by David Mark
I must have looked a bit upset by her words and she immediately changed her expression. ‘Don’t listen to my blather,’ she said, smacking her lips together. ‘Your friend’s gone without the courage to pop in and join the show.’ She gestured at the window. The figure across the street had gone. ‘Won’t look so sinister when a bunch of skinheads are kicking him in.’
I suddenly wanted a hug. Lottie had hung up the phone and was deep in conversation with Brendan. She had that zeal in her eyes – the sparkle that always got her viewers to send in badly spelled messages with lots of capital letters.
‘… all this time – under my nose! And not so much as an apology. And they really said “expert”, did they? I’m not one to sing my own praises but the man has no right. It’s not … it’s not decent. Not British!’
Brendan was in full flow. A smell of damp carpets was coming off him. I wanted him to stop talking to Lottie. Wanted her to myself.
‘It would be silly not to,’ said Lottie, more to herself. ‘I think I will. It couldn’t be more convenient, if you think about it. Could you do it? Drop a note? Or should I?’
Brendan poured himself another glass and Lottie turned to me, all excited and warm. ‘Will you be OK for a little while? It’s an opportunity. Honestly, I never thought …’
I didn’t say anything important. Just gave her a smile that I knew she was after and took a kiss on the forehead as she pulled on her coat. She grabbed a notepad from behind the bar and scribbled down a few lines of blue ink. She tore the sheet off and looked at me with genuine glee. ‘It would be amazing if he agreed, don’t you think? I won’t be long. Honestly. Under my nose!’
Lottie banged out of the bar and turned left past the glass. She was walking fast and an instant later I was alone in the front bar with Brendan, Katriona, Connie and the Ripperettes. I felt horribly dejected. Horribly alone.
‘I feel betrayed,’ said Brendan, and stuck a finger into his nostril, in a way that suggested an inventive and elaborate suicide may be on the agenda. ‘Never once asked me. Never once.’
‘Where is she going?’ I asked, confused.
‘To see my nemesis,’ said Brendan, disgusted. ‘To see Autolycus.’
I barely heard his final words, but they have resonated with me through the years; a whisper full of grim prophesy.
‘She’s gone to see his blood.’
MOLLY
A bright yellow sign has been tied to the railings outside the little courtyard garden beside the Baptist church on Globe Road. It asks witnesses to an ‘incident’ to come forward. The Metropolitan Police would appreciate any assistance to a ‘violent’ occurrence. The notice gives a three-day window in which the unnamed incident could have occurred. Molly suppresses a shudder as she stands in the teeming rain and reads this last line. Banky’s body must have been so repulsive and bloated by his time in the water as to be forensically hard to read. The police cannot tie down a time of death. His corpse must have spilled its secrets into the murky waters. She wonders how people like Lottie can stand the sheer grotesqueness of sliding a scalpel into such horrid specimens, with their purple lips and blue-tinged skin and puffy, waterlogged flesh. She remembers sitting in a patrol car, years before, waiting for a Detective Superintendent to come back from telling the husband of a suicide that his wife’s body had been found in a little tributary of the river they had been dredging. No, he would not be able to view the body. The police told him this was for ‘procedural reasons’. In truth, she was so pulped and engorged from her time in the water that her flesh slid off the bone as the police divers slid her from the water. Most of her identifiable features slipped off the divers’ gloves like soggy tissue paper.
Molly looks through the railings. By the light of the streetlamp she can make out traces of the activity that has gone on in the neat little garden. She sees footprints in the soggy ground. A scrap of forensic overall clinging to a spiky bush like tinsel to a Christmas tree. The absence of any kind of litter is also revealing. Any can of drink, any cigarette packet, any food wrapper, will all have been bagged up and taken away for examination by the forensics team contracted in by the investigations team. Everything will be tested. Every database will be cross-checked. She doubts that such painstaking meticulousness is the result of any desperate need to see justice done by the dead man. She knows from experience that such things are done so that in the event of a cock-up, nobody can accuse them of negligence. She does not believe that whoever killed Banky would have been fool enough to stop and share a can of cider with him first.
