Willing Flesh (4 page)

Markary blinks quickly, three, four times and reaches for the glass, snatches it away. ‘I have nothing to tell you.’ He downs the Armagnac in one and sits on the sofa, flicking through the
Estates
Gazette
. Not reading it at all.

‘Shame to drag your lawyer out of bed for nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I’ve got what I want.’ Staffe looks down on Markary and raises his voice half a notch. ‘I shan’t fuck about. I’ll talk to your wife, if I need to, just in case she used your phone by mistake and it was actually her calling this poor murdered girl you don’t give two bloody hoots for.’ He feels his blood quicken and he breathes in, long.

Markary looks up, says in a tender, cracking voice. ‘What did they do to her?’

Staffe looks at the painting again. ‘They say Sickert knew the Ripper.’

Markary nods. ‘Some say he
was
the Ripper.’

As Staffe goes into the hall, Markary’s wife emerges from a bedroom. She is older than the whore, and she is beautiful.

Staffe lets himself out, murmurs, ‘I’ll rip
your
bloody mask off.’

Four

Janine stands back from the pale victim, livor mortis yet to manifest itself. The woman had been decomposing for approximately seven hours – until she was moved to this controlled environment. The skin will not blister or slip, for now, and she remains purest white. Janine puts the back of her hand to the woman’s hip. The skin is cold as slate but the flesh yields, untethered. Janine has cut her open from collarbones to breast plate and down to the pubis. Her insides are bare to this windowless, photoflood corner of the world.

She flicks off the operating lights and an electric hum disappears into the early morning in a strange reversal of nature. But you don’t get birdsong this time of year.

Janine sits in the corner, hands on her knees and back straight, drinking in the scene. Some colleagues are immune to the objects of their craft – the lives left in the wake. Janine takes counsel each month, for the loss of her subjects, and this beautiful woman with her frozen look has haunted her since she first shone a torch into her mouth and nose and elsewhere.

A knock at the opening door makes her flinch and she begins to stand, but when she sees it is Staffe, she slumps back down in her seat. He forces a smile but she can tell he is practically out on his feet. For the first few seconds, each time they meet, she can’t help remembering when they were together. It was a brief affair – if you could flatter it so – and it ended quickly, amicably. She considers him a friend; fears for him, sometimes.

‘You want some coffee?’ She asks.

‘I’ll make the coffee.’ He takes a jar of instant coffee and powdered milk from the cupboard beneath the high, barred window which is kerb-level. ‘Talk me through it.’

‘There was no sperm inside her, just a trace secretion of her own fluids in the gusset of her pants. The pants are Rigby and Peller.’ Staffe turns round, raises his eyebrows and they each decide not to share a private joke. ‘There is no bruising or laceration. The vagina had not been penetrated. The head and the blood on the carpet were juxtaposed. She didn’t move once she hit the ground.’

‘Not your typical sexual act,’ he says.

‘There were only six strands of fur fibre, and no carpet fibres in her nose, and none in the mouth or throat, and no trace of inhalation of the fibres from the pillowcase.’

‘She was unconscious when they finished her off – with the pillow,’ says Staffe. ‘No struggle?’

‘Look at her face; the expression.’

‘I have.’ The kettle boils.

‘No damage to the nose or cheeks, no bruising to the lips. The skin and blood on the radiator are a perfect match. She has a bruise to her lower neck which may have been caused by a knee during a suffocation but there’s a defined epicentre to the bruise. I think it was a rapid blow.’

‘And the fall against the radiator an accident?’

‘I don’t think “accident” covers anything that happened to this girl.’

‘The pillow could be part of a sexual design.’

Janine shakes her head, goes across to fix her coffee the way she likes it. Staffe has left it black, for her to finish. He remembered.

She glimpses the woman’s fur, hanging in the corner. It is a vintage natural oyster mink with a wing collar. The real thing. ‘Was that your girlfriend at the Thamesbank?’

‘We’d been away for the weekend.’

Janine wonders why people put themselves through that. Why not fast-forward to the heartache and tears and save yourself the pain. ‘Getting serious, hey Staffe?’

He smiles, thin-lipped. ‘What happened in that hotel room?’

‘Over to you, lover boy.’ Janine takes off her gloves and washes down. When she is done, she catches Staffe standing over the body, staring deep into the woman’s face.

‘It gets worse,’ she says.

‘How?’ he says, not looking away.

‘Some might say there’s another victim.’

‘What?’ He looks up.

Janine suddenly feels cold as he follows her look to a small table on the far side of the room. There, barely larger than a grape, is a dead foetus. ‘She was pregnant, Will.’

*

Darius is out, scoring coke and MDMA for the party. He’ll be out all night so Arabella has walked across to Becx’s place on a litre bottle of super-strong cider and her last line. Becx had some crack when she last saw her and with a bit of luck, they might be able to suck on the pipe before they go out. Her feet are rubbed raw in her sharp-toed, take-me boots and she is so cold that she can’t feel the metal against her finger when she presses the buzzer. Her nose is running and she stands back, hoping to see the curtains shift. They do, but it isn’t Becx. The lock whirrs anyway and she pushes the door open, makes her way up the stairs.

