Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  “Don’t look now,” Sadie said, “but look behind you.”

  This nonsense set Elisabeth off again. Will, happy that they were happy, glanced over his shoulder and started laughing too.

  There was a man in the car park in a crash helmet. Huge coils of rope were slung over his shoulder. He was climbing. He was climbing the car park. Horizontally.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: WETWORK

  MAY MOULDER IS 63. Until her husband, Brian, died five years ago, they lived in Toxteth. She recently lost her sight thanks to diabetes. She worked all her life at a factory, punching the asbestos from grids for gas fires. She’s been battling to get her dilapidated flat repaired by the council. The environmental health declared it unfit to live in but the council won’t do anything about it. She also has trouble with the electricity board, paying over the odds to heat her house, and they are charging her for a fridge and cooker she never bought. Payments are being deducted through her electricity token meter.

  Fuck her.

  Sean put the page back in its folder and tossed it into the box where all the other files sat on the back seat. He’d gone on what? Nine, ten jobs with Vernon now, and there had been no progress. No feeling of getting under his quarry’s skin at all. Vernon was holding back from him. Vernon didn’t want him too close. Sean thumbed through the documents filing cabinet of his memory and tried to find some clue that he might have missed, but always, at the moment of closure, he was sent away.

  Oliver and Victoria, both in their late sixties, had been a middle-class couple retired to comfortable life in Stockton Heath, to the south of Warrington. Victoria contracted a virulent form of Parkinson’s disease. Oliver was caring for her full-time. Pitiful man, he was, Sean now remembered. Gone to seed but trying to put on the hard man act. Photographs of him as a young man, Kray-like in his intensity, his polish, were arranged around the rooms. Sepia pictures of him shadow boxing, or in the ring waiting for the bell to release him from his corner. Pictures of him and his mates standing on a street corner, toy gangsters in white shirts with big collars and dark suits.

  Victoria needed medication every two hours. They received no relief from social services or the NHS – Victoria was assessed as not needing medical care – so it was left to the pair to make ends meet alone. Their savings were not large and would soon run out if they were to get nursing care or a stay in a home. Oliver, the hard man, was being ground down. No way out. What help did he get from Vernon? What promises?

  And the others.

  Homeless Cheryl, twenty-five, unable to get any kind of housing other than a night shelter haunted mainly by old men. Wasn’t she HIV+? Sean remembered her whimpering as Vernon stood over her in a dark archway connecting Sankey Street with the delivery road behind Woolworths in Warrington’s town centre. She told Vernon how she applied for hardship payments, but large amounts were docked to pay for the night shelter, leaving her with next to nothing to live on. She was sleeping on friends’ floors. All her friends used drugs and she was rapidly sinking into that lifestyle. The voluntary agencies were powerless to help her. Ah diddums, Vernon had said, striking the wall above her head with the bat and causing her to shriek, recoil, try to make herself invisible before him.

  Sean remembered Jess and Daniel, neighbours on a Liverpool housing estate trying to escape from homes that were no better than diseased hovels. The health of their children was compromised. Sean recalled tiny, denuded faces staring up at him, like ghosts. Underfed children that played with him while Vernon raged in the kitchen. One boy playing with half a dozen cockroaches. A girl sitting in nappies that hadn’t been changed for days. Ignored by the council on the basis that their houses were no worse than any others on the estate, Jess attempted to find a house through a private landlord while Daniel withheld rent as a protest and faced eviction. Two of his children were severely asthmatic. That’s not all they’ll be, Vernon warned, if you don’t give me something to put in my pockets. The children waving at him from the window as they left.

  “Putting these... dossiers together, what? Does that codify all this for you? Make it acceptable? Does this woman really need a visit with a baseball bat?”

  “Codify,” Vernon said. “I like that. I love what comes out of your mouth, Redman. Love it.”

  “You going to answer me?”

  Vernon pushed a smile onto a face that didn’t welcome it. “I’m not answering anything. But while we’re at it, let’s sort us out a new rule, shall we? That rule is, you stop asking me questions. I’m trying to concentrate and you are making my shit hang sideways with this constant, cocking chat.”

