Dust and Desire (29 page)

‘I want to know where the person is who’s paying for you to stay in this five-star get-up,’ I said. That drew the salt out of her. She suddenly appeared hunted, as if she was a child caught putting a whoopee cushion on the vicar’s chair. She answered by lighting a cigarette and instantly putting it out in the ashtray.

‘It’s not for ever,’ she said. ‘Just till I get back on my own two feet. Then we’ll be moving on.’

I chanced my arm. ‘I know it’s Kara Geenan,’ I said. The name made the holes in her face grow wider. ‘She had Gary hypnotised, or else she drugged him up with his favourite cocktail–’

‘That’s not fair! Gary was trying to come off the whiz. He was–’

‘Whatever she did, it doesn’t matter. Because somehow she got him to come and have a crack at me. And when that didn’t work, he killed himself. And I think he knew that, when he was gone, you and the little ones would be looked after. He saw his own death – was forced or tricked into seeing his own death – as providing some kind of key to a door for you, a new future. And here you are.’

‘Nobody said nothing to me about a killing,’ she said, trying not to lean too hard on the last word, so that it came out in a frightened whisper like that of a well-brought-up child trying out some four-letter curse for the first time. ‘Gary said he was going to do a job for someone, and it would mean us getting out of the miseries for a change. He never talked about suicide. Never.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t. He was conned into it, wasn’t he, by this Geenan woman? She runs hypnotherapy courses, and counselling for druggies. Only she does it on the quiet, right? So she can use her poor, desperate clients to do some dirty work for her, if needs be. Which is why she isn’t in the
Yellow Pages
.’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘Bollocks.’ Me trying to come the hard man, while sitting on a midget
Pokémon
beanbag. Carol was buying it, though. She went to refill her glass, but saw that she hadn’t touched the last tot. She put the bottle down.

‘If she finds out it was me–’

‘She’s not going to do a blind thing. I’m going to nail the bitch tonight, if you’ll pull your finger out. Nobody need know about you or your little stash of dirty bills, but if you won’t play Cluedo, there’ll be more coppers in this room than you’ll find in bumbags at a car boot sale.’

‘You wouldn’t, you bastard. Would you? For me and the kids, Gary was a good man.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I was thinking that, too, as he pulled a big knife on me the other night.’

‘The kids,’ she said again, but I just waited.

‘She’s out East somewhere,’ she said at last, and capped the statement by draining her mug.

‘Narrow that down for me a tad, will you? I could knock on all the doors between Homerton and Hoxton Square, but by the time I found her I’d be pointing at her with a wet stump.’

‘Spitalfields,’ she said. ‘I think that’s right.’

‘Better,’ I said. ‘Now all we need is an address, and the next time you see me it won’t be in court.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘I
don’t
.’ Her eyes flared, spittle flying from between her lips. She wasn’t having me on. So that was that. I helped myself to another mug of whisky and thanked her anyway.

‘You won’t screw me over, will you?’ she asked. I didn’t answer. She needed a bit of excitement in her life. On my way out, I helped myself to one of Gary’s jackets that were draped over the banister. She wouldn’t notice, and I was doing her a favour. I reckoned that everything in this house that belonged to Gary would be burned or left on the doormat at the local Oxfam shop, before the end of the day.

I was close. I was so fucking close to her I could smell her, but not quite close enough. I checked my watch: coming up to 5 a.m. Still dark outside, an unpleasant urban dark, fume-filled and uneasy as if the fevered dreams of the people sleeping beneath it were just hanging there, unable to escape. I felt the weight of it pressing down on me as I made my way back to the main road and lucked on to a night bus. As I drew closer to the city centre, the handful of shift-workers dozing in their seats around me grew restive, their breathing troubled, as if they could sense it too. London’s heart was being choked by its own excesses, palpitating with its ceaseless need for violence, as if it were the drug that kept it fast and loose: feeling alive when it was anything but. Nobody lived in London who didn’t look over their shoulder now and again. The pressure you felt here wasn’t anything to do with traffic jams or the nine-to-five. It was the barely suppressed question:
Will I be next?
I was asking that question now. As the bus roared along Camden Road, and I buzzed the driver to stop, I wondered if I’d ever really asked myself any other.

