Rush of Blood

by Mark Billingham

  He knew others might find it all a bit … strange, what with him being such a science geek and all that, but he’d never found the two things to be incompatible. Like he’d said to Marina once, ‘Why can’t I have God and an iPhone?’ He’d been very pleased with that one, had passed it round the congregation the following Sunday.

  ‘Quiet night in, yeah?’

  Marina nodded.

  He’d taken her to church for the first time a day or two after they’d met. That party when they’d found out how much they had in common. He’d told her just how much his faith had helped him with all the bad stuff, told her it would do the same for her.

  Which it had, that was obvious.

  ‘Stops the hate eating you up,’ he’d told her. ‘And the guilt.’ They both agreed that was the worst thing.

  They never really disagreed, not about anything that mattered, which Dave reckoned was what made them such a perfect team. I’m the brains of it and you’re the heart, he would say to her. Give me the best computer in the world and I couldn’t design anything better. You and me versus the rest of them kind of thing.

  God, the Florida lot …

  Turning into the street where they lived, he felt a nice fresh stone heavy in his chest, the jagged edges of it.

  ‘Nowhere to park,’ Marina said, quietly.

  He could just imagine how they would react. Barry sniggering like a kid and Ed making ‘God Squad’ remarks, the wives meek as mice. Well, Barry was thick as mince and the only divinity Ed believed in was between his legs, so screw them!

  ‘When are we going to get Residents’ Parking?’ He felt for the inhaler in his pocket, the stone settling in. ‘How many emails have I sent now …?’

  Ten minutes trying to find a space, and walking back from the next road along, Marina’s hand still hot in his and the sun on his back, Dave could see nothing but their faces. Smirks and knowing glances and Ed pretending he was a deep thinker; trotting out the usual tired shit.

  ‘So, if God is love or whatever, how do you explain tsunamis and babies with AIDS? How do you explain murdered girls?’

  Dave imagined it all very clearly. Barry nodding, impressed, and Ed waiting with his arms folded. Go on then, smartarse, answer that. He wouldn’t of course, not because he couldn’t but because they were not worth it. He would say nothing. He would just smile and hope they understood how worthless he thought they both were.

  He would say nothing.

  Marina went straight to the fridge and began swigging water from the bottle. She’d nearly been sick in the church, but now, when Dave came across and rubbed the small of her back, mouth twisted in concern, she just put the bottle back and smiled and said she was fine. A bit hot, that was all.

  He’d trotted off to check on the thermostat.

  But not for long.

  More than anything she wanted to be on her own, just for five bloody minutes, but he kept following her; upstairs, then from bedroom to bathroom and back again like a puppy. He spoke in that high, silly voice he reserved for times like this. He reached out to stroke her neck when she passed and, in all the ways she had come to recognise, made it blindingly obvious that he was hoping for his Sunday night special.

  She could never understand it. Why did God make him so horny? The last thing praying made Marina feel like was fucking.

  She wanted a hot shower.

  Not that she had been praying, of course.

  At first she’d gone along because she had nothing better to do, happy enough to make him happy; clinging to the hope that it might help, that maybe belief was something you could get better at, like table tennis or a foreign language. It couldn’t hurt, could it? But she’d known almost straight away that it wasn’t for her. She’d found it all a bit creepy to tell the truth, a bit desperate, and she could never quite bring herself to tell him, to destroy his image of them as ideally matched. Beautiful, he’d said, that’s what we are, like the perfect bit of software.

  MarinaDave Version 1.0. He’d actually written that once, in a Valentine card!

  She didn’t know how he managed to … disassociate himself the way he did. Like he was a character in one of the games he designed, like what had happened wasn’t real. She envied it, if she was honest, couldn’t find anything that worked better than spliff or red wine. Maybe she didn’t want to let go of the hate, not completely. Sometimes she felt it crackling through her and it was like she was empowered by it, staring at some of the idiots on the other side of the reception desk and feeling so much stronger than they could possibly imagine.

  The guilt was something else though.

  Today, Dave belting out some dirge about kings and shepherds next to her and she could feel it coming off her like sweat. She half expected that her fingers would leave it there for everyone to see, in tell-tale, guilt-greasy smudges on the hymn book.

  What she’d done. What she wanted to carry on doing.

  She wasn’t stupid, I mean you didn’t need to be Freud or whoever to work out that this was probably why she wanted to be an actress or a writer. Why she wanted to tell other people’s stories.

  ‘You look tense,’ he said.

  ‘Just tired,’ she said.

  ‘How about a massage later?’ Behind her now, his small hands on her shoulders. ‘I could run you a bath …’

  She knew what people thought, how they looked at her sometimes when she told them she was an actress. An actress … who works as a dental receptionist. Oh right … you get a lot of work? She’d seen that look from Angie and from Ed, from Sue even and she was probably the only one with a creative bone in her body.

  ‘That would be lovely,’ she said. ‘Thanks, babe …’

  Nobody knew how good an actress she really was.

