Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  I dug for my house keys, trying not to panic. If the police were here, perhaps they already knew about Azymuth’s body and would think I was involved, which, when I came to think of it, was close to the truth. In fact, I seemed to be leaving a trail of bodies in my wake. How the hell did anyone get my home address?

  Stitch-Head couldn’t have found out where I lived unless I’d left something in the apartment with my name written down. My last credit card bill, which I’d taken along out of sentimental value, had been lying on the bedside table since my arrival at the Ziggurat. My plastic; first it had failed me, and now it was betraying me. He had taken my address when he had returned to remove the body on Friday night.

  ‘You won’t need these, honey,’ Lou indicated the spare keys she kept for me. ‘They kicked your front door right in. That nosy old bitch from number five came by and complained about the state of your garden, then tried to make off with your watering can, can you believe it? Some people.’ Lou pushed open the gate for me.

  We trooped inside, me, the constable, and Lou following more from a ghoulish desire for adventure than sympathy. The lounge had been torn apart, mud and broken glass trampled into the carpet, a sole unwanted sofa gorily eviscerated, the few last pictures splintered. Upstairs, the mess was even worse. The desk Gordon had left behind had been emptied drawer by upturned drawer. Metal shelves fixed to the wall containing work files – mostly purchase orders for shoes – had been torn out of the plaster. It looked as though the house had been pitched on its side, then uprighted.

  ‘They’ve made quite a mess,’ said the constable, who was obviously a college major in the Bleeding Obvious. ‘I know this is a distressing time for you, but I was wondering if you knew who did this?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ It nearly killed me to withhold evidence. I’m crap at keeping secrets. Also, there was something unencouraging about the police officer. He had a dyspeptic look on his face, as if he was still trying to digest a particularly starchy pub sausage. He seemed to be waiting for me to make a slip. When he suddenly thrust his hand in his pocket I thought he was going to pull out a pair of handcuffs, but it turned out to be a tube of fruit gums. He explained that he ate them to stop himself from smoking, and tried to offer me one, but they were all stuck together.

  For a moment I thought of trusting him enough to tell him the complete truth, but then I remembered that he was the law, and came to my senses. He might look like an awkward, big-eared youth in a too-large helmet, but you could bet there were operatives at his station involved in monitoring calls and electronic conversations, probably with some kind of attachment to GCHQ or Interpol or something. They would find out what I had done if I gave them cause to suspect anything.

  ‘The fingerprint man’s already been. He wondered where all the furniture was,’ said Lou, ‘so I had to explain that you and Gordon were selling the house.’

  ‘It was a good job your furniture had already gone,’ the constable pointed out. ‘I know it’s a mess, but will it be possible to know what’s missing?’

  I had no idea what to say or where to start. Clearly, I couldn’t tell him about Azymuth without implicating myself in the events that had followed. Playing dumb would be the only way I stood any chance of avoiding arrest.

  ‘I saw two men leaving the house,’ Lou told me. ‘One looked liked a caveman, heavy-set, bald, young I think – I only saw their backs – the other was slim and smartly dressed. They got into a new model Mercedes saloon with blacked out windows. That’s when I called the plods.’

  ‘What made you do that?’ asked the constable, clearly used to being referred to as a plod.

  ‘Oh, come on. June never has visitors, she doesn’t know anybody. Nobody comes sightseeing in this neighbourhood. You can come and stay with me, June,’ she offered. ‘I’ll kick Darren out into the shed. He’d be happy there. He’s reconditioning a motorbike. It’s a mid-life thing.’

  ‘No, Lou, I’ll be fine. No-one’s going to come back here.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, you don’t know what goes through the minds of these kids.’

  ‘They weren’t kids, and they were looking for me,’ I whispered, pulling her to one side. ‘This was a warning.’

  ‘A warning? You’ve only been up in London for two days, what on earth do you need warning about?’ she whispered back. ‘I thought we agreed you’d suffered an hallucination.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe what’s happened since I saw you.’

