by Peter May
MacNeil shoved his way through the drinkers to the bar. Anyone who objected was likely to get an elbow in the face. Vocal protest was drowned by the music. A dyed blond barman with black roots regarded MacNeil warily. MacNeil was older than the usual clientele, much more conservative, and he still had his coat on, in spite of the heat. Besides which, his face was bruised and lacerated on one cheek with tiny cuts from the glass on the forecourt of the South Lambeth flats. ‘Whisky,’ he shouted. ‘Single malt. Glenlivet if you have it. And a little water.’ It seemed like a long time since he’d had a drink, and now the anticipation of it was almost overwhelming. But just the one. He knew that more than one would weaken resolve and lead him into a downward spiral of sorrow drowning.
A glass with half an inch of amber, and a small jug of water, were banged on the bar in front of him. He handed over a fiver and got no change. He diluted his whisky fifty-fifty and took a sip. He turned to the barman. ‘That’s not Glenlivet!’
‘You said if I had it. I don’t have it.’ No apology.
MacNeil took another sip. It was just some anonymous blend. He was disappointed by the taste of it, but enjoyed its warmth burning all the way down into his stomach. Then he tipped the glass and it was gone in an instant. He thought about all the times he’d had just one more, anything to put off the moment when he would have to go home. Back to Martha. He thought about all the times Sean had been asleep by the time he got back. All those missed moments. All those wasted hours. And he turned and shouted at the barman for another.
When it came he caught the barman’s wrist and leaned over the bar. ‘Is Ronnie in tonight? Ronnie Kazinski?’
But the barman raised a hand to shoosh him as the music stopped, suddenly, on a single drum beat, and reverberated around the club for several seconds. The sea of masks stopped heaving, and there was some sporadic applause as the dancers and drinkers all turned expectantly in the direction of the stage. From a door somewhere at the back, a young man who looked to be in his thirties emerged carrying an artistically tied white cloth bundle suspended on a pole over his shoulder. It looked for all the world like the cartoon bundle in which a stork would deliver a baby. And for a brief moment, a fleeting memory of Laing winged its way through MacNeil’s thoughts.
The hooded dancers had melted away, and somehow left behind them a small folding table centre stage. There were some cheers and whoops as the man placed his bundle on the table. He was dressed all in black. Even his mask was black, and he was almost subsumed by the black wall behind him. The white upper-half of his face glowed in the fluorescent strip lights, and seemed to dance around, disembodied, above the glowing bundle on the table. His hair was thin and wispy, and scraped back across a balding scalp. He spoke into a microphone, leaning on the pole, and his dead voice boomed out above the heads turned, as one, towards him.
‘Art,’ he said, ‘real art, is about life on the edge. It’s about pushing the boundaries as far as they will go, and further. What is a life lived within boundaries set by others? We must make our own boundaries, and draw them in ever widening circles, encouraging others to go with us. We are not our parents, or our parents’ parents. We are we. And we are here and now. The future is ours, and only what we make it. Only by treading that razor-sharp path between life and death, between good taste and bad, between acceptable and unacceptable, will we find true meaning in our lives.’
He looked around the upturned faces watching him in breathless silence. They knew that he was going to do something awful. It’s what most of them had come for. This was underground art. It was what had made the club cult before the emergency. MacNeil looked on, fascinated, unexpectedly caught by the hypnotic quality of the performance, completely unprepared for what was to come.
The man in black leaned over the table and theatrically pulled one end of the knot that held the bundle, and it fell open, revealing a strange, bloody-looking mulch that seemed devoid of form or shape. There was a gasp from the crowd. The man’s eyes shone like coal, black beacons in circles of white. He whipped his mask aside and seized the mulch in both hands, raising it, dripping, high above his head.
His voice, too, rose in pitch. ‘This is life,’ he said. ‘And death.’ Only the hum of the sound system breached the silence in the club. ‘It is just two hours since the heart in this child beat in its mother’s womb. Just two hours since it was ripped from its umbilical, denied any future, bereft of a past. Abortion. The rejection of life. The curse of our age.’
