Plastic (12 page)

‘This isn’t him,’ I explained, ‘it’s a her, a young girl. This is just a lad the gentleman downstairs got me talking to. I don’t even know him.’

‘Listen, love, it’s a busy night out there,’ the paramedic pleaded. ‘You’re not pissing me about, are you?’

‘No, I swear there was a girl’s body here. How do you think I got blood all over me?’

‘You sure you didn’t cut yourself?’

‘No, of course not! It came from her! I had to cut her with the scissors!’ That came out wrong.

‘I think you have to consider that you might have imagined it. I mean, in the dark and that. Have a cup of tea and a sit-down, love, and if you decide it was just a nightmare, you should call your GP, all right? The man downstairs is a detective, love, he’ll want you to make a statement.’ The paramedic was pleasant enough, calm and soft-spoken, but his seen-it-all attitude incensed me. I wished he would stop calling me Love.

‘I didn’t see any body either,’ said Nalin unhelpfully, spitting pips into his hand.

The paramedic searched the flat before being called away to a car smash at Nine Elms. He stopped short of accusing me of wasting his time, but asked if I’d had a drink. The flat was clean. Only the smell of the smouldering duvet hung in the air like a November bonfire.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Past Coming Through

O
NCE HE HAD
gone I searched the bedroom, desperate to find anything he might have missed that would validate what I was already starting to think of as a bad dream. One thing was odd. The floor looked too clean. There were no dust balls anywhere. It was as though the boards had been wiped. The girl was slim and light. Her attacker could have come back and carried her out. The only blood left was on me.

And I could smell her scent beneath the burnt duvet, and was pretty sure it was L’Intense by Givenchy. God knows I’d sniffed enough sticks of it.

Nalin seemed unfazed by the fact that there was no corpse in the apartment. He helped himself to a can of Coke and rooted about for chocolate biscuits, eating from the packet as he loped about the apartment, checking the view from every angle.

‘I think we should go back down,’ I told him.

‘The old git’s not coming up. He’ll wait.’

I needed to construct a logical explanation for the night’s events, and finally settled on one: the girl had also been staying in the building, performing a similar chore, caretaking the property for an owner. She had been visited by someone she knew, her boyfriend perhaps, and they had fought. Unable to contact anyone, she had staggered out into the corridor for help, to find the boyfriend still there.

The theory would have been fine, except for her getting strangled with a plastic tag, which suggested something a lot nastier than hasty words. So either the stitch-headed man had returned and dragged her from the building, all the way down the stairs, without passing any of us, or he had locked the penthouse door from the inside and was waiting there until the coast was clear. I suddenly realised I still had the spatchcock scissors in my back pocket, which was evidence of a sort, although it was probably evidence that I had helped to kill her.

‘What have you got there?’ Nalin mistrustfully watched as I brandished the kitchen implement.

‘I tried to cut her tag off with them. Evidence.’ I tipped the blades to catch the light.

‘All the police will see is a weapon with your fingerprints all over it.’

I gave in, dropping the scissors onto the steel counter. ‘You’re not helping, you know.’ I suddenly wanted to cry, but joined Nalin on the sofa instead. His eyes were bituminous in candlelight and oddly unfocussed, as though he was beyond reach. ‘I didn’t imagine it and I’m not crazy.’

‘I wanna believe you,’ said Nalin unreassuringly.

I took a good look at him, anxious to find something that would stop me from thinking about the girl lying on the floor. ‘Surely you can’t be homeless. I mean, you’re so young.’

‘I’m not homeless, I got places to stay. I got jobs. The plods all know me. I can’t go back to King’s Cross.’

‘So you said. What about your parents? Where’s your mother?’

‘Off her head. Agoraphobic manic depressive. I was living with my dad, but now he’s inside.’

‘You mean in prison? Why, what did he do?’

