Quite Ugly One Morning (5 page)

From his window that evening he had seen the woman remonstrating with the police, and had made out enough of the conversation to understand that she wanted into Ponsonby’s flat. He made sure he got a good look at her face and clothes, and scribbled down
Girlfriend?
on his notepad.

He was still suffering from jet-lag, and was finding it very hard to get to sleep before about three in the morning as his body got used to the time difference. Staring at the ceiling had lost its appeal after a couple of hours, and he had got up and out of habit wandered into the living room, forgetting that he didn’t have a TV. Instead he found himself looking out of the window at the Square, his eye occasionally caught by the meanderings of drunks heading down Elm Row. Then he saw the woman from earlier on, looking back and forth – but inexperiencedly not up – to check no one was watching her. She disappeared out of view and into the close. He got dressed.

Twenty minutes later he was making her coffee in his kitchen.

It was a total lie about the policeman.

Darren Mortlake was in the huff. He was feeling unappreciated, taken for granted and unfairly chastised. He had shown initiative, proven his ability to adapt under pressure, and bollocks, he had got the job done. But it hadn’t been enough, apparently. That bearded wanker Lime had been furious, talking to him like he was some stupid kid, ranting away down the phone and telling him – no, ordering him – to stay put in this fucking awful guest house until he had decided what to do about it.

It was at times like this he wished he had just killed the cunt that night. Christ, plead guilty to a reduced plea of manslaughter, keep his nose clean inside and he might have been out by now.

But the real reason Darren was in such a bad mood, he knew, was that he
had
screwed up, and because he had screwed up he had had to listen to the little hairy fat bastard’s whingeings without being able to give him an earful back.

He had been quite proud of the way he had improvised in a tricky situation, and had managed to kid himself for a while that Lime might even be impressed. He had ‘thought on his feet to protect the investment’. A ‘successful damage limitation exercise’, he would say. Lime liked words like that.

But there had been no getting away from the one crucial error.

Lime had given him the cash and told him to get someone else this time, ‘put the contract out to tender’. His job had been simply to find ‘an independent operator’ to ‘neutralise a potential liability’. They ‘could not afford high exposure on this transaction’, and Darren had to assume ‘a less pro-active role’ and ‘take the job out-of-house’.

What? Did the cunt think Darren was in some nationwide guild of criminals, that he could put an ad in the newsletter and find a good operator up in fucking Jockland, just like that?

Darren had assured Lime that he had found someone with
the appropriate skills, pocketed the dosh and decided to do it himself after all. Lime wouldn’t be any the wiser.

It was supposed to look like suicide. Lime had given him the syringe and the stuff to pass on to the ‘sub-contractor’, with the instruction that there should be no mess whatsoever, or ‘the second instalment of the remuneration’ would be withheld.

No mess.

The words had popped in and out of Darren’s head in Lime’s nasally little voice all throughout the battle in the flat.

He had got in silently through the first-floor window at the back, despite the shoulder-strap from his little plastic satchel catching unseen on a piping bracket and almost strangling him. He had contorted his huge frame to try and wriggle out of it, his feet resting on another pipe below him. He twisted his neck and his head popped free suddenly, rattling painfully off the stone by the window-frame. At least it hadn’t hit wood or glass, as there might have been more sound than just the quiet, dull thud which preceded the steady flow of blood into his right eye.

He wiped it with his sleeve and clambered in. He had dripped some blood on the window-sill inside, but no matter. Once the job was done he could clean up after himself.

He removed the ropes from the satchel and crept stealthily into the bedroom, where the ‘liability’ was asleep on his stomach, head turned away towards the wall. He had planned to restrain him before the injection, but he didn’t think his ropes would fit around the double bed and there was no headboard to tie him to either. Besides, he might leave ropemarks, and that would just get the Filth interested. Best to just stick him right away, get the stuff into him and if he wakes up, hold him down until it takes effect.

He held the syringe delicately in his left hand and leaned over, having selected a spot on the liability’s arm. However, as he was about to penetrate, another little rivulet found its way into his eye, and he instinctively brought his hand up to wipe it, ramming the needle into his forehead and breaking off the syringe.

He failed to stifle a yelp, and it was enough to waken the liability, who looked on in bewildered terror for a moment, quickly decided he wasn’t dreaming and darted for the door. Darren leapt blindly after him, catching his foot and tripping
him up so that he spilled into the hallway, kicking out at Darren’s face. The liability got his leg free and scrambled into the living room as Darren pulled the needle out of his forehead and wiped more blood from his eye.

