Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  18

  There used to be a good little bookshop up towards Camden Lock. Compendium, it was called. You could buy all these weird literary ’zines and books about fetishes, American paperback editions, lots of odd stuff: highbrow texts and sleaze so low it must have been just this side of criminal. And then it closed down to make way for something abysmal, just another cliché shop in the row of overpriced clichés that Camden High Street was turning into. Even the people who came here at the weekend for the market became different. They dressed in shabby-chic clothing or peasant gear, or as Goths, but you knew when they went home they’d get back into their jeans and Travis T-shirts. There’s a Wagamama in Camden now. That says it all.

  It was just shy of six when I reached the top of Camden High Street, just where it morphs into Chalk Farm. A couple of clubbers in gear that at 2 a.m. would have looked rad now merely made the people wearing it look raddled. They were eating slices of pizza they’d bought from God knows where, while walking silently back to twelve hours of kip. One of those motorised roadsweeps was redistributing the litter more evenly across the roads and pavements, and a garbage-disposal truck was emptying bins that nobody bothered to use.

  There was a newsagent’s just opening, and a café that looked as if it had never closed. It would have been nice to buy a paper and read it over a coffee, but my mind wasn’t up to anything that wasn’t Melanie Henriksen. I knew that if I didn’t sort something out before the morning was over, then I’d collapse, unable to wake up again until long after she’d been plugged and left to cool.

  I compromised by swapping the last of my shrapnel for a takeaway espresso, which I guzzled while crossing the road to the tattoo parlour opposite the warren of stalls and boutiques that make up Camden Market. Hib’s Tats, the place was called. Tattoos announced another sign in the window, in dead neon over three boards of photos depicting the sore, red-edged patterns that people had acquired in Phil Hibbert’s needle-and-ink surgery minutes before those pictures were taken. Above the display window was a black space, curtains drawn.

  The coffee had slapped me around a bit, so I kicked at the door and jammed the heel of my hand down on the buzzer, until the black space of Hibbert’s bedroom window became a nicotine-coloured space and the window opened.

  ‘Fucking lay off it, will you? Crack of fucking dawn.’ How the words got past that expanse of beard, I’d need a degree in physics to work out.

  ‘Phil Hibbert,’ I said.

  ‘Correct. Well done. Now get to fuck.’

  ‘Open up. It’s the police.’

  ‘My arse.’

  ‘Do you want to open this door, or do I break it down? Makes no odds to me.’

  ‘Fucker.’ But he shut the window and a few minutes later a light came on in the hallway, and I heard him stomping down the stairs.

  He was swearing again before he’d even got the door open, but that all faded away when he saw the gun I was pointing at his guts.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Get your teeth married and let’s get indoors before my finger gets too cold and needs a work-out.’

  We went into the shop front, where his catalogues were stacked with pictures of butterflies and dragons and tribal symbols. There was the smell of nervous sweat and dead cigarettes in the walls. Plastic chairs were arrayed around this waiting room, and there was even a small table covered in magazines: copies of New Woman and FHM from the late 1990s.

  ‘Let’s go into your surgery,’ I said.

  ‘You look like shit,’ he said.

  ‘What’s your frame of reference, pubis?’ I said. ‘That remark might hurt if you meant anything to me. As it is, I haven’t met you before in my puff, and I don’t expect to again. Unless you fancy going face-to-face with me in court. So let’s get this over with, so we can get back to where we were before, hmm? Me outside, breathing fresh air, and you in your pit, feeling up your so-called dick. And both of us a lot happier.’

  I sat on the edge of his treatment table. His tattoo gear was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he kept it in a little black briefcase and got it out with a nasty little flourish, like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want? There’s no need to play hard bastards.’

  ‘I’m a private detective,’ I said with a start, noticing one of my business cards pinned to a cork board filled with local adverts on the wall behind his head. ‘What I want is for you to do me a very great favour.’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘Just what I wanted to hear.’ My stomach rumbled. ‘Look, you don’t have anything to eat, do you?’

  ‘For you, after that graceful entry? You can eat the winnets off my arsehole.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I’m starving.’

