Dust and Desire (30 page)

‘Now where’s the gun?’ I said. And then I realised that the noise he’d been making for the past few minutes was the answer.

‘…thedeskthedesk…’ he was wailing.

I let go of his beard and he dropped to his knees. Blood from his nose was making the beard look more and more like something mankind should never have evolved. I retrieved the gun from the desk drawer and stepped over him. ‘Shave it off,’ I suggested. ‘You can always tattoo it back on.’

* * *

Melanie Henriksen was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair. She was naked. Her flesh was white except for the deep gash of red that opened her torso. The tiny, caramel-brown mole that sat midway along her right clavicle looked as enticing as it had when I’d left her at her doorstep the other night. It was the best way of identifying her, since whoever had killed her had stolen her head.

No.

I had to keep hold of the hope that she was alive. I sat in the back of the taxi, fuming silently at the traffic on the City Road and trying not to allow the black tidings of my thoughts to gain a foothold. The old guy who was driving was on his phone now, talking about Chelsea versus Everton. He waved a woman in a Corsa on to the main road from an adjacent street. I realised I was squeezing my fist too tightly when I saw four tiny crescents of blood across my palm. The next time the taxi stopped, I opened my door and then I opened his door.

‘What the bleed–’

He was on the ground, his hand still wrapped around his phone, and it was all I could do not to stamp him into the tarmac.

Rein it in
, I thought.
Use it on someone who deserves it.

I got behind the wheel and took the car up on to the pavement, sent the needle up to a number that started people screaming. Car horns blared at me, just drivers full of hot air wishing they had the stupidity gland that allowed me to do what I was doing. No police on the City Road, thank fuck. Not for now, anyway.

I’m a good driver. I’ve never had an accident, never had any points on my licence. When I was a kid, I was a member of the Tufty Club.

A woman coming out of a second-hand clothes shop, pushing a buggy. Kid in it wearing one of those humiliating jester’s hats, the kind that make them grow up into granny-batterers. Hard right, just avoiding her, and half on to the road again, skinning the cab against the passenger doors of London’s patient motorists. Guy on the radio saying that in the capital, you lucky people, we’re looking at some very early spring weather coming our way, just for a short while. Now here’s three in a row from Céline Dion.

Cyclist. Hard left, back on to the pavement. Take out a couple of saplings and a litter bin. Plastic tables outside a grotty café become pretty, but impractical, sky furniture. I save the locals from buying bruised or unripe fruit from the greengrocer’s by ploughing through his stall. I’m standing on the pedal and leaning on the horn. It feels as though my arse hasn’t touched the seat since I got behind the wheel. All I need now is a couple of blokes carrying a huge pane of glass to walk out in front of me, and I’ve got the set. If the traffic doesn’t ease up soon, I’m going to kill someone and that must not happen. That will not happen.

Down on London Wall, the traffic did become less of a bitch. I pushed the taxi at fifty to Bishopsgate, and turned north. Opposite Liverpool Street station, I took a right and parked along Brushfield Street. I got out of the car and hurried towards the old Spitalfields Market. The unseasonal spring weather we were just being promised wasn’t here yet; the sunshine earlier hadn’t possessed the muscle to last the entire day. Rain was coming in hard from the west, black fists of cloud rising in readiness to hammer the city once again. By the time I reached the archway leading into the market, the first spits were coming. The sky felt close. The colour in the Christmas decorations hanging from the entrance had turned to lead, and darkness was being trowelled thickly on everything. I tried to swallow, but the wetness had gone from my throat. I sucked in some deep breaths and tried to think rationally.

I ducked into a phone booth and rang Jimmy Two. Jimmy Two, as mentioned earlier, is a mate of mine, the younger brother of Jimmy One, a nasty piece of work who’s in Wandsworth doing a stretch for armed robbery. I’ve no idea what their surname is. Jimmy Two is all right, though. He has a garage out on the Cally Road, but he loves my motor more than I do and he promised to pop round to Berners Street to slip a new tyre on her within the hour. I told him that if he could get the car over to me in E1, I’d keep him in whisky for the next six months. No problem, said Jimmy Two. I almost asked him if he wanted to come in with me on what I was about to do, but that would have been pushing it a bit. And, anyway, the clock was ticking.

