‘Calm the fuck down!’
My ribs were smarting and felt as though they would bruise. It surprised me that there was actually some strength behind her physique.
‘How fucking dare—’
‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!’
She struggled and aimed a kick at my shin.
‘Fuck sake, calm down!’ I snapped, tightening my grip on her wrists.
‘I’m calm!’ She unclenched her fists, showed me her palms. ‘I’m calm.’
Not sure whether to trust her, I let her go and stepped back rapidly, out of range. She was looking at the floor and I took the moment of respite to check my ribs, my heart pounding.
‘I’m calm,’ she repeated to herself.
I picked her shoes up off the floor. She was at least three inches shorter without them.
‘These are pretty fucking brutal,’ I said as I handed them back. ‘Where did you buy them, one of those cellars, you know… with all those gimp masks?’
‘I had them made.’
‘I’m gonna bruise, you know.’
‘Like a peach.’ She picked up an electronic cigarette from her desk and took a few perfunctory drags. ‘Don’t sweet-talk me, Nic. Not now.’
‘Honestly, I don’t know what this is about.’
She adjusted her outfit. There was tension in her shoulders, as if she was deciding whether to continue with her rage. Her temper came and went with a speed that rivalled any man I had worked with. Even now I couldn’t decide whether I would be able to go through with fucking her, or if it would feel too strange to be used by a woman in that way.
‘I got sent some photos,’ she said. ‘Photos of you talking to someone. Ring any bells?’
I felt a nagging sense of dread. ‘Um… who? I don’t know, I honestly fucking don’t.’
With a grim smile she walked back around her desk and took a wad of photos from one of the drawers. She put them down and pushed them towards me.
I could see who it was without coming any closer.
The photos were from the alleyway beside Brinks’s house. I racked my memory for anything that had seemed out of place but there had been nothing. Thinking of the flashes outside the café this morning made my fists clench. I had been so careful, so fucking careful and now someone was messing with me, toying with me as if I was nothing, nobody.
‘It’s…’ There was nothing I could say without resorting to clichés. ‘It’s not what it looks like.’
‘Bullshit. I’ve had these checked out, and I’ve made copies so don’t think you can take them and run.’
‘Who sent them to you?’
‘It was an unmarked envelope.’ She shook her head. ‘You know, I never thought it would be you, of all people…’
‘Edie, you’ve got to believe—’
‘No. No, I really don’t.’
I couldn’t blame her. In her position I wouldn’t believe me either.
‘Look,’ I said, trying not to sound as though I was begging. ‘He helps me with cases, gives me information—’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ She looked up at me. ‘If it was anyone but you, anyone, I promise you’d be…’
She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it, didn’t like to think of herself as someone who did business like me. She had one foot in our world and one foot in what was legitimate, but wouldn’t commit to either of them.
I knew what she meant though; that was clear.
I nodded. ‘I… believe you. I’ll prove this is wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna get proof that this is fucked up.’
‘Fine.’ She puffed away on the electronic cigarette and shrugged. ‘But for now, you can get the hell out of my office.’
She stared me down, daring me to start something. I pushed away any images of violence, flipping the desk over and causing a scene, turned and walked back into the stairwell. It had to be Hudson, I knew that much, but he seemed more capable of finding me than I was of finding him.
‘Fuck!’
I slammed open the fire escape and kicked the wall of the building opposite.
‘Fuck!’
I looked at my hands, marked by Edie’s nails, and thought about Clare Dyer. I had to meet Pat, but wanted more than anything to go home.
14
Pat had scratchmarks down the side of his face; three straight and identical lines. He sat down opposite me in the bar, glared as if I was stupid enough to ask about them, and then ordered a glass of wine from the waitress.
His expression made me feel petulant and I raised my eyebrows over my mug of coffee.
‘Angry cat?’
‘Too curious,’ he said, stonewalling me. ‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘Do you know what Emma liked to do in her spare time? Did you know her friends well?’
Eyes narrowed. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘Nothing, I just want to know.’
‘What do you already know?’
‘Jesus, will you just answer the fucking questions?’ I rolled my eyes, shivering every time the door behind us opened and shut. ‘I’m not implying anything; these are just standard questions I need to ask at this point.’
He thanked the barmaid for the wine and sighed. ‘She liked lots of things. She danced, like her… She danced a bit, but she was better with books and stuff.’ His hand went to his face but only for a moment. ‘She liked to go to parties but she didn’t usually stay the night. We would always pick her up.’
Whenever he spoke about Emma he squinted down at the table, directing the intensity of his words at his drink. Pat never seemed to wear anything but a suit. I wondered how much he depended on this constant display of importance. Did my jeans look like inferiority to him?
‘I didn’t know many of her friends, I admit. She went a lot of places and we didn’t mind dropping her off but I mean, I work, I’m not home a lot. If you want to talk about her friends I’d talk to her, my… I’d talk to Clare.’
I nodded my way through the name. ‘That’s cool, I can do that. Look, this is nothing really to do with Emma—’
‘What’s it to you? It’s none of your business,’ he said, absently touching his face again.
