by Neil Cross
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Mr. In-Between
Neil Cross
1
Adrenochrome
When the man was dead, Jon was compelled to tidy up the mess he’d made in the process of killing him. Because the man had put up something of a struggle there was a fair amount of furniture to be straightened, photographs uprighted and pillows to be fluffed, which he went about with efficient detachment born of a sense of contractual and personal obligation. He knew that little touches, insignificant in themselves, could be surprisingly effective in context of the whole. It was a question of presentation.
When the flat was tidy, he took the corpse beneath the armpits and hauled it with some difficulty into an armchair. Then he set about doing to it exactly what the Tattooed Man had asked. It took a long time and considerable skill. When it was done he stood, wiping the blade of the scalpel on the arm of a chair, walked to the kitchen on stiff legs and washed his hands in cold water, soaping them with washing-up liquid. On the squeezy plastic bottle there adhered a yellow price sticker, its legend blurred beyond legibility, corners curled to reveal its white underbelly. Returning to the living room he stuffed his things into a small army-surplus rucksack. He picked up the tape recorder which sat on the coffee table, rewound the cassette then replaced it. He took care to balance on top of the cassette player the printed card that read ‘Play Me’ in such a way that it would not be toppled by a draught.
He took a moment to scrutinise the result. The Tattooed Man had asked for something besides a compensatory death. He wanted to open perceptual doors for those in whose honour it had been conceived. He wanted them to sleep with the lights on for the rest of their lives.
Jon pulled on his overcoat, slung the bag over his shoulder and left the flat. He walked down three flights of steps and out on to the street. He paused to nod hello to a smartly dressed old woman who passed him on the threshold, her face smooth and fragrant with powder that had made a small stain on her Burberry scarf. He lit a cigarette and began to make his way home.
By the time he had settled on the train the amphetamines he had injected that morning were beginning to wear off: his upper arms began to twitch and his spit felt thick and sticky. He removed a pewter hip flask from an inside pocket, took a swig, winced, replaced it, then awkwardly opened a newspaper across his knees. Smoking and drinking and reading about murder and corruption and celebrity, sex and money and fame, he whiled away the journey. By the time the train pulled into the station, he was beginning to feel better.
Although the station was three miles or more from where he lived he decided to walk, putting off the amphetamine comedown and its paradoxically restless ennui. The city centre was bathed in a dirty sodium halo. He walked past taxi ranks and multi-storey car parks that gradually gave way to the area he called home. Decaying Victorian tenements circled in a slow vortex towards a brutal, atavistic henge of tower blocks. This was where the classes merged. Pubs and wine-bars stood at different faces of the same corner. The stench of kebabs drifted in malodorous eddies past Italian restaurants. Puke stains on grey doorsteps.
He knew that his house would have been a disappointment to anybody who suspected the nature of his profession. The professional killer of the popular imagination lived in splendour just the wrong side of vulgarity: luxurious white fur and black leather, high windows, chrome accessories thrown in for the express purpose of reflecting cruel, passionless features. Mirror-lensed sunglasses and elegant cheekbones. Distantly, he found this amusing.
He lived in a converted three-bedroomed terraced house whose scrupulous order, sharp lines and hygienic soullessness invited notions of a meticulous and ordered mind. It existed in a continuum of timeless stasis, of preservation. It was free of dust because it was devoid of life. There was a monolithic television, a stereo almost ostentatious in its minimalism. There was an armchair and a sofa. There were neat bookshelves, each book with an unbent spine. Perfect and unread.
It was showroom neat but had none of the essence of the new, of the carefully chosen statement of status. It was odourless and the light it contained was ancient, the quiet light of a deserted attic, where there are no eyes to employ it.
