Dead Like You (10 page)

25

Monday 5 January

Maybe it was time to quit.

Prison aged you. Ten years it put on – or took off – your life, depending on which way you looked at it. And right now Darren Spicer wasn’t too happy about either of the ways he was looking at it.

Since he was sixteen, Spicer had spent much of his life inside.
Doing bird.
A
revolving-door prisoner
, they called him. A career criminal. But not a very successful one. He’d only once, since becoming an adult, spent two consecutive Christmases as a free man, and that had been in the early years of his marriage. His birth certificate – his real one – told him he was forty-one. His bathroom mirror told him he was fifty-five – and counting. Inside he felt eighty. He felt dead. He felt …

Nothing.

Lathering up, he stared at the mirror with dull eyes, grimacing at the lined old geezer staring back at him. He was naked, his gangly, skinny body – which he liked to think of as just plain lean – toned up from daily workouts in the prison gym.

Then he set to work on his hard stubble with the same blunted blade he had been using for weeks in prison before his release and which he had taken with him. When he had finished, his face was as clean-shaven as the rest of his body, which he had shaved last week. He always did that when he came out of prison, as a way of cleansing himself. One time, in the early days of his now long-dead marriage, he’d come home with lice in his pubes and chest hair.

He had two small tattoos, at the top of each arm, but no more. Plenty of his fellow inmates were covered in the things and had a macho pride in them. Macho pride equalled mucho stupidity, in his view. Why make it easy for someone to identify you? Besides, he had enough identifying marks already – five scars on his back, from stab wounds when he’d been set on in prison by mates of a drug dealer he’d done over some years back.

This last sentence had been his longest yet – six years. He was finally out on licence now after three of them. Time to quit, he thought. Yeah, but.

The big
but
.

You were supposed to feel free when you left prison. But he still had to report to his probation officer. He had to report for retraining. He had to obey the rules of the hostels he stayed in. When you were released, you were supposed to go home.

But he had no home.

His dad was long dead and he’d barely spoken a dozen words to his mum in twenty-five years – and that was too many. His only sibling, his sister Mags, had died from a heroin overdose five years back. His ex-wife was living in Australia with his kid, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years.

Home was wherever he could find a place to doss down. Last night it was a room in a halfway house just off the Old Steine in Brighton. Shared with four pathetic, stinking winos. He’d been here before. Today he was going to try to get into a better place. St Patrick’s night shelter. They had decent grub, a place you could store things. You had to sleep in a big dormitory but it was clean. Prison was meant to help your rehabilitation back into the community after serving your time. But the reality was that the community didn’t want you, not really. Rehabilitation was a myth. Although he played the game, went along with the concept.

Retraining!

Ha! He wasn’t interested in retraining, but he had shown willing while he had been at Ford Open Prison these past six months in preparation for his release, because that had enabled him to spend days out of prison on their work placement scheme.
Working Links
, they were called. He had chosen the hotel handyman course, which enabled him to spend time in a couple of different Brighton hotels. Working behind the scenes. Understanding the layouts. Getting access to the room keys and to the electronic room-key software. Very useful indeed.

Yeah.

His regular prison visitor at Lewes, a pleasant, matronly lady, had asked him if he had a dream. If he could ever see a life for himself beyond the prison walls. And what was it?

Yeah, sure, he’d told her, he had a dream. To be married again. To have kids. To live in a nice house – like one of those fancy homes he burgled for a living – and drive a nice car. Have a steady job. Yep. Go fishing at the weekends. That was his dream. But, he told her, that was never going to happen.

‘Why not?’ she had asked him.

‘I’ll tell you why not,’ Darren had replied. ‘Cos I’ve got one hundred and seventy-two
previous
, right? Who’s gonna let me stay in a job when they find that out? And they always do find out.’ He’d paused before adding, ‘Anyhow, it’s all right here. Got me mates. The grub’s good. The electricity’s paid for. Got me television.’

Yeah, it was all right. Except …

No women. That’s what he missed. Women and cocaine were what he liked. Could get the drugs in prison, but not the women. Not very often, anyway.

The Guv had let him stay in over Christmas, but he’d been released two days after Boxing Day. To what?

Shit.

Tomorrow hopefully he’d move. If you played by the rules at St Patrick’s for twenty-eight days, you could get yourself into one of their MiPods. They had these strange plastic pods in there, like space capsules, taken from some Japanese hotel idea. You could stay in a MiPod for another ten weeks. They were cramped, but they gave you privacy; you could keep your things safe.

And he had things he needed to keep safe.

