Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  I explained the situation and asked him to come with me, but he told me he wouldn’t be able to manage the stairs with his bad legs.

  ‘Well, is there anyone else you can call?’ I asked.

  ‘There is someone else in the area who may be able to help.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  He ushered me into the car and we drove around the corner to Vauxhall Bridge Road, where he pointed out a boy of no more than sixteen hunched beside a bus stop, balancing on the outside rims of his trainers, hands deep in his pockets. He was avoiding my eye, pretending I wasn’t there.

  ‘It’s all right, he’s one of the lads we keep in touch with around London. Our eyes and ears. Don’t let him near your pockets. Shiny objects stick to him. All right, Nalin?’

  The boy grunted. He looked like a million other youths, low-slung jeans with no arse, grey cotton hoodie, red curve-peaked baseball cap, an exercise in operational invisibility except when it came to looting Currys and getting caught on CCTV.

  ‘I like your trainers, Nalin, where did you get them, somewhere in Camden? What colour would you call that, heliotrope? Listen, this lady lives nearby and all her lights have gone out – a blown fuse or something, and she’s scared of the dark. It’s a phobia, I’ve forgotten the medical term for it. Nyctophobia, that’s it. I get muddled up because there are so many of them. Pogonophobia is fear of beards, did you know that? Do you think, if it’s not out of your way, you would mind escorting her upstairs, only her lift’s not working and my knees aren’t up to it. It would be a good deed, like in the scouts, not that I suppose they do that sort of thing any more.’ The old man gave me a confident smile. ‘Show him where you live – I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘I’m June, like the wet month. June Cryer.’ I pointed to the curved concrete wall of the apartment block, its lower levels sunk beneath the angle of the raised roundabout.

  The boy watched me silently for a few moments, sucking his teeth. He had that totally bored look all teenagers have these days, as if showing an interest in anything would cause them to lose credibility. ‘I’m not allowed in Finsbury,’ he announced, clearing his throat. ‘I have to be careful.’

  ‘Oh.’ I tried to muster an answer but failed to think of anything even vaguely appropriate.

  ‘Or King’s Cross. I got run out of King’s Cross. I can’t go back there. Or the Elephant.’ His eyeline followed my pointing hand. ‘Where d’you live then, the Ziggurat?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said in some surprise. ‘You know it?’

  ‘A mate of my dad’s did the plumbing. He said he’d show me the inside but...’ His thought trailed off.

  ‘But what?’ I asked, anxious to keep the conversation alight.

  ‘He got put away. Pentonville, three years for receiving and interfering with a witness. Jeffrey Archer’s buying a flat in there, isn’t he? I’ll take you in ’cause I don’t want to stay out here. I’m not supposed to be outside.’

  He was behaving very strangely, shifting back and forth on the edges of his trainers, watching the horizon. The old man didn’t look at all worried. I began to have second thoughts about asking either of them for help, but had no intention of walking into a blacked-out building with a dead body and some madman possibly waiting in the dark, even if there turned out to be a logical explanation.

  ‘It’s this way.’

  Mr. Officer pulled me back before I could step into the traffic hurtling across the roundabout. He gave me another reassuring smile that made him look slightly mad. I noticed he was wearing very white false teeth.

  ‘You don’t have to go right around. There’s a staircase.’ He pointed to a set of steps leading down from the end of the bridge. We splashed down to the ramp below, making our way past Portakabins and JCBs, across the churned mud of the square.

  ‘The electricity’s off,’ I warned, brushing down the arms of my jacket.

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Nalin. ‘I can see in the dark. That’s why I only come out at night.’

  It crossed my mind that the boy might be on drugs. ‘There’s not supposed to be anyone else here this weekend,’ I told him. ‘They’ve only sold a few of the units and the other residents have been warned to stay away.’

  ‘Then why are you still in your place?’ he asked reasonably, stopping on the steps.

  ‘It’s this way up.’ I felt too tired to explain again.