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hey, Jeff …’

  Hey, like she was happy enough it was him, but also hey, like she was not that surprised, like who else would it be? Gardner could not help asking himself how many other people were calling Patti Lee Wilson these days to see how she was. When he’d been up there he hadn’t seen too many signs that anybody else had been around to check up on her. There were no cards, no food in Tupperware from neighbours in the fridge. There had been a handful of distant relatives at the funeral, a few of Amber-Marie’s friends, but nobody had seemed keen to stick around afterwards.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Just watching TV,’ she said.

  ‘Anything good?’

  ‘Some gameshow. It’s OK.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with gameshows.’

  ‘Hey, I got a job.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Just the checkout at Best Buy, but that’s fine, you know? Pays the bills, right? No point waiting around for IBM to come knocking at my door.’ She laughed, and Gardner heard applause from the TV. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Busy,’ Gardner said.

  ‘People never get tired of killing each other, huh?’

  ‘Seems that way.’

  ‘It’s a sick world, Jeff.’ She paused and the volume from the TV was turned down. ‘It’s kind of ironic, but sometimes I think my baby was too good for it, you know? Better off … somewhere else. Does that make sense?’

  Gardner had no idea if Patti was religious or not. The ceremony had been pretty much standard, except for a short reading from The Prophet and the pop song Patti had said was her daughter’s favourite. Something about fireflies.

  ‘Yeah, I see that,’ Gardner said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather not be busy?’ she asked. ‘Trying to catch murderers, I mean. Wouldn’t you rather be giving out tickets or chasing the assholes who didn’t pay their taxes or whatever? I bet you’d sleep a damn sight better.’

  ‘It’s my job, Patti. I just deal with what comes my way.’

  She sighed a ‘Yeah, I know,’ then said nothing for a few seconds. ‘So, this part of your job, Jeff?’ Her voice was quieter now. She sounded sleepy. ‘The aftercare?’

  �
��Listen. I wanted to ask you,’ Gardner said. ‘When you were at the Pelican Palms, you remember the three British couples?’

  She said, ‘Sure,’ but there was hesitancy and a question in it.

  ‘The three guys, you remember them?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Ed Dunning, Dave Cullen—’

  ‘I don’t remember their names—’

  ‘That’s OK—’

  ‘Which of them was which, anything like that.’

  ‘Look, I’m just asking if maybe one of them was a bit friendlier with Amber-Marie than the others.’ Gardner was struggling to find the right words. ‘Did you notice … anything that might have been a little off?’

  ‘Don’t you think I would have mentioned that?’

  ‘Maybe something that didn’t seem strange at the time, I don’t know. I know I’m asking you to think back, but—’

  ‘They were nice,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like I got real friendly with any of them, it was just a few words once or twice, you know? But they were nice …’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Why? You think one of those guys …?’

  ‘No … look, it was just a shot, OK?’ There was more noise from the television, bells and klaxons sounding. ‘I’m just following up on a few things, loose ends, you know?’ He did not want to say anything else. She did not sound tired any more.

  ‘Shit …’ He heard a noise, a hand slapped down on the cushion of the settee, maybe. ‘Now I’m going to have to take some pills.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’ve just started to sleep a bit better, four or five hours the last few nights, but now … well, I think I may need a little help after this.’

  ‘Really, there’s no need.’

  ‘Easy for you to say.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Gardner held the phone to his chest for a few seconds, cursed quietly. ‘Like I said.’

  ‘Your job, right.’

  He told her that he needed to go, then said the same things he’d said countless times. He told her that he would let her know as soon as there was any real news, that the case was anything but closed. He tried to make it sound fresh, meant, half expecting to hear a sarcastic ‘blah blah blah’ coming back at him.

  ‘You like Lucinda Williams, Jeff?’ she asked when he was done.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gardner said. ‘I mean … I’ve never really listened to any of her songs.’

  ‘There’s this one of hers, “Sweet Old World”. It’s a real sad one, where she’s talking to some fool who’s killed himself, telling him about all the great stuff he’s left behind.’ She began to softly hum a few ragged bars and, when she stopped, the breath catching in her throat, the muted applause from the TV sounded as though it might be for her.

  ‘Patti …?’

  ‘I love her stuff … always have. She’s got this voice, you know? You can hear the hurt in it and the pack of Marlboros a day and all the great sex she’s having. She can give you chills, I swear … but I’m telling you right now that’s one stupid song I’m never going to listen to again. “See what you lost when you left this sweet old world”. You see what I’m getting at, Jeff?’

  He saw it, but let her say it anyway.

  ‘Nothing sweet about it.’

  FORTY-SIX

  The house was in a long, leafy street in Tilgate, a quiet neighbourhood a mile or so south of Crawley town centre. Jenny grabbed a parking space a few doors down. She turned off the radio and took a last look at the notes she had prepared.

  Wilson/Gold Interviews 2.

  She had written most of it up at home the day before, her flatmate thankfully away with friends for the weekend, but an extra page had been added to the file first thing that morning, after a short session on the Police National Computer. Running the six interviewees through the PNC would normally have been standard procedure, but she had not been able to do it first time round. Any access to the database was strictly monitored – the log-ins timed and registered, the electronic fingerprint unmistakable – and that had not been something Jenny had wanted to risk while she was working rather more off her own bat than might have been tolerated. Now though, she had been given the all-clear. Trainee or not, she had been … endorsed.

