Beneath the Blonde (12 page)

When Siobhan eventually calmed down enough to sleep two hours later Saz lay in bed and counted the hours until they would have her safely home in London—where at least the stalkers wrote their nasty letters in good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon.

He was easy actually. He drinks too much. Drank too much. It’s easy to kill a drunk. Even a bullying drunk. They are soft, pliable. They fall swiftly, crumple easily.

He was drinking alone too, that helped. I joined him at his table. He was an angry bastard at the best of times, but that night he was really bad. Furious with the world, the band, himself. But most of all, he was furious with her. She didn’t appreciate him, he said. She never had really valued him. Understood his art. His talent. For a moment there I thought he was going to venture as far as his genius. But even he wasn’t quite that arrogant. Not then, anyway.

He was drinking bitter. I joined him and ordered whiskys for the two of us. He was surprised that I wanted bitter. I was bitter that he still wanted her. And he did want her. Had done since the first day they met. It doesn’t surprise me. Everyone wants her, I think. At least they think they do. Want to have her, hold her, own her. Everyone wants to possess her.

Everyone except me. She isn’t worth having. I know.

After that I killed him. With a baseball bat. I know, it’s a cliché and actually, to tell the truth, it was a softball bat—all I had to hand, I’m afraid. His skull was bloody hard. His skull was bloody.

Not immediately after, you understand. I am expeditious, not hasty.

More speed less haste, my piano teacher used to say. Then she’d smack my knuckles with her wooden ruler. Smack is a small word for that splintering caress. She’d splatter my knuckles with her wooden ruler. She left a cut in the knuckle of my left index finger once. A long thin wooden splinter, it tore my skin and bled when I pulled it out. Extradition can be a very bloody process.

I took him home first, we ate, I gave him a sandwich—a thin last supper of white bread and processed cheese—and opened another can. Lager this time. And then another. And more. It was very late, three, four in the morning. We shared six cans of Heineken, and a half pint bottle of whisky. I drank little, listened to him. He drank and talked, ate another sandwich, talked, dribbled, whined and then he cried. Actually, it’s lucky that he cried. If he hadn’t cried I might not have been able to do it. Merely angry, I just wanted to hit him. To smack him, in the jaw, the nose. I wanted to hear that swift crack of knuckle against his cheek. To spite him, surprise him, shut him up. But I held back my itchy fist. He was my guest, I had to be polite. And I hadn’t quite decided that it really was what I wanted to do. I had a moment of wavering self-doubt, contradiction. The tears though, they made me pity him too. So after that it was easy. I was just putting him out of his misery. Putting him out of my misery.

Once he’d really got himself into a state I offered to take him out for a walk. Walk the unpleasing puppy dog. Help him to clear his head. As it were. It was dark in the hallway, dark outside too. A gentle rain was falling. One of those soft rains. My mum calls it Scotch mist. Though I don’t suppose he’d have seen what I was carrying even if a five hundred watt bulb was shining on it. He only had eyes for her. We went to the park and, in a pretty little copse with the autumn leaves fast turning to life-enhancing mulch, I beat his brains
out. He was leaning over to throw up and presented me with such an easy target. I don’t suppose he suffered, the first blow seemed to knock him right out. Actually, he probably died fairly quickly but I needed to be sure, it’s not as if I’ve killed a lot of people before. Or any. His skull was very hard though. It took several swings, batter-up! I heard the crack. It was a small sound, shallow. His head breaking, blood and bone and a little brain—I suppose it was brain—spilling out, splashing out. It sounded more like a splintering twig, more natural than anything I’d been expecting. Because, then, I didn’t know what to expect. Of course, I do now.

When you plant a new garden you clear all the old debris first. Or, indeed, when you uncover the foundations of a garden laid long ago. That’s what I’m doing now. Clearing the path.

