Dust and Desire (33 page)
The light changed. A deep fart from a train reverberated through the walls: of course, the platforms of St Pancras International must be just on the other side. Keeping close to the wall, I started up the stairs. A landing maybe two dozen risers up sat below two huge, ornate arched windows covered with anti-pigeon netting. I could make out figures on the platforms below, the snout of a Eurostar idling in front of the buffers. A black wedge of night hung beneath the great arch of the train shed at its northernmost point. I felt secure there, so close to the mundane, to the everyday. Somehow it wouldn’t matter how weird or dangerous things turned out, as long as I kept in mind the passengers down there, with their magazines and elasticated underwear and their six-inchers from Subway.
A soft, snicking sound drew my attention back to the unremarkable stairwell, what I guessed would have been a means of access for the servants when the building had been known as the Midland Grand. I climbed half a dozen steps to a door that would have led me on to the first floor, had it been unlocked. I doubted Phythian had keys for the place, but I couldn’t be sure. I had to keep going. The second-floor door was shut, but it opened when I turned the handle. I was greeted with a sigh of rotting wallpaper and ancient dust, despite all the clean new rooms waiting for their new beds and shower units. Recesses were punched into the darkness on either side of a long corridor running parallel to the Euston Road. It was hard, forcing myself out on to that corridor with all its potential booby traps and tripwires. Every shadow contained his silent form, waiting for me to draw level before he dropped on me and finished off the job. I wondered if any murders had been committed in this building over the years, and whose blood in the floorboards my own might soon mingle with. But I got myself through the doorway and walked down the centre of the corridor, one step at a time. All I had to do was think of those dead girls. All I had to do was imagine Sarah struggling under his damaging hands. It was easy once I thought of that.
Halfway along, the beam of a torch sliced across the carpet at the corridor’s far end and I ducked left through a door into a sub-corridor which served three large rooms that must have comprised an extravagant suite at one time. The first room had an open fireplace and enormous windows that reached just a few feet above the floor to a few feet beneath the ceiling. The drone of traffic rose up from the main drag. I caught a glimpse of the BT Tower, off to the left, before the torch swung into the mini-corridor and I had to start moving again. I tried to match the rhythm of the security guard’s footsteps, approaching him as he approached me, but on opposite sides of the dividing wall. I had to gamble that he wouldn’t move into any of the three rooms on his right; if he did, I’d be caught in his beam. I could try to butch it out, claim I was a builder who had left some tools behind, but it wouldn’t look good. All the grunt work was finished here. Now it was the turn of the painters and decorators.
I was bypassing a door to my left, keeping my eye on the torch beam as it gradually intensified, its angle of attack rising as it met the hand that wielded it, when he did decide to move into the next room in the suite, directly in front of me, despite being able to see that there was nothing in there. I glimpsed him, not ten feet away, and stepped neatly to my right just as he turned the beam my way; I watched it fall across the space I’d just occupied. Again I followed his lead, matching his measured tread, my heart leaping like a barefooted punk in a mosh-pit full of broken glass, and I heard him sniff loudly as we bypassed each other, separated by a mere inch or two of wall.
I gathered pace once I had jinked back on to the main corridor, knowing that he would be out of the suite before I reached the far end. He might not train the torch back along the route he’d already covered before arriving at the servants’ stairway, but then again he might. I was steeling myself to face the wash of light, to hear a strident voice calling after me, but it never came. Instead I found myself turning on to the main landing of the second floor of St Pancras Chambers. The sweeping staircase before me made the stairwell back home look like something borrowed from a Barbie doll’s house. Other corridors peeled off this floor, leading to suites and storerooms and function areas. They all seemed to contain yet more beams of light pushing through the darkness, so I skipped up another floor, hoping that Phythian was shy of security guards, too, and had done the same.
