Bright Spark (8 page)

“I don’t mean to come here. It
just happens.”

“Robert, you’ll wake up in a
minute so we haven’t got time to debate fate versus free will. So, you just
happen to come here the same way you just happened to turn up at that girl’s
door when Hayley was working away. It says a lot that between us we can’t think
of her surname.  Always imagined you’d put in a better performance. A fumble on
her futon, one and only one mediocre orgasm, a guilty sulk then a very pricy
cab-ride home; barely seems worth undermining your marriage for.   

“And don’t give me that look.
The spirits told me all about it, not long after you knocked them back.
Besides, I’m in your head and I see some rum stuff in here.”

The cat was patrolling between
the potted plants, tail held aloft and twitching, a lonely dodgem looking for
something to collide with. Harkness sighed and clung to his knees, knowing that
if he relaxed into the deckchair he’d end up on the floor wearing it.

“So, Robert, you want to know,
yet again, if you’ll ever be free of it. The big thing, the thing that makes a
sneaky fumble look very small indeed?”

Harkness stared at the
corrugated panes above his head, almost opaque with ivy and guano. He stared at
the white band on his wrist where his watch should have been. He stared at his
feet, finding plimsolls as grey as old chewing gum where his brogues should
have been. He clamped his eyes shut and commanded himself to wake up, but she
was still there, chuckling.

“No time. Not for this. Not
today.” How could his voice quaver in his own imagination? What audience did he
fear?

“Au contraire, mon petite
gendarme. You can’t put it off any more.”

The heat had intensified and
found a voice. Beads of sweat were squeezed from his face and he heard a sound
like the mumbling and rustling of a restless audience awaiting the curtain’s
rise. Mrs Crowe shrugged and turned her palms upwards, showing flames sprouting
from her palms as new shoots of light split open the flesh of her wrists which
recoiled in shreds of yellow, red and black.

“If you don’t end it today,
it’ll just keep happening.” She tilted her head back and a scream leapt from
her mouth, dragging with it a roiling column of smoke, filling Harkness’s
lungs, crushing the light and reeking of tar and boiling meat.

Harkness flinched, fell through
the deckchair and found himself entangled in its burning limbs. Mrs Crowe was a
writhing creature of flame now. She had stood, arms outstretched, cruciform,
screaming, begging, damning, drilling anguish into Harkness’s ringing ears. The
fire reduced her flesh layer by layer: skin, fat, muscle and bone blistered and
peeled, rendered down and reduced to carbon; no quiet asphyxiation was being
granted today.

“Same time tomorrow?” she said,
as she crumbled into charcoal.

A horn blared and he was on his
feet, in the basement garage, swaying above his indentation in the sofa, hand
drifting up to shield his eyes from the glare of headlights. The lights faded,
leaving the loops of their filaments scorched on his retinas.

“DS Harkness, good morning,
again! Delivery for you.” Morse slammed shut the door of Slowey’s Fiesta and
lobbed the keys at Harkness. He almost caught them, instead deflecting them
into a stack of lead cladding.

“I can see you were thinking
very deeply about your enquiries and I hate to impose but your batman said
you’d look after his car for him.”

“Why does his car need looking
after? Why didn’t he ask me himself?” He tried to shake the sleep from his head
and felt the weight of his phone in a pocket, laden with missed calls.

“If you people listened to your
radios now and again, you might know.”

“I’m not sure I’m talking to
you,” said Slowey, catching the bag of boiled sweets in the hand that wasn’t
clasping an icepack to his pate. He was clenching his buttocks to give his
tenderised back some relief from the kinked slab of plastic that passed for a
seat. He was also clenching his teeth every time the regulation A&E drunk
drew breath for another chorus of ‘Come On Eileen.’

“They should’ve let him keep
his White Lightning. Keep standing, an’ all,” he added, as Harkness stooped to
sit, “that light’s a bit bright and you make a good lampshade.”

