Dust and Desire (25 page)

It could have been, of course, at a different time. But I was still in recovery, and not doing very well at it. I was laid out in a bed, on a drip, gradually coming back from the edge in a ward where there should have been no visitors allowed. The sign at the end of my bed said
Do Not Resuscitate
.

One night, watching her steer her tight, white bum into a tight, white thong, she said: ‘Malc and Jenny want us to go round for dinner on Saturday – is that all right, babe?’

I tossed my glass at the wall and picked up my coat. ‘I’ve had enough,’ I said. ‘I’m getting out.’

That’s what I’d done to cheese this one off: saved her from messing her life up. But they never see it that way, do they?

And, anyway, Malc was a twat.

‘What’s up with you?’ she said now. ‘You look like you’ve been doubling for Droopy.’

‘Cheers,’ I said.

‘How do you have your coffee?’ she said, knowing full well. ‘Milk, no sugar, two drops of strychnine?’

‘On the button,’ I said.

She still looked good, five years on, better than I must have looked to her. Her hair was longer but it was as black and glossy as ever, the kind of hair, thick hair, that never gets tangled. Sly hazel eyes. A cute, slightly jutting lower jaw, a bit Reese Witherspoon-ish. She had recently been on holiday, or was putting in the hours on a sunbed, because her body was a deep, even brown. The tops of her breasts had the kind of healthy gleam to them that made your mouth go dry. She smelled good, her flat was sumptuous, she made a mean cup of coffee and, as I remembered, she gave remarkable blowjobs. Pretty shallow plus points, I grant you, but enough to start me wondering whether I was destined only to keep stepping on the dog shit all my life.

‘It’s good to see you,’ I said.

‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘Drink your coffee and then fuck right off.’

‘I was wondering if I could kip here.’

‘No,’ she said, and her voice sounded just the right side of Dalek.

‘I don’t want to get in with you. I’ll take the sofa.’

‘Joel!’

‘Please,’ I said. Everything was descending, the crap of my past tumbling down on me, and the death that had dogged me these last few days was capering just beyond her front door, looking for a way in so that it might wrap itself around my throat and draw tight. ‘Just a couple of hours. I’ll be gone before you get up. I need… I really need…’ But I couldn’t finish the sentence, because there were too many different ways to end it.

Maybe she recognised that manifold need behind my eyes, because her face softened. She left me for a few minutes and came back with a couple of blankets and a pillow.

‘Do you want to tell me what’s up?’ she asked.

I shook my head. If I started now, I might never stop.

‘Okay. Go to sleep. Help yourself to what’s in the fridge when you wake up.’ Her voice soft, warm. ‘You fucking bastard.’

16

I
could hardly afford it, but I needed the tonic it provided. I booked myself in for a day’s membership at One Aldwych, and took the lift down to the basement. There I picked up my robe and slippers and went through to the changing rooms. I handed my clothes over in a bag and asked that they be washed, dried and pressed, then I put my wallet and watch in a locker and went for a swim.

They’ve got a cracking pool here: lots of blue tiles, soft music and underwater lighting; cascades of H2O pouring down the walls. No bugger comes here during the week, so, if you’re lucky, you can get it all to yourself, especially if you come in the morning just as most of the desk jockeys are sitting down to their voice messages, a cup of tea made by someone who can’t make tea, and their first Rennie of the day.

I did a few laps then got out and had a shower, before stepping into the sauna. A couple of ladles of water on the coals, five minutes on the hourglass, and I tried to relax with the morning’s newspaper.

But the words wouldn’t settle.

I had tried calling Melanie when I rose that morning, but she had been right about the signal: I couldn’t get through. A call to the vet’s was no good either; the place didn’t open for another hour and, anyway, they wouldn’t be able to help me at all. I was impatient to see her, and I was jealous of the entire county of Devon. She was breathing its air, somewhere. Walking its streets. Eating its cream teas.

Mawker wasn’t answering his mobile, either. I had taken a pot of yogurt from Lorraine’s fridge, and left her a note saying thanks and sorry. I thought about leaving her my phone number, in the vain hope she might want to be friends again, but decided against it. You can’t just be friends if you’ve had a passionate past that burnt itself out so completely. There’s nothing but ash to build it on. So I left.

