Three Steps Behind You (12 page)

I had to run to Adam’s house, to ask him to come back and help me find out. Adam thought I was joking. Wouldn’t stop kicking his football with the kids on his street. Wouldn’t even talk to me at first. He didn’t want it to be true either. But I kept telling him and telling him, and eventually he had to come with me. Then we went into the room together. He was still hanging there. Unmoved.

‘His neck’s broken,’ I remember Adam saying.

‘Yes, but is he dead?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘He is.’

After that I ran to Adam. He fought me off, but I held him, I held him, I held him, until he was still. Dad was dead; God was dead; all I had now was Adam. I don’t know how long we stayed like that. It was long enough for Adam’s mum to come looking for him. We’d left the door open so she came in and saw us there.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

Then she saw him, Dad. Or at least, she must have done, because she screamed. She pulled Adam and I apart, pulled us out of the room, and shut the door. That was the last time I saw my father.

But I wasn’t implicated then, you see. Or at least, not really. People kept telling me I mustn’t blame myself. How would I blame myself? I was a fourteen-year-old boy. My Dad was a grown-up. He made his own choices. So because it wasn’t my fault, I could ask other people’s view. I can’t do that now. I can’t say, ‘It wasn’t me, it was Luke, my fictional creation, but would you mind awfully, Adam, or DC Huhne, or random man on the street, going to check if the woman Luke might have killed is dead? Watch out, though, because if she isn’t, then she is standing in the hallway of her flat, and she’s probably angry’.

No. The only thing for me to do now is to walk to Moss Bros to deliver the jacket. Now that I have it, I mustn’t delay.

I arrive. It is shut. I look at my watch. Ten p.m. That makes sense. I should go home. But no – this is where I need to be right now. The next step is to return the jacket. So here I must stay.

I sit down on the pavement outside Moss Bros. What I need is a television. I need 3,000 televisions, each with a pixel of Adam, or just one Adam on each screen. Then I would tell him everything. I have another secret now, that I cannot share with him. Although book three is our secret really, even though he doesn’t know it. He’ll get the benefit with the next book, though, of our closeness. All my readers will.

Would he understand about Ally? Could I tell him: another woman, killed? Would he shrug and say, What’s one more? Or would he start to side with Nicole?

If there were all those Adams, then so quickly their screens would become invaded. That shared gaze with just the two of us lost. First Helen would enter screen, half filling them with her enormous pearled bust. Then Nicole would dazzle her way in, diamonds flashing. Paste, this time: she hasn’t Helen’s money. Ally would follow, filling the last empty space with her nudity so I could no longer see Adam.

I blink away the screens and look at the street again. There is a red blob down the street. Nicole and her beret? I squint. She has got very tall.

Oh.

Traffic light.

Nicole is being lazy. Unless I am on a long leash now. Or she has abandoned the beret, perfected her disguise. She could be wearing anything now. Black. Or nothing. Pale fleshy pink. She must wear nothing. I must compel her.

What would Luke do? The invitation for lobster would not be enough. Luke would do something romantic, something bold. Serenade her. I wonder if Luke should sing. I open my mouth and sing a few lines of ‘Yesterday’. No. I cannot do method if it requires singing. I will have to try something else.

Adam has a violin, I remember. Or at least he used to, from school. It lived in the corner of his sitting room, before he married Helen and got the house. He had this little joke of always putting it in the chair I liked to sit in, so I had to move it, every time I came round, whether he was expecting me or not.

It’s probably in their attic now. I could ask to borrow it. Or maybe just ask Adam. Otherwise it won’t be a surprise for Nicole. Maybe Adam can teach me. I’d like that. Then I can teach Luke. And so we can be close again, Adam and I. Not book three close. But next best thing.

I trace the shape of the violin on the pavement with my fingers. I try to visualise it so I can write about it. There are all those curves, with one each side, like the arch of a back. I run my finger down each one. Then on top of the violin there are the holes, again lovely curves, facing each other. They are like a two lobsters, paired for life in wood. Yes, Adam can teach me. Then I’ll find a night when Adam is out. And I’ll take Nicole by surprise.

