The Cutting Crew (24 page)

Something was turning on itself within my mind, whining and growling, hidden only slightly behind a thin screen of skin. For no obvious reason, I was scared. I looked down at my hands and they were trembling.

'We've got Harris,' Rosh said, slipping his phone back into his pocket and snapping up my attention. He'd brought Lucy back over with him.

'Where?' I said.

'Officers found his car earlier on this morning, with him in it.

Their initial professional opinion is that he's not alive anymore.'

'Shit.'

Rosh nodded. 'Shit indeed.'

Then, he frowned. 'Where's the kid gone?'

I gestured at the pub. 'Cigarettes.'

There was a brief pause.

'Shit,' I said again.

Whatever I was feeling, I needed to listen to what my head was telling me and get a fucking grip on it. Guilt, fear - these things could be dealt with later, when thinking about them too much wasn't going to fuck things up. We went back inside Whitelocks to check, but there was no point. While I'd been sitting there feeling frightened, Jamie had disappeared.

Chapter
Fifteen

Unlike me, Lucy and Rosh still had jobs to go to. Following a little manipulation within the department, it turned out that Rosh's assignment would involve checking out Harris and his car, while Lucy would head off to the lab to work the evidence, and - if she had chance - do some research on Damian, the fourth member of the art group. I was at more of a loose end. Since I had no gainful employment of any kind, we decided that I should go to visit Rob Hedge and see how much of Jamie's story he was able to confirm.

I'd hoped that some time apart from Rosh and Lucy would clear my head a little, but within a few minutes of being dropped off at the edge of the campus I was even worse. More than ever before, the ground felt as though a heart was beating underneath it. The great, slow thuds of it sounded like a clock ticking. The buildings, tall and hard, were like the petals of some dark, malevolent flower: closing slowly around me and beginning to block out the sky. As I walked along I realised that, for no reason I could pin down, the fear I'd experienced at Whitelocks was beginning to turn into panic.

It was only mid-morning, but already hot and bright. The campus was heavy with people. That, the temperature and my mood was making everything hard to take, so I found a seat on a bench next to a girl eating pastry out of a paper bag, and for a second I just sat there, breathing slowly and watching everyone.

Sometimes it seems like there are too many people in the world.

Certainly in our city anyway. For all I knew or - if I was honest cared, the people around me could have been a record that was being played over and over again. It was difficult to imagine so many lives having substance. People like to think they're all connected and part of society, but they're not. In reality, you have a small group of friends and acquaintances, and that's all the city will ever be for you. Everybody else is a mystery - just window-dressing and background colour. As I sat there, people were smiling, laughing, touching each other on the arm. Walking. Hitching up bags. Pointing at things in shop windows. There was just so much life going on and it seemed impossible that everybody moving around me had any back story: that they weren't just extras in a crowd scene or swirls painted on the scenery to stop me feeling lonely.

The girl beside me stood and screwed up her paper bag. She was pretty, I thought. She had a nice, neat hairstyle. Her clothes were intricate and detailed. She must be real. But then she was gone before I knew it: disappearing off into the faded smear of this busy world, dropping the bag into a bin. At that moment, I had never felt more abstracted from everything. The people around me were just dabs on a painting that I was sitting too far away from to touch.

After a few minutes, Lucy phoned me.

'Okay,' she said. 'I've got Hedge's address. You got a pen?'

'No, of course I haven't. Just tell me and I'll remember it.'

'Thirty-three, Oxley,' she said. 'That's student flats, right?'

'Right. Look.' I took a deep breath. 'I'm sorry about last night.'

'Forget about it,' she said.

'No, seriously.'

'Seriously forget about it if you like.' She sighed. 'I've got to go.

Take care and keep in touch.'

'Right,' I said. 'Okay. Good luck.'

'You too.'

So that was what we were reduced to for the moment. It wasn't just me, of course. She had a lot to think about, and one of the things she would be doing back at the department was investigating Carl Halloran - who he was, and where we'd received the tip-off that had marked him for the post-office murders. The money we'd taken clearly hadn't come from there, and whatever Halloran had been doing in that hotel room, it wasn't lying low. A lot of people had died because of what the four of us did that night. We all had a lot to think about.

Later.

I got up, slipped my phone into my pocket and headed off towards the district's centre.

It turned out that Oxley was quite a nice block: newly built, with flats stacked on top of one another and linked by plush, fresh corridors that were all window down one side. It had the community feel of a tower block without any of the usual graffiti, odour or threats of violence. The front door was made of glass and almost impenetrably solid, but somebody had thoughtfully lodged it open with a lump of rock culled from the kerb outside, and so I was free to make my way up to the third floor, squinting against the amplified heat as I went. Then I found Hedge's door and knocked. After a minute or two, I knocked again a little harder.

Did none of these bastard students have any manners?

When Hedge eventually opened the door, leaning against the frame, it was clear from both his manner and attire that I'd got him out of bed. He was wearing an old blue dressing-gown, tied loosely at the middle and gaping slightly to reveal a white T-shirt and pyjama bottoms. His hair was short, black and messy, and he was rubbing his pillowy face in an attempt to massage some life into it.

