Dust and Desire (12 page)

‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘Just for a little while.’ The backs of her fingers pressed against my stomach, slid a millimetre down behind the waistband of my jeans. ‘Just so I can say goodbye.’

I kissed her on the forehead and stepped out of reach. ‘It isn’t safe,’ I said. ‘Look after Mengele for me. I’ll call you. And if you feel lonely or scared or anything, give Keith Bellian a ring.’ I spelled out his surname for her. ‘He’s in the book. Tell him I told you to call him, and he’ll come and get you.’

‘Keith Bellian,’ she repeated. I nodded and walked away.

I turned back once I heard her footsteps making their way to the front gate, and I watched until she was safely behind the closed door. Still I remained, watching the street, looking for any signs that there was someone wise to her involvement, but the street was quiet and, like me, sleepy.

I headed back to the tube but paused to tie a bootlace in a drive on Chalcot Crescent. ‘Evening, PC Subtle,’ I said, addressing the shadows.

‘Bastard,’ came a voice from the azaleas.

‘The girl I was with, you’d be better off keeping watch over her,’ I said. ‘She’s worth more than a dozen of me.’ And then I was away.

W
ire pocketed the money from her purse – a matter of twenty pounds and a handful of shrapnel – and with it he bought himself dinner: pasta, lean chicken, steamed vegetables, a bottle of mineral water. No wine. No dessert. Keep control. Know your body. Your limits and levels.

She had a little label tucked into the side of the purse:
If lost, please return to… a reward will be given.

He caught a tube to Tufnell Park. The woman had lived in an attractive Georgian house on Dartmouth Park Road. Leafy. He liked streets with trees on them. He liked trees. He had no compunction about giving trees a hug.

He watched the house for hours. He did this safe in the knowledge that neighbourhood awareness was not as honed locally as it was back home in Liverpool. There was much more of a serve-yourself attitude here. He knew about London. He wasn’t stupid.

Once it was apparent that there was nobody at home, he slipped in through the front gate and kicked in the basement window. He slid through it into a room with a sofa and a desk with a computer on it. The room was very white. Even the computer was white. The only things that weren’t white included a potted plant and a bowl of Granny Smith apples. A white guitar, a Les Paul, hung on the wall, and it was the only thing that did. He moved up the steps to the ground floor, where a piano stood in the hall. Pages of sheet music, basic children’s stuff – ‘If I Had a Hammer’, ‘Little Boxes’ – rested on the music stand. An empty Ski yogurt pot had been left on the stairs, a screwed-up tissue and a clog of hair stuffed inside. In the kitchen, a casserole sat in the centre of the table, with a pink, heart-shaped Post-it note tacked to its lid:
H. Lamb stew… middle shelf @ 180, soon as you get in. Love you, Lx

Messy, bright pictures – unrecognisable daubs of paint that might have been dinosaurs or flowers, or pictures of Mum and Dad – were fixed to the fridge with magnets.

He climbed the stairs. First floor: two bedrooms obviously belonging to children. Toys all over the floor. Characters from
Thomas the Tank Engine, Toy Story, Ben 10
on the walls. Second floor: bathroom, Mum and Dad’s bedroom. She was an untidy woman, in private: jumpers and jeans and cargo trousers lay around like deflated bodies. He went through her stuff in a desultory fashion, and he did not flinch when he heard the front door creak open, and noise instantly filled the house.

He went up to the third floor even as he heard the trampling of footsteps and the shriek of laughter, as the children ascended. Further away, he heard car keys drop on the kitchen table, then music – Radiohead, he thought it was – and the clink of cutlery as dinner places were set.

The third floor was a work area: two studies, a small bathroom with compact shower, toilet and sink. Her study faced the same road that he had just been watching from. No computer in here, just a desk with a large notebook on it, a simple wooden chair with a blanket over the back, a bookcase that held lots of gardening and cookery volumes. At the back of a drawer in the desk he found a large tin which yielded a Jim Crace paperback, a carton of Colgate dental gum, two tampons, two plastic wallets containing handwritten notes, phone numbers and contact names, an old diary, a tube of Smarties and a Siemens mobile phone with a cracked screen.

