We sat among the poppies, and she occasionally reached out to hold my hand. She always held my hand when we sat together, whether it was to watch the football on the telly or having lunch in town, or at a film at the Odeon. I said to her, Sas, you know I love you, don’t you? And I turned to find she was gone. And I wasn’t holding her hand any more: I was holding my own. I started looking for her among the poppies, worried that in telling her I loved her I had chased her away from my life. And I saw something in the field, something redder than the flowers, if that was possible, and I ran towards it, knowing that it wasn’t just that I loved her, it was that I hadn’t loved her enough during the awful time when we were trying to get back on track after Rebecca had been killed. And before I reached the red, before I could determine its shape and its meaning…
I was shaken awake by a guard at Lime Street Station. It was getting on for ten in the morning, and I shivered on the platform, wiping my eyes, wishing that there was a bar or a pub open at this time of day. Wishing that I’d packed a jumper. Wishing that I’d even packed. Wishing that my mind wouldn’t betray me like that whenever I was asleep. Most of the people from the train had already disappeared through the ticket barrier, and the train was cooling on its tracks, catching its breath now the journey was over. Exactly what I should be doing myself. I’d had to leave my car at home because it would have stood out here and I also didn’t fancy coming back to it to find a solitary wing mirror remaining.
I stalked up to the concourse by the entrance to the station and looked out at Lime Street itself. Liverpool was wadded in mist. St George’s Hall, across the way, looked like a ruin from a ghost story, its exhaust-darkened columns failing to look real, as did anything – cars, buses, people – that streamed up and down the arterial road.
I went into a café built into the containing walls of the station and ordered a bacon-and-egg sandwich and a mug of coffee. I sat by the smeared windows and watched the buildings slowly reclaim themselves from the mist. It could as well have been the previous night, which I’d spent most of in a horrendous grease pit by Euston Station, nursing mugs of tepid tea and watching the cockroaches leave in droves, kvetching about the filth.
By the time I’d had my breakfast and another cup of coffee, I felt as if I might be fit enough to play a more prominent part in the morning. I walked down to the easyCar rental place on Paradise Street, and picked up the A-class Merc that I’d booked at the same time as buying my train ticket. Then I drove through the rush-hour traffic to a B&B I’d found out about on Marine Crescent, in Waterloo, a couple of miles north of the city centre. The woman running it, an old and starchy hen called May, seemed happy to see me even though I’d interrupted her in the middle of filling glass jars with what looked like raspberry jam. She scampered up three flights of stairs to show me my room. It was the usual B&B nightmare: florid pink wallpaper, threadbare moss-green carpet, knickknacks strewn all over the place (plastic dogs next to a brass alligator nutcracker; a ceramic plate of Princess Diana opposite a framed mirror etched with the Coca-Cola logo). She gave me the rundown on breakfast and checkout times, then bid me a good day and went back to her preserves.
I stretched out on the bed for a while and thought about Melanie. How her body had moved under the dress she wore as she walked back through the shadows and lights to her front gate. I thought about how much I’d have liked to further explore what that body moved like when it was dressed only in me. I wanted to call her but I didn’t want to appear too possessive. Instead, I wandered downstairs to the hallway and checked in the phone book for a name that I knew I wouldn’t find.
But there was a Geenan there. Geenan, J.
Whoever it was, they lived in Hope Street, back in the centre of town. I rang the number, unsure as to why my heart was beating so hard. A man answered, who sounded tired and broken. Like a man who has received too many kickings in his life and never known what it feels like to dole a few out instead.
I said, ‘Is Kara there, please?’
‘You cunt,’ he said. ‘You fucking cunt, leave me alone,’ and put the phone down.
I tried the number again but Geenan, J., just let it ring. I dialled the number of an old journalist friend of mine who worked on the Echo, a guy called Mike Brinksman, and arranged to meet him – late on, as it transpired, because he was up to his nuts in a red-hot story about a city councillor and an underage schoolgirl. The traffic had eased, and it only took me ten minutes, but by the time I got to Geenan’s address there was nobody in. The cathedrals at either end of the street seemed uncertain about how they should look; the remnants of the mist still clung to them and softened them into childish sketches.
