‘Lived there for a bit. Obviously not long enough to pick up an accent.’
‘You wanna wait for him?’
I could taste copper and my pockets felt heavy. ‘Yeah, that would be great, thanks.’
As he let me inside I noticed he was wearing a T-shirt with a black and white picture on it. It was of a girl, crouched on a pavement wearing heart-shaped sunglasses, with a cigarette between her fingers. He had the effortless confidence of the upper middle-class. When I had been his age I had struggled to look adults in the eye; in some ways I still did.
The inside of the house had pieces of Edie everywhere, in the open-plan rooms, the overload of glass and the abstract ornaments made of twisted metal. Contrary to what I had expected, there were books everywhere, shelves and shelves of them.
‘You wanna drink?’ he asked me as he led me into the kitchen.
‘Yeah, sure, what have you got?’
‘No coffee till Dad gets back, but we’ve got juice, tea… some of Mum’s gay tea, with fruit and stuff?’
I leant against one of the stools at the breakfast bar. ‘Juice is cool, thanks.’
The discs were probably upstairs. The staircase ran up around the walls of the living room, one of those modern ones with no banisters. My heart started beating faster and I tried to calm it down.
‘You seen your mum a lot recently?’ I asked.
‘Na, not much. She works a lot. Dad works too, but she works all the time.’ He pushed a glass of orange juice across the breakfast bar. ‘I haven’t seen too much of her since Dad kicked her out.’
‘Yeah, I heard… Sorry.’
He shrugged and hopped up on to one of the stools across from me. ‘Was better than them getting mad at each other all the time.’
‘What happened?’
‘She threw a toaster at him, and then they told me to go to my room.’ He smiled. ‘Looking back, it was kinda funny. They find it funny now, anyway.’
There was something disturbingly well adjusted about him. Was this the head start that all rich kids had? Yeah, I could see him experimenting with drugs, smoking the odd spliff and maybe doing a few lines of coke at some parties, but I couldn’t see children like Scott ever fucking up. Not fucking up how other children fucked up. It was impressive, the level of confidence that came with knowing you’d always have a financial safety net.
I liked him.
‘Your dad has quite a library for an ex-pat,’ I remarked.
‘He’s obsessed.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘He says you might as well take your stories with you, because no one can throw memories out when you’re gone.’
‘That’s pretty cool,’ I said.
‘It’s all right, he’s a sap sometimes.’
I heard the front door open and tensed.
Scott didn’t bother to get up, he just shouted, ‘Dad, friend came round for you!’
I looked over my shoulder and Sidney could see me as soon as he closed the front door. He was rubbing his hands together, a plastic shopping bag hung over his wrist.
‘Who, Scottie?’
‘Some guy from New York.’
I stood up, slowly, and said, ‘Yeah, I’m here about those discs Edie said you were going to lend me.’
There was a silence.
Sidney had put the bag down by his feet. I saw the momentary fear cross his face, and his eyes scan the room behind me for his son. He was a big guy, extremely tall and built like an American footballer. The enormous khaki winter coat he was wearing made him appear even larger.
‘Scott,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, you got coffee?’
I smiled, hands in my pockets, one around the butt of an automatic. ‘Yeah, Sid, let’s have some coffee.’
If Scott had noticed anything, he wasn’t showing it.
Sidney looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
I shrugged, indicating my head ever so slightly at his son.
‘Yeah,’ he said, his voice taut. ‘You want coffee?’
‘Would love one. Be good to catch up. You got those DVDs for me?’
‘DVDs,’ he repeated, picking up the bag again.
‘The DVDs Edie said you’d have for me. Been looking for them for quite a while but you can’t get them in the shops. They’re quite the rarity. Some might even say the only ones of their kind?’
‘Sounds cool,’ Scott said.
‘They’re pretty cool.’ I nodded over my shoulder in agreement, and smirked back at Sidney. ‘I’ll make the coffee, shall I?’