I thought I saw something move, like a shadow that flirts with the periphery of your vision, at the end of the corridor opposite the top of the stairwell. I moved into it fast, because the landing was better illuminated than the corridors, thanks to the huge windows sucking in the lights from the main roads surrounding King’s Cross. Some of the rooms along this arm abutted the roof of the train shed. They were filled with damaged filing cabinets and desks, and they seemed to have been overlooked. In one, a table groaned under the weight of a prehistoric manual typewriter, so these rooms must have been used by hotel staff, presumably as their administrative offices. Perhaps no guest would tolerate a view of the train-shed roof, or the constant clamour that went on beneath it, so maybe these rooms would end up being part of the staff headquarters, and therefore didn’t need to be improved as urgently as the others.
The last room on the left was the WC. A stained, cracked toilet bowl gaped as if in shock at some of the things it had witnessed over the years. Flyblown mirrors hung over sinks that bore the tracks of hard water dribbling from loose taps over a long period. The window above the urinals was open. A gangway beyond led to a metal stairway that crisscrossed the rising vault of the train shed, leading to its apex a hundred feet above the ground. The weather gods, in their wisdom, had decided that a session of sleet was in order; it now slanted in across the roof of the shed, propelled by a bitter wind. Sleet is the most miserable weather going: it can’t be arsed to wait till it’s cold enough to become snow, and it’s not wet enough to be proper rain. Every time you see it, your mouth goes south and your eyes garner the kind of weighed-down, pained look that often accompanies stomach cramps. I made a mental note to send that DJ who had promised pleasant weather something unpleasant in the post, then ducked through.
I clambered on to the gantry and hurried across towards the shed itself. Spotlights picking out the clock tower provided a little ambient light for the shed roof, like a gleaming finger stroking the outermost curve. Outlined against this, Phythian was making his way up to one of the catwalks that led the entire length of the shed, extending to the furthermost point overhanging the converging tracks that, as soon as they had crossed a narrow bridge over York Street, split into numerous routes diverging out of the city.
How desperate was this clown? Was he so intent on evading capture that he’d taken to living on rooftops like a fucking pigeon? I watched him until he disappeared beyond the crest of the arch, heading towards the opposite side of the shed. I followed, glad of the donkey jacket, but I could still feel the cold searing through me, sleet stinging my face. When I got to the brow of the roof, where he had slipped out of sight, I was able to see him a couple of hundred feet away, crouching down on his haunches and staring out at the night sky. Liverpool lay in that direction: a home and a hell for the both of us. He remained as still as a bit of architecture, a gargoyle waiting for time and the weather to erode him.
I kept my hand inside the jacket as I approached, loosely clasped around the hammer. I couldn’t see the blade on him, but he wouldn’t have dropped it. It was with him like an extension, an extra finger for his hand, and every bit as familiar. I thought of the way Barry Liptrott had been carved apart, and any doubt I had that this kid wasn’t insane flew apart in my mind like tissue paper fed to a flame. Twenty feet away I spotted the remnants of a meal scattered next to a sleeping bag nailed into the framework enclosing the panels that comprised most of the roof. He was totally still, his hands empty, planted firmly on either side of his body. Dark shapes moved faintly underneath us like fish swimming at the bottom of a brackish pond.
‘Hey,’ I said, trying to come over all authoritative, but sounding like a boy at bollock-drop. I should have brought a clipboard. ‘Hey, this place is off limits to the public. You’re trespassing. We could have you arrested.’
I wasn’t going to get an answer from him. That was okay. We both had plenty of time on our hands. I dumped the site-foreman voice and squeezed the handle of the hammer. I thought about how, only the day before, I was determined not to listen to his side of things. That I would simply jump in and do him before he could have a chance against me. But now he was right in front of me – a big, solid shape, yet somehow still possessing the stature of a child – I found my resolve fragmenting. He was what? Eighteen? He had a whole lifetime in front of him. And then the frozen, lizard-like part of my brain must have thawed a little, and I thought, he’s going down for life for multiple murder, so you might as well fuck him over anyway.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s cold. Let’s get inside. It’s over.’
Quietly, but just audible above the slashing sleet, he said: ‘It isn’t over till I say so.’
He knew my face.
