Exile (40 page)

Toner was back at the bar. He looked up at her as she came out, leering as if she’d sucked him off. He said something to the flies and they looked over at her and laughed. She walked unsteadily across the room, every eye watching her. She walked through the little doorway and into the empty leisure drinking room and stopped at the bar, telling herself that she would have a whiskey, just to show him she wasn’t scared. But it was a Winnie lie. She needed a whiskey to get straight again and she couldn’t hold out until she got somewhere else. She stuck her tongue into the cut, feeling along the edges of the rip, trying to guess how long it was. The barman came around to her. “What can I get you?” He smirked nervously.

“Large whiskey,” she said, keeping her eyes down, scratching the gash in her cheek against her razor teeth as she spoke. The barman leaned over and emptied the optic twice, dropping the glass in front of her. Maureen only had a twenty and some change. She picked out the right money with tremorous fingers, certain he wouldn’t come back with the change if she gave him the big note, knowing she couldn’t come round the bar looking for him.

“You’re not staying here,” he muttered, as she counted it out into his hand, “because I don’t want trouble in here.”

She lifted her glass, swallowing a big mouthful of bloody whiskey, and felt the spiky liquid sate the wound, as gentle and comforting as a kick in the tits. She dropped her empty glass.

“You’re a cunt,” she said, her voice strangled and rough.

The barman lifted the glass and wiped the bar under it. “Get out,” he said, and watched her until she did.

She wanted to forget Ann, she wanted to go and get Liam and leave here. A sharp breeze swirled along the pavement, carrying dust and city filth, making it difficult to see. She couldn’t face the busy high street with people looking at her, smelling the vomit from her coat, seeing her broken neck. He had hit her in front of all of them, fifteen men in a room, and not one of them had flinched. They thought she deserved it. She wondered if Toner had killed Ann in front of them, if the audience of mute men had seen that too and done nothing. As much as she wanted to go home she knew she couldn’t just let him get away with it. She needed to find Elizabeth. She stopped and looked up and down the lane, trying to imagine where a woman would run to with her madge hanging out. Elizabeth had had a fright, a big fright, and she was jumpy anyway. She’d be looking for comfort and calm. Maureen looked up Brixton Hill. Elizabeth’d be in Argyle Street; she’d be at Parkin’s house.

Maureen walked up the hill, staying on the opposite side of the broad road, urging herself on. Parlain had no reason to come after her now: she’d given the Polaroid to Toner and there was nothing he could do about it, but she was scared anyway. She thought she’d stay scared for a long time.

She didn’t want to go up the stairs or even wait outside. Her throat was aching and she sat on the low wall behind the Perspex bus stop, watching across the road, lighting a cigarette and swallowing blood, watching the street for signs of Elizabeth. The moment she had frozen in the toilets she knew she couldn’t handle herself. Like Leslie, she couldn’t fight everyone, and knowing that had made her deeply afraid. She remembered the sensation of her hand slipping past the comb to the photograph, the cold metal on her palm, and being too afraid to lift it and use it. She saw a shadow coming out of Tarn Parlain’s block.

Elizabeth fell out of the door and sloped across the muddy grass to the road, her knees weak, her jumper pulled to the side, looking as if she’d been attacked. Maureen stood up and Elizabeth saw her. She darted across the road without checking the traffic and ran up to Maureen. “Will you help me?” Elizabeth looked desperate. She glanced back at the door. “My friend won’t help me, will you help me?”

“What happened?” said Maureen.

“He pushed me out, my friend, he pushed me. Will you help me?”

“What’s wrong?” But Maureen knew what was wrong. It was obvious from Elizabeth’s quivering panic and her damp skin.

“Lend me some money?” said Elizabeth.

Maureen shook her head. Elizabeth pointed down the hill. “Buy me a drink?”

“Okay.” Maureen’s voice came out as a rasp. “Talk to me?”

Elizabeth was looking at Maureen’s neck. She nodded. Maureen wanted to get the fuck away from here to somewhere relatively safe. She spotted a black cab coming over the hill and asked the driver to drop them at the Angel. She saw the driver watching them in the mirror, worried, knowing something was very wrong.

