Being (11 page)

I got up off the bench, dropped the chicken remains in a litter bin and started walking.

Eddi Ray’s flat was on the seventh floor of a high-rise tower block in a sprawling estate called Gillespie Heights. There were about half a dozen other tower blocks on the estate and they all looked pretty much the same – cold and grey and scary. Some of the ground-floor flats had bars on the windows, others had reinforced doors. There were bicycles chained to balconies. Broken saplings. Broken needles scattered on the ground.

As I cut across a patch of grass and followed the pathways into the estate, I kept my eyes open and my hand on the pistol in my pocket.

After a while, Eddi’s tower block came into sight. It was straight ahead of me, standing tall and dark against the North London sky. In front of the tower block, a bunch of Asian kids were karate-kicking each other around a ruined playground, and a skinny Alsatian mongrel was squatting to crap by the swingless swings.

There was no one else around.

No one was watching me.

No silver eyes.

No men in suits or coats.

It was around midday now. The air felt tired and washed out.

I went inside the tower block and took the lift to the seventh floor.

The hallway was empty when I stepped out of the lift. It smelled of soup, cigarettes, marijuana, petrol and piss. Thick heavy bass booms were thumping out from a flat down below –
doomp doomp d-doomp, doomp doomp d-doomp, doomp doomp d-doomp.
The air was stale and the hallway was grimly lit – yellowy-white, scratched and cold. The walls seemed to lean inwards. At the end of the hallway, a bleak window showed a rectangle of rainy-day sky.

I walked towards it.

Doomp doomp d-doomp
…

The beat went on.

Eddi’s flat was 722. The door was fitted with black steel mesh. As I stood there staring at it, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t given this much thought. What if she didn’t let me in? What if she wasn’t at home? What if she didn’t even
live
here any more?

It was too late to start worrying now.

I took off my hat and rang the bell.

After about thirty seconds, a voice called out from behind the door, ‘Who is it?’

A female voice. Sweet but hard.

I stared at the peephole in the door. ‘My name’s Robert Smith,’ I told the invisible eye. ‘I came here about a year ago with John Blake.’

‘Who?’

I hesitated, wondering what she meant. Who’s John Blake? Or who’s Robert Smith?

‘I’m Robert,’ I said. ‘I was here with John Blake –’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Robert Smith.’

‘What do you want?’

I hesitated again. What
did
I want?

‘I’m in trouble,’ I told her. ‘I need your help.’

Silence. I could feel her watching me through the peephole, thinking about me, deciding what to do.

‘Does anyone know you’re here?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Did you tell anyone else you were coming here?’

‘No.’

‘Just a minute.’

I heard bolts thunking, chains rattling, locks unlocking… then the door finally opened and there she was – Eddi Ray. Black vest, ripped jeans. Peroxide hair, short and spiky. A sculpted face. Pale skin glinting with studs and rings.

She was a lot prettier than I remembered.

Pretty and hard.

She looked over my shoulder, checking that I was alone, then she stepped back and ushered me inside.

It was a fairly big flat. A large front room, two bedrooms, a hallway, a kitchen, a bathroom. There were locks on all the doors, and the windows were masked with heavy
black curtains. The only light in the front room came from the flickering glow of countless computer monitors and TV screens. CNN played silently on a widescreen TV in the corner. CCTV images stuttered on a black-and-white portable – images of the hallway outside, the lobby, the estate. The room was filled with equipment – laptops, PCs, printers, scanners, phones, copiers, cameras, work desks, tools, piles of papers. The air hummed with electric heat.

‘You’re wet,’ Eddi said to me.

‘It’s raining.’

She nodded, smiling at me. Her smile didn’t look right – too false, too kind. I couldn’t work it out.

‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing at a leather settee. ‘You want a drink or something?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m all right, thanks.’

I put my rucksack on the floor and sat down. Eddi remained standing. I didn’t know how old she was, but I guessed she was around nineteen or twenty. She was slim and short, strong, well balanced. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted black. She had very blue eyes. She was still smiling at me…

And that bothered me. She shouldn’t have been smiling at me. She should have been wary, wondering what I wanted, wondering what I was doing here.

‘It’s a shame about John,’ she said.

I shrugged.

She lit a cigarette. ‘You know Curt’s dead too, don’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘Curtis, John’s brother. My ex.’

‘Really?’

She nodded. ‘Never got out of prison. Got popped inside.’ She drew on her cigarette and smiled again. ‘So,’ she said, blowing out smoke, ‘what can I do for you, Robert? How can I help?’

Whatever I was, I’d lived my life by certain rules.

Never believe anything.

Never back down.

Never get used to anything.

Never trust anyone who offers to help.

Over the years, I’d expanded that last one into never trusting anyone at
all,
but the basic principle was still the same: charity stinks.

Selfless charity doesn’t exist. Everyone wants something. No one does anything for free. There’s always a catch.

It sounds pretty dirty, I know. But that’s how it is.

So, when Eddi offered to help me – all smiles and kind looks and caring blue eyes – I knew that something was wrong. I could feel it, sense it. I could see it in her eyes. She knew something. She was treating me like a friend, but I wasn’t a friend. I was just some kid who’d come round to her flat one night with her ex-boyfriend’s brother. It was over a year ago. I’d only stayed for an hour, barely said a word. She shouldn’t have even remembered me. But here she was, treating me like a long-lost friend. And that wasn’t right.

‘Could I use your bathroom, please?’ I asked her.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’s just down the hall on the left.’