  He steered the four-by-four back onto Fiddlers Ferry Road. Across the St Helens Canal, Spike Island, a thick spit of mudland reaching into the Mersey, was tigered with mist, as was the Runcorn bridge, like a brontosaurus’s skeleton spanning the river. Thousands of roosting starlings made cloud formations above the bridge. Once they were across it, Vernon toed the accelerator and they moved on to the Spur Road at ninety.

  “What did you tell your lassie, in the end?” Vernon asked, mischief returning to his features. “What was the wordsmith’s excuse tonight?”

  “I told her that you rang me up and asked me to go out on a job with you.”

  “And she said?”

  “And she said, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll go out some other time.’”

  Vernon seemed cheated. “Women today. No spunk in them at all.”

  “Unless they’re in your films,” Sean said. That set Vernon off on a long, rich passage of laughter that turned into a hacking cough.

  “Did you find us a lady? A lady who wants to be in pictures?”

  “Maybe.”

  Vernon thrashed the Shogun around a series of tight bends as they drove past the concrete mesas and buttes of Runcorn’s Shopping City. Up ahead loomed the urban goldfish bowl that was the Uplands. The porthole windows and token attempts at decoration were swamped by the vast edifice of cement out of which its features glared.

  “You’re enjoying it though, the game, this rush?” Vernon asked. “All kinds of life is here. All kinds. Adds to your experience. Makes you more of a man. No?”

  “Whatever you say, Vernon. I just wish you’d let me know what you’re doing. I thought you trusted me.”

  “Time is on our side, Sean. Impatience is no help to anybody. You’re still on probation.”

  Vernon parked the Shogun under a guttering streetlamp that sent shadows into his eyes as he pulled the bat from behind his seat and stuffed it into the deep inside pocket of his leather trenchcoat.

  “Surely, Vernon, you don’t need that. She’s sixty-three. She’s blind for God’s sake.”

  Vernon made a moue of his lips. “Her circumstances might’ve changed. She might have a big, beefy lodger. She might have bought herself a guard dog.”

  They went up the graffiti-strewn stairwell, Vernon verbally ticking off each floor as he met it. On the fourth level, he ducked to his right and marched along a narrow passageway. Down below them, on a patch of grass, three boys were trying to set fire to a dead dog. A white Cosworth was up on blocks and a pair of jean-clad legs were sticking out from beneath it. A radio played Bryan Adams. A radio played Hole. A radio played Roger Whittaker.

  At the door of Mrs Moulder’s flat, Vernon smoothed down his hair, adjusted his collars, and rubbed the toe of his left boot against his right calf. Then he yanked the bat out of his pocket and did for the door with one mighty swing.

  “You want to be in with us on the softstrip,” Sean said. “An action like that.” An old joke now.

  Filth on what remained of the carpet tried to glue Sean’s boots to the floor as they moved deeper into the flat. The kitchen was a laboratory of horrors, bad smells burping from the drains. Slicks of grease covered every surface. An ecstasy of silverfish writhed under the sink units. In the living room, dark mould spread fingers up the walls. The air was damp and reeked of piss. On the television, a gardener showed how to keep frost off a vegetable patch.


  Sean listened to Vernon in the hallway, smashing a collection of tiny Wade whimsies from the MDF cabinets and wonky shelves.

  “Where are you, Mrs Moulder? No point hiding, lovey. It’s not me who’s blind.”

  Sean heard the click of the bathroom lock and was at the door as the handle turned and Mrs Moulder fell through the gap, her skirt around her ankles. She had hold of an emergency cord in her hands and was yanking on it.

  “Jesus Christ, Vernon,” Sean said, bending to help Mrs Moulder to her feet. Her thighs were dark with waste. Her breathing was hard and shallow, her face white. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Vernon. She’s just an old woman.”

  “It’s okay, Sean, I’ve got things under control now. Why don’t you go and make yourself comfy in the living room? Watch a bit of telly, and I’ll give you a call when I’m finished here, okay?”

