Shut Eye

by Adam Baron

  I worked hard but only got one hit. A middle-aged man, in a pub on Old Compton Street, said he thought he may have seen the man, but then changed his mind quickly. I thought he might have changed it on purpose, in fact I was pretty sure he had, and I got quite excited. I asked the man if he was sure. Yes, he was. He told me he had to use the toilet and when he didn’t come back after five minutes I could have kicked myself. He’d done exactly what I’d done to Lloyd. The fire escape was open and when I chased out of it on to Dean Street all I could see was a few hardy souls sitting outside a cafe and a waiter sneaking a fag break in a doorway. I wondered why he had legged it, why recognizing the man had caused him to panic. Was he scared? He didn’t look it. Ashamed maybe? I made a mental note of his face in case I ran in to him again. I never did. None of the other patrons of the pub had seen him before.

  Sitting in various pubs, bars and cafes I sometimes thought about Lloyd, and tried again to see if there was anything I’d missed out concerning the charming MP. I racked my brains for a way to get to him, to connect him with the man in the hat. I couldn’t think of a way. I could, of course, let the police know about his affair, and I did resolve to do that when I ran out of anything else to do. It was, after all, the only thing of note I had managed to find out. It wouldn’t do much good though, I knew. If he was innocent it would just cause a lot of embarrassment and if he was guilty it wasn’t really much in the way of evidence against him. All it would do was cause him grief, which I wasn’t too concerned about, but it would cause Edward’s widow a whole lot too.

  I called Sir Peter, having forgotten to check up on Lloyd’s alibi, and he confirmed that Lloyd had been away when Edward was killed. Sir Peter’s cheerfulness had vanished, a temporary blip on a downward slope, and my lack of progress didn’t cheer him up any. I told him what I’d done and he insisted that I had to go on until there really was nothing more I could think of doing. I felt there was something masochistic about his fervour, as though he was punishing himself. I told him that I needed another cheque if I was to continue and he was more than willing to send me one. He sounded very depressed and I got the feeling that finding his brother’s killer was all that he could think about now. He then told me something which proved that I was right. Sir Peter Morgan was resigning from the Tory front bench and retreating to the relative safety, as he put it, of the back benches. He might even chuck it all in completely, he said.

  Spurred on by Sir Peter’s unsettling determination I took a day off from the bars and pubs and interviewed some of the stewardesses Edward had flown with. Apart from glowing descriptions and in one case a flood of tears, I didn’t get anything out of them. I spoke to the steward Michael Chalkley had told me about and he said that he did go to the Pavilion Bar now and then, and he sometimes met men there. That meant that it could well have featured as a potential pick-up place for the killer, even though it was risky. But how, I wondered, would he have known about it? It certainly wasn’t in the Time Out Guide to Gay London.

  I thought about talking to Charlotte Morgan again but I knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere, not if I couldn’t find the man in the hat. One lunchtime I got a call from Andy Gold, and he met me at Mike and Ally’s cafe for lunch.

  Andy looked very tired, and unusually subdued. He picked at his sandwich and only made a half-hearted attempt to get me to tell him the information he suspected I was keeping from him. We chatted about old times, cases we had worked on together. He told me that he was sick of police work. He had been taken off the gay killer case and reassigned to something even more nasty, if that was possible. Somebody, other than their parents, was meeting young girls from school, apparently offering them modelling contracts, and then taking them for photo shoots. He may have taken some pictures for all the police knew but what he did then was almost too disgusting to imagine. There had been two so far and one lucky escape.

  Andy said, ‘It’s not the bodies. They don’t get me any more, they really don’t. It’s the family. The dad looking bewildered, the mother hysterical, a little sister who’ll stay lost in the middle of her head for ever. The photo on the mantelpiece. And worse, we never learn. Something happens and we fix it and then there’s something else that happens which we haven’t thought of. There’s always something else, some new way some poor fuck’s going to cop it. Thinking ahead is too expensive, it pisses too many people off without apparent just cause. All we do is clean up after the shit’s already been shat, then spray pretty-sounding words around to kill the smell. What’s the fucking point of it?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I left, remember?’

  Andy gave me a set of keys to the Morgans’ flat in Canonbury, and that night I took the short drive over there. Teddy’s Rover was still in the garage, as was Charlotte’s car. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go back there, even for that. I noted the scrapes of paint on the Rover’s wheel arch and the slight dent in the side of the Golf. I walked through the garage and into the apartment the way I assumed Teddy and his guest had gone. The apartment was dark but for the orange light of a lamppost spreading in through the open curtains. I closed the curtains, flicked a switch and walked into the middle of the living room.

  The flat was very large for two people. The floor was Norwegian pine and the walls were an off-white broken up by modern prints and the odd original. There was a Chesterfield sofa, a coffee table and two armchairs. The place was far more to my taste than Charlotte’s mews cottage had been and I wondered if actually she was borrowing that from a friend, or had rented it complete. I liked the simplicity of the place, the roomy feel to it. I felt perhaps that my flat could look like a miniature version of it, if I ever got round to making that trip to Ikea.