They pushed open the door and found the butch lady-man behind the bar, sipping from her blue mug, reading a newspaper. Elizabeth sloped off to a table as far from the bar as she could get but the barwoman recognized her. She looked from Elizabeth to Maureen and seemed disappointed. “What happened to your neck?” she said, putting her mug down.

Maureen blushed and lowered her head to hide her shame. “I got in a fight,” she said.

The landlady came over to her, keeping her eyes on Elizabeth cowering in the far corner. “One drink,” she said. “I’ll give you one drink and then you have to go.” Maureen turned to Elizabeth. “Vodka,” said Elizabeth. She didn’t specify how much or what she wanted in it. She just said vodka, spoken with an open ending, making it sound as if it could go on forever.

“Large,” said Maureen. “And a large whiskey.”

The woman gave them the drinks reluctantly. A trembling junkie and a battered Scot wouldn’t exactly draw in the business lunch trade. As she walked across the empty room and sat the glasses of succor on the table, Maureen saw the lady-man watching her and she knew what she was thinking, that Maureen and Elizabeth were the same. And maybe she was right.

They huddled over the table, two frightened women hiding from the men, wasting the day getting out of it.

Chapter 41

LITTLE PATS

Maureen’s throat hurt when she spoke and she couldn’t swallow properly. She was having to sip her whiskey, let it slide down her throat and numb her cheek. She wanted to gulp it down and lose herself in it. She had stood limp and let him slap and throttle her. She was frightened and she hated everyone. She wanted to go home.

“Where are you from, Elizabeth?” rasped Maureen.

“London,” said Elizabeth, looking at her drink.

“Where are your family?”

Elizabeth smiled churlishly. “Where I left them, I suppose.”

“Have you got brothers? Sisters?”

She sat up a little. “A sister. She’s a designer. Furniture. She makes it all herself. In a workshop. In Chelsea.”

“She must be doing well to afford a workshop in Chelsea.”

“No, we had trust funds …” She tried to smile again. “All gone now.” She frowned at her glass, the light shining in through the softening etched windows.

Maureen couldn’t tell how old she was. Her long hair and hopeful smile fitted a different life, a crazy deb living life her own way, with real people, making all the wrong choices. Elizabeth didn’t want to talk. Whatever she was feeding into the back of her knee wasn’t working for her today. She was trembling inside her dirty Vegas sweatshirt and her hairline was damp. Maureen looked at her and thought of kind Liam sitting at Martha’s, waiting to whisk her home to safety. She’d never made the connection between Liam and these people, never acknowledged a causal connection between his big beautiful house and bony bodies like Elizabeth’s.

“Remember Ann who died?” whispered Maureen.

Elizabeth tore herself away from the mess in her head and looked up. “Yeah.”

“She had kids. Her husband’s looking after all four of them but he’s been arrested for murdering her. They’ll go into care.”

Elizabeth nodded slowly, taking it in. “I had a kid.” She sat up, remembered, then her back bent and she slumped. “Nice kid.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Joshua. He never cried. He was a good boy.”

“When was that?”

Elizabeth brushed her hand into the past but her mind went with it and she stared vacantly at the table.

“Is he in care?” asked Maureen.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Died. House fire.” She took a deep, deep drink of liquid eraser.

“Sorry,” croaked Maureen, and Elizabeth shrugged, as if she’d heard the word a thousand times and was sick of hearing it. She took another drink.

“If I knew what happened to Ann,” said Maureen, “he might not go to prison. The kids could have a normal life.”

Elizabeth drank again, looking at her glass.

Doyle had misjudged her: mentioning the children had had no impact; all that mattered to Elizabeth was what she could get and where she could get it.

“I’ve got five hundred quid. If you tell me what happened, I’ll give it to you.”

Elizabeth sat up.

“Five hundred.” Maureen sipped her whiskey and Elizabeth stared at her.

“What for?”

“Ann. Tell me what happened.”

Elizabeth tried to find the catch. “How do I know you’ve got five hundred quid?” she said.

“In the bank,” said Maureen.

Elizabeth hesitated so Maureen reached into her pocket and found an old cash-line receipt. The account balance at the bottom was faint but Maureen showed it to her and Elizabeth smiled and relaxed when she saw the figures. She gave it back to Maureen and looked at the floor, thinking.

“Can we get it now?”

“No. Once you’ve told me.”

“But we might miss the bank.”

“Tell me quickly, then.”

