“It didn’t feel like stealing at the time.” She tilted her head up, like she was looking for approval. “I mean, I’d thought about it for quite a while. You can rationalize anything if you try hard enough, especially after the economy took a shit on us.”
She took a sip of wine. The green of her eyes looked darker than it had in the pub, as if great clouds had rolled in. “I just kept thinking I just need one lucky break. One push to get me out of the life I’d been living. I knew how to live the way I wanted, but I just couldn’t get there on my own. If everyone could just look the other way, just once.”
I kissed her. I’m stupid like that.
I don’t remember either of us moving from the door, but soon we had both stumbled up the stairs and into my bed. I made the run to the bathroom for a condom and stood fighting with the wrapper, trying not to think of cold things or waterfalls. By the time I got back into bed she was snoring. It was a soft snore, very cute. I kissed her on the forehead and covered her with the sheets.
I pulled my jeans back on and trod carefully down the stairs, ignoring the noisy step and steadying myself on the banister to stop the world spinning around me. I dropped onto the sofa, and as I closed my eyes, I could feel the booze taking me under.
I stirred for a moment, not knowing if my eyes had been closed for seconds or hours. The thought of making a coffee crossed my mind, but then the sleep came again like a blanket. It wasn’t until sun hit my face that I woke up again, daylight streaming in through curtains I’d forgotten to close.
I sat up slowly, squinting against the light and feeling my head throb. As far as hangovers went, this wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t the worst I’d had. It felt more like a rugby match than an all-out war. I climbed the stairs and leaned into my room. Mary was almost as I’d left her. Lying in the bed, wrapped in the sheets.
Almost the same.
Except she was dead.
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic. Hold it in, concentrate.
Fuck it.
Panic.
I was wrong. I had to be.
I touched her skin and it was cool. It felt like a waxwork model. I felt for a pulse at her wrist. When I couldn’t find one I tried for a heartbeat. I brushed her cheek with my hand, hoping for some kind of reaction or a flutter of her eyelids. Anything.
She’d been dead for a few hours, and the realization connected somewhere between my head and my gut. I felt empty, as if someone had pulled a plug in my stomach.
She was wearing her underwear. The rest of her clothes were still piled on the floor where we had left them. There were needle marks on the inside of her right arm. I hadn’t pegged her as a junkie, but she could well have shot up after I fell asleep. Or someone may have done it for her. The second option was more likely, because I tore through her pile of clothes but didn’t find any drugs or needles.
That wasn’t what killed her, though.
I could see marks around her neck, a thick band of skin that was raised and swollen where something had squeezed. One of my old work ties was on the floor with her clothes, and it hadn’t been there the night before.
I’d always hated wearing a tie, but I’d never hated the sight of one as much as I did right then. I noticed a tattoo of a butterfly on her inner thigh, and right then it looked like the saddest thing I’d ever seen. I stared at it for a moment, transfixed.
Then I felt the panic build inside, running up my spine and taking over as my knees began to shake. I made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up.
I stood up when I finished retching, feeling light-headed. I splashed my face with cold water, pressing my fingers into my eye sockets, as if I could erase the image of her dead body. I tried to stop breathing so fast. Now was the time to think clearly. Slow down. Do the sensible thing.
But I didn’t move to pick up the phone. Instead my father’s voice ran around my head.
“If there’s trouble, be far away from it. If you can’t be far away, run like hell.”
I seemed to feel his hand on my shoulder when I thought of that speech. I could picture him, face and arms covered with marks from police beatings, for being the wrong race in the wrong place.
“They’ll just see a Gypsy, they won’t ask questions, won’t stop to see who else might have done it. They will kick the shit out of you and lock you up. If your hands are out of sight, they’ll assume you’ve got a knife. Whatever happens out there is not your concern. Run.”
Born to run.
This is where I really fucked up. I shouldn’t have listened to my dad’s voice in my head. But I couldn’t help it. I ran downstairs, pulled on my jacket, grabbed my keys, and fled.
I drove. I didn’t have a plan, and I didn’t need one. My mind had gotten good at autopilot over the past year, and a familiar fog drifted in over my thoughts, a white blanket wrapped around the inside of my skull. I tried listening to music, but I couldn’t settle in, nothing would distract me. If I’d driven south I would have hit town after town, the epic urban sprawl that leads to Birmingham. Instead I drove west, where the city gives way to wide-open country and to the sleepy market towns that separate England from Wales. There was a buzz at the base of my skull, like tinnitus in the wrong place, something I could feel rather than hear. A few times on the force I’d witnessed violence, and this was the same reaction I’d had, a distance growing between me and the world.
The buzz didn’t begin to fade, the blanket to let go of my brain, until I reached Bridgenorth. An ancient town built on the ruins of a castle that had been sacked after the civil war, it always looked to me like an island of rock surrounded by countryside. It had always been the perfect place to think. It would also be the perfect place to defend against a Welsh invasion, but that didn’t seem likely. I was sitting in the beer garden of a pub I liked, with a pint of bitter in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
And I don’t smoke.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mary’s dead body. I kept trying to think of her as just a woman, someone I was detached from, the way they had taught me on the force. “No place for crusades or grudges,” the advice went. “Don’t get attached.” But each time I started to build up a wall against Mary, she would break it down with her smile or with that lock of hair she was always blowing out of her face.
