Amphetamines and Pearls (11 page)

I wasn't sure why but I wanted to hit him again and again. Then something made me stop hitting him and I looked round and Jane was standing to one side. She looked as though she did not believe what was happening. I looked down at my fists, clenched hard. Looked at Martin's shattered face: the terror in his eyes. The fear of someone who thinks he is about to be killed. All around us was silence, stillness. A crowd of people watching. For some perhaps it was another part of the entertainment

Martin's glasses were on the floor. I reached down and picked them up. I handed them to him and his hand took them but it didn't put them to his face. Just held them in front of him like some strange gift.

13

My dream was all glasses and eyes, moving, interchanging, slipping in and out of focus. Pink eyes, white eyes, eyes staring with fear at their centre. The cracked lenses and twisted rims of a pair of spectacles. Lying in the middle of an all-black room. Dangling from the hand of a corpse. Looking. Looking into me. Jane's eyes looking at me. Not knowing what she saw. Not knowing if she saw. Hating what she saw. Closing, moving away. Blind.

A smash of glass and I thought it was in my dream. But then I sensed that it was not. I opened my eyes and looked at the digital clock. Five-ten. The glass must have been the small window downstairs near the door. I jumped out of bed fast and grabbed for my pants; then for my gun.

I pulled open the bedroom door and they were half-way up the stairs. This time they too had guns and they were pointing straight at me. I stood poised with one hand on the bannister rail and the other holding the Smith and Wesson.

‘Put your gun away and get dressed, Mitchell. You'll catch a cold.'

It was the chatty one; back in command. His friend wore a plaster across his nose and a nasty expression all over his face. I turned around and went back into the bedroom.

One of them took my gun and I let them take it and pulled on my trousers and a sweater. I didn't like what was happening: not one little bit.

‘We warned you.'

‘Yes, we even offered you money.'

‘But you wouldn't listen.'

‘You just kept getting your nose in the way.'

‘Where it didn't belong.'

‘And now we're going to have to put it out.'

‘Permanently.'

Oh boy, now when they both talked they were something else. If only they had had the build for it, these two guys would have made the next Laurel and Hardy—or was it Old Mother Riley and Kitty MacShane?

‘Did you know she was a man?' I asked them.

They exchanged blank looks: something else they had a talent for.

The one with the plaster said: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?'

‘The lady in the picture, of course.' I pointed at the wall behind them. They fell for it; only the slightest of movements towards the wall away from me, but I hoped it was enough. It had to be.

I kicked at one and chopped down on the gun arm of the other. The gun fell to the floor but the man still stood in my way. My kick had landed high on his partner, but he was holding himself as though winded and his gun was against his chest. As I kicked again I wondered if it was free of the safety catch. The explosion told me it had been. He had tried to bring it back round to face me but the underneath of my foot pressed it back into his body as his finger squeezed down on the trigger. He fell back with a scream.

His friend grabbed my arms from behind and I butted back hard with my head. It must have caught him on the forehead as that was where he was holding when I turned. I punched him twice in the belly and dropped to one knee to grab his gun.

He was game. He didn't give up. He lashed out and booted me over against the bed, then jumped for me. I rolled aside and raised the gun high and fast. Then brought it down. The noise as it struck the back of his skull was as empty as a hollow drum. I did it again to make sure.

Then I looked at the boy with the plaster and the new gunshot wound. The bullet seemed to have gone into the meat of his shoulder and there was quite a lot of blood. He looked at me and spat in my face: I let him have it with the barrel of the gun and it raked away the plaster and gave him a new cut to add to his collection. I took his gun off the floor and gave him a lecture about safety. Then I went downstairs and phoned the law.

Tom Gilmour sat in the back with me and he kept the journey pretty functional. We were going to take them in and get them booked and then he and I were going to go back to his office and have a nice little talk. Maybe. Or maybe we wouldn't be in his office. It could be the blank, anonymous room downstairs which they kept for questioning their prime suspects. Far enough away from the enquiry desk to ensure that old ladies who came in to enquire about their missing tabbies didn't lose all their respect for our wonderful British police.