“You’re not the police, are you?”

“D’ye think I’d have this mess on my neck if I was the police?”

Elizabeth hesitated, staring at her drink, then looked up suddenly. “It was an accident,” she said. “She fell over.”

Maureen snorted, and regretted it immediately. “She fell into the river?” she said, holding her throat and trying to swallow.

“No. She fell over and banged her head. We were trying to look after her.”

“Where did she fall?”

“Dunno. Do you know Tarn Parlain?”

“I do, yeah.”

“Tarn said she fell and banged her head. She was on the couch when I got there. She was in a mess, her face was all bloody. No one wanted to look at her.”

“Who was there?”

“Ann, Tarn, Heidi and Susan. Heidi came up with me — she used to be on the methadone program with me up at Heme Hill. It was closing time.” She took a sip of vodka. “Tarn came and told us we had to go to his house. She was on the sofa. And then she died.”

“Why did he want you all up there?”

“For Toner. He was teaching us all a lesson for Toner.” Elizabeth sipped again.

“What was the lesson?”

“He was teaching us not to steal. She’d stolen from Toner and Tarn was doing him a favor.”

“What did she steal?”

“She stole a lot. A whole shipment. She went missing after that but Toner found her. Tarn was teaching us not to steal.”

“Do you carry for him?”

“Not now.”

“What about the mattress and the river?”

“Well, we got a fright so Tarn got some of his friends to come and put her in a mattress and put her in the river.” Her skin was so white and damp it was beginning to turn silver. “Is that it? Can we go to the bank now?”

“No. Why burn her feet? Who cut her legs?”

Elizabeth sat up straight, as uncomfortable as if Maureen had accused her of farting at dinner. “Oh,” she said, “that was the others. Tarn made them do it, to teach them. I had to go out and see the doctor.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“No,” said Elizabeth, trying to put the times together. “That was later, the next day, or the day after, I think.” Elizabeth didn’t think she was lying: she was so divorced from reality she genuinely believed that mutilating and killing a drinking partner constituted a bit of an accident.

“They did it when you went to the doctor’s?”

“Yeah,” she said. “See, she was on the sofa and Tarn got really fed up with her being there and he got Heidi, I think it was Heidi, to burn her feet to wake her up, but she didn’t wake up.”

“What about her legs?”

“Oh, Tarn told them to cut them, I don’t know why. I was out.”

“She was wearing a gold bracelet. Why didn’t you take it off her?”

Elizabeth looked guilty. “Tarn said leave it.”

Maureen leaned into her, dropping her aching voice. “Elizabeth,” she said, “did Toner ask Tarn to get her?”

“No,” she moaned, cringing and afraid. “That’s why it was such a big deal. Tarn did it to teach us a lesson. He thought Frank would be pleased but he wasn’t. It wasn’t what Frank wanted. And now Tarn’s crossed him but we were there.” Elizabeth glanced out of the door. She lifted her glass to sip but was trembling so much she had to put it down again. “And Tarn might say we were there. Tarn comes from a big family, he’s got people behind him. Frank won’t hurt him but he’ll hurt us.”

“The little fish?”

“Yes.” Elizabeth nodded, dipping her chin down and looking up at her, making herself the victim. “The little fish.”

“Toner didn’t mean to kill her?”

“No, no, he wanted to ask her about the bag and there’s a photo of him and it’s missing now. It’s very bad for Frank.”

Maureen looked at her glass, at the thousands of tiny scratches on the surface. “Why would he want to ask about the bag? She said it had been stolen but he didn’t believe her, did he?”

“Not at first, no, but then he put out the word that he wanted to talk to her about it.” She tried to smile. “Frank doesn’t talk to people about things like that, not usually.”

“What made him want to talk to her?”

Elizabeth took a deep, impatient breath. “I don’t know. It turned up in the wrong hands and I guess he thought it had been stolen after all.”

“But she died before he got the chance?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, shaking her legs under the table like a small girl desperate for the toilet. “Please can we go?”

“We’ll go when I’ve finished or we won’t go at all. Who stabbed her in the legs?”

“Tarn told them to do it,” she said.

“But, Elizabeth, why did the women do what Tarn asked them?”

“It was her or us.”

But Maureen knew there had to be more to it. “Did he feed you while you were there?”