He knew my face, because I knew his. Some famished thing in the back of my head extended a claw that was holding the school photograph Don Banbury had shown me. Gemma Blythe smiling out of it, looking tired, looking like a teacher whose class is getting on top of her. Gemma, her voice broken and hoarse with tears, saying,
Don’t leave me, Joel. How will I get by without my Sorry Boy? Don’t leave me, please. What about my babies? WHAT ABOUT MY BABIES?
‘You… Gemma?’ I said, but he rolled on to his back and flipped his legs over his head – agile, frighteningly agile for his size – before I could get the rest of it out. His feet were bare. I saw the knife only after it had ricocheted off the hard hat I was wearing, and slithered away down the curve of the roof. Now he was upon me and I was staggering back, trying to keep my footing on what was to me uncharted territory, and slippery with it, all the time trying to get the hammer clear of the pocket. The claw had become caught in the heavy, wet fabric.
I jammed my arm up in between us and, though he was total calmness, economy of movement, focus, there was also madness in his eyes. I knew it would be dangerous to do so, but if I could unlock that frenzy, try to bait his rage, then I might survive.
He was trying to get at my throat with his teeth.
‘I know you,’ I said. He laughed, not even expecting that himself; a rope bridge of saliva connected our faces for a couple of seconds. Everything slowed down: I saw each and every arrow of sleet lash into us, every wet explosion of it on our skin in acid-bright detail. The powder-white arc of light from the floods turned the outer edges of him into frost, left his centre an impenetrable black thing. I said, ‘I’ve wiped your arse.’
The eye is the only part of the human body that does not alter in size throughout a person’s life. It possesses exactly the same dimensions from the first breath to the last. I knew this fucker’s eyes – eyes now close enough for me to lick them.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ I said. ‘She took her own life. I was well out of it by then. I had no idea. You want someone to blame, dig her up and stick your knife through what’s left of her. She’s to blame. She took her own life, and she took your life too.’
He breathed on me and I almost folded with pity, with the horrific threat of love. I realised that, if things had turned out differently, I might have loved him. I remembered him as a baby, lalling happily in his cot, smiling up at me, his eyes brimming with complete trust. The smell of his scalp. The tiny hands, the fingers grabbing my hair, sometimes reaching out to touch my nose or my mouth with barely creditable tenderness and precision. There had been nothing evident in him then to turn him this way. No stains, regrets, grudges. All that was in him was the warmth of love and a blissfully simple routine of sleep and nourishment and play, and wondrous things viewed with large laughing eyes. He had been a happy baby, so what had gone wrong?
I had gone wrong. His mother had gone wrong.
I could almost smell milk on his mouth. His teeth didn’t yet know what a filling was.
My woeful boots slipped on the glass panels and I went down, my other leg twisting awkwardly under me, the knee popping as if it had just opened a bottle of champagne. He actually winced at the sound. I screamed as I landed on my back, and the violence of it threw him off me. I rolled as he sprang back towards me, already on his feet. Again I tried for the hammer. It shifted a little, tearing the lining of the pocket. Sleet filled my eyes, slapped me awake.
I lifted an arm, but could only partially parry the kick he aimed at my nuts. I felt the jag of pain cut through my groin. I was off-balance again. This time I tripped on one of the gangway rails and sprawled on to my back. I started sliding and the sky rolled like a few half twists on a kaleidoscope. I rammed my fingers into the roof’s curve but was rewarded only with a couple of torn fingernails. Another tug on the hammer and it ripped free, but I almost lost it as my arm jerked back. I tightened my grip and brought the claw down hard, felt myself jerk to a halt as it bit into one of the rubber seals edging the roof panels.
Christ, what was wrong with me? I thought I was all right. I thought I could move okay, still pretty fit for a guy in his mid-thirties. I was no Premiership footballer, but then I wasn’t exactly a Sunday afternoon toe-poke either. Phythian was making me look like the last spaz to get picked for the school netball team.
I levered myself upright and scrabbled back to an even footing, my kneecap feeling as if it had been replaced by an eggshell filled with molten lead. He’d retrieved his knife, and my cheek burned in recognition. I peeled off the hard hat and flung it at him. He volleyed it back over my head, showing me exactly what balance meant.
