Dust and Desire (23 page)

As I crossed the A561, I wondered if the same kind of thing had happened after Georgina Millen’s body had been discovered. Just on the left there was a little track, a path that nevertheless possessed the sign Otterspool Road, which took you through Otterspool Park to the promenade and various beauty spots by the river. Under the road sign was the bracketed, unpleasant word
Unadopted
. The girl had been discovered just beyond the gate that prevents vehicles from using the track, her broken body hidden from the main road by the first bend. Her head had been removed. I ducked under the barrier and tiptoed through the mud. I didn’t have to look too hard, because there was an old bunch of flowers pinned to a tree, all colour drained out of them, and hiding their faces like shameful children. I scuffed about in the mud, wondering what I’d hoped to find here, considering that forensics would have taken every last fleck of gnat shit away for scrutiny. But I knew I wasn’t really here in the hope of finding a miracle shred of evidence; I just needed the smell of him, I needed to be able to see what he had seen. Somehow that comforted me, made me feel closer to him. And once I was closer to him, he didn’t seem so out of reach.

I was about to go back to the car when I noticed something attached to another tree, a sheet of white paper, about twenty feet or so deeper into the park. Before I reached it, I knew it was a photocopy of a picture. It was one of the copies that the woman at Stodge had taken of me the other night. He’d been there all along, drinking champagne with the swingers, watching me flap around looking for him. That knowledge turned my balls to ice and my breath came quicker, misting around me like ghosts trying to rub me out of existence.

I took the picture down and there was a photograph Pritt-Sticked to the back of it, along with a message:
Hello again.

I didn’t need to look at the date stamp on the photo to know it was freshly developed. It was a colour picture taken from an upper-floor window, showing a large road filled with semi-detached houses. There were cars in some of the driveways and purple wheelie bins parked out on the road waiting to be emptied.

I should have gone straight to the police with it, but my prints were all over it now, and anyway, the police were on my shit list. I can persuade myself pretty quickly about some things, but this was too personal now. This was too much
me
and
him
.

I broke down for a little while back at the car. I lost it a bit. I couldn’t think of the dead girls without thinking of my own and I hoped if Sarah had suffered at all, that it hadn’t lasted for long. I called Melanie at her home and she answered me breathlessly. She’d just got back from playing badminton and she was about to jump in the shower. I imagined her naked, smiling at me down the phone, her lithe little body hot from exercise. I almost blurted out that I loved her. Need was rising in me so quickly that I didn’t know how to begin to identify it. Instead, I said I was hoping to see her again very soon.

‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Hey, listen, I’m going to have to go away for a little while, to Devon. My dad’s not well. My mobile might not be up to it – the signal out there is pretty weak – but you can try to call me if you want to.’

If I want to.

‘What about Mengele?’ I asked.

‘I can either take him with me, or get Fiona to look after him, from the surgery. She’s good with cats.’

‘If I’d known that, I’d have dragged you up here with me.’

‘Aw, that’s sweet. If I’d have known that, I might have let you.’

‘This Fiona,’ I said, ‘is she as good as you?’

‘In every respect.’

‘Not every respect,’ I said.

She said, ‘Hurry home, Joel.’

I switched off the phone with a feeling that we’d just made a quantum jump forward. Our conversation had really contained nothing more than the usual jousting we got up to, but it had been underscored with a faint line of desperation. Two hundred miles was drawing it all to the surface. I wanted her; there: I’d admitted it to myself at last. No more stepping back from the line, but time to stride over it.

‘I want you. Melanie, I want you.’ Christ, that sounded good.

I noodled about the roads for a while, driving without any destination in mind, just trying to put Melanie in a warm safe place of my mind while I loosened up the rest of the dross that was stopping me from thinking clearly. Eventually I found a pub. I parked and went inside. It was one of those places where the bar staff give you your change on a little saucer, in the hope that you might leave a tip. I ordered a pint and a bag of nuts. Above me, on a separate deck, people, with kids mostly, were having their dinner. I checked out the menu: simple stuff – pies, burgers, fish and chips – at far from simple prices. Fucking complex prices. Everybody was drinking bottles of Bud or bottles of Breezer. I sat in a corner with my drink and watched the staff take the meaning of apathy to a new level.