I didn't know and looking across at Gilmour's face sure didn't help any. Mostly it was stony, impassive—except when it was creased by a heavy scowl. But that was okay.

If you had seen what his face had seen then you would be stony too.

He spent seven hours on a ledge in Upper Brooklyn. The ledge was twelve storeys up and no more than a foot wide. All Tom had to hold on to was the sill of an open window and a few remaining hopes. The girl had no window and no hopes. She stood jammed back against the brickwork of the building, arms spread out wide as though she were waiting to be crucified. It was early evening; it was gathering dark and it was raining. A dull, insistent rain which beat down and down and down. Not that the rain mattered. It wouldn't have altered things if there had been a heat-wave.

Tom Gilmour squatted on that ledge until he had lost all feeling in his legs; until the arm which held fast to the wood of the ledge was an unmoving thing which he had long forgotten as a part of his body. And all this while he talked and tried to get the girl to talk. Most of the time it was just his voice and the beat of the rain, against the wall and up from the ledge.

Occasionally she would say something: and it wasn't very nice. It was not very encouraging. She swore at her father, whoever and wherever the bastard was; she swore at her mother, for having opened her legs on that fatal occasion and for opening them at every opportunity ever since; she swore at the son-of-a-bitch who had got her pregnant then gone off and left her, too late to have an abortion, with a life inside that she neither wanted nor needed.

Tom had said what about the child, the child who is alive inside you. And she had said it is for the sake of the child that I am doing this. And she had pushed back with her hands against the wetness of the wall and had simply dived out into the greying air.

She hadn't waited for them to come for her with the nails.

Tom watched the first fluent movement outwards, then turned his head away before the fall turned into a tumble, a vain flapping; he covered his ears from the scream, pushing his head down against the arm which held his own life fast. Even through the muffle of hand and shoulder he could hear the sickening thump.

That was just one thing: one event in the year Tom Gilmour had spent with the police force in New York. He learned a whole lot and he saw a whole lot. He came home a different man: something was missing from the centre of his body and its place had been taken by something new inside his brain. Something shining, efficient and metallic. Deadly. Maybe in a way Gilmour himself had died out on those streets.

Now he was a faster cop, a harder cop, a cop who carried his gun whenever he could squeeze the authority and who loved to feel the strength of its handle between his two hands. He had seen in New York what a city could become and now he saw in London what a city was becoming. And he didn't like it. Now he was a better cop.

A stony one. As stony as a dirty, rain-streaked ledge a foot wide and twelve storeys up.

The car pulled in outside West End Central Station and we went inside.

Gilmour took me up the stairs to his office and shut the door behind me. He went over and pulled down the blinds. Then he offered me a seat and when I sat down he kicked it away from under me. I hit the floor with a thump that must have told the guys in the office downstairs to put the earplugs in again. But Tom just stood there looking at me with an expression that was a mixture of contempt and pity.

‘Christ! Mitchell, you are one hell of a creep! When are you going to realise that there isn't always going to be someone like me around who is going to leap around in the early hours of every goddamn morning bailing you out of the shitty messes you keep falling arse over end straight into?'

He spat into the wastepaper bin. He missed and he rubbed his shoe over the offending phlegm.

Then turned back to me: ‘You see that yellow mess that just coughed out of my gut? Well, that's you. And you see what I did to that mess? Well, that's what I'm just liable to do to you.'

I was on the point of asking him what for, but I stopped myself. I thought that given time he would tell me anyway. He did and he didn't need much time.

‘All the way along you've been withholding enough evidence to fill a paper sack and then some. You said that you had no idea who that little creep was whose head was bashed in on your stairs. Well, you knew, Mitchell. You knew and as sure as all hell you went round to his house and you found out what you could—and you got hold of his little red book into the bargain.'

I must have looked surprised for he sat hard on the front of his desk and eased the toe of his shoe into my shoulder. It sure wasn't comfortable on the floor but I wasn't about to try to get up and get pushed down by a foot in my face. That wasn't my kind of luxury.

