The Smiling Man

by Joseph Knox

  ‘Sir,’ we said in unison.

  ‘Evening, Peter,’ said Parrs, talking to Sutty. ‘It’s been too long. How are things?’

  He shrugged. ‘No complaints …’

  ‘That’s not what the last girl you arrested said, pal. Anyway, it’s late. You must be hungry. And I need a word with the boy wonder. Why don’t you go and grab a bite to eat?’

  ‘Famished,’ said Sutty, looking at me gravely. He was already walking backwards, still clinging on to his sub. ‘Evening, Superintendent.’

  ‘Good evening, Detective Inspector.’

  Parrs watched him go, still smiling. He didn’t speak again until Sutty was out of sight, and even then he didn’t look at me.

  ‘Get into the fucking car,’ he said quietly.

  5

  ‘Would you say you’re still a young man, Aidan? Actually, don’t answer that. Youth’s a bit like beauty, isn’t it? In the eye of the beholder. I’d say you are, though. I’ve seen a girl or two giggle in your direction. You’ve got a job, a jawline. Even your hair. If I were talking to someone else in your position, I might even say they had their whole life ahead of them. Hold that thought for me, eh?

  ‘In January of this year, we had a visitor. Not really our tourist season so he turned a few heads, too. Older heads than yours, though. People with long memories who could put a name to a face. Blunt Trauma Billy, they called him.’ He smiled. ‘Blunt Trauma Billy’s one of those names you don’t really hear so much any more. Bit like Doris or Ethel. Of a time and a type. Yeah, sure enough, our tourist was well into his sixties. Retirement age for most. Unfortunately, old Billy’s chosen profession doesn’t provide much of a pension plan. A mechanic, these old heads called him.’

  Parrs paused and smiled. ‘Not the kind that fixes cars, though. They remembered him as a sort of freelancer. Headhunted for certain jobs. A specialist who moved around the country to wherever the money took him. You have to be a bit nomadic for that kind of life. Rootless, with nothing to tie you down. Nothing to lose. That’s probably why he’s got no family, no friends. Bit like your smiling man. Bit like you. Do you know what Blunt Trauma Billy’s specialism is, Aidan?’

  ‘He fixes people,’ I guessed.

  ‘Correct. Dozens of them over the years, although only one that ever stuck. Anyway, back in January when we kicked his door in for a chat he had his mouth full. The funny thing was that he was tucking into a piece of paper. A couple of big lads held him down and, shall we say, obstructed the nasal passage, so he spat it out. It was just an address but I think you’d recognize it. You live there, after all. And there were three words scrawled below. Make it painful.’

  He let that sink in for a minute. I realized I could hear myself breathing.

  ‘People keep asking me what you’re still doing here, son. You’re like a lucky charm that doesn’t fucking work. But I tell them someone’s gotta write Sutty’s reports for him. That you’re a gifted young detective with a bright future ahead. Obviously you and I know that’s a fairy tale. The truth is that it’s convenient to keep a compromised officer around the place. Someone I’ve got so much dirt on that I can use him for special jobs. See, I don’t believe in trust, Aidan. People you trust let you down every day. But when someone understands that you can flick off their life like a light … then you’ve got someone you can depend on. Make no mistake about it, son, my finger is hovering over the fucking switch.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘A hit’s slightly different, though. An imposition. In the game we’re playing, us versus them, there is one sacrosanct rule. Cops die of natural causes. I’m not talking about the madmen and the users, they’re a law unto themselves. I’m talking about the firms. The families. The ones who’ve got history and should know enough to know better …

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’ve wished ill on you at times, Aidan. There’ve even been occasions when it might’ve been convenient for you to go missing. Convenient for you to not turn up to work for a few weeks. Convenient to fish a headless torso out of the river, identifiable only by his thirty-inch waist and the word TWAT tattooed across his shoulders. But a hit represents a breakdown of the system. If I allow that, I’m opening the door to anarchy. Frogs raining from the sky, cats marrying dogs, etcetera, etcetera.