His mate, Terry Biglow – if he could call the shifty little weasel a mate – was safeguarding the only possessions he owned in the world. They were inside a suitcase, with three padlocked chains holding its contents a secret – the chains and padlocks were a mark of how much he could trust Biglow not to open it up.

Maybe this time he could stay out of jail. Get enough money together, from burgling and drug dealing, to buy himself a little flat. And then what? A woman? A family? One moment that seemed attractive, the next it was all too much. Too much hassle. Truth was, he had grown used to his way of life. His own company. His own secret kicks.

His dad had been a roofer and as a kid he’d helped him out. He’d seen some of the posh houses in Brighton and Hove his dad worked on – and the tasty women with their beautiful clothes and their flash cars who lived in them. His dad fancied that kind of lifestyle. Fancied a posh house and a classy-looking woman.

One day his dad fell through a roof, broke his back and never worked again. Instead he just drank his compensation money all day and night. Darren didn’t fancy roofing, that wasn’t ever going to make you rich, he figured. Studying could. He liked school, was good at maths and science and mechanical things, loved all that. But he had problems at home. His mother was drinking too. Some time around his thirteenth birthday she clambered into his bed, drunk and naked, told him his father couldn’t satisfy her any more, now it was his job as the man in the family.

Darren went to school every day, ashamed, increasingly disconnected from his friends. His head was all messed up and he couldn’t concentrate any more. He didn’t feel a part of anything, and took to spending more and more time alone, fishing, or in really bad weather hanging about in his uncle’s locksmith’s shop, watching him cut keys, or running errands, and occasionally standing behind the counter while his uncle nipped along to the bookie. Anything to escape from home. From his mother.

He liked his uncle’s machinery, liked the smell, liked the mystery of locks. They were just puzzles, really. Simple puzzles.

When he was fifteen his mother told him it was time he started supporting her and his dad, that he needed to learn a skill, get a job. His uncle, who had no one to take over the business when he retired, offered him an apprenticeship.

Within a couple of months, Darren could solve any problem anyone had with a lock. His uncle told him he was a bloody genius!

There was nothing to it, Darren figured. Anything that was made by a man could be figured out by another man. All you had to do was think your way inside the lock. Imagine the springs, the tumblers – imagine the inside of the lock, put yourself into the mind of the man who designed it. After all, there were basically only two kinds of domestic lock – a Yale, which operated with a flat key, and a Chubb, which operated with a cylindrical key. Mortises and rim locks. If you had a problem, you could see inside most locks with a simple bit of medical kit, a proctoscope.

Then he graduated to safes. His uncle had developed a bit of a niche business, opening safes for the police. Given a bit of time, there wasn’t any mechanical safe his nephew could not open. Nor any door lock.

He’d burgled his first house, up in Hollingdean, when he was sixteen. He got busted and spent two years in an approved school. That was where he developed a taste for drugs for the first time. And where he learned his first valuable lesson. It was the same risk to burgle a shitty little house for a stereo system as it was to burgle a ritzy pad where there might be jewellery and cash.

When he came out his uncle didn’t want him back – and he had no inclination to get a low-paid labouring job, which was his only choice. Instead he burgled a house in Brighton’s secluded Withdean Road. Took seven grand from a safe. Blew three of it on cocaine, but invested four of it in heroin, which he traded and made a twenty-grand profit.

He did a string of large houses after then, made himself almost a hundred Gs. Sweet. Then he met Rose in a club. Married her. Bought a little flat in Portslade. Rose didn’t approve of him burgling, so he tried going straight. Through a bloke he knew, he faked a new ID and got a job working for a company that installed alarm systems called Sussex Security Systems.

They had a top-end clientele. Half of the city’s big homes. Being in them was like being a kid in a sweetshop. It did not take him long to miss the buzz of burgling. Particularly the kick he got out of it. But even more particularly the money he could make.

The best of all of it was being alone in a posh bedroom. Smelling the scent of a rich woman. Inhaling her perfumes, the perspiration on her underwear in the wash baskets, her expensive clothes hanging in her wardrobe, her silks, cottons, furs, leathers. He liked rifling through her things. Particularly her underwear and her shoes. Something about these places aroused him.

These women were from a different world to the one he knew. Women beyond his means. Beyond his social skills.

Women with their stuffy husbands.

These kinds of women were gagging for it.

Sometimes a scent of cologne or a sour odour on a soiled garment would remind him of his mother, and something erotic would burn inside him for a brief instant, before he suppressed it with a flash of anger.

For a while he’d been able to fool Rose by telling her he was going fishing – night fishing, mostly. Rose asked him why he never took the kid fishing. Darren told her he would, when the kid was older. And he would have done, he really would.

