Shut Eye

by Adam Baron

  * * *

  After I’d left Sharon I’d followed Dominic Lewes and friend to a row of Victorian houses only two minutes walk away, some of which looked ready to fall down and others which had yellow alarm boxes on the walls and which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Highgate Village. Dominic showed his friend into number 23 Elm Drive which, it wasn’t difficult to see, was a squat. The man seemed to look nervously at the run-down hole he was about to enter, hesitating on the doorstep and running his tongue over his lips. But his needs were obviously stronger than his fear of cockroaches and mildew because he soon went in. I wrote the house number down and then smiled to myself. The old Mazda was showing signs that my investigative prowess was rubbing off on it. It was sat directly outside.

  I moved the car and parked it further down the street towards King’s Cross, but facing the house. I sat in the front seat, waiting, listening to the late book on Radio 4, which at any time would have been too early. After fifteen minutes the man who had gone into number 23 emerged – but without Dominic. I saw him walking towards the car and I had the sudden urge to jump out, tell him I was vice squad and scare the shit out of him. I let the urge pass.

  He walked by without noticing that I was inside the Mazda and headed back the way he had come, no doubt to a wife and kids who by the look of him could well have been about Dominic’s age. He was in his fifties, tallish, well dressed but not in the Peter Morgan bracket. He looked like he’d just been away for a few days on business and had decided to make the most of his last few hours of solitary anonymity. He looked pleased with himself. I had the sudden urge to jump out of the Mazda and kick the living shit out of him. I let the urge pass.

  I thought about going home. I didn’t know if Dominic would come out again and even if he did I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to get a picture of him. Hell, I knew where he lived, I could easily come back in the daylight. And I was tired. Dominic, however, came out five minutes later, while I was still deciding. He didn’t walk back towards his pitch though, but turned right out of his house and then right again at the top of the street, walking quickly. I hopped out the car and followed him, just catching sight of him as he crossed the street and headed towards a medium-sized tower block which announced the beginning of the Russell Estate. Concrete forest perhaps, if not quite concrete jungle.

  Two figures waited by a fire exit at the bottom of the old, stained building, wearing dark puffas and B-hats. When Dominic walked up to them they both pushed themselves off the wall and stood in front of him. It didn’t take long for Dominic to reassure them, however, probably because they recognized him, or if they didn’t, with a password or the name of The Man. They let him through and held the fire exit open for him as he walked in quickly. I strolled past the building with my hands in my pockets until I was out of sight of the two doormen, and then I pretended to use a payphone across the road which didn’t have a receiver on it.

  Dominic was out again in less than ten minutes. I let him get round the corner before going after him. I watched him cross the road, turn left, and then insert his key into the door of 23 Elm Drive once again. I walked by back to the car.

  In less than thirty minutes Dominic had picked up a john, sucked him off or let him fuck him, and then scored what was almost certainly twenty or forty quids’ worth of crack or horse. And in the same amount of time I had ascertained these facts and in doing so had revealed the salient points about Dominic Lewes’ life at that point in time. He was a smackhead who was young enough to sell his arse rather than go housebreaking which, for all I knew, he probably did as well. He’d come a long way since I’d first seen him – here he was jiving with the guys on the corner, gaining entry to secret, exclusive places. I was pretty sure he hadn’t been a user when I’d seen him eight months ago, looking bewildered and lonely, asking any man that passed if they wanted to take him home with them. Even asking me. He had come a long way all right, and I’d found him in exactly the same place he’d started from. I got back into the car, turned the key and drove home.

  * * *

  I finished my breakfast and made two or three calls. It was a bright, clear morning, summer making one last stand in mid-October, and I was eager to get up and out into it. Probably the caffeine. I put on a dark Aquascutum suit which had been my uncle’s, a white Pinks shirt without a tie, and a pair of old brogues I could see my face in while I was tying the laces. I ran my hand over my chin and regretted that I’d been too lazy to shave that morning. Too late. I turned the machine on, left a message to unknown callers that I would be on my office number from around lunchtime, and skipped downstairs into the street.

  It was still only nineish and Exmouth Market was busy with people on their way to work, or looking through the four or five stalls which give the street its name (just). Workmen were busy ripping out the old Spar minimarket which was about to become another restaurant and a group of bleached trendies who didn’t seem to have gone to bed yet sat outside Fred’s Cafe, drinking cappuccinos, probably waiting for The Face to open. I walked past them, waved at Alberto through the window and bought a paper from the shop next door to Zak’s Snacks. Walking back past my flat to the Mazda I flipped over to the sports pages and saw that Arsenal had lost last night at home to Forest. 2-0. Campbell and Thomas. It put a spring in my step. What an absolutely perfect way to start the day.

  I sat outside 23 Elm Drive for ten minutes but it was far too early and I gave up. I drove through the back streets which run horizontal to the Euston Road until I reached Harley Street and then I joined the main drag. It took me twenty minutes to drive the quarter of a mile further to the Westway, and once on it I didn’t move very much faster until well past Ladbroke Grove. I didn’t want to use the Westway, I never wanted to use it, but there was no choice really. I listened to ten minutes of Call Nick Ross and then switched over to Robert Elms on GLR. He was quite funny as usual and quite interesting as usual. But there was something about him which annoyed me. As usual.