  He reached around the back of a desk and pulled out a packet of biscuits, which he handed over, reluctantly. I could have thrown the gun away and asked him to marry me there and then, if it weren’t for the beard. I devoured a couple and, as the sugar kicked in, my eyes sprang apart as if I’d been dunked in ice-cold water.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, feeling better, the need for sleep retreating for a while. ‘Okay, this is what’s happened. You had a visit from a friend of mine. Bloke called Errol, he could fit me and you into his trouser pockets – yeah, I see you know who I’m talking about. Now, I know he shook you down pretty vigorously, but Errol, he’s thicker than two poodles. What he forgot to ask you about our pal Gary Cullen was, where was he going for this treatment of his?’

  ‘Spitalfields,’ Hibbert said, quicker than a kid in class trying to win a gold star.

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘If you could bung me an address, then I could leave you in peace. As opposed to leaving you in pieces.’

  He didn’t hang around admiring my wit. He said, ‘Spitalfields Market. Basement of the Elegant House. It’s some kind of airy-fairy gaff sells scented candles, soap with bits in it, herbs. You know the stuff. Gary told me he used to come out of there smelling like a whore’s drawers.’

  Fatigue slammed down on me. I don’t know if it was because I felt I was suddenly in charge of how things might turn out, that for the first time I had the upper hand over Kara Geenan, but my body seemed to give in a little, to flag under the weight of adrenaline that was spewing through my veins. I sat down in his dentist’s chair and the light swam around my head. I saw him move across the plane of my vision, his beard like some dirty cloud spoiling the view. The gun was heavy in my hand, so I put it down and took off Gary Cullen’s jacket. The light was turning into liquid, drops of brilliant water that wouldn’t fall and just kept rilling around on the ceiling. Hibbert rolled up my sleeve and wiped the biceps of my left arm with alcohol. From somewhere he produced what looked like a pen with a lead attached to it. His beard parted and I fixed on its pink, wet centre.

  ‘I don’t…’ I said.

  A tongue flickered from the end of the needle, black and bifid. I felt its heat against my skin, and then all I knew was the buzzing, and his beard turned into a swarm of flies and I could see nothing beyond that.

  * * *

  I woke up and the light was gone. No, not gone. Different. It didn’t have the watery edge of before. I sat up and a blanket fell away from me. I reached for the gun and it wasn’t there. I pulled my sleeve up and I was slightly disappointed to find the skin had not been broken. Sunlight painted a square of gold on the drab wall of the parlour. Late sunlight. Very late. I felt my guts clench and I stood up groggily, reaching out for a hand or a rail that wasn’t there.

  Stumbling across the room, I got to the parlour to find Hibbert in there, his needle working on a red-haired woman. She was having a spider’s web across her breasts.

  ‘Look,’ she said, when she saw me, ‘tit for tat!’

  I ignored her. You would, too. ‘Hibbert, what the fuck did you do?’ I said. My voice felt gummed up and untrustworthy.

  ‘I did nothing. You blacked out. It was like someone reached inside you and pulled your plug. You must have been burn
ing the candle at both ends with a flame-thrower.’

  ‘I’m in a rush,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have–’

  ‘I know, but you sparked out and there was no kicking you awake. I tried, believe me.’

  ‘Where’s my gun?’

  His beard moved; I could imagine his jaw hardening beneath it. ‘I don’t think you should… I took it off you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it looks that way, doesn’t it? So give it back.’

  ‘Guns,’ he said. ‘People who use guns…’

  ‘There’s a killer loose,’ I said. ‘He’s killed at least three people. And he’s got someone I care about and if I don’t find him, he’ll kill her too. If he hasn’t already. And there’s no way I want to go up against him with nothing more deadly than the piss in my dick.’

  The woman laughed. Hibbert withdrew his needle and gave her a look. She quietened down and he went back to work. In the shade of the hallway, his own tattoos writhed around his arms as if they’d been imbued with life.

  ‘So call the police,’ he said.