I hesitated. ‘Er, no… I didn’t mean that. I was going to ask whether you know Felix Hudson very well? He’s a businessman, works in imports, he—’
‘I know who he is.’ He reddened, jerking both hands down to the table. ‘Why?’
I watched his eyes, watched for which way he looked when he tried to lie.
‘He’s linked to someone important,’ I said. ‘I was just interested in what you know of him – where he hangs out, if you’ve ever spoken to him.’
He glanced at the door and across the bar before shuffling his chair forwards a little. ‘Only a few times. The last time I saw him, the last few times I saw him in fact, was at the Underground… You know, Edie’s place? Of course you know it, I mean, who doesn’t?’
‘I know it, yeah.’
‘Well, the last time I saw him was there. It was about a month ago.’ He reflected on the time for a moment, when he had still been a father. ‘We had a fight, something pointless, and we both got barred for a few weeks.’
‘What was the fight about?’
‘You know, I can’t even remember. Maybe it was over one of the girls, I don’t know. It gets a bit heated in there sometimes, when I’ve had a bit to drink and when he’s had a bit. I had some coke, got aggressive, but it wasn’t all my fault.’
‘Yeah, right.’ It came out more sarcastically than I meant it to. ‘You on good terms now?’
‘We were never on good terms, he’s a Grade A fucking psychopath.’ He snorted. ‘And that’s coming from me.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He does things to shut you up,’ he said. ‘Speaks in riddles, passages from books, recites poems to people while threatening to shoot their kneecaps off, leaves fucked-up notes—’
‘What do you mean, notes
?’ I sat up and wished that I hadn’t.
He sipped from his glass but didn’t take his eyes off me. ‘You know, notes. Bits of paper. He threatens people with them… Don’t go around shouting about it, but I only know this because I hooked up with his girlfriend once. When he found out she was cheating on him the first time he left this note with a line from Othello. You know Othello, right?’
‘I couldn’t quote it but yeah.’
‘“Sweet soul, take heed, Take heed of perjury; thou art on thy deathbed.”’
I wished I knew its relevance.
‘You know, Othello says that just before he murders his wife, for adultery. She’s not stupid, a quick search on Google and she knew what he meant. She said she broke it off quickly after that. Now… now she’s just more careful. But Felix Hudson, he’s a freak, man. A proper freak.’
No power hath he of evil in himself.
‘Right,’ I said, trying not to let anything show on my face. ‘Right, thanks.’
Pat spread his hands. He didn’t know how he had helped.
I tried to bring the discussion back to the scratches. ‘How are you both holding up?’
‘Pfft, what the fuck do you mean, how are we holding up?’ It looked as though he was trying to laugh but he only succeeded in twisting his lips. ‘Fuck you, you mean how did I get these fetching scars?’
Afraid of talking him out of an answer, I stayed silent.
Pat didn’t say anything for an unnerving amount of time. His face was blank, the vacant calm that paralyses the features before an explosion of either tears or violence. I’d have given anything to see what he was seeing.
‘She’s… hard to live with,’ he said.
There was an almost irrepressible urge to smash his forehead into the tabletop.
‘She’s always liked drama… liked making things hard, but that was one of the reasons why I…’ He looked me right in the eyes, shameless. ‘She’s hard to live with, anyway.’
The disgust must have been visible on my face because he raised his eyebrows.
‘I’ve given you an answer,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to fucking like it.’
The door opened and shut again. A shiver went down my spine.
‘Do you mind if I speak to her now about Emma’s friends?’ I asked, standing.
He smiled at me. The bastard actually had the nerve to smile.
‘Look at you,’ he said.
I left.
When she answered the door I could tell that she had been drinking, or had taken something stronger. Her eyes were a little too wide, blackened with eyeliner. There was a bruise on her cheek and the nail varnish on her right hand was chipped.
‘What?’ she said, leaning with one arm up against the doorframe. Her hair was obscuring the wrong half of her face, her fringe across an eye.
Behind her something melancholic was playing.
‘Is that the Doors?’ I said before I could stop myself, before I realized how ridiculous it sounded.
She looked me up and down. ‘Pat’s not here, you know.’
‘I know. It was actually you I wanted to speak to.’
There was a pause, another scan, and she left the door open as she walked back inside.
I followed her, surprised by how dark the place seemed. The dim lighting didn’t seem able to reach the corners of the high ceilings any more. The grandiose ornaments, the mirrors and mock chandeliers, drew longer shadows and looked almost menacing.
It was the Doors, I thought.
Clare went into the living room. ‘His voice sounds almost like Sinatra here.’
‘It’s my favourite actually,’ I said, unwilling to come further in.
‘I always had this idea, when I was younger, that one day I’d be listening to that bit… you know that bit with the piano.’ She stopped by the CD player, the one I hadn’t noticed the other times I’d been here, and rewound the track by a few millimetres. ‘You know, this bit, coming up…’
‘I know it.’