  I checked out the bathroom and then the bedroom. The forensics people had taken away the bedroom carpet, the bed, and all the sheeting so there was no sign of the events which had taken place there. There was a faint smell though: someone had closed the windows a little too early, and it’s not the sort of smell you could ever forget once you’d encountered it. It was faint, the tart iron of blood mixed with that of old sex, and excrement, and something else, something indefinable but very present nevertheless. It was the smell, not just of death, but of violent death.

  I stayed in the flat for a while, poking around, opening cupboards, not really knowing what I was looking for. I found a box containing four bottles of champagne and thought of the forensics report I’d read. I listened to the silence which seemed to ring from the walls, the indiscernible echoes of vicious blows and terrible screams. I sat back on the sofa and closed my eyes and tried to picture what had happened to Edward, patching together everything I knew about him and his last day alive, filling in the gaps with movements that I thought were the most probable.

  I saw him at the airport. I saw him at the bar and then on the way home. I saw him smile. I saw him sitting where I was sitting now, with another man by his side. I managed to put together a scenario, complete with dialogue, one which I knew was plausible enough but could never be exactly right. Even if I had got the broad facts, and put them in roughly the right order, what I saw was only guesswork, a model which I had built simply to help me. Only two people ever knew what really happened in this flat. Only they really saw it. I was looking for one man so that I could ask him, but even if I found him he was hardly likely to tell me. And as for the other, I was sure that he would have been more than willing to speak to me if he could, but he would never be able to tell me. This flat, which was so full of his things, his clothes in the closets, half-empty bottles of after-shave, a brand new tennis racket, seemed so full of him I felt like saying, ‘Teddy, who killed you, who was it?’ The clothes and the scent and the tennis racket could make no answer to me.

  I knew that sitting there moving different figures through my mind was just a fiction, but for some reason it seemed to help. It struck me that Edward’s killer, in spite of the apparent frenzy of his actions, was someone perfectly in control of himself. He had waited until
he was in the bedroom. Going into the bedroom is the last thing you do with someone. It was the last thing Edward had done. They had apparently been in the bath together, the man must have been itching to kill Edward then but he hadn’t. He was a man with composure, a man able to deny himself something until the exact moment when it would give him most pleasure. It was this, I knew, which was making it so difficult for either the police or myself to find him.

  Sitting in Edward’s flat, and thinking of the person I felt I now knew, depressed me immeasurably. This easy-going man had, as far as I could tell, inspired only affection in all the people I had spoken to. I thought about his killer again and got a physical pang of hatred for him, for his cynicism, for his shrivelled and petrified heart. I wanted to catch him far more than I had done before, talking to his brother over the crème brûlée. I left the flat and knocked on the doors of some of the neighbouring flats and houses. I spoke to a few people who had nothing to tell me, no suddenly recalled flashes they hadn’t relayed to the police. No one had seen anything or heard anything. The people were all unwilling to talk to me, annoyed that I had come round to remind them that they lived next door to the house where such a horrible thing had happened. One old man even looked at me suspiciously. He made the point that murderers often came back to the scene of their crimes. He closed the door a little once he had thought of this, and glanced back into his hallway. I got the feeling that as soon as I had gone he would phone the police. I didn’t want to get Andy into trouble for giving me the flat keys so I got in my car and drove home before I could find out.

  I dropped the keys off to Andy and went back to my round of the pubs with renewed determination. All that week and then the weekend too, and then Monday and Tuesday. I didn’t do anything else or see anyone. Elbowing themselves into the spaces between the thoughts I was having about Edward Morgan and his death, were thoughts of Sharon. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her. I left her a message which she didn’t return, and I stopped myself at the last minute from leaving several more. It was obvious she didn’t want to see me. I asked myself how I hadn’t seen this coming, and then realized that I had in a way. It had been ages since we had been to see Luke together. Sharon never wanted to, saying it was better if we went on our own because that way he got more visits. It was me who suggested we drive out there together last Sunday. I kept seeing Sharon’s face, remembering the times we had gone to the movies together or she had sat across from me at my table sipping wine, her teeth stained, her hair the colour of old Condrieu. I thought about going round to her flat, talking to her, trying to find out exactly what she thought, trying to make her see that she didn’t have to abandon any hope that Luke would recover in order to get on with her life. I didn’t go. I worked hard instead. I didn’t really know what to say to her. I probably wanted to tell her she should live her life as a celibate, tragic heroine, stoic at the bedside of her fallen lover, waiting for the magic day when he would wake from his sleep and finally marry her. I couldn’t say that so I didn’t say anything.

  To keep myself from brooding I hiked round London trying to catch a killer. The weather had turned from irritable to petulant, and then from that to sullen and miserable. It seemed dark all the time and London was dull and quiet, the streets clenched as people braced themselves for three months of freezing winter. The last of the tables disappeared from outside the cafes, the tennis courts and parks were emptying. The doorways which had held recognizable, sleeping forms in the summer, were now filled with mounds of old clothes and blankets which could have covered any number of people, or no one. Faces were tighter, bodies more tense, and there were less people hanging around to ask questions of. London itself seemed to hold on to its secrets tighter.

