Crusher (17 page)

“I know how bad that sounds, but I really believed—I somehow persuaded myself that I couldn’t be any good for you if I was unhappy. And I was unhappy. I told myself that you needed stability, and your dad, and I needed …”

“To leave.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know how often you want me to say it, I can’t mean it any more than I do right now.”

“Right,” I said. “Is that it?”

“He was going to take me back. Noel. He said the hard part would be persuading you.”

“He wasn’t a complete idiot, then,” I said. My mother sighed, put her mug down and stood, buttoning her coat up. She pulled the black beret from her coat pocket and pulled it on, tucking her hair up inside it.
She was still very pretty, I realized; somehow the faint lines of age suited her pale, fine features. She took a folded note from the other pocket and laid it down beside the cup. “My cellphone,” she said. “If you want to talk again.”

“Could you leave the house keys as well?”

She hesitated, and I glimpsed hurt in her eyes. But she fished a ring with two keys from the same pocket that had held the note and laid them down by the mug. She never carried a handbag, I remembered now. She hated them.

“You should change the locks anyway,” she advised in a little voice.

I bristled. I didn’t need her to tell me to do what I’d planned to do anyway, and I’d do it at a time that suited me, not her.

“Goodbye, Finn.”

She turned and walked out, and I let her go. I heard the latch click and the gentle tinny rattle of the letterbox, and the clack of her heels as she walked away. Of course, now, all the things I’d meant to say for years were jostling in my head.
I don’t want you back anyway. You ruined my life. You broke Dad’s heart. Fuck off back to America
. I hadn’t said any of them, and now I knew I never would. I picked up the folded note with her mobile number—cellphone number, she’d said, she even
talked like a bloody Yank, why did she have to come back?—carried it into the kitchen, stepped on the pedal of the bin, ripped the note into pieces as small as I could manage, and I sprinkled them into the rubbish.

Dad and her had been talking? When was he going to tell me? How had they talked? I hadn’t seen any letters. Maybe by email … I wasn’t surprised Dad had never found the nerve to raise the subject. He knew how much I hated my mother, how I blamed her for everything that was wrong with my world. It was anger at what she’d done that drove me wild, anger at her running away like that, abandoning us.

Abandoning me.

It was too late now—Dad was gone, and even if he had fallen for her sob story, I wasn’t going to. I wished I hadn’t ripped up the note—I wanted to ring her, that instant, and tell her to stop wasting her time. You wanted a clean slate, you’ve got one. You didn’t want me in your life then, I don’t want you in mine now. We’re quits, so long, goodbye.

The doorbell rang. She’d forgotten something. Accidentally on purpose, so she could come back and work on me some more. I stomped to the front door, fumbled with the latch in haste and finally jerked it open.

Zoe’s nervous smile faded when she saw the look on my face, and she stepped back uncertainly.

“Hey!” I said. Under her parka she wore her shapeless brown school uniform, the frumpy look rounded off with a totally impractical shoulder bag bulging with books.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have called or something, but I don’t have your number, so I just …” She shrugged.

“No, it’s fine,” I said.

“Is this a good time?” she said. “I know you had the funeral this morning. Maybe you want to be alone.”

I said nothing, but pulled the door wide open, and she stepped inside. Her hair brushed my face as she passed me and I tried not to let her see me breathing in its scent.

“I told my dad I was going to do homework with my friend Phoebe. Are you any good at history?”

“I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast,” I said.

“English? Do you know any Spanish?”

“Zippo.”

“Looks like I’ve come to the wrong place.”

I grabbed her parka as she shrugged it off but a Velcro band on the sleeve snagged on her school cardigan. As I helped unsnag it my hand caught her right wrist, and lingered there a moment of its own accord. Gently Zoe pulled her right hand away and laid it on my cheek,
and her left hand on the other. She kissed me on the mouth, softly and hesitantly, until I kissed her back, my arms slipping round her slender waist, pulling her close, her back arching as she pressed her mouth up against mine, her hands sliding up my face to run through my hair.