  My eyes filled up with red. When they cleared again, I had my hand wrapped around his chin mullet, and I was smacking his head down against the bone in my knee. The woman was sitting back on the chair, lifting her boob up for a closer look. I felt awake and refreshed. While I was putting dents into his head, I thanked him for lending me his blanket. He was making noises, the same noise over and again.

  ‘Now where’s the gun?’ I said. And then I realised that the noise he’d been making for the past few minutes was the answer.

  ‘…thedeskthedesk…’ he was wailing.

  I let go of his beard and he dropped to his knees. Blood from his nose was making the beard look more and more like something mankind should never have evolved. I retrieved the gun from the desk drawer and stepped over him. ‘Shave it off,’ I suggested. ‘You can always tattoo it back on.’

  * * *

  Melanie Henriksen was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair. She was naked. Her flesh was white except for the deep gash of red that opened her torso. The tiny, caramel-brown mole that sat midway along her right clavicle looked as enticing as it had when I’d left her at her doorstep the other night. It was the best way of identifying her, since whoever had killed her had stolen her head.

  No.

  I had to keep hold of the hope that she was alive. I sat in the back of the taxi, fuming silently at the traffic on the City Road and trying not to allow the black tidings of my thoughts to gain a foothold. The old guy who was driving was on his phone now, talking about Chelsea versus Everton. He waved a woman in a Corsa on to the main road from an adjacent street. I realised I was squeezing my fist too tightly when I saw four tiny crescents of blood across my palm. The next time the taxi stopped, I opened my door and then I opened his door.

  ‘What the bleed–’

  He was on the ground, his hand still wrapped around his phone, and it was all I could do not to stamp him into the tarmac.

  Rein it in, I thought. Use it on someone who deserves it.

  I got behind the wheel and took the car up on to the pavement, sent the needle up to a number that started people screaming. Car horns blared at me, just drivers full of hot air wishing they had the stupidity gland that allowed me to do what I was doing. No police on the City Road, thank fuck. Not for now, anyway.

  I’m a good driver. I’ve never had an accident, never had any points on my licence. When I was a kid, I was a member of the Tufty Club.

  A woman coming out of a second-hand clothes shop, pushing a buggy. Kid in it wearing one of those humiliating jester’s hats, the kind that make them grow up into granny-batterers. Hard right, just avoiding her, and half on to the road again, skinning the cab against the passenger doors of London’s patient motorists. Guy on the radio saying that in the capital, you lucky people, we’re looking at some very early spring weather coming our way, just for a short while. Now here’s three in a row from Céline Dion.

  Cyclist. Hard left, back on to the pavement. Take out a couple of saplings and a litter bin. Plastic tables outside a grotty café become pretty, but impractical, sky furniture. I save the locals from buying bruised or unripe fruit from the greengrocer’s by ploughing through his stall. I’m standing on the pedal and leaning on the horn. It feels as though my arse hasn’t touched the seat since I got behind the wheel. All I need now is a couple of blokes carrying a huge pane of glass to walk out in front of me, and I’ve got the set. If the traffic doesn’t ease up soon, I’m going to kill someone and that must not happen. That will not happen.

  Down on London Wall, the traffic did become less of a bitch. I pushed the taxi at fifty to Bishopsgate, and turned north. Opposite Liverpool Street station, I took a right and parked along Brushfield Street. I got out of the car and hurried towards the old Spitalfields Market. The unseasonal spring weather we were just being promised wasn’t here yet; the sunshine earlier hadn’t possessed the muscle to last the entire day. Rain was coming in hard from the west, black fists of cloud rising in readiness to hammer the city once again. By the time I reached the archway leading into the market, the first spits were coming. The sky felt close. The colour in the Christmas decorations hanging from the entrance had turned to lead, and darkness was being trowelled thickly on everything. I tried to swallow, but the wetness had gone from my throat. I sucked in some deep breaths and tried to think rationally.