18

T
here used to be a good little bookshop up towards Camden Lock. Compendium, it was called. You could buy all these weird literary ’zines and books about fetishes, American paperback editions, lots of odd stuff: highbrow texts and sleaze so low it must have been just this side of criminal. And then it closed down to make way for something abysmal, just another cliché shop in the row of overpriced clichés that Camden High Street was turning into. Even the people who came here at the weekend for the market became different. They dressed in shabby-chic clothing or peasant gear, or as Goths, but you knew when they went home they’d get back into their jeans and Travis T-shirts. There’s a Wagamama in Camden now. That says it all.

It was just shy of six when I reached the top of Camden High Street, just where it morphs into Chalk Farm. A couple of clubbers in gear that at 2 a.m. would have looked rad now merely made the people wearing it look raddled. They were eating slices of pizza they’d bought from God knows where, while walking silently back to twelve hours of kip. One of those motorised roadsweeps was redistributing the litter more evenly across the roads and pavements, and a garbage-disposal truck was emptying bins that nobody bothered to use.

There was a newsagent’s just opening, and a café that looked as if it had never closed. It would have been nice to buy a paper and read it over a coffee, but my mind wasn’t up to anything that wasn’t Melanie Henriksen. I knew that if I didn’t sort something out before the morning was over, then I’d collapse, unable to wake up again until long after she’d been plugged and left to cool.

I compromised by swapping the last of my shrapnel for a takeaway espresso, which I guzzled while crossing the road to the tattoo parlour opposite the warren of stalls and boutiques that make up Camden Market. Hib’s Tats, the place was called.
Tattoos
announced another sign in the window, in dead neon over three boards of photos depicting the sore, red-edged patterns that people had acquired in Phil Hibbert’s needle-and-ink surgery minutes before those pictures were taken. Above the display window was a black space, curtains drawn.

The coffee had slapped me around a bit, so I kicked at the door and jammed the heel of my hand down on the buzzer, until the black space of Hibbert’s bedroom window became a nicotine-coloured space and the window opened.

‘Fucking lay off it, will you? Crack of fucking dawn.’ How the words got past that expanse of beard, I’d need a degree in physics to work out.

‘Phil Hibbert,’ I said.

‘Correct. Well done. Now get to fuck.’

‘Open up. It’s the police.’

‘My arse.’

‘Do you want to open this door, or do I break it down? Makes no odds to me.’

‘Fucker.’ But he shut the window and a few minutes later a light came on in the hallway, and I heard him stomping down the stairs.

He was swearing again before he’d even got the door open, but that all faded away when he saw the gun I was pointing at his guts.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Get your teeth married and let’s get indoors before my finger gets too cold and needs a work-out.’

We went into the shop front, where his catalogues were stacked with pictures of butterflies and dragons and tribal symbols. There was the smell of nervous sweat and dead cigarettes in the walls. Plastic chairs were arrayed around this waiting room, and there was even a small table covered in magazines: copies of
New Woman
and
FHM
from the late 1990s.

‘Let’s go into your surgery,’ I said.

‘You look like shit,’ he said.

‘What’s your frame of reference, pubis?’ I said. ‘That remark might hurt if you meant anything to me. As it is, I haven’t met you before in my puff, and I don’t expect to again. Unless you fancy going face-to-face with me in court. So let’s get this over with, so we can get back to where we were before, hmm? Me outside, breathing fresh air, and you in your pit, feeling up your so-called dick. And both of us a lot happier.’

I sat on the edge of his treatment table. His tattoo gear was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he kept it in a little black briefcase and got it out with a nasty little flourish, like Laurence Olivier in
Marathon Man
.

‘Who are you? What do you want? There’s no need to play hard bastards.’

‘I’m a private detective,’ I said with a start, noticing one of my business cards pinned to a cork board filled with local adverts on the wall behind his head. ‘What I want is for you to do me a very great favour.’

‘Get on with it.’

‘Just what I wanted to hear.’ My stomach rumbled. ‘Look, you don’t have anything to eat, do you?’

‘For you, after that graceful entry? You can eat the winnets off my arsehole.’

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I’m starving.’

