by Mark Morris
I reached the French windows without mishap and felt for the lock. As soon as I had it I slotted in the key and turned it with a rusty creak. I pushed the metal handle down and the door opened easily. A couple of seconds later I was inside.
The room I was standing in smelled of dry old carpets and furniture polish. I couldn’t see much. There seemed to be lots of empty floor space, some items of furniture – possibly armchairs – over to my right, flanking what I guessed was probably a fireplace and mantelpiece, and something long and flat-topped – a bureau or a sideboard – against the wall to my left. Directly opposite the French windows the wall looked extra-dark and oddly uneven, which puzzled me for a second before I realised it was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Somewhere in the building I could hear a clock ticking, and there were the usual tiny creaks you get in any old house as the structure settles and shifts. But apart from that, nothing. Right at that moment it was hard to believe I was in the middle of one of the busiest cities in the world.
Leaving the French windows ajar, I made my way across to what I guessed was the sideboard on my left. Clover had told me that this was where the old man kept the obsidian heart, on a little velvet stand beneath a glass dome. As I approached it, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what I’d do if the old man had moved the heart. It was possible, especially considering that people had been offering him pots of money for it. What if he’d put it in a safe, or even a safety deposit box in the bank? Would email man blame me if I couldn’t fulfil the task through no fault of my own? More to the point, would he carry out his threat to harm Kate?
My anxiety lasted all of three seconds. I was within a couple of steps of the sideboard when I made out the gleam and vague shape of a glass dome. I stepped closer, trying to identify what was beneath it. All I could see was a fuzzy black blob, which could have been anything. I reached out with both hands and carefully lifted the dome aside. Despite what Clover had said I half-expected an alarm to go off, but nothing happened.
Although it was still too dark to see clearly, I could now tell that the object was roundish and gleaming dully. I reached out and picked it up, lifting it from the plinth it had been resting on. It was heavy for its size and sat snugly in my palm like a slightly misshapen egg. It had to be what I’d come for, but I tugged the glove off my left hand with my teeth so that I could touch it with my fingertips to make sure. I was thinking that if the old man was worried someone might try to steal the heart, he could have put a decoy here. I felt like a blind man reading Braille as I ran my fingers over the object’s smooth, cool surface. I tried to picture what a human heart looked like, with its valves and veins and bulges. From what I could tell this was a pretty accurate representation.
Satisfied that I’d got what I came for, I put the glove back on, and was about to zip the heart into my jacket pocket when I heard the creak of a floorboard behind me. I spun round, and a shape rushed at me out of the darkness. Immediately I realised someone must have been sitting in one of the armchairs by the fire, hidden in the shadows, the whole time I’d been here. I could just make out a thin, stooped figure waving something above its head – a walking stick or a cane. As I turned to confront it, the figure let out a shrill, ragged screech. Then it brought the cane sweeping down towards me.
I jumped to the side and the cane smashed down on the sideboard – right on to the glass dome, shattering it to pieces. From the way he moved I could tell my attacker was a frail old man, so guessed it must be McCallum. As glass flew everywhere, McCallum gave a grunt and the cane flew out of his hand. I heard it go slithering and clattering away even as I was turning towards the open French windows. Next thing I knew the old man had thrown himself at me and was clinging on like a giant spider. He wrapped his thin limbs around me, digging his bony fingers into my arm and back. I tried to shake him off, but he clung on tenaciously, hoisting himself up and curling his legs around mine.
‘Give it back!’ he screeched into my ear. ‘Give it back!’
His chin was digging into my shoulder blade. I struggled with him, trying even harder to push him off. But he just tightened his grip, like that bloody face-hugger thing in Alien.
‘Please… get off…’ I gasped.
‘Give it back!’ he screeched again.
