Heaven's Light (5 page)

The new year had come and gone and they’d still been friends, allies, fellow travellers on the road back to socialism. By now, the relationship had developed a physical side, her initiative, not his, and more and more often he’d find himself staying the night, waking up in the small hours to find her looming over him. From the start, she’d had a frankness about sex and about her own appetites that had first surprised and then alarmed him. Whatever he did, however often, it was never enough. She wanted to be stretched. She wanted to be tested. She wanted him, in her own phrase, to fuck her until her lights went out. This he tried to do, but with the growing certainty that his own role was entirely symbolic. He wore a leather jacket. He lived on his wits. He occasionally kept heavy company. He was, in every conceivable respect, the antithesis of the other politicos she was obliged to mix with. Thus, perhaps, his appeal.

Billy tempted the cat with a saucer of milk and toyed with beating a retreat and going home. He shared a small terrace house about a mile away with two students and an out-of-work chef. Sunday nights, they generally watched football videos. He glanced up at the clock on the wall, asking himself whether he was really up for another hour of Eric Cantona, then he abandoned the idea and began to climb the stairs. The bedroom was at the top of the house. Kate was propped against the pillows, reading the Sunday papers. The lead story speculated on the latest Tory initiative on Europe.
IS IT TIME TO LEAVE?
went the headline.

She glanced up at him, dispassionate, one eyebrow raised. ‘Where’s the car?’

‘Outside.’

‘Key?’

Billy fumbled in his pocket and tossed it onto the counterpane. He could hear the cat outside, scratching at the carpet.

‘I tried to fix the radio,’ he said at last, ‘but it’s still not sorted.’

‘Don’t worry.’

‘No?’

She glanced up, shaking her head. There was a long silence. At length Billy took off his jacket and began to unbutton his jeans. Kate was back in the paper. By the time she looked up again he was naked beside the bed. She studied him briefly then abandoned the paper and reached out for him. Often it started like this, sometimes his call, sometimes hers. Either way, the transition was always abrupt, a shoe-horn that took them from one life into another.

Afterwards, he tried to join her in bed but she pushed him away. When he tried again, she rolled over onto her side, nodding at the pile of clothes on the carpet. ‘Take the cat with you,’ she said sleepily. ‘He needs to go out.’

Hayden Barnaby awoke at dawn, reaching automatically for the glass of water beside the bed. According to the digital clock, it was 04.16. He blinked in the half-darkness, feeling the tightness of the bands around his head. He and Charlie had finally got to bed past midnight, the roast beef still in the oven, three bottles of Burgundy up-ended in the bin.

He slipped out of bed and padded across to the window. Liz was asleep, a long untidy comma of blonde hair splayed across the pillow. When he looked back at her face there was something in its helplessness that reminded him of
Jessie at the hospital. He stood at the window for a full minute, watching her, before shuddering and reaching for his jeans.

Outside, it was still cool, the wind off the sea. Away to the east, a ledge of cloud masked the first blush of sunrise. He used the bleep in the key-ring to unlock the Mercedes and then slipped behind the wheel. The basement flat where Jessie lived was barely a mile away, one of a series of streets that ran down into the heart of Southsea, the city’s resort area. Barnaby slipped the car into gear and eased towards the main road. His route took him past the hotel where he’d exercised the previous day and he paused at the roundabout, looking across at the extension that housed the swimming pool. The heat from the pool had pebbled the smoked glass with condensation, and he tried to imagine Kate Frankham, in just a couple of hours’ time, cruising back and forth, cooling down after her forty minutes on the machines.

Meeting her again had troubled him more than he cared to admit, partly because she’d taken him by surprise, the kind of social ambush he hated, and partly because she’d become so obviously independent. Leaving her had been the hardest decision he’d ever had to make and he’d believed her when she’d told him they were throwing away a relationship that neither would ever be able to duplicate. Yet here she was, barely a year and a half later, plainly in control of a life she adored. He’d seen it in her eyes, in the way she’d sat back and so openly appraised him. And he’d caught it again in the look she’d given him as she’d driven away. You don’t know what you’re missing, she’d been telling him. You poor, sad man.

