The Unblemished (14 page)

Manser felt alternately light and heavy, as if one moment he had
taken a whiff of oxygen, or done some exercise and then
overeaten, or become bogged down with fever or a messy cold. He
could hear Jez Knowlden's voice, but it was as if it were coming to
him from the end of a very bad telephone line, or a dream. His head
was thick with aches or hangovers, something that made everything
slow motion, tortured. He liked Knowlden's voice; it was strong
without being authoritative. He knew his place. He knew the limits
of his own abilities. Knowlden always listened. His acknowledgment,
when they were driving together, came in a smooth burst of acceleration,
a purpose unveiled. It came in the focus he gave the damp road
and the way he flexed his shoulders or tightened his grip on the
steering wheel. He was gearing up. Manser felt utterly confident with
Knowlden alongside him. Manser would take a tilt at Satan if
Knowlden was there to back him up.

He felt a little shimmer of excitement in his gut, childish stuff, the
kind of butterflies you got when you were in the alleyway with the
cute girl from school, thirteen, fourteen maybe, psyching yourself for
that first kiss. He always got that when there was the smell of blood
in the air. He imagined Claire prepped and reduced within twelve
hours, arcing her back for him on a wet leather couch, mewling
around a gag made from his jockstrap and a metre of duck tape.

Something wrong. A smell of bonfires. A smell of death.

First time he saw her, when was that? Five years ago, lounging
back against the bus shelter waiting for her folks, library was it? High
summer. One of those evenings that contains so much light you
wonder how it could ever get dark. Light so real, so close, you might
grab a handful out of the air, keep it in your pocket for a special
moment. Romantic evening. Love at first sight. God but she was hot.
Twelve years old? Thirteen? Must be. What was she wearing? Like
you have to try to remember. It's there in your mind like an
inoperable tumour. A black, tight T-shirt. Naughty, naughty logo:
You have to be at least eight inches to ride this.
How did she slip that
one past her cold, ramrod mother, and that streak of piss she called
Dad? Maybe they didn't even get it. Maybe they were too whacked
out on diazepam or Prozac, shitting it over all those red figures in
their accounts to be able to register that they had a kid.

Blue jeans with spangly hems, pink lining poking free of the
pockets, a Barbie belt. Plenty of midriff, taut, with that gorgeous little
vertical shadow right down the centre of her tummy, the kind of thing
you usually only find on girls who worked out. Scruffy, unlaced
Adidas Kick shoes. White, hooded cardigan with drawstrings round
the neck she liked to chew on. She was standing, irritable, clumsy, on
the shadow-line, ready to take the plunge into womanhood. She was
nearly there. Thirteen? Fuck. Get those pretty little teeth. Tiny,
square, even. Pink gums, she shows a lot of gum when she smiles.
Strawberry lip gloss. Long, naturally curly blonde hair tied off with
red elastic bands cadged from the postman. What does it smell of,
that hair? Maddening, that's what. Apples. Peaches. Thirteen?
Fucking hell. Thirteen-year-olds like that. When did that happen?

In the leather seat in the back of the Audi, Manser closed his eyes
and imagined his hands winding through that hair, plunging his face
into its thickness. Her blood so young, so fresh, it would fizz as it fled
her.

He bit down suddenly on his cheek when Salavaria shivered into
his thoughts. His own blood flooded across his tongue. He wouldn't
be able to keep his tongue away from that bite now, a bit like his
thoughts and Salavaria. He always crept back. His master, his
ambition. He was treading on Manser's toes now, with Claire, but
what could he do? He was to Salavaria what Knowlden was to
Manser. You didn't answer back. You didn't create ripples. You
swallowed and nodded and said yes sir, three bags full sir, what else
can I do for you today?

Something wrong though. Something out of whack.

What a pain. What a setback. She was his. She ought to be his.
Could still be his. Salavaria didn't need to know. Deliver her alive. Get
Loshy to stitch her up properly, do a good job. He could wear a
surgical mask and wash his hands, for a change.

This year's number three had died badly. It had been a pity. He
liked that one, but what do you do? You can't keep the fuckers. What
are they, pets? You have to feed them, clean them, wipe their arses.
He was no nurse. But Claire could be different. He could go the
distance with that one. The sutures on her legs might heal in such a
way as to chafe his thigh as he thrust into her. That would be a plus.
Any infection and he could pour antibiotics down her throat. Loshy
would see him right. They would talk about the best way to prevent
gangrene. He knew what Losh's response would be:
let it heal, don't
mess about with it.
But he liked his meat so very rare when he was
fucking it. He liked to see a little blood. Acceptable risk. There was
such a thing as acceptable risk. Salavaria would understand. I'm a
weak man. I have my fetish, just like the next guy. I can't work at a
hundred per cent if I'm not happy, if I don't fill my boots, wet my
beak once in a while.