Molly sniffs, hard, and manages to inhale the rain that has been pouring down her face. It catches in her throat and she starts to cough. She feels weak. The ceaseless rain is extinguishing the urgency that propelled her out of the door of her pub. Suddenly she feels ludicrous. She is a barmaid in fancy dress, leaning against the railings of a murder site and waiting for a meeting with a torturer. She wants to ball her hands into fists and punch something solid.
‘What are you bloody doing?’ she mutters. ‘Just go. You’re not in too deep. Listen to yourself …’
Molly realizes her teeth are chattering. She pulls her coat around herself and shudders at the touch of wet fur. She turns at a sound behind her and looks into the face of Karol. In this poor light it’s hard to make out the expression on his face, but he is not smiling. She looks him up and down. Black boots. Black jeans. Waxed jacket and exposed throat. He must have a car nearby but she did not hear it pull up.
Molly feels a surge of emotion, as if she is flooding with different chemicals. Her mind is aflame with flickering images. She sees him hurting the men who came to her door. Sees him smiling at her from the end of the bar. Sees his face in profile, driving through the East End. Sees him looking down at her and their blood mingling upon her face. Sees him as he was in the video clip, doling out brutality as a warning. She lets a burst of pure temper show in her expression.
‘I got the video,’ she snaps. ‘Proud of yourself, are you? Needed to warn me off, did you? Thought you’d show me what I’d get if I went to the police? Who do you think you are? Where do you get off? I’m not some scared little woman …’
Karol gives a shake of his head. Water sprays from his dark hair. There is almost no colour in his eyes and the way he is staring at her causes Molly to slide a hand into her pocket and unconsciously close her grip on her keys. There is a prickling upon her skin and she fails to suppress the judder that suddenly wracks her. She shivers and grows angry with herself for looking so vulnerable; so feeble.
‘You didn’t go to where they found him,’ she says, through gritted, chattering teeth. ‘Didn’t go to the water. You came here. Must have known. What else have you beaten out of your suspects, eh? What else could you have told me if you’d had the guts to just trust me?’
Karol looks almost amused. There is a tiny smile on his face and he continues to look at her face. His eyes are upon her lips and the shadow where her jaw becomes her neck. She remembers that look from before and feels a blush start to rise. She curses herself and her disloyal skin.
‘You just came here to stare, did you? Probably tired after a hard night of steaming some poor kid’s skin off.’
‘Be quiet,’ he says, so quietly she can barely hear it. A car goes slowly over the speedbump behind him and he turns to track its progress. Across the road is a graffiti-covered wooden screen, covered in advertisements for the new apartment block being built behind. None of the pictures of the futuristic construction show the railway bridge to its right, or the murder scene across the way.
‘You don’t tell me what I can do,’ says Molly, stepping forward. She wants to slap his face. She feels betrayed, somehow, as though he has let her down. Were she not so irritated and uncomfortable she would start remonstrating with herself for making any of this about her. She barely knows him. She has no right to expect anything of a man who is clearly a criminal to his bones.
‘I said to stop talking. Fuck, you English, it’s l
ike the radio. Just talk and talk and noise and noise. Stop. Listen.’
Molly opens her mouth fully, as if taking a huge bite of something. Her expressions have always been childlike. She looks like an infant who has just been told to go fuck herself by another pupil.
‘I just want to know she is safe,’ says Molly, and her cheeks and her eyes suddenly feel hot as pure frustrated helplessness becomes as heavy and sodden around her limbs as the soggy fur coat that drips dirty water on to her boots.
