Incinerator

by Niall Leonard

  Without a word Nicky indicated, turned deftly into a cul-de-sac, pulled up on a single yellow line and killed the engine.

  “We can take the Tube from here,” she said. “Have you got any money?”

  “I have enough,” I said.

  twelve

  The nearest Tube station was a short walk away and I used a lump of Tony’s wedge to buy Nicky and me single tickets across the city. Out in the hinterland at this time of a Sunday morning there were plenty of empty seats, and we found ourselves a double bench facing forwards. We sat staring into space, as wordless as one of those married couples who have run out of things to say to each other, while we tried to make sense of everything that had happened. If I’d been wrong about Susan, maybe I’d been wrong about Harry. Maybe he was planning to rob his own bank to pay the ransom … but surely as soon as he paid up, this Turk would kill him and Nicky both?

  And why had Susan been helping me if she and Nicky hated each other that much? Because they’re still family, I thought. Then it occurred to me that I of all people should know the cruelty families are capable of.

  As the ancient Tube train rattled and banged through the gloomy cuttings the carriage slowly filled with Sunday workers and nervous tourists clutching flimsy maps and checking the Tube diagrams every three minutes. One girl with wavy blonde hair still wet from her shower glanced at me and turned away. I realized I’d been staring at her hard enough to make her uncomfortable, but I honestly hadn’t been ogling her. It was just that seeing her made me long for a shower—I couldn’t remember the last time I had washed. I abruptly became aware of how badly I smelled, of dirt and sweat and violence and death. Oh well, I thought, at least it will stop the tourists crowding my space.

  If I did stink it didn’t seem to bother Nicky. It must been a long time since she had bathed too. She looked as dazed and shell-shocked as I felt, which was understandable after all that time locked in a windowless box wondering if any moment she might be violated and murdered and dumped in a pit. Yes, she was free, but then I’d said those things about Harry. She must have been wondering now if it was even safe to go home. And I couldn’t help her—I had no home to go to. The last haze of days had been all about finding her or finding out what had happened to her, and now I had, it didn’t seem to have fixed anything or solved anything or answered any questions.

  The clatter of the train’s wheels as it dived deeper into the tunnel rebounded and echoed inside the carriage until it was almost painful to my ears, but somehow I still felt sleep creeping up on me. I lost all track of time, the way you do in dreams, and I felt myself falling into a pit, and as the floor rushed upwards I knew it was strewn with the bones of others who had fallen before me, tangled with the entrails that had burst from their bellies on impact.

  Nicky touched my hand, and I woke with a jolt. We were at Embankment station, where the darkness and thunder were displaced by the blue glare of striplights and the tramp of travellers’ feet and the squawking electronic burble of platform announcements. Semi-comatose I followed Nicky past the bustling bodies through the warren of stairs and elevators onto yet another Tube train, until we finally emerged onto the concourse of Waterloo, Nicky leading me through the ticket barriers onto a platform for the next overland train to West London. Beyond the station roof I could see cheery blue sky and innocent white clouds cavorting miles above our grimy crowded circus.

  As we waited I noticed a copper staring at us—not a real copper, I realized, but a ticket inspector, or revenue protection officer, or whatever they were called—clearly trying to decide whether Nicky and I were fare-dodgers who’d been sleeping on trains for a week or just seriously partied-out lovers. But when the train pulled in Nicky walked right past him and her air of blithe self-assurance seemed to change his mind about challenging us. Maybe she’d teach me that trick someday.

  As the train carried us rocking gently across the Thames the sunshine gleamed off the wrinkled grey river below, dazzling us both so much we turned away, shading our eyes. Heading out of the city this early on a Sunday the train was almost empty, and only the cheery chime of the doors at each station and the hiss of them sliding open and shut again marked our progress west. I watched Nicky staring at the endless gritty bricks and slates of London’s suburbs speeding past our windows, and I wondered if she had finally started to believe me, but her thoughtful silence repelled every question I could think of.

