Dust and Desire (32 page)

Mawker came on in the middle of bawling someone out: ‘…see your face again, you idiot! Who is this?’

‘Ian,’ I said. I was almost happy to hear his voice. ‘It’s Joel.’

‘Sorrell? Where the fuck are you? I’m going to come down on you like a fucking plane whose wings just fell off.’

‘I can’t tell you where I am.’

‘This Geenan woman turned up this morning, dead as my cock. Know anything about it?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘She’d been shot. And then she’d been turned into pizza by a big truck.’

‘Sounds as if that might sting for a while.’

Mawker’s voice went into Radio 2 purring mode. I wondered if he’d learned how to do that at Bruche. ‘Talk to me, Joel. We want this nutcase just as much as you do.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said.

‘Look, there’s another dead woman. Not the same MO as Liptrott and the Liverpool lass, but the same knife, we found out. Had her throat slit a couple of weeks ago in a back alley in Holborn. Fucking rush hour, and no fucker saw a thing. This guy is fast, but he moves like a ghost. He wouldn’t leave footprints in diarrhoea. The linens have given him a name already: the Wallpaper Man. He blends in something fucking frightening.’

‘The Holborn girl will have been classmates with Georgina Millen and Kara Geenan,’ I said. ‘Bank on it.’

‘Our Kara Geenan?’ he asked. I could imagine the puzzlement drawing lines all over his face.

‘No,’ I said. I then gave him the details of the school in Penketh. Told him that maybe it would be a good idea to track down the other members of the class. Keep an eye on them. ‘I can’t come in yet,’ I said. ‘He wants me.’

‘We gathered that,’ said Mawker. ‘That could be to our advantage. We can offer you cover. If he makes a move for you, we’ll have him.’

‘I’d rather do this alone.’

‘Look, Sorrell,’ the voice changing again, losing its even tone, ‘if one more person dies at the hands of this cunt, you’ll go down. If
you
die at the hands of this cunt, you’ll go down. I fucking guarantee it.’ Then he said, ‘Don’t be a hero, Joel. It isn’t going to help you get any more work if you’re lying on a gurney having your head sawn open.’

I called Mike Brinksman then and let him off his leash, thanking him for being patient. He barely said two words to me, and one of those was some incoherent bark of gratitude. I had no choice. In another few days he’d have gone after the story, anyway. Everyone seemed to be closing in, but nobody was any the wiser as to who the guy was or where he was hiding. Now it looked as if he’d won. The only way I could get something out of this whole shitty mess was to go back to living my life. Move back into the flat. Get out on the streets. Show myself. And hope that he made a mistake when he came for me. Hope that this wallpaper man had a bit of damp in him.

I got to the library about ten minutes before closing time. A security guard on reception was leafing through the sports pages of his newspaper. Behind the double doors of the library, there was one girl in tight jeans and a cropped sweater, checking out a huge cairn of poetry anthologies, chatting to the guy with the stamp who didn’t believe she was going to read all of them in the few weeks before they were due back.

‘All right?’ the guy greeted me, as I walked past the desk. I nodded.

I had the rest of the library to myself, and I made a beeline for the medicine section. I don’t know what I expected to find there. Maybe some kind of elaborate messaging system on the
Alternative Remedies
shelf. Maybe a contact of hers. What had seemed promising back at Lorraine’s place now seemed like just another dead end. It was a book, that was all.

He knew my face.

How, exactly? How did he know my face?

The guy on the desk was asking the nice-looking girl in the jeans how old she was.

‘Get away,’ he said, ‘you don’t look a day over seventeen.’ Might have been flattering, I thought, if she was in her sixties, but I glanced at her and saw she was lapping it up. She was guessing his age now.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I’m actually four years old.’

Well, with that chat-up technique, it wouldn’t surprise me. I traced a finger across the spines while he then explained he was a ‘leapling’, born in 1992, a Leap Year. Fascinating. The girl giggled and jiggled. Good luck to him, I thought. Hopefully he’d score and pull out a four-year-old’s cock. That’d wipe the smile off her face.