  ‘The way you’re looking, I probably would. You can’t stay here. Look at the place.’

  ‘I want to be in my old house, Lou, even like this. I need time to think.’

  Lou looked uncertain. ‘All right, but if the house creeps you out, ring me and come over. Our plans have changed because of Hadrian’s skirmish with the law. I’ve got Darren’s mother staying with us now, but I can always chuck a sleepie into her dragon food.’

  The constable came around the corner. I couldn’t be certain he hadn’t overheard us. ‘It might be advisable to stay with a friend tonight,’ he suggested.

  ‘Really, I’ll be fine.’ I made a show of walking around the lounge. ‘There doesn’t appear to be anything missing,’ I told him, ‘but it’s hard to be sure.’

  ‘Perhaps you could just have a look through the rest of the house for us, if it’s not too upsetting for you.’ I made my way up the stairs, avoiding him.

  I had clothes in plastic sacks in the wardrobe. They had been knifed open and emptied, but there were things I could still wear. If Rennie’s men were looking for some clue to my present whereabouts, they would have drawn a blank. Clearly, they hadn’t expected me to return to the Ziggurat, and even if they had, there was no way for them to know that I had switched apartments. The building was large enough to get lost in, and no sound carried from floor to floor. Unless they were posted at the main entrance night and day, they would have missed me.

  But why were they putting in so much effort to find me? There are witnesses who are dangerous, and others who just want to run away and hide. Surely they’d have pegged me for the latter.

  ‘Burglary can leave you feeling very uncomfortable,’ said PC Big Ears, ‘you’ll be given a support number you can call,’ but I looked around the wrecked room and felt nothing. There was a casual insolence in the way they had passed through the house, confident and amoral, as though it was just something they would normally do, like eating or sleeping. The lights in the bedroom were pointlessly smashed, a couple of unsold bedside tables full of inhalers and used tissues upended and kicked in.

  ‘No,’ I assured the constable, ‘I really don’t think anything’s been taken. There’s a lot of vandalism around here. Kids. I’ve had trouble before.’

  ‘So you’ve made previous reports to the local police?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted, but I was running on adrenaline now. I could handle these two.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure you’ll be all right.’ He looked uncertain.

  ‘I’ll take care of her,’ Lou told him, placing a protective arm around me. Before he left, the constable gave me a card with the number of a support line on it, and I gave him the number of my defunct mobile. I assured Lou I would be fine and sent her home.

  There were stalagmites of glass everywhere, so I wrapped myself in the slashed innards of a quilt and settled in a corner of the lounge. Odd bits and pieces had been left behind in the rush to clear the house, but I couldn’t find a phone charger.

  I slept without sleeping pills for the second night in four years. Muddy dawn light woke me through unclosed curtains. The carpet appeared to be covered in diamonds. Realising how hungry I was, I looked for something to eat, but the refrigerator had been unplugged and cleaned out. I washed in cold water, dressed in a black sweater and black jeans and tidied myself as best as I could. Then I went off in search of a transport café.

  I was becoming addicted to such places. It was pleasant to sit at a plastic-topped table in a steamy overlit room while the sky was still de
ep grey, listening to electricians and plasterers swearing and laughing about each other, their jobs, their birds, the government and anything else that crossed their minds. They looked at me with curiosity, but smiled when I caught them looking. I wondered why I hadn’t come here before.

  An odd side-effect of everything that had happened was being comfortable in the company of strangers, and becoming less mindful of my own behaviour. I ate a plateful of eggs, bacon, fried bread, beans and tomatoes that would have had Nigella throwing up in horror, and read a copy of the Daily Mirror that someone had left on the next table.

  I thought about Azymuth operating on a penniless immigrant’s face and tried to imagine how much it had changed Petra. She was young and hungry. She had wanted a new life. What had she traded to get it? Her face? What had it looked like before? The pre-plastic photograph in Azymuth’s files appeared to be not much different from how she looked when she died. In the picture she was a little thinner, less tanned, free of makeup, her hair brushed back behind her ears. If the changes were so minor, as the doctor insisted, what was the point of making them at all?

