The Fly Guy (11 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Alison stopped taking the train into the city because she was getting so wet. Once in the car she very quickly began to relish having that personal space. Even if she was sitting in traffic, at least she was comfortable. At the end of the day she didn’t have to rush to the station, she could stay late, she could go home whenever wanted to.

In the office, she was the manager’s first choice. He chose her to be the one who dealt with important or tricky contracts. One contract was representing a very wealthy vendor who was picky about who he sold his property to and what they were going to use it for. He wanted the property, which was a listed building, to retain the design features he had installed as well as the official heritage architectural features. She met with him several times and let him talk and talk, asked him about his business and interests. She secured a sale for above the price he was expecting, and she also showed him around some exclusive properties she knew of, on the pretext of showing him examples of what some of the most sought after architects were designing for the city centre.
What you are interested in is a very specialised area,
she told him as they took in the view of the city from a high rise studio space,
and the passion you have is truly a vocation. Converting old to new. I think that you will love Park Road. Not many properties like this come along at this kind of price,
she said. They visited the Park Road property together and he went for it. The feeling of achievement as she watched the elegant loops of the vendor’s signature appear on the contract was like nothing she had experienced before. Inside she was excited like a child, she wanted to jump up and down and clap her hands, hug everyone in the room. Instead she smiled broadly and congratulated the millionaire on making an astute purchase. When she reported to her manager he was astounded.

“They bought? Hang on, weren’t they selling?”

“Yes, they sold and they bought Park Road.”

“You sold theirs? And they bought another? Park Road? They bought Park Road?” He scanned the papers she had put on his desk, open mouthed.

“Good grief, Alison, I really don’t know how you did that. I put you onto them because I thought they were a pain in the ass. Alison, you’re a treasure. Here, there are some other interesting inquiries coming up you might want to handle. The Phoenix development, do you know about it? You should take a look.” He took some files from his drawer.

“I know it, that’s not due for acquisition for months.”

“We’ve got a heads up. Take a look at what they’re doing.” He handed her a file. She promised to give it a look over and walked out of his office, leaving him looking at the paperwork and shaking his head.

As she walked through the main office she could feel the eyes of the others on her. She felt energised, like she had just been linked to a chain of electricity.

Back home, she was sitting on the couch with her laptop open, reading from the screen and turning a pen slowly between her teeth as Martin flicked from one news channel to another.

“You are getting later and later,” he said.

“Later and later?”

“Home. After work.”

She continued to read from the screen, scrolling down.

“That’s because I’m working later and later.”

“And who are you working with?”

She looked up. “Martin, I’m working alright? It’s not like I’m missing out, when I get back you’re stuck up in your room anyway. I’m not working with anyone.”

“Do you have to work when you get home?”

She closed the laptop and put down her pen.

“Okay. Sorry, I’m here now.” She leaned back and lay across the sofa, so that her feet were in Martin’s lap. “Can you do my feet babe?”

“Sure,” he said and put his hands around a foot.

“Where’s the remote?” she asked, and he handed it to her.

While she pressed the buttons to skim through the channels, he watched the changing images on the screen and massaged the sole of her foot with his thumb. She went through channel after channel, occasionally stopping for longer than a few seconds, but never long enough for Martin to get a grip of what the images were saying.

“There’s nothing ever on,” she said.

That night they went to bed together and lay side by side. They didn’t turn the light off and lay facing each other.

Martin saw the rounded contours of Alison’s face and the lines around her eyes and mouth. Her eyes closed slowly as she put her hand to his face and moved her head so that her lips met his. They kissed tenderly and she slowly rolled on top of him. This was the first time in weeks they had been this close.

Martin tried to think, had they made love since the rain started? Since the Sugar Club? He was willing himself to get aroused. He felt no sensation in his groin, he knew that they were making contact, but he felt nothing. They caressed each other, Martin running his fingers up and down her back, Alison gently holding his head and neck as their mouths opened wider and their breathing got heavier. Alison eased her hand down his chest, over his stomach and down. Martin felt she may as well have put her hand into a black hole, into a vacuum.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s not … sorry.”

“Martin,” Alison replied, “don’t apologise, I like kissing, let’s just kiss.” They did, but all Martin could think of was why his body was not responding to what his mind was telling it to do. He tried to concentrate. The sickly thick smell of the pack of men jerking their cocks in the cold storage room of the Club came to him, and his stomach heaved. He dry retched into Alison’s kissing mouth. She straightened up, straddling him. “What was that? Are you okay?”