  And then I came to the place. The railing had been repaired long ago and the wrenching skid marks on the tarmac were also a thing of the past. Nobody would have been able to guess what had happened there because there was no evidence left, there was nothing to see any more; it was just a normal stretch of the flyover. But there was a lot for me to see and though I tried not to I saw it all. The gaping hole in the smashed barrier, the mess the car made after it had nosedived down on to the street below. I saw the rain and the flashing lights and the crowd of firemen and medics crowding round my wrecked car as I ran up to it and pushed my way through, through to the body they were cutting out of it, covered in blood, his face blank as if he wasn’t even there. The way he just hung in their arms. And then hearing the sound of someone else begging to be let through the cordon and turning round to see Sharon arguing with the officers, who wouldn’t let her through. And I was glad that they wouldn’t let her through.

  In the short-term car park at Heathrow I looked through my case to see that I had everything. Teddy’s broad face grinned at me again. He still looked cheerful and in control. Alive. I hadn’t mentioned any specific time to the barman so I went through his file again to make sure there wasn’t anything I’d missed, any question that I would have liked to have asked and would feel annoyed about if I thought of it later. I didn’t think I was going to get anywhere on this thing but at least I’d know that I’d done what I could. I took out the pathologist’s report and quickly had another run through it.

  Teddy Morgan died of a massive coronary thrombosis caused by severe lacerations to the abdomen and stomach lining which induced massive stress on the heart. He had been battered unconscious by a champagne bottle which caused a lot of structural damage to his face and which broke on impact. It was then used to cause the injuries to his stomach area which proved fatal.

  A quantity of semen was found in Teddy’s anal canal, and the police are unsure as to when it arrived there. While it was at first assumed that Teddy had been buggered before any
attack was made on him, it is possible that this may have occurred after he was bludgeoned unconscious. The lack of any significant bloodstains directly under Teddy’s body ruled out the theory that he was buggered while dead: the assailant would have had to turn the body over on to its front, and this would have soaked the sheets beneath his torso.

  Fragments of glass were also found a long way up Teddy’s anus. The police pathologist believed this to be one of the last things that had happened to Teddy, and that he could not have known anything about it. One of the larger fragments was matched to a long sliver of glass which had broken from the main body of the bottle, probably on initial impact with Teddy’s skull, and the lacerations to Teddy’s anal canal indicated that they were caused by a long, slender piece of glass rather than the main body of the bottle itself. The use of the shard of glass (as well as the lack of any alien fingerprints anywhere in the flat) suggested that the killer was, at that moment at least, wearing gloves. The rest of the shard was found jammed into what was left of Teddy’s face.

  The last thing that happened to Teddy was that whoever used the champagne bottle on him then stuck the top half of it into his gaping abdomen, wedging it between his hip and rib bones, where it stayed until Teddy’s body was discovered by his wife. This struck me as the cruellest, most cynical thing his assailant had done – an insult to someone whom he had already humiliated, a two-finger salute stuck up to whoever found him, a salute which would never leave the memory. Even I could see it and I hadn’t been there, and I wondered at the mind which would take pleasure in such an act. I suddenly had the strange realization which I used to get on the force, that the person I was thinking of was out there somewhere, out and about talking to people, laughing with them, sitting at a bar with them maybe. The police psychologist reported that the perpetrator’s last action with the bottle meant that he was likely to have a highly developed, ironic sense of humour. That he liked a joke. Right, I thought, as I put the file back in my case. Ha ha ha.

  It was now after ten and the airport wasn’t that busy. The business flights were gone and it was not the time of the week or year when us Brits can’t take it any more and rush off to other parts of the Continent we are so sceptical about. I wandered through the white halls avoiding the odd bag-laden trolley and looked for the Pavilion Bar.

  The bar itself was a semi-circle surrounded by aluminium stools, none of which was occupied. I took one to the left side and ordered a Perrier from the only barman, the man I had come to see. He was tall, late twenties, with long light brown hair which was receding slightly at the sides, leaving him a full, back-combed widow’s peak. He was clean-shaven with smooth, even-coloured skin, a large flat mole on his left cheek, and very dark, blue eyes. He was wearing wire-rim glasses which did not undercut the loose, rather lackadaisical style he had about him. As he took my order I noticed a hint of Australian in his accent, but it was difficult to tell which way round it was, whether he was English and had been there recently, or an Australian who’d been living here for ages. Perhaps it was neither. Perhaps there’s an accent which people pick up simply from working in airports too long. Whatever it was it made me think of the time when Luke and I had gone backpacking in Queensland for a month, just before Luke had met Sharon.