He heard the living room door slam and the turning of a key in its lock. With enormous relief he saw that there was a telephone on a small table in the hallway, and he picked it up to hear whether the liability might be calling the Filth from another extension. Just a dialling tone.

He backed up the full length of the hallway, took a run and lunged shoulder-first into the living room door, which crashed splintering through on to the wooden floor with him on top of it.

No mess.

The liability was on top of him instantly, pummelling at him with some sort of metal ornament, like a cast of a race horse going over a jump. He rolled over to throw the liability off, and lashed out with a heavy right fist, which smashed into the plate of glass on top of a coffee table very similar to the one in his mum’s house in Dagenham, breaking it into huge shards. His fist emerged like an over-ripe plum, purple and gushing juice from several lacerations.

No mess.

He saw the liability sprawling next to him on the floor, looking to get some purchase with his fucking race horse again. He let him stagger almost to his feet, waiting for that half-balanced moment, then suddenly sprang up and charged, running him across the floor until they rammed a bookcase, sliding it a few degrees out from against the wall and spilling its titles on to the floor. Darren punched the liability in the stomach, doubling him over, then threw him to the ground and toppled the bookcase over towards him. However, the liability rolled reflexively out of the way, so Darren leapt upon him and they struggled about the floor in an angry tangle of limbs.

Darren found his good hand trapped somewhere amidst the two heaving bodies, but could feel facial features with his pulped one. He reached around, seeking out the eyes with his straining fingers. The face was slippery under his hand due to blood and sweat, and the liability’s writhing made it impossible to get a grip on anything. His pinky slipped into a hole which he guessed to be a nostril, then it happened.

He felt a searing, tearing, grinding pain as the liability clamped his jaws closed on his index finger, biting with mortal determination. Darren screamed and tried to pull himself away, but just couldn’t get the finger free. Then with a mighty lunge he rolled himself clear, his hand whipping out from his opponent’s face with a sudden recoil. The liability must have finally opened his fucking mouth, which was inevitable if he wanted to breathe, as Darren had still had a finger up the cunt’s nose.

Then he saw the liability spit something out, and looked in alarm at his hand.

He had bitten his finger off. The Jock cunt had bitten his finger off. Next to his thumb there was just a messy stump with little stringy bits and a throbbing, pumping spurt of blood like a burst water pipe.

Right. That was it.

He leapt at the liability once more in a blazing torrent of rage, getting hold of one of his ankles and punching his bollocks once with his free fist. Unfortunately it was the recently ravaged one, and the pain on contact was blinding. He got his elbow into the liability’s groin instead, and started pumping at it until the bastard was paralysed, then got hold of his ears and sank his teeth into his nose, shaking his head and worrying at it, at which point the liability passed out.

He stood up and scanned the wreckage – the door, the table, the bookcase – and the noseless, blood-spattered wreck lying unconscious in front of the fireplace.

He reckoned the Filth might not think it was a suicide now.

The room’s condition reminded him of many such sites in his teen years, breaking into places just for fun, wrecking the joint and taking their cash and booze. Maybe the Filth would think so too. He could empty out a few drawers, make it look like he had really been through the place.

Then he had his flash of inspiration, his moment of genius.

Make it weird.

Confuse the Filth. Get the bastards guessing.

He moved the liability on to the door and tied him to it securely with the ropes, then propped the whole arrangement up on the remains of the table.

‘Right you cunt,’ he said.

Taking his knife from the satchel, he quickly and practicedly
cut the liability’s throat, which brought him round and initially started him screaming until he cut through the vocal chords, after which he just sort of gurgled. Darren placed a hand over the dying man’s mouth because the gurgling noise was annoying him, then remembering what had happened earlier, he stuffed a rolled-up magazine in there instead, and held the door in position from behind as the liability struggled against his bonds.

Gradually the struggling calmed and Darren stood away, sighing with exhaustion.

What next, he thought, then remembered. When he trashed a place in his youth he usually liked to shit on the floor somewhere, a nice centrepiece to the surprise the poor suckers were coming home to. It wasn’t a unique calling card, everyone did it. The Filth knew that too. So if he left a turd they’d be sure it was a burglary – might even reckon he was laying the finishing touch when the victim had come home and surprised him. Only thing was, where to put it? If he had just squatted down on the floor in here, there’s no way the Filth would believe the thing could be intact after the battle that had pretty obviously taken place.