MacNeil watched in disbelief, frozen by horror. He heard a solitary voice whisper, ‘Oh, my God!’
‘Only in life can we find death, and only in death can we find life.’ The man in black suddenly dropped his hands level with his face. He paused for just one moment before gouging with his mouth at the bloody mass he held in them. Gorging himself on it.
Someone in the crowd vomited. There were just a couple of voices raised in disgust or dissent. The only other sounds were the guzzling and snorting of the man on stage as he fed on the contents of his hands. Then just as quickly as he had begun, he finished, dropping the remains of his meal into the bundle on the table. His face was smeared red around his mouth.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he called, and he retrieved his props and vanished in a flourish back through the door from which he had come.
The lights immediately plunged low, and the music started where it had left off, assaulting the body and the senses. The sea of masks rose and fell in a frantic, stormy swell.
MacNeil was shocked and shaking, and wanted to throw up. He turned back to the bar and the waiting whisky and found the barman grinning at him from behind his mask. ‘Quite something, eh?’ he shouted. He was enjoying the revulsion written clearly on MacNeil’s face. ‘Who was it you were looking for?’
MacNeil threw back his whisky and banged the glass breathlessly on the counter. ‘Ronnie Kazinski.’
The barman frowned for a moment, then enlightenment dawned. ‘Oh, yeah. You mean the crem guy?’
It took MacNeil a second or two to realise that crem meant crematorium. ‘That’s him.’
‘Why don’t you ask Foetus Man?’ he shouted, flicking his head towards the stage. ‘They’re big pals, those two.’
III.
The corridor behind the stage led to toilets at the far end. MacNeil could smell stale urine the moment the door from the club closed behind him. But it muted the assault of the music, and for that he was grateful. A harsh yellow strip light reflected off dull linoleum, and MacNeil brushed past framed black and white photographs of some of the celebrated performance art which had made the club its name. The dressing room was the last door on the left. A sign said Private. MacNeil pushed the door open, and Foetus Man turned from the wall mirror above his dressing table, still cleaning the mess from his hands and face with hot, wet towels.
‘Can’t you fucking read?’
MacNeil crossed the room in two strides, grabbed him by his lapels and slammed him hard against the wall, knocking all the breath from his lungs. ‘Yeah, I can read. And right now I’m going to read you your fucking rights, you sick bastard.’ He held him pinned to the wall with one hand and showed him his warrant card with the other. ‘I’ll figure out the charges later. Body snatching, foetus theft, murder, maybe. Someone as sick as you should be locked up for a very long time.’
‘Hey,’ Foetus Man protested. And he started to laugh. ‘Come on, man. You didn’t think any of that was real, did you? I mean, give us a break. I’d have chucked up all over the joint.’ He nodded towards the bloody bundle still sitting on the dressing table. ‘It’s just jam and bread roll. Can’t stand the canteen food, so I bring my own packed lunch.’
He pulled himself free of MacNeil’s slackening grip.
‘It’s just performance, man. People like to be shocked. They like to think it’s real. But deep down they know it’s just a bit of fun.’
‘You call that fu
n?’
‘It’s pushing the boundaries. I’m engaging the audience, provoking an emotional response. It makes them question stuff, stretches their limits.’
He sat down again and continued wiping his face, and MacNeil watched his reflection in the mirror keeping a wary eye on him.
‘I mean, where would I get a foetus from, man? I got the idea watching this documentary about a Chinese guy who did it for real. I mean, really did it. Now, that was sick. Me? I just enjoy a sandwich.’ He finished cleaning himself and stood up. ‘Was there something else you wanted?’
MacNeil looked at him, filled with anger and contempt and a large residue of the revulsion his performance had induced. He tried to focus on what had brought him here in the first place. ‘I’m looking for Ronnie Kazinski,’ he said.
Foetus Man shrugged. ‘Ronnie who?’
