To Die For (24 page)

Wind caught the rain a couple of times and lashed it against the plate-glass window. I remember that, the rain. Cars splashed through puddles and their tyres whirred and zipped with the water. People walked with their heads low and their shoulders hunched. Buses and cabs and cars had their lights on. Thunder rumbled, vibrating the window. It died down and the place was quiet again, nobody talking.

The door crashed open and two women burst into the cafe, their heads covered with their jackets. The sounds of the street came in with them, full of water and engine sounds. When the door closed it was quiet again and the sounds were outside and far off.

One of the women had short blond hair, shaved almost, and silverware in her nose. The other had straight black hair and thick black eyeliner. I recognized them. I knew what they did. They didn’t work the Sportsman, but they worked nearby, around King’s Cross. They shook their wet jackets and sat at a table near me.

The fat woman disappeared out the back. A man in a suit turned the page of a broadsheet. Someone coughed. I remember all this.

The women were talking about something, their voices low. I wasn’t interested, but they were near me and the way they huddled close to each other, leaned over the table, gave their words urgency.

‘Never catch ’em,’ I heard the black-haired one say. ‘They never do.’

A man in denims stood and walked over to the till. The fat lady came back with a plate piled with food. The food was steaming. She handed the plate to the waitress and went over to the till. She took a pad from her apron pocket. The man in denims had long, straggly brown hair.

‘Fuck,’ the blonde said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

The waitress dropped the plate on to the table in front of me. I was hungry. I cut the steak and watched some blood ooze out.

They started talking again. I tuned out. I cut. I ate. Blood came out. I heard phrases, words. I heard ‘police’. I heard ‘psycho’. I heard ‘her body’.

Something was wrong.

I swallowed. I cut another piece of meat and put it in my mouth. The sky flashed and the windows shook from the crack of thunder.

I heard ‘some alley’.

I stopped eating.

I heard ‘razor or something’.

I heard ‘couldn’t recognize her’.

I froze, not looking anywhere, not doing anything, just hanging there like one of those drops of water that’s about to fall from a leaking tap. It hangs there and hangs there and everything seems to stop. And then it stops some more.

I heard ‘Brenda something’.

The meat in my mouth felt different; felt like flesh, not meat; felt like death, not food. It felt bloody and pulpy and disgusting and I wanted to spit it out.

Brenda something.

My insides knotted up. Something cold sucked on my guts. The blood drained from my head.

The waitress was standing next to me. I hadn’t seen her come.

Brenda something.

‘You want some more?’

Brenda something.

‘More coffee?’

Brenda something.

‘Are you okay?’

Brenda something.

‘Is there something wrong with the steak?’

I can’t remember what I did with the half-chewed meat in my mouth. I swallowed it, I suppose. I can’t remember much of anything after those words. I know I grabbed the one nearest me, the blonde. I know I shook her, shouted at her. I wanted her to tell me. I know I hurt her. I didn’t care about that. I know people screamed and yelled and tried to pull me off. I know I wound up wet in the street and then I wound up being sick in a pub somewhere off the Pentonville Road. I threw my guts up into a toilet and then I rolled into a ball and felt the stale cold piss and water soak my jacket and my trousers and I didn’t care.

They threw me out of the pub and I tried to get back in for more booze. I banged on the door and the barman or someone opened up and started to say something. I grabbed him and hurled him into a parked car and walked back in and ripped a bottle of cheap Scotch from the wall behind the counter, pulling down half the other bottles as well. There were a few others in the pub but nobody stopped me and nobody said anything. I left the pub and walked past the barman, or whoever he was.

I drank the Scotch until I no longer felt the acid burn as it went down. That was what I wanted, to no longer feel. I drank some more and then dropped the bottle to the floor and fell to my knees and held my head in my hands. I felt empty, weak.

I went to the Sportsman. I found Matheson. I grabbed him.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know, Joe. Jesus Christ. Please.’

I snatched another bottle of Scotch.

I found another pro outside. I grabbed her.

‘What happened?’

‘You’re hurting me. I don’t understand you. What do you want?’