Then he noticed the space in the middle of the mantelpiece where that fucking race-horse statue thing must have stood.

By the time he had climbed back down, the liability was dead. He looked with satisfaction at the bloody throat, the ravaged nose, but glancing at the stump where his index finger should be he felt another wave of anger, and grabbed at the liability’s right hand, gnashing and chewing at the index finger until the bone was exposed and he could snap it off.

Make it weird, he remembered.

He stuck the finger up one of the liability’s nostrils. Then he repeated the drill with the other hand.

Right. Done.

His anger extinguished, his rage calmed, he simultaneously caught a whiff of his turd and a taste of the liability’s flesh, and vomited copiously over the radiator.

Darren diligently ferried a few armfuls of clothes from the bedroom and scattered them liberally about the floor, then conscientiously upturned most of the remaining items of
furniture, and as an after-thought, rammed the hatstand through the telly.

He took his purple shellsuit out from the satchel, pulled it on over his bloodstained clothes, shoved the ropes, knife and syringe into it, and headed out of the front door, which he left unlatched.

No mess.

‘So, did you find what you were looking for?’

They stood on opposite sides of Parlabane’s one hundred per cent furniture-free kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil.

‘You know, before I even think about answering that question, I think I should get a reply to the “Who the fuck are you” one.’

Sarah felt the confidence of being behind a mask. There was always an unreality to the sudden death of someone you knew, this time doubly so due to it having been murder. There was a feeling of the rules having been suspended, a grace period during which you were someone else until you were ready to resume being yourself and accept the responsibilities ahead. The shock, the jolt gave a hazy sense of control having been lost, and the appearance of a mysterious stranger together with the promise of other knowledge had drawn her, like an open door on a train pulling away from the platform, headed for an unknown destination.

‘Sorry,’ said Parlabane. ‘My name’s Jack. Jack Parlabane.’

‘I didn’t ask your name, I asked who the fuck are you. I feel pretty sure you’re not a cop, and I came up here in the fervent hope that you’re not just a nosy neighbour.’

Parlabane chucked his jacket on the worktop and spooned powder into a suspiciously murky cafetière.

‘I could be the killer. Didn’t that occur to you?’

Sarah sniffed dismissively. ‘No you couldn’t. From what I gather, the killer got the better of Jeremy after a real ruck. Nothing personal, but you don’t look up to it. You’d have to be a lot bigger, a lot stronger and probably a lot fitter. So one more time, who the fuck . . .’

‘I’m a journalist.’

Sarah rolled her eyes. His intriguingly mercurial look had just become probing and seedy. Reality was starting to precipitate in a sordid grey.

‘Fuck your coffee. I’ll take my chances with the police.’

Jesus, thought Parlabane as she made to leave, Rupert Murdoch had a lot to answer for.

‘Wait,’ he called after her. ‘Two things you ought to know. One, I’m not that sort of journalist.’

She kept walking down his hall. ‘What sort of journalist is “that sort of journalist"?’ she muttered.

‘The sort it would be wise to walk out on without hearing what he had to say.’

She stopped with her hand on the lock.

‘I’m not after you for a story,’ he assured her, hands in the air. ‘At least, not the kind of story you’re worried about.’

‘All right. Milk, no sugar.’

She walked back to the kitchen behind him. He was actually a couple of inches shorter than she had first thought, his initially menacing stance lending him stature. He looked very light-framed but not skinny, like a lightweight boxer, and the black leather belt fastened tight round his waist seemed to pull the denim neatly around his well-formed buttocks. An endless parade of flabby arses presented to the surgeons for abscess removal had taught her great appreciation of a nice bum when she saw one.

‘What’s your connection to the late doctor?’ he asked, pushing down the plunger on the dark liquid. ‘Ex-wife, ex-girlfriend?’

‘Ex-wife. How did you guess?’

‘Well, no offence, we all grieve in different ways, but you’re not quite crying buckets over there.’

‘Cried my last tears over Jeremy a long time back. We broke up more than a year and a half ago.’

Parlabane handed her a mug of steaming coffee.

‘Afraid it’s UHT. No fridge yet.’

‘That’s fine,’ she said and took a few sips.

She sighed and put the mug down on the worktop.

‘Sarah,’ she said. ‘My name’s Sarah.’

