Shut Eye

by Adam Baron

  ‘A couple of hours previous to discovery, maybe three. You could have done it easily.’

  I turned my head away. A dead kid in my bed with my pubic hair inside his body. Caught red-handed, on the scene, after a tip-off. Mike Williams, I thought, I hope you know someone good.

  ‘I wasn’t there, I told you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, York Way and the Big Bad Wolf.’

  ‘Did you check it?’

  ‘You were there, Billy, I’ll give you that. Prints on the door handle like you said and a bag full of puke. Some blood. But there’s nothing to say at what time you were there. What I think is you went there earlier, before picking up the arse and—’

  ‘A girl, a whore on the road. I spoke to her …’

  ‘Got a name? An address? Might be difficult to find her.’

  Clay put down the sheet and picked up another. He started to read it, not seeming particularly interested in me. He was strangely subdued and I didn’t know why. He would usually have gone after something this good like a bull through a gate in springtime. My mouth was dust. Clay let out a sigh. Then he shook his head and smiled.

  ‘Such a shame,’ he said, turning to the DC. ‘It would have been very convenient.’ He looked back at me. ‘Not that I would have wanted to see a distinguished ex-colleague like yourself go down, mind you. No.’ He paused and glanced back at the A4 sheet before putting it down. ‘I fibbed about the time of death I’m afraid. It was earlier. Burg is sure it wasn’t much after seven and it can’t have been earlier than six-thirty because the boy was seen going into the Mcdonald’s in King’s Cross at that time. He was a regular and a lassie there recognized him.’

  I took that on board. I was in the gym. Pete. Sal. Witnesses.

  ‘Why did you check the Mcdonald’s?’ I asked. I was relieved, curiosity moving into the space being vacated by panic.

  ‘You’ve to thank Burg for it. If I were you I’d send him a bunch of flowers.’ Clay pushed the pile of papers towards me and I picked up the top one and looked at it. ‘There was a Big Mac in his stomach, or at least a small part of one. Burg patched it from the mayonnaise. You’d already told us the lad worked the King’s Cross area so we checked the restaurant.’

  I scanned the page trying to find the part I wanted. I couldn’t. ‘Where was the rest of it?’ I asked. ‘The burger?’ I had a horrible feeling that I knew what the answer would he. Clay’s smile made me feel slightly sick.

  ‘Removed,’ he said.

  I saw a gaping hole of blood and intestines. Clay read from the sheet again.

  ‘ “Only a small part of the food was found, which had been chewed but had not begun to be digested, indicating that it cannot have been present for more than an hour at most. It is my opinion that the rest of the burger, assuming that all of it was consumed by the victim, was removed by the perpetrator to avoid an accurate assessment of the time of death. This theory is compatible with other evidence, specifically the slashing open of the stomach and the disturbance of other local organs.” ’ Clay pursed his lips and nodded to himself again. ‘Clever fellow. Burg too. I’m not sure every stiff stitcher would have spotted that. He says he suspected something like it when he saw how the stomach had been carved up, and that’s why he looked so closely for the food. There wasn’t much of it left by all accounts.’

  I caught a picture of two bloody hands scraping the contents out of Dominic Lewes’ stomach.

  ‘It means, of course, that your movements can be accounted for.’

  I shut the picture out.

  ‘Like I said. And the hair, I mean, he put it there. You can accept that, can’t you?’

  ‘Maybe. Or you could have fucked him before he met his maker. We might do you for that. Sex with a minor.’

  I ignored that. ‘But how did he get the kid into my flat? I’d gone back after the gym, he wasn’t there then, after Burg says he was killed.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I’d have noticed,’ I said.

  Clay paused. He liked having me on the hook. He didn’t want to let me go lightly, simply because I was the wrong fish.

  ‘He was killed somewhere else,’ he admitted finally. ‘The body was moved. He’d been strangled. There was very little shit on your sheets which would not have been the case had he been done there. The blood patterns were wrong too, the major arteries didn’t spurt the way they should have if his heart was beating. The boy kind of just leaked. All that gory stuff in your place was cosmetic. He carried the boy up there and then had his home anatomy lesson.’

  ‘He was hoping I was out.’