Spitalfields Market was pretty much dead. It only really came to life at the weekends, when the stalls and the shops were filled with people looking to buy lamps and mirrors and candles, or kicking back at the lunch areas or having a beer. There were a couple of games of football taking place on the five-a-side pitches, though, so the occasional shout, cheer or insult echoed around the enclosure. I turned right and walked past a shop that sold cast-iron beds. Next-door was a second-hand bookshop. And next to that was the Elegant House. I hung back, although it appeared that the shop was empty. A fat padlock was looped through the front-door handles. A sign above the lock read:
Closed for three weeks. Holiday
.

In the windows were displays for calligraphy pens and coloured inks in tiny, attractive bottles. Orange fake-fur cushion covers were piled up behind them, along with vases made out of twisted glass in electric blue. The smell of the soap seeped out of the cracks in the door, a heady mix of lavender and sandalwood. It was a beautiful display. I waited for another vociferous outburst from the artificial pitches, then put the butt of the gun through the window. Quickly, I hacked out as much of the glass from the window frame as I could and ducked into the shop. The smell of the soap was much stronger now, and I had to fight the urge to sneeze. I stood in the gloom for a while, hunched over, listening out for any noise to signal that there was someone in here, but nothing happened. There were stairs leading to a basement office. A sign at the top said
KayGee Karma
, with an arrow in red felt-tip pen pointing downwards. I followed it.

At the bottom of the stairs there was a small seating area and, behind a partition, a desk with a couple of books on it, and a stool on either side. On one of the white walls was a picture of a heron standing by a river, with a fish speared on its beak. Beneath it was some certificate of authenticity regarding Kara Geenan’s proficiency as a hypnotherapist. I ought to get her to do me a warrant card, it was so good. I checked the drawers of the desk but they were locked. There was a door behind the desk. I went to open it but it was locked. Down here, the sounds I was making died pretty quickly, so I thought fuck it, fuck it, and kicked the bastard in. A frightened human smell sprang out at me, backed up by the sour reek of organic waste. I scrabbled for a light and threw the switch.

A pale bulb shone at the centre of the ceiling, illuminating some kind of storeroom containing tons of junk: broken brushes and dustpans, old posters rolled up and secured with elastic bands, chipped plant pots, a deckchair speckled with cigarette burns. There was a tall metallic cabinet filled with receipts and invoices. To the rear of the storeroom, where the light bulb was having trouble penetrating the dark, something was moving under a large mound of hessian sacking.

I switched off the safety on the Glock and edged forward, tiptoeing around the mounds of furniture and bric-a-brac. I couldn’t breathe, but then I realised that was because I wasn’t trying any more. She was speaking, and I heard her voice but, in the moment before I recognised it, I didn’t want to recognise it. I wanted to shoot her in the head without pulling back the sacking. And then I wanted to run away, run until I’d worn the soles off my boots, run until I ran out of land. Do her and go, I urged myself. You don’t want to see her, not if she’s speaking like that.

‘Anything,’ she was saying in a broken, dispirited voice. ‘I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything. Just don’t kill me.’

I tugged off the sack and it was bad, but you manage. You have to deal with it. You might say ‘I can’t bear it’, or ‘I can’t go on’, but then you do, despite it all. You have no choice. What’s behind the closed door bothers you only for as long as it’s closed. I untied the bloody string around her wrists and helped her to her feet. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. Shit and piss drizzled off her naked thighs. The bleach that had turned her hair white had burned into her forehead and neck. Her mouth was bruised and dry, like a sliver of dried aubergine, and her eyes wouldn’t fasten on anything. She was shaking. So was I.

I was leading her out of the room, masking her with my hand against the glare of the lights, when I heard a single footstep gritting on the broken glass in the shop upstairs.

‘Wait here,’ I said.

‘Joel?’

‘It’s okay, Melanie,’ I said. ‘Just wait here for me. I’ll be gone a minute, that’s all.’

I sat her on a chair, then I went up the stairs as fast as I could, going into a roll at the top and swinging my arm round towards the shape that was coming at me from the front of the shop. I knew it wasn’t the police as they’d have said something by now, so I fired at the legs. Nothing happened. Hibbert – he’d emptied the clip, the prick, the fucking, fucking prick.