The Mercedes purred away from the roundabout. The Common stretched away to the right, a big green buffer between the genteel terraces of Southsea and the rash of
cafés and amusements along the seafront. Barnaby slowed for the bend by the Queen’s Hotel, catching sight of the reviewing stand erected for yesterday’s memorial service. The structure was somehow smaller than he’d expected, an untidy tangle of scaffolding, planked and timbered for rising tiers of seats. From the road, against the cold dawn light, it looked bare and empty and on an impulse he pulled in and parked, switched off the engine and let the window purr down. The air in his face tasted of low tide, a rich mixture of salt and seaweed, and Barnaby sat back, letting it sluice through him, clearing his head.

After a minute or two, he got out and crossed the road to the Common. The grass was still waterlogged after Saturday’s rain and he listened to his own footsteps as he squelched around the reviewing stand. He clambered onto the scaffolding and zipped up his thin cotton jacket against the swirling wind. The chairs that had been here yesterday had gone and someone had been round with a broom, but when he reached the third tier and turned to face the sea, it was easy to people the muddy, tyre-rutted spaces, to imagine the marine bandsmen with their helmets and their glittering instruments, to hear the long keening salute from the lone bugler.

Barnaby plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, thinking of Clinton again. The big man had sat here, barely feet away. He’d listened to the Archbishop intone the service. He’d watched the seated rows of veterans, stiff-backed, attentive, bemedalled. And minutes later, when HMS
Illustrious
slipped out of the harbour mouth to take up her position for the fleet review, he’d probably reached across and touched Hillary lightly on the arm, drawing her attention to the big grey aircraft carrier ghosting slowly past the war memorial. As a piece of theatre, the service had
translated wonderfully to television, and Barnaby had watched it again last night, drunk and remorseful, after returning from the hospital.

Now, he raised a weary arm to the imaginary crowds below, wondering again what it might be like to be Bill Clinton, then began to retrace his footsteps to the road. Jessie’s flat lay a couple of blocks inland from the Common, and he walked the hundred yards or so to the street where she lived. The houses here were Victorian, tall forbidding mansions built for the families of naval officers but long since given over to multi-occupation. Most of the flats were let to students or families on benefit and the area had developed a shabby, unloved look: permanently curtained windows, dripping water pipes, loud music, and little nests of bulging bin bags spilling their contents onto the street.

Barnaby counted the front doors until he found number 26. At the hospital, they’d given him a small polythene bag containing Jessie’s possessions. With the pound coin and the packet of Rizlas was a key. Barnaby pushed through the gate, avoiding the flattened scabs of dog turd. Steps led down to an alleyway beside the house. The walls were green with damp and he could feel broken glass underfoot. Halfway along the alley were steps down to a door. Barnaby paused at the bottom and inserted the key in the lock. It turned at once, he stepped inside, leaving the door open, feeling along the wall for a light switch. The smell was overpowering, a mixture of old fat, rising damp, and a rich oriental perfume Barnaby recognized from the days when Jess had taken to burning incense in her bedroom. His hand closed over a wall switch and he found himself surrounded by bicycles in a narrow hall. To the left, a half-open door. He pushed at it with his foot, muffling a cough then announcing his presence.

‘Haagen?’ He hesitated, waiting for an answer. When nothing happened, he stepped inside the room. Light from the street spilled in through the half-window at the front. The room was sparsely furnished, bare floorboards, a table, a council deckchair lifted from the beach, a television, a pile of wooden crates full of books, and a double mattress on the floor. Blankets were thrown back across the top as though someone had just got up, and there was a pile of clothes beside a candle in a saucer.

Barnaby bent to the clothes and untangled a rust-coloured halter top that Liz had given Jessie for Christmas. He lifted it to his face. It smelled of sweat and roll-ups, a sourness that reminded him at once of the prison visits he made to interview clients. He balled it in his hand, meaning to take it home, and bent to inspect the books in one of the crates. A lot were from libraries, thick biographies on various Nazi luminaries, ministers like Speer and Goering; when he looked at the return dates it was obvious that they’d been stolen. He prowled around the room again. Behind the door, on a tea chest, was a sound system. The needle was dancing on the VU meter on the cassette deck, and when he turned up the volume control he found himself listening to something sombre, heavily classical, scored for full orchestra. He lowered the volume again and noticed the flag for the first time. The Union Jack was huge, covering the entire wall, hanging limply from a line of drawing pins pressed into the picture rail. Barnaby touched it. It felt as damp as everything else.

