Bubblegum Smoothie (6 page)

Then, he nodded, just the once. “Sit.”

“Thank you,” I said. I perched myself down on a stool and Martha did the same. The smell of this overweight giant didn’t get any more bearable when I sat. I thought about whether I’d ever smelled anything quite so bad in my life, and then I remembered the time I had the shits in Fuerteventura in my teens. Usually, the smell of your own shit is bearable. Which sums up just how disgusting that smell actually was.

“Stacking coins?” Martha asked. She forced herself into a higher voice, which was actually slightly demonic. She pointed a flirty grin at Fatso.

Fatso smiled back at her. Congealed drool and age-old chocolate stuck to the corners of his mouth. “Want a go?”

Martha shook her head. “I’m fine, darling. You stack away to your heart’s content.”

Fatso chuckled at this. His chubby cheeks flushed. Jesus, had he actually
fallen
for Martha?

Sorry. I shouldn’t think like that.
Martha isn’t Mart in a dress. Martha isn’t Mart in a dress…

“What’s your name anyway?” I asked, breaking through the overwhelmingly uncomfortable sexual tension, all of it coming from the beast of a bloke at the opposite side of the table. “I’m Blake. This is Martha—”

“Gus,” he said.

“Gus!” I replied. Not sure why I sounded so surprised. Just seemed such a fitting name for a bloke like him. No offence to any Guses, or anything like that. “Well it’s a pleasure to meet you, Gus. Do you come here often? Swear I haven’t seen you in here before.”

Gus didn’t say a word to me. He was too busy drooling at Martha, who was applying an overcoat of thick red lipstick.

I thought about how this guy could possibly have wanted to buy any knives. I thought about the best way to ask him. The best way to casually slip it into conversation.

“So… what else do you like to do besides sitting in the pub—”

“Gus like food!” He looked right at me. Opened his mouth wide, revealing his rotting teeth. Wow. Martha could keep this heartthrob all to herself.

“Food, ey? You know, I love food too. Bacon… sausages… I run a smoothie stall, you know? Groovy Smoothie? Ever seen it? In the town centre near Friargate.”

Gus’s eyes twitched as he tried to comprehend what I was saying, like a dated computer struggling to take in modern information.

“No? Doesn’t matter. Anyway, reason I’m here is…” I added my approach up in my head. Hoped to fuck it was going to work. “I was wondering if you knew anyone that… that, like, gives away free food?”

Gus’s eyes narrowed. He scanned my face, then looked back at Martha, then at me again.

“Free food?”

I scratched the back of my neck. Shit idea, this. “Yeah… Like—like who lets you do little jobs for them and… and pays you in food. Something like that?”

Gus frowned even more. He wobbled his lips, trying to get his head around what I was saying. “Free… free food.” He thought about it like it was an answer to a pissing pub quiz question. “Erm. Mum. Mum give me free food.”

I held my smile, but deep down I felt tense and pissed. “Not your mum, Gus. I mean… anyone else. Like—like a man. Are there any men who give you free food?”

Gus’s face just curled up even more. “Men who… who free food?”

“Yes Gus,” I said. “Men who come into this pub and give you free food for you to do jobs for them—”

“Dad?”

I stopped again. Closed my mouth and bit onto my tongue. What I’d give for a lozenge or nineteen to sooth my throat, to cool me right down. I stared at the table. Tried to work out a different approach. There was no chance in hell that Gus was the perp. And by the sounds of things, he didn’t have a bloody clue what I was talking about. So either Martha’s arms guy was screwing us, or Gus really was just an airhead simpleton.

When I looked back up and saw Gus re-stacking his coins, I think I found my answer.

“Who taught you to do that with coins?” Martha asked. Somehow, her voice was smoother than mine, more chilled. Maybe I was getting out of practice. Maybe I should get my wang chopped off and go full woman, too.

“No one taught,” Gus said, plonking another coin atop the pile. “Me taught.”

“Well that’s very clever of you,” I cut in, intentionally making my voice higher and smoother, like Martha’s. “Where do you get your coins, anyway? Mum give them you for pocket money?”

Gus plonked another coin down. “Man in hood gave me.”

He said it so nonchalantly that I almost missed it.

