“There’s something about you that smells wrong, North.”
She knew his name, but did she know he used to work for the same people who killed her nephew? That if he had been told to kill Ned Fellowes instead of Honor Jones, he would – without hesitation – have seized him around the knees and tipped him over the edge of the parapet of Westminster Bridge, walked away, and never thought of him again.
Under her scrutiny, North did his best to smell of clean sheets and sunny days, before the woman with leopard skin hair shot holes through him to make him smell of blood and shit and dying. He decided to take as a good thing the fact she drew up a chair, swung it round and sat down opposite him, her forearms resting on the back of it, the gun dangling in her grip.
“I admit Ned was odd,” Stella said, “even as a kid.”
“A weirdo.” Jess added.
“But our weirdo.”
Jess’s hand rested on her mother’s shoulder. A Victorian portrait: Beauty and the Beast, and North decided if Jess’s smile was the last thing a man saw before he died, that man would die happy.
Resting the barrel of the gun on her forearm, Stella closed one eye to align the rear and front sights, and sat back to take all-the-better aim at his crotch. “Last Friday, my sister rings, and I can’t make out what she’s saying at first.” Her eye opened and she came forward again as if she was enjoying the craic too much to break it up with the small matter of killing him. “Your auntie’s the hysterical type, isn’t she, Jess?”
Although Stella’s question was addressed to her daughter, she wasn’t looking at her.
“She tells us that Ned’s dead,” said Jess.
“Which, by the by, completely fucks my rota,” said Stella.
“She tells us he killed himself.”
“In London, of all places,” said Stella.
“The thing is – he’s not the suicidal type, is he, Mam?”
“More the stick-around, right pain-in-the-arse type. I’m upset, aren’t I, Jess?”
“You trashed the place, Mam.”
The knuckles of the hand which held the gun were red raw and purple with bruising. “I get to wondering about this astronomer he was obsessed with, so I decide to talk to her. Maybe she upset him, I’m thinking. But I can’t talk to her, because no one knows how to get hold of her. Instead, I meet Little Fangfang and we discover a mutual interest in Dr Peggy Boland. That was yesterday. Today, you turn up round Fangfang’s, and guess what? There’s a murder at the university all over the news, and a one-eyed, vicious-looking length of piss is round the streets asking has anybody seen Michael North because there’s money in it for anyone who has. You’re in demand.”
The hair on North’s neck stood to attention. The one-eyed man from outside his London flat and from Seamouth harbour. Here.
“I’m not one to make assumptions. But I’m thinking I should do Fang and Jess and me a favour and make you go away.” With the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, Stella clenched her fist as if holding tight to something magical, then let it go – whatever she’d held, flying to the four corners of the world. “I don’t want me or my girl ending up dead, because I didn’t take precautions. Because it strikes me that asking about Peggy Boland isn’t good for anybody’s health right now.”
“Mam, we don’t know he hurt our Ned. Maybe he did jump.”
Jess started to cry, she wiped a tear away with sparkling fingers, her head bowed, and Stella’s face clouded with concern. Jess sobbed louder. The girl walked across to the chair and sat in his lap, pressing her body against him, laying her freckled face against his chest, bright red curls everywhere as if she was overwhelmed with the need for comfort and a place to rest. Honey made woman, the firm swell of her breasts against him. As a human shield she took some beating, and at any other moment, North might have enjoyed it.
She was a girl used to getting her own way. He hoped she insisted on it, while Stella had the look of a woman who wanted to redecorate the club once she shot him, then shoot him again for getting blood all over its walls in the first place.
Jess hiccupped, sniffed then puckered, her eyes closed – like a small child waiting for a kiss goodnight. Her mother was going to kill him. Of course if her mother wasn’t going to kill him, and then he kissed the girl – the mother might just kill him anyway. Jess’s violet eyes opened and she grinned up at him revealing a fetching gap between her two front teeth, then dutifully puckered again. Strawberry lips. He took the chance.