It didn’t take him long; he understood completely. Coming forwards, he stopped in the doorway. I held out my hand for the bag while keeping the other in my pocket, and put it down on the side when he gave it to me. He kept looking at Scott, but I shook my head.
‘How’s Edie?’ he asked.
‘Good form.’
‘I bet she is.’
‘I’ll put on the coffee, shall I?’
‘No, I’ll do it.’
He made to move behind the breakfast bar and I cut him off, making it appear as if I was just stretching my legs.
‘Guys,’ Scott said from behind me. ‘I’ll make the coffee, if you like?’
‘Thanks, Scott, that would be great,’ I said, not taking my eyes off Sidney. ‘I’m just going to go with your dad to find these discs.’
He glared at me.
‘Come on,’ I said, still not taking my right hand out of my pocket. ‘Lead the way.’
Sidney backed away and, with another glance at Scott, turned back towards the living room. I walked about three or four paces behind him; he looked like the sort of person who had the strength to manhandle a gun off someone if he took them by surprise.
‘Nice, Edie,’ he murmured as he walked towards the stairs. ‘Real nice.’
I lied, deciding to relieve Edie of the hassle. ‘I’m not working for her. I’m on my own.’
‘You’re all scum, people like you. People like her.’
‘Mind your language, there are children in the house.’
I dropped further behind him as we climbed the stairs, mindful of the sheer drop and lack of banister. At one point he paused suddenly, letting me come a step closer, and I halted.
‘Don’t even fucking think about it,’ I said.
In the kitchen Scott had put the radio on.
Sidney started moving again.
‘If you weren’t a coward,’ he said, rigid with hatred, ‘and you fought me man to man, without your weapons, I would kill you.’
‘Well, that’s why it’s called the great equalizer,’ I said as we reached the top and I followed him into the bedroom. ‘We can’t all rely on natural selection.’
I felt as if I had gone into something of a trance, where our voices were magnified and everything else sounded as though I was listening to it from under water. It was a familiar state. For the first time in a while, I knew I was in control.
Edie’s dressing table was still here, and as he opened the wardrobe I could see a lot of her clothes. She struck me as quite a difficult person to remove from a place; some trace of her would stay where she had been and that was probably how she wanted it.
Sidney crouched and took a handful of DVDs out from under a plastic box of socks. There were numbers written across them in red marker pen.
‘If I give you these, you won’t hurt my son.’
I shook my head. ‘He’s a nice kid.’
His lip curled. ‘Don’t talk about him like that.’
I took the DVDs off him and put them in the pocket that didn’t contain my gun.
‘If this isn’t all of them, you know I’ll come back?’
‘I’m not stupid. They’re all there.’
I moved around the double bed and let him lead the way back out of the room, keeping a safe distance behind him again. At the top of the stairs he stopped again and I moved my feet into combat position.
‘You know if you take those she’ll get custody of Scott?’ he said, turning
to face me.
I swallowed. ‘That’s nothing to do with me, is it? And she is his mother, anyway.’
‘Some people…’ He looked down at his hands and he seemed to find it difficult to speak. ‘She’s a great person, but some people aren’t meant to be mothers. She doesn’t really want him, she just likes having possessions.’
We both listened to the radio for a second.
‘Well…’ I couldn’t find a reply; the trancelike state of action had vanished and the DVDs felt cumbersome in my pocket. ‘Like I said, it’s none of my business.’
‘It is, now.’
I took a step backwards. I had a mental image of him grabbing me by the collar of my coat and hurling me over the edge of the stairs. I could feel the impact, and knew I was too close to react in time.
The moment passed.
Sidney turned and carried on downstairs.
‘Hey, how do you take your coffee?’ Scott called from the kitchen when he saw us.
‘He has to go, Scottie.’ Sidney stood in the centre of the living room, between me and his son, and stared at me in a way that made me wonder from whom Scott had inherited that intimidating trait. ‘Emergency at work.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, waving. ‘Nice to meet you, Scott.’