Once it was all over I went home. The rain was much heavier now. Opaque waves of it starting to wash the blood away from me even as I walked home. Washed it all away from him too, I expect. Lucky, really. You always see on the TV, don’t you, how they find the bad guy from an old bloody shoe print? But not after two inches of heavy autumn rain, I wouldn’t have thought. I put my clothes in the washing machine, rinsed off the bat with soapy water and a pot scrubber. Just an old-fashioned wooden bat. With a few dents in it now. Wood is so much more natural than aluminium, yielding to touch. I washed my clothes—my upstairs neighbours were away so the machine didn’t disturb them. Not that I’d care if it did. They vacuum at eight in the morning on a Saturday. Bastards. Vacuum to make their flat shiny and perfect before one of their happy-young-couple shopping trips, coming home laughing and smiling together as if all that was needed to keep them content was a good
bargain on their fabric softener and yet another chrome and glass shelf on which to stack their CDs. Actually, I think it is all they need. They’re fairly simple.

I sat in front of the machine and watched the mechanized water rinse his blood from my jeans and shirt. Sitting on my bathroom floor staring at the machine like the sad old git in the laundrette. I even put my socks and trainers in too. They needed a wash, stinking from too much running around, from putting too much effort into my life. I put the powder in that little dispenser thing, added the fabric conditioner—I always buy the yellow one—and turned the hot tap off at the base so they were being washed in cold, clear water. My mum always said to wash blood out in cold water. Not hot. She’s good on handy hints, my mum. Knows how to get red wine out of the carpet too. You must never attack any stain with hot water. Hot water means the blood never really goes away. Always a ghost of a stain left behind. I got a lot of nose bleeds as a kid. But I didn’t do my own washing then. Not like now, I’m very domesticated now. Almost tame. I watched the water rinse through the blood and bits of him, heard it all gurgling down the waste pipe. Then I ran myself a long, hot bath. I lay in the bath for ages, until the water was cold and scummy with my flaking skin. After a while I took the plastic shower attachment and hosed myself down with icy cold water. By the time I was finished, the washing was done and I hung my clothes over the shower rail, trainers upside down to let the collected drips fall out. I took my time, measured my actions. I was very precise. My German teacher at school used to say, “The Germans are very precise.” I can hear his voice now.
“Fernsehen
—far-seeing—television. You see? The Germans are very precise.” My German teacher was Czech, so I don’t think he valued German precision especially highly. I don’t think he’d have valued my night’s activities either. But I was very precise. I’ve learnt that you have to be. I was going to eat, I thought
I might be hungry but when I went into the kitchen I saw the plate he’d left on the table. The crusts from his cheese sandwich. So I threw them out my window for the pigeons and washed the plates and cups, swept the floor. Made it all nice. It was too nice to mess up with making toast for myself so I just left it. Clean and bright and shiny and new. Like me. Then I went to bed. I slept like a baby. I didn’t expect to. Didn’t think sleep would come so easily. But it did. Must have used more energy than I thought.

I do have one regret. I regret I had to be quite so fast about the actual act. I should have liked to spend a little more time with him. I have questions about the lyrics, about the music. Questions about her. And I wish I hadn’t been so nervous with the hitting. I should have liked to have been more exact. Less messy. But then a softball bat is hardly a precision instrument, is it? I can’t be expected to kill a drummer in perfect three four time. Not without a lot of practice anyway.

No one other than Saz, Siobhan and Greg had any cause to link Alex’s messy murder to the letters and anonymous bouquets. The police least of all, because Siobhan refused to tell them. Or to show them the flowers that arrived the next morning, this time with no note attached but two red roses deep inside the yellow bouquet. Saz felt horribly certain that ignoring the possibility of a link meant another nasty surprise was lying just around the comer for them. She tried to explain as much to Siobhan, but to no avail. Siobhan, lying in bed—where she’d spent the twenty-four hours since Alex had been discovered, only two days after their return from Estonia—once again refused Saz’s attempts to discuss the matter. She swallowed another mouthful of too warm vodka and shook her head.

“No, Saz. It’s got nothing to do with them. I don’t want the fucking cops getting in on this.”

“But surely, just telling them you might think there’s a link?”

“You think there’s a link. I still don’t know.”

“Well, let me talk to them instead.”

“I spoke to those two detectives the morning they found him, then in the afternoon I repeated everything I knew to the policewoman and then told it all over again this morning to that dim bitch from victim support. Look, as far as they’re concerned, this is just another gay bashing, they don’t even want to find who did it. They don’t give a fuck about gay bashings.”

