Hellbound Hearts (5 page)

Now he glanced around him. Sleet against the sodium-lit night like ash at the end of the world. Buses shifting through low gears, ploughing filthy slices of old snow onto pavements riddled with litter and grime. The muffled beat of a band playing the MEN arena. He used to love live music. He'd go to a couple of gigs a week in his twenties, if he could afford it. Gemma hated the sweat and the stink. The beer in plastic. She was a CD to his scratched vinyl. The glossy black windows of the Arndale Centre. The electric cables for the trams stretching out like exposed veins. Low-wattage bulbs burning in upper-floor flats. Secret homes. What went on? Who dared to know?

Over to the right, in an alley adjacent to a fish and chip shop, a line of industrial bins disgorged their contents onto paving stones that had cracked in the cold. On the wall above them was a faint silvery line, like the trail of a slug across a dewy lawn. More graffiti. He realized now why he had come here. He knew what he would find. A killer with a calling card. It was all the rage. He thought of Rachel Biddeford's torn body and thought of the pain she must have endured. The silent screams on these victims' faces seemed ingrained. They must have been so very violent to cause the corners of their mouths to split. No Hollywood shrieking here. No C-sharp in plum lipstick. No handsome A-list star to come to their rescue. They lay in the shit and the sleet, their eyes cramming up with snow until some drunk or graveyard-shifter stumbled over their solid bodies. And they remained frozen forevermore. In time, in the minds of the people they left behind. Iced hearts beyond thawing. Always associated with violence and loneliness and death.

“I'll warm you up, love,” Gravier whispered. There were tears in his eyes and he couldn't even begin to kid himself that it was the cold bringing them on. He thumbed the lock on his mobile phone and called Simmonds.

“Hands off cocks, on socks,” Gravier said, when Simmonds
eventually picked up. “I want you to take a ride out to the SoCs in Whalley Range and Denton. Check the walls for graffiti. Yes, Simmonds, graffiti. What do you think I fucking said? Tahiti? Look for silver paint. References to the cold or winter. Call me when you find it. I also want a list of all spray-paint manufacturers and suppliers in the Greater Manchester area. Automotive finishers, decorator centers, varnishing and coatings trades. The lot. And I want that about ten minutes before I called you. Check this out as well.
Three feet of ice does not result from one day of cold weather
. I found it at the Shude Hill scene. Very clever, isn't it. Well find out where it comes from. Oh, and Simmonds? Next time you don't pick up on the first ring, you'll be wearing your phone as a butt plug. Got it?”

He grew aware of something tickling the back of his scalp like fear. He turned to face the main road and saw a figure watching him from the tram stop platform. He was bathed in the acid white of floodlights, a tall, thin man in a long, gray coat and a dark, woolen hat. The man stared at Gravier, unabashed. His hands were deep in his coat pockets, writhing, as if he were wrestling to keep something from exposing itself. Gravier stepped toward him. “Could I have a minute with you, sir?” he called out.

The man did not move. The woolen hat was pulled down almost to the point where it blinded him. The closer Gravier got, the more he did not want to approach. It was as if he were being repulsed. When he was standing in front of the other man, whom he could now see was closer to six foot four, he noticed that the hat was not dark; it was a pale cement color, but it was covered with stains.

“Could I have a minute of your time, please?” Gravier asked again, having to give more spine to his voice than he was used to.

“You could. You could have more.”

Christ. A smell hit him, of all the things that made him want to puke. Wet dogs, tooth decay, weeks' old piss in the doorways of dilapidated buildings. It was all he could do not to gag in front of the man, not that he'd notice. His eyes were shivering in their sockets.

“Are you all right?” Gravier asked.

“All right,” the man replied. His voice was accentless. It was like water.

Gravier found himself struggling to even remember what he'd said. He glanced back at the bins and their overscore of painted wit. “We're currently investigating a murder, sir,” he said, trying to summon some iron. “I wondered if you knew anything about what happened here, January twenty-seventh.”

