Dust and Desire (8 page)

She gave me a slow blink. ‘The other question. Try the other question.’

‘Well, I was burgled and the flat’s in a state and I just need you to look after
Der Todesengel
for me – just for a few days.’

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘happy to. What about you?’

‘I’ll muddle through.’

She shook her head. She looked pretty disgusted with me, but in a nice way, if you can believe it.

‘I have enough space at my flat. I have a very large sofa.’

‘I couldn’t impose–’

‘You are imposing, so you might as well take advantage. It’s no problem.’

She jotted her address down on a pink Post-it and adhered it to my nose. ‘I’ll be in after seven tonight.’

‘Melanie–’ I began. I must have been getting a bit gooey-eyed because she shooed me out, and quite right too. I gave Mengele’s chin a rub first, and I nodded at the old dears and their shivery dogs. Then I got in my car and drove to Westminster.

It started to rain on the way but I wasn’t too bothered about that. I was busy thinking, why couldn’t I have been burgled before now?

7

I
parked a little way up the road from the Paviours Arms. I don’t like situating myself directly outside the building I’m aiming for. Even my own gaff, I park a hundred metres or so further along the road. Things shouldn’t be too cosy, too convenient. Even when it’s chucking it down. Things are too sweet, you start to ease off. You find, when you need it most, your edge has turned into a curve, and a big soft one at that.

It was busy in the pub, but then it was getting on in the afternoon, on a Friday, and the suits were in a rush to get slaughtered. You could see the ones who had been here since lunchtime as they’d taken over the sofas, and their tables were audibly complaining under the weight of so much glass. I pushed past the acres of cheap jackets and women in black (why is it so many women in offices wear black, and nothing but? They must curse Marlboro for not doing black packs, or pray that John Player might become trendy some time soon) and, using two portly men at the huge bar as a mangle, fed myself through to the weary barmaid. I ordered a pint of Stella and, shielding my drink as best I could, jinked slow-motion over to the one space in any pub where you are unlikely to find anyone standing: the square inch by the gents’ toilet. Behind me was a space dedicated to food, and I sneered at the ranks of loosened ties as they tucked into their fish and chips and shepherd’s pies. A pub was for drinking. It ought to smell of spilled beer and urinal pucks, not of vinegar. Crisps, pork scratchings, peanuts: fair enough, because you need something salty to help your beer down. But meals? In a pub? Christ, it brings me out in hives.

I forced my attention back to the scrum to see if Kara Geenan was around, but that would have been just too dashed lucky. A guy with a bunch of keys as big as a football attached to his belt appeared behind the bar and spent some time chatting to another guy at one end, who was sipping a pint of Guinness. I was about to set off on another life-threatening trek to the north face of the bar, when Big Keys disappeared into the back. Nathan, I thought and, by way of congratulating myself for such sterling deductive reasoning, drained my glass and went in search of another pint.

I took my time with that one, because I could feel the buzz from the cocktails getting their second wind. I watched the various pockets of execs and secs and no-necks flirt and argue and play their little power games, all the while grateful that I’d bailed out of the great career jet just after take-off. I was no more a true policeman than a badger is an Olympic-class ice-dancer. It didn’t help that the helmet was an embarrassment and the pay – for wandering around in a uniform that might as well have had the words ‘HATE ME’ daubed on the back – was staggeringly awful. At least now, although my money situation was even more staggeringly awful, I could wear plain clothes, fall out of bed on my say-so and swear 24/7 at the boss. I had to make a go of what I was doing and, to a certain extent, I did. Fear drove me, more than anything else. Fear that I’d end up in an office wearing Homer Simpson ties and emailing the guy sitting two inches to my left to ask him if he had any spare paper clips I could borrow.