I gave up trying to forget her and thought of calling the police. But I was screwed if I did that. I was just a dirty Gypsy with a corpse on my hands. She was strangled in my bed. With my tie. Her prints were all over my house. Everybody in the city knew I was dirty, and the police wouldn’t trust me to boil an egg. As my dad used to say, there would be no questions, no pause.
My other option was to call the Mann brothers. They’d paid off the mortgage on my house. The jobs they paid me for kept me in food and drink. All that was left was the formality of handing them my soul, which is what I’d be doing if I asked them to clean this up.
Either way, I was trapped.
I left the pint on the table and stubbed out the cigarette, suddenly feeling the taste of it in my mouth. I found my car in the street outside and drove back home, listening to some bland soul station on the radio. It was like driving forward in time as the market town and Roman roads slowly dropped away and the tarmac and factories appeared, signs of the industrial age kicking in. As I neared the city, the industrial age gave way to the bankrupt age and the views were of a region whose identity had been snatched away. It had been a long time since these factories had stopped pumping soot and smoke into the sky, but the clouds always seemed to hang a little lower and darker over the area.
There wasn’t much traffic as I neared Wolverhampton, as if the whole world was in the same daze I was. I killed the engine after pulling into my driveway and stared up at the windows of my house. I didn’t want to move, either forward or back. I wanted to close my eyes and stay right where I was, forever.
I breathed in and out, willing the hole in my gut to close, and got out of the car. I unlocked the front door and p
ushed it open, stepping into the house before I had time to change my mind.
It felt wrong.
Even with a corpse in my bed this morning, the house had still felt as if it had life in it, as if there were more people in it than just me. This time, though, the emptiness and stillness clung to my hallway.
I climbed the stairs slowly, taking them one at a time with heavy feet. I reached the top and stepped into my bedroom.
It was empty.
Mary was gone.
My bed was stripped bare; the sheets had vanished along with her body, her clothes, and my tie. I felt the buzzing at the base of my skull again as I wandered from room to room, trying to find where the corpse had walked to.
I tried to imagine everything was different. That I’d been wrong. That Mary wasn’t dead. That she’d woken up, cleaned the room, and left. That I was free and clear and a silly little boy.
Yeah, right.
Someone had moved the body. Someone had cleaned my room, removed the evidence, and taken the murder weapon with them. Who would do that? Someone was fucking with me, and I had no idea what the hell I’d stumbled into.
I closed my eyes and tried the opposite trick now, tried picturing what made her human again in my mind, the smile, the hair, her tattoo. But all I could see was her dead body.
I sat at the kitchen table, looking around my space. It felt like someone else’s house now. It had never felt completely mine. Even when we bought it, it had felt more like Laura’s project. She was always talking of grand plans. Of a nursery in the front bedroom, of a music room for me where I could put up big speakers and tune out, of a desk for her in a space that would be her own. That was another year and another life. Now the house was just the scene of a woman’s murder.
Somewhere out there was a killer and a dead body. Someone had gone to the trouble of killing Mary in my home, then removing her. But they’d also taken my tie, which incriminated me. It was like a joke with the punch line missing. Every instinct I had still told me to get the hell out of Dodge.
To give in to my blood.
I owned the house outright—I could simply walk away if I wanted. Packing wouldn’t be hard. In truth I’d never fully unpacked. I had clothes in my bedroom and food in the kitchen. In the living room I had CDs, DVDs, and the equipment to play them on. In a cupboard I had a box of my wife’s things, not a lot, just the things she’d left behind.
But what would that achieve? I wouldn’t be able to just forget Mary. She kept speaking to me. Fragments of conversation from last night kept drifting to the front of my mind. If she’d died in someone else’s house, it would have meant nothing to me. But she was a lost woman who couldn’t find a better soul than mine to cling to on her last night on earth.
Fuck it.
Somebody out there had something on me, and I knew it. They were dangling the threat of the corpse over me. Stay quiet, and it could stay vanished. Leaving town would be OK too, as long as I kept my mouth shut. Poke around, start asking questions, and it could reappear. Whoever was holding Mary’s body was counting on my silence, thinking that the threat of a murder rap would scare me. Well, they were right. But I was also stubborn, stupid, and angry. I hate secrets. I hate mysteries. And I hate being used.
I thought again about the needle mark in Mary’s arm. Drugs. It had to be drugs. Someone had shot her up last night, and there would be no other reason to do that. Someone was making a point. If it involved drugs, then somebody in town would have heard about it. These things never stay secret. The drug trade is like any other, full of office politics and juicy gossip. All you need to do is find the right office junior and apply pressure.
I’d ask around and maybe I’d get lucky.
Maybe I’d get killed.
In this line of work, you’re only as good as the people you lean on for information.
I was going to have to start at the bottom.