The dressing room door opened, and MacNeil looked past Foetus Man into the mirror and saw the reflection of a young man in jeans and a leather jacket. He was not a tall man, and he had managed to emphasise the smallness of his head by gelling thin black hair down over his skull. For a moment MacNeil thought he knew him. There was something familiar in the high cheekbones and wide-set eyes. He had bad skin, pasty and white, that looked as if it hadn’t seen daylight in months. An odd memory flashed through MacNeil’s mind. A woman’s face behind a net curtain, features made mean by generations of poverty. And he remembered where he had seen this man before. A smudged image on a faxed printout. Ronald Kazinski.
Kazinski stopped in the doorway and saw MacNeil’s reflection looking back at him. His eyes flickered to meet Foetus Man’s and he knew immediately he was in trouble. He turned and ran, sprinting back up the corridor like a man possessed, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. MacNeil went after him, slower, his big frame lumbering through harsh yellow light until he hit the door at the far end, bursting through it into the glowing sea of masks and the assault of the music. Kazinski had cut a swathe through it towards the stairs at the far side, and MacNeil followed in his wake, shouldering bodies out of his way as he went, until finally the sea parted voluntarily before him.
He took the stairs two at a time, and the heavy metal door was slamming shut as he reached the landing at the top. The bouncer with the bald head and the leather waistcoat stood in his way. He put a hand out to stop him. ‘Where do you think you’re going, pal?’
It took the merest flick of his neck, MacNeil leaning forward as if to kiss him. He felt the bridge of the man’s nose splinter beneath his forehead and the bouncer staggered back, a look of astonishment in his eyes. The back of his head smacked into the wall and his mask turned red as blood soaked into white cotton. MacNeil heaved the door open and was out into the night. He heard the clatter of overturned bins, a smell of stinking refuse whipped up on the edge of an icy wind. Light spilled across the courtyard from the open door, and he saw the shadow of the fleeing Kazinski as he dived up the alleyway towards the street. Rats scurried and screamed underfoot as MacNeil ran after him.
When MacNeil emerged from the alley, Kazinski was sprinting up the centre of Dean Street, being rapidly swallowed by the dark. He was like a hare to MacNeil’s bulldog. MacNeil saw him turn into St. Anne’s Court, a narrow pedestrian street between tall brick buildings, and knew he was going to lose him. But as he reached the corner, he saw that there was something going on beyond the far end of the lane. The flicker and glow and crackle of flames. Voices raised in laughter and howling derision. Looters. Kazinski pulled up and glanced back towards MacNeil, caught between the devil and the deep blue. MacNeil could almost hear the wheels grinding as Kazinski tried to decide which was the lesser of two evils. But he found a third way instead. A narrow passage that ran south, at right angles to St. Anne’s Court, opposite the shattered Georgian windows of what had once been a cake shop. It was no more than three feet wide, and he hurtled down it, covering twenty yards or more before realising that the opening into Flaxman Court at the far end of it was choked with upturned bins and debris tipped from the windows of looted offices. MacNeil heard him curse in the darkness, and slowed to a walk to try to catch his breath. There was no way out for Kazinski. He’d turned into a dead end and wasn’t going anywhere.
As MacNeil approached, Kazinski backed off until he couldn’t go any further. ‘Your mother thinks you’re at work,’ MacNeil said.
‘What do you want?’
‘Why did you run?’
‘I can smell a cop at fifty paces.’
‘Yeah, it’s the smell of urine from creeps like you pissing their pants.’
‘I got rights.’
‘Yes, you have. You’ve got the right to bleed quietly. You’ve got the right to a decent funeral. Not that you’ll get one. Not these days. But then, you’d know all about that.’
Kazinski tried to break past him, ducking and squeezing to scrape between MacNeil’s right side and the wall. But MacNeil was nearly as wide as the alley itself. He just leaned to his right and pressed Kazinski against the wall. Then he grabbed the back of his collar, almost lifting him off his feet, and threw him bodily against the barrier at the end of the lane. Kazinski fell in a crumpled heap, and refuse and rubble cascaded over him.