He let himself in, took off his overcoat, hung it in the hallway, walked into the living room and sat in a black leather armchair which, like many of his possessions, had been a gift from the Tattooed Man, who genuinely seemed concerned at his lack of interest in the little luxuries. From his pocket he took a short, silver tube with a spherical end the circumference of a pencil and laid it on the coffee table parallel to a mirror with an ironically elaborate frame, another obscure whim of the Tattooed Man. From the same pocket he removed a self-sealing plastic bag and tapped on to the mirror a small pile of amphetamine sulphate, which he arranged into two lines with a razor blade. He snorted the powder through the tube and sat back, wincing and sniffing. In time the speed entered his bloodstream and charged his viscera with palpitating energy. He picked up the mirror, stared at the reflection of his eyes and said his name. The personality that the name belonged to stared silently from deep within the blackness at the back of his eyes, which were the wrong eyes. They had the unspecific mildness of a kitsch Christ rendered in Catholic tat. While his face was sombre and inanimate, these eyes reflected back at him the tentative self he adopted whenever he stepped outside this lifeless mausoleum. He was neither particularly suited to the social milieu he chose to haunt, nor particularly unsuited. He was seldom first to get in a round, never the last, neither irritatingly witty nor lumpenly dull. He affected vague support for a football team. He never told jokes, but laughed or groaned or grimaced as necessary at the jokes of others. Even mean drunks did not become jealous if he engaged their wives in conversation, and women did not fantasise about him, even when fantasy cast-lists were stretched to desperate limits. The memory of him seemed to slip from the consciousness as if he had never fully occupied it. He registered on the cornea but slid from the cortex.
Only once had somebody enquired what he did for a living. It was during the blue last-orders haze of a Friday evening, before the Chinese take-away and a sweating, football-song stagger to some house to view a forgettable, pornographic horror movie.
Fat Dave, fresh from a diatribe about Pakis (he wasn’t a racist mind you, there were some smashing Pakis about), drew on the soggy stub of a cigarette, leaned his elbow in a pool of warm lager and said, ‘What about you, then, Jonny? What is it you do, again?’
Jon took the cigarette from Dave’s hand, drew on it, handed it back and said, ‘I’m an assassin, Dave.’
Gordon the Gofer spat lager in a wide, briefly iridescent fan, wiped his lips and said, ‘Oh yeah? Pays well does it?’
Jon nodded seriously and said, ‘I do all right.’
‘Tax free as well, I expect,’ suggested Jagger, luxuriating in his wit.
Jon nodded. ‘Unless MI5 ever ask me to do a job.’
‘Oh yeah? They do that, do they?’
‘Not as yet. But you never know.’
The bell rang last orders and, pausing on his way to get a final round, Jagger said, ‘How do you do it, then—offer to buy them a drink and wait for them to die of boredom?’
‘Or surprise,’ added Fat Dave.
‘I’ve got a couple of targets for you,’ suggested Nelson gamely. He had recently suffered the ignominy of his wife running off with an older, fatter and poorer man, resulting in the widespread and oft-voiced conclusion that said man was hung like a carthorse and went at it like a pneumatic drill.
‘I expect he gives a discount for mates,’ said Dave
.
‘Only for bulk orders,’ said Jon.
‘Hurry,’ said Nelson morosely. ‘This offer must end soon.’
The conversation steered inevitably to a discussion of public figures deemed worthy of murder. It was generally agreed that there were not a few, although Fat Dave’s quite disproportionate loathing of and apparent wish to systematically mutilate John Noakes was the cause of some concern. By the time the subject of discussion had moved off at a tangent, the question of Jon’s employment had been forgotten, and aside from a short-lived fashion for referring to him, obscurely, as the Avon Lady, was not mentioned again.
Eighteen months after the conversation had taken place, the cuckolded Nelson murdered his runaway wife and her sexually precocious lover. He was picked up by the police the following morning, still drunk, waiting alone outside the George and Dragon for it to open. There was a bloodstained hammer on the back seat of his Ford Orion and a small triangle of scalp in his pocket.
Murder was easy. As Nelson demonstrated, it tended to be a depressingly vulgar crime. Usually the murderer was known to the victim, often intimately. Frequently the parties involved were drunk. More frequently the murderer was a lamentably stupid creature: the crime, though endlessly fantasised about and mulled over, was committed in haste and fury and drunkenness. Although a modicum of planning (even as rudimentary a detail as disposing of the body) greatly increased one’s chances of avoiding detection—even investigation—murderers tended to be squeamish cowards horrified by the results of their own orgasmic release of rage and most murderers, simply, got caught.