  ‘Course, our mechanic, Blunt Trauma Billy, is old school. That’s his USP. If he gets arrested he stands up, keeps his mouth shut and does his time. He wasn’t gonna talk to us, and he’d done nothing wrong except have a bad reputation and a copy of your address. So I let him go and told him to leave town. Far as I know, he’s never been back. Then I made a series of speculative arrests. I wanted to talk to the kinds of people who might’ve had him on speed-dial. I brought in what’s left of the old families. The Burnsiders, The Franchise. Even your old friend Zain Carver. And I explained to them the golden rule of the game: cops die of natural causes, and I told them what happens when they break it. You’re still alive, so it looks like they got the message. One hand went up at the end of class, though. Zain Carver. Teacher’s pet. He said he appreciated my time, the courtesy that I’d extended, but asked, out of curiosity, if the rule would still be applicable to people who became ex-police officers. People who got fired, for example. Are they still golden? Well now, I said, that’s in the jurisdiction of someone slightly less important than me. That’s between you and God.

  ‘When we first met, you were on your very last chance. Now you’re past it. Your life quite literally depends upon you keeping this job. This job quite literally depends upon keeping me happy. Do I look fucking happy?’

  I realized he expected an answer. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And why do you think that is?’

  ‘Oliver Cartwright, sir.’

  ‘Oliver Cartwright,’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t suggest that you stay away from him, did I? I didn’t say, “Stay away from him if you feel like it”, did I? I took you up the mountain with me and engraved it in stone tablets. Thou shalt not.’

  He threw a rolled-up newspaper at me.

  The main story was about a man who’d died in police custody. A whistle-blower had come forward, saying the stompers, the tactical response unit, had applied an illegal chokehold. There was a picture of Chief Superintendent Chase looking grave.

  ‘Surprise surprise, the news broke on Cartwright’s site. He’s been sitting on it for months in agreement with our mother superior, Chief Superintendent Chase, but since my men are harassing him, he decided to put it out there. You can imagine how upset she is with me, and in turn how apoplectic I am with you. You are labouring under the illusion that your continued existence in this world is related to skill or talent. You are wrong. Do something useful and focus on those fucking dustbin fires, because the day I can no longer depend on you will be the last day of your life, Aidan. And it’s getting closer.’

  He turned to look at me but I kept staring straight ahead. After a minute or so he climbed out of the car, slammed the door behind him and walked away.

  6

  Sutty and I passed the rest of our shift sitting in deafening, heavy silence. The only sound was the wet click of his alcoholic hand-sanitizer, which he compulsively applied and reapplied as I drove. The fumes became so strong that the car felt like a hot box, and I started to see a trail on every light, a slipstream for every object. When I finally dropped him home in the early hours of the morning, he turned.

  ‘Anything you wanna tell me?’ he said. Sutty was a walking nightmare, but he’d also survived several career-ending catastrophes, constant controversy and his own rampant unprofessionalism. If I wanted to live through this, there were worse people to ask for advice.

  ‘Parrs thinks—’

  ‘Y’know what,’ he said, climbing out of the car. ‘I’m not interested.’ I watched him hustle up the path into his building like I was infective. I turned off his road and sat at a set of traffic lights for a minute.

  A hit.

  The engine was running, and the lights must have gon
e from red to green several times before I noticed. When another 5 a.m. driver, the first I’d seen for some time, angrily pulled around me I snapped out of it. I wound down all the windows, flicked on the sirens and tore through empty streets for an hour or so, blasting Sutty’s clinical stink out of the car, the cobwebs out of my head. The sudden exhilaration was something close to a high, and I ached for the days when I could have swallowed this feeling in a pill or snorted it off the back of my hand.

  When I had these thoughts I sped up, attempted impossible manoeuvres and hairpin turns. I raced towards buildings with my eyes closed and didn’t stop until the last possible second. By the time I arrived back into the Northern Quarter I was shivering, and I could barely feel my arms and legs.

  The night had passed and the morning commute had begun.