“Man in… A man in a hood? Which man?”

Gus placed another coin on top of the pile. Squinted so hard that his eyes were bloodshot.

“Gus? Which man gave it to you—”

“One who give me letter and tell me to give…”

His speech trailed off. Jesus, this airhead was incapable of stringing more than two words together before losing himself.

“Give you what, Gus?” Martha asked.

His pile of coins tumbled down. He squeezed his fists together, banged them against the table, made a sound like a problem child.

I decided to give it a second before I spoke. I didn’t want to annoy the guy. Sure, he was dumb as shit, but he was at least forty-five times my size. I’m not sure I’d survive a punch from him. I was barely surviving his stench.

After Gus had calmed down and started to re-stack the coins, I took a deep breath of the shitty air in and readied myself.

“What did the man in the hood give you, Gus?”

Gus plonked a coin slightly to the side now, like he was going for a different tactic.

“He give me coin and I give him present when I… when I ask the man for present. Then he give me more coin.”

I looked at Martha. We both nodded at one another. It was obvious what had happened now—the perp had bribed Gus. Offered him some shiny coins in exchange for an arms deal, in exchange for the knife. Poor big bastard. He had no idea what he’d gone and embroiled himself him. I’d be surprised if he even knew what “homicide” was.

“This man. This man in the hood. What did he look like?”

Gus leaned back from his coins. He rubbed his huge, sweaty hands together. “He… He was man.”

I nodded. Forced that smile again, but I was struggling to hold it. “Yes, I know he was a man, but what did he… did he have dark hair? Blonde hair? Was he big? Small? Fat? Thin?”

Gus took a few seconds. Rubbed his palms together. He was muttering things. Totting things up under his breath. I prayed he remembered. Prayed he could give me something—something we could go on, even if it was just the colour of his hair.

“Yes,” Gus said. He nodded his head, and his flabby chin flopped around.

Martha and I sat there, silent.

“Yes what?”

“Gus like drink now,” he said. He seemed oblivious to the un-drunk pint of Fosters on the table beside him.

“Okay, we can get a drink for you. But what about… about the hooded man? You were telling us about the hooded man who gave you your coins. Remember?”

Gus frowned. His huge forehead rolled together. “Hood man?”

I cursed really quietly under my breath. For a moment, I thought he was doing what Martha’s arms guy had done and going down the bribery route, but I was clearly flattering his intelligence. Martha did get him another drink, but the second she did, he seemed more interested in playing with her necklace, guffawing like a retarded primary school kid who people only hung around with for their own sick amusement.

I sipped at my second flat Coke. Sipped at it, as Martha did her best to entertain Gus the Simpleton. It seemed like we’d been here forever, and yet what had we learned? That the killer got Gus to buy his knife for him. Was that progress? No. If anything, it was the opposite to progress. Regress. We’d made some regress.

My phone vibrated. I pulled it out, clocked the unknown number.

“Yeah?”

“Blake, my man!” Lenny. “How’s it hanging? To the left? To the right? Even-keel?”

“With a noose around my neck and halfway down the stairs.”

“Oh cheer up, you cynical git. It’s a glorious day today. You know, I just had to catch a cat from a tree. Like, it was
stuck
up the tree, and I actually had to climb up there and catch it. But the weather’s so beautiful that I just stayed up there an hour longer than I should saying “Here, kitty kitty” and getting a tan. Burned my knees, though. Throbbing like a—”

“What do you want, Lenny?”

“CCTV,” Lenny said. Stopped talking, just like that.

“Wait, what—”

“We’ve got CCTV footage of our perp carrying the body of the second victim over to the squad car. You’re gonna want to get down to the station and check this out immediately, boyo.”

I ended the call with Lenny. Felt a little more optimistic now I knew we had some actual evidence to go on.

“Pleasure meeting you, Gus. We’ll have a burger some time, right?”

Gus grinned. “Burger time.”

I shook his huge, boiling hand and never thought I’d get it back. Had to remind myself to wash it later.

“So what’ve we got?” Martha asked, as I pushed open the door to the pub, a warm breeze brushing through my hair.

“CCTV,” I said. “Meeting my pillock associate to check a lead out.”

“Is this the guy that’s paying us?”

“Paying
me
.”