  The barman picked up a small bottle of Perrier from a row behind him, twirled it round in his hand with a very professional absent-mindedness, and then set it down in front of me next to a glass full of ice and a wedge of lemon. His movements were cool but not showy, a natural affinity with objects he touched every day, and they seemed to strike a cord with me as if I’d seen the man before. I was sure I hadn’t. I took the wedge out of the glass, put it in an ashtray and poured the water over the ice. Then I watched the barman as he served another customer. I looked at the chairs standing up against the polished wooden sides of the bar like men in a firing squad, and wondered which of them Teddy had sat on. Which the other man, the man he had met. Maybe I was sitting on it. I thought about all the people who must come every day and sit on the stool recently used by someone who was going around London mutilating homosexuals. And never knew it. I took a sip of my drink and then caught the barman’s eye.

  The barman got the manager to cover him, took off his apron and came round the bar to join me. He told me that his name was Alex Mitchell, which I already knew, and then he said that he’d told the police everything he could remember but was happy to help me anyway. I gave him my card.

  ‘He came up and sat down,’ the barman said. ‘The other guy was already here, he had been for quite a while. The pilot had a drink on his own and then the next time I looked the other guy was sat next to him and the pilot ordered a drink for both of them. I was too busy to hear what they were talking about. They stayed about half an hour more and then left. That’s it.’

  The barman shrugged his shoulders and sat back on his stool. He gave me a sort of hopeless look, as if to apologize for wasting my time coming all the way out there. I opened my case, took out a pad and looked down at some notes I had made. The file with Edward’s murder in it stared at me and I closed my case quickly as though something, his screams perhaps, were going to escape from it.

  ‘The man had a bag,’ I said, ‘which you noticed.’

  ‘Yeah. It was leather, slung over his shoulder. I remembered because I needed one. I told the police that.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I thought about it.

  ‘Did it look empty or full?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ said Alex, ‘I dunno really. Empty. Yeah, it looked pretty empty. Is that significant?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It could be. It gives an indication that he hadn’t travelled anywhere, that he only had a few things in it. Things he would need in the immediate future only.’

  ‘Like murder things?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  Alex reached over the bar and filled a glass with water from the soda gun. He took a sip from the glass and then set it down on the bar top.

  “Tell me about the man,’ I said.

  He thought for a second. ‘Well, it’s hard,’ he said, frowning. ‘I already sat with the police on this computer imager thing, but all we got was the baseball hat really. I suppose that’s why he wore it. He was white. Well built. Young.’

  ‘Good-looking?’

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know. He didn’t seem to be. I don’t know.’

  ‘As good-looking as Teddy? As Edward Morgan?’

  Alex bit his thumbnail and then looked either side of me.

  ‘I don’t know. No. I don’t think so, I don’t know.’

  ‘OK. Now,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘if you were to guess, what do you think he did? What was his job?’

  Alex seemed surprised at the question.

  ‘How would I know?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, for instance, you said he was well-built. He had on jeans and a leather jacket, trainers. Did he look like he wore these things all the time? Or did he look the sort who had changed into them from a suit after work, say?’

  ‘No,’ the barman said, getting into it a bit more, surprised that he was able to answer the question. ‘No. He didn’t look like he wore a suit or nothing. I don’t know why I think that but he didn’t. I can’t imagine him in a suit. He sat sort of slouched, maybe that’s why.’

  ‘So if you had to guess, what did he look like he did? Manual work? Building work?’

  ‘No.’ Alex shook his head. ‘He didn’t seem like a bricky or something like that either.’

  ‘Well, did he look like a student then?’

  ‘Oh no. Not that I know why. He was more … weighty. In himself. In charge. He looked, I don’t know …’ I waited.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter if it sounds stupid or it’s just a guess. All I want to know is the impression you had of him.’

  ‘He looked,’ Alex went on, ‘like someone with important things going on in his head. Real world things, not like a student looks.
But I can’t see him doing anything for a living. Strange though, his bag looked expensive, that’s why I remembered it…’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘But I can’t think of him doing any sort of job.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘That’s fine.’ I took a sip of water and then put my glass down on the bar. I looked at the barman and asked, ‘Did Edward Morgan look gay to you?’

  ‘Oh.’ Alex hesitated for a second. ‘Well, I didn’t even think about it when he came up.’ He ran a hand back through his hair. ‘Not at all. Not that I’m an expert. But when he sat with the other guy, and then they left, well, I just assumed. Not that they touched or anything. But it was pretty obvious.’

  ‘And the other man,’ I went on, trying to keep him with it, ‘when you served him initially, did he seem gay?’

  He thought about it. He bit hard at his bottom lip.

  ‘I don’t know. Yeah, he did. Or, rather, he seemed something. Definitely something. Then when I saw the two of them leaving I knew what it was. Or, rather, when I found out what he did. What happened to the pilot. I can remember what he made me feel like when I served him, what he gave off. It was nasty. Like he knew stuff which wasn’t nice. Not nice at all.’ Alex seemed to have gone somewhere, but he came back and laughed. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘I can remember all that, now that you ask me. What he seemed like and stuff. But for the life of me I can’t remember his face. I can’t remember what the bastard looked like.’

  I asked Alex a few more questions, without any great feats of reasoning standing in wait behind them. For some reason I didn’t want to leave yet, as though there was a question that I wasn’t asking but should be. When he said he’d been working at the airport for a couple of months I realized that my accent theory was wrong. He was an Australian, from the west coast, but he’d lived in Britain for the last two years.