I didn’t want to hurt him, but I had to get him off me. I could smell his stinking breath, like sour milk and rotting fish. Despite his strength, his body felt wrong, twisted and sinewy, the skin too thin, the bones too sharp. The easiest thing would have been to give him back his property and leg it out of there, but I couldn’t do that, not with Kate’s life at stake.
Still holding the heart in my hand, I brought my arm round, intending to give him a little bash on the head with it, just enough to make him loosen his grip. But something happened. As the heart made contact with his skull, there was a sort of zing noise, and then a horrible gristly crunch. Next thing I knew something hot and wet was splattering the side of my face and McCallum’s suddenly limp body was falling away from me, tumbling to the floor.
For a few seconds I stood, panting and shaking, not knowing what the fuck had happened.
‘Mr McCallum?’ I said. ‘Mr McCallum?’
He didn’t answer, didn’t move. He just lay there, a black heap on the carpet.
I hesitated for a couple of seconds. The easiest thing would have been to run off and leave him to it, but I had to see what had happened, had to check whether he was okay. So I walked to the far corner of the room to where I could just make out what looked like a doorway to the left of the fireplace and felt around on the wall until I found a light switch.
After the darkness the light was so bright that for a moment I couldn’t see anything. I screwed my eyes up tight, trying to squint through the glare. I imagined neighbours swarming to the house, attracted to the light like moths. I wondered how visible I was through the French windows. More to the point, I wondered how visible the old man was, lying motionless on the carpet.
Probably sooner than it seemed, the glare faded enough for me to open my eyes. I blinked a couple of times, then looked down at the old man.
My guts lurched. The first thing I saw was the halo of blood fanning out around his head. I stepped closer and saw his open eyes, already glazing over. Above his eyes was a neat round hole, which was where the blood was coming from. It looked like the sort of hole an apple corer would make in a piece of fruit.
How the fuck had that happened? I’d only tapped him.
I looked down at the obsidian heart in my gloved hand.
To my amazement a black, vicious-looking spike, about the length and thickness of my index finger, was sticking up out of the middle of it. I stared at it stupidly. That hadn’t been there when I’d run my fingertips over its surface. My first thought was that it must have sprung up out of a hidden compartment, like a flick-knife blade, but I couldn’t see anywhere it might have come from. Besides, it looked too long to fit inside the object in my hand. What was happening here?
I nearly cried out and dropped the heart when the spike suddenly retracted. It was like… how can I describe it? Like when you touch the eye stalk of a snail and it draws it back into its body. One second the spike was there, the next it had been… absorbed. I thought I was going mad. My brain was trying to tell me I was holding something alive, but my eyes were telling me that it was nothing but a human heart carved out of hard, black, shiny stone.
If it hadn’t been for Kate, I would have thrown the heart across the room and run like hell. It was only the thought of what would happen to her if I fucked this up that enabled me to keep my head together. I took another look at McCallum’s body, and saw for the first time just how withered and twisted he was. He looked like an ancient, dried-out vampire who had finally succumbed to a stake through the heart or a blast of sunlight. I walked back across the room and turned out the light before dropping the heart into my jacket pocket and zipping it up. I felt nervous carrying the heart, as if it was a vicious animal that was currently asleep,
but which might wake up at any moment. As soon as my eyes had readjusted to the darkness and I could make out the layout of the room, I walked across to the French windows, giving McCallum’s body a wide berth, and let myself out into the garden, locking up behind me. All I wanted to do was run, get to the hotel as quickly as possible and offload the thing in my pocket. Little did I know at that moment what I had set in motion, and what fate had in store for me.
TEN
ABATTOIR
I’m not the sort of person normally given to panic. Then again, I’m not the sort of person normally given to stabbing old men through the cranium and killing them stone dead. It wasn’t until I had retraced my steps across the garden and reached the gate that the full impact of what had happened hit me. For the second time that day I started to shake and the strength went out of my legs. I staggered over to the hedge, squatted down and threw up.
