Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  I know Keith, who runs the place, from way back when I first came to London in the early noughties. When I went solo, one of my first pay packets was courtesy of him, after I’d provided the evidence he needed that his wife was cheating on him. What he paid me was a fair whack, but nothing compared to what she had been siphoning from his bank account over the years.

  He gives me fifty per cent off the monthly rate for the smallest of his lockers, which is still big enough for, say, one of the larger widescreen TVs on the market, and thirty quid a month is no great drain.

  I was early – the place only opens after lunch on certain days of the week – so I sat in the Saab drinking illegally hot coffee from a cardboard cup, waiting for Keepsies to open. I asked myself some tough questions, there in the car, while I blistered the pulp of my lip. Chief among them: Joel, what the fuck is going on? I asked that of myself a few times, with increasing volume, but I didn’t scare any answers out of myself. A goodish-looking woman, a cry for help, a missing brother, a botched cosh job, a burgled flat, and a goodish-looking woman vanishing into thin air. She was the key, I reckoned. If I found her then everything would slowly unfold like a scrunched-up ball of cellophane. I hoped.

  I was startled out of my thoughts by Keith tapping the plastic stirrer from his own cup of coffee on my window. I got out and we shook hands. He asked me – through mouthfuls of his chicken and mayo sub, as we crossed the road to his warehouse – how things were going, and I said fine. He nodded grimly. He knows exactly what I’ve got locked up at his place, and it’s all credit to him because I could probably get him closed down if the police ever found out. I signed his register and left him at reception, telling him I’d only be a couple of minutes. Then I wandered off to find my cubicle, fishing the unmarked key from my pocket.

  In the cubicle was a scuffed brown-leather briefcase and a larger container, one of those solid Samsonite suitcases from, I believe, their Silhouette range. Very attractive silvery appearance, like brushed steel. I used another key to unlock this and took from it a paper envelope that contained three hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes. I skimmed off a hundred and folded it into my wallet. Replacing the envelope, I turned my attention to a soft canvas bag. From this I retrieved a gun, a 9mm Glock 17, the kind of weapon used by the police, and a box full of shells. After a long deliberation, I put the gun and the bullets back. Guns scare the shit out of me.

  Then I thought about the bashing I’d been given and took it out again. I had never fired it in my life. In fact I don’t know much more about that gun other than it makes a loud noise and kills people. I don’t know its history (I don’t want to know its history) but it has probably a very ugly past, since I came across the weapon in the bedroom of a teenage runaway who had overdosed on pure heroin. I thought the mother of the boy would be shocked enough by his death and his habit without discovering that he was carrying firearms around with him, too.

  There’s other stuff in the bag. Things I wouldn’t get shot at or arrested for. Pictures of Rebecca and me. Pictures of Sarah and me. Pictures of the three of us together, looking happy. I inspected one of them before I locked the cubicle and went back to Keith at reception, to sign out. Three smiles, all on the same 6x4: me, Rebecca and Sarah sitting in the garden in Lime Grove, just as the sun was going down. I can almost smell the buddleia, as well as the perfume on Rebecca’s throat. But whenever I see these photographs, whenever I think about those times, I’m not smiling.

  * * *

  I motored over to York Road, stopping off at my flat to check that Jimmy Two had done the work I needed. The makeshift door and padlock combo now looked more secure than what had preceded it.

  Inside the vet’s were three women, all of them collecting age hard, as if it was a hobby, and holding toy dogs on their knees in various states of tartan and shiveriness.

  ‘Morning, ladies,’ I said and, leaning on the receptionist’s desk, asked if Dr Henriksen was in.

  ‘I’m in, but I’m busy,’ she said, stepping out of her surgery. She was wearing a pair of surgical gloves which makes sense. But I wouldn’t have said anything either if she’d come out with a pair of goalkeeper’s mitts on. You don’t question the methods of people in medicine. Somehow, you just don’t. She was also wearing a short black skirt and a pair of barely black nylons that made a noise when she walked, which entered both ears simultaneously and came together in a hot melted knot at the centre of my head.

