Dust and Desire (37 page)

So how about Vermilion Antagonistes for a girl and Braggadocio Clapperboard for a boy?

How tragic that Daddy suffered a horrible death just before birth, Rebecca said.

‘Maybe he’s off sick today,’ I said.

‘He was fine this morning,’ Jen said.

‘It comes on fast sometimes.’

‘He would have texted me, or called in. He’s good like that.’

‘So call him.’

‘I tried,’ she said. ‘He’s not picking up. I think he’s on to me.’

She was pale with fright, her eyes unable to lock with mine.

‘Christ, Joel,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

I said: ‘Where does he live?’

She said: ‘You won’t hurt him.’ It wasn’t a question.

* * *

Renfrew lived out Clapton way in a house on Wattisfield Road that overlooked Millfields cricket pitch. When I got there it was beginning to rain, despite clear, soft blue skies just a little further south. I parked on the street, a little way from the building, and waited. A monkey puzzle tree grew in his front yard. A wad of circulars stuck out from the letterbox like an impudent white tongue. A woman dressed for sunshine in a lemon-yellow dress pushed a buggy across the grass, the backs of her legs streaked with mud.

I watched Renfrew’s windows for a while but there was no movement beyond them. I wondered if he might well have seen Jen’s texts to me and decided it was time to get out of Dodge. I got out of the car and walked over to his front door. I rang the bell once and I heard it echo through the building. Bare floorboards, I thought. And no footsteps falling upon them.

I walked round to the back of the house, slipping through a tired, sagging side gate, and saw a cat bowl, freshly-filled, on the patio near the door. I tried the handle. Open. Keys dangling from the handle on the inside. I stepped through into the kitchen. A smell of garlic and harissa: last night’s dinner still hanging in the air. Breakfast remnants. Renfrew ate well in the morning: fruit, yogurt and muesli. Green tea. More keys on a table. Along with a passport. A door leading to the cellar. Locked.

I moved through the house and the creak of my feet on the boards went with me. The rooms were small and unremarkable, utilitarian. There were no photographs on the surfaces, no prints on the walls. It seemed like a house that was hardly ever used: a sleeping station rather than a place where warm memories were made. But then who cared about their house when long shiftwork hours were the focus of your day?

I went upstairs. Some of Jen’s products in a wash bag on the cistern. In the bedroom, on a double bed, was a large suitcase. I stared at it for a while, and at the indentation next to it. I felt the skin on my scar prickle as if cold air had just flooded the room. I raised my hand to touch it and it was that action that saved my life.

A looped bicycle chain whipped over my head and snapped back against the edge of my hand, tightening suddenly. I felt myself forced back against a hard body. Panic descended, but all I could think was… how is he doing this with just one arm? I did my best to make some space, forcing my hand against the links, knowing it would be agony, but knowing too that the chain could not slice through my skin in the way a piano wire would. I earned enough room to be able to turn my head to the left. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that the man who must be Renfrew had the other end of his chain in his teeth. I got angry then. No way was I going to allow myself to be garrotted by a fucking one-armed man. No way was I going down in
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
as the guy who was strangled by a mouth. I’d never live it down.

I closed my eyes and jerked my head back, smacking my skull into his nose. His grip on the chain loosened. I stamped my boot down hard on his instep, then turned within the circle of his arm and hit him in the chest as hard as I could. I felt bones snap – his ribs or my fingers I couldn’t yet know for sure – and we both cried out. I could taste blood in the back of my throat. My hand throbbed where the links had chewed at it. He shook the chain out and it rattled on the bare floor. He seemed to like the theatre of that because he kept doing it. I tried to keep to his left so he wouldn’t be able to swing it at me with much of an arc.

‘You going somewhere, Carl?’ I asked. I sprayed blood on that aspirant ‘s’; I’d bitten my tongue pretty bad.

‘How do you know me?’

‘I’m a friend of a friend. She wanted me to come and see if you were okay.’