A nervous tic started up in Stella’s right cheek. Holding her own in club land was one thing. Managing her daughter something else again. She gestured the girl up and away from North’s lap, sliding the Glock back into the holster as she stepped on to the stage, before leaning down to pull a narrow knife out of her boot.
“You’ve nothing to fear from me, Stella.”
“Because I have a knife and you don’t?”
“You could help me.”
“Why should I?”
The blade balanced horizontally on her index finger, tipping down then rising up, down then up, like the scales of justice.
Why should she help? It was a reasonable question.
“Because you’re a compassionate woman.”
“If only that were true.”
“Because Ned didn’t jump. You’re right – his death is linked to Peggy’s disappearance, and I’ll find out how for you.”
“Resurrections don’t come round till Judgment Day.”
“Then, because I can pay you.”
It was a reasonable answer.
As she sliced through the nylon ropes holding North’s wrists, Stella sighed. “I’m going to regret this in all sorts of ways.”
They fixed on a ten grand helper’s fee. Information and equipment. Paid as and when North next had access to money. He would pay her and Fangfang, and consider it cheap at the price. The only reason he didn’t have his bank wire it through as a matter of urgency was in case the Board was across the account.
Stella already knew what Jimmy the Sniff was saying round town, because she already knew Jimmy the Sniff. Stella knew a lot of the wrong kind of people, probably because she was one herself. But anyone willing to fry eggs and a plate-sized sirloin and fix him a pot of coffee was OK with him.
Back on a seat at the bar, he sucked the last of the salt and meat juices from his teeth as she watched him in the mirror.
Her voice was low and musical in his head. She’d reached out for the small-time drug dealer but there was no sign of him on the street.
“Where will I find him?”
She thrust out her jaw and scratched at her cheek with her absurd nails. She climbed down from the bar stool and went back behind the counter. On her mother’s orders, Jess disappeared upstairs to bed an hour before – the girl drooping with fatigue but desperate not to miss out on the excitement. She’d geared up to fight it, but her mother’s face told her this time she wouldn’t win. Closing the door, she’d blown him a kiss and he imagined it beating its velvety wings like a lipstick butterfly to land, poppy-red and incriminating on his cheek.
“When he’s not dealing or breaking into cars, he hangs out with another scraggy-arsed no-mark in a dump off the Scotswood Road,” Stella found a pen and wrote the address on his hand, on the flesh between his thumb and forefinger – a strangely intimate gesture. “He’s not at his own place, I’ve had one of the girls go see.”
Reaching for the cognac through its brother bottles, she uncorked it, keeping the cork between her teeth to pour a slug into each of their coffee cups, then spooned in brown sugar. Alcohol fumes wreathed around them, seductive and dangerous, as she spat out the cork.
“In my experience respectable types like this Peggy tart,” she said, pouring cream over the spoon and into the cup, white covering over the black like a smile covers sin, “have secrets they’ll go a long way to keep. Does your Peggy want to be found?” Another good question, and he hadn’t asked it.
One wrong decision and a person’s whole life unra
velled. He sipped the scalding coffee through the spreading cream, raising his eyebrows as the cognac and brown sugar hit his blood stream, the smell alone honing an edge on him, leaving him sharp and dangerous to know.
“What’s she to you, after all?” Stella slotted the bottle back in its place behind the cheap stuff the punters drank. He was getting used to the strange face with its different profiles – grim one side, ruined the other. He didn’t even have a favourite. They both had their own particular appeal. “Leave it be. She seems to have brought you nothing but trouble.”
“I made a promise.” North offered up the explanation as if it was the first time he had heard it, the first time he even thought such a thing, but it was the truth. He made a promise to himself. Holding the cut-apart flesh of Honor’s wrists together as the blood pulsed out of her, he’d known she’d die for her cause – whatever crusade it was that she was embarked on. He saw that, and saw too that he was going to have to help her because it was the only way to keep either of them alive.
“I only ever made one promise,” Stella said, “and that was the day Jess was born when I promised her she wouldn’t grow up hungry like me.”
