Tooth And Nail (23 page)

‘I never wanted you!’ her mother would screech. ‘You were an accident! Why can’t you be a
proper
little girl?’

Run, run, run. Out of the studio and down the stairs, through the morning room, and out of the doors. Father, quiet, innocuous, cultured, civilised father. Reading the newspapers in the back garden, one trousered leg crossed over the other as he reclined in his deckchair.

‘And how’s my little sweet this morning?’

‘Mummy shouted at me.’

‘Did she? I’m sure she didn’t mean anything. She’s a bit crochety when she’s painting, isn’t she? Come and sit here on my lap, you can help me read the news.’

Nobody visited, nobody came. No family, no friends. At first she went to school, but then they kept her at home, educating her themselves. It was all the rage with a certain section of a certain class. Her father had been left money by a great aunt. Enough money for a comfortable life, enough to keep the wolf from the door. He pretended to be a scholar. But then his painstakingly researched essays started to be rejected and he saw himself for what he was. The arguments grew worse. Grew physical.

‘Just leave me alone will you? My art’s what matters to me, not you.’

‘Art? Fuck art!’

‘How dare you!’

A dull, solid thump. A blow of some kind. From anywhere in the house she could hear them, anywhere but the attic. But she daren’t go to the attic. That was where … Well, she just couldn’t.

‘I’m a boy,’ she whispered to herself, hiding beneath her bed. ‘I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy.’

‘Sweetness, where are you?’ His voice, all sugar and summery. Like a slide-projector show. Like an afternoon car-ride.

They said the Wolfman was homosexual. It wasn’t true. They said they’d caught him. She almost whooped when she read it. Wrote them a letter and posted it. See what they’d make of that! Let them find her, she didn’t care. He and she didn’t care. But he cared that she was taking over his mind as well as his body.

Sweetness … Oranges and lemons say the bells of …

So unbecoming in a man. Long nosehairs, her mother had been talking about Daddy’s nosehairs. Long nosehairs, Johnny, are so unbecoming in a man. Why did she remember that utterance above all others? Long. Nose. Hairs. So. Unbecoming. In. A. Man. Johnny.

Daddy’s name: Johnny.

Her father, who had sworn at her mother. Fuck art. Fuck was the dirtiest word there was. At school it had been whispered, a magic word, a word to conjure up demons and secrets.

And she’s on the streets now, although she knows that really she should do something about the Butcher’s Gallery. It needs cleaning badly. There are torn canvases everywhere. Torn and spattered. It doesn’t matter: nobody visits. No family, no friends.

So she finds another one. This one’s stupid. ‘As long as you’re not the Wolfman,’ she says with a laugh. The Wolfman laughs too. He? She? It doesn’t matter now. He and she are one and the same. The wound has healed. He feels whole, feels complete. It is not a good feeling. It is a bad feeling. But it can be forgotten for a moment.

Back in his house.

‘Some gaff you’ve got here,’ she says. He smiles, takes her coat and hangs it up. ‘Bit of a smell though. You haven’t got a gas leak, have you?’

No, not a gas leak. But a leak, yes. He slips his hand into his pocket, checks that the teeth are there. Of course they are, they’re always there when he needs them. To bite with. The way he was bitten.

‘Only a game, sweet.’

Only a game. Bitten in fun. On the stomach. Bitten. Not hard, more like blowing a raspberry. But that didn’t stop it hurting. He touches his gut. It still hurts, even now.

‘Where do you want me, love?’

‘In here will do,’ he says, taking out the key and beginning to unlock the door. The mirror was a bad idea. The last one had seen what was happening behind her, had almost screamed. The mirror has been taken down. The door is unlocked.

‘Keep it locked, do you? What you got in there, the crown jewels?’

And the Wolfman, showing teeth, smiles.

He woke up in his hotel room, which was something in itself, bearing in mind that he had no idea how he’d got there. He was lying on his bed, fully clothed, his hands pressed between his legs. Beside him lay the carrier-bag full of books. It was seven o’clock and by the quality of the light streaming in through the uncurtained window, it was morning rather than evening. So far so good. The bad news was that his head seared with two kinds of pain, bad when he opened his eyes, unbearable when he closed them. With eyes closed, the world spun at an awkward tilt. With eyes opened, it merely floated on a different plane.