  ‘Or he was waiting outside till you went out.’

  I thought for a second.

  ‘Or he knew I was unconscious and he did it then,’ I said. ‘He was having a go at me and all the time Dominic’s body was in the boot of his car.’

  ‘Possible,’ Clay admitted. ‘Possibly so.’

  Clay looked wistful. I’d seen him look that way before. It was the distant, all but faded ghost of compassion, conjured up by a vision of Dominic Lewes. He shook it off with a laugh.

  ‘By the way, we had a look in your office, to see if we couldn’t link you with the lorry driver or the other rent boy. Or Morgan. We found the keys in your flat. Your office diary said you were in the clear but we checked anyway. Some dodgy bar owner we weren’t sure about and then a lawyer bird called Sharon. She backed you up.’ Clay laughed again. ‘Tour office is not what you’d call impressive, is it? You doing well in the private sector, Rucker?’

  Having established that I was no longer in the frame Clay asked me questions about the man in the hat. I told him that he might be from the North, and that he had practically admitted being the killer. He’d said it didn’t matter if he killed me, he would go away for the same stretch anyway. Clay asked me if I’d seen enough of him to add to the picture image; apparently there’s now a computer program that can do stuff like that. I told him that, unfortunately, I had not. I told Clay about the Escort. Whoever it was had obviously been waiting in it, and when I came back he called in a report about a young kid and a man with a knife. Clay said he’d already put it out on the wire.

  I sat back in the chair and stretched. An hour or so had passed. Clay asked me about Rollo and I told him what had happened, that the Morgan thing and looking for Dominic were completely unconnected.

  ‘They’re not any more,’ Clay said.

  I asked if Clay had grilled Rollo on the man in the hat. Clay said he had but he’d pleaded ignorance. They were going to have another go at him. Clay said he thought that was the best bet for now, the closest they were to him; Rollo was someone he knew of even if Rollo didn’t know him.

  I relaxed some more, allowing latent exhaustion to begin to spread into my bones. I was waiting for Clay to tell me I could go home. But he didn’t. He put the sheets of A4 back into the file and sent the duty officer out for tea. He also turned the tape recorder off.

  ’Right then, Rucker.’ Clay made a movement with his hips and his whole enormous frame shivered forward in the chair. ‘What have you got?’ I was about to reply but I was cut off. ‘And don’t give me any shit. You’re close. The guy in the picture picked on you and then this bumboy winds up in your bed after you’ve had a go at his daddy. Not for the first time he’s been there I don’t imagine but this time he’s dead. You’re close, I know it. So give it to me.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. He’d done this the wrong way round. If he’d said this when I thought I would be facing twelve indignant citizens having to explain what my pubic hairs were doing in the anal passage of a murdered fifteen-year-old rent boy I might have tried to answer. Now, I didn’t have to say a thing.

  ‘Tell me about Lloyd.’

  That surprised me. How did he know?

  ‘Lloyd?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve had Mother Teresa on my back. He says that a certain former detective from my division had been harassing a prominent and respected MP.’

  ‘A different matter,’
I said.

  ‘Like hick it is!’

  ‘And harassment is a bit strong. I just wanted to chat.’

  ‘About what? What did you want to chat about?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘TELL ME WHAT YOU CHATTED ABOUT!’

  Clay continued to ask me that question, or tributaries of it, for the next hour, at a steady increase in volume. He also wanted to know what Dominic Lewes had to do with Morgan and simply would not believe that I was working on two things at once. He mentioned terrifying terms such as ‘withholding evidence’ and ‘perverting the course of justice’, but I knew the law. I didn’t know the link between the two things myself, and I still couldn’t think of a reason to tell him about Lloyd and Charlotte. There wasn’t much the police could do other than lean on Lloyd and hope for a very unlikely confession. They had to catch the man who had beaten me up. Without him they didn’t have anything.

  He got tired eventually.

  ‘You better find out what’s going on, Rucker, and you’d better tell me when you know, or I’ll make some big shit for you. We’re checking that gym story of yours again and if it looks like you might not have been there exactly when you said, you’ll be back in here quicker than piss down a drain. Hear me?’