He reached around the back of a desk and pulled out a packet of biscuits, which he handed over, reluctantly. I could have thrown the gun away and asked him to marry me there and then, if it weren’t for the beard. I devoured a couple and, as the sugar kicked in, my eyes sprang apart as if I’d been dunked in ice-cold water.

‘Okay,’ I said, feeling better, the need for sleep retreating for a while. ‘Okay, this is what’s happened. You had a visit from a friend of mine. Bloke called Errol, he could fit me and you into his trouser pockets – yeah, I see you know who I’m talking about. Now, I know he shook you down pretty vigorously, but Errol, he’s thicker than two poodles. What he forgot to ask you about our pal Gary Cullen was, where was he going for this treatment of his?’

‘Spitalfields,’ Hibbert said, quicker than a kid in class trying to win a gold star.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘If you could bung me an address, then I could leave you in peace. As opposed to leaving you in pieces.’

He didn’t hang around admiring my wit. He said, ‘Spitalfields Market. Basement of the Elegant House. It’s some kind of airy-fairy gaff sells scented candles, soap with bits in it, herbs. You know the stuff. Gary told me he used to come out of there smelling like a whore’s drawers.’

Fatigue slammed down on me. I don’t know if it was because I felt I was suddenly in charge of how things might turn out, that for the first time I had the upper hand over Kara Geenan, but my body seemed to give in a little, to flag under the weight of adrenaline that was spewing through my veins. I sat down in his dentist’s chair and the light swam around my head. I saw him move across the plane of my vision, his beard like some dirty cloud spoiling the view. The gun was heavy in my hand, so I put it down and took off Gary Cullen’s jacket. The light was turning into liquid, drops of brilliant water that wouldn’t fall and just kept rilling around on the ceiling. Hibbert rolled up my sleeve and wiped the biceps of my left arm with alcohol. From somewhere he produced what looked like a pen with a lead attached to it. His beard parted and I fixed on its pink, wet centre.

‘I don’t…’ I said.

A tongue flickered from the end of the needle, black and bifid. I felt its heat against my skin, and then all I knew was the buzzing, and his beard turned into a swarm of flies and I could see nothing beyond that.

* * *

I woke up and the light was gone. No, not gone. Different. It didn’t have the watery edge of before. I sat up and a blanket fell away from me. I reached for the gun and it wasn’t there. I pulled my sleeve up and I was slightly disappointed to find the skin had not been broken. Sunlight painted a square of gold on the drab wall of the parlour. Late sunlight. Very late. I felt my guts clench and I stood up groggily, reaching out for a hand or a rail that wasn’t there.

Stumbling across the room, I got to the parlour to find Hibbert in there, his needle working on a red-haired woman. She was having a spider’s web across her breasts.

‘Look,’ she said, when she saw me, ‘tit for tat!’

I ignored her. You would, too. ‘Hibbert, what the fuck did you do?’ I said. My voice felt gummed up and untrustworthy.

‘I did nothing. You blacked out. It was like someone reached inside you and pulled your plug. You must have been burning the candle at both ends with a flame-thrower.’

‘I’m in a rush,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have–’

‘I know, but you sparked out and there was no kicking you awake. I tried, believe me.’

‘Where’s my gun?’

His beard moved; I could imagine his jaw hardening beneath it. ‘I don’t think you should… I took it off you.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it looks that way, doesn’t it? So give it back.’

‘Guns,’ he said. ‘People who use guns…’

‘There’s a killer loose,’ I said. ‘He’s killed at least three people. And he’s got someone I care about and if I don’t find him, he’ll kill her too. If he hasn’t already. And there’s no way I want to go up against him with nothing more deadly than the piss in my dick.’

The woman laughed. Hibbert withdrew his needle and gave her a look. She quietened down and he went back to work. In the shade of the hallway, his own tattoos writhed around his arms as if they’d been imbued with life.

‘So call the police,’ he said.

My eyes filled up with red. When they cleared again, I had my hand wrapped around his chin mullet, and I was smacking his head down against the bone in my knee. The woman was sitting back on the chair, lifting her boob up for a closer look. I felt awake and refreshed. While I was putting dents into his head, I thanked him for lending me his blanket. He was making noises, the same noise over and again.