  I parked up, got out of the car and stood in the warming morning sun for a few minutes, letting it sink into my skin and bones.

  When I passed another pile of cigarette butts, each smoked down to the filter, lying on the kerb outside my flat, they carried new meaning. A health warning. I looked all around me for anyone who might have left them, then kicked them out into the street. If what Parrs had told me was true, it seemed possible, even likely, that I was being watched. The enemies I’d made had deep pockets and they could afford to wait for my next mistake. My mind went back to the man I’d seen, a few days before, watching me when I’d left The Temple.

  I opened the flat and went to make myself a drink. The bottle I’d been chipping away at was empty, but I didn’t remember finishing it. I looked at it for a moment before opening another and pouring a strong one, which I barely felt. I paced the room. The message from Parrs had been clear. My next mistake would be my last. Somehow, far from feeling trapped, I felt free. He’d described a sequence of events – my becoming undependable, my becoming unemployed, my becoming unprotected – that felt inevitable.

  Like a clarification.

  Once I’d paused, let it sink into me like the morning sun, I felt much more certain about where I stood. Who I was and what I’d do next. I thought about the arrogance of Oliver Cartwright. I didn’t have the full story between him and Sophie, but I was certain he was using her body, her youth, her sex, against her. Using my own past, my own job against me. Gliding through life like my exact opposite, untouched by consequence or cause and effect, while the rest of us drowned in it.

  I picked up my keys and took another drive.

  7

  As a younger man I’d habitually snorted methamphetamine. There’s no point saying whether I did so to excess or not. In some cases I’d taken it until my nose bled. I’d taken it until I couldn’t remember my own name. I’d seen and heard things as a result that I knew to be impossible, and had long, animated conversations with people I knew to be dead. Occasionally this altered perception still bleeds through into my sober life, rendering events and people as more grotesque, or more beautiful, than they could in reality be. Occasionally, my surroundings become altered almost beyond comprehension, peopled with living ghosts, phantoms and sirens.

  I’d managed to kick by acknowledging privately that my abstinence likely wouldn’t be permanent. I told myself that the next relapse would be different, though. Sensible. I’d take time out, draw the blinds and relax into it. Fully recover afterwards and wait another six months before I used again. And because this fantasy was what made my day-to-day sobriety possible, I nurtured it.

  At irregular intervals over the course of a year, I’d withdrawn small amounts of cash, which now added up to something more substantial. It would cover the tracks of how I paid for drugs if financial forensics ever looked closely. Before leaving my flat I’d gone to the bathroom and stared into the mirror for a moment, feeling my face warp and alter, even as I unscrewed the fixture and pulled it off the wall. I’d taken the black carrier bag that had been hidden, pressed flat behind it, and carried it to the car with me. Inside was the cash I’d saved and a simple lock-pick set. Drugs, burglary and lies. My only inheritance. Now, little more than an hour later, the bag was burning a hole in my pocket.

  It was still early, but the city was already bustling, and the heat felt incredible. Half weather, half malice. I was running down a Chorlton Street rumour. When I arrived, the coach station was busy and I walked inside, into a feeling of inescapable, repeating history.

  I’d always come here when I was running away.

  Usually with a pocket full of saved or stolen cash that had never quite been enough. As a boy I’d vanished from foster homes with this as my destination. The only fixed idea in my head. Sometimes I got as far as the next city, sometimes I was back in care before they noticed I was gone. I remembered oblivion nights, sleeping outside, waiting for the doors to open, and all of my first kisses, with girls, with drink, with drugs. I remembered running away here as a teenager, with the first love of my life, and coming to outside the next morning. The girl and the money were both gone, and she’d written a Dear John letter on my left hand in red biro.

  I found myself walking through all those old faces, now. Organized, optimistic people, taking trips. Reluctant, frazzled travellers, following work or family on to the next place. Stiff-limbed rough sleepers trying to look respectable enough to use the toilets, where they’d wash up as much as possible before being moved along. The endless ebb and flow of a major city. And unmistakable in the throng, all of the lovers running away.