       Harkness shrugged and sat, sniffed, stared at his
shoes then twisted his neck to look at Slowey over his shoulder. Slowey’s
notebook lay at his side, pen marking a page, hand resting on its scuffed
cover, finger tapping. Despite the ice pack, Slowey’s face was lop-sided, lips
swollen into a sneer and crusted with blood, eye socket bulging and blotched.
His jacket had been rolled into padding for his lumbar, and his shirt was torn
and speckled with red.

       “Sorry, Ken. Didn’t plan to earn you a kicking
tonight.”

       “I know. Not exactly your fault. You should see the
other guy. In fact, so should I. Just a thought, though: It wouldn’t be a bad
idea if you answered a phone or a radio now and again. Remind me to put it in
your personal development plan.”

“Have they told you how long?”
Harkness gestured towards the reception desk, where a clerk kept an owlish
vigil from a plexiglas cage adorned with ‘no smoking’ signs and the hospital’s
policy on violence towards staff.

“No. They seem busy though.
Apparently, some victims of a house fire were brought in. Why is that woman
waving at you?” The receptionist was mouthing something at Harkness and holding
a pinkie and forefinger to her head.

Harkness frowned then smiled,
held an outspread hand and mouthed, ‘five minutes’ in reply. “She had a charger
that fitted my phone. Bloody thing must have gone off again. Anyway, that’s
what voicemail’s for.”

“How would you know?”

“People like you keep telling
me. So, what did you find out at the pub?”

“Don’t mollycoddle me, you
soppy sod.” Slowey’s attempt at a grin split something and he tasted blood
again, swallowed and sighed. “Well, I found out that I need a bigger stick and
some new shoes. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I haven’t got a name
for the guy Murphy had a pop at and the CCTV has been nicked.”

“Nicked? How?”

“Usual manner, with a crowbar
and grubby, thieving mitts. Odd about the timing though. Ciggies and cash
stolen, as per, but they’ve taken the CCTV hard drive from behind the bar.”

“Balaclavas?”

“The one I leathered,
certainly.”

“So CCTV by itself wouldn’t
help us catch average guys in balaclavas unless they were dwarves, giants or
had missing limbs.”

“I counted a full complement of
limbs on my suspect and they were all in good working order.”

“Odd. So, the timing is fishy.
Who wouldn’t want us to look at that footage? Did you turn out SOCO?”

“I’ve got a couple of eggs on
my head. Are you giving me another one to suck?”

“That’s just my leadership
style, Ken. Repeatedly tell you what you already know just to make sure I get
the credit for it, unless it goes tits up, in which case you can’t say I didn’t
tell you.”

“You can take the credit for
this then, and get it processed an’ all.” Slowey handed him an evidence bag,
DNA swabs in plastic phials sealed inside, times, dates and description
completed in Slowey’s intricate hand. “Borrowed some kit from the rape centre
next door. Got some samples of blood and gore from my knuckles. Pretty sure
it’s not all my own.”

“You do thrive under pressure,
Ken. I’ll bet you interviewed the landlord as well.”

“Well I did have time to kill
and a couple of shorts to take the edge off. Not that he knew much. Knows
Murphy, remembers him laying into some scrote he doesn’t know. Might recognise
the scrote again, might not. He can’t speak for the regulars so we might have
to go back.”

“Enquiries in the pub, like the
good old days. We might need to tidy ourselves up. Sports jackets, stay-crease
slacks, splash of Hai Karate. Bish bash bosh. What do you think?”

“I’d settle for two minutes
with a bar of soap. Mind you, I thought I smelled rank ‘til you turned up.”

“Kenneth Slowey.” A nurse in
powder blue scrubs announced his name over a clipboard, eyes scanning the
unwashed heads cluttering up the waiting room.

“Here,” said Harkness and
Slowey together, both lurching painfully to their feet. 

“That was quick. Look Ken,
ordinarily I’d tell you to go sick for a few days after something like this,
but when you’ve finished messing about here, I could do with a leg up.”

“Assuming my brain isn’t
leaking out through my ears, I’ll think about it.”

“Fair enough. If Biddle turns
up, don’t tell him where I am.”