What did Salavaria want? Did he want The Ton? Did he want
MCM? Or did he prefer someone who wasn't firing on all cylinders?
This was big school. He needed top men working at full capacity. If
he fucks with me, I'll fuck with him. I don't want to, but that's how
it pans out. Reciprocity, sir, there's the key. Let's get some
backscratching going, Master. Co-operation. Synergy. A melding of
minds. Mutual masturbation. Whatever the fuck.

Something wrong. Gyorsi. What happened? What happened
between me and you? Old friend. Something wrong. Something out
of whack. Something burning. Something dead.

At lunch time, Ray would leave her in charge of things and have a
pint of Broadside and something to eat at the Lord Nelson.
Although she had warmed to him quickly, Sarah was glad to have
these few hours to herself. Claire seemed happy to sit in the deep
leather armchair in the office, warming herself by the three-bar
electric fire, drinking raspberry leaf tea, flicking through ancient
copies of
Chat
and
Take a Break.
She found them hilarious. It cheered
Sarah almost to tears to hear her daughter in another room chortling
over the knitting patterns, or the letters pages
(Top Tip: Clean dusty
Venetian blinds with L-shaped pieces of crusty bread)
, or the true-life
stories (
Love Me, Love My Piles
).

The work itself was really anything but. All she had to do was
make sure no kids came in to shoplift the comics. Every now and then
there would be a couple, obviously tourists, come in for a mooch of
the paperbacks and the Wade Whimsies. They'd shell out twenty
pence for a William Trevor or a John Braine or a Len Deighton, giggle
over the handwritten lines on the old postcards, and that would be it.
For the first time in days she had felt able to relax. The jolt at
seeing the police officer checking her car had receded. There had been
no enquiries made at the hotel, no further nosing around the Alfa
Romeo. Just a spot check. These things happened, she supposed.
There had been no shadowy surveillance from the window opposite
hers, unless you counted an old woman with a blue rinse leafing
through magazines over endless cups of tea and peering into the
street. It was time to kick back, take stock. She had slipped Manser.
And that meant she could work on Claire, start to try to bring her
back from the brink.

The jingle of the small bell at the door. Another customer. Or just
someone browsing, or coming in from the cold for a while.

The man came into view through the hillocks of furniture, the tall
bookcases groaning with creased, stained, water-bloated copies of
Barbara Taylor Bradford, James A Michener, and Harold Robbins.
She thought, immediately,
police.
Her breath shortened; a band
tightened around her ribs. The ego boost she'd given herself earlier
dissipated like mist beneath a noon sun.

Everything about him screamed of office, of telephones, of too
much beer and pies. He wore a faded grey raincoat that looked like
an extension of his skin: his face carried the pallor associated with
pub snugs and fluorescent lighting. There was too much tea inside
him, too many bacon sandwiches. She knew he hid a bottle of cheapblend
whiskey in his desk. She wouldn't be surprised to know that he
was married but kept a mistress. His wife and his bit on the side both
took turns in ironing his Y-fronts. His shared secretary at the station
reminded him whose birthday was when.

Despite her freshly ignited panic, she couldn't help but laugh. She
tried her best to disguise it by coughing, covering her face with a used
tissue stowed up one arm of her cardigan. The man looked her way.
Thinning hair, moustache, plain blue tie. All he had to do was bend
himself at the knees, put his arms behind his back and say:
Hello,
hello, hello.

'Can I help you?' she asked, to deflect his scrutiny.

'Much obliged, but no,' he said, staring levelly at her. 'I'm just
browsing.'

Much obliged?
He didn't blink. He said
browsing.
Nobody who
walked into a junk shop said they were
browsing
, even if that was
exactly what they were doing.

'No problem,' she said, calmly, as he moved along the tables that
contained old plates crammed with coins that could no longer be
offered as legal tender; cracked porcelain drawer knobs; used stamps
still framed in hinges that had lost their adhesive; heavy-metal pins
and badges from the 1970s: Judas Priest, Rush, Black Sabbath.

The worst he could do was arrest her, but for what? Then maybe
he wasn't police, or rather, he was ex-police. Which meant?