Through a veil of tears, Molly sees Karol extend his hand. She jerks her head back instinctively, as though he is about to hurt her, but instead the cool rough skin of his palm touches her damp cheeks. She flinches but does not pull away. She forces herself to keep her eyes open. Tears spill and run on to his tattooed fingers. She stares at him, defiant, looking like a beaten boxer who will not fall until their heart gives out. She sees an intensity in Karol’s stare. He is breathing heavily. For an instant she feels his thumb stroke her cheekbone and brush the corner of her mouth. She shivers, and almost gives in to the mischievous, girlish smile that twitches her lips. The movement causes her to pucker her mouth and her lower lip brushes Karol’s thumb. He leans forward, slowly. She raises her face, expecting his kiss, but instead he slides his face past hers and breathes in deeply, taking the scent of her into his nostrils and throat. Her skin raises in goose pimples as he draws her musk inside himself; her miasma of rain and gin, of crushed peaches and old clothes. She breathes him in too. Cigarettes. Leather. Something spicy and unidentifiable but which makes her think of sawn wood and new pennies.
She hears the clank of metal upon metal and realizes he is opening the metal gate to the park. A sudden flutter of panic rises in her chest but she forces herself not to give in to it. And then his hand is closing around hers and he is pulling her behind him into the darkness of the little park where a homeless man had his throat cut for trying to protect a little girl.
‘Can we?’ she asks, and curses herself for speaking. ‘Is it OK …?’
Her boots squelch into wet grass as Karol pulls her into the dark space. She looks up, shivering. A billion raindrops are tumbling from a blue-black sky and the trees that edge the park look like angry slashes of charcoal. She feels thorns pull at her skirt and curses. Gives a nervous giggle as he pulls her, firmly, beneath the canopy of a tree she would not be able to name.
Suddenly her feet are sliding in mud she cannot see and her back is against hard brick and Karol’s mouth is upon hers. She feels his tongue sliding between her lips and is astonished by the fire with which she returns his kiss. She wants to bite him. Wants to pull at his hair and scratch at his skin. Her passion enflames his own. She feels his hands grabbing at her skin, pulling open her coat, seeking her out. Feels his hardness through his jeans as she pulls up his coat and runs her cold, soaking hands upon his skin.
There is barely any light but she catches a glimpse of the whites of his eyes and his pale skin and feels herself give in completely to the sensation of wanton, desperate need. She slides her hand inside his jeans and tugs at his fly and he gasps as she closes her hands around him. She feels him fumbling at her skirt, trying to turn her, to press her face into the brick, but she stands firm and shakes her head and pushes him back, forcing him down on to the carpet of thick mud. She lands heavily on top of him and is surprised to hear a sound midway between a gasp and a giggle but she cannot tell which of them made the utterance. And then she is lifting her skirt and pulling aside her knickers and she feels the heat of herself and smells her own need and he says something in Lithuanian as she takes him inside her and her boots squelch into the cloying mud as she rocks back and forth; raising her face; feeling the rain upon her hot skin, and gives herself utterly to the feeling that floods her; reaching down to force her fingers into his mouth as she lets out a wail of pure pleasure that fills her with a feeling that is all honey and flame.
They stay as they fell for a time. Karol moves before Molly does. His hands are still in her hair and he is careful as he disentangles them. He tries to direct her face so she is looking at him but she holds herself still, embarrassed and sated and unsure if she can stand. She finally slides him out of herself and collapses on to her back, staring upwards and feeling the rain upon her face. Her hands make fists in the mud and she wonders what kind of mess they have both made of themselves. She finds herself laughing though she cannot explain it, and then Karol’s weight is upon her and he is looking down, concerned. ‘Are you crying? Did I hurt you? You wanted to, yes? I thought you wanted to …’
She raises her hand to his face and pulls him down, kissing him tenderly, and he seems reassured. He slides off her and tucks himself away before reaching down and taking Molly’s hand. He pulls her up and she is amazed at the strength in him. She has an absurd fantasy in which he lifts her like a princess bride and carries her home and then she is telling herself off for being so giddy and silly and the wave of guilt begins to wash in upon her good feeling. It is Karol who breaks the spell, his voice almost apologetic as he tells her a truth that she is not sure she would have been so similarly able to share.
‘It was here,’ he says, and he squeezes her hand before he releases it. He reaches into the pocket of his coat and finds his cigarettes have been crushed by her knees. He finds a smokeable, crooked cigarette and lights it. He holds in the smoke as he had held in her scent.