Sweat poured off me, speckling the front page. I put the paper down and closed my eyes but images of Melanie swam out of the darkness. I saw her face for an instant, dangling amid the sea of masks from my dream, and snatched at breath. Fuck this treatment, sometimes it’s impossible to relax. It’s especially difficult to relax when you’ve actually got the time to do it. It’s even more difficult to relax when you don’t deserve it, or haven’t earned it, or your head is too freshly stained with the kind of things that make relaxation something that might never be achieved again.

I had to leave.

I walked out of the sauna and straight into a man, a big man with a chest about as wide as I was long. He pushed me into the steam room next-door, and sat me down. He sat next to me, near the door. I could hardly make out his face through the clouds, but I could tell he was ugly. Maybe even ugly enough to scare pigs from a shit pit.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘can I not have an hour to myself?’

‘Nice here, isn’t it?’ the big man said. He inhaled deeply. ‘Good for my sinuses, this menthol stuff they pump in here. I broke my nose playing rugby five years ago. I ought to have an op but I’m scared of the anaesthetic. They want to put a drill up there, and dig through all this bone and tissue that’s built up over the years, but I couldn’t face it.’ He looked like a horror film star who’s forgotten to have his make-up removed.

‘Go and tell it to your prop forward while he rims you off,’ I said. ‘Do I look like I give a shit?’

He slapped me, almost casually, across the back of the head and I folded over on to the floor.

‘Mawker wants a word with you.’

‘Tell Mawker to crawl back inside the rat that shat him out.’

‘You’ve got a dirty mouth,’ he said.

‘There’s no big secret about it,’ I said. ‘You can have one too, if you try hard enough.’

‘You should show a little respect to your fellow human beings,’ he said.

‘Is that what you are?’ I said, getting to my feet. Dark shapes were assembling beyond the glass door. ‘A human being? You’re having me on.’

‘I’ll have you mashed into my dog’s dinner bowl if you carry on lipping me,’ he said. ‘Now get outside.’

I considered legging it, but I wasn’t going to get far down the Strand in my fluffy little slippers. Mawker was standing by the pool with two more heavies at his shoulder, trying to look like Pacino in
Godfather III
, and looking more like Kermit from
Sesame Street
.

‘At ease,’ I said.

‘Sorrell,’ he said, ‘you’re coming down to the nick with us, for questioning.’

‘Don’t be a cunt all your life,’ I said, and Boris Karloff gave me another tap round the ear. ‘Mawker,’ I said, ‘if you want a chat, fair enough, but call off your girlfriend here. And Bert and Ernie, too, while you’re at it.’

Mawker said, ‘I could do you, Sorrell. I could be on you like a horny teenager on the school bike. You’re no different from the scum we collar every day of the week. Private investigator… bloody hell, a bit of flat-footing and you think that gives you the right to play Inch High.’

‘You’ve just reminded me,’ I said. ‘We had a bike at Bruche, do you remember? Phyllis, her name was, but everyone called her Syph. ’Cept you, of course. Weren’t you the sad, Bambi-eyed fuck whenever she walked in? It was like watching a peckish lioness who suddenly finds a calf come wandering into her manor.’

‘That’s my wife you’re talking about,’ he said.

‘Ex-wife, I’ll bet – and she’s been your ex for a long time. Put a tenner on it. Put fifty on it.’

‘You piece of shit, Sorrell,’ but it was all air, and it came out of him in a long rush, deflating him. He didn’t have a streak of the cold, hard stuff in him; didn’t even have a pinch of it. He looked suddenly old, and I thought,
You and me both, mate
. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

And then he was coming back at me, but his words were slow, his face crumpled. He wasn’t comfortable with this level of nastiness. Which was a surprise because you had to have the mouth if you wanted to get on in the Force. You didn’t gain your pips for saying please and thank you.

Anyone else and I would have waded in, but from him, a man who was trying to play my game and struggling at it, the words hit home and stayed with me, like painful splinters just beneath the skin. All he had to do was say their names, and that was me finished.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

‘You shouldn’t throw so many fucking stones, Joel,’ he said. ‘There’s always someone who’ll pick a couple up and throw them back.’

‘Don’t take me in,’ I said.

‘Give me something to work with,’ he replied.

‘The girl?’ I said. ‘Melanie. The woman I was with when you had me tailed, is she back yet?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘I asked you to look after her.’

‘Forget her,’ he said. ‘It’s me you should be cosying up to. I don’t look after your diary for you, sweetheart.’