‘Fucking prick,’ I cried, and hurled the gun at the shadow. It sidestepped it easily and waded in. Something flashed by the side of my face, connecting hard, and I went down. It felt like a hammer, or a cast-iron candlestick, but I didn’t have time to play Guess What? I scuttled backwards on my arse as fast as I could, feeling my mouth fill with blood, trying to blink away the darkness that was trying to close in. A slow sweep of headlights through the window showed me enough of her face to tell me who it was.

‘Kara,’ I tried to say, but my jaw felt too loose and the words turned into a wet sigh of pain. She came on, swinging the weapon in her fist, and I was running out of scuttling space. The most dangerous thing my hand fell upon was an inflatable cushion for the bath. But then the room filled with white light and the sound of thunder. I heard a bullet zing off the wall and shatter a mirror about a foot above my head. Geenan threw herself at the broken window. Another huge crash, another bullet thunking into the heavy wooden frame.

I pushed myself upright. Melanie was slumped over the top riser, her arm outstretched. I went to her and took the gun out of her hand.

‘Where did you get this?’ I asked her.

She moved her head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Desk,’ she breathed, ‘if you know where the keys are kept.’

‘I’ll be back,’ I said.

I could hear her footsteps, already distant, moving fast, very fast, across the concrete. Kara could run. Yeah, well, so could I. There are few things I can do better.

* * *

I took a potshot at her, to keep her on her toes, just as she was careering around the corner of Steward Street into the new development that had been built in the pocket of land directly behind the market. Office buildings, bland and grey, the kind of place you just can’t wait to get out of bed for in the morning. And there would be plenty of people getting out of bed now, double-quick, at the sound of all this gunfire. I had to get closure on this little bitch before the Sweeney turned up.

I reached the corner just in time to see her disappear into the building site. I got after her fast, never taking my eyes off her point of entry. She flitted between two Portakabins, and I squeezed off another round. The gun was big and heavy and the shot went well wide, but I wasn’t too bothered. It was a nice feeling, knowing that she was the one being hunted for a change. The far end of the building site was protected by a tall, white wooden fence that enclosed the rear half of the perimeter. There was no way she was climbing that unless she had a pocket stepladder concealed down her strides. The only way she could get out was if she ran straight down my throat.

I skipped down the side of the Portakabin and spotted her by a stack of pallets loaded with white ceramic toilets wrapped in shrink-wrapped plastic. She was standing with her hands behind her back, head down. It looked as though she knew she was on a loser and had decided to play nice.

Yeah, right.

I approached her with the gun pointing straight between her breasts. Any funny stuff and I was going to blow her chest wide open and sod the overtime she owed me. But, as I got nearer, I found she was crying.

‘Give it a rest, Kara,’ I said. ‘What are you expecting me to do? Melt?’ I stepped closer. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I will fucking shoot you if you fuck about with me. I want to know where this cunt is who’s trying to rub me out. And I want to know what’s in it for you.’

She wasn’t crying; she was chanting. Some weird mantra that I couldn’t get a hold of. It looped in the thick air between us, feeding off her fear and my suspicion, sounding like a familiar name that I’d forgotten about for years. The name of someone precious to me who had been so long gone they had almost escaped my thoughts.

‘What?’ I said, and leaned in closer. Her voice deepened and grew softer, becoming something lyrical that ought to be listened to while accompanied by music. The noises she was making were as alien as a foreign language, yet as known to me as the sound of my own breath as I lay in bed at night. Other notes came into the lilting of her voice, turning it warmer, more trustworthy, the kind of voice that your mother has.

Her hands came out from behind her back. They were holding a beautiful crown made of some astonishing silver metal that absorbed all of the light and made it appear liquid. Glittering seeds swam all around the circumference, blazing here and there like polished jewels. It drew the light and colour from my eyes.

‘Can I wear that?’ I asked, and a great mouthful of spit and blood washed across my chin. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the crown. Her face was a black nonsense. And then it all went wrong. The noises from her mouth stopped sounding like aural honey and were spiked by awful jags of rage. I stumbled back as the crown spoiled in her fingers, turning into a rusted length of thick iron with a vicious claw on the end. The whoop of the police siren twisted through the air like a fantastic creature taking flight for its dinner. I staggered some more and a couple of large staples in the plastic wrap punched through the skin of my outstretched hand.