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to keep the moment held like that drip of water, stuck there. I almost cried, then I almost burst out laughing but I caught myself.

‘What ha – ’

My voice cracked. I took a swallow of the booze and felt the fumes come right back up and into my nose. My head hurt and I realized stupidly that my jaw ached from where I’d been clenching it and grinding my teeth.

‘Was it her? Was it Brenda?’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please, don’t.’

I went back to my flat and wrenched up the floorboard. I took out the rag-wrapped bundle and opened it up. I had a Beretta then. It looked good. It looked sleek. I wanted it in my hand. I picked it up and it felt heavy, solid, like it gave me a purpose or something. I thumbed the safety off and on and let the clip slide out on to my palm. I checked that the clip was fully loaded and rammed it home. I jacked a round into the chamber, let off the hammer and slid the magazine out again. I took a cigarette package from beneath the floorboards and opened it up and tipped another round into the palm of my hand. I pushed this into the magazine and rammed it home. I wanted the thing full. I gripped the Beretta tight in my hand and tried to think what I could destroy.

I didn’t want to think about her. A john, they’d said. Some psycho had cut her up. Carved her up and dumped her in an alley.

I tried not to think about it, about her, but the more I tried not to think about it, the more I thought about it. I drank straight from the bottle in gulps and it made me heave. My throat hurt from the throwing up I’d done earlier, but I wanted the pain. I thought the Scotch would help me not to think; I thought that it might blur things. It didn’t.

I wanted to kill him. I didn’t know who he was. I asked around. Nobody knew. I still wanted to kill someone.

I went to see Frank Marriot. His club was closed. I wasn’t armed. I wanted this to be with my hands. I wanted to feel it. They tried to stop me. They didn’t.

I found Marriot in his office at the back. He had some Polaroids laid out on his desk. Nice pictures of scared children. He said something. I don’t know what it was. He seemed amused. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his tie and started to talk again. He put his glasses back on and pushed them up on to the bridge of his nose. I smashed my fist into the glasses. They shattered; his nose shattered. Everything shattered. I ground the glass into his eye. He’d stopped talking by then.

It took four of them to pull me off. By then, the damage was done. I don’t remember much about it. I remember the blood. I was soaked in it. I remember the gore on my hands, the sound of bones cracking, his screams, the smell of his piss.

I heard he was in hospital for weeks. I heard he lost his eye.

It didn’t make me feel any better.

I always wonder what it was she’d thought about when she’d been quiet and had that far-off look. Christ, I wish I’d asked her.

I left Warren’s and drove. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know where I was going, didn’t care. I just drove. I didn’t know what time it was. It was late, that was all I knew. Too late.

All around me now seemed grey and fogged and coated with soot and grime. The sky was grey. The cars, the road, the buildings were grey and shapeless, blurring into one. My life was grey. I was getting old. It began to turn dusk, or maybe it was the dawn. It didn’t matter. The image of the Argentinian kid, dumped on the ground like trash, flickered in my mind. I shook my head to get rid of it. Brenda’s face, bloody and screaming for me, came instead. I set my jaw and stared ahead.

I had to think things through, had to make sure I was right. I kept coming back to Dalston – the way the house had looked, the way Beckett and Walsh and Jenson had been killed, the way the locks were off and they’d been relaxing, watching TV, drinking beer. Cole hadn’t killed them, I was sure of that. Beckett had done the job for Cole but then double-crossed him. He was in league with someone else, someone close to Cole. Whoever it was, Beckett would have been careful about handing the money over. He would have arranged the time and place. He would’ve been ready. He wasn’t a stupid man. The night he was killed, he wasn’t ready. He’d been surprised.

I kept thinking about the girl, too. The way she acted, the way she was scared, the way she looked at me. That look. It bothered me.

There was something else. It was what she’d said. ‘I am sorry for those men.’ She’d said it so quietly that I hadn’t been able to make out the tone she’d used.

I was thinking now that I’d been wrong about a lot of things.

It was the look. Something in the look she’d given me. There was the key. She was the key.

The more I thought about it, the more I knew I was right.