  Clay left in as much of a hurry as he’d arrived. A sergeant came in. My clothes were returned to me and I put them on; all except my shirt which would have to go in the nearest bin. I was allowed to keep the sweatshirt they had given me. I was made to sign for everything and was offered a lift home, which I initially declined. I didn’t know whether or not I wanted to go home. I wanted to think about it over a curry but then I realized that I had no money on me. I changed my mind about the lift and told the sergeant on the front desk that. He said I should take a seat and wait.

  It was now ten thirty and I was shafted. The adrenalin which had kept my system in operation for the last thirty-six hours had drained away and all that was left was a deep lake of fatigue, along with a diminishing pain in my head and on my face, and an increasing pain in my ribs. I didn’t rate the chance of sleep too highly though. It would have to be on the sofa in my flat, or on the sofabed in my office, and anyway the whirl of questions which had been stirred by the events of the last day and a half, but kept in the back of my brain, had begun to spin right out into the front of it.

  Who broke into my flat? How did Dominic fit in? Lloyd, was Lloyd involved? It seemed ludicrous to think so but I couldn’t think of anything more plausible. But if he was, why carry on after doing Edward? To fit me up? Really? Or was it all the same guy? How had the man got the picture with my address on the back? Was he in one of the pubs I went to? Did I speak to him? Had I spoken to the killer, been friendly, given him information to help him find me? Find Dominic?

  And how the hell was I going to find any of this out?

  When the boy in blue came to give me my ride he was plainly pissed off at having to do so. It was a course in crime detection he’d done, not the Knowledge. I ignored his attitude and told him where I lived. I’d decided to go home because I had some cash there which I could pick up and then cab it down to the twenty-four-hour greasy spoon on Theobald’s Road before deciding where to sleep. At least I hoped I had some cash. My flat had been broken into by a psychopath and given the once-over by a team of detectives. Was it likely? At least I could change out of these clothes and pick up my cash card or a chequebook.

  The car stopped at the top of Exmouth Market. I walked down towards my flat, wondering if the police had left it open or fixed the doorjamb for me. I wasn’t looking forward to going in there. I wondered how much clearing up they’d done. I was tired, hungry, and in no small amount of pain. As I got closer I saw the light from Fred’s Cafe on the right and I wondered if it was still open. It was quarter past eleven and I knew it would be but there wouldn’t be any food on. They’d probably do me a sandwich if I pleaded but I wanted something hot. I walked past the cafe and was about to turn down towards my flat when I heard the door swing open. I glanced round as a figure hurried out of the door towards me. My heart bucked in my chest on impulse and I turned, backing away, pulling my hands out of my pockets.

  ‘Billy!’

  Sharon stood in front of me. I let out a breath. She went to put her arms around me, but stopped when I winced. She looked at me for a second, holding on to my arm, and then held a hand up to my face, lightly touching the bruising beneath my left eye.

  ‘Oh, Billy,’ Sharon said. Her voice was a mixture of worry and relief. It sounded good. Her eyes reached up for mine. Sharon rested her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘They called me,’ she said. ‘I came but they wouldn’t let me see you. I’ve been here all day. I was so worried.’ Sharon’s hand moved across my bruising again. She moved her body closer to me. The pain I was feeling, and the exhaustion and the latent fear, all seemed to rise up and out of me like the soul from a dead man’s body. All the misunderstandings, the problems we’d had, went too. There wasn’t anything left, nothing but the face in front of me, and the pleasure I felt seeing it there. I moved forward, filling the small gap between us, and Sharon’s fingers closed round my neck.

  ‘Oh, Billy,’ Sharon said.

  And then there was fear greater than when a shotgun had been pointed at my head.

  ‘I love you. I love you so much.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  We stood in the street and we kissed for a long time. After that we just stood holding on to each other. I didn’t want to let her go. I didn’t want to not be holding her, I didn’t want to deal with what we were doing or what would happen next. I felt hollow and weak. Eventually Sharon started to shiver with the cold and I released her and watched her run back into Fred’s for her coat which she had left on the back of a chair.