I scanned the shelves, wondering how many hands had held these volumes, how many pairs of eyes had pored over the words, and closed in boredom. How many of them had Kara cribbed from, in order to entrap Gary Cullen with her words of wisdom and calm?

It had been years since I set foot in a library. I could never be bothered with them. I preferred to buy my books in pristine condition, rather than flick through something that might have been handled by some ogre with mange. I liked the idea of having a little library of my own: some separate room that I could lose myself in, dipping into favourite books, using them as reference points to remind myself of different times, places, or women. Maybe one day. There was nothing wrong with reading the same book twice, I thought. Books tend to receive bad treatment that way. Every other art form gets a look in more than once. You didn’t buy the latest Oasis CD just to put it on the player only once. If you’d loved
Eyes Wide Shut
, you bought it when it came out on DVD. And every time you walked past that Rothko print, you gave it another glance. Books, well, most people read them the one time and then they went to the charity shop or ended up forgotten on a shelf gathering dust.

I was turning my attention to the philosophy section, thinking, hang on, I
did
play the latest Oasis CD only once: it was shite. When I checked my watch again, it was twenty-five to seven. I glanced back at the double doors and saw that they had been closed. The guy behind the desk had buggered off, forgotten about me. I thought I heard someone in the row next to mine, a fellow prisoner perhaps, but when I rounded the far end of the shelves, there was nobody. I strolled over to the doors and fuck it, I was locked in. Great.

I put the book down on the desk and gave the glass inserts a hefty knock with my watch strap. The security guard was nowhere to be seen. Fine, fire escape then.

The lights went out.

Again, I thought I heard someone moving among the shelves, a little whisper of fabric. ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘I think we’re locked in.’

I made my way over to the rows of shelves again, thinking it might be a senior citizen, or a kid turned nervy because of the dark, but again there was nobody there. I had to be alone. The guy had missed me, even though he must surely have checked the place was empty before he locked up. I was surprised nobody had made an announcement that the place was about to shut. Maybe his thoughts had been elsewhere, tangled up with that bookworm’s tight jeans, for example. Maybe she’d decided she liked his inane banter and had gone off for a beer with him. I couldn’t blame him.

I went back to the desk and picked up the book, then made for the rear of the library where the fire escape was located. I’d come back tomorrow and talk to the staff, see if they knew anything about Kara. I was halfway there when the shadows thickened and I felt the air tremble just by my cheek.
Ghosts between the shelves
, I thought. There was a sensation of cold, and then extreme heat. I backed off, feeling fluid coursing down my face, and I started panicking because I thought, shit, if I get blood on this book there’ll be a hell of a fine. The shadow came again, quiet and lethally fast, and I kept stepping backwards, trying to keep more than an arm’s length between us. I felt the blade again, felt its slipstream wash across my throat as it slashed through the space between us.

He knew my face.

I threw the book at the shadow and took off for the door, trying to get the gun out from my jeans, but of course it was back in the flat, nicely wrapped up in a towel, waiting to go back to Keepsies. I felt another shift in air pressure and I was only saved from having my back carved open by the thickness of my jacket, which split open by at least a yard. I crashed against the bar of the fire escape and we were suddenly outside. I resolved never to go anywhere without a gun in future, and bollocks to the risks. Carry a gun and you were more likely to get shot. Fair enough, but I could live with those odds right now, right this minute.

I ran across the road towards the train station. The concourse in front was, as usual, filled with weaving drunks, ugly prostitutes, pretty prostitutes and backpackers staring grimly at maps of the London Underground. I pushed my way through this meat market, nicking glances behind me and feeling panic build up in my guts like a Bernard Herrmann score. People were backing off when they saw me. I raised a hand to my cheek, and it came away sopping with blood. My hand looked as though I’d shoved a red mitten on it. I wasn’t going to be able to blend in, then, or hope to spot him under cover of my fellow pedestrians.

I stopped and backed up against the glass screen of a bus shelter. The road in front of me was choked with traffic: taxis, buses, and couriers on motorbikes navigating a route around the larger vehicles. People streamed along the pavements in all directions. Pretty much everybody gave me and my flapping cheek the once over and then treated me with a super-wide berth. He could have been any one of them. I wondered if he knew about Kara yet. Perhaps he’d gone back to the Elegant House to pick up Melanie, and been confounded by the police barricades. If I was lucky, he was feeling confused and threatened, unlikely to be thinking straight. And, if I was right and he relied on Kara as a child often relies on its big sister, then he was in unfamiliar territory for the first time. He was out on his own. He was wounded and dangerous, but then so was I.