  I ducked into a phone booth and rang Jimmy Two. Jimmy Two, as mentioned earlier, is a mate of mine, the younger brother of Jimmy One, a nasty piece of work who’s in Wandsworth doing a stretch for armed robbery. I’ve no idea what their surname is. Jimmy Two is all right, though. He has a garage out on the Cally Road, but he loves my motor more than I do and he promised to pop round to Berners Street to slip a new tyre on her within the hour. I told him that if he could get the car over to me in E1, I’d keep him in whisky for the next six months. No problem, said Jimmy Two. I almost asked him if he wanted to come in with me on what I was about to do, but that would have been pushing it a bit. And, anyway, the clock was ticking.

  Spitalfields Market was pretty much dead. It only really came to life at the weekends, when the stalls and the shops were filled with people looking to buy lamps and mirrors and candles, or kicking back at the lunch areas or having a beer. There were a couple of games of football taking place on the five-a-side pitches, though, so the occasional shout, cheer or insult echoed around the enclosure. I turned right and walked past a shop that sold cast-iron beds. Next-door was a second-hand bookshop. And next to that was the Elegant House. I hung back, although it appeared that the shop was empty. A fat padlock was looped through the front-door handles. A sign above the lock read: Closed for three weeks. Holiday.

  In the windows were displays for calligraphy pens and coloured inks in tiny, attractive bottles. Orange fake-fur cushion covers were piled up behind them, along with vases made out of twisted glass in electric blue. The smell of the soap seeped out of the cracks in the door, a heady mix of lavender and sandalwood. It was a beautiful display. I waited for another vociferous outburst from the artificial pitches, then put the butt of the gun through the window. Quickly, I hacked out as much of the glass from the window frame as I could and ducked into the shop. The smell of the soap was much stronger now, and I had to fight the urge to sneeze. I stood in the gloom for a while, hunched over, listening out for any noise to signal that there was someone in here, but nothing happened. There were stairs leading to a basement office. A sign at the top said KayGee Karma, with an arrow in red felt-tip pen pointing downwards. I followed it.

  At the bottom of the stairs there was a small seating area and, behind a partition, a desk with a couple of books on it, and a stool on either side. On one of the white walls was a picture of a heron standing by a river, with a fish speared on its beak. Beneath it was some certificate of authenticity regarding Kara Geenan’s proficiency as a hypnotherapist. I ought to get her to do me a warrant card, it was so good. I checked the drawers of
the desk but they were locked. There was a door behind the desk. I went to open it but it was locked. Down here, the sounds I was making died pretty quickly, so I thought fuck it, fuck it, and kicked the bastard in. A frightened human smell sprang out at me, backed up by the sour reek of organic waste. I scrabbled for a light and threw the switch.

  A pale bulb shone at the centre of the ceiling, illuminating some kind of storeroom containing tons of junk: broken brushes and dustpans, old posters rolled up and secured with elastic bands, chipped plant pots, a deckchair speckled with cigarette burns. There was a tall metallic cabinet filled with receipts and invoices. To the rear of the storeroom, where the light bulb was having trouble penetrating the dark, something was moving under a large mound of hessian sacking.

  I switched off the safety on the Glock and edged forward, tiptoeing around the mounds of furniture and bric-a-brac. I couldn’t breathe, but then I realised that was because I wasn’t trying any more. She was speaking, and I heard her voice but, in the moment before I recognised it, I didn’t want to recognise it. I wanted to shoot her in the head without pulling back the sacking. And then I wanted to run away, run until I’d worn the soles off my boots, run until I ran out of land. Do her and go, I urged myself. You don’t want to see her, not if she’s speaking like that.

  ‘Anything,’ she was saying in a broken, dispirited voice. ‘I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything. Just don’t kill me.’

  I tugged off the sack and it was bad, but you manage. You have to deal with it. You might say ‘I can’t bear it’, or ‘I can’t go on’, but then you do, despite it all. You have no choice. What’s behind the closed door bothers you only for as long as it’s closed. I untied the bloody string around her wrists and helped her to her feet. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. Shit and piss drizzled off her naked thighs. The bleach that had turned her hair white had burned into her forehead and neck. Her mouth was bruised and dry, like a sliver of dried aubergine, and her eyes wouldn’t fasten on anything. She was shaking. So was I.