Parlabane nodded acknowledgement over the brim of his mug. They stood quietly drinking for a few moments, exchanging brief, assuring smiles, aware of the almost bizarre awkwardness of their situation. Sarah looked younger than Parlabane, about twenty-seven, twenty-eight, he figured. He instinctively began piecing her together. Young to be divorced, divorced from a doctor . . . chances were she was a doctor too. Female doctors had the highest divorce rates of any profession in the country. English accent with Scottish inflections meant she probably studied up here – Edinburgh or St Andrews – met
the ill-fated Dr P and stayed on. He couldn’t be sure though. From what he could remember, Edinburgh was full of natives who spoke with that anonymous, Home Counties BBC accentless English accent, and who got very shirty and upset when you asked where they were from down south. To them, theirs
was
a Scottish accent, just a more refined one than the rather rough and coarse vernacular favoured by the lumpen proletariat. In Parlabane’s more militantly Glaswegian moments, this pissed him off no end.

Sarah had fine, wispy, shoulder-length red hair, worn straight, framing lightly freckled pale skin which bore no make-up. She was in black jeans and a black, blazer-style jacket, on top of a white cotton button-up blouse, the kind it had taken Parlabane years to discipline himself not to try and peek through.

‘So have the cops had you in yet? Fishing for background on your ex?’

‘Briefly. Miserable-looking sod called McGregor and a big drink of water named Gow. But either I couldn’t tell them much or they weren’t asking the right questions. Probably thought they would get better information from his current girlfriend.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Oh, some nineteen-year-old nurse with blonde hair and big tits, someone happy to suck his cock metaphorically as well as literally.’

‘Was she anything to do . . .’

‘With the divorce?’ Sarah laughed. ‘Oh God, no.’

‘Then why so bitter?’

‘Disappointment, really. The embarrassment of having been married to someone who has turned out to be . . . oh, never mind. You don’t know doctors much, do you?’

‘Guess not. Apples are an important part of my daily diet.’

‘Wise man. And trust me, meeting them in a social capacity is often worse than having to meet them in their professional capacity.’

Parlabane looked her in the eye. ‘And what about meeting them in a just-trespassed-on-the-ex-husband’s-murder-scene capacity?’

She took her time swallowing a mouthful of coffee, playing calm but buying a moment to silently recoil.

‘You’re very perceptive. You should be a journalist.’

‘Maybe some day. So the nurse . . . they weren’t living together, so how long . . . ?’

‘Couldn’t tell you precisely. More than six months, I know that. It’s a familiar scenario, suits someone like Jeremy down to the ground. Worshipful girlie he can pick up and play with when he wants to, then put back down when he’s finished. And believe me, she’d have put up with it, no matter how long it stayed that way. There’s legions of young nurses in that position. White Coat Syndrome, their peers call it. Ego-massage and fuck-therapy for the dashing young doctor, lying back and thinking of some suburban two-kids-and-a-volvo dream he’s going to make come true. Sad cows.

‘The cops won’t have got much out of her. Jeremy would never have let her close enough. She won’t know a great deal more about him than that he drinks in Montmartre’s, plays rugby on free Saturday mornings and says “Oh Jesus” a lot when he comes.’

‘Present tense,’ Parlabane said.

Sarah made a self-dismissive waving gesture. ‘I know, I know. A change of tense in talking about him could be the only practical difference his murder makes to my life. It’s not easy to get used to the fact that he’s dead. The change would obviously have had a more profound impact if we were still together, but as I only saw him occasionally . . . I don’t know, I never felt like I missed him, so I was very much used to him being out of my life already.’

‘So if you were used to him being out of your life, what were you looking for downstairs? Family heirloom? He still owe you money?’

She smiled sadly to herself, thoughts Parlabane could but guess at.

‘Oh, he owed me plenty of money, but that was written off way back. I suppose I was looking for an ending. I had got Jeremy out of my life and out of my head, but deep down there’s still a lot of loose ends, questions I intended to seek answers for when a lot more water had passed under the bridge. Maybe a few more years down the line I thought I would be able to look at him and know a bit more about what went wrong between us.

‘But on the other hand his death somehow didn’t surprise
me, and that’s what makes it feel even emptier. As if I should have known. As if I
did
know it was coming but just didn’t anticipate precisely when or how. But that’s probably because, if you like, he was already “dead” to me in a way. I’m not known for great psychic awareness. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to say goodbye.’

