve
In her dream, she saw a death's head looming through the net curtains, two black holes for eyes and a maw where the mouth should have been. "You'll never find who killed me," Paul's voice spoke clearly, his voice in her head.
Then she wo
ke up, with a sob, as if she had spent too long underwater. The dream faded and Kate was left alone where she had always been, back in their empty marital bed.
They said you couldn't die of grief, but this pain was unbearable. She kept her eyes closed, not wanting to face today.
What she did need to do, though, was pee. Wrapping a dressing gown around herself, she padded down the hall to the loo. When she'd finished, she went into the kitchen, switched on the radio and made herself a cup of instant coffee. They were out of the real stuff. As she spooned the coffee into a mug, a line by TS Eliot from her schoolgirl English lessons came back to her, the one about counting our lives out in coffee spoons. How many cups of coffee before she could join her husband?
Stop being so bloody morbid, she thought. Either she could fight this or give up. You told Colin that Paul would have wanted him to keep the business going, she said to herself. He wanted you to remarry as well, if anything happened to him. She wondered why Paul had even said that. Was it because he had a premonition of what he was going to do, that things were going to end badly?
Her iPhone calendar reminded her that she had an appointment that morning with an American woman who handled soft furnishings for one of the big US hotel chains. She had seen Kate's bedspreads and curtains for luxury hotels and wanted to know if she could make cheaper versions for the budget market. Big bucks if she could get into that. Ker-ching, Paul had said when she told him: America was the holy grail for any business. Kate cursed herself for not remembering to cancel the eleven o'clock appointment. Right now even the idea of dressing herself seemed impossible.