Dust and Desire (24 page)

But that was going to happen anyway, once the smoke had cleared. I was now so deep in shit, I needed a snorkel. It didn’t matter what I did any more, since Mawker and the rest were going to use my bollocks for catapult practice no matter what choice I made now.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just do me a favour, then. Have someone watching Melanie Henriksen’s house for me.’

‘Who?’

‘Woman friend of mine. She’s away at the moment, but she’ll be back, maybe in a couple of days. I’d feel better if you could keep an eye on her.’

‘All right,’ Mawker said wearily. ‘What’s the address?’

I gave her Melanie’s details, and he sighed again. ‘No, fuckwit, the body. Where’s the fucking body?’

After that, I put the phone down and found that I was rubbing my other hand over and over against the side of my jeans. It was getting late as I dumped the car back at the rental place and posted the keys through the door. I had forty minutes to kill before the train was due to depart, so I killed them – and a couple of million brain cells – in the bar on the station concourse, along with a few men in suits who were drinking as though programmed to do so by a hacker who only knew a code that contained the word
Grolsch
. The beer on its own wouldn’t take away the shakes, so I conscripted a double vodka to help out.

She was gone from the neck down, her head rammed on to a fence post that had been secured in the centre of the room by a porridge of mortar and blood. I had tried to find the rest of her but there was nothing else in the bedsit bar a raft of unsigned Mother’s Day cards arranged on every available surface. I didn’t look too hard, though, it has to be said.

The fucker had applied lipstick and mascara to the face, but the make-up wasn’t staying where it ought to. There was the heavy, chemical smell of embalming fluid or varnish, or both. She looked like a clown in a steam room. Now I think of it, although she was grinning, she looked sad. Sadder than sad.

* * *

There were a couple of other drunks on the train with me when we got underway, half an hour late because the train driver had called in sick. Yeah, right. He was plum deep in his missus, if he had any sense. Nobody in their right mind wants to ride the last train back to London. Well, nobody except me, because I’d had my fill of Liverpool. Any shred of hope I’d clung to that it might fill my heart with love and warmth from fondly-remembered days of growing up there had evaporated like dog piss off a hot radiator.

I’d begged the barman to sell me a couple of miniatures before leaving the pub. I sucked on them now as the train eased away from the platform, my fellow drunks eyeing me enviously; the nervous, sober passengers wishing all these pissheads would fall asleep or that they themselves had had the common sense and decency to get tanked up beforehand, too.

I drifted in and out of sleep all the way back to London. I dreamed a little: foggy, confused dreams powered by alcohol, in which I had been crushed into the corner of a room in a bleak Liverpool bedsit. The only light came from the pulse of a neon sign through a naked window, sickly yellow blows that lit up thousands of masks dangling from the ceiling on differing lengths of string. You couldn’t have moved in that room because of them. The only problem was that the masks were still attached to the faces they were trying to conceal. The linoleum was tigered with blood. All I could hear was the patter as red rain fell from the masks on to the floor. I couldn’t look away, because my eyelids had been clipped off, or else stapled to my forehead. I felt as though my eyes were bulging in their effort to see the masks, to take in every grain of detail; and that if I didn’t, mine would be the next face up there, spinning for ever along with the others, waiting for something unspeakable to come and try it on for size.

I woke up with Sarah’s name vying for space with the bile and spittle in my mouth. We had come to a stop ten miles shy of Euston, and it was gone one-fifteen in the morning. I’d been on that train for nearly four and a half hours. Wind buffeted the carriages, making them lurch. Beyond the window, darkness spread like an infection. A woman in the seat behind me said ‘He’ll not have waited for us. We’ll have to take a cab, and what then?’

Eventually the driver felt like sharing the bad news with us. There had been a fight on a platform at Euston, a big one, and someone had been pushed under a train. All incoming passengers were being diverted to St Pancras. Naturally, it was going to take time for this to happen. Sleep pulled me down again.

A cold morning as autumn dwindled, frost making the streets seem clean. The newly laid carpet in the hallway and living room still had that slightly rubbery smell. The radiator had been cleaned, the old paint scraped off it. I was considering taking it off the wall and throwing it away, but I was scared that there would still be blood that I had missed on the wall behind it.

I called upstairs to Sarah and asked her what she wanted for her breakfast. No reply.

The sofa in the living room was gone, chopped up and burnt to cinders in the garden, replaced by wooden chairs until I got round to buying something new. I’d taken down all the pictures of Becs because I couldn’t hack it, walking into the house every day to have her looking at me and to find myself thinking her eyes aren’t brown; they’re black and full of ash.