  ‘Hi Melanie,’ I said. ‘How’s Mengele?’

  The varicose jobs behind me audibly sucked in their breath at my mention of that name, and for the nth time I asked myself just what had been going through my head when I came to name my cat. Bitterness, probably – and the fuck-you bug that I’d been infected with since my teenage years.

  ‘Your cat,’ Melanie said, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the animal’s name, ‘is fine, as you well know. And he’s ready for you to pick up now.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘slight problem.’

  Dr Henriksen gave me a look over the oblong frames of her Calvin Klein glasses. A blade of brown hair swung out from behind her ear and hung alongside her deep red mouth. With a face like hers, who needs Zebra crossings?

  I could feel the wattles on the old dears behind me quiver as they strained to hear what I had to say.

  ‘Can I speak to you in private for a second?’ I said.

  I think she’s keen on me. I hope she’s keen on me. Sometimes she strikes me as someone who is merely humouring me, using me as a benchmark by which she can measure her connection to the human race, a way of keeping her oar in until such time as she feels she has spent too much time chasing the rewards of her career and decides to knuckle down and swap rings. Other times – just slivers of time, but slivers worth waiting for – she’s warm to me unlike any other woman I’ve known, including Rebecca. We’ve never made love. We’ve never even clashed teeth after a few too many Stellas at the Marylebone Bar and Kitchen. But there’s a change in her voice, her smile, the heart-stopping moments when her bottle-green eyes get tired of looking at mine and slip to check on my mouth for a beat or two. There’s some electricity between us: enough to keep me interested.

  I closed the door behind us, once she’d ushered me into her surgery. I could imagine the ecstasy of rolled eyes as I ducked past her to enter. On the operating table was a tortoise. We regarded each other for a moment – the tortoise even nodded – before it went back to looking sullen and daydreaming about lettuce, or roller skates, or whatever.

  ‘Go through to the back,’ she said. ‘My office.’

  ‘I’m in a bit of a tight spot,’ I said, as I pushed on through to a tiny room that, until Mengele had been deposited there, had been dominated by an ancient IBM computer and a pot plant.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. She plugged in the kettle and raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Tea?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said. Mengele hissed at me, then looked up at Melanie Henriksen for approval. ‘Anyway, yeah, a tight spot.’

  ‘Mm,’ Melanie said. I had only known her for six months, but it was enough for her to have learned to grade my bullshit. If there were Pyrex containers for it, mine would be in one bearing the label: Very poor.

  I blew out my cheeks and widened my eyes to illustrate just how very tight my tight spot was.

  ‘The answer’s yes,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to ask me.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘would you be kind enough to massage my buttocks? With olive oil?’

  ‘Try the question that was on your mind first.’

  ‘Believe me, that was the que–’

  She gave me a slow blink. ‘The other question. Try the other question.’

  ‘Well, I was burgled and the flat’s in a state and I just need you to look after Der Todesengel for me – just for a few days.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘happy to. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll muddle through.’

  She shook her head. She looked pretty disgusted with me
, but in a nice way, if you can believe it.

  ‘I have enough space at my flat. I have a very large sofa.’

  ‘I couldn’t impose–’

  ‘You are imposing, so you might as well take advantage. It’s no problem.’

  She jotted her address down on a pink Post-it and adhered it to my nose. ‘I’ll be in after seven tonight.’

  ‘Melanie–’ I began. I must have been getting a bit gooey-eyed because she shooed me out, and quite right too. I gave Mengele’s chin a rub first, and I nodded at the old dears and their shivery dogs. Then I got in my car and drove to Westminster.

  It started to rain on the way but I wasn’t too bothered about that. I was busy thinking, why couldn’t I have been burgled before now?

  7

  I parked a little way up the road from the Paviours Arms. I don’t like situating myself directly outside the building I’m aiming for. Even my own gaff, I park a hundred metres or so further along the road. Things shouldn’t be too cosy, too convenient. Even when it’s chucking it down. Things are too sweet, you start to ease off. You find, when you need it most, your edge has turned into a curve, and a big soft one at that.