  Later, in her flat, we made love, gently at first because of my ribs, but then with a fervour which brooked no mitigation for pain or injury. Sharon was so familiar to me but her body was so strange; I found it odd that the woman I knew should have this great store of sexuality, a physicality which was as much herself as the Sharon I had known had been. Her full breasts, her nipples, her belly, her sex, the flushed look on her face when I entered her. This was not a woman I had known, not a woman I had even suspected. It was as though, when I helped her undo the buttons of her blouse, I hadn’t expected to find anything underneath. What I did find was exhilarating, a nakedness so complete I was winded by it, a fist clenching desperate fingers round my heart.

  I hadn’t thought about anything, not even in the taxi over to West London during which we had sat, hands tight together, not speaking a word. Neither of us had said what was going to happen or spoken about the future. Sharon had led me up to her flat and then into her bedroom where we’d kissed for a long time before Sharon pulled away, her face solemn, her hands going to the bottom of my T-shirt which we pulled over my head. My ribs were bandaged and Sharon carefully undid them and then kissed the bruising there and held her cheek against it. When we were both naked we just sat looking at each other, the slightest sad smile on her lips, my bones light but my stomach heavy. I felt like I was about to throw up. Sharon moved under her duvet and I joined her beneath it, merging into the warmth and a smell which was so familiar but richer than I had ever experienced it. We held on to each other and Sharon drew me inside her almost immediately, her hand cold on my cock, her sex full and so wet I moved straight into her. We made love slowly, hardly moving, unwilling to surrender our skin to even the shortest moment of not touching. We came with our mouths locked together, Sharon’s teeth biting into my lower lip.

  We had both been completely silent, and now we lay together, Sharon clinging to the side of my torso which wasn’t bruised, both my arms around her neck and shoulders. We still didn’t speak, and there were still no thoughts in my head. There was just the smell of her and the feeling of her body next to me. Time was a closed warm space, a static world, a pressure cooker of sensation and emotion. It didn’t have an outside to it; nowhere it had co
me from, nowhere it was going to.

  We made love again and this time it was wild and uncontrolled as we let our emotions unleash themselves. I bit into her beautiful skin, making marks which would stay on her, and she did the same to me. The pain I felt seemed part of a greater, more powerful sensation, a tunnel of feelings which I’d never known I needed but I needed more than anything. We didn’t speak to each other, not like we had spoken in my flat, or over dinner or in a bar. But there were words. Embarrassing words, sex words not love words. We tore at each other and pulled the other back close, we moved into different positions, our hands never satisfied, clawing, prying, our mouths moving constantly in an effort at completeness. I wanted to touch all of her with all of me, I wanted to have her in every possible position all at the same time, to turn her inside out and fuck her that way too. I wanted to do something which could never be undone, something which could never be just explained away, causing a slight blushing or a looking to the side. Something close to terrifying. I held on to her and scoured her body with my three-day beard. I felt her nails in my back, her teeth in my bottom lip, more, harder, my cheek, my stomach. I couldn’t tell where my body ended and Sharon’s began. It was stunning and uncontrollable and I never wanted it to end.

  * * *

  But it did end. We lay together, exhausted, feeding madly on air, our tears running down each other’s faces. I moved on to my back and we lay side by side, Sharon’s hand covering mine. Almost immediately I was asleep, but it was a sleep in which I was cut off from though aware of the room I was in and the body I was lying next to. My body just went somewhere, to a place of rest and perfect calm, where it lay detached from me in an ambient limbo. It felt like bathing in an enchanted pool. And then I floated back to a more connected sort of consciousness, a greater presence in the room, with Sharon there lying on her back with her eyes closed, her breasts rising and falling in a steady motion.

  The duvet had long since fallen on to the floor and Sharon was naked. I could not accept or fully believe the actual fact of that. I looked at her body and found myself feeling guilty about doing so, as though I shouldn’t be looking at her. I desperately wanted to touch her breasts, to hold them and run my hands down over her belly and entwine my fingers into the golden triangle of her pubic hair. But I was scared to, I was afraid of being so familiar. I didn’t know why, given what we had just done, but the feeling would not go away. With her eyes closed I felt like a voyeur, seeing something I shouldn’t, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes from running all over her, boring into the places they had never had access to before. It was exhilarating. Had I always wanted to do this? I was suddenly aware of my own nakedness. I was naked. I was lying in a bed, naked, next to Sharon.