  The doors chimed again and she rose to her feet.

  “This is us,” she murmured, and without looking at me stepped down onto the platform.

  “Nicky, wait,” I said. “What are you planning to do?”

  “I’m going to ask Harry if it’s true,” she said.

  As we approached the smart black railings separating her house from the street I glanced around, trying to see if any of the Turk’s people were watching her house from a parked car. One sleek soft-top was parked a little further up, but it was empty. There was no passing traffic—not many churchgoers in this prosperous neck of the woods—so nobody saw us arrive, and I still hadn’t decided if that was a good thing or not when we walked up to the front door and Nicky started digging among the flowerpots. I couldn’t believe she’d hidden a key there. A house like hers surely needed better security than lazy idiots like me would use, but it didn’t feel like the moment to point that out.

  Nicky slid the key gently into the lock, turned it silently, pushed the door open and entered, leaving it open for me. I half expected to hear a burglar alarm; what we heard was voices raised in argument—one male, one female.

  “… all the finesse of a randy goat—”

  “You still enjoyed it, though. Admit it. That’s why you kept going back.”

  The male voice was Harry’s, the female Susie’s. Nicky and I looked at each other, and her face reflected mine; we both felt sorry for each other, and sick with betrayal.

  “Oh, for the hundredth time, I only slept with him to find out what he knew. You’re the one I want, Harry. Please get dressed.”

  “Stop bloody railroading me—I got enough of that from her.”

  I felt icy rage boiling up, at Susie and myself. Twice now I’d let a woman drag me along by my dick. Never again. Nicky shut the front door so gently behind us the latch clicked home with barely a noise, and we slowly edged closer to the library where Harry and Susie were having their slanging match.

  “You said the transfer has to happen today, before the system upgrade—by the time the bank finds out we’ll be on the other side of the world—”

  “It’s not that simple.” Harry’s voice sounded grim and business-like, as if he knew something he wasn’t going to share with Susan, however much she pleaded.

  “He’ll never find us, not with that much money. We could buy our own island—”

  We were right outside the library door now, and inside I heard the metal scratch of a key in a lock, and the rattle of wooden shelving—what was Harry up to?

  “For God’s sake, Harry, this is the Turk. You’re not going to frighten his people with an antique bloody shotgun—”

  “I know that.” His voice wasn’t angry now, just calm and cold.

  “There’s no going back now. This way we get to be together.”

  “I don’t want us to be together.” I heard a heavy click of metal snapping shut.

  “What are you talking about? We’ve been planning this for months—”

  “Change of plan,” said Harry.

  Beyond the door we heard Susie gasp and scream in the same breath. “Harry! Don’t—”

  The blast was so loud it stabbed right through my ears and deep into my brain. Nicky and I both recoiled from the noise and the shock, and then came a second shotgun blast, and I slammed the library door open and moved fast, right across the room, past Susie writhing on the floor to Harry where he stood by the tall cupboard—the gun cabinet—still wreathed in blue smoke.

  He stared at me in astonishment and fear, fumbling with two fresh shells, but I
had guessed right—his hunting shotgun had to be broken open to be reloaded, and I was on top of him before he had time to snap it shut. I did that for him, trapping his hand and crushing the lower knuckle of his right thumb. He screamed in pain and cursed until I shut him up by slamming my forehead into his face. He crashed backwards into the gun cabinet and slumped to the floor, stunned and groaning.

  He had dropped the gun at my feet somewhere, but I ignored it and ran back to Susie. Her face was white with terror and pain, her blonde hair was glued to her forehead with sweat, and her white blouse was already soaked in blood. She was panting in shallow breaths, clutching the mess of her stomach and staring at me in desperation. There was no recognition in her eyes, no room for anything except agony and fear. I looked around for something to staunch her wound, grabbed a velvet cushion from a nearby chair and pressed it to her belly. She scrabbled and clutched at my hand as if my touch could cure her pain.