It felt like we’d been in bed the whole evening but it wasn’t even ten when we finally fell back, panting and sweaty, limbs happily entangled. Her breasts were as wonderful as I thought they’d be and she, clearly proud of them, let me admire them from close up. When I kissed them she’d squirm and giggle, then the fire would catch again. I was sure I had some condoms somewhere, but she kept a handful hidden in her school bag, “just in case,” she said. You could not help but admire a girl so fabulously equipped in every respect. Surprisingly, the faff and fumbling with the slippery packets was part of the fun, and although the first bout didn’t go the distance, in the second we pretty much tied on points, and the third was a knockout.

My father had overcome his embarrassment of talking to me about sex by going into unnecessary detail, ignoring how I cringed with my fingers stuck in my ears singing la-la-la. He kept repeating loudly,
Please your
partner or you’ll end up pleasing yourself
. I knew what he meant now, and I was glad he’d persisted. Zoe seemed glad too, as she lay there glowing with perspiration and playing with her hair.

“Got any cigarettes?” she said.

“Do you ever bring your own stimulants, or do you just bum them off other people?”

“Excuse me, but after all that stimulation I think I’ve earned one cigarette.”

“Your dad would smell them on your breath.”

“I’ll tell him it was Phoebe,” she said.

“Would he believe you?”

“No,” she sighed. “He doesn’t believe anything I tell him. And I can’t tell him the truth.”

“Why not?”

“Lying’s easier,” she said.

“Would you lie to me?”

“Try me.”

“What does your dad do?”

“He’s a policeman.”

“Shit.” I sat up. She turned her head to look at me, and I tried not to notice how lovely she was.

“What’s his name?” I said. “Your name, I mean.”

“Prendergast.”

“Shit.” I practically leaped backwards out of the bed, and stood there starkers, my hands in my hair. “He’s the
one who told you about me—that I sold drugs when I was a kid—”

“He didn’t tell me. He brings his work home, his files. I look through them, when I can’t sleep. I don’t sleep much.”

“Holy crap … you must know everything about me.”

“Of course I don’t.” She frowned, laughing. I found myself wishing I did have some cigarettes, and went to pull my jeans on—the corner shop would still be open. With a grunt of exasperation Zoe sat up, grabbed the T-shirt hanging over the foot of the bed and pulled it on. “Fuck’s sake, Finn, what’s the big deal?”

“What are you going to tell him about me?”

“What? Why are you being so paranoid? Nothing! I told you, he never listens to anything I say anyway.”

I looked around for my T-shirt, and realized she was wearing it. She was leaning up against my headboard with her arms folded, looking at me through her fringe, and I felt the wave of anger break and recede, leaving nothing but froth and confusion.

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I just told you.”

“He thinks I killed my dad.”

“So what? You didn’t.”

“Yeah, but thanks to him the cops aren’t looking for anyone else, and I’m having to do all their bloody work.”

“What work?”

“Finding out who did. Whether it really was some burglar, or that crazy girlfriend, or that fucking nutcase McGovern—”

“McGovern?” she said.

“Never mind,” I said.

“McGovern the gangster?”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“I’ve seen his file.”

“Holy shit. Could you get hold of it for me?”

“No. Are you insane?”

“No. Right. Sorry,” I said.

She leaned forward, with a look of real concern. “Finn … why are you doing this? Asking about who killed your dad. What do you think you’ll achieve?”

“I just have to know the truth,” I said. “He was my dad. I owe him that much.”

Zoe shook her head. “You can’t go after McGovern,” she said. “The guy’s like a war criminal or something. If he had your dad murdered …”

“What?”

“You’ll never be able to prove it. He’s killed loads of people, it’s like his hobby. Finn—leave it, please. Let SOCA handle it.”

“SOCA?”

“Serious Organized Crime. My dad’s the local liaison.”

“OK, if you can’t bring me McGovern’s file, could you just read it and tell me what’s in it?”

She looked away. “I have to go.”

Pulling the bedclothes back she clambered off the bed, pushed past me, pulled off my T-shirt, flung it at me and ran naked down the stairs. By the time I got to the living room she was already half-dressed and cursing the zip of her uniform skirt. Her blouse had ended up draped around Dad’s urn, somehow, and I apologized silently to him as I carefully pulled it free.
To hell with that
, he said.
Don’t blow it now
.