‘Bollocks,’ he said.

He came at me with the chain and I sidestepped him, but he twisted and caught me full in the face with a roundhouse kick. My mistake was to try to stay upright. He tossed the chain to one side and in that moment I knew that he knew he had me. I was positioned to defend another kick, but instead he punched me above my left eyebrow and followed it with a head-butt. I was trying to say something, trying to say how that wasn’t very jujitsu of him, but the darkness smothered my words.

* * *

I can’t have been out for long because when I revived my tongue was still bleeding. I was lying at the foot of a set of stone steps – I could just make out their shape in the thin edge of light sneaking under the foot of the door – on a cold cement floor. I hobbled up the steps and tried the handle. Locked. I pressed my ear against the wood and heard Carl coming down the stairs with his suitcase.

‘You won’t get far, you fucking freak!’ I shouted. ‘We’re on to you!’ But I doubt he heard me. And even if he did, so what? He was gone. He could be at the airport in an hour. He could be lost on the network of rails in less time than that. Yes he had quite an unusual identifying feature, but there was something about him, the way he crept up on me on those bald floorboards, like Grasshopper on rice paper. He could lose himself, all right. He was smoke and shadow.

I flicked on the light and looked around the cellar. Unlike some cellars I knew, used as a dumping ground for the debris a family collects over time, this one had been kept tidy. Interlocking foam mats covered the floor in red and black squares. A punch bag hung from a chain attached to the ceiling. Free weights were arranged in one corner. Next to that was a filing cabinet. Next to that was a small fridge freezer.

I shuffled over to the furniture, trying to work out if anything was broken. My fingers were sore but I could move them. My left eye was puffing shut, and the back of my head was throbbing where it had met with the gristle in the centre of Renfrew’s face. But I was mostly functional. In the filing cabinet were folders containing bills, bank statements, documents regarding Renfrew’s car, various papers concerning his job. I found a large envelope stuffed with cards from landmark anniversaries, separated from each other with elastic bands. Eighteen, twenty-one, thirty. Y
ou passed your driving test! Congratulations on your new job! We’re sorry to see you go!
In another envelope was a bunch of notes and cards and letters from old girlfriends.
I love you. I hate you. I miss you.
I sifted through them, feeling ugly at the enjoyment I was receiving from seeing his seamy past laid bare before me. It was a kind of revenge. Pathetic, but then I’m not the most noble of men.

I dug out my phone. No signal. I felt a sudden piercing panic as I imagined Renfrew setting fire to those fliers in the door with me trapped down here, but murder would only intensify the search for him, if any were to be ordered, which I doubted. I closed the filing cabinet and reached for the fridge door. If he had any booze down here then not only would it make the wait bearable, pleasurable even, but I would take out a full page advertisement in
The Times
apologising to Renfrew for everything. I should have known, though that a green tea-drinking martial arts expert would be unlikely to own anything so unhealthy as a beer fridge. The shelves were packed with health drinks – pomegranate juice, carrot juice, kefir, a range of smoothies, a couple of protein shakes. I slammed the door in disgust and tried the freezer.

I was sitting on the other side of the room without knowing how I got there. The freezer door was still open, as was the first drawer I’d pulled out. I was trying to convince myself that what I’d seen wasn’t what I’d seen.

A pair of eyes. Tiny organs on ice. A hand, like something snapped from a doll.

* * *

Gone seven o’clock in the evening, my arse numb from sitting on the floor. I was rooting around in a toolbox for something that might help me get the door open when I heard footsteps on the gravel drive, and a key in the lock. Carl returning, seeing sense. I doubted that. And anyway, these footsteps were lighter. I heard them go upstairs. After about twenty minutes they returned to the kitchen. I heard a cutlery drawer rattle open. Then a key in the cellar door.

‘Hello Jen,’ I said.

‘I’m finished,’ she said. She was holding a long butcher’s knife in her hand.