‘Oh… Bye.’
I’d been concerned about what he might have had to witness. I liked him.
Sidney crossed his arms, and didn’t stop watching me until I had left the house. I thought I would feel a greater sense of achievement, having got the proof I needed to show Edie that I could still be relied on for professional integrity. But my first instinct, when I got back in the car and put the discs on the passenger seat, was to snap all of them in half.
21
When I stopped at home to drop the DVDs off I checked my phone again, trying to drink tea from a polystyrene cup. I had a text and a voicemail.
In the car I’d been thinking about watching Clare’s video again.
I jogged up the remaining stairs and let myself in too quickly.
‘Someone was proactive this morning,’ Mark called from his bedroom by way of greeting.
‘You ever work any more?’ I replied, picking up a pencil and my notepad from under the sofa.
I found my laptop under the coffee table and opened the screen, feeling out of breath. It took a while to start up, but I typed in the link and waited for Mark to leave before letting it load.
‘My hangover is fucking apocalyptic. Think it might be haunted.’
His voice was closer this time, and I looked behind me to see him standing with a mug by the kitchen door, still in his boxers and Kurt Cobain T-shirt. He was paler than usual and had a slight sheen of alcohol sweat, but he wore the look better than I ever did.
When I didn’t reply he made a noise of distress and rubbed his forehead.
‘You want some paracetamol or something?’ I said, knowing that he would refuse.
‘No, I’ll just struggle through.’
‘Well, stop fucking moaning.’
‘I never said I’d struggle quietly.’ He ran his hands through his hair, grimacing. ‘I’m going for a shower, then we’ll talk Christmas stuff, yeah?’
‘Plan,’ I said.
As he left the room with a weak thumbs-up, I smiled to myself. He must have been feeling rough, I thought. It was unusual for Mark not to ask what I was up to. I turned back to the laptop and refreshed the site.
Inspiration. That was why I was watching it again. I just felt like drawing something.
I could hear Mark dropping things in the bathroom, singing a Duran Duran song to himself.
As Clare appeared on the screen again, I sketched a rough outline of her body, but then screwed the paper up and decided to just draw her face instead. The adrenalin that had been coursing through my system since the encounter with Sidney and Scott started to ebb.
I looked up at the video every so often, reminded of how surprisingly strong she had been. She disguised it well, with her coy smile and displays of grace, but it was still there.
Drawing her eyes was easy, I realized, because there wasn’t much in them. They glared up from the page, more life-like than I had expected them to be.
I glanced at the video, on repeat, and she was twirling.
As much as I wanted this job to be over, so much so that I had started to fantasize about the months before I got that phone call, I had started to live in the future, focusing on the times when I would get to see her again. I wanted to know what was making her tick. I wanted her to keep pushing me, keep provoking, until I had an excuse…
I started the video again.
It only seemed beautiful because she was, I reminded myself, desperately trying to regain some objectivity. Aside from her presence it felt no different to watching a mental patient crying whilst being led along by their carer, or a car slowing down by a children’s playground. You watched it and maybe felt uneasy, but you never said anything, because even if it felt wrong, that was just the way things were.
I drew her jawline, sharper than Emma’s had been, and the shadow that her cheekbones cast across her face.
I watched the video a few more times, but I couldn’t see anything in detail in this light. Nothing that I had missed anyway. Every time I thought she was drawing me closer it felt as if I was still behind a pane of glass.
I looked down at the notepad on my lap and was surprised by how easy it had been to capture her essence on the page. With some unease, I saw that it was because she looked at home in 2D. She wasn’t hard to draw because there didn’t seem to be much humanity to capture. I had tried drawing Mark once, when he had nagged me to, but after a couple of days I had refused to try again. I knew him too well, all of his idiosyncrasies and his perfections and imperfections, to do him justice on paper.