Everywhere I went in that house, I smelled cigar smoke.

Two months since I had discovered her body. A month since they picked up the scumbag who had killed her. Graeme Tann, his name was, and he worked as a cleaner and handyman at the gym where Rebecca attended her Pilates classes. When they opened up his locker, they found about a thousand Polaroid photographs of Rebecca, some of which he’d taken through a vent that opened into the female changing rooms. He’d been stalking her for the best part of two years, it transpired. I’d even seen him a couple of times when I picked Rebecca up from the gym, standing out on the steps, smoking his cheap, Nicaraguan cigars, enjoying the evening air.

He had attacked Rebecca in a sexual way, that much was obvious, but there were no semen deposits, no signs of his having introduced any part of his body to hers. At his flat in Oval they found stoppered test tubes containing his sperm, dozens of them, with the names of girls he’d masturbated over and the dates of his ejaculation written on the labels in jagged handwriting. He’d been at it for years, collecting his fantasies in this way, but Rebecca had been the first one he had visited physical harm upon. When they asked him about this, he had said that she reminded him of a kitten he owned as a child. It had been such a cute, attractive kitten that he had felt the compulsion to batter it to death. He didn’t feel that anything so comely should be allowed to exist, to highlight the ugliness in others. When he hit Rebecca, and caused her nose to bleed, he felt better, but he couldn’t stop until he had removed her attractiveness completely. He needed to ruin her, to dehumanise her, before he could feel normal again.

I remember feeling utterly emasculated in terms of being a husband, a father, a law enforcer, a man. In any or all of those guises, I had failed my wife and my daughter. They asked me, the guys down at the nick where he was being held, if I wanted to spend some time with him, one night. I did, I did so very much want that. And I went along, too. But I grew so weak with rage and loss, and the need to do something to him to try to correct the balance again, that I couldn’t go through with it. I could barely even walk, never mind clench my hands into fists. I was a foal, ten minutes old. I was water. In this way, I also failed myself.

So that day, a month later, I had gone up to Sarah’s room to see if she wanted to go out for breakfast. I went out for breakfast quite a lot, and I spent as much time out of that house as possible. I found myself stopping outside estate agents with increasing regularity. Maybe if I’d put the house on the market immediately, Sarah wouldn’t have run away.

Her bed hadn’t been slept in. There was no note. Some of her clothes were gone, as was her school rucksack and the savings from her cashbox, about twenty-five pounds. She had been supportive to me in the days after Rebecca’s murder. She had greeted the stony cold of shock with remarkable stoicism. She had stroked my hair as I lay trembling in bed. I had leaned hard on her, and she’d seemed able to bear my weight. I didn’t for one moment consider that she was only thirteen and that I ought to be doing more for her. I told her to stay at her friends’ houses as much as she wanted, so I myself could spend more time in the pub looking for Rebecca’s reflection in my vodka glasses.

I almost slapped her across the face one night, when I came home drunk, and she was sitting on the stairs in her nightie, looking shockingly like her mother with that sad, soft expression on her face. She asked me: ‘Dad, did you kill her?’

I almost slapped her because there was some truth in what she said. I almost slapped her because, in a small way, I
did
kill her. I killed her by failing to see. The fact that there were no clues, no prior warning of what was to happen, didn’t mean anything to me. For two years he had been watching her, taking his fetid little pictures, wanking himself stupid over her naked body. Little eyes burning into her, tracing the curves of her flesh, drawing a map for his knife to follow. His hungry eyes, I should have noticed them, at least. But I didn’t. All I saw when I picked her up from the leisure centre was the paperwork I had to get through, the jobs that were lined up. I saw everything but his intent, little eyes.

Instead of slapping Sarah, I screamed at her until we were both crying, holding each other so tightly, so closely that for a lunatic moment I was certain we had fused, and would never be able to pull ourselves free again.

Sarah’s room smelled of her, nothing else. That baby-woman smell that drives you wild with compassion and love. Her skin, her scalp, her sex. These days, I remember only the cigar smoke. Sarah’s smell has become lost to me. Sometimes I question whether I had a daughter, at all. Maybe she was never anything more than a dream. But that hug we shared, that violent, desperate hug, I remember well. It’s as if I still bear the imprint of her body on my tender, pathetic flesh. It’s what keeps me going.