For a minute or so afterwards I kept going hot and cold, shivering like I’d come down with a fever. For Kate’s sake I knew I had to get myself together. I pulled off one of the gloves and brought my hand up to wipe the sweat from my forehead, and that was when I felt the stickiness on my face and neck and remembered how I’d been spattered by McCallum’s blood as the spike had gone into his brain.
It was the shock of this, more than anything else, which brought me back to my senses. What would have happened if I had gone out on to the high street with blood all over me? There might have been some parts of London where no one would have batted an eyelid, but Kensington was not one of them. I had to think this through, cover my tracks – both for Kate’s sake and my own.
Pulling a handkerchief from my pocket, I used it to wipe off as much of the blood as possible. I could have done with checking myself in a mirror, but there was no way I was going back into McCallum’s house to search for one. I wondered how much forensic evidence I’d left at the scene – footprints, hairs – but knew it was pointless worrying about things I could do nothing about. I was certain I had left no fingerprints, which was something at least.
Unsure whether you could get DNA from someone’s puke, I kicked soil over mine just in case, burying all traces. The last thing I did before opening the gate and stepping out on to the pavement was take off the baseball cap Clover had lent me and stuff it into my pocket along with my bloodied handkerchief. I might be more recognisable without the cap, but I was more suspicious-looking (and therefore more memorable) wearing it. Plus there might have been some of the old man’s blood on it, which someone might remember later if they saw a news report about his murder.
Hoping I wouldn’t walk smack into someone exercising their dog or on their way back from the pub, I took a deep breath, then pulled open the gate. I stepped smartly on to the pavement, tugged the gate shut behind me and began to walk away from the scene of the crime. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to run, but I kept to a steady pace. It took a real effort to keep looking ahead instead of glancing around, but somehow I managed it.
Fortunately the street was empty, though that didn’t mean there might not have been someone looking out of a nearby window. Again, though, there was nothing much I could do about it. I would just have to face that problem if and when it arose. By then, at least, I hoped to have fulfilled my part of the bargain and done enough to secure Kate’s release. At that moment nothing else mattered.
I walked as far as Campden Hill Road, where I spotted an empty bus shelter. Stepping into it, I sat on one of the plastic flip-up seats. Even though I hadn’t been running I was sweating and panting with tension. I put my head back against the Perspex wall and tried to will myself to calm down, but my heart was going like crazy. Eventually I took the A–Z out of my pocket, gripping it tightly in both hands in an effort to stop them from shaking. Instead of walking back down towards the high street, where even at this hour there would be people around, I decided to skirt around the edge of Holland Park and head north to Notting Hill.
I kept away from the high-population areas around Holland Park and Notting Hill Gate tubes, and called a cab from a street off Ladbroke Grove. When it arrived I ducked into the back and told the driver to take me to Dean Street, which ran parallel to Frith Street. The driver was middle-aged, Asian, jowly and unshaven. He glanced at me once disinterestedly in his mirror, then nodded.
Luckily he wasn’t the chatty type, and apart from constant pick-up requests over the tinny radio from a woman with an Essex accent the journey passed in silence. By the time we arrived in Dean Street it was after 1 a.m., and I was feeling a bit more together. I paid my fare, giving the driver a decent tip, but not one so big that he’d remember it, and looked around, wondering how to kill the next fifty minutes.
Incognito was only a few minutes’ walk away, but I couldn’t face the thought of explaining to Clover what had happened. In any case, I was reluctant to deviate from the plan; the last thing I wanted was to do anything that would give email man a reason to get twitchy. I walked up Dean Street and spotted an all-night café across the road beneath an overhang of darkened offices. It looked like a dive, but that was fine. The grottier the clientele, the less I’d stand out.
The first thing I did when I stepped through the door was to duck into the toilets. I hoped there would be a mirror on the wall, and there was – part of one at least, in the form of a jagged triangle clinging to a single screw. I checked myself out, and noticed a couple of smears of now mostly-dried blood just under my jaw line, which I’d missed. After cleaning myself up with a wet paper hand towel and flushing away the evidence, I went back out into the café and ordered tea and toast.
