Shut Eye

by Adam Baron

  The man stepped out in front of me when I was about five yards from the end of the alley, and he blocked the exit. He stood with his arms folded and one leg pointing further forward than the other. He looked straight at me with his head thrown back, dressed in biker boots, black Levis, a tight T-shirt and an expensive blazer jacket. One roll-up oh the sleeves. He looked at me with a disgusted menace, and when I checked my stride and stopped he took a step forward. I recognized him immediately; I really am good with faces. He was the guy who came to the door on Elm Drive when I’d gone looking for Dominic.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  He had unfolded his arms and was standing square in front of me. His voice was big, and it echoed off the alley walls with a metallic sound. I took my hands out of my pockets. I let my bag slide down my arm on to the ground beside me, keeping hold of the strap.

  ‘I said, who the fuck are you?’

  He was angry but in control. Confident. I could tell immediately that tiying to bullshit this man wouldn’t get me very far. So I didn’t try. I didn’t say anything.

  ‘What you been taking pictures of my boys for? Why you been coming round? What you want?’

  His boys.

  ‘I’m talking to you, tosser.’ A long finger stretched out towards me. ‘If you’re the Bill you’re dead.’

  ‘If I’m the Bill,’ I replied quietly, ‘you’re nicked.’

  He didn’t like that.

  ‘Gimme your bag. Now. Give it here.’ He snapped his fingers.

  I let go of the strap, keeping the bag behind me.

  ’Listen,’ I said, fanning out my hands, taking a couple of small steps forward. ‘I don’t want any trouble. I’m just working for someone who wants to know that their son is still alive, that’s all.’ I tried a smile.

  ‘You deaf, tosser? Are you? Well? I said…!’

  I hit him with a straight right arm with a lot of shoulder behind it. Unfortunately he saw it; late but he saw it. He’d begun to twist left, taking a lot of the weight out but it still sent him spinning against the wall. Before I could hit him again he came out and charged at me, grabbing my lapels, but I managed to use his weight to take him past me and into the other wall. He still had my lapels and he butted me hard below my left ear, holding on tight to me. It hurt.

  I couldn’t get an arm free to hit him so I rammed him hard up against the brickwork. And again. He was shaken and I did manage to get a hand free, but he lunged out at me with all that he had before I could swing at him. We both went sprawling, landing on the wet concrete side by side. We struggled, trying to get on top of each other. I heard fabric tearing. I thought that, even if he wins this fight, my opponent was going to have to lose another four hundred quid in Emporium. I managed to wedge my foot against a wall and, pushing hard, I got on top of him. His arms went up to my neck but I ignored them. I held him by his jacket and his T-shirt and I belted the shit out him, right after right after right, until his arms were on the floor beside him. I heard his nose break. I felt his top front teeth bite into my knuckles as they broke up and snapped out of the bone. I saw his eyes change their focus, from me, to his own pain, and then to something I couldn’t know.

  When the man wasn’t moving any more and his head got heavy I stopped hitting him. I let him drop down to the floor. I pushed myself up from the ground and got to my feet, breathing hard, steadying myself against a head spin. Dominic’s pimp was lying back, almost conscious. I waited, getting my breath back. His focus returned and he lay there looking at me. Blinking. His neck and T-shirt were soaked in blood and I saw that the ripping sound I heard had been the top pocket of his jacket; it was hanging on by a couple of threads. I took a breath. Then, for some reason, I leant over to pull the pocket off. Just as I reached it his hand went up to stop me and he winced. I held the limp piece of fabric in my hands. He looked devastated. I hadn’t had to fight this guy at all, I should have just grabbed hold of his pocket and threatened to rip it off if he didn’t get out of my way.

  I pulled the pocket off and stood over the guy looking down at him. I wanted to say something to him, something cool and final. But I couldn’t think of anything. Instead, something he had said to me came into my head. My boys.

  I looked up the alley towards where Dominic was standing and I thought I saw another figure getting into a car. Another kid whose home had not been a home, who had come to find somewhere else to belong and had ended up belonging to this man here. A kid whose life was made up of so much shit that if you took it away from him he’d be lost, he wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on.

  ‘My boys.’

  The pimp didn’t move anything except his eyelids, which fluttered like two half-dead moths pinned to a board. I took a step back. I steadied myself. I looked into his soft brown eyes for a second and the fluttering stopped as he met my gaze. An appeal burst into his eyes like hold-up men in a bank, but I ignored it. Then I repeatedly kicked the man with all those boys as hard as I could in the groin until his soft eyes clouded over and he blacked out.

  * * *

  I stepped over the wino again. He was still smooching with the angels. I hitched my bag up over my shoulder and walked out on to the Pentonville Road. Night had fallen quickly and it was almost dark now. Dominic was gone. I felt cold all of a sudden and I shivered. I crossed the road and walked back into the cafe. The waitress who had served me the last two times I had been there and had seen me with my camera, looked shocked to see me. She stepped back against the counter, holding her hands by her sides. It said it all. It wasn’t the blood on my face that she was surprised to see. It was me. Standing up. I threw the liberated pocket on to the counter.