The carriage jolted and swayed as the train picked up speed. As we came through the busy convergence of crisscrossed lines at the mouth of the great train shed at St Pancras, I was rattled out of sleep for good. My eyes were reflected, red and swollen, in the window. A hangover was sucking the core out of me, making me feel hollow, spineless, like a cheap tin of pink salmon with its crumbling grey backbone removed. When the train came to a halt, I found it difficult to peel myself out of the seat. I waited till everyone else had shifted, and the platform was clear, before levering myself upright and shuffling down the aisle. I rescued a half-empty Coke can from the magazine holder behind one seat, and took the warm syrup down in a single gulp. The sugar rush hit me as I stepped on to the platform, dragging my eyes all the way open. A guard leaning against the ticket barrier stared pointedly at his watch and tapped a foot against its mate, waiting for me to show him my ticket. I heard a slumping noise and looked up to see a shape move across an opaque section of the shed roof, a hundred feet or so above me. Then the flare of the floodlights stung so hard that I had to bend over and blink that sting away.

St Pancras? There was no point in going round to Melanie’s, as she was still in Devon. And, anyway, how attractive would I have appeared to her, hungover, dirty, my breath as iffy as a cadaver’s cock? I flicked through the stained, tattered pages of the address book in my mind, came up with Lorraine Tokuzo, and reckoned I could do a lot worse. Lorraine lived in a place called Ice Wharf, on New Wharf Road. She ran a modest business out of the Essex Road, an antiques-dealing partnership concentrating on old doors and chimney pots. She was something of an expert on them and could charge a fair whack for a house visit, to assess joists and flues and offer advice about how to jazz up a roof. She’d checked my own stack out for free, years ago, but that’s between her and me.

I hurried through the streets, chicaning round the arguing hookers, suddenly busting for a piss, and buzzed her number.

‘Tizzit?’

‘Lorraine? It’s Joel. Joel Sorrell.’

I pressed my hand against the grille, managing to cut off most of the profanities, and when she had finished I asked her if she was going to let me in, or was I going to have to piss all over her nice, clean entrance.

‘When did you ever do otherwise?’ she yelled, but the lock released and I went in, wondering what the hell did I do to cheese this one off?

I was still mulling it over when the lift doors opened and there she was, hanging out of her doorway like a fantastic Christmas decoration that someone forgot to put away. She hadn’t fastened her pyjamas up too well and too many bits of her were lounging out of the fabric, throwing darts into the bullseye of my memory, saying, hey, look at what you gave up, Bucko.

‘I thought I read about you in the papers,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I read you were killed somewhere?’

‘I’d hazard a guess that it was probably someone else,’ I replied.

‘Pity,’ she said, inevitably. ‘Come in, then. You know where the lav is.’

While I was relieving myself, I glanced around the bathroom, trying to remember. She must have redecorated, because there were no lightbulbs that lit up in my mind. I looked in the cabinet for a couple of Anadin, but there was nothing there but some contraceptive pessaries and a couple of jars containing stuff for parts of the body that just didn’t exist on people who didn’t read
Cosmopolitan
or
Vogue
.

She had put on a pale-blue towelling bathrobe and was now making coffee. The bathrobe, like her PJs, was undone, spilling her everywhere. It didn’t look as though she was doing this on purpose, but with Lorraine you could never tell. Fragments of our relationship – our three-month fling – seeped through to me from the fog of memory. She had been the first woman I’d gone out with after Rebecca was murdered. I was bruised and moody, not too attentive, drinking too much, perhaps a little snappy – hell, pretty much what I was like the whole time, anyway. I’d asked her out while in a hotel bar in Russell Square. She was there with some antiques convention, and I was there to get caned. I had started laying on the charm with a trowel, but decided that wasn’t enough and nipped out to the plant-hire place for a cement mixer. Lorraine had found my ceaseless pursuit of her rather amusing. If she’d recognised it for what it was – desperation, the need to know if I was still attractive to the opposite sex, a need to eclipse the ashes that used to be Rebecca’s eyes with something else, something alive – she’d have probably given me a jagged piece of her mind, and that would have been it. But she agreed to go for a drink with me, and then we went back to her room and we fucked every which way and then some, and soon on most nights I was sitting on the edge of a bed, nursing something on the rocks, while I watched her dunking herself into her bra and putting on her make-up. For weeks I had a mantra repeating in my head, and it was only towards the end that I decided to pay some attention to it and listen to what it was chanting at me, and it was this:
This isn’t right, this isn’t right
.