But then one February evening, burgling a house in Tongdean, the owner came home, surprising him. He legged it out the back, across the garden and straight into the deep end of an empty sodding swimming pool, breaking his right leg, his jaw and his nose, and knocking himself out cold.

Rose only visited him once in prison. That was to tell him she was taking the kid to Australia and she never wanted to see him again.

Now he was out and free again, he had nothing. Nothing but his suitcase at Terry Biglow’s place – if, of course, Terry was still there and not dead or back inside. And nothing else but his hard, scarred body, and the urges from three years of lying on his narrow bunk, dreaming of what he would do when he was back out …

1997

26

Monday 29 December

‘I
can
forget that I saw your face,’ Rachael said, staring up at him.

In the yellow glow of the interior light he looked jaundiced. She tried to make eye contact, because in the dim, distant, terror-addled recesses of her mind, she remembered reading somewhere that hostages
should
try to make eye contact. That people would find it harder to hurt you if you established a bond.

She was trying, through her parched voice, to bond with this man – this monster – this
thing
.

‘Sure you can, Rachael. When do you think I was born? Yesterday? Last week on Christmas fucking Day? I let you go, right, and one hour later you’ll be in a police station with one of those E-Fit guys, describing me. Is that about the size of it?’

She shook her head vigorously from side to side. ‘I promise you,’ she croaked

‘On your mother’s life?’

‘On my mother’s life. Please can I have some water? Please, something.’

‘So I could let you go, and if you do cheat me and go to the police, it would be OK for me to go round to your mother’s house, in Surrenden Close, and kill her?’

Dimly, Rachael wondered how he knew where her mother lived. Perhaps he had read it in the papers? That gave her a glimmer of hope.
If
he had read it in the papers, then it meant she was in the news. People would be out looking for her. Police.

‘I know everything about you, Rachael.’

‘You can let me go. I’m not going to risk her life.’

‘I can?’

‘Yes.’

‘In your dreams.’

27

Thursday 8 January

He liked to be inside nice big houses. Or, more accurately, to be inside the
inside
of these houses.

Sometimes, squeezed into narrow cavities, it felt as if he was wearing the house like a second skin! Or squeezed into a wardrobe, surrounded by hanging dresses and the tantalizing smells of the beautiful woman who owned them, and of the leather of her shoes, he would feel on top of the world, as if he owned the woman.

Like the one who owned the dresses all around him now. And who owned racks and racks full of some of his favourite designer shoes.

And for a while, soon now, he would own her! Very soon.

He already knew a lot about her – far more than her husband did, he was sure about that. It was Thursday. He’d watched her for the past three nights. He knew the hours she came home and went out. And he knew the secrets on her laptop – so obliging of her to have no password! He’d read the emails to and from the Greek man she was sleeping with. The files with the photographs she had taken of him, some of them very rude indeed.

But for a while, if he got lucky,
he
would be her lover tonight. Not Mr Hairy Designer Stubble, with his massive, indecently big pole.

He would have to be careful not to move an inch when she came home. The hangers were particularly clanky – they were mostly those thin metal ones that came from dry-cleaners. He’d removed some, the worst offenders, and laid them on the wardrobe floor, and he’d wrapped tissues around the ones nearest him. Now all he had to do was wait. And hope.

It was like fishing. A lot of patience was required. She might not come home for a long time, but at least there was no danger of her husband returning tonight.

Hubby had gone on a jet plane far, far away. To a software conference in Helsinki. It was all there on the kitchen table, the note from him to her telling her he’d see her on Saturday, and signed off,
Love you XXXX
, with the name of the hotel and the phone number.

Just to be sure, as he’d had time to kill, he’d phoned the hotel using the kitchen phone and asked to speak to Mr Dermot Pearce. He was told in a slightly sing-song voice that Mr Pearce was not picking up and asked if he would like to leave a message on his voicemail.

Yes, I am about to have sex with your wife
, he was tempted to say, getting caught up in the thrill of the moment, the joy at the way it was all dropping into his lap. But sensibly he hung up.

The photographs of two teenage children, a boy and a girl, displayed downstairs in the living room were a slight worry. But their two bedrooms were immaculate. Not the bedrooms of children who were living here. He concluded they were the husband’s children by a former marriage.

There was a cat, one of those nasty-looking Burmese things that had glared at him in the kitchen. He’d given it a kick and it had disappeared through the flap. All was quiet. He was happy and excited.

He could feel some houses living and breathing around him. Especially when the boilers rumbled into life and the walls vibrated. Breathing! Yes, like him now, breathing so hard with excitement he could hear the sound of it in his ears, and he could hear the pounding of his heart, the roaring of his blood coursing through his veins like it was in some kind of a race.

Oh, God, this felt so good!