  I had grown colder too. I kept myself to myself and got more and more depressed about both Sharon and Edward Morgan. I tried not to admit it but the case was going nowhere. No one had seen the man in the picture and in any case by now he had almost definitely changed his appearance completely. It was especially frustrating because I had become convinced, for no concrete reason that I could think of, that there was more to this than simply the latest instalment in a series of never-to-be-understood acts of savagery. There was, I knew it, but getting close to it was like trying to hold the shadow of a man who’s left the room. I had nearly gone through the entire section of the Time Out Guide to Gay London, and once I had finished that I knew that there wasn’t going to be anything else I could do to quell the doubts which were nagging at me like an ulcer. I trudged on, telling myself to think of the money, but after two and a half weeks of increasingly dull and aimless leg-work I had just about decided to give up on it.

  But then one night I took the car down to the gym and did some training. Sal told me that she definitely hadn’t seen the man in the picture I had given her a week and a half earlier. I went in with Mountain Pete. I watched a cocky boy who thought he was Naseem Hamed and noticed a look of fear on the face of another boy holding a big orange coat, who wasn’t sure if he wanted to get into the ring with either of his friends, who were both a bit bigger than he was. I got in my car. I went to see Nicky, who I’d not seen for nearly two weeks, and then I went home to my bed, drifting off into sleep to the bitter honey of Nick Drake’s ballads of death and longing.

  And then a voice on my answerphone woke me from my dreams and I went to stand in the cold outside a freight depot behind King’s Cross station, where the owner of the voice joined me and pointed a sawn-off shotgun at my head.

  Part Three

  Chapter Fifteen

  He was not, as far as I could tell, someone I’d met before. But he could have been. He’d stepped out from behind a trailer and I could barely make him out. What I could see was that he was tall, with a right arm strong enough to hold the weapon steady in one hand at arm’s length. He was wearing what seemed to be jeans and a waist-length leather jacket.

  And a baseball hat.

  I didn’t move. The night was very cold but suddenly I couldn’t feel it. The man was backed by the blackened brickwork of the Victorian freight depot. He held the weapon steady as he took a step forward, his left foot dragging slightly as he did so.

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  It was the second time somebody had asked me that question recently. I still didn’t have much of an answer to it. I was thinking what sort of a chance I’d have if I tried to bluff him out and get the gun off him. Not much.

  He didn’t seem upset that I hadn’t answered his question. As he took another step forward his foot dragged again on the wet tarmac.

  ‘Turn round.’

  I didn’t move. Turning round didn’t seem like a wise thing to do. I tried to find some spittle in the back of my throat.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, trying to sound casual, ‘there’s no need for this …’

  ‘Shut the fuck up and turn around!’ The voice was angry, nervous, not the sort you want with a finger behind it pressed against a trigger. I decided I may as well do what he said. He was standing far enough away that if I lunged for him he’d just blow my chest apart before I could reach him, and near enough that if I turned and made a pattern he couldn’t easily miss if he wanted to blow a hole in my back.

  Slowly, I edged round to the right until he was out of my frame of vision. I moved round some more and focused on the streetlight fifty yards across the road on York Way. I remembered speaking to a prostitute once, standing underneath that very lamppost. Why the fuck wasn’t she there now? Why was there no one on the street at all? My throat was completely dry; I thought about it, but I couldn’t have begged him if I wanted to. I did want to, and I would have if I’d thought it would have done any good. Why the hell not? But it wouldn’t. I wondered if I would hear the shot. I wondered if I would even feel it. My stomach began to lurch, and then to tremble like there was a sparrow stuck in there. I suddenly became aware of an odour, a strong smell of aftershave. I couldn’t tell which type. Through my fear I remember thinking, hey, that doesn’t smell too bad.<
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  I heard the foot scrape again. Then the entire freight depot fell on my head and the streetlight multiplied and spun around my eyes for a dazzling moment until everything was blackness.

  * * *

  When I came to I was inside.

  Somehow I could tell this even though a thick canvas bag had been placed over my head and tied tightly round my neck with what I took to be a short length of rope. My hands were tied too, behind my back but not secured to anything. I was on a cold concrete floor. My head rang and I nearly threw up, which would have been a mistake given the bag. I could feel a cut on the back of my head where the butt of his gun had connected. I tried not to move, seeing if I could hear anything before my assailant knew I had woken up. He must have been watching me though and there’s really nothing you can do to prevent the change in your body when you come into consciousness. I heard him stand up and push a steel chair aside violently which shrieked to a halt across the floor and then tipped over. I found myself pushing my feet against the floor, backing away from the sound that was coming towards me.

  A hand grabbed my jacket and pulled me up. It then pushed me back and was replaced by two hands which jarred my back against the wall hard, three times in a row. I didn’t resist except to try to keep my head from connecting. On the third time I was winded and started to cough violently. I was released and I kicked out, trying to get lucky where I thought his groin would be. I think I got the side of his leg and received a heavy, steel-capped toe in the ribs for my trouble. I curled up in pain, closing my arms on my sides, expecting more.