Murder Club (6 page)

‘You’re a good man, Bible,’ he said.

Steve took the bottle, scowled as he looked at its diminishing contents – barely one-third left now – and had another small slug. He dragged the back of his coat sleeve across his mouth. ‘That, sir, I am not,’ he said. ‘The Lord has looked upon my blackened soul and He has seen that it is not good.’

‘I don’t know about the Lord, but there’s not many as would share whisky,’ said the older woman.

The younger girl snuggled into Bible Steve and he put his arm around her and roared again. ‘But if at the church they would give us some ale. And a pleasant fire our souls to regale. We’d sing and we’d pray all the livelong day, nor ever once wish from the church to stray!’

‘Too fucking right!’ said the young girl and Bible Steve pulled her in tighter to him. ‘Cuddle up, my lovely, old Bible’ll keep you warm. Warm as toast,’ he said. ‘Warm as buttered crumpet.’

The woman nodded, her eyes half-closing again.

‘I’ll make Christians of the whole heathen, ruddy lot of you,’ he said. He stood up, the girl’s face falling into his crotch. He held it there for a moment or two.
‘Business
first though,’ he said. ‘Nature calls.’

The hairy man put a hand to the side of the rough brickwork to steady himself, he had to blink for a moment or two to remember where he was. All memory of the last two hours had vanished from his mind again as soon as he stood.

This happened to him often. Whole hours of blankness, days sometimes. He remembered early evening. A drunken Japanese tourist had handed him a twenty-pound note some hours ago when he had asked for any change. A mistake by the tourist, presumably, being unfamiliar with the currency, or else to impress the loud and overly made-up women who accompanied him and his business colleague.

Hired women no doubt, Bible Steve thought at the time. But if you were to ask him now what he thought he wouldn’t have been able to remember where the money he had spent had come from. Strong lagers and a bottle of whisky. He had passed a slug or two of the whisky around, but not much and the bottle was severely depleted. He looked at it, confused, and down at the people he had been talking with.

‘Have you been at my whisky?’ he snarled.

But the other three were huddled into each other and didn’t reply.

Bible Steve patted the young woman on the head. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, darling. Don’t worry, Bible’ll see you all right. He’ll see you snug,’ he said with a wink.

He took his hand off the wall and staggered a little further down the alleyway. Bright light spilled from a lone restaurant further ahead.

The Lucky Dragon restaurant. Cantonese. Bible
Steve
staggered towards it and put his hand on the glass, peering in as he fought to keep steady. The nearly finished bottle of whisky swayed in his left hand as if to counterbalance.

He didn’t recognise the figure staring back at him, reflected palely in the glass of the restaurant window. It had the face of a wild-haired and heavily bearded man. A French rugby player came to his mind. But he couldn’t remember his name. This man’s hair, though, was lank, greasy and matted. The beard covering most of his face was like a tribal shaman’s mask. He had on a battered and soiled army greatcoat with layers of equally filthy clothing beneath. His eyes were like coals. Sore, cracked and flickering with residual heat, but near to winking out as his eyelids closed. He shook his head and growled. He peered in the window, scowling at the diners within, who regarded him with an equal mixture of horror and disgust. An elderly Chinese woman shook her hands, gesturing at him as if to shoo away a large rodent.

Bible Steve blinked again and then snarled and banged on the window.

‘A corruption! A plague!’ he shouted. His native tongue broader now than earlier that day. His voice raspy with the rawness of the whisky and his outrage. ‘And the Lord says that he who eats with the pigs shall be as swine. Consumption and damnation is your bill. And ye shall pay it in punishment and in death!’

He banged on the window again. The Chinese woman leaned out from the doorway and shouted at him.

‘I call police! I call police! You go now.’

Bible Steve looked across at her and belched. ‘Madam, I shall gladly go now, as per your instructions.’ He belched again.

He looked down at the bottle of whisky in his hand, now empty, and tossed it imperiously to one side. Then glared at the woman once more. ‘As per your commandment, so mote it be!’ He fumbled with his trouser zipper and pulled out his member. ‘If you want me to go I shall go. And great shall be the mic … the mic …’ Bible Steve said, struggling to find the word and then grinned showing a full set of yellowed teeth. ‘Great shall be the micturation!’ he said and began to urinate powerfully on to the window, splashing down onto the pavement. The Chinese woman hopped, horrified, back into the restaurant, flapping her arms and shouting like a startled crow.