  Sean backed off, checking first that Mrs Moulder was okay and wasn’t likely to simply pitch over or succumb to a coronary. In the living room he tried to busy himself with the newspaper but the damp on the armchair was seeping into his trousers and Vernon’s voice seethed through the flat, making the ornaments shake.

  “I give you so much leeway, May. So much. But no more. I do not put up with you lot pissing me around. No more. I will fuck you to within an inch, girl, if you try to piss me around any more. Now. You will hand it the fuck over, hear me? I’m not going away empty-handed this time, you night-seeing cunt.”

  Sean felt the sensation of a darkening in the room, as if someone had pulled the curtains to on a bright day. Now he heard a conversation in the hallway. Two men.

  This was not good. Not good. Sean gritted his teeth and tried to force the violence out of his body. What was driving Vernon Lord to this kind of action? Fear? He couldn’t actually enjoy terrorising old people, could he? And who was the other guy? Where the hell did he spring from? Sean edged to the threshold and peered around it. In the kitchen, the surgeon was standing with his back to Sean, a hand in a white rubber glove holding a pair of scissors that snipped at the air as he played with them. As he knelt, he gripped the old woman’s jaw with his free hand and Vernon leaned around him to close the kitchen door, winking and mouthing the words fuck off to Sean.

  Footsteps in the glass outside the door. Sean’s head cocked to one side. Three men, it sounded like. Heavy. Fit.

  He shrugged off his jacket to prevent it from limiting his movement. During his time in the police he had never once, despite the misfortune of some of his colleagues, been placed in a position of having to defend himself. Part of the reason for leaving, he considered now, as the footsteps transferred to the carpet, was that he did not want to invite physical violence which, the law of averages demanded, became more likely to visit him the longer he remained in uniform. On her first day in the Force, Sally had been headbutted by a shoplifter in Greenwich. Broke her nose. It could have been someone with a knife or a gun. Next time, it might be. Next time, it might have been Sean.

  And here he was, tensing, ready for the mash of fists and the stamp of boots. Ready for blood on his lip. A blade, even. All in the name of Naomi.

  “WHO WERE THEY?” Sean asked again. He couldn’t see out of his left eye. It felt as though somebody had inserted one of those needle adapters for footballs into his forehead and inflated the flesh. It ought to sting like a bastard, but he couldn’t feel any pain.

  He felt drained and sick. His body was tight, as though his skin had been cinched around the muscles. Adrenaline drained away, lactic acid in the meat of his arms and legs conspiring to make him feel as shitty as one of old May’s stockings.

  Vernon glanced at him again. There was affection and awe in the way he favoured him. His voice was cowed: “The way you moved,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a Fred and Ginger moment in there, Vernon. It was down and dirty. I’ve never seen fighting like it. They were fucking evil.”

  Vernon nodded. “I’ve not seen fighting like it either,” he said. “You didn’t give them a chance.”

  Apart from the crack to his eye, an anonymous elbow early on in the skirmish, Sean hadn’t received any other injury. He remembered little of the scrap, apart from the way it started

  (Sean: Who are you?

  Bucket-faced ape: Chin that fucker. Deck him now.)

  and the way it finished, with him slamming one head repeatedly into another while the third goon tried to breathe around the splintered newel post that had been rammed into his neck. All through it, Mrs Moulder had been whining like a puppy: “I haven’t finished paying for this carpet! I haven’t finished paying for this carpet!” Bizarrely it had helped him keep his focus. Vernon had stood there with the bat limp in his hand, drying his tongue out. When it had finished, he had been comically polite to Mrs Moulder, telling her that he would be back next month and thank you very much.

  “Well? Who were they?”

  As they bypassed it on their right, the cooling towers of Fiddlers Ferry power station belched white plumes towards Widnes. As a child, Sean had been able to see the towers from his bedroom window. Red lights punched into the towers gleamed like demonic eyes.

  “I don’t know. You saw her pulling on that emergency cord like she was at bell-ringing practice.”

  “They looked pretty tough for people who come round to plonk you back on your commode.”

  “Estate security then, who knows? Who cares?”