‘I couldn’t phone her, because she went to Devon. But if she’s back, then I have to go and check on her,’ I said. ‘I don’t want her to get into any trouble.’

‘It’s you who’s in trouble, sunshine. You went away without my say-so, and I want to know what you did on your holidays.’

‘I gave you the head in that flat, Mawker. What else do you want from me?’

‘Who is she?’

‘I told you, I don’t fucking know.’

‘How did you know she was… This would go down better at the nick. Come on.’

‘Look, I’ll do you some Jackanory, but let’s all nip up to Maida Vale first. Just to put my mind at rest, hey? If she’s not back, then I’ll leave a note and you can leave one of your glove puppets there, to make me feel better.’

‘What prevented you earlier? Having your dick massaged by some floozy wearing a hotel uniform seem more important then, did it?’

‘What stopped me? Only the thought that you were doing what you promised me you’d fucking do.’

‘We’ve had police in the area,’ Mawker insisted, ‘and everything looks tickety-boo. Very Maida Vale. People fart in Maida Vale and Neighbourhood Watch makes a report. Now book the fucker, Les.’

‘Ian–’

‘Oh,
Ian
is it now?’ said Mawker. He was clearly enjoying himself. ‘Get him into the fucking car.’

‘You take me in, clearly I am not going to give you anything. I’ll clam up, no matter what you do. Even if you set this mong and your two boyfriends on me.’ I saw his face change, soften a little, and I went at the seam with a chisel. ‘Come on, Ian, give me this. Please. It’ll take us half an hour.’

‘And then you spill?’

‘I’ll tell you everything I know. I’ll chatter away into your ear until you’re begging me to stop.’

‘You’d better, Sorrell, you little wank stain. I’m getting dumped on from above, and the brass have got some serious big arses on them.’

The lights reflecting off the surface of the pool made little creamy ripples on the ceiling. Lapping water, the music gentle and jazzy, we stood there and took it all in while the cogs in Mawker’s head turned. It wouldn’t have seemed out of place, somehow, if we’d all started swaying to the music. Kicked off on some soft-shoe shuffle routine.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘get dressed. Les will help you. We’ll wait upstairs.’

Reception gave me my unwashed clobber back and I put it on, feeling grimy and unrested. In the foyer, the three bears were giggling over the prices in the cocktail menu.

‘What’s up with your face?’ Mawker asked, as we joined them. ‘You got your own way, didn’t you?’

I strolled past him to the doors. An unmarked police car was parked on a double yellow. Some stiff opened the hotel doors for us and we headed over to the Vectra, Bert and Ernie flanking me, Mawker behind, Boris Karloff making for the driver’s seat. We drove up High Holborn and got on to the Euston Road heading west. Mawker suggested we tool round Regent’s Park, seeing it was a nice day, and I chewed my cheek, wishing Boris would step on it a little. We eventually got up to St John’s Wood and pootled through the streets to Maida Vale. There were quite a few people out, stunned into action by the bright sunshine, although I thought the shades and T-shirts that some were wearing were a bit optimistic. At the garden centre, people were lugging giant bags of ericaceous compost into their car boots. Bungle started twatting on about Acers, and Boris chipped in with how his old mum was having to create some raised beds to grow rhododendrons, because her soil was too alkaline.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said, ‘let’s all can
Gardener’s Question Time
and show some fucking discipline, hey?’

Nobody said a word to that. I wished they had. I really wanted to lay into someone, and my tongue was aching to sharpen itself against one of these dumbfucks’ whetstone heads.

As we got close to Melanie’s place, the tension wound itself up inside the car and Mawker opened a window. We piled out on to the street and I barged through the gate, deaf now to the filth’s command to
Hold back, we’ll take it from here
. I was putting the key in the lock when the door swung open, and it was as if my guts had attached themselves to the door knocker just as it moved away from me. I felt myself unravelling all over the fucking welcome mat. She’s dead. Dead, and there’s me poncing about in a sauna like some health-farm fanny.

Don’t touch a thing
, somebody said, but forensics would be too late to find any iota of evidence to nail this cunt. A fibre from his clothes was hardly going to give us a map to his centre of operations. I went in, despite the swearing, and started calling her name, over and over, until the syllables mashed into each other and it became something nonsensical, almost unreal. The living room was untouched, the mezzanine sleeping area nicely fluffed up, with Mengele on top of the folded blankets, looking down at me bleary-eyed and disdainful. I almost asked the little bastard where she was.