  Nicky was paying no attention either to me or Susie; she’d picked up Harry’s shotgun and was calmly sliding a shell into each barrel.

  “Call an ambulance,” I said.

  Nicky looked at me with the same expression I’d seen a few hours before, when I knelt over Tony’s body preparing to massage his heart.

  “It’s too late” was all she said.

  She was right. Susie’s grasp was weakening and her frantic breaths becoming more shallow. She blinked a few times, and opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a whisper I didn’t catch. Then she shuddered and lay still, her eyes half closed.

  “Nicky?” Harry stuttered. “Christ, Nicky, I thought—”

  He was hauling himself to his feet, leaning on the gun cabinet for support and clutching his nose as if I’d broken it, which I’d hoped to do but missed. He flexed his jaw and shook his head as if trying to rattle his brain back into place.

  “Don’t, Harry. Move away from the cabinet,” said Nicky. Her tone was distant and dazed, like she was trapped in a hallucination. Harry straightened up, holding his palms out in a gesture of innocence as if we hadn’t just heard him shooting Susie in cold blood.

  “Jesus, Nicky, I know how it looks, but she was going to mess everything up—”

  Nicky had the gun pointed at him, but I wasn’t sure if she was capable of using it, even with Susie lying there beside us, her life soaking into the rug. I wanted to call an ambulance, even if it was too late; but I held back, because I knew that with the ambulance would come police, and we’d never blag our way out of this mess.

  “She wanted to keep the ransom,” said Harry. “She wanted to let them kill you.” He was slowly closing on her, pleading, and I saw the shotgun shaking in her grip. Did she actually believe him?

  “How long had you been sleeping with her?” Nicky’s voice was trembling like her hands.

  Harry winced, as if the question was in bad taste, and moved closer. “I’m so sorry—it was months ago. I was depressed, I’d had too much to drink, you were at work, one thing led to another. Please, don’t point that at me—”

  He was close enough now to jump her, I realized. And if I lunged in now to stop him, any one of us might catch a faceful of buckshot.

  “You weren’t going to pay the ransom, Harry.”

  “Nicky, come on—”

  “It was you who told them I’d gone running in the park. You gave them my passport. You sold me to them.”

  Her voice was full of disbelief and heartbreak, and Harry sighed, and smiled. It was a roguish, wicked grin that had worked for him a thousand times before, I knew, because he was good-looking and charming and rich, and guys like him always got away with it, and always would, even this time, because Nicky was smiling back as if she loved him too much to argue. She let the stock of the shotgun drop, and held it out to him. Harry reached out to take it.

  “Nicky, don’t—” I said.

  With one gentle, smooth movement, she pushed the gun against Harry’s chest, the muzzle under his chin, and I saw her fingers flick to the trigger. Instinctively I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t stop myself hearing another shattering blast, and something splatter on the ornately plastered ceiling, and a moment later the bump of Harry’s body falling to the floor. My ears were still ringing as I opened my eyes again and wiped my face, expecting to see brain and bits of bone smeared on my hands. I saw nothing but sweat. Nicky was standing there, shaking, staring down at what she had done.

  “Nicky,” I said. I didn’t want her going into shock. “It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK. Just … don’t touch anything.”

  I looked down at Harry’s body with its ragged mess of a head. His hands were still loosely grasping the gun. If we left now there was a chance this would look like a murder-suicide. Nicky was officially thousands of miles away and the Turk was just a rumour—in fact, if the cops decided to pin this on anyone, it would most likely be me.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said.

  “Wait a second,” said Nicky. Stooping over Harry she reached for his right hand.

  “Don’t,” I said. “You can’t leave prints—”

  “It’s my gun,” said Nicky. “It already has my prints.” Carefully she curled Harry’s limp fingers around the trigger. This was the cool, calm Nicky I used to know, the one who thought two steps ahead of everyone else. I was glad to see her again, even if she scared me.