“Right, and you’d know.”

Siobhan rubbed a hand across her tired face. “Well, of course I wouldn’t, but that’s the impression I get. That’s the impression everyone gets, or are you suddenly a member of the police-loving right?”

“They’re not all fascists.”

Siobhan sighed, “No, and all priests aren’t child molesters either. It’s irrelevant anyway, I can’t just suddenly jump up and say, oh by the way, I forgot to tell you, I’m being harassed by a fan who won’t leave me alone.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Because of the tour, Saz. Because of the band. If the cops knew about the flowers as well, we’d never get out of the bloody country without an entourage of police and hangers-on.”

Saz stood up to look out at the autumn trees. She turned back to Siobhan, both worried and frustrated. “That might not be such a bad thing. Maybe you could do with some visible police presence.”

Siobhan finished her vodka. “Yeah, and maybe I could do with writing ‘victim’ across my forehead and seeing just how well that adds to the sex-goddess image.”

Saz moved away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed. She refilled Siobhan’s glass and stroked a wisp of hair away from the younger woman’s face. “Listen to me, Siobhan, I know you’d rather just pretend all this isn’t happening, but you can’t. Cowering in bed isn’t going to make all this go away. If you won’t tell them about the letters, you could at least mention the guy in Tallinn. Anyway, the cops already know that something isn’t adding up. They know Alex isn’t gay.”

“Wasn’t gay. But they know he was at a gay pub with Dan. Dan says he left Alex there and went home alone. ‘What more do they need? It’s just another sick bastard who thought he’d lucked out and killed a deserving queer. You
know what Alex is like, he’d talk to any bastard who was buying the drinks.” She started to cry again, “Or he’d fight with any bastard who was buying the drinks.”

“The autopsy, Siobhan. This person was with him for longer than just a couple of drinks in the pub, whoever it was had coffee with Alex.”

“Or Alex had coffee by himself. And a cheese sandwich by himself. Yes, I know all about it.”

“How?”

“No mystery,” Siobhan replied wearily, “You got the autopsy info from your police lady friend, right?”

Saz nodded, “After a little persuasion, yes.”

“You told Greg, Greg told me. He tells me everything. I don’t know why you didn’t talk to me about it in the first place.”

Saz pointed to the empty vodka glass in Siobhan’s hand. “How about your lack of sobriety for a start? That and the fact that Greg thought we shouldn’t worry you.”

“Yeah, well, he stops being quite so sensitive about my worries when he’s coked out of his head and panicking about his own problems at four in the morning. Shame you aren’t here in the middle of the night to try and win him round the way you do with me.” Siobhan screwed up her face and finished off the rest of the vodka from the bottle, “Coke’s a brilliant drug for partying but probably not ideal when your best friend has just been beaten to death and you’re the one who has to identify him.”

Saz winced and tried one more time. She got as far as, “But couldn’t I just …?” when Siobhan’s irritation flipped over into rage.

“No, you fucking can’t. You can just bloody leave it alone. You can do what you’re paid to do and take care of me, and if that isn’t enough for you, then you can fuck off. I’ve worked on this for years with Greg. Our band. Eight, nine bloody years. We will go to LA. After that we will go to New
Zealand and have our far-too-fucking-brief holiday and then plan the next nine years. The next album. The next tour. I’m sorry about Alex, I’m really fucking sorry and the man I love is devastated. I’ve barely slept for three days. About the only thing that’s keeping me going is the thought that there’s more work out there. Another gig to do. And with the record company kicking up a stink about us having to get on with the business regardless and the boys falling apart all around me and the police and the tabloids sticking their noses in every bloody place, I’m damn well going to cope as best I can.” She paused to catch her breath, “You know, I thought Greg and I had been through a lot, but this is worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I’m telling you, Saz, I’m fucked if I’m going to let some homophobic bastard killing Alex stop us. Not this, not that big git in Tallin and certainly not the inconsequential cunt who’s trying to scare me with his pathetic little letters and nasty fucking flowers. So you can either drop this whole idea of telling the cops right now or you can just piss off too. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get up, get dressed and exercise away some of this self-pity and alcohol and I’d like a little privacy to do that. Thank you.”