The Cutting Crew (28 page)

I looked up and saw the girls that would - I was sure - love me.

They were hanging out on the balconies overhead, dressed only in underwear, smoking, waving down at passers-by. Ostensibly, the building was a theatre. It would have the standard three live shows a day, with more personal attention given to patrons upstairs if the money was right; and the price would be cheap enough to be tempting. There was a blacked-out box office at the top of the steps, and this man out front was acting like some kind of spider: reeling in the men and women who passed.

'I'm okay, thanks,' I said.

He nodded deferentially and I started walking again. There were literally hundreds of these theatres intermingled with the bars and nightclubs, and yet the competition was placid and easy-going perhaps because the same few people owned most of them, and so it didn't really matter who went where as long as everyone went somewhere. And everyone did - why else would they be here?

This was the western wing of Wasp. Further east, moving out towards the edge of the city, the establishments, architecture and people are far less accommodating. The whole district is basically two rough circles, joined at the centre by a thin channel.

The western wing is a sleazy but accepted public attraction.

People come to party, buoyed by its twenty-four-hour bars and clubs and constant access to everything you could ever want. There is more neon lighting here than free wall space, and more music than conversation, with a different disco tune thudding out of each bar you walk past. Even in the daytime, the streets and paths are teeming. There are platoons of young men, knocking back shots and staggering from one bar to the next. Couples strolling, sometimes nervously approaching vendors, psyching each other up to go inside. Suits out for quick sandwich lunches, leaning against the yellow and black railings and soaking up the sexual bohemia.

Despite this, the area is surprisingly safe, with relatively little real trouble - beyond the occasional idiot shooting into the sky to break up a fight, anyway. As police, we'd get a few drunk and disorderlies, sometimes a fight or two, but this isn't Horse or Lion and everyone knows it. Wasp is pure hedonism cast in architecture, yet people know they have to behave themselves round here. You get the impression that you are walking around in a theme park designed to look dangerous while being safe underneath, but you're always aware that the reverse is true. So you come to have a great time - to go wild - but you do so within limits that go beyond any hold the law might have. If you set up metal detectors to check for guns on the main roads in then the clientele would probably halve.

This all stems from the eastern wing, where you find the people who own and run Wasp. In fact, these people run a great deal of the city.

The tram had dropped me off on the edge of the western wing and I had to walk to get to eastern Wasp. There are no trams to that part of the district because there is a tacit understanding that nobody who needs to use public transport would ever want to go there.

It took me half an hour, during which time you could visibly track the degeneration of the neighbourhood. Despite being off centre, Wasp is one of the oldest districts, always in existence on the periphery as the city grew stronger to the west, slowly expanding to encompass it. The district had been ramshackle more wood than stone, and more cobbled paths and dirt trails than actual roads - and many parts of the eastern side hadn't changed that much in the intervening years. Some of it had been modernised, but certainly not in what you'd think of as modern times. I guessed that the people who operated there preferred it that way.

Thirty minutes later, I was there - Parker Street. It was slightly wider than the average road in Wasp, but far more dilapidated and abandoned. The left-hand side was mainly boarded-up shops.

There was a liquor store of some kind that looked open behind the yellow and black swirls on the windows, but everything else was shuttered and dead-looking. There were old tenements along the right, but sections of the brickwork had been smashed out of them at random, as though two people had dared each other to knock more and more out without the entire building falling down. The only glass remaining in most of the windows was so grimy that it obscured even the dark inside, and all of the doorways I could see were boarded over with timber.

It wasn't much further north of here before you edged into the industrial alleys of southern Bull, and it showed. The low and broken buildings were nearly identical, and there was the same sense of structural loss - of architecture that had actually died rather than been abandoned. Except it was worse here. Where the streets of Bull had died of old age and heartbreak, here you wanted to open an inquest and have somebody arrested.

I walked down the street. Number twenty-seven was on the corner of an alleyway about halfway along on the right, and it didn't look promising. Once upon a time it had been some kind of bed and breakfast, but now it was just four old stone walls, with nothing but silence and rot emanating from inside. The front door and downstairs windows had been filled in entirely with breeze blocks and concrete; and all but one of the second-floor windows were barricaded with wood. I wasn't about to start scaling the front in broad daylight, though. My first impression was that there was no way in.

I looked across the road. The hotel was opposite an establishment called the CandiBar, and I gave it a quick glance to see whether it was still open or not. There were grey-green shutters down across the main window, with another set over what was presumably the door. The windows above ground level were dirty and impenetrable but seemed intact. Security cameras watched the pavement from two storeys up, where the building finished and the dismal, smoke-filled sky began.

I dawdled for a moment, figuring I'd wasted my time. But I was here now, and so I decided I'd wander down the alleyway and see if there was a side entrance, or maybe some back way in.

Two steps into the alley, I drew my gun and stood very still.

The feeling had intensified: the singing sensation in my chest.

Too high-pitched to be anything with a name, but if you lowered the frequency I thought it might be fear. Lower still, terror. Right now, it was just an awful unease caused by something I was feeling rather than seeing or hearing.

I scanned the alleyway. It was only narrow, and there didn't seem to be anything in it except old bins and old bags. No movement. No sound. I glanced behind me at the street, but it was still deserted. Even so, the unease remained, and I was far enough off the map not just to tell myself to hold it together. After a moment, I started walking again, cautiously keeping my gun in my hand.