Bible Steve looked down and grinned again. ‘And the Lord looked down at the waters that came to pass and he was pleased,’ he said before falling backwards to crash unconscious on the floor, a river of piss still flowing toward the kerbside.

A short while later and in the distance was the faint sound of an ambulance siren. But Bible Steve didn’t hear it. He was snoring like an elephant, and the buzzing, for a while at least, had stopped in his brain.

Above him clouds scudded past, revealing a full moon that hung even lower and fatter in the sky now, its pits and craters clearly visible to the naked eye. Yellow, seemingly, like ancient wax, swollen and pregnant with omen.

The Chinese woman looked up at it and made
another
gesture. Warding with her fingers and muttering under her breath. She looked scared.

She had every good reason to be.

DR KATE WALKER
lifted the eyelid of the man lying supine on the cot in the holding cell and shone a small torch in his eye.

The man’s pupils contracted but he continued to snore. Loudly. She looked over at ‘Slimline’ Matthews and shook her head.

‘Sleeping Beauty here won’t be round any time in the near future.’

‘Not surprised.’

‘Get someone to look in on him in the morning.’

‘The amount of booze he had in him, probably take a day or two before he’s fit for questioning. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘You know him?’

‘Oh yeah. Keith Hagen’s been a customer of ours since he was fourteen years old,’ said the sergeant as they walked out of the cell. He closed the door behind them none too gently but the snoring could still be heard.

‘And how old is he now?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Really? He doesn’t look older than eighteen,’ said Kate, surprised.

Dave Matthews shrugged. ‘I guess some people
have
all the luck.’

‘It’s the kind of luck that won’t see him making thirty.’

The sergeant shook his head as they headed towards the custody area. ‘I’m not so sure. The thing is, he only does it now and again. Most of the year he’s as good as gold. Works for the post office, volunteers at a local charity shop most Saturdays.’

‘So what sets him off?’

Dave Matthews jerked his thumb to the moonlight shining through the front window of the police station. ‘The full moon. Brings all the loonies out.’ He twiddled his finger round his temple in case Kate had missed his point.

Laura, who was putting a report behind the reception desk, turned round and frowned at him.

‘Not a term we in the medical profession entirely endorse, sergeant.’

Kate walked across and looked out of the window at the night sky. The moon hung clear for a moment or two, as it had all evening, and then clouds began to drift around it, quicker than she would have thought, and soon the moon was wrapped and hidden and the night was dark.

‘They reckon we’re due snow any time now,’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t wonder,’ the sergeant grunted, looking none too happy at the prospect.

‘Not looking forward to a white Christmas, Dave?’ asked Bob Wilkinson cheerily for a change. ‘Not going all “bah humbug!” on us, are you?’

Dave Matthews’ scowl deepened. ‘We’re spending it at the in-laws’.’

‘Ah,’ Bob nodded sympathetically.

‘
Ah
, indeed.’

The telephone on the front desk rang and PC Wilkinson snatched it up.

‘White City Police Station?’ he said and listened for a moment or two. ‘Okay, Peggy. Show me as attending.’

He hung up and nodded to Dr Laura. ‘You’re with me.’

Laura looked at her watch. ‘I’m off soon. Can’t you go, Kate?’

‘Sorry. I’m off shift, and I’ve got a pile of paperwork to process before I can get home.’ Kate shrugged apologetically.

‘It’s only Edgware Road,’ said Bob Wilkinson to Laura. ‘Come on, Doctor, the sooner we go, the sooner we’ll be back.’

A SHORT, FAST
ride later and Laura Chilvers and Bob Wilkinson were walking down Edgware Road.