I handed Zoe her blouse. She shrugged it on and quickly fastened the buttons I’d so carefully undone a few hours earlier.

“Forget it,” I said. “Forget I asked, I’m sorry. Do you have to go?”

“Of course I have to go, you pillock,” she said. But I could hear a laugh in her voice. Her brown cardigan crackled with static as she tugged it on and flipped her hair free of her collar. When I grabbed her hips and pulled her towards me she looked surprised and not displeased.

“That was amazing,” I said. “You’re amazing.”

I bent down to kiss her, and she kissed me back, and when she heard my breathing deepening she pushed me away again and turned and grabbed her coat and bag.

“Yeah, that was fun,” she said. “We must do it again sometime.”

“Sorry about the homework,” I said as I saw her to the door.

She paused on the step outside. “Seriously, Finn … stay away from the Guvnor. He’s like a disease. Everything, everyone he touches …” Her voice tailed off to nothing. Without another word she turned and walked away, her head down, and with that little skip in her step girls use when they’re trying to hurry without actually running. I watched her till she vanished round the corner, then stepped back inside and shut the door.

There was no answer at Elsa Kendrick’s flat. I knocked and rang for a few minutes, then stood back, looking up at the windows. It looked like she wasn’t in. I cursed at having come all that way for nothing. When I’d phoned Jonno Kendrick that morning to get her mobile number, he’d said, “Hold on a minute” and put the phone down. After five minutes of listening to 1970s cock-rock playing on what sounded like his cab radio, I got the message and rang off. In spite of the wasted effort, part of me was relieved. I hadn’t known what I was going
to say to Elsa. The only thing I knew for sure about her was that she was an exceptional liar, which meant she was hardly going to burst into tears and blurt out a confession as soon as she saw me. I didn’t have any new evidence to confront her with, apart from my conversation with her ex-husband, or husband, or whatever he was. Though it would still have been interesting to watch her reaction when I told her what he had told me.

There was no answer from the upstairs flat either. I could hardly wait around all day for Elsa to return. I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t stake the house out, and like most suburban London streets there was nowhere to park anyway. I had a bicycle at home, but sitting on a bike was hardly a discreet way to stake out someone’s house. Short of breaking into the place opposite and twitching their net curtains, there was no way I could keep an eye on Elsa Kendrick’s flat, without some nervous neighbour taking me for a criminal and calling the cops to frogmarch me away. I glanced at my phone. It was nearly time to go to work anyway. I’d have to think of some other way to reach Elsa, maybe a message relayed through her old workplace, something designed to pique her curiosity. Of course I’d tried that before, when I claimed Dad had written about her, and she’d seen right through me that time. She was a slicker liar than I was. But I’d think of something.

When I arrived at the Iron Bridge I was greeted like an old friend by the waiters and kitchen staff already on duty. I’d discovered there was a real camaraderie in the place, clearly born from a mutual terror of Chris Eccles. Working for him was meant to be a baptism of fire—or maybe a baptism of boiling goose fat—and a successful apprenticeship could get you a job skivvying in any restaurant in Europe. Maybe the trainees mistook me for a fellow dreamer starting at the bottom by scrubbing pans. I hadn’t tried to explain to any of them that my idea of haute cuisine was taking a sandwich up to my bedroom. But it was nice to be welcomed, and it was with a twinge of shame that I remembered I was only there to pick up information. If there was none to be found, I wasn’t going to stay … was I?

But why shouldn’t I? I needed a job, and this was a job. Yeah, it was thanks to McGovern I’d got it, but maybe I could have got it for myself if I’d walked in and asked for it. Eccles didn’t scare me. In fact, I quite liked the guy.

Like Zoe said, I hadn’t a hope in hell of proving anything against McGovern, even if he had ordered my dad killed. And if he hadn’t, what was wrong with staying here? Apart from anything else, the food was the best I’d ever tasted, and I was in serious danger of getting a
belly. Maybe even I could learn to cook like that, if I set my mind to it. There wasn’t much reading involved—you didn’t see the chefs flicking through cookery books. I could run a kitchen. I might have my own restaurant someday. Zoe could do front of house, and when the last customer had left we’d fuck like bunnies, on a different table every night.