It was ridiculous - but because of that feeling I now had no doubt at all that this was the right building.

The side of number twenty-seven continued, unbroken, for about fifteen, twenty metres, and then the building stopped and a wooden fence took its place. It seemed that the hotel had a back garden. I pulled the uprights one by one and was unsurprised when four in the middle swung in slightly. I knelt down, my jeans creasing tightly. The nails had been removed from the bottom. Four of them lay, bent and rusted, at the base of the fence.

So this was it: Sean's front door.

I pushed the planks. They pivoted slightly, creating just enough space for me to squeeze through. Okay. The wood pressed at me, hard and sharp, and I had to put my palm down into the wet grass on the other side to help pull myself through. It came away dirty as I stood up. The fence cracked back into place behind.

I wiped my hand on my jeans and looked around.

At one point this had clearly been the hotel's back garden. There were old patio stones beneath the overgrown grass, but they were cracked and buckled out of place now. The sodden remains of a few benches and seats rested closer to the building. Litter had drifted in and stayed, fading over time. The air was moist and damp, as though it was a misty morning and the ground had recently been dug over. There were fences on all sides and they gave the garden a feeling of seclusion - no windows overlooked it, beyond the shattered, hooded holes in the back wall of the hotel itself. I turned my attention to that.

Round here, I noticed, the wall wasn't completely sealed up. At ground level, the windows had been boarded over, but someone had recently pulled away the planks across one. I walked over. The unease hadn't left me, and my free hand was shaking a little as I rested it on the dirt-streaked windowsill and peered inside. All I could tell was that it was very dark.

I listened for movement but the building was silent, and so I stood there for a moment, allowing my eyes to become accustomed to the interior. Gradually, I began to pick out the shadowy details of the room. There was no carpet, just stone and broken glass, and the walls were bare. Still some furniture, but right now they were just odd shapes in the dark.

No guts no glory.

I put away the gun and clambered inside, which was far more difficult than it looked. A few awkward contortions later, my feet crunched down on the floor and I felt the itch of dust in my nostrils. Immediately, I drew the gun again.

Okay, Sean, I thought. Let's see what you've made of the place.

There was glass everywhere underfoot, and most of the remaining furniture was skeletal, with scraps of fabric hanging off the frames like old skin. Cabinets and cupboards had been reduced to broken boxes. I worked around it all carefully. This first room had obviously been a dining area, and there was an adjoining kitchen that was similarly stripped and bare. The cooker and fridge and most of the units had been pulled out like teeth. A hallway beyond was empty, ending in a small reception area by the front door.

There was a desk running down one wall, with a few faded leaflets still resting on it, covered in dust. Untouched for a long time.

Stairs doubled back on the main hallway and led to the second floor. I stood at the bottom for a moment, staring up. It looked slightly lighter up there - probably because the windows weren't so secure, but it made me nervous all the same. The building could almost be tenanted.

Well, it actually could be, I thought.

Obviously, Sean wasn't here anymore, but someone else might have got in. A homeless guy, maybe; or kids with nowhere fun to go.

I took the stairs quickly but carefully - with visions of broken legs replacing those of masked men and baseball bats. But the steps were sturdier than the damp had led me to expect, and I made it onto the tattered landing without injuring myself. Again, there were no carpets, just dusty old floorboards. And little wallpaper up here either, just pale plaster, chalky-green and wet. A quick glance showed what seemed to be six bedrooms. Only two of them were still in possession of their doors, while the others were wide open and strewn with rubble. A single small bathroom at the far end of the corridor spoke tellingly of how cheap this place must have been in life.

I worked through the bedrooms quickly, starting at the back.

They were all empty - even the furnishings were gone - but it was obvious from patterns in the dust on the floor that somebody had been here recently. Each vacant room made me more nervous. But then, as I approached the fourth one, I felt sure I had found Sean's makeshift home.

It was one of the closed bedrooms towards the front of the hotel, but unlike the other this had received special attention. There was a steel strip running halfway across the door at waist height, joining another curl of metal on the frame, and the two were secured by a padlock. It looked like a recent addition, and would probably have been enough to deter a casual intruder from investigating any further. But not me. I took a deep breath and kicked the door hard: stamping at the side near the handle. The door was flung inwards, swinging wildly on old hinges. The padlock and pieces of metal remained intact, but a good section of the doorframe they'd been attached to was torn out with the force.

Straight away, I knew this was the place.

There was a mattress in one corner that looked as though it had been slept on recently, with books and papers strewn around it. It was like he'd been prepping for an exam and then fallen asleep, woken up late and had to run. A torch was resting in the centre, bulky as a brick. When I saw it, I realised why he'd picked this room as his home: no window. From the outside, nobody would have been able to see the torchlight shining through gaps in the stones or beams.

The floorboards creaked beneath my feet as I walked over and picked up the torch: a big, rubber block with padded circular buttons on the neck. I pressed one and a beam of light cut across the room onto the bed. The knotted sheets glowed white.

I swept the beam around. The rest of the room - that corner aside - seemed bare and unused, but then the light flashed across a suitcase by the remains of a fire, and I moved it back and held it there for a moment.

Not a suitcase, I realised, but a rifle case. It was red, about a metre long, and I recognised it: Sean had brought it to the range a couple of times and even let me fire it. As things designed for killing people go, it was a beautiful piece of machinery: a present from his father that he'd cared for over the years. The fact that it had been abandoned in this dirty old building brought it home to me again that he was gone.