Even the vocational killers, the serial-and mass murderers and assorted oddities, were brought down less by the cunning of the Constabulary with its DNA fingerprinting, psychological profiling and dogged persistence, than their own largely unconscious drive to get caught, get punished and get famous. Hence the tell-tale reek of rotting flesh from an anonymous house, the letter to the Mail.
However, for professional killers, the clear-up rate was improperly modest, even though in most instances ‘professional’ was something of a misnomer, usually little more than a euphemism for ‘paid’. If a job was carried out properly and efficiently, only liaison with clients carried any real risk. On top of this the police were somewhat less interested in gangland murder—criminals despatching other criminals—than in domestic killings, and not only because the latter were, on the whole, easier to clean up, in both senses of the word. They looked on gangland murder as an ongoing process of social Darwinism. Indeed, retired inspectors would talk openly and fondly of the days of the Krays and their ilk, gangs who monopolised crime and thus made life easier for all concerned, at least in so far as there were rules which everyone obeyed and no shortage of professional gentlemen more than willing to punish those who didn’t. Modern gangland—being modern—had less of this spurious romance, and there was little unofficial fondness for urban scum, but a certain amount of self-regulation was allowed. Young thugs with a sawn-off and a motorcycle (young men ‘known to the police’) could kill other young thugs with relative equanimity, so long as they didn’t allow their egos to become too large and their bragging too public, so long as the reputation which preceded them didn’t do so to the extent that it became an embarrassment to the police, and so long as the people they killed weren’t going to be missed by anyone sensible. The police preferred to concentrate on catching only the idiotic and brutal, while blaming declining moral standards and, like every other sector of society, the government.
Amphetamines hammering in his veins, Jon walked upstairs. He paused outside the Oblivion Suite with a junkie’s craving for the infinite space that lay within. Briefly he rested his forehead against the door, then went on to the bathroom and showered and shaved and changed. Naked, he was incongruously slight. He wore the finger-traces of scar tissue across his chest and ribs and back, testament to knives and teeth and glass.
He craved the Oblivion Suite, but the Tattooed Man wanted to see him later that night. Since he didn’t care to wait, he went to the pub. Stepping from the crisp night air into its smoky cacophony was a blunt, physical blow. For a second he couldn’t draw the miasmic atmosphere into his lungs. He shouldered past shouting strangers and stood at the bar, lighting a cigarette to help counteract the speed-fuelled shaking. A pint and a double to chase. He sat next to the pinball machine. Two young men, porcine faces made hideous by some fundamental internal ugliness, snorted and cursed as they took it in turns to hump the table with enthusiastic abandon. The machine replied with delighted bell ringing and flashing lights. When one of them asked if he could set his drink on Jon’s table, Jon remembered to call him ‘mate’ when answering. Not to include this pacifying rune counted as heresy in the unwritten cabala of such places.
Somebody put money in the jukebox. Over the blare of cheap music Jon could hear two sour, overweight men, one balding with Victorian sideburns, the other with flesh the texture of supermarket cheese and a long comb of nicotine-yellow hair scraped and greased across his bald pate. They were exchanging manifestly psychotic fantasies of revenge against women who had done them little harm, dressed as sexual boasts, dressed up as stories. Jon listened and knew that they were impotent, that they spent endless flaccid hours on the bog with increasingly violent pornography, that at heart they were rapists, that they would never be anything but rapists even if the act of hatred was never carried out.
Later, Fat Dave spotted him across the bar and beckoned for him to come and sit among his menagerie of corpulent gargoyles in football shirts. Jon made a space on the table by piling some empty glasses into one another and squeezed into the corner. Everyone said, ‘All right, Jon?’ in turn, and he smiled tightly and offered round his pack of cigarettes. Fat Dave got in a round and Jon monitored the conversation, which was about marriage, a favourite subject.