She said “hungry” but North heard more than that. North heard the fear and the pain of a child clutching a toy leopard, its ears chewed away to nothingness, hiding under scratchy woollen blankets, terrified to fall sleep because of who or what might wake her. North knew the feeling.
Chapter 46
NEWCASTLE
2.45am. Thursday, 9th November
The two halves of the cannibal car were held together by an even seam of rust, scarred soldering and spit. Parked up on breeze blocks in the cement front garden, the Ford Mondeo had a silver front end and a battered blue rear end. It was the work of a lock-up optimist, because only an optimist would have thought the welded scrap could make it past 10 miles per hour without the two parts breaking apart in sparking, shrieking shame.
He stepped around it, and over the bags of powdery cement which made him think of bodies buried under concrete, and between the discarded spin drier and pitted fridge that stood in for garden ornaments. The fridge door swung wide as he edged past it, letting out a smell of putrification and a cloud of mould. He tried not to breathe.
From the outside, the house was everywhere you wouldn’t want to live, and North suspected it was worse on the inside. But good or bad in there, he couldn’t see which, because the curtains were drawn and cardboard fixed to the inside of the windows with brown packaging tape. He knocked, and when no one answered, knocked louder – this time with his boot and the full weight of his body behind it.
With the splintering sound of rotten wood, the door gave.
The stench of cat urine hit him first, and hanging on to its tail a stagnant, faecal sweetness. The garden was bad, but the stink of the house worse. Breathing through his mouth, North stepped into the rancid darkness. Floral wallpaper peeled from the damp walls of a narrow corridor lined with boxes. North hit the light switch which flickered, sparked blue, and died. He shoved one of the larger boxes against the front door to keep it open as much for air as light, and ran the car key along the join to lift its flaps. He started back as the deflated latex face of the sex doll stared up at him, her red mouth open in angelic delight. He closed the box back up again. Hadn’t internet porn killed off latex dollies? He’d once known a sergeant who hid a sex doll called Gloria up a chimney, only to light a fire and set the house ablaze. His wife of 10 days blacked his eye and left him that night. Rumour had it that the sergeant was more upset at the loss of Gloria than his wife.
But that was years ago.
There was a clatter from the rear. Cautiously, he moved through the gloom of the hallway towards the kitchen. Underfoot was soft and hazy, like walking over damp rags on top of rotting wood on top of a graveyard. There was no door.
By the sink in front of the kitchen window, a scraggy tabby licked herself, as if she wanted the fur to come off in fleshy strips, rubbish and moulding food piled on every surface – pizza boxes mixing with Saturn-ringed saucepans of shrivelled beans, corrugated silver containers of half-eaten curry on top of engorged bin bags which, on smell alone, were full of dead goats.
If the cat hadn’t moved as North reached out to stroke her, he wouldn’t have seen the reflection of the arm bearing the hypodermic scything towards his neck.
Jimmy the Sniff had been an addict for as long as he could remember. He wasn’t big and he wasn’t strong, but he was scared and a man scared for his life is a formidable opponent as North well knew. He grabbed the arm as the needle touched North’s skin, hurling Jimmy away and into the sink – filthy pots and pans cascading to the ground, and with an unholy screech the cat leapt for safety. Only it wasn’t safety, it was on to Jimmy the Sniff’s face who in turn shrieked like a banshee. North stood back from the fray as man and cat fought – man for freedom, cat for purchase, scattering piled up pots, and leaning towers of plates.
As Jimmy threw the cat against the wall, he scrabbled for a knife on the zinc counter – the hypodermic crushed underfoot on the shard-strewn, greasy floor.
“I’ll cut you up,” he snarled.
North hit him.
It didn’t take long for the dealer to come round – 12 minutes. It would have taken longer but North helped by holding his head down the toilet and flushing it repeatedly. The cat watched. She looked like she approved. Jimmy spluttered and retched as he came round, then retched some more as he saw what he was looking into.
“Divn’t kill me,” he fought to free himself from North’s grasp, his hands everywhere and nowhere, as North tried and failed to flush the toilet again. “Please, mate. I wouldn’t have cut you.” The dealer slumped to one side, wiping his face with a grubby sleeve, his shoulders heaving, his ribs as skinny as a picked-over chicken carcass. “I canna stand the sight of blood. It makes me come over reet queasy.”