  It was busy in the pub, but then it was getting on in the afternoon, on a Friday, and the suits were in a rush to get slaughtered. You could see the ones who had been here since lunchtime as they’d taken over the sofas, and their tables were audibly complaining under the weight of so much glass. I pushed past the acres of cheap jackets and women in black (why is it so many women in offices wear black, and nothing but? They must curse Marlboro for not doing black packs, or pray that John Player might become trendy some time soon) and, using two portly men at the huge bar as a mangle, fed myself through to the weary barmaid. I ordered a pint of Stella and, shielding my drink as best I could, jinked slow-motion over to the one space in any pub where you are unlikely to find anyone standing: the square inch by the gents’ toilet. Behind me was a space dedicated to food, and I sneered at the ranks of loosened ties as they tucked into their fish and chips and shepherd’s pies. A pub was for drinking. It ought to smell of spilled beer and urinal pucks, not of vinegar. Crisps, pork scratchings, peanuts: fair enough, because you need something salty to help your beer down. But meals? In a pub? Christ, it brings me out in hives.

  I forced my attention back to the scrum to see if Kara Geenan was around, but that would have been just too dashed lucky. A guy with a bunch of keys as big as a football attached to his belt appeared behind the bar and spent some time chatting to another guy at one end, who was sipping a pint of Guinness. I was about to set off on another life-threatening trek to the north face of the bar, when Big Keys disappeared into the back. Nathan, I thought and, by way of congratulating myself for such sterling deductive reasoning, drained my glass and went in search of another pint.

  I took my time with that one, because I could feel the buzz from the cocktails getting their second wind. I watched the various pockets of execs and secs and no-necks flirt and argue and play their little power games, all the while grateful that I’d bailed out of the great career jet just after take-off. I was no more a true policeman than a badger is an Olympic-class ice-dancer. It didn’t help that the helmet was an embarrassment and the pay – for wandering around in a uniform that might as well have had the words ‘HATE ME’ daubed on the back – was staggeringly awful. At least now, although my money situation was even more staggeringly awful, I could wear plain clothes, fall out of bed on my say-so and swear 24/7 at the boss. I had to make a go of what I was doing and, to a certain extent, I did. Fear drove me, more than anything else. Fear that I’d end up in an office wearing Homer Simpson ties and emailing the guy sitting two inches to my left to ask him if he had any spare paper clips I could borrow.

  When Rebecca died (when Rebecca was killed, when she was killed), a couple of months before Sarah went missing, it made it all the easier for me to hand in my notice at the Met. If they hadn’t accepted my resignation they would have sacked me within six weeks, because I had gone into something of a decline. I drank a lot, I stopped shaving, I stopped washing. I stopped caring. Because what I cared about wasn’t there any more. And maybe that thought, filling my mind like a black sun, blinding me to anything else, meant that Sarah’s leaving became inevitable. She must have noticed how much I marginalised her when I was trying to deal with what had happened. And I was writing on a very small page, so of course she was going to fall off the edge. What I cared about, a big chunk of what I cared about, was still there, but my wallowing wouldn’t allow me to see it like that. How must she have been feeling? I never asked. I still don’t know. I’m too scared, too much of a chicken to even begin to guess. Instead, I tried to find other Rebeccas in bars so dark that even a passing resemblance was enough for me. When I woke up next to them in the morning, I left before they could ask me if I really meant what I’d said, and if something that happened so fast really could be it. And Sarah witnessed it all. I wasn’t The One for anybody (I should have been, first and foremost, to my daughter) and I felt like that for a long time, until Keith pulled me out of the mire and asked me to spy on his wife.