‘It’s fucking kids, innit,’ said Jagger, scowling into his beer.
‘That’s what does it,’ agreed Nigel, sagely.
‘I’ll never have fucking kids. Never,’ added Jimmy the Scot, who was Welsh.
‘You fucking couldn’t if you tried,’ said Jagger, and the table erupted into laughter, in the light of which he unashamedly basked.
‘No, I mean it, like,’ said Jimmy the Scot.
Fat Dave set a pint before Jon. ‘Keith’s missis just had a nipper,’ he explained. Keith had been a Mate. If there was one thing a Mate could do that was worse than Getting Married, worse than Taking the Piss, worse even than Going Queer (which had actually happened in the case of a former Mate, Gordon, henceforth Gay Gordon, whose name was only mentioned in hushed, embarrassed whispers), it was Having a Kid. Having a Kid was the ultimate betrayal.
Keith had proposed to his wife live on breakfast television, while a cherub-faced presenter jammed a fat microphone beneath his piggy nose (which, at twenty-eight, was relief-mapped in vivid purple). Even that had been OK. Proposing on the telly was quite a classy and romantic thing to do. Keith had blown away wassname who’d since become his missis, and you had to hand it to anyone who had the bottle to blow away a bird in front of the whole fucking country. Before she stammered her answer, Keith’s beloved’s eyes had flitted nervously towards the camera, and thus into the homes of the nation. She had struggled to fight back tears. If you were honest about it (you’d probably had one too many, like, but be honest), it was moving. Many of Keith’s Mates had bought boxes of Milk Tray decorated by a functionless purple ribbon that day. Even more had intended to, and had spent the remainder of the day vaguely troubled that they had forgotten something. For a while all this actually elevated Keith’s standing in the community; having a Mate who had appeared on telly was something special, it tinged him with greatness, with glamour. Now he’d gone and Had a Kid. It was unforgivable.
Besides, only last month Jagger had appeared on a TV quiz show based on luck (computerised dice) and judgement (If I was to give you a piccolo what would you do with it? Would you a) wear it, b) play it, or c) take it for a walk?
), demonstrating considerable composure even in the presence of a woman with thighs like concrete coated in peach skin and teeth as lustrous as a hospital sink. Jagger’s glamour was therefore of awesome power. He shone. That bird, you know, the one on the programme, she’d given him the fucking come-on, a bird like that, in front of everybody, in front of the nation. Naturally, in the face of this, poor Keith’s slide from Matehood to Wankership was swift and assured. He would carry this stigma with him for the rest of his life.
Untouched, Jon’s glass gently turned on its axis, like a planchette on a Ouija board.
‘I see,’ he said. He had a sudden, graphic flash of where he had been and what he had done that afternoon. He took a long, gulping draught of beer.
‘Seen the last of him, like,’ elaborated Jimmy. ‘He might as well be dead.’
At twenty past eleven, Jon and his companions left the pub. The others staggered in the direction of the chip shop while, all but unnoticed, Jon hailed a passing taxi. A police car screamed past, followed by an ambulance. Jon gave the driver the Tattooed Man’s address and sat back in a seat that smelled faintly of vinyl, ash and vomit. He gazed sombrely ahead as the taxi’s path was crossed again and again by cheap cars driven by men too witless to care they were drunk.
The Tattooed Man lived in a Victorian mansion house set in a large garden which was demarked from the pavement by a crumbling wall. The street on which it sat was lined by similar buildings, most of which had been converted into flats, evidenced by gaggles of dustbins that huddled in the corners of concreted drives. The road was lined by gnarled and twisted trees which lifted kerbstones with their roots. The Tattooed Man’s house had a history in which, despite ironic intimations of things best left unsaid, Jon could summon little interest, partly because he could sense its questionable history in the oblique quality of the shadows it cast across the clipped lawn and gravel drive, lined by beds of flowers withdrawn as autistic children, and in the way its moist limestone blocks crumbled to the touch. On the front lawn stood a ragged topiary cockerel, an obscurely salacious presence.