“Lonely man?”

“I'm sorry?”

“The lonely can take extreme measures to, ah, stop being lonely anymore.”

“What have you got in your pockets?”

“My hands.”

“Come on, mate. Empty them. It's too cold for this. You can smart-mouth me all you like down the station if that's what you'd prefer.”

The man took his hands from his pockets and opened them, a conciliatory gesture. They were huge. The nails were like scimitars on his fingers, backlit: ten pearlescent crescents, packed with filth. Gravier felt dread shift inside him, like something concrete. This man was dangerous. “I have nothing in my pockets.”

Gravier suddenly did not feel like frisking him for the truth. “What's your name?” he asked.

The man was sweating. It was maybe minus one or two degrees Celsius, yet here came tears of perspiration from the collar of his hat.
More worried than he's letting on
, Gravier thought. The man bore the expression of someone digging lightly for a recently forgotten item of information, and then: “Henry Johns.”

“Henry?”

“Henry, yes.”

“Do you have any ID on you, Mr. Johns?”

“I don't.”

“Address?”

“I'm not from this place.”

“Why are you in Manchester, then?”

“Business.”

“What kind of business?”

“I represent a client in the entertainment industry.”

“What, so you're an agent?”

“You could say that.”

“And who is your client?”

Johns handed Gravier a card. Gravier took it. He couldn't remember where it might have come from; he was sure Johns's hands had been empty ever since he removed them from his pockets. The card was a translucent tablet with a claw-mark effect cut out of the top-right-hand corner. A name, in eggshell white, was just legible if you tilted the card away from the plane of vision.
Lady Ice.
No phone number. No address.

“Great card,” Gravier said. “I bet she does a roaring trade.”

“You'll find her when you need her the most. They all do.”

Gravier was tired and cold. He wanted coffee. He gave Johns a card of his own. “Give me a call if you have anything interesting to say,” he said. “A girl of nineteen was killed and then dumped here. Not good. Not good.” He was turning to go, feeling bad about the whole thing, warning signs going off all over his head.
Nick him. Nick him now
.

“She's sweet,” Johns said. “She could be yours, if you want her. She wants you.”

Gravier stared at him. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Girl of your dreams, Detective Inspector.”

Gravier ignored him and hurried away. He climbed into his car and turned up the heater, his hands shaking. The sweat drizzling out of the wool of Johns's cap was what had been staining it. Sort of dark. Sort of bloody. He closed his eyes to the impossibility of it and released the handbrake. He drove up Shude Hill, retracing the steps he had taken, until he was level with the tram platform. He saw Johns moving away down Balloon Street toward Victoria train station. Gravier watched him remove his woolen hat. He took it off tenderly. He peeled it away from the exposed lobes of his brain.

Back at the nick in time for breakfast. Sausage sandwich and a tangerine. Hot, sweet tea. You get it down you, somehow. A head full of black ice and white bone. Soaking, cold trouser cuffs. You should have arrested him. On suspicion of . . . anything you say . . . But too scared. Too old. It was in him, all of a sudden, this need to get out. You put the hours in, you became the job and happiness, fulfillment never came, and you ended up realizing it was because you had hated the job all along. What he'd seen, he hadn't seen. Put it down to a lack of blood sugar. Put it down to nervous exhaustion.

Gravier here. Ah, Simmonds. Nice of you to make the effort. Give us the griff, then. What's that you say? I found a Chinese proverb, did I? Well, well. He is an educated boy, isn't he? What about the others? Any luck? Yes? You found some? Excellent. We'll make a policeman of you yet. Well yes, you have to follow your hunch, don't you? As Quasimodo said while walking backward one day. E-mail them over, soon as you can. And, Simmonds? Thank you.

Whalley Range. Emma Tees.
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
Denton. Gillian Jarvis.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.
Simmonds had called him with the authors. Kafka he'd heard of. The beetle man, wasn't he? But E. E. Cummings? He didn't so much sound like a poet as a porn mag for mice.