She brushed her hair away from her face with both hands, swayed a little to the rhythm when the piano started, did a measured spin that made her red skirt flare, and stopped, glassy-eyed.
‘One day you think you’ll listen to it and you’ll have one of those stupid clichéd moments, those epiphanies about life, and everything will… make sense, make more sense. It really makes you want it…’
When the piano stopped she raised a hand as if to rewind it again, but turned back to me. I wasn’t sure if it was alcohol; she wasn’t talking like someone who was drunk.
‘What did you want?’ she asked.
‘I wanted to check some things about Emma’s friends. Pat said to talk to you.’
At first I didn’t think she’d heard me. An expression like disillusionment came over her face and she turned the CD player off. She stared at it for a long time before sitting down on the sofa.
I stayed standing.
‘And what if I don’t want to tell you anything about Emma’s friends?’ she said, pushing her hair off her face again as though it was smothering her.
‘That’s not going to help.’
‘I wasn’t the one who wanted your help.’ She blinked, hard. ‘OK, what?’
‘Did she ever mention anyone called Felix Hudson?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know who he is?’
‘No.’
There was nothing about him in Emma’s diary either. I would have remembered.
‘Is that all?’ she said.
‘No.’ I sat down this time, on the adjacent sofa like before.
She stood up sharply with her arms folded. Standing still seemed to be difficult; she didn’t leave the spot but her feet never stopped moving.
‘You know more about her than me, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re telling me names that I don’t even know and they’re involved with her. You’re going to give me a list of names and I won’t… I’m not going to know any of them. Why don’t you tell me about her? Go on, I’m asking you. You’re being paid for it, so tell me about my daughter.’
Something about her twisted around the inside of my skull. I wondered if it was just me or whether this happened with everyone. When she looked at you it was as if her eyes were trying to force their way past yours, wind their way inside and take you over like a disease.
There was a glimmer of recognition but I couldn’t place it. It raised the hairs along the back of my neck and I felt a shot of adrenalin make my heart beat faster.
‘Do you want to see a picture of her again?’ she asked, not giving me time to think about an answer.
Without me saying a word she had taken down the same photo frame as last time.
I took it but couldn’t drag my eyes from her.
‘How did you get that?’ I asked, indicating my head at the bruise.
Like Pat she ignored the question, and sat down again, rubbing her eyes.
‘I knew most of her friends – the girls anyway, and Danny,’ she said.
‘Anyone called Kyle?’
‘No.’
‘Anyone called Matt?’
‘God, can you just… stop?’
I stopped.
‘I wish I could say that she had… said anything, but… I can’t remember. I can’t remember or she never said anything.’ She shrugged and her eyes became glassy. ‘Please don’t ask me any more.’
I looked down at the photo. It was the photo of her I didn’t like. There was something in her eyes; a calculated confidence that I found easy to attribute to Pat.
‘Was Emma happy?’ I asked, perturbed. ‘Did she seem happy?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well… happy, you know.’
‘She’s… normal.’
‘Yeah, but was she happy?’
‘She was fine.’ She raised a hand and started biting one of her nails.
My eyes were drawn back to the odd sculpture next to the space where the photo had been. It held my gaze for a while,
as if a head or some features might appear to give it some meaning, but the top of its neck stayed blank.
‘You saw Pat today then?’ she said.
I nodded, and it struck me that I had only seen them together once.
She started laughing; a high erratic sound. A few tears found their way down her cheeks and I had a fleeting vision of crossing the room to brush them away.
‘It’s not his fault, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s not something he can control.’
The words made me feel light-headed with hate.
‘It bothers him, when he can’t control something,’ she added. Her skirt had ridden up across her thighs and she pushed it down.
‘That’s not an excuse,’ I said, aware that I was overstepping the mark.
‘And what do you know?’ she snapped, standing up. ‘God, you’re all the same! Why are you under the impression that your opinions matter so much?’
‘Was Emma happy?’
‘Who the fuck is happy?’ She laughed again.
I didn’t want to provoke anything; I was tense enough as it was. But I couldn’t help it. I put the photo to one side and stood up also.
‘Why wasn’t Emma happy?’
She waved the question away. ‘You don’t know anything.’
‘I know what you’re doing is fucked up.’
‘Shut up!’ She stepped forwards, got in my face and hissed, ‘You don’t know anything about me.’
‘I know that you’re lying to yourself.’
The slap was unexpected and it stung like hell. Out of reflex I raised my hand to retaliate and stopped myself, mortified.
‘Are you going to hit me back, Nic?’ She was breathing hard as if she was steeling herself for the blow, inches from me. ‘Would you like that?’
She made it sound like the most inviting thing in the world and I felt faint, not in control of myself. Her eyes were wide, imploring me for something. I couldn’t step away from her, couldn’t catch my breath. She cocked her head and her expression was loaded with scorn.
‘Didn’t think so,’ she said with a smile. ‘You have to be paid to help, right?’
I didn’t know what to say.
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