“I’m just not feeling great, let’s just …”

Alison looked down at him and said, “Yeah, you look a bit yellow.” She moved off him. Martin turned away from her, curling his knees up to his chest, pulling the duvet over his shoulder.

“I’ll be fine, I’m just not feeling right. Can you turn off the light?”

Alison leaned from the bed and turned the lamp off. Immediately Martin felt himself relax. The darkness of the room gave him some distance from her, from himself. He didn’t feel like he had to say anything when the light was off.

“Oh yeah,” she said through the dark, “I meant to say, I’ve got that office thing tomorrow night, it would be great if you could give me a lift in.”

“No problem.”

“It shouldn’t be a late one.”

The rain continued to fall.

***

Chapter Sixteen

Maya’s husband drives a big black four-by-four with tinted windows. There is someone in the passenger seat, another man.

The car is easy to track. Henry has tracked so many lives over the years, followed so many people’s personal maps of the city streets. Each time it is like a combination lock; a simple reordering of the familiar and each person has their own code to unlock the city. Henry has an imprint of the city in his mind. The pathways he has tracked crisscross and connect like synapses. The patterns are embedded, they can never be undone. Henry’s mind is a mesh of the tracks left by others people’s lives, secrets, and crimes.

All the time he passes through the city like a ghost, unattached and unseen, making no marks of his own. His thin frame and sunken eyes do not encourage a second glance. One look is enough to see right through him. His small, thin-lipped mouth does not demand any attention, his inquiries are innocuous enough never to be called to mind again, and his paper-thin presence is instantly forgettable. When people do speak to him, they often empty out their souls, tell him what they could never tell anyone else. Maybe it’s because they sense that he will disappear. Maybe it’s because, in his expressionless face, his unjudging, unflinching demeanour, they see that he will never have anyone to tell, and if he does tell, no-one will listen to him anyway.

* * *

Maya has sent some family pictures to his phone. She is as Henry pictured her, but younger. Her voice carries a weight of years her face does not. She has attractive exotic features, like a Caribbean queen. Her husband is broad and muscular and very tall, shockingly pale in comparison, with a bald head and a thick neck, on the side of which is the tattoo of a scorpion. Her daughter looks like her, or how she would have looked as an awkward teenager. There is a palm tree behind them and sand at their feet. The picture must be a few years old because the girl looks young, about fifteen, skinny, straight hair, and braces. He stands behind the two of them towering like a smiling colonial giant who is about to snatch them off their tropical island.

Within an hour of trailing, Henry sees it’s clear that the Scorpion man doesn’t work for a chemicals firm. First he goes to a run-down area in the north part of the city, to a cluster of high-rise flats constructed generations ago, rising like rotten teeth from the skyline.

Henry sees the black four by four pull up in a car park. Henry parks up and watches the children roam in gangs and the broken and elderly shuffle past. The Scorpion man, dressed in a black suit, gets out of the four by four and it pulls away. He enters the block of flats. These layers of concrete were designed to be used, not admired, and are now abused and feared, even by those who live there.

The clouds behind the grimy flat roofs pass quickly until the Scorpion man comes back out from the foot of the tower dressed in stained white overalls and walks to a white van. He puts a hold-all, which is weighted so that the straps are straining, into the back of the van and then gets in the driver’s seat. Henry notes the number plate and lets the van get to the end of the street before starting up and following.

He follows the van east, around the city ring road to a wealthy suburb. The white van turns off the main street and down a leafy estate road. Halfway down, in the shadow of an old elm, Scorpion gets out and carries the hold-all to the side door of a semi-detached, where he knocks three times. The door is opened by a man in glasses and they disappear inside.

Henry unties his shoelace and gets out of his car and walks down the street. Beside the van he kneels to tie his lace and slips a tracker on the underside of the van. He walks a bit further, and crosses the road. He lights a cigarette and looks at the house Scorpion has disappeared into. All of the curtains in the house are pulled across. The garden is tended, the grass no longer than next door. The face of the house is giving nothing away.

Henry walks back to his car. While he waits he looks again at the family picture and checks the tracker receiver on his phone. Twenty-four minutes later Scorpion emerges with an empty hold-all and gets back in the van. Henry lets him pull away, then opens up his glove box and rummages through some laminated cards till he finds the one he is looking for.