It is still the wrong day, and the shop remains shut. Night stretches before me but I am too awake to sleep. I will run. I put on the jacket and set off, tails flapping behind me as I run down Oxford Street, to Charing Cross Road, loop back up, through Soho Square, Dean Street, Old Compton – no, stay away from there – back to Dean Street, controlling my breathing, then Greek Street, Tottenham Court Road.

On, on, on he goes, running past the darkened world waiting for light, waiting to breathe again. Breathing will be through her, his beloved, as close beside, close inside her, he touches again the fulfilment of his being
.

Chapter 5

It’s only when I hand over the jacket, in the glare of the shop lighting, that I notice the lipstick. There is a smudge of it, on the jacket pocket, a pink rim around the opening. The same lipstick as Ally wore and that is on the note. From Luke. In Ally’s flat.

I raise a hand to snatch back the suit, but the assistant has sheathed it in plastic, zipped up like a bodybag. I can’t ask for it back. He has already over-noticed me, as I had to buy some other trousers to change into, out of the suit ones. I need to be incognito, not to attract attention to myself. It will be difficult in plum-coloured cords. But they were the cheapest. I run my hands down them, to wipe off the sweat. I notice they already have pre-ploughed furrows, for forks.

If Ally is alive, creaking round inside her flat, it doesn’t matter that the lipstick is on the jacket. She won’t report it; people don’t. She’ll just put it down to naiveté – a bad sexual experience. The police will think she had a good sexual experience, and is ashamed.

I don’t think of it as a sexual experience at all.

And even if she is dead, if that creak was something else, then what does it matter? There is nothing to link that jacket with the flat. Not any more. That’s why I bought it back. I am safe.

‘Aye, aye, what’s this?’ asks the assistant as he processes the trousers. He puts his hand in the pocket and it comes out jingling. Keys. Ally’s keys. ‘You wouldn’t want to forget about these!’ says the assistant, dangling the keys over to me.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t.’

I take the keys and place them in the pockets of my new trousers.

As I walk to the Tube I feel the pressure of Ally in my pocket. Her keys dig into me. I should discard them, throw them under a train, or into the Thames. They are Evidence. But what if I need them again? What if I need to, I don’t know, plant or unplant something in the flat?

Or what if a neighbour notices they are missing? Or the ex-boyfriend, the one she says she just broke up with, tells the police that always, without fail, she kept the keys under the mat. I should put them back.

My feet guide me back round Soho Square, Dean Street and then Old Compton Street.

When I get to the corner I see the incident tape. And DC Huhne.

Chapter 6

Huhne is talking to a uniformed officer at the door of the apartment block. She is frowning, he is nodding. I ought to turn round and walk back to the Tube. But I walk forward, slowly, watching Huhne. She has abandoned the skirt in favour of trousers. She is holding an evidence bag, I see, although I cannot make out what is in it.

I stand facing her. She does not look up. I am merely one amongst the other gawpers.

A car drives past, splashing me with water from a puddle. I jump, and the lady next to me squeals. Huhne looks up. She does not see me at first, or rather does not take me in, for she looks back toward the policeman.

Then she looks up again, straight at me.

‘Hello, Debbie,’ I say.

‘Mr Millard,’ she says.

‘What’s happened here, then?’ I ask.

‘An incident,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you any more than that.’

I nod.

‘You’ll see it in the news,’ she says, ‘in due course.’ She nods over to the street corner. I see a television camera and a reporter. ‘I'm giving them a statement, in a bit.’

Incident, news, statement – sounds like a death.

‘Pearce not giving a statement, then?’ I ask.

‘They’ve realised I don’t need a supervisor to explore cases,’ she says. ‘Old ones or new ones.’

‘Well done,’ I say, to show I am not afraid.

‘Like I say, I can’t tell you anything more right now. What are you doing here anyway, Mr Millard?’

I shrug. ‘I’ve got some time on my hands now, after, you know.’ She nods. ‘And I was here last night with your informant. Whose identity you can’t possibly reveal.’

‘You’ve been here since last night?’ asks DC Huhne.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I went home.’

‘Then came back?’

‘Am I under caution?’ I ask.

Huhne smiles and shakes her head. ‘No, sorry. New case. I see leads everywhere. I’d better get on. Excuse me.’

