What Dies Inside (4 page)

‘How long have we been sitting here now?’ Vardy wondered grumpily, reaching for the door handle. ‘I need a slash.’

‘Where are you gonna go? There’s nowhere round here.’

‘Let me worry about that,’ Vardy replied, pushing the door open.

‘Hold on,’ said Wickes as he started snapping away. ‘That fat bloke is coming out again.’

Slipping back into his seat, Vardy looked at his watch. ‘What’s Billy Bunter been up to, I wonder? He’s been in there for more than an hour.’

‘Maybe he’s an associate of Durkan,’ Wickes mused.

Associate.
Vardy hated it when Wickes used language he’d picked up from American cop shows. They were British, for God’s sake. And this certainly wasn’t
Starsky & Hutch
, even if he did detect a bit of a passing resemblance to David Soul when he looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Why would he spend so much time inside if he was looking for Durkan? He must know the old woman – family, most likely.’

‘He’s sticking something in his pocket.’

‘Mm.’ Vardy was more interested in where he was going to relieve himself. The two policemen watched the man stop at the front gate, before turning right and walking down the road, away from the Cortina.

‘We’d better go and tell Cahill,’ said Wickes, taking a few last shots of the man’s back, before tossing the camera on the back seat.

‘OK.’ Slamming the door closed, Vardy turned the key in the ignition and the Cortina’s engine roared into life. Pulling away from the kerb, he stomped on the accelerator. ‘Let’s get going before I bloody piss myself.’

Trying desperately to keep his gaze on
Saturday Superstore,
Carlyle used his peripheral vision to track Samantha Hudson as she walked languidly through the living room. Watching the voluptuous young woman pad across the carpet wearing nothing but a black bra and a pair of lacy white briefs, he reflected, not for the first time, on just how unfair life could be. Reaching the bedroom, Sam placed her hand on the doorframe and leaned forward, giving Carlyle an excellent view of her perfectly symmetrical backside as she stuck her head round the open door.

‘Dom,’ she trilled, sounding every inch the pampered Sloane refugee that she was, ‘fancy a coffee?’ From the bedroom came an indecipherable grunt. Turning, the girl retraced her steps towards the kitchen, giving Carlyle a cheeky smile as she sashayed past in slow motion. ‘He’ll be out in a minute . . . probably.’

Feeling himself blush violently, Carlyle raised his gaze as far as her navel. ‘OK.’ With great force of will, he gritted his teeth and returned his attention to the TV. Somehow, though, even the ever-perky Sarah Greene didn’t seem so alluring on this particular morning.

After listening to Sam banging around in the kitchen for a few minutes, Carlyle was wondering if he should leave. He didn’t like playing gooseberry at the best of times, and this brutal demonstration of the difference between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ was causing him an almost physical pain. He was just about to get up from the cream sofa when Dom, wearing not a stitch of clothing, finally wandered into the living room, scratching his head and yawning widely. ‘Late night?’ Carlyle asked, his voice dripping with jealousy.

‘Not particularly,’ grinned Dom, as he looked towards the kitchen. ‘It’s more to do with the company I keep.’ Stepping over to the armchair in the corner, he picked up a pair of jeans and a grubby looking green and white Frank Zappa T-shirt. ‘Where are my trainers?’ he asked, pulling on the jeans. Carlyle pointed to the pair of blue Adidas Originals peeking out from under the chair.

‘Ta.’

‘No problem.’ Carlyle felt like crying.

‘C’mon,’ Dom grunted, pulling the T-shirt over his head and slipping on the shoes, ‘let’s go out and get some breakfast.’

Carlyle took a bite of his egg roll and washed it down with a mouthful of lukewarm Nescafé. The Roadrunner café on Goldhawk Road had long been a favourite haunt; the food was crappy and the service appalling, but it was cheap and had a seedy, down at heel air that appealed to him. At this time on a Saturday morning, it was almost full, so they had to share a table with a couple of young women busy fortifying themselves for an assault on the department stores of the West End.

‘So,’ Carlyle said, wiping ketchup from his chin with a napkin, ‘you and Sam, is it serious?’

‘Serious?’ Dom pulled a packet of Embassy Regal from his pocket and stuck one in his mouth.

‘Well, you know, you’ve been going out together for, what, almost six months now?’

‘“Going out”?’ Ignoring the disapproving glance of one of the women at a nearby table, a pretty blonde wearing a denim jacket over a cheesecloth blouse, Dom laughed as he lit up his smoke. After taking a long drag, he turned away from the table and exhaled. ‘Listen to you,’ he continued, lowering his voice. ‘We don’t “go out”, we get high and we fuck.’