Mitch is leaning against the frame of the door. He’s wearing a porkpie hat and has tats on his neck and arms, piercings in his nose and eyebrows. He looks her up and down. He’s gorgeous and knows it and exactly the type Becx always gets snarled up with, but Arabella has his measure.

‘You want to …’

‘Fuck off,’ says Arabella, placing an open palm on his T-shirt chest. ‘I’ve got Darius.’

He looks her all the way down to her heels and sneers. ‘Looks like it.’

He goes into the flat and Arabella follows him in. The place is done up nice with soft lighting and ethnic knick-knacks. It is warm and a red glow comes off the electric fire pulled up to the sofa. Both bars are on.

Arra wouldn’t need much to get her and Darius a place like this. It is time to have that chat with her father. Time, too, to work on her music; for Darius to go back to his art.

‘Where’s the guitar?’ says Arabella, looking around the living room.

‘In our bedroom.’ Mitch smiles at her, pulling on a leather biker’s jacket. ‘I’m popping out.’

‘When’s Becx coming back?’

He pauses by the door, ‘No point having a rummage.’ He taps his pocket. ‘It’s all here. Stay out the bedroom, girl, I’m warning you.’ His smile goes off like power, cut. He suddenly looks capable of the terrible. ‘Slag,’ he says, closing the door.

Arabella heaves off her boots and flops onto the sofa. The sheet of heat from the electric fire hits her shins straight away, works its way down to her toes and up along her long, thin thighs. She closes her eyes, the mind slowing right down, memories drifting, to that sad house across town. She misses her mother, who was Imogen and beautiful; making the men smile but sometimes crying when she drank wine, which her father didn’t like. They would argue and her brother, Roddy, would run to his room, but Arabella would clutch on to Imogen’s skirts, sobbing, looking up at her father and wondering how she could love such a man. After, he would hold Arabella tight and they would cry together and she loved him again.

From the bedroom, music pipes through. It is house but with a Latin flavour and the swooning trumpet loop ushers her to a deeper rest. She dreams that she cannot hear the sound of her own name in her mother’s mouth.

The warmth of the fire seeps deeper into her flesh. She dreams, too, that she is standing at the gate, looking up, a small case in hand. Her father calls her a whore. ‘Nothing but a whore like your mother.’

When she falters from sleep, Arabella has been crying and the music from the bedroom seems to get louder but Arabella keeps her eyes closed. She thinks, ‘If I open my eyes, all the changes will begin to happen.’ She hopes that Becx will come. The music goes up another notch and this puzzles Arabella. Moments later, she feels a shadow scroll across her.

A tall figure looks down at her. He is tall and fair, with a straight nose – just like her – like Imogen, too. She scrunches her eyes tight shut and rolls away onto the floor.

She waits for him to come at her, but he doesn’t. He just stands there. ‘What the hell are you playing at, Bella?’

‘Roddy?’ She sits up, peers up at him. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ She scoots back on her bottom, away from him, her back against the sofa. Even though he is her brother, whom she bullied when she was young, now she is afraid. He is one of them and a different kettle of fish when their father is not around.

‘I can come see my big sis if I want.’

‘I don’t want. So fuck off.’

‘He wants to see you, Bella.’

‘Father? Is it me, or my friend he wants?’

‘You have to settle this nonsense.’

‘I’m not afraid of you.’

‘But you can be.’

Roddy seems altered tonight, wearing twisted jeans and a white T under a combat jacket. He’s put wax in his hair. ‘How did you get in here?’

‘He needs to know you won’t do anything stupid.’

She looks her brother up and down and wishes she could feel different, says, ‘Don’t tell him you know I’m here.’

‘Where’s Darry?’ says Roddy, trying hard to sound casual.

‘He’s providing for me.’

‘He’s using you, is what you mean.’

‘I use him.’

‘You really don’t know anything.’ Roddy turns his back, doesn’t give her so much as a glance, says, ‘You do the right thing, Bella.’

‘Have a heart, Roddy. Have a fucking heart.’

He closes the door and the electricity clunks down. The place goes instantly dark. The bars on the electric fire fade from red to pink to a low, diminishing amber. Like a fast-setting sun. The elements click as they cool and Arabella says, ‘God help me.’

Five

Staffe double-parks the Peugeot, puts the POLICE AWARE card on the dash and strides up to his flat, in a fine row of Georgian town houses in South Ken. The lightest dusting of snow has fallen during the night. Above, the dark sky seems set to yield more.

As soon as he puts the key to the door, he knows Pulford is in, but doesn’t expect anything like the scene that is laid out before him.

He tries to school himself not to react, but he can feel his pulse accelerate away from him. His breath is short. His fingers have wound into fists.

‘What in God’s name …’

‘Staffe! You said …’ Pulford stands up, knocks a pile of poker chips to the floor and one of his friends clumsily tries to catch them. There is a thick pall of spirits in the air and bad rock thuds from a boom box. They have been smoking and pizza boxes scatter the living-room floor. ‘… You said you were away for the whole weekend.’

‘You said you were knocking
this
on the head.’ Staffe steps towards his sergeant – only twenty-six, but with his stubble and unkempt hair and gravelly voice, seeming far older. He knows he must look as if he is going to lose it because Pulford’s mates drain their glasses. One of them picks up the deck of cards and another scoops the Jack Daniels.

‘See you, Dave.’