  It was dark in the foyer, but blacker still in the stairwell. Somewhere far above, water drizzled from an unfinished gutter. I found Madame Funes’ lighter and flicked it. ‘I’m sorry about this.’

  ‘I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind,’ said the old man, settling himself into one of the red armchairs. ‘God, these things are uncomfortable. I’d keep an eye on the place from outside, but sitting on cold stone plays havoc with my Chalfonts. Nalin, listen to the lady and see what you can make of this. I’ll be here when you get back.’

  ‘What floor d’you live on?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Right at the top, I’m afraid. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What I didn’t tell you was, the girl on the next balcony looked as if she’d got into some kind of fight. It’s none of my business, but she saw me looking, and I think she wanted me to help her but then she passed out and stopped breathing. The phone’s off, there are no lights, it was awful.’

  The stairs went on forever, as though they were expanding in the brackish gloom.

  ‘It’s through here.’

  The landing door led to corridor, and the square of pale light where the half-naked girl had slumped against the wall. The footprints had dried and vanished. There was no sign of any disturbance at all.

  ‘Which one’s yours?’

  ‘This way.’

  The door to the apartment stood slightly ajar. I shoved it wider, then stepped back as cold spirits rushed me. ‘I can’t go in.’

  ‘I’m not going to walk in first, am I? This could be a set-up by one of my enemies. Someone might be standing inside that door with a bit of wood.’ The boy was covering his own nervousness.

  ‘I’m not setting you up for your enemies, I promise. I’m beginning to think I’m losing my mind.’ That was more honest than I’d intended. I was forced to lead the way into the corridor. ‘Through here.’ Extending the lighter and waving it about, I stopped at the threshold of the lounge, trying to see inside, frightened of what I might find. ‘Nobody.’

  ‘I can see that. This is lush. Must have cost you a fortune.’

  ‘She was attacked out in the hall.’

  ‘You got scared of the dark. I used to until I did a couple of weeks on the streets.’

  ‘The girl is in the bedroom.’ I suddenly realised what I was about to do, letting him see her in a state of undress, but it couldn’t be helped.

  ‘I thought you said she was in the hall.’

  ‘She was but then she came into the apartment. The door was open.’

  Nalin stepped out onto the balcony and peered over the wall. ‘There’s an ambulance going round the front of the building.’

  ‘Oh God, I forgot about that. You go to the bedroom and stay with her.’ I couldn’t go back in there. I went into the corridor.

  The ambulance was small and low, a white estate with yellow stripes and a discreet blue light. It looked more like a vehicle for carrying out urgent repairs to venetian blinds than a ferry for the sick. The paramedic who emerged from the passenger seat wore a white paper suit spattered with droplets of blood that gave him the jaunty air of a Hoxton artist interrupted in the middle of an action painting.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said, tearing off the suit as he arrived out of breath on the seventh floor, ‘we were just round the corner. Some little sod got glassed in a pub and spat teeth at me when I tried to help. I was tempted to break the Hippocratic oath by standing on his ankles. Ain’t you got any lights?’ He paused to try a switch in the hall.

  ‘Everything’s o
ff. Through here.’ I pushed back the front door and picked up my lamp, giving him the short version of what had happened, but I could tell from his cautious silence that he wasn’t convinced. As I led him through to the bedroom, I started to think that perhaps the only thing worse than leaving a semi-naked corpse in someone else’s apartment was leaving a dodgy stranger in there with it.

  ‘You shouldn’t be wandering around without lights, love, you could have an accident.’ The paramedic indicated the bedroom door. ‘In here?’

  I walked in behind him, hardly daring to look. The bedroom was empty, the floor clean of any incriminating mark. No body, no stranger, nothing. But the air smelled acrid from the fire.

  ‘I’m not imagining things,’ I said defensively, pointing to the burned coverlet in the corner. ‘That was alight but I managed to put it out.’ Telling him about the blaze in the bedroom only made matters worse.

  Nalin was sitting in the lounge, eating an orange.

  ‘Well, he seems alright now,’ said the paramedic.