Manser's stink was all over him.

Sarah busied herself with the ledger that Ray kept up to date, a
recording of everything that came in or went out of the shop, how
much was paid, how much was received. She added up rows of
figures that didn't need totalling, numbered blank pages deeper into
the ledger with a black Biro. Now and again she would glance up at
the man in the grey raincoat as he browsed, and failed to hide his
interest in Sarah as she worked behind the counter.

His slapdash approach reached its nadir as he pretended to peruse
a copy of
National Geographic
magazine, which he help upside down
in his hands. Sarah might have laughed at his ineptitude had his
presence not meant that she and Claire were looking at yet another
upheaval. How could she have even entertained the fancy of escaping
Manser's clutches? His stain was on everything. Of course he was
going to have bitches who wore stripes accepting his dirty money.
How could she have believed that he wouldn't, or that his sphere of
influence would somehow be weaker out here on England's east
coast? It was as if the UK's profile were Manser's profile. His
aggressive head was Scotland's most northerly part, bent over,
inspecting his Welsh navel while his Cornwall leg stretched out and
his Kentish arse shat into the English Channel.

The man with the inverted copy of
National Geographic
looked
up sharply when Sarah's harsh bleats of laughter echoed around the
junk shop's high ceiling.

'This job does strange things to you,' he said.

What, yours or mine?
she suddenly felt like asking. She didn't like
the man's skin. It was too pink, and bumpy, like an orange. He had a
bad scar on his jawline, livid and white, perhaps a shaving accident.
She guessed with skin so uneven he sustained a lot of nicks and slashes.
She also didn't like the set square parting in his hair, which was too
ginger to be described as red, or strawberry blond, which was, she
ventured, how he liked to see it. His eyes were too small and close-set.
His teeth were uneven. His shirt had not been ironed, or ironed too
well ...

'Yes,' she said at last. 'I spend far too much time staring at old
curiosities.' She wanted to laugh again. The urge was in her like that
of wanting to pee.

He seemed discomfited by her apparent slur, but was either too
polite or too stupid to challenge her on it. He put down the magazine
he had been reading, and Sarah noticed with a pang of regret that he
had been studying one of the stapled supplements, a map or graph of
some kind, and that it had been inserted the wrong way up.

'What do you do for a living?' she asked, then chided herself for
being so upfront. What was he going to say:
My name's DCI Doe.
Would you come with me to the station, please, madam?

He seemed mildly astonished by the question. 'I'm an insurance
salesman.'

Oh yeah, sure you are.

'Is there anything I can help you with?'

'Possibly, Miss –'

But she wasn't falling for that. She simply arched her eyebrows.

'I'm interested in old watches. I collect them. Do you
have –'

'We've not got any watches at the moment. You could try the
antique shop, just up the lane.'

'How about clocks?'

'Not really. The stuff we stock is a little further down the antique
food chain.'

'If I could leave you my card ... you could contact me if
something horological came in.'

Horological. Very good. Boning up on his subject back at the
station before he came over ...

She took the proffered white rectangle and gave it a quick glance:
Mick Goodhart, Salesman.

'Could I have your name? Just as a point of contact?'

Point of contact ... police if ever she heard it.

'Ray Carver owns the shop. You'd be best speaking to him.'

'And you are?' He wouldn't give up. He was staring at her,
unblinking. To evade him again was to incriminate herself.

'Martha Peake,' she said, removing the Patrick McGrath novel of
the same name from the desktop. She gave him a piece of paper with
the junk-shop name badly photocopied across the top and its contact
details.

He made a play of inspecting an opened tin filled with brooches,
but she could tell he wasn't really looking at them, and then he
quietly turned away and walked out of the shop. She followed him to
the door, fully expecting to see him climb into an unmarked squad car
and radio in to HQ, but he was standing by the window of the
furniture shop, staring at a dining table. She watched him pull a hand
from his pocket and assess his loose change, then he crossed the main
road and entered the fish and chip restaurant.

She wiped her hands against her blouse, as if ridding herself of his
oleaginous residue; she could still smell him, a mix of stale tobacco
and coffee, and something else, something acrid: shoe polish, maybe.
Brasso. Wrinkling her nose, she went back to the counter.

Claire was no longer reading. She was asleep, her face laced with
weak, wintry sunlight. Something chased her in her dreams; she was
restive, agonised. She was mouthing words that Sarah had to stoop to
get any hope of understanding. Millimetres from her daughter's face,
she thought they might have been
Come to me.