‘Here?’
‘The tramp. The homeless man. This is where he slept. Where his blood was spilled. Where she was taken.’
It takes Molly a moment to readjust. Suddenly she is aware of herself. Of the cold sweat upon her skin and the smell of desire and churned dirt in her nostrils. She looks at the patch of earth and the imprint their desire has made and is not sure how to feel as she considers the similarly animalistic act that took place here. A man died. Blood spilled. Human essence spilled into the ground …
‘I did not want the clip to be sent you,’ he says, like a child apologizing for eating the last of the biscuits. ‘My patron. He was concerned. He thought you might be foolish.’
‘Foolish?’ asks Molly, and she stares at him without really understanding. She feels empty and yet full of flame.
‘He knows you are clever. Ex-police. You saw what happened when those fools decided to try and make cash from Meda’s disappearance. He wishes things to be done his way. He does not want the police to be involved. He thought that if you saw how his people could behave – what he could make his people do …’
‘I understand.’
He looks at her and raises his hand to her face. His eyes are earnest. Searching. ‘Do you?’
‘I’m not stupid enough to think I understand your world,’ she says, and she did not realize the truth of her words until she spoke them. ‘I don’t know who or what I am. But I didn’t need the threat. I wouldn’t have told. I just want her safe. Meda.’
‘I see this when I look at you. You seem to feel her pain as if it were that of your own child. And yet you knew her so little. Why is this your concern, Molly?’
She looks around, as if hoping the answer will be written on the troubled ground. ‘It’s just so horrible. I know bad things happen to good people. That’s the way of the world. But I knew her. I met her. It brought my daughter pain …’
‘That is what my patron said,’ mutters Karol, breathing out cigarette smoke. ‘He says you don’t care for Meda. You care for your child’s sadness. He does not say this with anger or accusation. He understands this kind of mind.’
Molly shakes her head. ‘You can’t imagine just caring about somebody? They have to be yours to care about, do they? Are you saying Meda doesn’t matter to you? She’s just a pay-day? I saw what you did to those men who tried to capitalize on her going missing. You feel this, I know you do.’
Karol considers the glowing tip of his cigarette. He shrugs. ‘I want her home. I want them all home. I want nothing bad to happen to innocents. I want to go the rest of my life without hitting or being hit
. But life is not like that.’
They stand in silence and listen to the rain. ‘You’re keeping something back,’ says Molly, at last. ‘Please, whatever it is – trust me.’
Karol pinches out his cigarette and puts the stub in his pocket. He looks at the woman who just fucked him on the wet ground and slips his hand into hers.
‘His throat was cut with a specific type of blade. Curved, with a rounded tip. It looks a little like a sickle. It was pushed in below the jawbone and great force was exerted. There was a microscopic trace of rust in the wound.’
‘Shit …’
‘More,’ says Karol. ‘There was a substance in his system.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Of a sort. A chemical. Chloroform.’
Molly stands perfectly still, unsure if she has heard correctly. ‘Chloroform? That’s not something you can buy. That’s like, from the olden days.’
‘Olden days?’
‘The past.’
‘There was a bruise on his chest,’ says Karol, and touches Molly’s left breast. ‘Here. Leaned on and cut. The blood spilled here,’ he says, pointing at the ground.
‘But we’re five minutes from where he was found.’
‘He slept here most nights. The priest at the church turned a blind eye. Left him food and blankets sometimes. Meda came here to give him food for his dog. She had done so before. Somebody took his place. Killed him. Took her.’
‘Why?’ asks Molly, and the single syllable is weighted with despair.
‘People do bad things,’ he says, shrugging. ‘I think you were right in your suspicions. Somebody bad has been taking girls like Meda. I have asked questions. These past years, we have thought all such crimes the work of gangs. Of men like me. Of men who want money. I think we have made a mistake. Somebody has been taking girls for their own reasons. I want to find this man. I want to hurt him for the pain he has caused.’
‘Why do you think that, all of a sudden?’ asks Molly, and suddenly feels horribly English.