I went round the back and looked through the window, but no luck. I knocked on the door next to his, and a fat bloke with white flesh wearing an off-white vest and a pair of blue tracksuit bottoms answered it. One hand was clamped around a pear, and his fingernails were crammed with filth. A dead cigarette was jammed in the corner of his mouth as he ate around it. The smell of hot fat and boiled vegetables breathed its way past him.
‘Do for you?’ he asked.
‘Next-door,’ I said. ‘Do you know where Johnny’s gone?’
‘Jimmy,’ he said.
‘Yeah, of course, I was thinking of his brother.’
‘I didn’t know he had a brother.’
‘Anyway,’ I said.
‘He’ll have gone to work,’ he said.
‘On a Sunday?’
The other guy took a bite out of his pear.
‘Quickest way there?’ I said. ‘What is it, do you reckon?’
‘The Docks? You’re having a laugh, arntcha?’ he said. ‘Not from around these parts, then?’
‘Used to be. Long time ago.’
‘Try the Mersey, then. You never know, you might find the Docks down there. Now, d’you mind, only I’m missing the footie.’
‘Which one is it? There’s bloody hundreds of them.’
‘Princes,’ he said, or I think he said, because the door was closed by then.
I found a car park on St Nicholas Place, in the shadow of the Royal Liver Building, and sauntered down to the riverside just as the foot ferry bound for Seacombe was puttering away from the landing stage. To my right, a path swept into Princes Parade, a sad, broken-down stretch of water surrounded by a great deal of dead land where once a number of unloading sheds and residential buildings had stood, all confined by the crumbling remains of the granite-rimmed dock wall. It was hard, as I walked down to the blasted industrial estate that existed there now, to imagine ships of any description inching in towards the jetties. A rowing boat would seem too grand for this place now, let alone the New York packets, or the cotton ships and traders that had swarmed in during the 1800s.
Someone was walking towards me, a man in a yellow reflective coat and a hard hat. He held a clipboard in his hands, but he obviously didn’t want to conduct a survey.
‘You, piss off. Now,’ he said. He had a face like Punch. His nose and chin were so close together I supposed that he had to push his mouth out to the side in order to kiss his boss’s arse. He got close enough for me to see the little bits of dried egg on his tie. He smelled faintly of Dettol.
‘I’m here to see a Mr Geenan.’
I find that if you slot that indefinite article in before a name, it gives your manner the kind of professional gloss you might otherwise be missing. Here’s me in jeans and a badly scarred leather jacket, hair needs cutting and a pair of suitcases under my eyes, but because I say ‘a Mr Geenan’, Eggy Tie’s on the back foot. He thinks I’m an undercover cop. Thinks I’m Inland Revenue. Health and Efficiency.
‘Jimmy?’ he said. ‘Jimmy’s busy. I’ll deal with it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No you won’t. It’s a delicate matter. Personal. I need to discuss it with Mr Geenan privately.’ I began to get my wallet out, to show him the unforgivably poor warrant card I’d made with a few crayons and a photo, but Eggy was already making cut-it-out gestures with h
is clipboard.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Jimmy’s over by the warehouse. He’s on the forklift. Tell him I said it was okay to take a break. If there’s anything I can do to help, I’ll be in the Portakabin over there.’
He went off, mincing prissily, his too-fat thighs rubbing together in a way that must generate too much heat, making you think he’d go up in flames if he wore the wrong kind of fabric or put on a burst of speed. Presumably thought he’d helped the cogs of justice to wheel around a little more freely. He’d soon be sitting in his Portakabin, studying his clipboard, while stewing in his juices over why I’d come to talk to Jimmy Geenan. I hate clipboards. Give someone a clipboard and they can’t help but start acting like an officious twatter. Even if the clipboard has nothing clipped to it but a piece of paper that says Don’t forget: bananas, dry cleaning.