‘Tell me about the bones,’ MacNeil said.
‘What bones?’
MacNeil sighed. ‘I’ve got a thumbprint on an Underground ticket found where you dumped them. You’re going down for murder, Ronnie.’
‘I never killed her!’ There was panic in Kazinski’s voice. ‘Honest, mate. I was just to get rid of the bones.’
‘You didn’t do a very good job.’
‘I was supposed to sneak them into Battersea, dump them in the furnace. At first they wanted me to get the whole body in. But there was no way I could have got her in there past security. So I said, gimme the bones. I can get them in. They didn’t want no traces, see? They had to be destroyed.’
‘Why?’
‘I dunno. I didn’t have nothing to do with it, honest.’
‘So why didn’t you burn them?’
‘Because that hole was going to get filled in with concrete this morning. It meant I didn’t have to take no risks, and they wouldn’t have been any the wiser.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Bullshit!’
‘Honest, mate. They just paid me to get rid of the bones.’
MacNeil leaned in towards him. ‘Ronnie, you’re going down for these guys unless you tell me who they are.’
‘Jesus, mate. I don’t know their names. This guy approached me after work one day, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’
MacNeil shook his head. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that, Ronnie. Where did you pick up the bones?’ He heard Kazinski sighing deeply in the dark.
‘I don’t know the address. It was a big house. You know, some rich geezer’s place.’
‘Where?’
‘It was somewhere near Wandsworth Common. Root Street, Ruth Street, something like that. It was dark. I dunno. They picked me up and dropped me off in a car.’
‘During curfew?’
‘Sure. It didn’t seem like a problem. Nobody stopped us.’
MacNeil stood and looked down at him for several moments. He needed much more than this, and he was sure that Kazinski had more to tell. ‘Come on, get up,’ he said.
Kazinski didn’t move. ‘What’re you gonna do?’
‘I’m taking you in, Ronnie, on suspicion of murder.’ He didn’t see the pole coming out of the dark until it was too late. He heard the hollow clang of it against his skull, and his knees folded under him. Kazinski dropped the length of scaffolding tube his fingers had found amongst the rubble, and it rattled away across the tarmac as he leapt over the prone figure of the policeman and sprinted back the way he had come.
MacNeil was doubled over, gasping, lights flashing in his ey
es. How could he have been so careless? He cursed, and spat on the ground and tasted blood in his mouth. It took him a full minute to recover enough to stagger to his feet, leaning one hand against the brick wall to support himself until he was able to stand without falling. His head was still ringing like a bell. There was no point in taking things too fast. Kazinski was long gone.
It was several minutes before he emerged shakily into St. Anne’s Court and saw a dark shape sprawled on the ground a few yards to the east. He wondered for a moment what it was. There hadn’t been anything there five minutes ago. He stepped towards it and saw that it was a man lying face down, black liquid pooling on the ground beneath him. Sticky blood, coagulating in the chill wind. MacNeil knelt down and felt that he was still warm. He pulled the body over and Kazinski gazed up at him with staring eyes. His white shirt was soaked with blood, but MacNeil could still see where the three bullets had passed through it. All in the vicinity of his heart. He was quite dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I.
MacNeil slumped to the ground and sat with his back against the wall. There was still a fire burning somewhere beyond the west end of St. Anne’s Court, but the looters had moved on, because all he could hear now was the crackling of the blaze.
Someone had shot Kazinski three times in the chest. Someone who had been waiting out here in the lane. MacNeil had heard no shots. Even with the ringing in his head he could not have missed them. He remembered Laing’s verdict on the sniper who had shot the kids in South Lambeth. It was a real pro job. A professional weapon in professional hands, he had said. This, too, had all the hallmarks of a professional. A clean, efficient execution. A weapon with a silencer. Someone did not want Kazinski talking to MacNeil, or anyone else. And it occurred to him that perhaps it was the same professional. Perhaps the marksman who had saved his life that afternoon had been waiting there for Kazinski. And now he had got him.
