The Cutting Crew (21 page)

'Trust me.' This time those purple eyes looked at me. He shook his head again. 'Harris really had nothing to do with it.'

I thought back to the email and the video attachment. We knew that Harris had been involved in luring Sean to his death and we strongly suspected he was after Keleigh now, so it wasn't a wild leap to imagine that he'd helped abduct Alison too. The question was why. He'd obviously done a good job of convincing Jamie he was on the level, and so I changed tack a little to work on the motive.

'Okay,' I said. 'Was Harris ever involved with Alison?'

Jamie moved the glass again.

'No. He was just an advisor.'

Rosh said, 'Has he been in touch with you recently?'

'No. I've not heard from him in a while. What's the big thing with Harris?'

'Has he been in touch with Keleigh?'

'I don't know.' Jamie put his glass down and leaned forwards.

'Why are you asking?'

I wasn't sure how much to reveal at this stage, but Rosh took charge.

'We have reason to believe he may be involved with some people who want to hurt Keleigh.'

'Oh.' Jamie leaned back. He didn't look surprised by the idea that someone might want to hurt his girlfriend so much as the idea that it might be Harris.

'So, that's why we're asking,' I added.

'Well, she's safe,' Jamie said. 'We've not heard from Harris in a while.'

'Okay,' Rosh said. 'If you do hear from him, whatever you might think of him right now, you should be careful.'

'All right.'

'So he was an advisor,' I said. 'And you mentioned something about an art project. Was Alison involved in that?'

Jamie nodded.

'It was four of us. Me and Kel. Alison. This guy Damian. We just met with Harris a few times for some background.'

'Background on what?'

'Our art was to do with the city,' he said. 'It was to do with personifying the city, yeah? Making the city seem human. That's what my graffiti is all about. It's giving a voice to the actual architecture of the city, so that you're looking around and it's like the buildings or the pavements are talking to you. Like they have something to say.'

'Doesn't sound like my kind of thing,' Rosh said, giving him a smile. 'I always preferred plain old paintings. Kind of boring, I guess.'

It was an attempt to relax him, but Jamie wasn't biting.

'Very boring.'

'So your more interesting version is these street logos?' I said.

'Well, it's not just the graffiti.' He gestured with his hands a little. 'The writing's only an initial object. The actual artwork is people's experiences as they walk past and see it. Everybody participates and makes it what it is. In theory, anyway. Like, if somebody wrote a letter to the paper complaining about it, then that would have been part of the final piece.'

Lucy was clearly unimpressed by this. Since I wasn't working anymore, my taxes weren't directly supporting it and so I could afford to be a little more open-minded.

'And this is what Alison did, too? And Keleigh?'

'No.' Jamie shook his head. 'We all did different things. Keleigh did this thing with photographs. She had photos of eyes that she'd stick up on walls, giving the city a kind of sight. She took pictures, too, and left them places. Pictures of people taped to walls. Pictures of dogs and homeless people and things--'

I was fazing out, I realised: hardly taking in the rest of it. Pictures of eyes. Despite the noises around us, and the sound of Jamie talking, the main sound I could hear was ringing silence: this ominous, curling buzz in the air. I shuddered slightly.

Keep it together, I thought. But I wasn't sure why.

Jamie was still talking.

'- and it's all to do with that, really. That was what Harris was advising us on - the city's history, the myth of the brothers - and we were working around that, some of us closer than others.'

Rosh said, 'Okay. So what happened?'

I noticed the expression on Jamie's face, and it reminded me of nothing so much as the hooded, thoughtful looks that Sean had given me from time to time.

'We were trying to present the city as a living thing,' he said.

'You see? We were looking at the city so closely. And so we really shouldn't have been surprised when it started looking back.'

Lucy had lit another cigarette and was now smoking quietly, studying the grain of the wooden table. I didn't know what she was thinking, but she still looked deeply unimpressed. She'd always been immune to the kind of thoughts that Sean often voiced, and I thought she was probably figuring that this whole conversation was a waste of time. Someone had killed Alison, but it wasn't anything to do with some stupid, pissy art project - these people had automatic weapons and corrupt policemen on their team, for fuck's sake. Rosh was hiding his feelings better, but I was guessing he was probably on the same side of the fence.

I didn't know what to think. While we'd been speaking, the guy cleaning the flagstones had worked his way up to the top end of the alley, but I could still hear the steady swish. The rhythm had remained steady and every time he moved the brush it felt like it was wiping thoughts from my head. Slow hypnosis. I couldn't get a handle on what I felt, beyond a general sense of foreboding and the memory of everything that Sean and I had talked about as we watched the city tense and untense, like something awful was breathing beneath the pavements. With that as a backdrop, Jamie's story didn't seem quite so strange. There was a dark thread running through the coincidences of the past few days, finishing up here in a knot my mind couldn't see well enough to untie.

Once again, I told myself: keep it together.

'So,' Rosh said. 'You did graffiti. Keleigh did these photographs.

What did Alison do?'

'Murder,' Jamie said, and then gestured at Lucy's pack of cigarettes. 'Can I have one of those?'

She shrugged. 'Knock yourself out.'

He took one and lit it without saying thank you. After breathing out the first mouthful of smoke, he said:

'Her art was based around murder. When she first started, it was violent crime in general. But I guess there are only so many hours in the day.'