He goes to the house, to the front door, and rings the bell. No answer. He rings again. Still no answer. Henry takes the card from his wallet. It is dark blue laminate with gold writing and a lightning bolt across the top. It says
Sorry we missed you, Don’t miss out on our outstanding power offers
—
the Power Fix team.
He bends down to peek through the letter box as he puts the card in the door. He can’t see anything, but a smell of chlorine mixed with ammonia comes to his nose, like cat piss in a swimming pool. Henry gets back in his car and switches the tracker on his phone on. The van is moving toward the centre of the city. He could wait here until the glasses guy leaves the house and then get in and check it out, or he could follow Scorpion. It’s still early in the day; 12:50. Henry gets the feeling that the glasses guy doesn’t leave that house very often. He starts the car and follows the van into the city.

The city in the day is noisy and hot. The traffic moves slowly and Henry cuts across some streets to come out within sight of the white van. The van parks in a car park near the central train station, in a long-term bay. Scorpion emerges from it without his white overalls, back in his dark suit and with a briefcase and a shoulder bag, looking like a businessman on an overnight trip. Henry watches him walk out of the car park and disappear into the throng, people all moving with purpose, all with somewhere to go, all dressed in dark city clothes, crisscrossing shades of grey and blue and black. Henry undoes his shoelace again and goes to the white van, detaching the magnetic tracker.

Back in his car, he calls Maya.

“When he takes his calls, where does he go, in your house I mean? Does he have an office?”

“In the garden usually. We have a gazebo, he stands there and talks and smokes.”

* * *

Within an hour Henry is at Maya’s house, finding suitable locations for tiny microphones in the timber gazebo in the garden. The house is a well-kept detached, with a walled garden at the back. Under the circular gazebo roof sit two wicker armchairs and a glass table with a full ashtray in the middle. Maya sits on one of the chairs. She looks more tired than the Maya in the photograph, her nose more bulbous, her eyes smaller. There are string lights tied up to the eaves of the gazebo. Henry unscrews one and attaches the microphone in its place.

“You don’t have a wife do you, Mr. Bloomburg?” Maya’s voice rises lazily from the wicker chair. Henry finds the power switch for the string lights and turns them on and off and on again.

“Some people are never meant to share themselves. Some are never meant to keep anything of their own. I try to tell my daughter this, but it’s not something you can teach, you have to live it to learn it don’t you think, Mr. Bloomburg?”

Henry checks the signal on the transmitter, then turns around.

“That’s done.”

Maya leads him back to the front door.

“Maybe it’s something you don’t understand, Mr. Bloomburg, trying to come to terms with someone who has turned it all around. What you thought was the best idea turns around and it the worst thing you could have done?”

She opens the door.

“Mrs.—”

“Maya.”

“Maya, everything is turning all the time. It’s hard to make sense of something that won’t stay still. I’ll be in contact.”

Henry goes and gets some food from a drive-thru before settling down in his car just a house away from the Scorpion man’s home. He finishes each of his chicken wings and his French fries. Into the cola he pours some rum and drinks and smokes and dozes.

His phone rings. It’s Kramer.

“Kramer. It’s late.”

“I’m on stake out. I got something for your ghost hunt, Bloomburg. An artefact to add. A hand.”

“A hand.”

“Severed at the wrist. Lab says maybe eighteen months since separation and likely female.”

“Where?”

“It was from the beat. Some small time dealers were busted on the street—kids selling weed and pills. They tried to get rid of their stash in a small alley behind where they were dealing. When the boys went to clean up, they found the hand. Lomax road. Right in the middle. It’s sealed off, but nothing else so far.”

“Lomax. Okay, thanks Kramer. I owe you.”

“If it comes to anything, you can owe me. You on a case?”

“Same as you. I got chicken wings.”

“Ah. Bucket or basket?”

“Basket.”

“I’m on bucket. It’s gonna be a long night.”

Henry sees the black four-by-four approach and pull in to the drive.

“My man has just arrived. I got to go. Thanks, Kramer.”

Henry hangs up and sits up straight. Scorpion is still in his formal suit. He sees Maya welcome him home with a kiss. She reaches her lips up to him like a deer feeding from the branches of a tree.

Soon Henry picks up his voice from the bug in the gazebo. He speaks with a tone that surprises Henry. There is a softness to it, a rise at the end of each sentence.

“Yeah, sure,” he is saying, “I can do that. I got somewhere safe. When do you want me to get her? Okay. Well, if there’s heat, yes, of course, best keep her out of it. No problem. Let me know if there’s any change, I’ll let you know when I’ve picked her up.”

***