Plastic (21 page)

Two courses of action suggested themselves. I could get Mr. Ashe to check out the eco-unit facility, but fear of what he might find lying there dampened my enthusiasm. Or I could go back up to the flat. Thinking that it belonged to Malcolm, I had assumed that its owner was innocent of any involvement, and had respected his privacy by not looking in any of the private drawers. Now I wanted to see what kind of man could live here.

As I headed up to 701, each step unsettled me further. I had failed someone who had turned to me for help, and the fact that she was a total stranger only made it worse.

I admit I was being nosy. I didn’t think it was going to get me killed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Flesh

701
LOOKED DIFFERENT
to me now. The bedroom walls were shades of discoloured flesh. The great cubes of light I had admired by morning light seemed glacial and bruised with shadows. There was no longer any sense of normal life lived within these walls. The kitchen pots glistened because they had never been used. The medical textbooks no longer appeared to be articles of scientific reference but catalogues of a disarranged mind.

I began in the kitchen, sorting through drawer after drawer, finding only steel utensils, unopened instruction booklets for the new cooker and freezer, mats, cutlery. No item except foodstuffs to betray a hint of personality. One thing hadn’t changed; it was still a single man’s home, barely inhabited. The lounge yielded no more items of hospitality than a hotel room.

One high cupboard turned out to be sealed, but a small key left on the shelf below opened it. Here a dozen further medical volumes were concealed, probably because their colour plates were livid horrors; illustrations from the Firefighters Burn Center in Florida, operational procedures for the Heal the Children foundation, volumes from the European Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the Injection Therapy Unit, the Lipoplasty Society, the Anglo-French Burns Association, the American Cleft Palate Association.

The images would have made Dr. Frankenstein blanch; torn lips, burst eyes, leaking aqueous humour, sliced gums, rolls of yellow fat dripping from liposuction tools, spikes through skulls, flayed faces, shredded muscles in every shade of scarlet, pink, brown and purple like close-up porn shots. I wished I hadn’t looked.

On the topmost shelf was a booklet outlining services offered by the Azymuth Harley Street Cosmetic Surgery Clinic. Dr. A. L. Azymuth specialised in facial reconstruction, but his clinic could handle ‘thighs, bums and tums’, as the brochure coyly put it. Azymuth was pictured on the back, slim-jawed, bony, fortyish, Indian or possibly Egyptian, a trustworthy face for any insecure patient.

I searched his wardrobe. White shirts and bland navy suits, several pairs of identical black-toed Oxford shoes, nothing to mark out a man as a lunatic or an accessory to murder.

I dragged over a chair and climbed up, searching the tops of the built-in wardrobes. The cardboard box was not concealed, merely awkward to reach.

It contained over thirty pages of barely legible eight-point print from internet sites in Hungary, Siberia, Romania and the Ukraine. The names and addresses were occasionally accompanied by webcam pictures of young faces fast growing old with lousy diet and the stress of poverty.

A file followed every name, each page carrying the personal details of men and women: nationality, address, height, birthdate, weight, colour of eyes. The names appeared exotic to me: Omar, Valya, Jaspinder, Sergei, Lata, Anuradha. Medical histories followed, half-filled forms and pages frequently marked INCOMPLETE. Diabetes, HIV status, history of heart disease. It didn’t seem likely that they were overseas patients coming to England for treatment. For a start, the few photos that yielded any detail showed cheap clothes, self-inflicted haircuts, bad skin, poor posture. I’d seen enough footage of asylum seekers running across government land to recognise the signs of long-term hardship.

Perhaps it was some public-clinic sideline of Azymuth’s private practice. I knew that many private doctors worked in them one or two days a week. I was preparing to give up when I came across the photograph of the young girl whose bloodstained head I had cradled the previous night. Her hair was shorter and tucked under a white scarf, but I could tell it was her. The name on the file was Petra, but there was a second name beneath her photograph – ‘Cleo’. Some of the other files bore pairs of names.

Petra, too, had undergone a medical examination, but the handwritten notes accompanying her form suggested that surgery had been carried out on her face, specifically rhinoplasty, mole-removal and an eye-lift. Her form had been stamped: FOR PLASTIC.