He groaned, attempted to unglue his furred tongue from the roof of his mouth. Staggered to the sink and ran the cold tap for some moments, then splashed his face and cupped his hand, lapping water from it the way a mongrel might. The water was sweet, chlorinated. He tried not to think of kidneys … seven sets of kidneys. Knelt by the toilet-pan and retched. The big white telephone receiver to God. What was the score? Seven brandies, six dark rums – he’d lost count after that. He squeezed an inch-long strip of toothpaste onto his brush and scrubbed at his teeth and gums. Then, only then, did he have the courage to examine himself in the wall-mirror.

There were two kinds of pain. One from the hangover, the other from the mugging. He’d lost twenty quid, maybe thirty. But the loss to his pride was above price. He held in his head a good description of a couple of the gang and especially the leader. This morning, he would give what he knew to the local station. His message would be clear: seek out and destroy. Who was he kidding? They’d rather protect their own villains than help an intruder from north of the border.
Our man from north of the border. Jockland. Jock
. But to let the gang get away with it was worse. What the hell.

He rubbed his jaw. It felt worse than it looked. There was a pale mustard bruise down one cheek and a graze on his chin. Good thing training shoes were all the rage. In the early 70s it would have been a steel-capped Airwear boot and he would not have been so chipper.

He was running out of clean clothes. Today, he would have either to buy some new bits and pieces or else find himself a laundrette. He had come to London intending to stay no more than two or three days. He’d thought that after that the Met would come to see that he could add nothing to the case. But instead here he was, coming up with possible leads, making himself useful, getting beaten up, turning into an over-protective father, having a holiday romance with a psychology lecturer.

He thought about Lisa, about the way the secretary at University College had acted. Something jarred about the whole incident. Lisa, who slept so soundly, the sleep of a clear conscience. What was that smell? That smell creeping into his room? The smell of cooking fat mingled with toast and coffee. The smell of breakfast. Somewhere downstairs they were busy perspiring over the griddles, breaking eggs to sizzle beside thick sausages and grey-pink bacon. The thought sent Rebus’s stomach on a tiny rollercoaster ride. He was hungry, but the thought of fried food repelled him. He felt his just-cleaned mouth turning sour.

When had he last eaten? A sandwich on the way to Lisa’s. Two packets of crisps in the Fighting Cock. Christ, yes, he was hungry. He dressed quickly, making a mental note of what needed buying – shirt, pants, socks – and headed down to the dining-room clutching three paracetamol tablets in his hand. A fistful of dullers.

They weren’t quite ready to start serving, but when he announced that he needed only cereal and fruit juice, the waitress (a different face each day) relented and showed him to a table set for one.

He ate two small packets of cereal. A cereal killer. Smiled grimly and went to the trestle table to help himself to more juice. Lots more juice. It had a funny artificial smell to it, and a taste best described as ‘wersh’. But it was cold and wet and the vitamin C would help his head. The waitress brought him two daily papers. Neither contained anything of interest. Flight had not yet used Rebus’s idea of the detailed description. Maybe Flight had passed it on to Cath Farraday. Would she sit on it out of spite? After all, she hadn’t been too happy about his last little stunt, had she? Maybe she was holding back on this one, just to show him that she could. Well, sod them. He didn’t see anyone coming up with better ideas, with any ideas at all, come to that. Nobody wanted to make a mistake; they’d all rather sit on their hands than be seen to get it wrong. Jesus Christ.

When the first customer proper of the morning ordered bacon, eggs and tomatoes, Rebus finished his orange juice and left the restaurant.

In the Murder Room, he sat at one of the typewriters and prepared detailed descriptions of the gang members. His typing had never been proficient at the best of times, but today’s hangover was compounded by an electronic typewriter of infernal complexity. He couldn’t get the thing to set a reasonable line length, the tabs appeared not to work and every time he pressed a wrong key the thing bleeped at him.

‘Bleep yourself,’ he said, trying again to set it for single space typing.

Eventually, he had a typed description. It looked like the work of a ten-year-old, but it would have to do. He took the sheets of paper through to his office. There was a note from Flight on his desk.