The warehouse seemed to be void of anything that might need a forklift to deal with it. A few men in luminous yellow coats and hard hats sat around drinking tea, clipboard-free. You could feel the liberty, the goodwill. A couple of them smiled and nodded at me, but you could tell the ones who were obviously up for a clipboard soon. They scowled, their top pockets brimming with pencils. They played with their tape measures in a menacing fashion.
Jimmy Geenan looked as depressed as the buzzer on the reception desk of a hotel run by deaf people. He was wrapped in a heavy donkey jacket as he manoeuvred his forklift into position in front of a sad pile of pallets in one distant corner. Their cargo was obscured by thick layers of plastic wrap. Geenan’s hard hat, his thick black beard and unnecessarily large-lensed glasses gave him the air of someone trying to conceal himself from the public, as if all three belonged to a mask that he took off once he got home of an evening.
‘Mr Geenan?’ I said, as I approached, but either he was ignoring me or he couldn’t hear above the electric whine of the forklift’s engine. I stood in front of the forklift and raised my hand.
‘Excuse me, Mister,’ he called out, ‘but I’m trying to work here.’
‘My name’s Joel Sorrell,’ I said. ‘I rang you earlier. About a Kara Geenan?’
The indefinite article wasn’t impressing anybody this time. He moved the forklift forward, its tines extending on either side of me, until I was pressed back against the pallets.
‘I told you to leave me alone,’ he said.
‘Kara’s in London,’ I said. ‘I think she’s got something against me. Has she mentioned me to you at all? Joel Sorrell? Said anything to you about me? Why she’s got such a pain in the arse about me?’
What little I could see of his face was screwed up with either rage or incomprehension. He killed the engine and got down from his seat. He was a good three or four inches taller than me and his hands were balled into fists. The breadth of his combined knuckles could probably have been measured in feet.
‘I don’t want any trouble,’ I said. ‘I just want to find Kara.’
‘Yeah, well it’s too late for that. I don’t know who the fuck you are, or why you’re doing this to me, but I’m going to put a stop to it right now.’
He waded in, but it was fairly easy to step back, ducking under one tine of the forklift and keeping some distance between us. I showed him the gun and he went limp, his hands unfolding at his sides. They were shaking.
‘Why don’t you fuck off out of here, you little bastard,’ he said, and his voice was shaking too. He seemed close to tears.
‘Look, Mr Geenan, maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. I don’t mean to annoy you, and I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’ He gave a short, desperate bark of laughter. ‘But I really need to find Ka–’
‘Kara’s dead,’ he said, and the words dropped between us like tiny frozen fledglings falling from a nest. His face opened up, even as he said them, making him appear surprised. Maybe he was. It looked as if he had never uttered the line before. Footsteps behind me: half a dozen of Geenan’s workmates sloping over. No clipboards in sight. One of them was carrying a large wrench.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m in trouble. I’d like to talk to you about it. If you feel you can. I’m staying at the Seahorse Inn on Marine Crescent. Come and see me. I don’t mean you any harm, believe me.’
I started to move away. I don’t know if he’d caught any of what I’d said, because he had covered his face with his hands. His workmates were picking up the pace. One of them said, ‘Oi, wanker, come here,’ and I considered it for about as long as it took for a message to fly across my synapses to get the fuck out of Princes Dock.
11
I waited at the B&B for a few hours, but realised he wasn’t coming and who could blame him? I ran a bath and soaked for forty minutes, then I thought about changing for dinner and thought, sod it, and put on the jeans and shirt that I’d been wearing for the last week, and which were currently considering filing a formal complaint with social services for my maltreatment of them. I went out and found a chip shop and ate fish and chips at the dockside, looking out at the Wirral peninsula. If I was a poetic man, I might have said that it was being gradually flattened under a great convoy of black clouds that were shedding their load. But I’m not a poetic man, and it all just looked like a great heap of shit pressing down on another heap of shit. I wondered about Kara and why, if she was going to take an alias, she should take the name of a dead girl. It couldn’t just be a coincidence. I mean, how many Kara Geenans are there in the world? I reckoned maybe just the one. I only hoped that my Kara had known the real Kara personally. Less attractive was the prospect that she’d read about her death in the papers and just liked the name enough to pinch it for herself. Whatever, the Kara I knew was becoming less and less savoury in my eyes. In fact I was looking forward to seeing her again and finding out just what her fucking problem was.