I could feel her watching me as I got up and crossed the room. I was trying to stay calm, trying to act as normally as possible. But I was also trying to look round
her flat without letting her know that I was looking. I didn’t know what I was looking for – something out of place, something that might tell me something…

Whatever it was, I didn’t see it.

I went down the hallway and into the bathroom. I peed. Flushed the toilet. Washed my hands. Then I looked in the mirror. And as my face looked back at me – bedraggled and damp – I suddenly realized that I
had
seen something in the front room. I knew it. I’d seen something. I still didn’t know what it was, but I knew I’d seen something.

I closed my eyes and pictured myself leaving the room. What had I seen? Settee, carpet, computers, table…

Table.

That was it. There was a table by the door. I could see it now. A little wooden table, a telephone table or something. And on the table… on the table there was a newspaper. An
Evening Standard.
Folded in half. Front page. I closed my eyes tighter and focused on something at the foot of the front page… the bottom edge of a photograph… a familiar grainy photograph.

‘Shit,’ I said, opening my eyes.

My photograph was on the front page of the
Evening Standard.
Ryan’s false story about me –
Robert Smith, frenzied attack, horrendous killing…

Eddi had seen it.

‘Shit.’

When I went back into the front room, Eddi was sitting on the settee, smoking a cigarette. I paused in the doorway and looked down at the table. The newspaper had gone. I looked over at Eddi again.

She smiled at me. ‘All right?’

I looked round the room, then put my hand in my pocket. ‘Where is it?’ I asked her.

‘What?’

‘The newspaper. Where is it?’

‘What newspaper? What are you talking about?’

I looked down at the table again, then back at Eddi. ‘The
Evening Standard
,’ I said. ‘It was here when I went to the bathroom.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, still smiling. ‘I really don’t know –’

She stopped speaking as I pulled the pistol from my pocket and aimed it at her head. She stopped smiling too. Her mouth dropped open and she just sat there, staring in surprise at the pistol.

I was surprised to see it too. I wasn’t quite sure how it’d got there. One second it’d been in my pocket, the next thing I knew I was looking down its barrel into Eddi’s shocked eyes.

‘What are you
doing
?’ she said.

‘Where is it?’ I asked her again.

‘What
is
this? What’s going on?’

‘The newspaper, Eddi. Where’s the newspaper?’

‘What newspaper?’

Something was happening inside me now. Something was taking over. And I didn’t want it to be there. I wanted Eddi to give me the paper before I lost control.

‘Please,’ I said to her, ‘just give it to me.’

She tried smiling again, but her fear and surprise wouldn’t let her. Her lips were too tight to smile. ‘Come on, Robert,’ she said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘This is stupid. I don’t know what –’

The pistol kicked in my hand. I heard a dull
thwack,
a gasp of breath, then the room was still and silent.
Doomp doomp d-doomp.
Eddi was frozen white, breathing hard, staring wide-eyed at me. I’d pulled the trigger, fired a shot into the leather settee. I could feel the shock in my bones.

‘The newspaper,’ I said quietly.

Without taking her eyes off me, Eddi reached under a settee cushion and pulled out the newspaper.

‘Bring it here,’ I told her.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I don’t want –’

‘Bring it to me.’

She got up slowly and brought the paper over to me. I took it from her outstretched hand.

‘Sit down,’ I told her.

She backed across the room and sat down rigidly on the settee. I stared at her for a moment, then unfolded the newspaper and placed it on the table. I kept the pistol levelled at Eddi, glanced at her again, then turned my eyes to the front page.

They’d used the same photograph as the
Daily Express
, the one that made me look shadowy and gaunt.

The caption beneath the photo said:

I stared at the words for a while –
ROBERT SMITH: £50,000 REWARD
– and then, with the same sinking feeling I’d felt in the hotel, I forced myself to read the story.

There was a phone number at the end of the article. A London number. I took Ryan’s wallet out of my pocket, found his business card and checked the number against the one in the newspaper.

They weren’t the same.

I looked over at Eddi. She was just sitting there, staring at me. Her eyes were still shocked and her face was rigid with fear, but she didn’t look out of control. She wasn’t terrified.

‘You’ve seen this?’ I said, showing her the newspaper.

She nodded.

‘Have you told anyone?’

She shook her head.

‘You’d better not be lying.’

‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘How could I have told anyone? You’ve only just got here.’

‘Why did you hide the paper?’

‘Why do you think? It says you
killed
someone –’

‘I didn’t.’

She shrugged.

‘It’s a set up,’ I told her. ‘I haven’t killed anyone.’

‘You’ve got a gun,’ she said. ‘You took a shot at me, for Christ’s sake. What am I supposed to think?’

I was coming back to myself now. I was beginning to feel like Robert Smith again.

‘It’s not what it seems,’ I said.

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘What is it, then?’

I didn’t say anything. What could I say? How could I explain anything? I didn’t
know
anything. And even if I did, it wouldn’t have made any difference. She’d never have believed me.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked me.

‘What?’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What are
you
going to do?’

She smiled warily. ‘Look, Robert,’ she said. ‘I was frightened, OK? I saw the thing in the newspaper about you, and I remembered who you were, that’s all. I wasn’t going to do anything about it. What
could
I do? I didn’t know where you were until you turned up here. And then I didn’t know what to do. It was just a bit of a shock, you know? I mean, what would you do if I came round to your place and you’d just seen a story in the newspaper saying that
I
was a murderer?’ She lit another cigarette. ‘I panicked, that’s all. I didn’t know what to do.’

‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ I told her again.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘if you say so. But I don’t really care what you’ve done. I’m not going to grass you up, am I?’