It made no sense for impoverished Eastern Europeans to come to Azymuth for expensive cosmetic surgery. For a moment my mind filled with gangsters switching identities, changing their faces to escape conviction, the curse of watching too much TV. Then I thought, you know, white slavery. People trafficking. Perhaps it was just difficult to accept the fact that the doctor might simply be keen to help others.

Disappointed, I replaced the box. Or at least I tried to, but something was blocking the space at the back of the shelf. Standing on tiptoe, I reached in and closed my fingers around a waxed-cotton sack, pulling so that it fell into my upturned hands.

With the sack on the floor I stepped down and tugged open its drawstring. It took me a moment to realise that the currency bore the bridge symbols of euros. Even by my own poor calculation, I could tell there was about forty thousand pounds at my feet. The varying condition of the notes suggested they came from a number of sources. What kind of man kept so much money loose in his bedroom?

They come from Eastern Europe,
I thought,
they pay him cash for cosmetic surgery operations, cash because they can’t transfer savings from bank accounts.
He takes their money, promising to help, then murders them, stuffing their bodies into the Eco-Unit.

This theory, I had to admit, was even more absurd than the last. The internet photographs featured men and women who were already attractive in their own ways. They just needed the glow of wellbeing that a few months of good diet, some sun and better dentistry would bring. They required a little grooming, not new faces. It made no sense. I studied the pages again. Not one of the featured patients was over twenty-five. Azymuth was doing something to them, why else would he be hiding their details in the back of a cupboard? Why else would one of them turn up in the building on the very weekend that no-one would be there to see her die?

I set out the pages in rows across the bedroom floor, looking for links as the first spatters of rain hit the windows. Distant thunder rolled across the heathlands of North London. The room grew darker as the battery on the garage torch began to dim. I was about to look for more candles when I heard a key in the front door. I’d known that Azymuth could come back at any time, but this was more than inconvenient. It looked like burglary. The money was spread all over the bed and the floor.

I caught the flash of a torch in the hall, heading away to the lounge. I couldn’t trust myself to explain my presence in the apartment, but where to hide? Getting under the bed would trap me in the room. Besides, he would only have to glance at the chaos to see that someone had been rifling through his personal belongings. I slipped into the shadowed L-bend of the corridor and ran lightly toward the kitchen, pulling open a tall broom closet and shutting myself inside.

It was worse than I’d thought. First, I have a dust allergy. Second, Azymuth wasn’t alone; I could hear two men talking. One voice was public school, the other had the sealed-throat glottal stops of Essex English. I peered out through the door grille, but it was possible to recognise Dr. Azymuth from his photograph, even in the half-light of his upturned torch. Dressed in a rain-spattered anorak, tall and angular, he was as awkward as an ostrich. His companion wore a blue nylon jacket, his face muddled in darkness. One of them was wearing Vanilla Tobacco by Tom Ford, at a hundred quid a bottle. I watched them stop in the shadows of the kitchen entrance and held my breath, praying that the dust wouldn’t make me sneeze.

‘Can I offer you a drink?’ asked Azymuth.

‘Nah, I got to get back.’ The companion had his back to me, walking toward the door. ‘He’s cancelled your last two appointments.’

‘But I’ve already booked them in. They only need to be ten days apart.’

‘You’ll have to take it up with Mr. Rennie. I’m just telling you what he told me.’

As soon as they had moved from my sightline I placed my ear against the door and listened, then stepped out into the kitchen.

Silence.

A scuff in the hall, past the closed door of the main bedroom.

Now they seemed to be standing outside the flat. I looked and saw their backs through the gap in the front door.
It’s other people’s business,
I told myself,
nothing to do with me.
My fear had been overcome by my determination to see the matter through. Even my mother grudgingly admitted that tenacity was one of my few virtues.

With the closing of the front door, I crept out into the hall.

Azymuth was standing inside with his arms folded over his torch, watching me. ‘Would you mind telling me what on earth you’re doing in my apartment?’

‘This is so embarrassing,’ I began, attempting to brazen out the situation by adopting the voice I used for returning clothes. ‘I’m in the wrong place. There was a mix-up with my key. Madame Funes gave me yours by mistake.’