  I took a seat facing the payphones, a rarity these days, and watched as a man raked them. He was a dilapidated, raw-faced destitute, walking painfully on one crutch. He pivoted to move, seemingly having lost the use of one side of his body, and there were so many tattoos on his neck that it looked like he wore a collar. When he reached a phone he felt inside the change slot then threw himself to the next one. Once finished, he exited the building, disappeared from view for a minute and reappeared at the door where he’d started. I watched him repeat this circuit a few times, always glancing over his shoulder in what a casual observer might have thought a twitch. When he next exited I stood, crossed the room and stuffed my rolled-up banknotes into the change slot of the first payphone.

  I sat down and waited.

  The man laboured back into the station thirty seconds later, wincing from step to step. When he put his hand into the coin slot, his face betrayed nothing different from the norm, and he palmed the cash with a dexterity that was impressive to see. He carried on, disappearing for another minute. When he came back around there was nothing outwardly different about him. He painfully approached the payphones, checked the slots and clicked out of the station on his crutch. I went to the first phone, picked up the receiver and dropped in a coin. I dialled my own number and let it ring. When there was no answer I hung up and heard the change fall into the slot. It didn’t make the precise rattle you’d expect, but a muted thud, as though on to something soft. I put my hand into the slot, took the bag that the man had left and exited the station.

  There were street dealers I knew, both personally and professionally, but I couldn’t use them. First of all, I’d needed something harder than speed. Secondly, I’d needed total anonymity. In this case, someone’s word or discretion wasn’t good enough. I sat in the car, feeling the weight of the powder in my pocket. I’d always believed that there was more to me, my personality, than people saw. That one day I might surprise them with a good turn, an unexpected act of kindness. The Stromers of the world would re-evaluate me as a person. Parrs and Sutty would see me as someone who could be trusted, relied upon, perhaps even promoted. I moved the rear-view mirror so I couldn’t see myself and pulled out into traffic. Sometimes you confound expectations, sometimes you grow into the thing that people think you are.

  8

  I drove to the Quays and parked outside Imperial Point, Oliver Cartwright’s building. When I killed the engine it was with a feeling of inevitability. Like I’d reached a destination that I’d been heading to for a long time. Everything outside the car was quiet, still, bathed
in light, but inside it I was tapping my fingers on the dash, looking up at the building.

  Cooking my brain.

  I hadn’t sampled the coke in my pocket, but felt a buzz in my left leg, a contact high just from knowing it was there. I felt the right-hand pocket, the outline of the lock-pick set. I took a breath, climbed out of the car and approached the entrance. I buzzed 1003 and waited.

  No one picked up.

  After a few minutes I saw a young woman coming through the lobby. When she opened the door I smiled, stood to one side and allowed her to exit. Then I walked through the main entrance, past the comatose man on the front desk, and directly into a lift. I pressed for the tenth floor, stepped out into the same air-conditioned corridor as before and went directly to 1003. Cartwright’s flat. I knocked, rang the bell and waited.

  Nothing.

  I put my index finger to the lock and applied some pressure. The loose pin-and-tumbler rattle was like music to my ears. I took the case from my pocket and unzipped it, revealing an abbreviated locksmith set inside. As a boy I’d been able to break front doors using nothing but found pieces of wire. I’d scrambled on to the roofs of buildings looking for weak spots, or spent minutes painstakingly pressing myself through narrowly open windows. Now I’d need the tools.

  I selected a small torsion wrench and raker and got to work.

  A pin-and-tumbler’s simple. A series of brass pins which occupy a locking cylinder, preventing its movement. A correctly inserted key raises these pins so the cylinder can turn sideways and click open. Picking’s an attempt to appropriate that same motion. The process took a little over a minute.

  There was no sound from inside.

  I entered the flat, moving quietly from room to room until I was sure it was empty. Then I approached the hardshell flightcase that I’d seen in the lounge on my first visit. I lifted it, testing the weight.