  Since then I’d done some gritty, shitty jobs, but every one of them rates a ten next to the zero involving cheap, crease-free shirts and an hour for your lunch. I’d done mobile, static and covert surveillance; traced witnesses, fleeing debtors and missing persons; investigated insurance claims; executed company searches and pre-employment checks. I’ve proved infidelities. I’ve been punched, shot at (admittedly with an airgun), run over, and now I’ve been clouted around the loaf with a cosh. I’ve waded through each and every different type of manure, and at the end of it I’ve taken my shoes off and cleaned them without a peep of complaint. The worst thing about this type of work is the hanging around, and following that is having to listen to the inane gas that flies out of people’s mouths while you’re hanging around. You have to listen to a lot. And I was listening to it now.

  Two gym-slim blokes. One in a green woollen three-piece, one in a navy pinstripe silk-mix, a pair of Loewe shades resting on his head. Both of them, you could tell, played squash, or badminton, every lunchtime and the sense of competition was deep and hot inside them, like bile eating up their insides. They were now playing I’ve been to more places than you, and each sentence, more or less, began like this: ‘When I was in Mogadishu…’

  The jaw-clench-per-minute ratio was sky-rocketing.

  ‘If you’re ever in Warsaw,’ Silk-Mix was saying, ‘you have to stay at the Hotel Bristol. How could you not? I mean, it was opened by Maggie Thatcher, but don’t let that put you off.’

  Three-Piece took a big, punctuative swallow of his Strongbow and, nodding, replied: ‘I won’t go to Nigeria again, no way. I got shot at. That really put me off the place. Billy clubs studded with nails. People carrying them in the street.’

  Silk-Mix: ‘You know, some years ago I was in Sierra Leone. Believe it. The most dangerous place on Earth. The front line was between two villages and they’re called, you’ll never guess, Somerset and Winston. Believe it. That’s why there were British troops over there. That’s the only reason.’

  Nathan appeared at the bar again. I think he had added to his keys in the hour or so since he was gone. He was walking with a fucking list. I pushed unsteadily past Three-Piece and said to them: ‘In Morecambe they’ve got this pub with a sign that says “No nuclear weapons”, yeah. No, really.’

  God, I was more pissed than I’d given myself credit for. ‘Nathan,’ I called out, approaching the bar. ‘Nate. Nat. Natters.’

  He was looking at me as though I had just sold his grandmother for a handful of turds. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but you know somebody who knows me – which makes us virtually related. Let’s go on holiday.’

  ‘I think you’ve had enough to drink. Why don’t you put your pint down and leave.’

  ‘Kara Geenan,’ I said.

  There might have been the slightest hardening of his sta
re, but he handled it beautifully.

  ‘I said you’re drunk,’ he said. ‘Leave. Now.’

  Punters were now clearing a space at the bar. Maybe they’d seen this kind of thing in here before. What was he going to do? Lash me with his Chubbs? The gathering silence helped clear my head a little. He was coming around the bar and, up close, I could see he was no slouch. What I had perceived as flab was really part of a very hard gut. There was no give anywhere on him. He didn’t try to look dangerous, like the soft ones do. He looked laid-back and affable. Which obviously meant he could twist me into pretzel shapes without breaking sweat.

  He took my hand and very gently manoeuvred it up my spine until I was bent double with pain. He got down low too, and murmured something in my ear. Then he let me go and I acted like a good boy and went outside. Five minutes later he was where he promised me he’d be.

  The taxi rank on the corner of Regency Street and Horseferry Road was quiet at this time of night, this no-time in between people going out after work and stumbling home once the bars and clubs are closed. A couple of cabbies were taking advantage of the slow period to catch up on their red-tops or their zeds. A fine rain had begun to fall, and was misting the scuffed cellulose of the taxis like hoarfrost. Nathan was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the moon as it skidded along the roofs of the apartment blocks on Victoria Street. I stretched, feeling blackspots of pain break out all over my body, and waited for something to happen.

  ‘She’s nothing to do with me,’ he said at last.

  ‘Why so defensive?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not being defensive. I just don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘she’s plenty to do with you. She’s a looker. She’s been seen at your boozer, stuck to your arm like a plaster cast. I don’t want the sticky details. I just need to find her. Is she at your place?’

  ‘Why do you need to find her?’