  ‘Your boyfriend’ll want this,’ I said to her. ‘He’ll need his jacket stitching.’ The girl looked across at it and then quickly back at me. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Come to think of it,’ I added, ‘he might need his face stitching too.’ The girl’s mouth opened into a small Oh, and her eyes widened, but she didn’t say anything.

  Chapter Ten

  I fell asleep in the bath. I woke up when the water was cold and I got that feeling again, which I used to get when I was a child, of not knowing where I was. The eerie silence that seemed to hover in the air of my flat was not dispersed by the fact that I could actually hear things; the lazy rumble of traffic and a child crying somewhere for its mother. I lay in the water for a few minutes, getting colder and colder, staring at the toilet chain which seemed unnaturally still. I was still too, my body lying inert beneath the now grey water covering it like a shroud. I stood up, glad to break the still surface, glad of the noise the water made running off me and back into the bath. I leant across to the radiator for a towel.

  It was my gym night but I decided that I had fulfilled my pugilistic requirements for the day. I turned the thermostat up and the answerphone on, and I lay on my sofa with a glass of John Powers on the floor beside me, which I immediately forgot about. I tried to go over what I knew about my case but I couldn’t push the image of Dominic’s pimp out of my mind. Thinking about what I’d done to him, my bones felt hollow; whatever he was there was no excuse for it. He could have been dead for all I knew. I wondered what it was that made me lose it the way I had. I kept hearing the words my boys over and over and then I made the connection. It was what my father had called Luke and me. My boys are useless. My boys are lazy. My boys are ungrateful.

  No one tells me how I should treat my boys.

  I was restless but I wasn’t in the mood to do the rounds with the photo and there wasn’t anything else of any use I could do until tomorrow. I thought about looking at Luke’s poems but it had been a taxing day and I didn’t think I could do justice to them. Instead I used the remote for my stereo to tune in to a match on 5-Live which was just entering the second half. It was Birmingham against Luton, two sides I don’t have the slightest interest in, but I listened to it gladly, and to the post-match interviews. I switched to The World Tonight on Radio 4 and heard some politicians pretending to be stand-
up comedians in, I supposed, an effort to hide the fact that they didn’t have an awful lot to say. At about ten-thirty there was a click from my machine but no message followed as I had turned the volume to nil.

  I turned the radio off and the TV on, sitting all the way through a film in which Keanu Reeves made great strides with his surfing technique, helped hold up banks and jumped out of aeroplanes without the reassurance of a parachute. It seemed that old Keanu had his days all filled up too. At about twelve-thirty I went to bed and tried to sleep but there were too many gatecrashers in my head making too much noise, so I took one of the Seconals that I’d asked a friend of mine to send over from New York where she was working. The Seconal felt like a spider spinning silk around my body, tighter and tighter until finally I was paralysed. When I was bound so tight, but so softly, that I couldn’t move at all, the spider finished with her thread and bent down slowly to bite into me. Her poison was languorous and calming, and as her shadow covered me and blocked out the light completely I disappeared.

  * * *

  I woke up at eleven feeling empty and strangely removed after my flat, artificial sleep. I lay in bed for ten minutes looking calmly at the events of yesterday, from my conversations with Morgan and Charlotte to the face the waitress made when she realized what I’d done to her boyfriend. Yesterday seemed a long way away, and the faces I had seen there unreal, as if they were an implanted memory of a time I hadn’t actually lived. I sat up against the wall and took a hold of myself, deciding not to take any more of those rhino pills before I went to bed. I ran through what I had to do today. Then I pushed aside the curtains to see that the day was a dull cold grey with no shadows anywhere. I got up and lumbered across the room to the telephone.

  The message on the machine was from a certain Graham Lloyd. He must have tried my office last night and then looked me up in the phone book when he hadn’t got me there. There was another message on from him as well, left, so the machine informed me, at 7.49 a.m. precisely. My, I thought, as I signally failed to phone him back with the urgency he requested, aren’t we in a bit of a hurry today?

  I had coffee and half a slice of toast and then called my office to get the messages off the work machine. Graham Lloyd had indeed left me a message at my office, not sounding quite so impatient as he had tried to reach me there first. There was also a message from Mrs Lewes asking if I’d got any news about Dominic. She asked me not to phone her, saying that she’d try me again. The final message was from Andy Gold, saying it was nothing urgent but that maybe he ought to come over and thrash out some ideas. I was surprised that he was giving any credence at all to any other theories than the one he was pursuing; gay slasher strikes again. It all seemed a lot to deal with. I thought I’d leave Andy to get in touch if he wanted to, and the MP could stew for a little while longer.

  Not much longer. I was heading towards the shower when the phone rang. I picked it up with a pretty good idea who’d be on the other end. I was right.

  ‘Rucker? Is that Rucker?’

  My second ever phone conversation with a Tory MP. This was a pit bull in a Montessori Centre too but there was no leash anywhere.

  ‘William Rucker speaking,’ I said.

  ‘Rucker. I don’t know who the hell you are, but—’ I cut him off.

  ‘Can you hold, please.’

  I put the phone down without waiting for his reply and opened my pocket diary. I’d arranged to meet Sharon later and I couldn’t remember the exact time, whether it was half-six for some food before the show, or seven-thirty and we’d get something after. It was half-six. I leant over the table and picked up the phone again.