There were plenty of people out on the streets. London doesn’t stop for the cold; it doesn’t stop for anything, particularly at Christmas. The restaurants were packed with office parties, and the sound of their celebrations spilled out into the street as doors were opened and closed. A lot of sore heads in the morning, if the raucous laughter and the unsteady balance of people leaving and waving drunkenly for taxis were anything to go by, in Laura’s considered, professional opinion. She stepped aside as one drunken man in his twenties staggered out of McDonald’s and lurched by, clutching a hand to his mouth and hurrying to the kerb looking like he was about to be violently sick. She left him to it. Taking the Hippocratic Oath didn’t mean she had to rush to the aid of every binge-drinking idiot in London. She’d be working round the clock from here to Michaelmas if she did.

Bob Wilkinson was chatting to her as they made their way down the road, moaning about something or other as usual, but she wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about partying herself and the night
ahead
that she had planned. A new, fashionable fetish-club was opening in the West End and she was looking forward to paying it a visit. A young woman she had met last week at a gay bar in Soho had invited her. Laura had coolly told her she might be there, she might not! The woman was clearly the submissive type, but absolutely gorgeous, and Laura liked to play mind-games, as well as the other games. Mind-fuck them first, she thought to herself, and she was happy to take the dominant role if that was what was required. It wasn’t always her thing, but if the mood took her she’d get into it as much as any of the serious players. S&M was more about the mental than it was about the physical – something women understood a lot better than men in her experience. Laura didn’t consider herself a sadist as such, but she liked giving sensual pain if it was consensual. Not the kind of all-out beatings that some women she had met wanted. The kind that draws blood, leaves serious bruising; she couldn’t even watch that, at some of the clubs and private parties she had been to. She was a doctor after all and the Hippocratic Oath definitely did go against that kind of thing! She smiled to herself at the thought.

‘What?’ Bob Wilkinson asked her as he stopped walking and looked at her curiously.

‘Nothing,’ she said, keeping the smile on her face. She couldn’t imagine what the perennially cranky police constable would make of her thoughts, or her plans for that night. She certainly had no intention of telling him. Her private life she kept exactly that. And when she did attend the kind of clubs like the one she was going to later, she always wore a mask and went
incognito.
A sexy mask, mind. She was not only a doctor but a police surgeon, after all, not the sort of thing she wanted to be public knowledge. Fetish wasn’t quite the
new gay
yet. Hell, gay wasn’t even the new gay in the Metropolitan Police. She had lost count of the number of women who had hit on her. Some of them married, some with boyfriends, others not. But a lot of them asking her to keep it strictly between themselves. There were some women who were out and proud, of course. Chief Inspector Diane Campbell and her gorgeous girlfriend, who worked in the evidence area back in White City, for one. But a lot of gay women – and men come to that – kept that part of their life separate from work and, in all honesty, she didn’t blame them. It was a lot easier for her to come out as a student going on to be a doctor than it was for a cadet over at Hendon.

‘Down here,’ said PC Wilkinson, snapping her out of her thoughts and heading her off the main drag down a small cul-de-sac of a lane. There were a few shops, closed for the night now; some offices where homeless people were huddled together with their backs against the wall, taking some small comfort, she assumed, from the heat emanating from it. She looked up at the night sky, heavily swollen with snow, and wondered why they didn’t make it to one of the homeless shelters. Maybe they would later. She fished in her pocket and came up with a couple of pound coins. She threw them onto the blanket laid out in front of a young woman seated with a man and another woman, both much older than her. The girl looked up at her. She had the face of an angel, Laura found herself thinking. A malnourished,
haunted-eyed
angel. Homeless girl by way of Margaret O’Brien. But the girl’s eyes were unfocused as well as enormous and sad, the pupils dilated and huge. God knows what cocktail of booze and pills she was on. Laura wanted to stop and speak with her but the girl mumbled some thanks and closed her eyes, unable to keep them open, and leaned up against the older man next to her.

Bob Wilkinson pointed ahead some twenty yards further on to the Chinese restaurant. An elderly Chinese woman was waving angrily at them. In front of her restaurant window a homeless man lay sprawled on his back, a broken whisky bottle on the pavement near him, his arms outstretched. Cruciform. A hobo Christ nailed to a London side-street.

‘He piss on window,’ the Chinese woman was saying as they approached, still waving her hands around. ‘All the time he come and piss on window, and police do nothing!’