‘Kidnapping. He’d been out drinking and didn’t trust himself to drive home, so he left his car in Camden High Street and came back for it the next morning. The Tube was closed for repairs and he got there five minutes after the parking laws had come back into force. Found some mouthy fucking Camden traffic Nazi clamping the car, so he and his mates stuck a few temazepams on a strip of racing tape, put it over his mouth and pushed him into a hedge. They sat on him he ’til was asleep and then stripped him, unwound the rest of the roll round his body, bagged him up, took him to King’s Cross in a workman’s bag and put him in the luggage rack of a train going to York. My dad got two years ’cause he was on bail at the time. My mum went back on tranks and I went to my nan’s, but I didn’t like it there so I fucked off. Ended up on remand for criminal damage and common assault, brandishing an imitation firearm in a shopping mall, and went to Brinsford Young Offenders. Most of the boys in my class are in Brinsford, so I was with my mates. When I got out I jumped a train to London. Then Dalston put an exclusion order on me, and I got the ISSP.’ He cocked his head and listened. ‘There’s dead sound all the way through this place, have you noticed?’

‘There was a young girl here,’ I murmured, forcing the memory to life. ‘She coughed up blood on me. Her attacker left muddy footprints. I don’t have the confidence to make this kind of thing up.’

‘I’ll do one more quick check around the place, then I’d better go down and report.’ The boy’s identity shifted from focus; he no longer seemed the same impassive teenager I‘d seen lurking at the bus stop. I wondered how many other people had written him off before talking to him. Perhaps he wasn’t a street-wary misfit but a fantasist, studious and lonely, less likely to be living on the street and fearing the reprisals of gangs than biding his time in an ordinary home, in a silent suburb, his family afflicted with the guilt of making him bored.

‘It was real and it wasn’t a mistake,’ I insisted. ‘I didn’t imagine her. My husband says I have no imagination, so how could I?’

‘One way to find out. Give me a minute.’ I nodded dumbly as he collected a pair of candles from the lounge and left me on the sofa. ‘Don’t move from here.’

His footfalls retreated through the apartment. The front door opened and closed. For five minutes there was no further sound. Finally he returned. ‘There’s no-one outside. Your candles are knackered.’ He reached the entrance of the lounge and set the candles back down. ‘I tried the end penthouse but the door is definitely locked. I knocked but there was no answer. Didn’t sound like there was no-one inside.’

‘I’m out of my depth, Nalin. Maybe it’s this building. There’s something about these angled walls that unsettle me.’

‘It’s a weird shape to fit with the river, that’s why. I do decorating work, but my mate’s van is fucked at the moment so I’m doing nights in the burger stall by Vauxhall Bridge, earning a bit of straight. Clubbers and cabbies, gets really busy between two and five.’

‘Where were you going when I talked to you?’

‘Nowhere.’ He gave me a guarded look.

‘You were at a bus stop, that’s all.’

‘They’re bright. Nobody can move on you without you seeing them first. Sometimes the cops drive by for a chat.’ Perhaps that was it; he’d been touting for work. ‘You should go down to the garage on the next corner and buy yourself a decent battery lamp, one of them emergency ones. It’s safer than the lantern. You shouldn’t stay here without decent lights.’

‘You can stay for a while if you want.’

‘Nah. You’ll try it on with me, I know your type.’ He smiled, and I was grateful he’d attempted to make a joke.

As we walked back down the stairs, I caught the ferrety look in his eyes that made him appear so unapproachable, although I still wouldn’t have trusted him with my cutlery. His shoulders remained hunched and his hands were kept deep in his pockets, braced against sudden movement.

Outside, he glanced furtively from beneath the peak of his cap, scanning the streets left and right, never relaxing his guard. The elderly policeman was back in his car with the heater on. He wound down the window.

‘All finished?’ he asked, not even expecting to hear about a body. Nalin leaned in and they exchanged words.

Nalin rose and stuffed some notes into his pocket. ‘He’s going to take you to the petrol station,’ he explained, touching the light on a fat plastic watch that turned his face blue. He wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve. ‘I got to go.’

‘Can I ask you something? You said you were banned from some places, and can’t leave others.’

‘Yeah, I told you, ISSP.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Program.’ He pulled up the left leg of his jeans and showed me the grey band that circled his ankle. ‘Plastic. The tag beeps if I leave the area at night. I have to do therapy and re-education. And planting.’

‘Is that why you can’t go back to King’s Cross, Finsbury Park or the Elephant?’

‘No. I’ve got ASBOs on me in King’s Cross and Finsbury for fighting and that. And Shadwell Massive keeps me out of the east.’ He flicked his fingers at me in that silly gesture kids have copied from American music videos. ‘There’s places you can’t go after you’ve been marked. I got into a few sites and was given a warning.’