He didn't look pleased.

'What?'

'Robert Hedge?'

I showed my badge, and he smartened up instantly. Just like last night - you wave a badge around and it separates the tough guys from the fakers like a fucking knife.

I put it away and said:

'Detective Weaver. I'd like to talk to you about your relationship with Alison Sheldon.'

'Yeah,' he said, and then glanced behind him. 'Urn, yeah.'

'Can I come in?' I asked, wondering if he was concerned about any company he might have, or whether it was just drugs.

'Yeah,' he said.

Again, that glance over his shoulder. This was the second time in as many days. Did people think we had nothing better to do with our time?

'It's okay,' I said. 'Unless you've got a dead guy stashed in there, I'm not going to be bothered.'

'Right, okay.' Even now, he sounded doubtful, and I hoped he didn't actually have a dead guy stashed in his room. After a second, he held the door open wide. 'Urn, come in.'

'Thanks,' I said. Then: 'Wow.'

Aside from the debris, it was just a standard student flat: one room, with a single bed on the right-hand side and a wardrobe and desk on the left. There was a window in between with a small set of drawers underneath, all of it made out of the same pale-brown wood. Behind me - next to the entrance - a door doubled back slightly into an ensuite shower room comprised entirely of white tiles and bright light, scored by the insular hum of air-conditioning.

None of this was the reason for my wow.

'This place must be fun to insure,' I said.

Underneath and on top of the long built-in desk, Hedge had as much computer equipment as I'd ever seen inside a single room in my life. There were at least three separate hard-drive stacks, and all of them looked as though he'd constructed them himself. They were bustling with wires at the back and sides, linking them to different monitors that were in various stages of disarray and destruction. There were keyboards and mice, and the desk surface was a spaghetti mess of cables. Below it, there were more amplifiers, speakers, media players and adaptors than you could shake a health and safety certificate at. Little red power lights were dotted throughout the shadows behind it all, staring out like rats'

eyes.

It was the kind of thoroughly undisciplined mess that only a real expert could have switched on and made work. As an amateur, I was quietly impressed.

Hedge said, 'Fortunately, my department pays the electricity bills.'

'Oh yeah? No wonder taxes are up.'

Amongst the mess of components on the desk was a small ashtray filled with the ends of roll-ups. Cannabis debris was resting on an A4 sheet on the bedside table. Hedge noticed me looking and was about to come up with some excuse that would just have annoyed me.

'I don't care about any of that,' I said. 'You're a student. It's practically compulsory.'

I didn't care, of course, but it was useful. If Hedge wasn't as forthcoming as I wanted him to be then it was a subject we might well return to.

'Can I get you a drink?'

'No, I'm okay,' I said. 'I'm here because I think that one of my colleagues came to see you some time last week? A detective named Sean Barnes?'

It was a guess, but it turned out to be a good one.

'Oh - yeah.'

Encouraged, I tried another. 'He wanted to speak to you about Alison Sheldon.'

'Sure.'

'Well, basically I want to go over the same ground,' I said, making it sound casual - just a formality, really. 'You know? Just cover all the bases.'

He nodded quickly. 'Okay.'

'Can we sit down?'

'Yeah. Um, sorry.' He cleared an old pile of computer magazines off the chair by the desk. 'Here.'

I took the chair and he sat down on the bed opposite me.

'So,' I said, preparing to watch his reaction. 'Alison. Have you seen or heard from her recently?'

He shook his head.

'No. Not in months.'

Just an honest answer, I thought. He seemed eager to help; not at all surprised by the question. If Hedge knew for sure that Alison was dead, he was hiding it well.

'So - not since before you reported her missing?'

'No. It was ... let me think. I don't know. Maybe a week before that?'

I said, 'Okay. It's just that I want to get a general idea of what you and Alison were about. You were helping her with a computer project - is that right?'

'Right. Yeah.' Hedge scratched through his sleepy hair and frowned. He looked a little confused, but that was okay.

'What were you working on?' I asked.

'Well, it was something to do with her art,' he said. 'She explained it once, but I didn't really take it in. I just did the programming, you know?'

He gave me a nervous smile, and I returned it.

'Were you ... you know. Going out with her?'

'Oh no,' he said, a little too quickly. 'I mean, we were sort of seeing each other, but it was never anything as official as that. She was just a nice girl, you know. It was just a bit of fun. No big thing.'

'Okay,' I said. 'What did the computer project involve?'

'Oh, that was kind of strange. She had this map of the city, right?

And I was helping her animate it.'

'Animate it?'

'Yeah. I just put together this program that did it. I'll show you if you want.'

'You still have it?'

'Yeah.' Hedge frowned again. 'I mean, I showed Detective Barnes when he talked to me.'

'Okay,' I said. 'That would be good.'

Hedge stood up and sort of waved at the equipment behind me, and I cleared out of his way. One of the computers was already turned on, and he sat down in front of it, shifted the mouse to clear the screensaver and then started to scan through a couple of directories.

'Just easier to show you,' he said. 'You know.'

'That's fine.'

'Here.'