  No more coffee-runs or photocopying, for the time being at any rate.

  Jenny looked at the printout and got excited all over again. Half an hour on the PNC – a request to pull a file sent straight through to the General Registry – and she guessed that one of her interviews was going to be rather more lively than it might otherwise have been. Four of the six were, as expected, clean as a whistle. One had been cautioned four years before for possession of a Class C drug. Another – though all charges had eventually been dropped – had been arrested six years earlier for something altogether more interesting.

  She had fired off an email to Jeff Gardner straight away …

  The front door was open, so Jenny walked in. She showed her warrant card to the first workman who looked her way and asked where the boss was. The house was cold, the air thick with plaster dust and in the room where the kitchen used to be – where she guessed a new one would appear at some point – three more labourers were hard at work, while a fourth stood leaning against a wall taken back to the brick, fag in hand. Jenny raised her voice above the hammering and the sound of talkSPORT from a paint-spattered radio and was pointed towards the garden. She walked out through the shell of an extension and found Barry Finnegan talking to a short man wearing an anorak over a shirt and tie. The architect, she guessed. Planning officer, maybe.

  ‘I just need a couple of minutes,’ she said.

  Finnegan nodded slowly and Jenny waited patiently while he finished up with the man in the suit, shook hands and told the man to ‘bell me as soon as’. The conversation was semi-shouted, punctuated by the loud snap of the plastic sheeting in the window-frames, the bursts of noise from a jackhammer back in the house.

  ‘Right,’ Finnegan said, when the man had gone. He led her towards the end of the smallish garden, lighting a cigarette as he went. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I called your office,’ Jenny said. She stepped carefully. There was as much mud as grass. ‘Very helpful bloke gave me the address.’

  Finnegan nodded. ‘Adrian.’ He took a deep drag. ‘My brother.’

  They reached a dilapidated shed, its windows thick with cobwebs and a child’s plastic slide up against the door. They turned to look back at the house.

  ‘Big job,’ she said.

  ‘Not for us. Pretty standard kitchen extension.’

  ‘Looks like a bit more than that. I mean not as grand as what you’ve had done at your place, but …’

  Finnegan nodded towards the scaffolding at the side of the house. ‘Yeah, well, you start a job and other stuff comes up, doesn’t it? Brickwork turns out to be buggered or like this place, you point out to the woman that her roof could do with sorting out while we’re here. Tiles are blown. There’s always something.’

  ‘Something that means you can whack the price up.’

  ‘We’re not that sort of firm.’

  ‘An honest builder,’ Jenny said. ‘You should be on The X-Files or something.’

  Finnegan snorted a laugh, but there wasn’t much to it.

  ‘So, while you’re being honest, I wanted to ask you about that trip to buy cigarettes. When you left your wife on the beach and drove back into Siesta Village.’

  Finnegan’s shoulders sagged and he let out a long breath. ‘I told you.’

  ‘It took you how long? That wasn’t very clear first time round.’

  ‘I don’t know, half an hour, something like that.’

  ‘Your wife said it was more like an hour.’

  He said nothing for a few seconds. Lifted the cigarette to his mouth but didn’t draw on it. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Right, so you bought your fags and then decided to stay and have a beer. You went to what, the nearest bar?’

  ‘Yeah. It was hot
and I fancied a beer.’

  ‘You can’t remember the name of this bar?’

  Finnegan shook his head.

  ‘And you didn’t see Dave Cullen and Marina Green at any time?’

  Another head-shake, the cigarette in his mouth.

  ‘Thing is, they told us they were having lunch at the same time you were having your beer and it’s just that the whole stretch of the village is shorter than this street we’re on right now.’ She had spent a useful hour or two on Google Earth, mapped the place out. Half a dozen bars, a few souvenir shops, an upmarket strip mall. No more than five minutes’ walk end to end. ‘Just worth checking that you didn’t see them, maybe while you were driving past whichever bar they were in.’

  ‘Well, unless they were sitting outside I wouldn’t have seen them, would I? Like I said, it was hot, so they were probably inside.’

  ‘And obviously you didn’t see Amber-Marie Wilson.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  One of the labourers appeared on the patio, shouting something about the sparks and where the woman wanted her power points. Finnegan shouted back, said he’d be in to sort it in a minute. The labourer gave a thumbs-up and went back inside.

  Jenny said, ‘This bar.’ She scraped mud from her shoe on the edge of a stone. ‘It was probably the one nearest the place you bought your fags. I’m assuming you didn’t get back in the car and drive to it, did you?’

  ‘No. Yeah, it was close to the 7-Eleven,’ Finnegan said. ‘I got the fags from a 7-Eleven.’

  Jenny nodded. She remembered the map. There was a 7-Eleven a few doors down from a bar called Gilligans. That was one of the places Dave Cullen had said he and his girlfriend might have eaten lunch in.