I pressed my handkerchief against the gaping lips of the gash. I finally had my long-term wish: a big, manly scar like Action Man’s. I decided I wasn’t that keen on the idea any more, but it was too late now. Best, in future, not to wish too hard for what you want, I admonished myself.

The cut was beyond painful. I felt a little queasy when my finger slipped deep into the wound and through it I felt, or thought I felt, my teeth, but then a blast of cold air spanked me awake and I started moving again. It looked as if we had lost each other, when what we wanted most was each other rendered into millions of pieces. I needed to have him alive, though, just for long enough to find out what his monumental beef with me was – a beef so big it needed its own farm.

Just when I was about to give it up and get myself down to casualty for a six-hour wait on an uncomfortable plastic chair, I saw him. He slipped through a tear in a fence leading on to a building site next to St Pancras, where immense red Bachy Soletanche piledrivers were pounding the last ghosts of Agar Town from the gouged earth. I watched him for a few seconds as he made his way to the forecourt of what had once been St Pancras Chambers, which for decades had been little more than a glorified filing cabinet in which British Rail could lose their complaints letters.

I followed him, trying not to make too much noise on a ground strewn with plastic wrap and scaffolding, and it was me now trying to be like Grasshopper, trying not to tear the rice paper. There was a hammer hanging by its claw off the back of a JCB, along with a large donkey jacket and a hard hat that had been left behind at the end of the working day. I put the hammer in the jacket pocket and slung it on. I then jammed on the hard hat and moved towards where the scaffold rose against the face of the hotel entrance.

He was moving up through a lattice of struts, couplers and braces. He moved like a spider, skating over the obstructions as if they were nothing more than sketches on paper. He had made this journey many times, I realised. I thought of lairs and traps and slow death. A few lights were on in the ground floor of the venerable old building, and I could see movement inside, possibly workers desperately fitting out the hotel rooms to meet some impossible deadline. There was a sign,
Draper Security
, and I thought that if he was able to get past the guards on a regular basis, then either Draper was an appalling security firm or this guy
was
wallpaper after all.

Phythian disappeared through an open window on one of the upper floors, and I followed at a distance, trying to make sure that I wouldn’t stumble on top of him as I clambered inside, all knees and elbows and oaths. I pushed past a veil of brick netting and began to climb. Duckboards scattered with pebbles of glass and gritty chunks of plaster. Muffled footsteps. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a music playing behind the babble of a DJ on the radio.

I monkeyed on, clenching my jaw as I came face-to-face with two men just behind a window, drinking tea and staring out at the view. I averted my injured cheek. They nodded at me. I nodded back. Hard hats and hammers was clearly the way to go here, if you wanted to be inconspicuous. And maybe six inches of builder’s arse-crack for good measure.

I reached the same open window and swung inside. Dark here. A pale shape emerged from the gloom: a doorway. The light switches were decorous brass affairs, but I didn’t dare throw them. I inched open the door and peered out into the corridor. I thought I could hear the kiss of leather on stone and to my right, maybe fifteen metres away, the slow blur of something dark trembling against the grainy shadows, gradually rising. A stairwell? I took the claw hammer out of my pocket and gripped the handle, relishing the way the rubber filled my fist. Numbness was creeping across my cheeks as the blood there turned gummy; dull pain was already nesting in my lower jaw from Kara Geenan’s jemmy. I was going to have a face like a scoutmaster’s arse come morning.

I moved on through the corridors. The air was syrupy in here, as if it had not been refreshed by an open window for decades. There was a clean, new smell of furniture freshly unveiled from shrink-wrapped plastic, and the hot, sweet aroma of sawdust. But there was also an old smell of damp and diesel. You couldn’t give a place like this just a lick of paint and expect its grimy history to be eradicated. The walls here were soaked with the sweat of hundreds of thousands of people. Ghosts clung jealously.