A yellow comma of slime was curled across her top lip. Sarah
dabbed it away with her finger, wondering if Claire might have
sneezed in her sleep. When she saw the broken spider in her left hand,
moist, too moist to be alive, missing five of its legs and most of its
abdomen, she recoiled.

It's okay,
she thought,
it's okay to eat insects in your sleep ...
most of us do it without knowing.

The way she was holding it, though, like some little fondant fancy.
Like some ... some fucking
praline.

'Claire? Claire, darling?'

She stirred a little, enough to lift her hand with the remainder of
her snack and try to push it between her teeth. Sarah gave a strangled
sob and slapped the spider from her fingers. Her daughter came up
out of sleep fast, her eyes bloodshot, a snarl wadded in a throat that
sounded too wet, too animal. Her teeth were shocking. White. Deep.
Like a shark's. Sarah clattered backwards, knocking over a chair and
skinning her back on the hinged edge of the counter.

Claire's aggression faded as quickly as it had risen; she slumped
again, sucking her fingertips, making babyish lalling noises. A few
moments more and it was as if Sarah were seeing her asleep for the
first time. She seemed peaceful, content. Sarah shakily got to her feet
and drew the blinds. The sudden darkness made her feel giddy,
spangled with fear. She retreated into the cold space of the junk shop
and busied herself with tidying the magazines the so-called Mick
Goodhart had disturbed. She did not go back to check on her
daughter. She waited for her to wake naturally. When she heard her
stirring, a little less than half an hour later, it was all she could do to
stop herself from running out of the junk shop and away down the
high street.

My baby. My baby. Where are you? Where did you go?

Later. Had she slept? She must have done; the darkness was somehow
less dense, less invasive. Nevertheless, she did not feel refreshed.
Claire's hand was no longer within her own. She reached out but the
duvet had been thrown off. The dimpled area where Claire had been
was now cold.

Sarah switched on the bedside light and sat up, blinking, a fist
tightening inside her chest. Sometimes Claire preferred to spend the
night by the window, staring out at the dark. Frequently she did this
while nude, no matter how cold, her skin rising off her in a pimpled
mass. But she was not sitting by the window now. The door was ajar.
It was just shy of 5 a.m. At least, Sarah saw as she hurried to get
dressed, her daughter had taken her clothes with her.

She closed the door behind her and put her hands to her face.
Stupid. Stupid bitch. Who was that aimed at? Her. Her daughter.
Both. It didn't matter. Just get on and find her.

The door across from hers opened. It was Nick, the barman. He
was in a pair of shorts. Soft, trancey music followed him out on to the
landing.

'You doing a runner without paying?' he asked.

'It's my daughter. She's gone.'

He held up one finger, his face suddenly serious. He ducked back
into his room and she was suddenly convinced he would return with
Claire, freshly deflowered as some kind of rebuke for Sarah's lack of
interest in him.

He returned in seconds, wearing boots, jeans and a hooded top. He
handed her a sweater. 'It's cold outside,' he said. He carried a heavy
black torch with a long handle. Sarah hadn't considered that her
daughter might have gone out. She thought she would be in the lounge,
or sitting at the bar, but a cursory check suggested Nick was right. The
wind bit her as they stepped into the street. A brindle cat moved rapidly
along the row of shops opposite, belly low to the ground. There was
nothing else.

The sky was tinged with green where dawn touched it but it was
still too dark to see properly, especially away from the streetlamps.

'Are there any cliffs?' she asked in a small voice, seeing the worst,
as she could never help but do.

'Not near here,' he said. 'Further, much further up the coast. Don't
worry.'

It seemed too quiet to start calling Claire's name, but she chastised
herself for being so stupid. She cried out for her as loudly as she could
and was bolstered by Nick echoing her call.

She didn't know where to start. She looked to Nick for leadership
and he was moving off to the left, in the direction of the sea. She
followed, guessing it was the best place to begin. If she had been a
wounded teenager, she'd prefer the mystery and sympathy of all that
black water, although she felt bad about reducing Claire's problems
to some hormonal sulk. The street forked, becoming narrower. A
bookshop, a tweedy clothes shop, a fishmonger's, a charity shop, all
reflected her image as they moved towards the beach. She hated the
reluctant stoop of her shoulders, as if already weighed down with the
awful truth of her daughter's death. Or even worse, the unforgivable
wish that she was gone, because life would be so much easier.