If you really want to see the drug trade at work, you head out to the council estates and the parks or take a walk around the high-rise flats or boarded-up houses. That’s where you see capitalism at its youngest and purest. If the brains of these kids were put to military use, we would never lose a war.
The dealers you find in the city center are the ones on the edge of the wheel. They’re amateurs and losers with big talk and short attention spans. They taste their own gear and are on first-name terms with the police who roust them. You don’t tap these guys up if you want to know where the money is, but they are useful. If you want to find someone higher up the tree, you pull all the branches you can reach. My approach is simple: piss off as many people as I can until I get to the right guy.
Matt was always the first person I’d check with and the last person you’d buy anything off. He hung around Saint Peter’s Church, sitting by the fountain or in the grounds of the church itself. He was a rodent-like kid—small and greasy, wrapped in an old army coat with a German flag on the arm. He used to be a student at the university. After selling skunk to his friends, he realized how much money he could make by selling to other people. As soon as he started peddling his gear outside of campus, he officially became a problem for the university management. That, and his own spiraling habit, had led him to where he was now. Homeless, broke, and more addicted to the stuff he was trying to sell than his customers were.
“Eoin!”
He found me before I found him, running across the churchyard to greet me. Was he limping? Hard to tell. He didn’t seem to be supporting his own weight very well. He was thinner than I remembered, and he smelled worse. When he smiled, it was with more gums and less teeth than before.
“Hey, I was just looking for you.”
“Me?” He paused and looked round, telegraphing what was going through his head. “What you want to know?”
I could see the hope in his eyes. Here was his shot at being useful again, at being part of something. He was too sensitive, and everyone knew it. His time was marked if he didn’t get out of the trade. If I were a nicer man, I’d make a mission of straightening him out. But I already had one junkie for a brother and no interest in adopting another one.
“Just a couple questions. I’ll stand you a couple of drinks next time I’m in Posada.”
“OK,” he sniffed, wiping at his nose. I decided that he looked more like a beat-up old dog than a rodent.
“Anything big happening that I don’t know about?”
“Like what?”
“Any heists? Any stashes been nicked?”
“Shit, you know. The usual. Gaines and the Mann brothers have got everything divided up, and nobody touches them, so it’s all small shite, school kids who don’t know any better.”
Ransford Gaines was old money crime: gambling, protection, and vice. He’d expanded into drugs sometime in the eighties, when the Birmingham gangs were encroaching. Since then, he and the Mann brothers had agreed to disagree. “Any new product?”
“Nah. I heard that Claire Gaines was into meth, the wrong way, and her old man was going to start cutting the supply and keep her clean, but nothing’s new.”
Claire was the youngest Gaines daughter. She was a loose cannon, everybody knew that. “Have there been any new faces?”
“Yeah, some new guy. Polish, I think.”
“Selling in town?”
“Yeah, in the pubs and clubs. He’s probably going to try and get a place in the estates.”
That would be interesting. Once a new person started pushing in on the estates, there would be hell to pay.
“What’s this all about anyway? Not like you to be sniffing round drugs.”
“Bad joke, Matt, very bad joke. Any dealers having girl trouble?”
“Of course. You know how it is.”
I turned to leave. I could think of better ways to waste my time. Most of them involved sitting in Posada. I tried one last question.
“You know an Irish girl name of Mary?”
“No, is she fit?”
I laughed and walked away. I pas
sed through the church gate and headed toward the steps.
“I still get the drinks, right?”
“Whatever, Matt. Yeah.”
I’d forgotten about the drinks before I reached the steps.
I headed back out and started tapping up the street dealers. They weren’t all as low as Matt. In fact, the majority of them were at least three showers and a meal better off. But it’s hard to get anything solid out of a drug addict. I needed someone who didn’t use the product. I needed to go higher up the tree.
There was one person who kept eluding me.
I must have asked a dozen people, “You seen Jellyfish lately?”
Everyone had the same answer or variations on it. He wasn’t around or he was out of town or he owed them money.
Jellyfish wasn’t a dealer, but they all knew him. He was a professional good time. As far as I knew, he’d never held an honest job, but he always knew where the party was, who was doing the fucking, who was being fucked, and who was peddling the best gear. Like an old-school tobacco company rep, he’d always turn up at a party with free samples from whoever was protecting him that month—usually the Mann brothers.
It was usually quicker to get information from him than to go looking for it myself. I’d never known exactly where his nickname came from or what his real name was. I’m sure he started out as a Jeremy or a Justin, something along those lines. The nickname had something to do with him going both ways. Or, to be more precise, he went whichever way the money was.
Another question that kept turning me up blanks was, “Know a girl named Mary?”
“Nah, man, she owe you money?”
“Nah, man, she cut and run on you?”
“Yeah, man, I heard she’s your mom.”
I was getting nowhere.
I tried a few of the local pubs, telling myself I was still looking for information when really I was just drinking. As I left the last of the pubs, a skinny Asian-looking kid bumped into me. He wore a turban low over his forehead, more like a bandanna, and I saw a kara on his wrist, the metal Sikh bracelet. As he walked away he said, “Bauser wants to see you.”
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