  I thought about the private patient files. The age range and physical types were very close. They all had the same look, as though they’d been singled out for some kind of service industry. Perhaps they all had a particular disease prevalent in their age group.

  I turned the mug of orange tea in my hands, trying to make sense of someone else’s world. What could Azymuth possibly have known that was dangerous enough to cause his death? Why was it necessary for his associates to trace my address and turn my life upside down?

  I remembered the conversation I’d had with Lou on the day it had all began, and suddenly knew the answer. I paid the café bill and ran all the way back to the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Identities

  I THOUGHT OF it because Gordon’s mother kept a pair of pugs called Antony and Cleopatra. On that first day, I had been sitting in the kitchen matching beers with Lou’s Rum Sours when we’d had a conversation about how to work out your porn star name. That was what Petra’s other name, Cleo, sounded like: a porn name. I wondered if it could be an alias to disguise her real identity. Then I remembered the secondary names beneath the other girls’ pictures; ‘Honey’, ‘Brandy’, ‘Suki’, the nomenclature of pets. It sounded as though they had all been rechristened. It seemed a long shot, but it sort of made sense.

  I knew nothing about pornography except that there was a lot of it on the web, and I only knew that because Lou was downloading it all the time, printing out screen-grabs and leaving them in the bottom of Darren’s briefcase for him to find at work. These little acts of terrorism seemed to make her life easier.

  ‘I need to use Hadrian’s laptop,’ I told Lou when she opened the door. She was still in her dressing gown, her night one as opposed to her daytime schlepping-around-the-house one.

  ‘He’s taken it to a friend’s house,’ she explained. ‘It’s not a real friend, just someone with faster broadband. Darren’s knowledge of Crimewatch paid off and he managed to call a decent lawyer, but his mother is starting to think I’m related to the Krays. Are you going to file an insurance claim?’

  ‘No, I have to find... do you think the police will press charges against Hadrian?’

  ‘God, I hope so.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Don’t worry about us, we always find the appropriate level of dysfunction we need in order to survive. Darren’s reading Deepak Chopra and wants to discuss my anger issues. There’s nothing left in Hadrian’s bedroom. Funny, they stripped it bare and it still smells like Tutankhamen’s tomb. Darren has a computer in his shed.’ Lou led me through to the garden and unlocked an overgrown door. Inside, I manoeuvred around various bits of motorbike to some planks that had been arranged on top of a Workmate to form a makeshift desk for a PC and speakers. ‘The police don’t know about this one because I forgot to tell them about it. What are you looking for?’

  I seated myself on a yellow fibre-glass engine housing. ‘A porn star.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m looking for a girl called Cleo.’

  ‘I won’t ask why. The best place to start would be under my husband’s bookmarks. He uses his office phone number as a password. No imagination.’ She ran the cursor down a list of pages.

  ‘Not an American site, an English one.’

  ‘Okay.’ We scanned the lists together. ‘There are zillions, so it’s hard to know where to go. Wait, there should be an A-Z of names.’ I was surprised by her dexterity with a keyboard until I remembered how much time she spent alone. ‘Here, links to personal websites.’

  ‘You don’t mind Darren looking at this stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not? It stops him from pestering me. I wish he’d take up some of these penis enlargement offers, though. Don’t look so self-righteous. He got most of the dirtiest links from Gordon.’

  ‘My Gordon?’

  ‘That’s how all the husbands in this whole neighbourhood spend their evenings, duh. They don’t have the technology to build robot women so this is the next best thing. No ‘Cleo’ here. You sure it’s an English site? Wait, there’s a search engine for hardcore stars here somewhere. I used it when I was planning my hen night cake thing.’ Lou had once tried to set up a company specialising in novelty iced genitals, but before the company registration came through she had been sent a lawyer’s letter by Greggs bakery, who had discovered that she was using their sponge bases.

  Lou typed and waited. ‘My God, there are thousands.’