‘You were hiding in a cupboard. Anyway, the concierge isn’t here today.’

‘I know that. I only just found out it was the wrong key.’

‘Surely you could tell you weren’t in the right flat. Or even the right cupboard.’

‘That’s just it, I’m minding a place for a friend –’

‘What friend?’

The last thing I wanted was to get Malcolm into trouble. ‘More a friend of a friend. I agreed to flatsit for him. Here’s your key and I’m really awfully sorry.’ My subservience to professional men could be nothing short of pathetic. I’m surprised I didn’t offer to do his ironing. I extracted the 701 Yale and dropped it onto the hall console. Azymuth was walking from room to room, prissily checking everything. Any second now I knew he would see the mess in the bedroom.

I kept talking, trying to distract him, but the doctor would not be turned from his purpose. When he pushed open the door to the master bedroom, he stopped dead in his shiny Oxford-shod tracks. ‘Come here. Did you do this?’

My confidence flatlined. ‘No... uh, I just –’ I shifted away from him, aiming toward the front door. ‘Some other people were... listen, what goes on here is your business, I’m nothing –’

‘Have you been going through the confidential files of my patients?’ He lowered the torch so that it flared in my eyes.

‘I have to go,’ I insisted.

‘I don’t think so. Not until I get some kind of an explanation.’

Looking into his angry brown eyes, I felt for a moment that he didn’t have any idea what had been going on. But the girl had been a patient of his, left to die in his apartment. Surely Azymuth shared some guilt of her death? There was no point in trying to lie my way out; I just wanted to know if he was somehow responsible. I needed something to make sense in this impregnable, pristine world, even if it was something unbearably cruel. I mean, for years I’d believed Jeffrey Archer was honest, but it all made sense when he went to jail. It was embarrassing for him, but closure for me.

‘I saw a girl attacked here. Right where we’re standing.’

‘Attacked? What on earth are you talking about?’

‘She was strangled with a plastic parcel tag, and she was one of your patients. I can show you.’ Before he had a chance to answer, I dropped to my knees and scrabbled through the sheets on the floor, finding the girl’s photograph. ‘This one, Petra Valenski.’

He barely glanced at the picture. He didn’t need to. It was obvious that he recognised the name. ‘What would she be doing here?’

‘I don’t know. What did you do to her?’

‘It’s no business of yours. You have no right to ask anything, you’re in my apartment with some cock-and-bull story about mixed-up keys, threatening me, who the hell do you think you are? I’m the one who should be calling the police.’

‘The girl was on your property. Any forensic team would find evidence in seconds.’ I had no way of knowing if this was true, but it sounded good.

‘You’re mad. Who
are
you?’

‘Nobody, just a housewife.’

‘I can see that,’ he said, rather insultingly I thought.

‘But I’m the type who makes a convincing witness.’

Perhaps he decided to humour me then, because he suddenly changed his tone. ‘I don’t understand. What exactly do you expect me to do?’

‘It would help if you could explain who she was.’ I was pushing my luck, but couldn’t seem to stop myself. ‘These files all belong to your patients?’

‘No, they’re... well, I have a client. He sends them to me.’

‘You mean like a broker.’

‘I suppose so,’ he said irritably.

‘And they’re all for surgery.’

‘Yes, it’s just minor stuff, enhancements mostly, noses, lips, eyes, wrinkles, spot and mole removal, nothing structural beyond the odd bit of jaw realignment.’

‘What did you do to her, Petra Valenski?’

‘Hardly anything, as it happens. She was almost perfect. I made her a little fuller in the face, nothing that a few months of good eating wouldn’t have done. Just a couple of local injections in her cheeks. Oh, and I pinned back her ears.’ Professional pride crept into his voice. ‘It’s was a very neat piece of work.’

‘That’s all you did?’

‘In my opinion she didn’t need any cosmetic work at all, and she had no opinions of her own that I could understand because she spoke no English. She’d only been in the country a few weeks. When I took the booking I was told how much to spend, but I decide how much surgery to perform, and in this case I chose to keep it minimal.’