The photograph felt warm between my fingers. I imagined him holding it, then pinning it to the post on a misty morning, knowing that eventually I would get around to finding it. I wondered how he felt now. I wondered if he was getting anxious, waiting for me to find him – desperate to work his inhuman magic on me. He was giving himself to me either because he was impatient and wanted to finish things, or because he thought I was too thick to track him down without a few assists.

The wheelie bins. The cars. The houses. I spotted a ginger cat on a wall, now that I was relaxed and had more time to study the full picture. A City FM sticker in a bedroom window. At the bottom left of the photograph, almost cut out of the picture, was a road sign, but I couldn’t make it out. The sign was encrusted with filth and years of exhaust fumes, graffiti filling in any gaps. I took out my Swiss Army knife and, conscious that I looked the kind of saddo twat I always promised myself I would avoid becoming, I picked out its tiny magnifying glass and held the photograph up to the light. My face burned as a couple of sweet-looking girls turned my way and laughed out loud. I was a pair of tweezers and a stamp album away from becoming an Untouchable – one level up from a leper, or a serial killer.

…IE AVENUE L9.

How hard could it be? I put the knife away and took out my
A-Z
.

‘What else have you got in there, mate?’ A voice carried to me from the next table, where a couple of blokes were fighting over a woman in an Abercrombie top. ‘A bleeding flask and sandwiches?’

He had that kind of seriously overhanging jut of forehead that screams of an IQ so low you could use it to scoop up worm shit. ‘No,’ I said, speaking slowly so that he wouldn’t have to move his lips to follow me, ‘but I’ve got something for you.’

I reached into my pocket and dug around for a while. Then I pulled out my fingers in the shape of a V and flourished them at him. The girl shrieked. I went back to my map and flipped to the pages containing Allerton, while he tried to engage me with some more of his gentle Scouse wit. I spent another thirty minutes and the best part of a tenner on another pint and a bowl of chips before I found what I was looking for.

I got myself outside and slid behind the wheel of the rental car, started her up. And then I was thinking about Rebecca. Not abstract thoughts of the warmth and humour that had cocooned us in the years after we met, but the blunt edge of her death, recalled in dirty, bleached detail. The claws of that death dug into my shoulders from time to time, but I rarely looked up to scrutinise the face of what occasionally had come home to roost. Now I did. Every so often, you have to, to remind you of who you are, where you came from and, grim knowledge though it maybe is sometimes, where you’re heading. I looked up into its unblinking black eyes and it placed me back in the Saab when the car was a little younger, its engine sound a little smoother and sexier. I’d been out all day, but had called Becs at lunchtime to find out if I needed to bring anything home for dinner.

‘Grab some steaks,’ she had said. ‘Sarah’s at the school disco. We’ll listen to some music, and you can try out some moves on me.’

On the seat next to me was a bag of CDs from HMV. As usual, I’d shelled out on too many – there was a Stina Nordenstam album, I remember, and a Jeff Buckley live in concert, a couple of old Pixies albums that had seen me through my college days and which I thought I now needed in the more up-to-date format, some early Simple Minds before they wanted to conquer America. Some Curve, because I liked their barely controlled hysteria. Other stuff, too. And to make me feel less guilty about indulging in such a blow-out, I’d bought Becs a CD, too. Zbigniew Preisner’s ‘Requiem for my Friend’, because she loved the
Three Colours
trilogy, and I felt it was a thoughtful present, something to distract her from my featherweight wallet, sure, but something soothing we could both listen to with the lights out.

In the end, it was just me listening to it with the lights out. Because, when I got home, the front door was off its hinges and someone had painted the hallway radiator red. On one corner of it was a pulpy mass of bone, tissue and hair. Splashes of blood were up the wall and across the hallway carpet. I followed the smears of blood into the living room, which smelled of spilled whisky and cigar smoke. Whoever had killed Rebecca had thrown her on to the sofa. Her breasts were exposed, scooped out of her bra. They were latticed with slashes. Her knickers were torn and still clinging to her left ankle. There was blood on them too. There was blood everywhere. Her head had a great pile of gore dangling from it. I approached her, thinking how I shouldn’t be likening my wife to a Portuguese Man-of-fucking-War.