When Browne saw the scratches on my face, he swore at me.

‘I don’t know why I bother,’ he said.

I didn’t know either. He went to get some gauze and antiseptic cream, but I told him to leave it.

‘Those were done by a woman,’ he said.

I agreed.

‘Where’s the girl?’ I said.

He didn’t answer me. He was suddenly fearful. He put a hand out towards me. I don’t think he knew he’d done it. Above us, at the top of the stairs, a shadow moved. I looked up. The girl clung to the banister, her head no more than a foot above it. She peered down at us. Her eyes were large, but not from fear. She was looking at me with wonder, and for a second she was gone and I saw Brenda’s face.

I hesitated.

‘Don’t,’ Browne said.

He seemed to know what I was thinking. Maybe he saw something in my face. Maybe he just feared me with her. I eased him aside and walked heavily up the stairs. The girl watched me climb. I felt a hand on my arm. Browne was holding me with all his strength, trying to pull me back. I lost balance and back-stepped. I could have broken his hold on me easily enough. I could have pushed him aside and taken the girl and shaken it out of her.

‘I’m only going to talk to her,’ I said.

‘She’s just a girl.’

‘She killed them,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Beckett, Walsh, Jenson.’

All the time she was watching us. She had the same expression on her face, but now it seemed not a look of wonder, but rather a look of nothing. She looked hollow.

Browne reached up, grabbed weakly at my chest.

‘She’s just a girl.’

‘She killed them. Not with a gun, but she killed them all the same.’

His head waved from side to side.

‘You can’t know that,’ he said. ‘You can’t know.’

‘I know.’

‘How can you? How can you be certain?’

‘Her hair.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘It’s braided.’

He looked at me for a long time, his eyes holding on to mine, searching them.

‘You’re insane,’ he said finally. He believed it.

I was tired of it all, worn out. Insane, Browne called me. The whole thing was insane. Maybe I was, too. I felt it.

‘Someone braided her hair.’ I said. ‘You can’t do it by yourself. I think it was someone close to her. But when she was here, she didn’t try to call anyone, she didn’t ask us to take her somewhere, she didn’t try to go home.’

‘They were too far away,’ he said.

‘No. She’d still try and contact this person. You said it yourself, the girl has suffered. Being stuck with an old drunk and a thug isn’t any place for her to be. She’d go to the police, or ask us to take her, or go get a cab, or try to walk home. Or something. But she did nothing.’

I looked up at the girl. Browne looked up. There were tears in her eyes. I knew I was right. His hand dropped away from my chest. He knew it too.

‘You’re going round in circles,’ he said. ‘You say she’s close to someone, but then you say she doesn’t want to go to them. That’s a contradiction.’

‘No, it isn’t. It means the person she’s close to is close to someone she doesn’t want to be anywhere near.’

‘What the bloody hell has all that got to do with those murders?’

‘You remember when that woman came over, the second time?’

‘You mean Sue? What about her?’

‘What did the girl do?’

‘She hid. In the cupboard.’

‘Right. Just like in Dalston. Remember what you told me? She was reliving it.’

‘Post-traumatic stress. Nothing unusual in that. She was scared and she did what she’d done previously.’

‘Think about what she said to you, the girl. What did she tell you? Why was she scared?’

‘She asked me not to let them take her away,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She asked you not to let them take her
back
. There’s a difference. She was only scared of being taken away because she thought she would be taken
back
.’

‘Yes. So?’

‘Back where?’

Browne looked at the girl. She looked at him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand any of it. I don’t understand you, Joe.’

‘She didn’t want to go back to where she’d come from, back to the ones who’d sent her.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said weakly.

‘Christ. She hid in the cupboard at Dalston because she feared the men who were coming would take her back. You understand now? She knew the men who were coming to the house. She knew them. She knew they were coming because they were from the same place she was, the place she didn’t want to go back to. Put that together with everything else: she didn’t see the gunmen, she didn’t hear them, and yet she knew to hide in the cupboard; she knew to have a shooter handy and to use it on whoever opened the cupboard door.’