When Rebecca died (when Rebecca was killed, when she was killed), a couple of months before Sarah went missing, it made it all the easier for me to hand in my notice at the Met. If they hadn’t accepted my resignation they would have sacked me within six weeks, because I had gone into something of a decline. I drank a lot, I stopped shaving, I stopped washing. I stopped caring. Because what I cared about wasn’t there any more. And maybe that thought, filling my mind like a black sun, blinding me to anything else, meant that Sarah’s leaving became inevitable. She must have noticed how much I marginalised her when I was trying to deal with what had happened. And I was writing on a very small page, so of course she was going to fall off the edge. What I cared about, a big chunk of what I cared about,
was
still there, but my wallowing wouldn’t allow me to see it like that. How must she have been feeling? I never asked. I still don’t know. I’m too scared, too much of a chicken to even begin to guess. Instead, I tried to find other Rebeccas in bars so dark that even a passing resemblance was enough for me. When I woke up next to them in the morning, I left before they could ask me if I really meant what I’d said, and if something that happened so fast really could be
it
. And Sarah witnessed it all. I wasn’t The One for anybody (I should have been, first and foremost, to my daughter) and I felt like that for a long time, until Keith pulled me out of the mire and asked me to spy on his wife.

Since then I’d done some gritty, shitty jobs, but every one of them rates a ten next to the zero involving cheap, crease-free shirts and an hour for your lunch. I’d done mobile, static and covert surveillance; traced witnesses, fleeing debtors and missing persons; investigated insurance claims; executed company searches and pre-employment checks. I’ve proved infidelities. I’ve been punched, shot at (admittedly with an airgun), run over, and now I’ve been clouted around the loaf with a cosh. I’ve waded through each and every different type of manure, and at the end of it I’ve taken my shoes off and cleaned them without a peep of complaint. The worst thing about this type of work is the hanging around, and following that is having to listen to the inane gas that flies out of people’s mouths while you’re hanging around. You have to listen to a lot. And I was listening to it now.

Two gym-slim blokes. One in a green woollen three-piece, one in a navy pinstripe silk-mix, a pair of Loewe shades resting on his head. Both of them, you could tell, played squash, or badminton, every lunchtime and the sense of competition was deep and hot inside them, like bile eating up their insides. They were now playing
I’ve been to more places than you
, and each sentence, more or less, began like this: ‘When I was in Mogadishu…’

The jaw-clench-per-minute ratio was sky-rocketing.

‘If you’re ever in Warsaw,’ Silk-Mix was saying, ‘you have to stay at the Hotel Bristol. How could you not? I mean, it was opened by Maggie Thatcher, but don’t let that put you off.’

Three-Piece took a big, punctuative swallow of his Strongbow and, nodding, replied: ‘I won’t go to Nigeria again, no way. I got shot at. That really put me off the place. Billy clubs studded with nails. People carrying them in the street.’

Silk-Mix: ‘You know, some years ago I was in Sierra Leone. Believe it. The most dangerous place on Earth. The front line was between two villages and they’re called, you’ll never guess, Somerset and Winston. Believe it. That’s why there were British troops over there. That’s the only reason.’

Nathan appeared at the bar again. I think he had added to his keys in the hour or so since he was gone. He was walking with a fucking
list
. I pushed unsteadily past Three-Piece and said to them: ‘In Morecambe they’ve got this pub with a sign that says “No nuclear weapons”, yeah. No,
really
.’

God, I was more pissed than I’d given myself credit for. ‘Nathan,’ I called out, approaching the bar. ‘Nate. Nat.
Natters
.’

He was looking at me as though I had just sold his grandmother for a handful of turds. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

‘No, but you know somebody who knows me – which makes us virtually related. Let’s go on holiday.’

‘I think you’ve had enough to drink. Why don’t you put your pint down and leave.’

‘Kara Geenan,’ I said.

There might have been the slightest hardening of his stare, but he handled it beautifully.

‘I said you’re drunk,’ he said. ‘Leave. Now.’

Punters were now clearing a space at the bar. Maybe they’d seen this kind of thing in here before. What was he going to do? Lash me with his Chubbs? The gathering silence helped clear my head a little. He was coming around the bar and, up close, I could see he was no slouch. What I had perceived as flab was really part of a very hard gut. There was no give anywhere on him. He didn’t try to look dangerous, like the soft ones do. He looked laid-back and affable. Which obviously meant he could twist me into pretzel shapes without breaking sweat.

He took my hand and very gently manoeuvred it up my spine until I was bent double with pain. He got down low too, and murmured something in my ear. Then he let me go and I acted like a good boy and went outside. Five minutes later he was where he promised me he’d be.