‘What is it, man? Help you at all?’

Barnaby spun round. A small figure stood in the open doorway. Under the army greatcoat, he was wearing a pair of boxer shorts. His feet were bare and his hair was brutally cropped against the bony outlines of his skull. In one hand
he carried a mug of something hot. In the other was a kitchen knife.

‘Haagen,’ Barnaby said mildly. ‘No need for that.’

Haagen stepped closer, peering at Barnaby. His face was as thin as the rest of him and though he recognized Barnaby’s voice, he plainly wanted to make sure. Without his glasses, Haagen was semi-blind.

‘Want these?’ Barnaby had spotted them on top of the audio stack. He offered them to Haagen, who put them on. They robbed him of a little of his menace.

‘Brahms,’ he muttered, nodding at the cassette deck, ‘Requiem.’ He stood by the door for a moment or two then sucked at the liquid in the mug. Then he looked up, studying Barnaby over the rim. The steam began to mist his glasses, and he took them off, rubbing the lenses on the greatcoat. ‘You want some toast or anything?’

Barnaby thought about it. He hadn’t eaten for nearly a day. Toast might help the headache. He followed Haagen through to the kitchen. Another candle stood on a plate beside an ancient electric stove; its guttering flame cast a thin yellow light over the crumbling plaster walls. Haagen speared a slice of bread with a fork and held it over one of the rings.

‘I thought you’d be at the hospital,’ Barnaby said, after a while, ‘last night.’

‘I was.’

‘When?’

‘Before you came. And afterwards.’

‘Why didn’t you stay? Say hello?’

Haagen glanced over his shoulder, a smile edged with the same faint derision Barnaby remembered from the first time he and Haagen had met. The social worker had done the introductions and Haagen had simply sat there in the
court interview room, waiting patiently to have his say. When it came to the details on the charge sheet, he’d admitted everything with an indifference verging on contempt. He’d done the burger bar because they kept lots of ready money. The stuff about animal rights, Barnaby’s suggested line of defence, was bullshit.

‘This OK?’

Haagen was holding out a blackened slice of toast, thickly coated with Marmite. Barnaby bit into it, realizing how hungry he was.

‘So when did you get back?’ he enquired through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘From the hospital.’

‘Midnight. They threw me out. Sussed I wasn’t a doctor.’

‘Why would they think you were?’

‘I’d copped a white coat. Found it in an office. It’s just like anywhere. Wear a uniform, people leave you alone.’

Barnaby nodded, licking Marmite off his fingers. Haagen was the brightest nineteen-year-old he’d ever met, an East German refugee who’d fled to the West with his eldest sister and somehow ended up in Portsmouth. He’d attended schools in the city since the age of five but classroom learning had never appealed to him and at fourteen, expelled from a series of comprehensives for disruptive behaviour, he’d dropped out of formal education altogether. Thereafter, according to the social worker’s case notes, he’d embarked on a fitful career of burglary and petty theft, using the proceeds to fund years of voracious reading. He’d devoured Ernst Junger. He’d gone through most of Nietzsche. He’d read everything he could find on the history of the Third Reich. And with the knowledge he’d acquired went a scalding candour that landed him in almost permanent trouble. Not once had Barnaby known
Haagen stoop to telling a lie, one of the many reasons he’d fought so hard to keep him out of custody.

‘So how was she?’ Barnaby asked at last.

‘Pretty rough. You must have seen her yourself.’

Barnaby nodded, sluicing his fingers under the cold-water tap. Before he’d left the hospital, Jessie had been awake, sprawled on her side on the trolley, retching into a bucket. Liz had been beside her, holding her forehead, telling her that everything would be OK. Jessie had wanted them to ignore her, leave her alone, but Barnaby could sense just how badly she’d been frightened. Whatever she’d been using had nearly killed her. And she knew it.

‘The sister showed me the marks in her arm,’ Barnaby said quietly. ‘How long has this been going on?’