  ‘This isn’t him,’ I explained, ‘it’s a her, a young girl. This is just a lad the gentleman downstairs got me talking to. I don’t even know him.’

  ‘Listen, love, it’s a busy night out there,’ the paramedic pleaded. ‘You’re not pissing me about, are you?’

  ‘No, I swear there was a girl’s body here. How do you think I got blood all over me?’

  ‘You sure you didn’t cut yourself?’

  ‘No, of course not! It came from her! I had to cut her with the scissors!’ That came out wrong.

  ‘I think you have to consider that you might have imagined it. I mean, in the dark and that. Have a cup of tea and a sit-down, love, and if you decide it was just a nightmare, you should call your GP, all right? The man downstairs is a detective, love, he’ll want you to make a statement.’ The paramedic was pleasant enough, calm and soft-spoken, but his seen-it-all attitude incensed me. I wished he would stop calling me Love.

  ‘I didn’t see any body either,’ said Nalin unhelpfully, spitting pips into his hand.

  The paramedic searched the flat before being called away to a car smash at Nine Elms. He stopped short of accusing me of wasting his time, but asked if I’d had a drink. The flat was clean. Only the smell of the smouldering duvet hung in the air like a November bonfire.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Past Coming Through

  ONCE HE HAD gone I searched the bedroom, desperate to find anything he might have missed that would validate what I was already starting to think of as a bad dream. One thing was odd. The floor looked too clean. There were no dust balls anywhere. It was as though the boards had been wiped. The girl was slim and light. Her attacker could have come back and carried her out. The only blood left was on me.

  And I could smell her scent beneath the burnt duvet, and was pretty sure it was L’Intense by Givenchy. God knows I’d sniffed enough sticks of it.

  Nalin seemed unfazed by the fact that there was no corpse in the apartment. He helped himself to a can of Coke and rooted about for chocolate biscuits, eating from the packet as he loped about the apartment, checking the view from every angle.

  ‘I think we should go back down,’ I told him.

  ‘The old git’s not coming up. He’ll wait.’

  I needed to construct a logical explanation for the night’s events, and finally settled on one: the girl had also been staying in the building, performing a similar chore, caretaking the property for an owner. She had been visited by someone she knew, her boyfriend perhaps, and they had fought. Unable to contact anyone, she had staggered out into the corridor for help, to find the boyfriend still there.

  The theory would have been fine, except for her getting strangled with a plastic tag, which suggested something a lot nastier than hasty words. So either the stitch-headed man had returned and dragged her from the building, all the way down the stairs, without passing any of us, or he had locked the penthouse door from the inside and was waiting there until the coast was clear. I suddenly realised I still had the spatchcock scissors in my back pocket, which was evidence of a sort, although it was probably evidence that I had helped to kill her.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Nalin mistrustfully watched as I brandished the kitchen implement.

  ‘I tried to cut her tag off with them. Evidence.’ I tipped the blades to catch the light.

  ‘All the police will see is a weapon with your fingerprints all over it.’

  I gave in, dropping the scissors onto the steel counter. ‘You’re not helping, you know.’ I suddenly wanted to cry, but joined Nalin on the sofa instead. His eyes were bituminous in candlelight and oddly unfocussed, as though he was beyond reach. ‘I didn’t imagine it and I’m not crazy.’

  ‘I wanna believe you,’ said Nalin unreassuringly.

  I took a good look at him, anxious to find something that would stop me from thinking about the girl lying on the floor. ‘Surely you can’t be homeless. I mean, you’re so young.’

  ‘I’m not homeless, I got places to stay. I got jobs. The plods all know me. I can’t go back to King’s Cross.’

  ‘So you said. What about your parents? Where’s your mother?’

  ‘Off her head. Agoraphobic manic depressive. I was living with my dad, but now he’s inside.’

  ‘You mean in prison? Why, what did he do?’