Huhne turns back to the policeman. I start to walk away.

‘Oh, Mr Millard,’ calls Huhne. ‘My daughter wants your autograph, by the way. To put in her collection. For when you’re famous.’

It is good to have readers before I am even published.

‘I’ll have to get on with the writing first,’ I say. ‘Lots of new material.’

I don’t sign her bit of paper. I continue to walk along the street, rather than returning in the direction I came from. Wouldn’t want anyone to spot I’d come specifically onto the street to see this building. I pass the television cameras, a little way from Huhne. A woman not a lot older than Ally, with too much brown hair, is wearing a stripper mac while a camera man screws and unscrews a tripod. I wonder if they are news reporters or just shooting a porno.

I smile at the reporter.

She smiles back.

‘I saw you talking to the police,’ she says. ‘Did the inspector say anything useful?’

I shake my head. ‘Just that there’s an incident, and they'll be giving a statement soon.’

‘Anything else?’ she says. She seems a little desperate. Like I have something she needs. Information, I guess.

‘I said it sounded like a fatality and she didn’t contradict me,’ I say.

‘Would you mind saying that to camera?’ asks the reporter. ‘We’ve missed the breakfast slot and if we don’t get something soon, I'll miss the lunch window too.’

I make my excuses. It doesn’t seem smart, somehow, to identify myself to the nation right now. ‘But I hope they catch whoever did this to her,’ I say, as if this soundbite offering will assist. I see Huhne is looking up, like she’s heard me. She is staring right at me. First Nicole, then Adam, now Huhne, all staring at me, in that dumbstruck way. It makes sense. I am, after all, one to watch. All this new material will make me and Luke stars. It will be a while until Adam is home for our violin session. So I get the Tube to West Hampstead, find a café, and write.

There are some people who think that writing by hand is archaic. All around me in Wet Fish Café are people on tablets and shiny computers. None of them are eating Fish. I thought there might be lobsters, but no. Anyway, the people on the shiny devices are typing away furiously. I imagine them all at the end of the day comparing their word counts with each other. One thousand or 3,000 or 20,000. Who knows? And who cares? Their words will not be from a soul, either theirs or their characters’. When I write, there is a direct line from my soul to my brain, to my hand, to my pen, to the paper. My veins might as well bleed the words up to the surface of my skin so that they ooze fully-formed from my pores: it is such a natural process. At Feltham, they wanted me to write it all up on a computer, said then I could get my computer skills NVQ. But I knew they would just want to see what I had written – they would log onto the computer to check my inner imaginings were safe. That I wasn’t profiting from crimes. They were talking financial profit. Like book one would ever be released, like Adam would ever agree to go public with our co-authorship.

You can still do a word count on paper, though. It just takes longer. I am still counting book three. When I started, I just counted the average numbers of words on a line, then counted the pages.

But now I realise that some words have double value or even triple. Like Scrabble, almost. And some have negative scores, unless they are used positively. So sometimes Helen is worth minus 20 and then other times – well, the other time, the jubilant time – she is worth 20. Adam is always worth 40. Sometimes I use his name a lot, all at once, so those are very good word-score days. Other good words to use are: love, dead, resting. And close. Close is always good.

Book four words will be a bit difficult to count because it is not autobiographical, like book three. Luke is doing everything. Adam and Nicole won’t get a mention, by name. I think sex and death will need to have pretty high scores, though. Which means I’ll probably hit about 100k in due course.

An important point I will need to consider is that if Luke should die, how I will deal with that. He knows killing now, maybe, but if he were to die himself, how do I do that? Better perhaps to live, I suppose.

‘Can I join you?’ I hear.

I see someone above me, against the sunlight. Ally? I jolt up, and spill coffee all over my lovely words.

It is Nicole. Not Ally. I should have known she would be here, spoiling things.

‘Oh no! Can I help?’ she asks, staring at the spilling liquid.

‘Napkins! Napkins!’ I say. That’s my only hope. But even that is futile. The more I mop, the more the blue blurs and words disintegrate and join again, in ways they weren’t meant to, becoming zero words, minus words, useless. I tear out the pages nearest the spillage – sever them and spare the rest.