The tea was pantile-red and the toast soggy and hard to stomach, but I stolidly worked my way through it. I sat at a corner table furthest from the door, my back to a transparent display case, where cheese and ham pasties, slices of limp pizza and greasy-looking doughnuts offered themselves to the hungry and desperate. Over the heads of the few other customers – a pair of bleary-looking students and a brown-toothed old woman in a filthy headscarf – I watched the comings and goings in the street outside. Already what had happened an hour before was starting to seem unreal, like a vivid nightmare that it had taken me a while to shake myself out of.
Ironically, however, it was then – just as I was feeling a little calmer, and the incident was turning dream-like in my head – that the brutal reality of what I’d done suddenly side-swiped me. I realised, as if for the first time, that I was now a murderer, and that nothing I could do would ever change that. Whether I had meant it or not, I had ended the life of a man who had been on this planet for eighty or ninety years, a man who had been well into his fifties when I was born. And what made it even worse was that this man – Barnaby McCallum – had, from all accounts, lived a life of colour and variety and excitement; he had taken risks and grasped opportunities and worked hard for his achievements. Surely, I thought, such a man deserved to die peacefully in bed surrounded by his family and friends? And yet, thanks to me, his flame had been abruptly and brutally snuffed out, and he was now lying all alone on a cold, hard floor in a pool of his congealing blood.
The thought made my gorge rise and I lowered my head, breathing hard in an effort to stop my tea and toast from making a re-appearance. I couldn’t believe how, in the space of a couple of days, my life had turned to shit. Maybe email man would let Kate go, and maybe I hadn’t left enough evidence at the scene for the cops to catch me, but at that moment it felt like the walls were closing in. Eventually my stomach settled and I slowly raised my head – only to see a police car slowing to a stop at the kerb outside.
My heart lurched, and I almost dived under the table, before realising that the car wasn’t stopping, but was simply slowing down as a result of the natural ebb and flow of the London traffic. Logically I knew that even if I had left evidence at the murder scene, there was no way the police would get to me this quickly.
Not unless I had been set up.
Thinking about that, I suddenly wondered why the old man had been sitt
ing in the dark. It was almost as if he’d been expecting me to break in. Had he had a tip-off that I was coming? Or had he just been paranoid since being offered a quarter of a million for the heart? In which case, why hadn’t he moved it to a more secure place?
As before, my mind was full of questions. Had McCallum known what the heart was capable of? And what about the people who wanted to get their hands on it? Did they know? Then again, what was it capable of – apart, obviously, from what I had seen it do? Was it a weapon or…
I couldn’t think what else the heart might be apart from a weapon, and to be honest I didn’t want to ponder it too much. The thing gave me the creeps, and the sooner I was able to hand it over and get it out of my life, the better.
The clock on the wall said 1.41. I watched the minute hand creeping round until it got to 1.50 and then I stood up. Walking to Frith Street, I half-expected to be intercepted or apprehended, but less than five minutes later I was standing outside the Royal Gloucester Hotel.
Despite its name it wasn’t that grand. But neither was it a dump. In fact, it was pretty nondescript, which I suppose made it ideal for an illegal transaction. I entered through a set of revolving doors and found myself in a lobby with a spinach-green carpet. The reception desk to my left was dark, gleaming wood and the wallpaper was a lighter shade of brown imprinted with an over-fussy pattern of tangled leaves. A couple of sprawling, over-large pot plants completed the impression that I had walked into a building that wanted to be a forest. I spotted a set of lifts over to my right and strode towards them with the confidence of a paying guest.
No one tried to stop me or ask what I was doing, but it wasn’t until the lift was ascending that I breathed a sigh of relief. None of the lift buttons had said ‘Suite’ next to them, so I just pressed the button for the top floor and hoped for the best.