Rosh looked to me for support, but I was having trouble thinking straight. Lucy clearly wasn't going to help, so he went on by himself.

'So what about murder? What does that mean - what did she do?'

'She went to murder sites.' Jamie took another drag on the cigarette and then gestured with it. 'A bit morbid, I guess, but that was her thing. She was edgy like that. Or she liked people to think that she was, anyway. She'd light candles and take photographs, make sketches. Things like that. She was sort of seeing this guy who was working on computer stuff with her. He was helping her create something she could display.'

I realised that I needed to get back into this conversation, and it seemed a nice, easy question to begin with:

'What was his name?'

'Rob Hedge,' Jamie said. 'Something stupid like that, anyway.'

'He's at the university?'

'Yeah. He's doing a PhD. Computer Studies, or maybe IT. I don't know. Something computery.'

'Okay,' I said. So here was yet another candidate for the mysterious boyfriend. 'So what happened? Alison went to these sites. Did something happen to her at one?'

'No. She was usually really careful. She took her boyfriend everywhere when she was working.'

'And this was Hedge?' Lucy said, stubbing out her cigarette. 'Or perhaps Harris? You? Was it me?'

Jamie glared at her.

'Ignore her,' I said quickly, and then did so myself as I saw her glare at me in return. 'So what about this boyfriend?'

'This was a more regular guy,' he said. 'The thing you have to understand about Alison is that she saw a lot of people and didn't really have any hang-ups about sex. She just did what she wanted.

She liked it but didn't think that much of it, you know. She was like that with Hedge, definitely. But this guy was more of a boyfriend.'

'A nice guy?' I said.

Jamie shook his head.

'He was a dirty, fucking criminal.'

'Right.'

'Pretty much, anyway. She just picked him up one night at some club in Wasp. I guess he was edgy too--'

But I interrupted him:

'Spooks?'

Rosh and Lucy looked at me a little strangely, and I didn't blame them. Here was a solid lead - a boyfriend with criminal connections - and I was chasing up meaningless coincidences. But nevertheless, I needed to know.

'Was it Spooks?' I said.

'I've no idea.' Jamie was frowning too. 'I wasn't out that night.'

'You say he was a criminal?' Rosh took back control before I could open my mouth again. 'What was he into?'

'Nothing too heavy, I don't think,' Jamie said. 'He wasn't like the Godfather, or anything. And he didn't seem particularly dangerous. I don't know. You got the impression that he knew people. And he'd leave packages at our house every now and then.

You know - just for a few days. That kind of shit.'

'And what did you think of this guy? Did you get on with him?

'No,' Jamie said. 'He was a prick. But what does it matter?

Alison liked him. And he was useful to her, so she didn't think about it too much and neither did we. She certainly never felt nervous about anything. She was like that, though. I don't think she ever believed anyone would actually hurt her.'

Lucy said, 'But someone did.'

'Yeah.' That glare again. 'Someone did.'

There was a war about to break, so I interrupted quickly.

'What was his name?'

Jamie looked at me for a moment, and then he said it: 'His name was Carl Halloran.'

He spoke it slowly, and my mind said the surname along with him. I knew that name. We all did. All the coincidences clicked into place in my head, and although I was still too close to see the full picture I knew that everything fit and made sense.

Lucy, suddenly not so indifferent, said, 'Oh fuck.'

Jamie nodded, and then reached out and, without asking, took another cigarette from Lucy's packet.

It's difficult to put faces to names, though. I knew that Halloran had been the last one we'd killed and that it had been a couple of weeks before we'd found Alison's body, but I couldn't picture what he looked like. Not his face, anyway. I did know that it had been Lucy who killed him. Two shots in the back of the head. He hadn't been one of mine.

So that was the first thing Jamie said that knocked my legs out from under me, and a moment later he lit the cigarette and told us the second.

'That was pretty much your friend Sean's reaction, too.'

Chapter
Fourteen

Six months earlier, late afternoon.

In a cramped university bedroom, surrounded by computer equipment, Alison Sheldon was half-lying, half-sitting in Rob Hedge's bed, building a joint.

In life, Alison was beautiful. She had smooth, clean skin; grey eyes that changed colour in different lights - sometimes blue, sometimes green; and honey-coloured, tumble-down hair that was currently in a state of disarray from the sex she'd been enjoying that afternoon. Naked, cross-legged, with the covers resting loosely around her waist, she was quite a sight, and she knew it. Rob, sitting at the end of the bed, didn't know where to look - at her breasts, her face, or whether to watch those nimble fingers. She had a book resting on her lap where the main construction was taking place.

The window was slightly open, and there was a cold breeze drifting lazily in, like steam rising slowly from dry ice. Alison liked it; it had been snowing earlier on and the air smelled crisp. Outside, she could hear the sound of people, and she imagined them huddled and bundled in thick, woolly clothes, breathing out cool smoke that would flicker and swirl in front of their red faces.

Winter was good. She associated it with snow sparkling in bright light, with hard blue skies, with the rough texture of scarves and gloves. It was almost a shame to be inside, but at least she'd get out later. It was too bad that Carl was busy tonight. She'd have to remember to call Jamie; she figured he'd come with her if she asked nicely enough.