‘You're thinking how do I know. I know, Mitchell, because although it had obviously escaped your notice there is a whole goddamn police force in this city and there are more of them than there are of you. So when the police woman was talking to the little girl, after she had gained her confidence with a few sweets and a good heart-to-heart about girlish matters, she found out about the visit. The visit some man had made when she was cleaning her daddy's car the day her daddy didn't come home. And when she started to remember, boy, did she remember you good. She could describe you as well as if she'd been your own kid, not that of some dead jerk lying in the mortuary with his head staved in.

‘So that's how we know for one. For two, we found this in the desk in your office.'

This time I did get up—or try to. Why didn't I listen to my own warnings just one time? The flat underside of a size ten struck along the side of my face and I hit the filing cabinet hard. Hands dragged me up and when I moved my arm so as to rub my back, one of them hit me across the cheek so that it stung, then went numb.

I was always getting hit, and this day had started off worse than most. First two heavies break into my quiet little residence and try to take me to the cemetery. Then along comes the big bold copper to the rescue and proceeds to take over where they left off. One of these fine days I was going to start hitting back and when I did …

‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mitchell.'

I rubbed my face, trying to encourage a little feeling back into it.

‘Did you have a little thing like a warrant to go looking round my office for little red books?'

‘Don't crap around with me, Mitchell, and don't waste my time belly-aching about your legal rights because you forfeited those a long time ago. You forfeited those the first time you put one tiny toe outside the law yourself.'

He looked at me and something rose up in his throat again and this time he hit the bin. It was getting later and he was getting more control over his faculties. I hoped like hell that he didn't feel impelled to hit me again.

But instead he turned round and went behind his desk. He sat down and took out a half-bottle of scotch and a couple of glasses. Carefully, he poured two small measures: it was still early.

He passed one over to me. I pulled the chair up from the floor and sat down. I took the scotch and it felt good and warm as it went down. He reached over with the bottle and poured me another. That felt good too.

He shrugged: ‘Besides, your office lock was still busted. We just went in and looked around.'

He put the bottle back in the drawer and took out the red notebook. He turned to the page with Howard's name on it and reversed it; he pushed it across the desk so that I could see it. I sensed I was supposed to say something but I didn't. So he did.

‘We knew already, I guess. When you went up to Nottingham and saw Leake and told him you were off to see Candi Carter's manager.' He paused and sipped at his own drink. ‘Funny man, that Leake. Seems he took a liking to you, said you seemed all right. Liked the fact that you went and told him what you were going to do.'

He stared at me over the desk.

‘Of course, that's what you're supposed to do anyway. You might try doing it with me a bit more often.'

I nodded and asked, ‘Did Leake say any more?'

Gilmour shook his head, ‘Not much that was of any use. They're checking out all known acquaintances of Candi Carter's and hoping for a lead that way. The flat brought them nothing at all: whoever went through that and cleaned it up would make a good housewife. Spring cleaning wasn't in it! But he didn't go much on you in that role.'

I asked, ‘What about Howard?'

‘They busted a couple of musicians on the night you went there first. There was a guy in plain clothes watching you watching Howard.'

I said that I had known that.

‘After that it seems that Howard had another visit and Leake guesses it was from you. Whoever it was scared the shit out of him. I guess it was you, too. What did he tell you?'

I hesitated but the numbness in my cheek was only now disappearing and besides I preferred Gilmour when he was handing out scotch rather than punishment. Not that Howard had told me very much that was positive. Just eliminated a few possibilities.

‘Howard didn't help much, except he convinced me that it wasn't him that finished Candi. He was fed up with the way she had been using him all right, but he wouldn't kill her. I got the impression that he was stuck on her.'

Gilmour asked, ‘Did he have any idea who had done it?'

I didn't want to tell him about John until later that morning: I hoped I would be able to see that person first myself. My questions were more urgent. Then Tom could have him. So I told him part of the truth—which is all most people ever get anyway.

‘She was into drugs pretty heavily and
…'

He interrupted: ‘We knew that from the autopsy. Boy, she was so high inside that the doctor nearly went on a trip from just sniffing the samples.'