Patterns in frost. The bodies so cold the blood had frozen to black plaques on their flesh. A confectionery crackle as they were peeled clear of pavements and roads. Gravier lay in bed, feeling the temperature drop. His skin felt old and papery, hanging from his body as if unattached. Get up too quickly and it might simply flutter away from his bones. He thought of the girl on her bike, bent over the handlebars, thumbing at the spring-loaded clapper of the bell. He tried to remember what it had been like to be young. The absence of responsibility, the irrelevance of effect. You didn't think ahead as a child. It was all seat-of-the-pants from one day to the next. He yearned for a little of that freedom now. He seemed to spend every waking minute inside his mind, the pulses of his
thought processes pushing at the membranes that coated his brain. There was never any feeling of physical release. He was locked in; he was his own prison. And then he thought of the bars of a cell. He thought of ribs. A body opened and closed, like a police case, or a door to somewhere new. The killer had not taken a thing.

He stabbed his finger at the keys of his mobile phone.

“Simmonds. Get over to pathology. Get Mercer out of bed. Our friend, he might not be harvesting. But what if he's leaving stuff behind instead?”

Dead end. Sometimes the thoughts you believe might just blow your options wide open are the ones that close us down for good. Gravier accepted the pint from Simmonds and for a moment didn't know what he should do with it. Everything felt as though it should be kicked, punched, smashed; damaged in some way. It was not a good feeling. He was not having a good day. He swallowed half the pint in three savage mouthfuls. Nobody behind the bar or sitting at it would meet his eye. Danger radiated from him.

What's that, Simmonds?
Sir, if you'd just take it easy?
Don't you dare try the arm around the shoulder with me, Simmonds, or I'll punch you so hard you'll find you're suddenly rimming yourself off. Yes, I know the pathologist's report said there was no internal damage, nothing to write home about in any of the postmortems, but the pathologist isn't fucking Superman. Brian Mercer? Man's a sot. And half blind. If he wasn't wearing those Coke-bottle glasses of his, he'd take his scalpel to a turkey's twat and think it was a pensioner's mouth. Now fuck away off with you. Leave me alone.

Another night's torture for the brogues. Slapping through the wet, wondering why he never put on a thicker pair of socks, or invested in some of those Gore-Tex boots the younger generation clomp around in. Freezing wind wound itself around his neck and shoulders, reaching deep into his body. Some days he woke up with the core of his limbs giving him gyp, and could imagine his moldering bones turned damp with the cold. He used to walk through miles of
rain when he was courting and never felt the needling of it. He was happy then. The only thing pressing down on his shoulders were the five-inch-thick firecheck doors he had to lug around the warehouse where he used to work summer holidays. Seventeen. Full of cum and muscle. Not a care. When did it all turn bad? When you got a job that held a mirror up to the world and showed it to be some foxed, blighted shithole, that's when.

How long till the next one? And there
would
be a next one. There always was, even if the killer was one of those twisted individuals desperate to be stopped. He sensed himself walking faster, as if an increase in speed might hurry a conclusion his way. His fingers worried at the stylized business card in his coat pocket. If he stroked the surface, he could just feel the raised pimples of the typeface outlining her name: Lady Ice. No address. No phone number.

Why was he moving in this direction?

Here was a part of town he didn't know so well. He remembered a few callouts here, many years ago. But not a place he lingered. Somewhere he couldn't give a name to now, no matter how hard he delved for one. He frowned and checked road names, but none impinged on his memory. He felt a weird slanting in perception, as if he'd had a dizzy spell and felt the world shift away for a second. He put out a hand to steady himself and burned his fingers on the frozen door knocker of a large building, which reminded Gravier of the neoclassical buildings in the town center—the libraries and banks—bought by brewery chains and transformed into spit-and-sawdust pubs selling alcopops and indigestible hunks of beef.