He flipped through the diary and found photographs of Linda looking much younger. Most of them were of her and some guy called Si, to whom she had written little messages of love on the rear. In one of the photos she was baring her breasts and blowing a kiss. In another, she was sucking the thumb of the person taking the picture in a lascivious fashion, her eyes half closed. Apart from three ten-pound notes hidden inside the paperback, he found nothing else of interest. He put everything back in the desk. Then he lifted his holdall on to the desk and shoved his knife into a side pocket. He didn’t need to wipe it clean, because it was so sharp that it cleaned itself on the way out of whatever it had been stuck in.

From the bottom of the holdall, under an oil-stained towel, he pulled out a plastic carrier bag. He unwrapped the gun as if removing some kind of binding from an item of religious treasure. Show respect. Show dangerous things respect, and they won’t bite back. The butt was wrapped with masking tape, and the registration number had been filed off. He stared at the silver plating and curled his finger around the trigger. A .38 snub-nosed Smith & Wesson with the cylinder loaded and ready to do what it did best. It was a revolver, so the shell casings were retained within the gun, which meant that there was less evidence for forensics to work on should he ever be obliged to use it. He had bought it in the Old Swan for two hundred pounds from a guy called Ryan. He never even asked if it had been used to kill anybody, since he was too together for that kind of paranoid chat. That kind of chat could get around, and he didn’t want to become known as someone whose lips were always on the flap. Someone who was borderline shitting it.

A young voice calling down the stairs: ‘Dad, can we watch
Flapjack
?’ Not yet, according to Dad, who then turned up the music a notch to drown out any more requests.

Wire tucked the gun back into its hiding place and stepped over to the window. He jabbed his fingers at the numbers on the dead woman’s phone. Wherever you may be in London, he had heard, you are less than eight feet away from a rat. Maybe the same could be said of weapons, too. Everyone seemed to be carrying these days. On the Wire’s own patch in Liverpool, he didn’t know anyone who didn’t carry a chiv or a cosh or a gun. One guy never went out without a pair of Bowie knives hidden down his trousers. It was even worse in London, from what he’d heard. But he didn’t like guns, considered them too much of a liability. Knives were the craftsman’s tool. But, then, this was the Smoke and you had to have a gun to get ahead. No time for craftsmen down here. Well, maybe he’d show them how to think differently.

Now he heard ‘Who?’ The voice was flat, disinterested. It sounded too cultured for the number he had dialled. This number was supposed to be his
in
, his friend in the big, bad, bloody city. Maybe he had misdialled.

‘This is Wire,’ he said, his voice soft, like a child’s voice still. ‘This is the Four-Year-Old. How are you? It’s been a while. Did you…?’

The voice was back again, cutting through him – naughty, naughty, but let it go. ‘There’s a phone booth corner of Seven Sisters Road and Woodberry Grove. Be there in an hour.’

The Wire wanted to ask questions, but instead he pressed the ‘call end’ button, knowing that the voice had done just the same. He had learned quickly that patience meant everything in this business. The lack of it undid you, put you inside. Wire checked his
A-Z
and figured, yes, he could be in Manor House in half an hour. But first, but first…

On one wall the dead woman had hung a cork board. Photographs, theatre tickets and letters from friends were pinned to it. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic box filled with self-adhesive gold stars. In each picture of her, he concealed her face with them. While he worked, he found himself thinking about his mother, something he did more and more these days. The redness of her lips. The way her clothes hung on her. The blonde hair.

He was still thinking of her as he slipped down the stairs, with his holdall over his shoulder, not checking to see if the children had spotted him, because of course they hadn’t; not checking to see if the father was likely to walk into the hall, because why would he? He was the Wire. He was invisible. He was out in the street once more, and turning his face to the sky, fighting the tears, and he always won. He always beat the tears back, but there was only one person who ever threatened to draw them out of him. And she was nowhere now. Like him. Like him.