The taxi rank on the corner of Regency Street and Horseferry Road was quiet at this time of night, this no-time in between people going out after work and stumbling home once the bars and clubs are closed. A couple of cabbies were taking advantage of the slow period to catch up on their red-tops or their zeds. A fine rain had begun to fall, and was misting the scuffed cellulose of the taxis like hoarfrost. Nathan was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the moon as it skidded along the roofs of the apartment blocks on Victoria Street. I stretched, feeling blackspots of pain break out all over my body, and waited for something to happen.

‘She’s nothing to do with me,’ he said at last.

‘Why so defensive?’ I said.

‘I’m not being defensive. I just don’t want any trouble.’

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘she’s plenty to do with you. She’s a looker. She’s been seen at your boozer, stuck to your arm like a plaster cast. I don’t want the sticky details. I just need to find her. Is she at your place?’

‘Why do you need to find her?’

‘She owes me money, and an explanation. In that order.’

Nathan sighed. He dropped his gaze and stared at me. I must have been a bit of a come-down compared to the moon, but I was touched. ‘I haven’t seen her for a couple of days,’ he said, and he sounded like someone glad to get it off his chest. ‘She was staying with me. She got a job here first, serving behind the bar, and we hit it off. Couple of weeks later she had an argument with her landlady about rent, and I said she could stay here. We’ve got some spare rooms. But she didn’t end up using any of them, if you get my drift.’

I nodded. ‘Where was she before she turned up on your doorstep? Did she say?’

‘Liverpool. She wasn’t shitting me, though she’d have been wise to after what she did, little bitch. There was a ticket from Lime Street Station in her bag. And some of the numbers on my phone bill were 0151 jobs.’

‘When was this?’

‘She got a job with me tail end of summer, about three months ago.’

‘And she’s moved out, has she?’

He nodded again, his jaw firm. ‘Without telling me. And she took the folding stuff from the safebox, too. About four hundred pounds, the little cunt.’

I thanked him and tapped on the window of one of the cabs, feeling too drunk to drive. ‘Maida Vale,’ I told the taxi driver, and crawled into the back seat. My head was at that precarious state where only sleep or more booze would placate it. And my cheek was hurting where I’d bit it at the mention of Liverpool.
Liverpool, for fuck’s sake
.

‘Hey,’ Nathan said. ‘You find her, you let me know where she is, okay?’

‘Of course,’ I lied.

Dr Melanie Henriksen lived in a split-level flat in a smart Victorian terraced house on Oakington Road. The blinds on the front window were shut when I got there, but a pleasant honey-coloured light was edging them and I could hear, as I reached for the doorbell, music playing through a partially open window. As the cabbie pulled over, I looked down at the £3.99 bottle of plonk that I’d bought on the way over. It sat in the plastic carrier bag smirking at me. Fuck,
and
it was a screw-top. I gave it to the driver – some tip – and got out.

‘Hi,’ she said, after she’d buzzed me in. ‘I was just about to get ready for bed. But, now you’re here, how about a drink?’

Though I was eager for sleep, I said I wouldn’t say no to a vodka, and she went off to the kitchen at the rear of the flat. I followed her languidly, checking out the place as I did so. The living room gave on to a study with a mezzanine sleeping area. There was a tiny Sony Vaio on the desk, and a potted plant that might have come straight out of the Amazon rainforest. There was a window looking on to the sunken garden where a fountain gurgled, but it was too dark to see anything out there. The hallway had a framed print of Simon Patterson’s ‘The Great Bear’ and an arresting painting in sombre oils, by some guy called Walkuski, of Icarus before his feather-duster impression came a cropper.

Mengele was sitting on a large, sumptuous cushion beneath a couple of bookshelves filled with old Penguin crime novels, the ones with green spines. He broke off from cleaning his toes to give me a contemptuous stare. The kitchen was comparatively small (that said, you could have fitted my entire flat into it), but all the cons wore fishtail coats and rode around on Vespas. Boffi units, some very nice Fritz Hansen chairs, and a Barber Osgabi dining table. I was scared to put down the glass she handed me, since there was nothing so retro as a coaster. Maybe she had some courtesy-bots that would scuttle out from under the sink to hold your drink for you when you needed a rest from holding it.