North leaned against the wall. The rankness of the house was on him. Poverty smells different in its particulars but childhood memories of neglect and squalor were beginning to churn in his gut. He suffocated them.
“What do you know, Jimmy?”
The dealer began to shake, rocking himself back and forth, his grubby fingers to his mouth. North’s hand slapped itself against the pigeon chest, took hold of the dealer’s hoodie and hauled him to his feet, then upwards.
“You’re a hard bastard you. If it got that bloke at the uni killed, it’s ganna get me killed – and it’s ganna get you killed too,” North couldn’t fault the dealer’s logic. “I can’t be dead – I’ve tickets to the match this week.”
North shook him anyway – Jimmy’s head snapping back and forth like a puppet’s. “I canna remember anything – it’s the stuff y’kna. It drills holes in your head.” The addict dangled in North’s grasp, his birdlike claws over North’s hands, the touch dry and insubstantial, his feet fighting for purchase on the slimy floor. “Ah’m telling you the God’s honest truth, man.”
Jimmy, he reckoned, wouldn’t recognise God’s honest truth if the Angel of the Lord came down from heaven and announced it in his front room to a trumpet fanfare.
What did Hardman say?
That Jimmy swore he’d seen a woman snatched up from the street. He attempted to tune in to the addict. What had he seen?
It was dark and Jimmy was hunkered by the side of a car, a lock-pick in his hand together with a halved tennis ball. He had a leather bag by him on the ground. He was breaking into cars. A quiet residential street.
North half-dragged, half-carried Jimmy the Sniff out into the corridor. The dealer clawed at the boxes, but North kept him moving out of the house and over the threshold, into the wasteland of a garden, alongside the gaping fridge and the wreckage that passed for a car. Jimmy covered his eyes as if the streetlight was a sharp and hurtful thing and North kept one hand on him as he opened the door to the 4x4 Stella had lent him. He shovelled him in.
“There,” the bony finger trembled as Jimmy pointed a
t the house on the corner. He needed a bump – North felt the dealer’s urgent need in the pump of his own blood, in the quickened rise and fall of his breath. Any profits Jimmy made as a dealer weren’t going into a pension plan, but were reinvested straight back into the business. North thought about the purple pills he’d taken for the pain in his head, and the Harley Street doctor who wrote prescriptions for a patient he believed to be all but dead, a doctor who smelled of cologne and money. Not all dealers were as honest as Jimmy the Sniff.
The Edwardian villas overlooked the Town Moor, grass land stretching out to the Great North Road beyond, a tinny buzz and a snaking trail of traffic. In the early hours, the suburban street was quiet, a deep mulch of brown and blackening leaves on the ground. A nice street with a nice aspect. Quiet. Number 21 at the end of the terrace was shabbier than its neighbours – the home of a single professional preoccupied with her academic work rather than the state of the front garden. Honor said Peggy had a refugee family living with her, but the house was shuttered and silent.
“I don’t know who they were.” Jimmy’s voice had a wheedling tone to it as he pushed a plaited silk friendship bracelet round and round his wrist. The sort of thing a child would make. Did Jimmy have a child somewhere? A little girl who called him Daddy? He’d adopted a cravenly apologetic mien for not being able to give North everything he wanted. Having decided North wasn’t going to kill him, he’d become anxious to please instead. North almost preferred him with a syringe in his hand.
“I was out for a walk…” For which read I was out breaking into cars…
“What time?”
“About now.” Jimmy the Sniff was rubbing his dry hands together hard enough to spark up tinder. At three in the morning, clubbers and students were tucked into each other’s beds, bodies awash with cheap drink, hard drugs and easy sex. At three, the night shift was not yet awake and up and at ’em. Three – when souls depart the old and the tired of life to slide out of hospital windows left open by the wise and superstitious medic alike. A time to choose if there was harm to be done. A time North himself used in a different life.
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