‘John, I wish you wouldn’t keep disappearing. I’ve run a check on missing persons. Five women have been reported missing north of the river in the past forty-eight hours. Two of these could be explicable, but the other three look more serious. Maybe you’re right, the Wolfman’s getting hungrier. No feedback from the press stories yet though. See you when you’ve finished shagging the Prof.’

It was signed simply ‘GF’. How did Flight know where he’d been yesterday afternoon? An inspired guess, or something more cunning and devious? It didn’t really matter. What mattered were the missing women. If Rebus’s hunch were true, then the Wolfman was losing some of his previous control and that meant that sometime soon he was bound to make a mistake. They need only goad him a little more. The Jan Crawford story might just do that particular trick. Rebus had to sell the idea to Flight – and to Farraday. They had to be made to see that it was the right move at the right time. Three missing women. That would bring the count to seven. Seven murders. There was no telling where it would stop. He rubbed at his head again. The hangover was returning with a steel-tipped vengeance.

‘John?’

She was standing in the doorway, trembling, her eyes wide.

‘Lisa?’ He rose slowly to his feet. ‘Lisa, what is it? What’s wrong?’

She stumbled towards him. There were tears in her eyes and her hair was slick with sweat. ‘Thank God,’ she said, clinging to him. ‘I thought I’d never … I didn’t know what to do, where to go. Your hotel said you’d already left. The Sergeant on the desk downstairs let me come up. He recognised me from the photo in the papers. My photo.’ And then the tears came: hot, scalding, and loud. Rebus patted her on the back, trying to calm her, wanting to know just what the hell had happened.

‘Lisa,’ he said quietly, ‘just tell me about it.’ He manoeuvred her onto a chair, with his hand rubbing soothingly at her neck. Every bit of her seemed damp with perspiration.

She pulled her bag onto her lap, opened it, and drew from one of the three compartments a small envelope, which she handed silently to Rebus.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I got it this morning,’ she said, ‘addressed to me by name and sent to my home.’

Rebus examined the typed name and address, the first class stamp, and the postmark: London EC4. The frank stated that the letter had been posted the previous morning.

‘He knows where I live, John. When I opened it this morning, I nearly died on the spot. I had to get out of the flat, but all the time I knew that maybe he was watching me.’ Her eyes filled with water again, but she threw back her head so that the tears would not escape. She fished in her bag and came out with some paper tissues, peeling off one so that she could blow her nose. Rebus said nothing.

‘It’s a death threat,’ she explained.

‘A
death threat
?’

She nodded.

‘Who from? Does it say?’

‘Oh yes, it says all right. It’s from the Wolfman, John. He says I’m going to be next.’

It was a rush job, but the lab, when they heard the circumstances, were happy to cooperate. Rebus stood with hands in pockets watching them at work. There was the crackle of paper in his pocket. He had folded the description of the gang members and tucked it away, perhaps for future use: for now, there were more important matters to attend to.

The story was straightforward enough. Lisa had been scared out of her wits by the letter, and more so by the fact that the Wolfman knew where she lived. She had tried contacting Rebus and when that failed had panicked, fleeing from her flat, aware that
he
might be watching her, might be about to pounce at any moment. The pity was, as the lab had already explained, she’d messed up the letter, gripping it in her hand as she fled, destroying any fingerprints or other evidence that there might have been on the envelope itself. Still, they’d do their best.

If the letter was from the Wolfman and not from some new and twisted crank, then there might well be clues to be had from the envelope and its contents: saliva (used to stick down both flap and stamp), fibres, fingerprints. These were the physical possibilities. Then there were more arcane elements: the typewriter itself might be traceable. Were there oddities of speech or misspellings which might yield a clue? And what about that postmark? The Wolfman had outwitted them in the past, so was the postal address another red herring?

The various processes involved would take time. The lab was efficient, but the chemical analyses could not be hurried. Lisa had come to the lab, too, as had George Flight. They were off in another part of the building drinking tea and going over the details for the fourth or fifth time, but Rebus liked to watch the lab boys at work. This was his idea of sleuthing. It also helped calm him to watch someone working in such painstaking detail. And he certainly needed calming.