  They drove in silence until they reached the general hospital, where Sean told Vernon to drop him.

  “A quick nip of something warm back at yours?” Vernon tried.

  “Don’t think so, Vernon. I’m knackered. I’ll see you at work tomorrow?”

  Vernon shook his head. “Got business out in the sticks tomorrow.”

  “You don’t need me?”

  Another shake. “Salty’s coming with me.”

  Sean tried hard to seem nonplussed. “What’s this? I mean, why do you need me sometimes, and Salty others?”

  “What if I do?”

  Sean made a dismissive gesture. He was hungry. And he was sick of Vernon. “Whatever you say, boss.” He was about to walk away when Vernon tooted him on the horn.

  “Thanks for back there,” he said. “You did well. There’ll be forward motion for you soon. I promise. Be patient.”

  “Better than being a patient.”

  Vernon chuckled. “You’re right there.”

  BACK IN HIS bedsit, having walked once around the block to make sure that Vernon wasn’t tailing him, he withdrew the bottle of Absolut from the freezer compartment and sat by the window in darkness, refilling a cracked shot glass until the vodka had lost its syrupy chill and night clogged the streets.

  Sean fought the urge to bang the rest of the bottle back and get started on another. Getting pissed wasn’t going to help matters; it would only make his confusion more cloudy. Already it resembled some congested storm-anvil of black thoughts, questions and possibilities, reaching up into his head. He sipped his drink and felt the air change outside, as if it were mirroring his emotions. A gust of wind staggered through the badly fitting window, drunk on exhaust fumes and the smell of dog shit drifting over from the park.

  Sean couldn’t understand why he felt so instantly linked to Emma, but her ghost clung to his waking hours. He decided he was going to take another drink after all, as the rain started spanking down on the slates. The weather had made up its mind that it liked the taste of this town and bit deep. Wind howled at the weak spots of the house. Sean felt constantly as though he were trying to escape. Sometimes his skin felt too tight for the anger that moved within him. He felt directionless and wild. Emma had been like a magnetic field, drawing all of his focuses, taming the chaos. Swallowing the sour residue of his fourth, fifth shot glass of vodka and rising for a refill, he felt cheated. He had saved her, despite her protests, from a rape at least, murder at worst. Yet what would she be doing now if not what she had been paid to do before he helped her escape from those men?

  In an effort to dist
ract himself, he thought of Tim Enever, crapulous, coughing Tim Enever moving through the rooms of the de Fleche building as slowly as a sloth in lead boots. How he caressed the walls. What had he been up to? Was it enough that he was just weird? Sean didn’t think so. Maybe he should go back there. Later tonight. Check those walls, see if there was something behind them. Something hidden.

  On the back of an envelope, without trying to think too much, he wrote the name de Fleche. He couldn’t understand why it might be important, but it wouldn’t hurt to check it out. Suicide, Rapler had said before Ronnie came in to shut him up. Suicide.

  Had he ever considered, even obliquely, the easy way out in the days following Naomi’s death? Watching the creep of cold across his pane and the ice spreading through the puddles on the street, he couldn’t force his mind to find a region of similar cold. In the extremities of his despair, he had thought about a communion of thoughts with Naomi, but had he meant that to be as literal as it now appeared? He could never entertain such thoughts while her killer remained at large, but privately, he feared that he was not strong enough to stem the tide of such thinking for too long. The exertions of violence had wearied him, but the violence was nothing. It did not take a strong man to inflict pain on another, or to shed blood. The strongest people were the Emmas of the world. And yes, the Mrs Moulders. Sean took another drink and thought, yes, he would check himself out pretty soon if he ever found himself in a spot similar to the old woman. Outwardly he might appear strong. Inwardly he was as brittle as the icing on a stale cake.

  Sometime around midnight, the empty bottle slipped through his fingers, skidded and slithered on the floor, coming to a stop with the mouth pointing his way. When the glass followed it and shattered a few seconds later, the sound was not sufficient to wake him. Foggy street-lighting caught in viscous dregs smeared across the fragments and reflected his slumped form in a thousand different ways.