I presumed he meant gang territories. There had been an article in the paper about a boy being pushed under a DLR train by three gang members who had forced him from the platform onto the track. An argument over a box of KFC. Dreadful.

‘Is that something to do with graffiti?’ I asked.

‘Do I look like I’m in fucking infants’ school? Online gaming. You hide code inside jpeg pixels so that when the other person opens it, their system crashes.’

‘Why would you want to?’

‘If they piss you off and that.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to upset too many people.’ I thought of Lou’s son locked in his room, staring angrily into his computer screen while the street slept.

‘There’s people you don’t,’ he agreed. ‘Serious gunsters and a lot of jokers. The Lock City Crew in Harlesden, the Holy Smokes and Tooti Nung in Southall, the Drummond Street Boys in Camden, Snakeheads and Wo Shing Wo in Soho, Spanglers and Fireblades in Tottenham, Brick Lane Massive, Bengal Tigers, Cartel Crew in Brixton, maybe two dozen others. If you can convince the old git here to employ me more often, I won’t be such a drain on decent law-abiding society.’ He grinned at me, then lolloped off in the direction of Vauxhall Station, the ghost of a child shadowboxing as a man.

‘Hop in, Mrs. Cryer. We’ll get you a light,’ said the old boy.

‘I guess the lad told you there was nothing up there.’

‘Yes, he did.’ He held the car door open. ‘Come on.’

The surface of the river pulsed with a sickly jaundice from the floodlit buildings. Lights strung between the lamp-posts looked mournful, not celebratory. Half the bulbs were dead or missing. The rain had calmed to a soft mist, leaving lakes in the corners of the roads. We were within sight of the Houses of Parliament, yet the area felt unsafe and poorly planned, usable only as a thoroughfare that would quickly take you somewhere else.

‘There aren’t many people around.’

‘It’s early. Never gets that busy around here because the roads don’t lead anywhere.’

‘All roads lead somewhere.’

‘They don’t go where you want them to.’ He returned his attention to the blurred slush of vehicles, an elderly meerkat checking for predators. ‘Quiet streets. I prefer it late, when the moon’s high and the river looks like it’s made of mercury.’

‘You like the river?’

‘Because there’s more space, and there are more trees. When I was young you used to be able to walk through the tops of them.’

‘That doesn’t sound very likely.’

‘Down in Battersea Park they had a tree-walk right beside the river, rope bridges and Chinese lanterns. It was quite magical. You could do things like that when London wasn’t so crowded. Walk around empty museums, be the only person on a Tube platform.’

I smiled. ‘Normally I’d be going to bed around now.’

‘You’re not a Londoner, are you?’

‘No, I’m from somewhere you won’t have heard of.’

‘Where?’

‘A town called Hamingwell. It’s near Orpington, in Kent.’

‘You’re right, I don’t know that. The garage is over there.’ He stopped and pointed to a fierce bright area set back beside the railway arches of Vauxhall. ‘It doesn’t look it, but you’re fine around here. It’s a neutral zone. Over there, those are all gay bars. You’ll get queues outside later, it keeps the area safe.’ He brought the Wolseley to the kerb.

The garage was an oasis of brilliance. As I walked into it, the ferocity of the light stung my eyes. An African man in an ancient Ford Fiesta pulled forward on the forecourt near the kiosk and began shouting at the Asian cashier. Suddenly he ran back to his car, jumped in and drove it forward until the bonnet nearly ruptured the glass booth. Customer and attendant were still swearing at each other as the cashier vaulted over his counter, came out and threw a beer bottle. It looped through the air to smash across the windscreen of the car. Grains of glass scattered like a bucket of ice being emptied from a height, a fragmenting prism sparkling across the concrete, but the Fiesta’s windscreen held. The African man appeared to be waving goodbye to the Asian. There was a dull snap in the air and the car lurched off, bouncing out into the oncoming traffic. It took me a moment to realise that a gun had been fired.

‘Sorry about that.’ The cashier was breathing hard and smoothing his hair back in place as he rang up the price of the battery light. ‘Fucking Nigerians are always driving off without paying. Fucking hell. Did you see? I got a fucking bullet hole in my canopy. Fuck me. Always fucking Nigerians. You never see fucking Asian kids juking each other for drugs on the fucking street corners, do you? Asian kids know how to fucking behave. Fuck. Sorry. That’ll be nine ninety nine.’