  ‘Kidnapping. He’d been out drinking and didn’t trust himself to drive home, so he left his car in Camden High Street and came back for it the next morning. The Tube was closed for repairs and he got there five minutes after the parking laws had come back into force. Found some mouthy fucking Camden traffic Nazi clamping the car, so he and his mates stuck a few temazepams on a strip of racing tape, put it over his mouth and pushed him into a hedge. They sat on him he ’til was asleep and then stripped him, unwound the rest of the roll round his body, bagged him up, took him to King’s Cross in a workman’s bag and put him in the luggage rack of a train going to York. My dad got two years ’cause he was on bail at the time. My mum went back on tranks and I went to my nan’s, but I didn’t like it there so I fucked off. Ended up on remand for criminal damage and common assault, brandishing an imitation firearm in a shopping mall, and went to Brinsford Young Offenders. Most of the boys in my class are in Brinsford, so I was with my mates. When I got out I jumped a train to London. Then Dalston put an exclusion order on me, and I got the ISSP.’ He cocked his head and listened. ‘There’s dead sound all the way through this place, have you noticed?’

  ‘There was a young girl here,’ I murmured, forcing the memory to life. ‘She coughed up blood on me. Her attacker left muddy footprints. I don’t have the confidence to make this kind of thing up.’

  ‘I’ll do one more quick check around the place, then I’d better go down and report.’ The boy’s identity shifted from focus; he no longer seemed the same impassive teenager I‘d seen lurking at the bus stop. I wondered how many other people had written him off before talking to him. Perhaps he wasn’t a street-wary misfit but a fantasist, studious and lonely, less likely to be living on the street and fearing the reprisals of gangs than biding his time in an ordinary home, in a silent suburb, his family afflicted with the guilt of making him bored.

  ‘It was real and it wasn’t a mistake,’ I insisted. ‘I didn’t imagine her. My husband says I have no imagination, so how could I?’

  ‘One way to find out. Give me a minute.’ I nodded dumbly as he collected a pair of candles from the lounge and left me on the sofa. ‘Don’t move from here.’

  His footfalls retreated through the apartment. The front door opened and closed. For five minutes there was no further sound. Finally he returned. ‘There’s no-one outside. Your candles are knackered.’ He reached the entrance of the lounge and set the candles back down. ‘I tried the end penthouse but the door is definitely locked. I knocked but there was no answer. Didn’t sound like there was no-one inside.’

  ‘I’m out of my depth, Nalin. Maybe it’s this building. Th
ere’s something about these angled walls that unsettle me.’

  ‘It’s a weird shape to fit with the river, that’s why. I do decorating work, but my mate’s van is fucked at the moment so I’m doing nights in the burger stall by Vauxhall Bridge, earning a bit of straight. Clubbers and cabbies, gets really busy between two and five.’

  ‘Where were you going when I talked to you?’

  ‘Nowhere.’ He gave me a guarded look.

  ‘You were at a bus stop, that’s all.’

  ‘They’re bright. Nobody can move on you without you seeing them first. Sometimes the cops drive by for a chat.’ Perhaps that was it; he’d been touting for work. ‘You should go down to the garage on the next corner and buy yourself a decent battery lamp, one of them emergency ones. It’s safer than the lantern. You shouldn’t stay here without decent lights.’

  ‘You can stay for a while if you want.’

  ‘Nah. You’ll try it on with me, I know your type.’ He smiled, and I was grateful he’d attempted to make a joke.

  As we walked back down the stairs, I caught the ferrety look in his eyes that made him appear so unapproachable, although I still wouldn’t have trusted him with my cutlery. His shoulders remained hunched and his hands were kept deep in his pockets, braced against sudden movement.

  Outside, he glanced furtively from beneath the peak of his cap, scanning the streets left and right, never relaxing his guard. The elderly policeman was back in his car with the heater on. He wound down the window.

  ‘All finished?’ he asked, not even expecting to hear about a body. Nalin leaned in and they exchanged words.

  Nalin rose and stuffed some notes into his pocket. ‘He’s going to take you to the petrol station,’ he explained, touching the light on a fat plastic watch that turned his face blue. He wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve. ‘I got to go.’

  ‘Can I ask you something? You said you were banned from some places, and can’t leave others.’