* * *

It might be sunny outside, but to us there’s shadows and rain all over the fucking place. Me ma came in just now and asked us what I wanted for me tea. I goes shepherd’s pie, peas, chips, bread and butter. She said right, buckethead, that’s your starters sorted, so what do you want for your mains? Least, I wish that’s what happened. I can make them come to me, the daydreams, if I close me eyes and I’m alone in a silent room. Everything’s clear in me head, what she smells like (she wears this perfume called Charlie), what she’s wearing – sometimes she’s got a button missing on her cardi or her necklace has twisted, the one she liked best with all the tiny conch shells on it – and the way she’s got her hair; but her voice and her face won’t form. I look at it and it kind of mists over, as if she’s too shy to let us see it. I know why that is. It’s not ’cos she’s shy or me imagination is letting us down. I know what Ma looks like. I carry her with us wherever I go. It’s because she… it’s the way she…

Turn and face.

Mr Tones’ voice in me head. Good name, Mr Tones, for a PE teacher. I liked him. He was a Scouser like us. Was. What a divvy. Still is. Once a Scouser, always a Scouser. I bunked off whenever we did cross-country or 1500 metres. If you’re fourteen, you shouldn’t be doing cross-country. And I was only two at the time. That kind of lark is for spindly old bastards with digital watches and beards wearing shiny shorts that go right up your crack. I think he knew, but he never said nowt. Everything else I liked. Football most, of course. There’s a bit of football in every Liverpudlian’s blood. Tonesy said to us once, he said, ‘If I had your left foot, I’d be playing for Manchester United.’

‘I’m not that shite, am I, sir?’ I said and everyone fell about laughing.

I played left-wing, John Barnes, me. I took everyone on, made them look like cunts. Tonesy said I could ghost past players. I liked the sound of that. But I could move, too. ‘Skin him,’ Tonesy would shout if I just had the right back to beat and press on the gas and, see yer mate, have a nice time down there on yer arse with all the other worms. Then cross the ball in with the sweet left foot for Connie or Wez or Warbo to nut in. Either that or bury it meself. Leather it. No chance, ’keeper. Pick that one out.

End of every attack, Tonesy calling out to us, Turn and face, and as one we’d twist round so we were facing the ball, back-pedalling, keeping our eyes on the ball every moment. A new start, a new play. Find your man. Mark him. Keep your eye on the ball. Never look away.

I don’t know what her voice was like. I lie awake at night sweating over that. I wish she could have recorded her voice for posterity. It kills us to think that I’ll never know how her laughter sounded. Looking at her picture, well, you just can’t tell from the look of her, can you?

If I’d been old enough to go to a school where the kids were old enough to know how to be cruel, I’d probably have been called Dads, ’cos I seemed to have had more than me fair share of them. I don’t remember any specifically, but Ma’s diaries say it all. She wasn’t a slut, me mother, and anyone says she was’ll find themselves grinning through a second gob, she was just a lonely mare in search of company. They flitted in and out of her life like restless cats, staying for no longer than a few months. Her emotions were all fucked up, though. She was clingy, making demands that they couldn’t deal with. She recognised this and wrote about it in her diary. The entries start off neatly enough, the handwriting resting on the faint lines on the paper, but it isn’t long before the words start jagging about, becoming crushed just to fit on the page, the margins crammed, the sentences loaded with swear words and question marks. It’s hard to believe that she would go to work and spend the day with a classroom of kids, like a completely different person, being as breezy as I know she was, open and friendly to her pupils and colleagues. I’ve seen the cards they sent her, wrapped up in tissue paper and tied off with ribbon. They all loved her. There wasn’t a single person who came into her life who didn’t love her, for a while, for at least a little bit. Except…