“Biddle? What’s he got to do
with anything? And how will I know where you are?”

Harkness saw no need to tax Mrs
Slowey’s nerves with news of her husband’s exertions. The drying crusts of
vomit on her faded dressing gown and the squall of infant distress from
upstairs convinced him she had all the responsibility she needed for now. She
was quite happy for him to put together a bag of essentials for Slowey while
she cajoled a bucking and shrieking infant onto its back on the rumpled bed and
unfastened its nappy, laden with brown tar.

Without a full search team,
Harkness realised he wouldn’t find two matching halves of a suit in the wall to
wall explosion of textiles that Mrs Slowey called “the wardrobe room”. Nor
would he find a tie that didn’t feature the crest of some club for geriatric
plane spotters, or cartoon characters whose face-splitting grins and slapstick
poses might sit badly at a post mortem. He settled for a tie bearing the plan
view of a Vulcan bomber, which wasn’t exactly chic but probably wouldn’t cause
offence.   

When he returned to the
hallway, Mrs Slowey had pacified, cleaned and dressed the infant that clung to
her shoulder, and prepared a large lunchbox crammed with every food group that
Slowey might reasonably need for a long ocean voyage or an average day in an
office.

“Banged his head, did he?” she
said, eyebrows raised and mouth pursed, handing him the lunchbox which might
well have equalled the infant in weight.

“Checked in, did he?”

“He always does, day or night.
He makes time.”

“Yes, he does. He’s good at
that. Well, I didn’t……

“Want to worry me. I know.” Her
nostrils flared and her chin dipped, decision made. “Rob, just look after him.
He’s got a few more people to think about now, and he won’t say no to you even
when he thinks you’re acting like a pillock.”

Trying not to act like a
pillock, he walked down the driveway, matching pace with the shambling
scarecrow reflected in the gleaming paintwork of the Sloweys’ second vehicle, a
new people-carrier. Slowey’s children travelled in far greater comfort and
safety than their father.

He installed himself again into
the driver’s seat of the decrepit Mondeo, straddling the steering wheel as
something had snapped when he’d tried to slide back the seat.

He reviewed his phone again,
prioritising his omissions. Slowey and Hayley had all made multiple calls, as
had an unknown other likely to be Biddle. He’d ticked Slowey off his list for
now, having left him in more competent and tender hands than his own. The
longer Biddle waited the better. Hopefully he’d realised by now that Harkness
had slipped the leash. As time wore on, his growing irritation would crowd out
any capacity for rational thought, so the longer Harkness remained at large,
the less likely he was to be caught. He found himself nodding and cackling like
an extra at a chimp’s tea-party and couldn’t understand why. Nor could the
milkman approaching the Sloweys’ driveway, whose eyes remained bolted to his
feet even though the tune he was whistling had been whisked away.

He slapped both cheeks and
rubbed black grit from his eyes. He nodded and grinned at the returning
milkman, getting a lop-sided grimace in reply and the certainty that the
Mondeo’s registration number would be noted in his order book and reported to
the police should anything unpleasant befall the Sloweys.

He should go home. Peel off
these sulphurous rags. Take a shower. Eat something. Make himself presentable.
He wasn’t missing a great deal right now, but there was a lot of work coming
his way. He needed to be fresher than he was now. He couldn’t brace witnesses
and break the bad news smelling like a tannery.  This shouldn’t be a complex
decision, filling his head with bullet-points.

He should go home, speak to
Hayley, say whatever needed to be said and go back to work. Bite the bullet,
even if it bit back. Hayley, gorgeous, glorious Hayley, had become another bullet-point.
A shame his wasn’t a neat orderly chart but a machine-gun spray. No, today was
not the day to seek truth and order; there was so much chaos to be grappled
with. But then again, he heard her say, wasn’t that every day in his world?

He walked through his front
door and into another world. A silence, pine-scented and comfortable, rested in
the just vacuumed carpet, the plumped pillows, the gleaming kitchen units. Last
night’s charcoal, meat and booze had left neither sign nor scent. The second hand
of the kitchen clock glided past 7am, nothing mechanical in its movement, a
seamless circuit.