“Right. Paying you.” Martha opened the door to her Fiat Punto and hopped into the driver’s seat. It was stiflingly hot inside, and I couldn’t wait to get the air con on. “Looking forward to meeting the man who’s making me rich.”

“Trust me, you aren’t,” I said, as the car moved away from the pub. I pictured the look on Lenny’s face when I introduced him to my transgender friend.

TEN

The beauty of murder is that you don’t have to do it all at once.

He sits in the traffic. Sits waiting as the lights stay stuck on red, as impatient fucks pip their horns wastefully. But he doesn’t mind. He can’t mind.

Not with what he’s just done.

Not with all he still has left to do.

The sound of “Move On Up” by Curtis Mayfield blares out of his speakers as the sun beams down on his windscreen. He just can’t stop smiling, can’t stop moving around and singing. It’s one of his favourite summer songs. He has it on a Spotify playlist amongst the likes of “Walking On Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves. Both songs just make him so happy. So alive.

They’re also two of his favourite songs to kill to.

He edges forward as the lights turn green for a split second, then go straight back to red. Still, he doesn’t mind. He’s got so much to look forward to. His third victim, she’d exceeded his expectations. The way she scrapped back, the way he let her arms free and the way she scratched at his body when he pressed his knife against her naked skin… she was a fighter. A dirty girl.

And dirty girls deserved their own distinct kind of treatment.

He licks his lips and he tastes the copper of her blood. He wears her bodily fluids like a lipstick. Her screams—the screams of all his victims—are etched in the sounds of the upbeat summer music.

Shit. He’s had so much fun with the third. So much fun. And she is still very much alive, that’s the best part. She might be missing a handful of fingers—a handful, ha!—but he’d been sure to seal the wounds. A frying pan that he’d left on the stove all morning did the trick.

But he needs something new. A new toy to play with.

His knife is fun. A Marifone Killswitch, one of the best on the market. And he’s always been a fan of knives so he knows a good knife when he handles one. But he likes variation, too. He likes to surprise his victims as much as himself. He thinks of all the alternatives he could buy… pocketknives to pierce their legs with, hacksaws to add a whole new dimension to the murders.

He has to stop himself because he is salivating and his jeans are dampening.

The lights turn green and he is one with the moving traffic. He thinks about a mantra that’s always got on his nerves. The mantra that “bad things always happen to good people.” Something people always said when a poor little innocent died. But the truth is, there’s no such thing. The mantra is bullshit. Bad things happen to all kinds of people. They only become “good people” when the bad shit has happened to them.

And a lot of bad things were happening to his seven.

He sees the Black Bull on the right. No doubt the fat-headed dumb bastard will be there. No—he shouldn’t be too critical of him. The fat shit has done him a massive favour without him even realising. And with the bag of newer, shinier coins he’s brought with him this time, he’s about to do him a whole new favour all over again.

He indicates, humming along to “I Love It” by Icona Pop, one of his more recent summertime favourites. He turns into the Black Bull car park, pulls up in a free space. Practically bounces out of his door.

And then he sees them. Sees them walking out of the Black Bull.

He pulls his Land Rover door to very slowly. Closes it so it’s just slightly ajar, and watches these people.

The first one he notices is the he-she. Clearly a he-she. He can see it in its hands, in the way it struts around like it still has a cock swinging between its legs.

But it’s the one next to her that catches his eye even more so.

The man with the greying hair, the slender body. The man who he’d seen at the police station last night chatting with those idiot officers. He is dressed in yet another checkered shirt, blue jeans.

And behind him, waving goodbye, is Gus. The fathead himself, a hammy handful of coins in his grip.

He tastes blood in his mouth but it isn’t his victim’s. The sharpness, it’s from his teeth, and he realises he has bitten his lip. This man—the greying man, and Gus. Who is this man? Police informant? Private investigator? Undercover cop?

His stomach burns. He feels hot, and the heat brings back the memories of his dad, of the times his dad would drink his nine beers in front of the barbecue then lock him in the shed, lock him in the shed and pull his trousers down and…

He slams his palm into the radio. Switches his summertime playlist off right away. He can’t have it being tainted with bad thoughts. He doesn’t want to hear another song and link it to the bad thoughts.