Dinner over, I decided to leave the car in the car park near the B&B and walk back into town to shed the mega-calories I’d just taken on board. The gun was left in my bed, keeping it cold for me. When I arrived, I went for a cocktail in the basement bar of a big hotel and gave the brush-off to the prostitutes who latched on to me as I entered, complimented me on my jacket and asked if I wanted some company. They went away when I said, sure, but do you mind if we just talk? About my father? And his special needs? There were plenty of other poor dinks for them to work on.
There was some kind of science-fiction convention going on at the hotel, and everyone was wandering around saying ‘Klaatu’ to each other and comparing home-made phasers made out of dead Persil washing-up bottles. They wore name tags that said stuff like Epididymus, from the planet Vas Deferens. I finished up and got out quick, before I was energised into one of their bedrooms for some kind of anal-probe experiment.
It was still cold but the vodka martini had taken the edge off the chill. I went on a crawl through the pubs in the town centre, trying to work out how things had changed since my last visit here. I wasn’t due to meet up with Mike Brinksman for another couple of hours.
It was a little depressing to find that some of the pubs I’d liked, such as the Swan, had been closed down and earmarked for demolition. And drinking in the Grapes or the Vines proved a grim experience. There’s nothing worse than having a pint in a pub for old times’ sake only to find that it’s now just a pub, without any of the magic it contained when you were sitting around a table there with your best friends or a woman who was making the back of your neck hot. A pub you love isn’t so attractive when there’s nobody in it you recognise, beyond lots of other sour-faced thirty-somethings flailing around for the same thing.
At ten I made my way to the Philharmonic at the junction of Hope Street and Hardman Street, not a million miles away from Geenan’s place. I was determined to have another crack at him at home, without his hard-hat hard mates to back him up. I was a fifth of the way into a pint of lager when Mike came in.
I’d been at school with Mike Brinksman. He’d kicked further education into touch when he failed his A levels and got himself a job as a trai
nee reporter on the Runcorn World, a Mickey Mouse free weekly rag that wasn’t even based in the town it represented, but ten miles away. He’d spent two years there, earning eighty-five pounds a week, before lucking into a job at the Warrington Guardian, and thence to the Liverpool Echo, where he’d been ever since, apart from the occasional casual shift for one of the daily tabloids.
He looked tired. I got him a whisky and patiently listened to him outline the story about the councillor, while inside I seethed with the need to plug him about the killing in Liverpool. Once he’d got it off his chest, he relaxed, taking off his coat and losing some of the tension in his shoulders. He had very small, very blue eyes that appeared permanently surprised, in a face that was childishly round.
‘What brings you up here?’ he asked.
‘Rafa sees me as the new Luis Suarez,’ I said. ‘I’ve resisted up till now, but then Roy got on my case and told me I’d need a few matches to prove myself for England.’
‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I thought you were after information.’
‘Actually, now you mention it…’
We had another drink. I told him about Liptrott and the suspicion that it was linked to a murder committed five years previously in Merseyside.
‘Cause of death?’ Mike asked.
I shrugged. ‘I never got that far, but I saw the body. It looked as if he’d been opened up like a toddler’s Christmas present. I’d say loss of blood, but I couldn’t tell you which the fatal wound was.’
‘Knife, then?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh yes.’
‘I’ll ask around. I don’t remember it off the top of my head, but I’ll check the filed copies and talk to a few plods I get on with. Might be a bit tasty for me up here, anyway, if they’re going to reopen the files on it because your lot have got a hard-on for the killer.’
Dust and Desire Page 14