  There was no way of refining the search by country. The people who used the service clearly weren’t interested in demographics. I only ever went online to buy from discount designer outlets. I had given up after realising that even the most sophisticated technology was ultimately reliant on a relief postman hammering a package through a letterbox that was clearly too small for it.

  There were seven girls listed by the name of Cleo. ‘There are two registered to the UK, but only one represented by a London company, SlavStar. They specialise in Russian, Ukrainian and Hungarian performers. There’s a web address for them.’

  ‘Can you go to it?’

  The page scrolled down. ‘It’s not a free site,’ warned Lou. ‘You’ll have to enter credit card details.’

  ‘I can’t, you know that.’

  ‘Let’s put Darren’s in, then. I know the number and expiry date of his VISA gold card by heart.’ Her fingers flew across the keyboard. ‘We’re in. We enter his name, like so. He’ll be getting Viagra ads for the rest of his life, big deal. If you want to see what Cleo looks like, there’s a picture of her further down, look.’ She moved aside to show me. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve become a lesbian and fallen in love.’

  I found myself looking at the girl who had collapsed on the floor of Azymuth’s flat.

  ‘Jesus, listen to this. ‘Cleo is a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian queen, and treats all men as her sex slaves. Demanding and passionate, her commands must always be obeyed. In her spare time, Cleo loves to reveal her private kingdom on the internet. “Just like my horny ancestor, I have met some very wild men,” Cleo tells us. “To me, every man is my Mark Antony. If you want to see the pleasure I give them, you’ll have to enter my sacred site.” Oh, this is good. “Mark Antony, adult actor”. I love the way they call them that.’ She tilted the screen toward me. The image showed a burly, tanned teen leaning on a Greek pillar in a laurel wreath.

  ‘What on earth’s that sticking out of his toga?’

  ‘Whatever it is, he conquered Gaul with it. Adult entertainment is no longer technically illegal in the UK. We’re following European guidelines now. Legitimise the business and you eliminate the criminal, that’s the thinking. Obviously they hadn’t met my son.’

  ‘The real Cleopatra was Macedonian, not Egyptian, and she had a huge hooter,’ I pointed out. The present-day Cleo could have had that fixed. Azymuth hadn’t mentioned rhinoplasty. ‘
Has she got an email address?’

  ‘You’re joking. Of course she doesn’t list her address, imagine the nutters she’d get. Look, you can buy her film Cleopatra’s Pyramids, and she has a fan club. You want to try her chatroom? You won’t talk to her, just some employee in Djakarta, but you might find out something more.’

  ‘Show me how.’

  Early on Sunday morning turned out to be the perfect time to chat online about pornography. No wonder the local church was empty. Twenty minutes later we had an address. Not where she lived, and no location for SlavStars, but one forlorn-sounding online stalker going by the hotmail name of kooldude352 knew the central London address of the minicab company Petra used, and confessed to having waited outside for a glimpse of her on numerous occasions. I made a note, Argosy Street, then ran it through Google maps.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ asked Lou. ‘It’s kind of deep water, especially for a housewife who’s been getting out less than Stephen Hawking.’

  ‘Harsh, Lou.’

  ‘There’s an Argos House in London SE8 and loads of Argos Roads, but no Argosy Street, Road, Crescent or anything else. It’s just a stupid name made up by some creepy fan. I don’t know why I’m even listening to you. The whole idea is idiotic.’

  ‘But the girl exists,’ I assured her. ‘Maybe there’s another way to trace her.’

  ‘Okay, that’s it.’ Lou was tired and in need of a drink. ‘I demand to know what this is all about.’

  So I told her everything, including my part in Azymuth’s death and the kitchen-gadget-stabbing of Stitch-Head.

  ‘Christ, June, how could you have become involved in something like this? You mean this was why your house got smashed up, they were looking for you? Why didn’t you go to the police?’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say that, you’re on familiar terms with them, but I’d never spoken to a policeman in my life before this weekend. You always told me they were nothing but trouble, and look at the mess you’re in with Hadrian.’