No need to be so bloody smug about it,
Carlyle thought sourly.

‘Sam’s a nice girl,’ Dom explained, waving his cigarette airily over the table. ‘We hook up now and again, have a bit of fun, but that’s it.’

A bit of fun?
Carlyle felt his head spin with frustration as he watched the smoke from Dom’s cigarette rise lazily towards the ceiling. In his extremely limited experience, relationships with women were impossibly complex. It annoyed him intensely that Dom could make it seem so simple. Then again, it was like that with most things – Carlyle seeing complexity everywhere, while his mate just ploughed on regardless.

‘Anyway,’ Dom asked, ‘what about you? How’s the love-life?’ Sitting back in his chair, he winked at the blonde, who smiled despite herself.

‘What love-life?’ Carlyle replied, with rather too much feeling.

Taking another drag on his cig, Dom gave him a consoling pat on the arm. ‘Come on, Johnny boy, you’ve got to get out there.’ He gestured towards the passing traffic. ‘There’s a big, bad world out there, just waiting for you to jump into it.’

‘Mm.’ Carlyle slurped the last of his coffee. Deep down he knew that he simply wasn’t the kind of bloke who jumped into things – big, bad, or otherwise – much as he might want to.

‘If it’s just a question of getting your rocks off,’ Dom said, stubbing out the remains of his cigarette in a tin ashtray, ‘I know a couple of girls . . .’ He shot the blonde a frankly lecherous look that sent her scuttling from the table, with her mate in tow. ‘More than a couple, in fact.’

‘No, no,’ Carlyle said hastily as he watched the girls pay their bill at the counter and disappear through the door without so much as a backward glance. The last thing he wanted was for Dom to line him up with a hooker. Apart from anything else, he couldn’t afford one.

‘Whatever takes your fancy.’

‘No,’ Carlyle repeated.

‘Up to you,’ Dom shrugged.

‘Anyway, there’s a woman at the station . . .’ Desperate not to seem like a total loser, Carlyle gave Dom a quick bit of background on Sandra Wollard, omitting to mention the kids, the divorces and the fact she was well on the way to forty.

Dom listened patiently. ‘Ah well, good luck with that,’ he said when Carlyle had finished. ‘I’m not sure I would get involved with another copper, but that’s up to you. How is work at the moment, anyway?’

‘Nothing particularly exciting.’

‘That’s exactly why I left,’ Dom said, tapping the cigarette packet with his index finger. ‘Who would have thought the whole thing was just so totally fucking boring?’

Carlyle grinned. ‘I thought you left because they were gonna kick you out.’

‘Hardly.’

‘How many coppers tried to shop you over Syerston in the end?’ A few months earlier, in the summer, the pair of them had been billeted in an RAF base in Nottinghamshire while on picket-line duty during the mineworkers’ strike. For Constable Dominic Silver, presented with a captive market, it had been an opportunity to develop his growing side-line – selling drugs. There had been plenty of brother officers happy to partake of his wares. A fair few, however, had not been prepared to turn a blind eye to what was going on. Barely two months after returning to London, Dom had left the force.

‘One or two,’ Dom admitted. ‘Wankers. They should have minded their own fucking business.’

‘So,’ Carlyle persisted, ‘did you jump, or were you pushed?’

‘I jumped.’

Carlyle raised an eyebrow.

‘No, really.’ Taking the packet of Embassy from the table, Dom shoved it back in his pocket, fishing out a couple of pound notes in the process. ‘There were some murmurings before I left, but no one got round to starting any disciplinary proceedings or anything like that. My discharge was perfectly honourable.’

‘Glad to hear it.’ Carlyle sniggered.

Dom waved the notes across the table. ‘The point is, what I do now is far more lucrative. I’m good at it and I’m my own boss. There was no point in hanging around being a hopeless plod for thirty years just so I could collect my pension.’ Pushing back his chair, Dom jumped to his feet and went over to the counter to pay for breakfast. ‘No offence.’

‘None taken.’ Carlyle smiled limply.

Out on the street, Dom turned in the direction of his flat. ‘I need to get going. Sam’s waiting.’

‘OK,’ Carlyle said.

‘What are you up to?’

Carlyle looked at his watch. ‘I’m off to the Cottage this afternoon; taking my dad to see Fulham.’