An electric timepiece was his
idea; ticking made him nervous, particularly when he slept downstairs with his
guilt and his hangovers and his caseload. It was the sound of entropy, of life
not waiting for you to catch up, of a line of gunpowder burning and fizzing
towards the powder store. Upstairs, the hot water tank grumbled and water
pattered on a shower curtain.

She must have been up early to
get the house this clean, assuming she’d slept at all. Rubbing the mobile phone
against the stubble on his chin, it struck him that he’d registered her calls
at 4am, 5am and 6am and filed the information for later use without wondering
why she was awake or why she’d called at all. Only when he walked into their
home, the scene of all their intimate joy and sadness, did he think of her as
more than just another task.

In the kitchen, he boiled water
for coffee in the new, chrome kettle; it roared like a jet fighting to get
airborne, a hot fuss for a quicker beverage. He dropped two hunks of organic,
wholemeal bread into the new, chrome toaster, leaving crumbs all over its
complex controls and what had been an immaculate work surface. As the kettle
boiled and its engines spun down to idling speed, the howl of a new, chrome
hairdryer with 2,000 watts of grooming power reached him from the back bedroom.

His eyes traced the warpath
Hayley would find in a few minutes, marked out in sooty, size-13 footprints
across the quarry-tiled kitchen floor and the beige lounge carpet. He slurped
black coffee, tacky with sugar, between bites of toast laden with marmite. Was
he genetically programmed to be clumsy, messy and crass? Were his limbs so far
from his brain that something was always lost in transmission? That didn’t
explain the antics of his vocal chords. Perhaps there was a saboteur at
work.    

She treaded so lightly that he
barely heard her coming. Yet he imagined a tingling resistance in the air, as
if they were both ionised with anger, repelling each other, the impossibility
of touching now a simple matter of physics. Their polarities had been reversed
and what once attracted now repelled.

He kept chewing the toast,
mouth closed, eyes inclined her way without staring, manners adequate. He’d
heard what might have been a stifled sigh from the lounge before she entered
the kitchen, but now she was putting the finishing touches to her hair and
straightening her pin-striped jacket and skirt. His trail couldn’t have been
missed but hadn’t provoked so much as a flushed cheek or a bitten fingernail.
Their magnetic fields clashed midway between the toaster and the fridge and he
knew they would get no closer than that as she checked that her earrings were
still in place and studied the still gleaming sink.

“Morning,” he said. “Sorry
about the footprints. Messy night.”

“Morning to you too. Long job
or short job? Coming or going?” Her tone was neutral, businesslike.

“Long job. Going, soonish.”

“Find your phone?”

“Didn’t lose it. Just busy.”

“Fine. Just let me know you’re
alive from time to time.”

“Are you….are we ok?”

“Make your mind up.”

He sighed, his exhaled breath
finding no words to bring with it.

“Cat got your tongue? Well, I’m
going to be out of the door on time for a change. You’re eating Marmite.
Clinically speaking, I’d say you and I are functioning ok. Whether we are fine
is a question we should leave for a calmer time.”

“You are the sensible one.” He
smiled, a few ounces shaved from the lead weight on his chest. Her lips
remained pursed. If the floodgates opened even a crack, the deluge would
follow.

Kevin Braxton cared about
appearances. His dad dressed the right way for his job, football top stretched
over his gut, baggy-arsed jeans, steel-toecap boots, perfect for a labourer,
beer-swiller, gobshite, fighter and all-round bastard. The rough diamond act
also nicely obscured his nicest earner: dealing smack to the pitiful scum
lacking the balls or the nous to go elsewhere.

His dad was a marvel of
practicality. Skinny, skulking smack-rats with their stench and their sunken
eyes prompted righteous disgust from Braxton Senior, what with scum like them
dragging this once great country etcetera etcetera forever and ever amen.
Exploiting them for profit was almost a public service.