‘No, no. We can find him. Or at the very least, we can get you safe. But I doubt he’ll be ba–’

She sat on the bottom step. The knife gritted against its edge and she looked down at it, as if surprised to see it there. ‘No,’ she said. ‘This was not how it was meant to go.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She looked up at me and there was accusation in her eyes. Anger too. She levelled the point of the knife at me and her lips thinned. ‘You were meant to kill him.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me. That business between you and the guy. You and the guy on the roof at St Pancras. I read all about that in the newspaper. It was on TV. You were ruthless.’

‘That guy was ruthless. Carl wasn’t a killer. He’s sick, but he’s no killer.’

‘But you are.’

‘Jesus Christ, Jen. What the fuck are you talking about? What I did, I did in self defence.’

‘I know what he’s like. I know what he’s capable of. I thought you could finish him for–’ She stopped short and put her hand to her face. There was a green tinge to her skin but it might have been this weird subterranean false light, and the pressure of my black eye.

‘For… what? You?’

She sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re the private investigator. You work it out.’

We stared at each other. Her eyelids were drooping and she kept licking her lips. She had positioned the knife blade flat against her arm, the point dimpling the blue shadows at her wrist.

‘What have you taken?’ I asked.

‘Thirty diazepam tablets,’ she said. ‘I told you, I’m finished.’

Something heavy and thick was moving through me, like cold, like sickness. Dread.

‘Why did you and Graham split up, why did you really split up, all those years ago?’ I asked. My voice was suddenly small and uncertain in this enclosed space, cowed by the enormity of what was opening in my thoughts. ‘You told me it was because he wanted children and you didn’t.’

She smiled. Her eyes were closed now. When she talked her voice was gluey with fatigue. ‘He wanted children and I… couldn’t,’ she said.

‘You couldn’t? Did he know that?’

‘Eventually.’

‘Why not?’

‘I had a hysterectomy when I was seventeen. I suffered from endometriosis.’

‘And you never told him?’

‘I loved him, Joel. To tell him was to see him walk away.’

I had been backing away from her, beginning to understand the shape of my dread. Perhaps I had known all along, ever since the moment she came into the café from the wind-blasted Praed Street, maybe earlier, when I’d seen the way Graham watched the children playing in the park, all those years ago. I felt my thigh collide gently with the edge of a wooden chest. I sat down on it. I was trembling all over. It felt as if my bones were trembling.

‘Why did you do it, Jen? You tried to kidnap a child.’

‘And I couldn’t go through with it. That’s when I realised I had to find another way.’

‘The freezer… the freezer…’ I couldn’t say anything else. I didn’t know what to do.

‘I wanted to make a baby,’ she said, as if I was the world’s most stupid person. And I felt it, in that moment.

‘What’s the knife for?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry. It’s not for you. It’s in case I’m sick. But I think it will all be okay. I’m going to sleep now.’

I followed her at a distance while she moved up through the house. At one point I thought she was going to collapse on the stairs, but she composed herself and made it to the bedroom. She dropped the knife on the floor. She reached around to unzip her skirt, but thought better of it, or no longer had the strength for it. She got on the bed. She fell asleep.

I watched her. I don’t know why. At one point, after about ten minutes, she was copiously sick. But the drug was deep in her by then and she did not revive. I watched her for an hour, until the skin of her lips was blue, until the tremor in her eyelids was stilled.

I watched the monster until I was sure.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

L
ove and thanks to Mum and Dad, as ever. I owe it all to you. Thanks to the friends who read early drafts of this novel: Richard Coady, Mark Morris, Nicholas Royle, Michael Smith and the late, great Graham Joyce. Thanks to Robert Kirby for his faith in the book, Maxim Jakubowski for enthusiasm and support, and Peter Lavery for supreme editing skills. Thanks too to John Schoenfelder for help and advice. I’m deeply grateful to Miranda Jewess at Titan for breathing life into Joel Sorrell and giving him a future. Special thanks to Rhonda, who read this first, showed unwavering support for it and helped to find it a home.