‘Where’d you get the keys?’

‘He gave them to me. Foisted them upon me in fact. He was always losing keys when we lived together. Often turned up on a ward or outside a theatre looking for mine after finding himself locked out. So once he was out on his own, if he lost his keys he was stuffed. He asked me to keep a set at my flat that he could collect as a back-up. It was really just a ploy, an excuse to show up, a way of keeping my door open in case he needed something else. I know that because although he was bound to have kept locking himself out, he never once came round for them.’

Sarah put her mug down, emptied but still slightly steaming. By her folded arms, Parlabane knew it wasn’t just the coffee that was finished.

‘So what’s your role in all this?’ she asked. ‘I’m assuming you’re after more than the “dead doctor’s sex secrets”, so what’s the story? And come to think of it, you said “two things” earlier and never told me the second.’

Parlabane put his own finished mug down and took a deep breath.

‘Can I trust you?’ he asked quietly.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she said. ‘That’s your call.’

‘All right, scratch that. I’m
going
to trust you. I saw the place downstairs, before the police had cleared up. I saw the wreckage. I saw the body.’

He swallowed, nervously. He was about to turn her world upside down, black into white, light into dark, and she had no idea what was coming. He knew it was not entirely fair to share out such a burden without really waiting to be asked, but he needed her help and the best way to get it was to make her need his.

‘I believe your ex-husband was murdered.’

She closed her eyes for half a second, then opened them to reveal a bemused stare.

‘I don’t want to injure your professional pride here,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you’re going to be able to claim that
as an exclusive. I think maybe even the Lothian and Borders have scooped you on this one.’

Fuck.

Sometimes he wished a sub-editor could give his speech a once-over before it was issued.

‘I’m not finished,’ he said, trying to dig himself out. ‘I mean I have reason to think
he,
specifically Jeremy Ponsonby, was murdered because someone wanted him dead.’

Sarah’s eyes remained fixed, cold, on his own. She hadn’t run out screaming and she wasn’t looking at him like he was nuts. This was both a good sign and a bad sign. Good because it meant she thought he might be right. Bad for exactly the same reason.

‘Keep talking,’ she said.

‘I don’t know how much you’ve been told about how he was murdered and I don’t know how much you want to hear.’

‘Trust me, I’m not easily shocked.’

‘Fine. All right, he was badly bruised and had had his nose and both index fingers bitten off. Messy, gory, horrible and weird as fuck. But he was killed by having his throat cut. Plain and simple. Now nobody has found the murder weapon, and I doubt anyone ever will, but they’re certainly not going to turn up some kitchen knife missing from your ex-husband’s flat. I’ve had the misfortune of seeing more than one cut throat, and this one was done by someone who took pride in their work, wielding an implement designed with just such a purpose in mind. It was a clean, deep, practised cut with an extremely sharp and probably pretty large blade. No hacking, no slashing.

‘Whoever killed your ex-husband has killed plenty of people before, and although the recession has hit us all, I find it hard to believe someone of his skills is having to supplement his income with burglary.’

Sarah squinted as if at too-bright light, too much information coming in at once.

A question came along to buy her time to assimilate.

‘But if he’s so efficient, what about the mess, what about the fight?’ she asked.

‘I said he was efficient at cutting throats. Getting hold of Dr Ponsonby’s must have proven more difficult than he anticipated.’

‘And where did you see all these cut throats?’

‘A live-action version of the
Journal of Wound Care.
AKA Los Angeles. I worked there as a reporter for the best part of two years.’

‘But why didn’t the police notice this? Why only you, or are you just Mr Hot-shot.’

‘The police saw a burglary. They saw a chaotic mess. They saw a giant turd on the mantelpiece. Whether they also saw what I saw . . . they still have to pursue the more obvious line of investigation. That’s incumbent upon them. I mean, yes, there is a possibility that the killer was a burglar who got very lucky with a kitchen knife. I can afford to look into the other possibility and be wrong. They can’t. I’ve got a contact on their side. I’ll tell her what I think. She can then tell McGregor if she buys it. From there it’s his call.

‘One of them saw it though, I’m sure,’ Parlabane said. ‘The contact, DC Jenny Dalziel. She wasn’t buying the burglary story, anyway. She suspects there might be more to know about the man himself. You’re the expert. What do you say?’

She held up a small, transparent-plastic tube.

‘Yeah, I’d say there might be more to know.’