‘Oh yeah, who are they playing?’ Dom’s tone displayed a complete lack of interest.
I wouldn’t be interested in bloody football either,
Carlyle thought,
if I was heading off to cavort with Sam Hudson.
Belatedly, he remembered why he’d come over to see his mate in the first place. Pulling the flyer out of the back pocket of his jeans, he unfolded it and handed it to Dom.

‘Ever heard of this place?’

Dom looked at the picture of the bucking bronco and nodded. ‘Yeah, I know the McDermott Arms.’ He handed the flyer back to Carlyle. ‘It’s an Irish pub on Kilburn High Road. Not exactly home turf, but I’ve been known to do a little bit of business up there, now and again. Why do you ask?’

‘It just came up in something I was looking at,’ Carlyle replied vaguely.

‘Well,
constable
,’ Dom chuckled, ‘be advised that the McDermott Arms is most definitely not the kind of place for a boy like you. Not unless you’ve got thirty mates from the Riot Squad with you, all tooled up and ready for a ruck.’ He gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder and started off down the road. ‘See you soon.’

‘Have fun,’ Carlyle mumbled, the words sticking in his throat.

Propping himself up with a pillow, Harry Cahill watched Rose Murray lean over the edge of the bed and unceremoniously spit his ejaculate into an empty coffee cup sitting on the bedside table. All passion spent, a vague sense of irritation washed over him. ‘Why can’t you just swallow it?’ he complained.

Wiping her chin on the crumpled bedsheet, Rose scowled. ‘What’s it to you?’ she said. ‘And, anyway, when was the last time your wife gave you any kind of blow job, full stop?’

Good point
, conceded Cahill. Oral sex had never been on the menu at home at the best of times, and these were a long way from being the best of times.

Rose let an arm drop to the floor. Fumbling for a packet of John Player Special and a green Bic lighter, she placed a cigarette between her lips and offered one to Cahill.

‘Nah.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Lighting up, she tossed the packet and the lighter on to the bed and took a firm drag on the cig.

He watched her send a stream of smoke towards the ceiling and fall back on the bed. ‘So . . . how are things going at the moment?’

‘Don’t try and make small talk,’ she admonished him, inhaling deeply for a second time. ‘I know the drill: all you want to do is fuck me and then pump me for information.’ Folding her arms across her breasts, she shook her head angrily, ‘Trust me to end up being blackmailed by some bent copper from Special Branch.’

‘Those are the breaks,’ he said, absentmindedly scratching his belly.

‘Thanks a lot.’ Taking a third long drag on her cigarette, she leaned over and dropped it into the coffee cup.

Staring at his midriff, Cahill wondered if there might be any life left down there. That was one of the problems of getting older – his powers of recovery were definitely waning. ‘As I’ve told you before,’ he yawned, ‘if you want to play at being a trust-fund terrorist, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth.’

‘Fuck you!’ Lashing out, she smacked him on the arm, before jumping from the bed like a scalded cat. Standing at the end of the bed, hands on hips, tears mingled with the hatred in her eyes. ‘I don’t owe you anything, you bastard.’

Looking her up and down, Cahill felt a pleasant warmth spread through his groin. Rolling off the bed, he thrust out an arm, letting his hand tighten around her throat as he marched her backwards.

‘Ow! Get off me, you cunt!’ She tried to direct a kick between his legs, but he dodged the blow, pulling her up as she stumbled backwards and slamming her into the wall.

‘Now listen to me, you stupid bitch,’ he hissed, trying to conceal the level of exertion in his voice. ‘Just because you decided to disown your rich family in Knightsbridge and screw a bunch of mentally defective, sheep-shagging terrorists, that doesn’t make you Joan of fucking Arc.’ Squirming, she tried to spit at him but he tightened his grip round her neck and the saliva barely managed to trickle down her chin. ‘Trying to burgle your family home to raise funds for the armed struggle was one of the most stupid things I have ever seen in my life.’

‘We’re making a stand,’ she panted, ‘standing up to the power of the privileged elite.’

‘Yeah,’ Cahill scoffed, ‘and that doorman you hit over the head with a hammer will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.’ She made one last attempt to wriggle free, but he could sense that the fight had gone out of her. That was the thing with rich kids, they had no stamina. She tried another curse, but all that came out was a fragile wail. ‘If it wasn’t for me,’ Cahill continued, ‘you would have got at least eight years in Holloway for what you did. You’ve got a fucking good deal out of me.’ Releasing his grip, he took a step backwards.