  * * *

  “A man answering your description was spotted fleeing the scene.” McCoy was neither condescending nor sympathetic this time; she was all business. That didn’t surprise me. Gutted and headless corpses had been piling up in the suburbs and the police had to find someone to blame, or at least they had to look busy trying, and McCoy had been the first officer on my case, thanks to my idiot impulse to report Nicky’s disappearance. McCoy’s mute assistant sat at her elbow, staring at me hard as if that alone would make me burst into tears, but I’ve had harder stares from squirrels.

  “He might have answered my description. But so could a lot of guys.”

  “Your fingerprints were found in Sherwood’s office.”

  “Like I said, I’d been there a few times.”

  “You’d borrowed money from him?”

  “I hadn’t. My partner had.”

  I wasn’t sure how long this particular interview had been going on, but I didn’t check the clock to find out. I knew I’d be pounced on with those predictable sarcastic questions—“In a hurry, Mr. Maguire?”—so I sat there, smiling patiently, helping with enquiries as helpfully as I could. They’d arrested me on suspicion of murder, and that meant they had thirty-six hours to bring charges. Let them do the clock-watching.

  “OK, Delroy Llewellyn, your partner in this gym—he’d borrowed money off Sherwood. And Delroy couldn’t repay his loan, and you went to see Sherwood.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what happened on that occasion?”

  “I offered to repay Delroy’s loan, and he told me to get lost, so I did.”

  “That was the second time you met him, or the third?” She already had the answer written down in her notes. Maybe she’d forgotten, or maybe it was a lazy ruse to get me cross.

  “The first time, and the second. The third time I met him in the street and told him to stop sending his enforcers round. After that I never saw him again.”

  “Not even after your friend Delroy’s wife was run over and died in hospital?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you were with Winnie Llewellyn when she died. And you left the hospital shortly afterwards.”

  “Yeah. I went for a run.”

  “A run.” She tried her best to inject weary contempt into the word.

  “I was upset. Running helps to clear my head.”

  “And where did you run to?”

  “Nowhere in particular. North for a bit, then west, then south …”

  “According to our information, from the hospital you went straight to Sherwood’s office. You blamed him for Mrs. Llewellyn’s death. You confronted
him, and things went too far.”

  “Like I said, this informant of yours is lying.”

  “Why would he do that?” I saw her stifle a wince at her own mistake—she’d said “he” when she should have said “they.”

  I wanted her to know I hadn’t missed it. “Ask him. He’s your informant.” And his name’s Dean, I thought, and nothing he’s told you will ever be admissible in court, and he’s never going to testify, and you know that.

  “So you’re saying you were set up?” said McCoy.

  “You’re saying I was set up. I’m saying I wasn’t even there.”

  “I think you were. I think if you didn’t kill Sherwood, you know who did.”

  “You arrested my client for murder. Are you saying now you don’t think he did it?”

  Vora spoke as if he was making conversation with an annoying snot-nosed seven-year-old. He projected confidence and authority, with just a tinge of boredom, as if all this was beneath him. He was expensively dressed too, and there was no sign of the flapping, panicked old man who had passed me Nicky’s client files out of desperation.

  We hadn’t discussed how I was going to pay him, or even if I was going to pay him. I suspected he was doing this because he knew I’d rescued Nicky, but I didn’t want to ask what he knew about that, and I didn’t think he wanted me to ask. He had sat patiently all day in that little stuffy room listening to me re-tell my story with all its holes and evasions, and backed me up whenever he thought McCoy was pushing her luck. Thanks to him the process that was supposed to wear me down seemed to be wearing McCoy down instead.

  “I think your client is a material witness,” said McCoy.

  “And he’s told you three times he wasn’t there. Can we move on please?”

  McCoy shuffled through the folders piled in front of her and picked up a slim one she hadn’t opened before. I wondered what she was going to bring up next, and whether we were going to go over Harry and Susie again. McCoy hadn’t yet accused me of being involved in their deaths, and by now I was sure she wasn’t going to.