  ‘Now then. Who do I have the pleasure of addressing?’

  ‘Rucker,’ the MP began again, ‘you know damn well who this is. Now—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said cutting him off again. I ran a hand over my head and tried to shake off the weary feeling I still had in spite of two cups of coffee. ‘I’m sorry, but before we continue this conversation, can I ask you a question? Do you recall ever watching Ilie Nastase play tennis at all?’

  That got him.

  ‘Well, if you do,’ I continued, ‘you might remember him reminding an umpire to call him Mr Nastase. Not Nastase. Mr Nastase. It’s the same for private detectives, I’m afraid.’ I yawned.

  ‘Look here—’

  ‘No, Mr Lloyd, for I presume you are he. I will not look there. You call me, you want to speak to me. Far more, I imagine, than I want to speak to you. So I am William to restaurant owners, Billy to my friends and a firm Mr Rucker to you. Got it?’

  ‘Don’t you get—’

  ‘I said got it, lover boy?’

  There was a silence on the other end of the line which had the strange effect of waking me up a lot. Then, as if the first part of our conversation had never happened, Lloyd said, quite calmly, ‘Mr Rucker. I think we should meet. Come to my office. No, on second thoughts don’t come anywhere near my office. I’ll meet you for lunch. Do you know The Flag on Carlisle Street?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nor will I be there for lunch. I will, however, be sitting in The Colt on Stroud Green Road at exactly five p.m. If you’d like to join me.’

  ‘I can’t. Not at that time. Be in—’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. I tucked the receiver under my chin and took another swig of the now lukewarm coffee. ‘In that case give my regards to a certain Andrew Gold when you see him. He’s a police officer. He’ll call on you at about six o’clock with a couple of boys in blue in tow if I’m not sitting in The Colt on Stroud Green Road at five, looking across a table at you with a G and T in your hand. All right?’

  I put the receiver down and strolled into the bathroom, feeling the engines beginning to kick in now. There’s nothing like being rude to someone in power when the caffeine isn’t working. The phone went almost immediately but I let it ring and pulled aside the shower curtain. While I was getting drenched I wondered if all MPs had a secretary. If they did I felt sorry for Lloyd’s; she probably wasn’t having a very nice day today.

  I walked down to the repro shop and gave Carl the film I’d shot of Dominic Lewes. Carl looked exhausted, like he’d been down in the lab all night. I felt some sympathy for him and told him that the pictures weren’t that urgent and that he could take his time over them if he had to. He looked up quickly from the chit he was filling in.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said aghast. ‘What have you done with the real Billy Rucker!’

  After that I drove over to my office and sat behind my desk with Kojak and a bacon roll. I thought about Lloyd. I tried to work a scenario in which he could be placed. He wasn’t the man in the picture but he could have hired him. I wondered if Edward had found out about the affair and had refused a divorce. Would that make Lloyd want to kill him? No, not these days, not unless Lloyd was really, really jealous and couldn’t bear to think of Charlotte with Edward a second longer. Later on I’d meet Lloyd and maybe find out what kind of person he was.

  I looked at the file and picked up the phone but was once again informed that Alex hadn’t shown up for his shift that day and had not rung in with an excuse. The manager’s voice was tight as a tripwire and I could hear a very persistent American woman in the background saying, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ The manager put the phone down abruptly, without any goodbye. I couldn’t really blame her.

  I flicked over a few more pages until I found the statement given by Edward Morgan’s co-pilot. I read how Michael James Chalkley had known Edward Morgan for two years and had often flown with him. He said he had no idea that Edward was gay. Chalkley himself was married with three young children, and had witnesses who saw him say goodbye to Edward shortly after exiting customs. One of the stewardesses also saw him get into his Saab in the car park and was then stuck behind him in traffic on the motorway, driving into London.

  Originally I had decided that I wasn’t going to bother with Chalkley. I didn’t think for a minute that he was involved, and I couldn’t imagine what I could get
out of him beyond the report he gave Andy. I’d changed my mind though, because I wanted to know what sort of mood Edward was in before he was killed. If, for instance, he was miserable because he either suspected or knew for sure that Charlotte was seeing another man. I called the number Chalkley had listed, expecting a wife or a message but I got the man himself. He was in all day and yes he was happy to talk to me that afternoon if I wanted. I said that I definitely did and asked him what time would suit him. He said whenever; he was on guard duty and he wasn’t going out. The screams of what sounded like a whole classroom of kids in the background told me what he meant by that.

  I was glad I could get Chalkley out of the way today. I’d thought of hitting some gay bars with the pictures I had but there wasn’t that much time before I had to meet Lloyd and it would be better if I had a clear time ahead to do that. Doing the rounds was still the most likely way that the guy was going to be caught, but often, when you’re showing a picture round, someone will say ‘Sure, he comes in here’ and you have to wait until the place shuts to see if he does or not. You can’t leave a message for the person to wait for you until you’ve finished some other business.

  I copied down Chalkley’s address in my diary and stood up to go. Before I could get to the door, however, it opened.