She looked up at me from the page, and she still wasn’t giving me any answers.
‘Eh!’ Mark called from the other room, announcing his presence in time for me to shut the laptop before he walked in. He still hadn’t showered. ‘Eh, look at this. I forgot to tell you.’
‘What?’ I put my notepad down.
He handed me a newspaper, folded back on to a particular page. ‘About a quarter of the way down… You remember that address I sent you to when you were looking for that Kyle Browning? The one in Shooters Hill? A body was found there – check it out.’
‘Jesus…’ I sat up straight.
Mark slouched over the back of the sofa. ‘Just caught my eye, wondered if it was anyone you knew.’
Joseph O’Donoghue.
I didn’t recognize the name, but I recognized the picture. I recognized the blond fringe hanging over the eyes and the genial smile.
Meds.
‘Fuck,’ I whispered.
‘Oh God, you do know him?’
‘I didn’t know him, I… came across him when I went round there. He was…’ My eyes focused on one word. ‘Suicide?’
‘Yeah, heroin overdose. Nasty shit.’
‘But…’ I started to feel sick. ‘A heroin overdose?’
‘Yeah, really sad.’
I put the newspaper down on top of the laptop, got out my phone and tried calling Matt’s number again. There was nothing. Doubt was turning into comprehension. I knew I had to speak to Brinks; he was the only person I knew with easy access to CCTV footage.
The boy had a disarming smile, I remembered. He didn’t take heroin; I remembered that as well.
‘Mark, you… read books and stuff.’ I looked up at him. ‘“Bring thee to meet his shadow.” Where’s that from?’
It hadn’t seemed to matter before, the meaning of the words. But everything that had once been inconsequential mattered now; it was a mess, a fucking mess.
‘Edgar Allen Poe… “Silence”,’ he said, amused. ‘Um, random. Have I won a prize?’
‘No, I… It’s just something that someone said and it’s been bothering me a bit. I knew it was Poe but… what’s it about?’
‘“Si
lence”? Well… It’s about death, I suppose, like most of his stuff really.’ He crossed his arms, eyes searching upwards for the answers. ‘It’s subjective, it all is, but you could say that Poe’s life was just a sequence of deaths of people he loved.’
‘Jesus… Optimistic guy.’
‘Well, isn’t it the same for all of us really?’ He shrugged. ‘If you’re connected to someone you’re always signing up to having to watch one another die. It’s in our nature. I mean, you and me, we’re not going to live for ever. So which one of us is gonna go first?’
I swallowed. ‘Guess I’ve never thought about it.’
‘Well, that’s what Poe is talking about. Um, the shadow inside him—’
‘“No power hath he of evil in himself”?’
He stared at me, looking tired, concerned. ‘Nic, are you OK?’
I shrugged, shook my head, spread my hands, watching him follow the pointless gestures.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘I’m going to take that shower, all right?’ He gave my shoulders a squeeze, like a boxing coach. ‘Keep your cool, man. Keep your cool.’
‘“I ain’t got time to bleed,”’ I replied, snorting.
Mark smiled and wandered away into the bathroom, sniffing. When he had locked the door I hid my notepad under the sofa after looking at the picture one more time, and then left the flat again at a run.
I saw a car with blacked-out windows stop a little way down the road. The men who got out recognized me straight away,and Ronnie O’Connell slammed the passenger door with a smile.
‘Caruana, you elusive bastard, where have you been then?’
Usually I heard Ronnie before I saw him. He came bounding around the car and clapped me on the shoulder with a strength that would have sent me flying if I hadn’t been prepared for the impact.
He was a big man, broad and darkly handsome. The Italian in his features wasn’t as diluted as mine; he had browner skin and the authentic dark eyes. If he didn’t speak and betray his lack of accent he could be mistaken for the real thing; the mythical gangster of seventies films.
‘Just working,’ I said.
‘You haven’t been in touch for a while. Was Cassie OK?’
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