I stood and looked down at my wife, the bag of steak growing warm in my fist. Whoever had killed Rebecca had stubbed his cigar out in her eye sockets.

* * *

Brodie Avenue was a large thoroughfare that bisected Allerton, so large that I had completely missed it as I scoured the tiny surrounding roads. By the time I got there, it was turning dark and I was shaking, so it took longer than I was expecting to match the buildings in the photograph with those on the street. Maybe it was because the cat had fucked off. More likely it was because I couldn’t focus properly, with my memories burning up what was left of my mind.

But at last, I had it. Behind me, above a row of shops, was the flat where, presumably, this guy Phythian had lived, or still lived, when he wasn’t trying to put holes in me during his trips down to the capital.

I judged the window as being one of two immediately above a hairdresser and a Chinese takeaway respectively. When I tried the bell to the flat, there was no answer, which was no huge surprise. I tested the door’s strength by leaning against it with my backside, while I pretended to do up my shoe. It rattled in its frame, about as secure as a spun-sugar nappy. I waited for a couple of cars to drive by, and an old man to come out of the Chinese with his bag of chicken chow mein, and then I slipped the lock with a credit card.

I smelled it straight away. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s only one thing in the world that makes a smell like it. Death doesn’t wear perfume.

I waited on the stairwell, holding my breath, listening for sounds of occupancy. But I wasn’t really, since I knew the place was empty. I was just putting off something that I knew was going to slowly unveil itself in my dreams for the rest of my life. It wasn’t as if it would be alone in there.

Up the stairs, weary as a climber making his push for the summit of Everest. The carpet’s pattern was like an object lesson in vomit. I had to retrieve my handkerchief from my pocket as I reached the landing. Light from the main road spilled through the window, thought turned into something granular and uncertain by the net curtains.

How could the smell have gone unnoticed? But then a harsh blast of garlic and onions and sesame oil shot past me from the kitchens downstairs, and I understood. I inched forward to the room at the front of the flat and stopped when I saw, through the crack in the half-closed door, a figure standing very still in the centre of it. Its face was edged with light, wet light as greasy-looking as a woman wearing too much slap. There was no point in saying anything, because whoever it was, she was long past hearing me.

I got into the room and closed the curtains. When I threw the light switch, I didn’t look directly at her; instead I took my time, at first concentrating on the shadow that she cast. At least it’s not summer, I told myself, more times than was necessary. There was something about her shadow that just wasn’t right, but I was too pumped up to understand. Until I looked at her directly. I took in what was left of her for maybe a second, if that, then I turned off the light and sat in an armchair, just me and her in the darkness. Me and her and the ghosts of violence thickening in my mind.

15

I
can’t say for sure whose head it is,’ I said, ‘but I think it might be Kara Geenan’s, the real Kara Geenan, not the psycho I’m trying to find. Or else Georgina Millen’s, the girl they found on Otterspool Road five years ago.’

But for a second in there I’d even convinced myself it was Sarah – I’d wanted it to have been Sarah – as crazy and unlikely as that would have been. I didn’t want to consider how close I had come to punching that failed face in, once I was sure that it was not my daughter. Her mouth had carried enough of a smile to make me feel she was mocking me. It was a pinched smile, the kind of smile you might see on an old dear as she fends off a tramp begging for coppers. The thin reek of preservative fluid almost shut out the smell of decay.

‘You have to give me the address, Joel,’ Ian Mawker was saying. In the background I could hear the skitter of nails against a keyboard, the voice of someone asking who had ordered the coffee without. I could also hear the hunger in Mawker’s voice. He was too long without a big collar, and he was going to be all over this like snot on a kid’s blanket.

‘Ian,’ I said, ‘I need you to give me some space.’

‘We’ll fuck you over in more ways than you can imagine, if you keep this back any longer.’