The Guest House

by David Mark

  ‘You must have been going far too fast,’ I say, trying to maintain my anger. ‘I’ve lived here long enough and nobody’s ever wiped out the wall.’

  ‘Bloody satnav,’ says the driver, looking apologetic. ‘Trying to follow it and watch the road at the same time. Recipe for disaster. The boss’ll pay for any damage, I promise you.’

  ‘You’re damn right,’ I say, and suddenly all I want to do is go back inside and make a cup of tea. I want to invite these lads inside and be all hospitable and welcoming. I feel bad for my outburst. I hate this aspect of myself – this inability to stay cross for long.

  ‘We’ll be here for a while,’ says the driver, and he sucks on a vaping machine as if he’s a diabetic and it contains insulin. ‘What’s your name? I’ll ask the boss to pop by, sort all this out…’

  I take a breath, not sure if I want to give any more information to this total stranger. I step back, looking at the damage to the wall. It’s come apart in places and the rest will fall down when he backs out, but the masonry has been crumbling for an age. And now he’s been caught, he seems quite happy to sort out the cost of repairs. Maybe I should be thanking him.

  ‘You should be able to pull out okay, I reckon,’ I say, casting a critical eye at the tyre. ‘Your van’s okay too. Dent or two and the headlight’s gone but it could have been worse.’

  ‘Boss’s van, not mine,’ says the driver. ‘You okay to step back a bit? We’ll back up and be out of your hair.’

  I do as asked, squinting into the wind and rain as he crunches the gears. There is a moment’s resistance and then the spinning wheels find the driveway and the vehicle lurches free in a small avalanche of bricks and dust. I look at the ruined wall and find my energy draining away. I don’t need this. Even if somebody else foots the bill, I can’t face all this on top of everything else. I turn to the driver, who’s giving me a thumbs-up out the window. I walk over to him before he can put it into first gear and roar away.

  ‘How do we do this then?’ I ask, tiredly. ‘Do you have a card or something? Or do you want to come in and leave your details?’

  He glances across at his companion before answering. When he does look back at me I can tell at once that he’s been given instructions. ‘We’ve actually got a stupidly early start today, love – we’re already running late. I’ll pop back after we’ve finished for the day, or the boss will. We’re just working up the road.’

  I shake my head, unimpressed with the offer. ‘No, I think we need to get this sorted – it’s quite a lot of damage…’

  ‘We’re working here for a few days, love, we’re not doing a runner. We just need to get moving.’

  I look at the side panel of the van. There’s no livery or advertising on the bodywork. ‘Where are you working?’

  ‘Big old place,’ he says, waving his hand, vaguely. ‘Castle. Old folks’ home, isn’t it?’

  I give him a look. ‘Is that what they’re doing with it? I saw some cars heading up there last night – very expensive-looking.’

  The driver shrugs again, and I sense that he’s already wishing he hadn’t started this conversation. ‘Aye, well, we’re just doing the wiring, love, but it’s an early start and like I say…’

  I’m about to ask more questions when he suddenly begins to roll the vehicle forward, crunching over the fallen bricks and moving back towards the road.

  ‘Hey! Excuse me, we’re still talking…’

  ‘Bishop’ll be by, I’m sure. Don’t fret, love…’

  And then I’m standing on the driveway watching the van disappear into the distance; red lights flicking on as he slows down at the last possible moment before vanishing around the bend and the view is obscured by a thick black band of trees.

  I throw up my hands, pissed off beyond description. Had he said Bishop? I scowl out at nothing, wondering what the hell I’ve done to deserve any of this, and then the silence makes way for the unhappy screech of a toddler who’s been without her mum for longer than she considers acceptable.

  I turn and start to trudge up towards the house. And I see Nicholas Roe, standing by the garage: a raincoat over his pyjamas and dressing gown and a soggy cigar protruding from his closed mouth. He’s watching me. Must have watched the whole exchange.

  ‘Morning,’ I say, flustered. ‘Did it wake you? The bang? He must have been going at a hell of a speed. Says he’ll sort out paying for it, but the cheeky sod shot off before leaving his contact details…’

  He looks at me for a moment too long before speaking. Then he nods at the floor. In the dirt on the paving slabs in front of the garage, he’s scrawled down the registration number with the toe of his boot. ‘Doubt it’ll do you any good,’ he says, and there’s a horrible rattle in his voice, as if his lungs are full of marbles. ‘That registration doesn’t match that van. They didn’t make that style of transit in ’06.’

  I let out a deep sigh of disappointment. Something about his manner tells me he’s totally correct in his information and it doesn’t occur to me to ask how he knows.

  ‘They said they were working at the castle. Doing it up as an old folks’ home, he said…’

  Mr Roe shakes his head. ‘No, it’s going to be a private hospital. I spoke with my neighbour last night. Mr Paretsky. Surprised you didn’t hear him talking – not a man with a gift for Chinese whispers, that one. He’s got all the gossip. New owners are turning it into a rejuvenation centre, whatever the hell that is. Facelifts, tummy tucks, designer vaginas, that sort of thing.’

  I start smiling at once. He’s got a way with words, has Mr Roe. I feel a wave of warmth towards him.

  ‘I’ll be starting breakfasts soon but you’re welcome to come in for a coffee and a croissant if you can handle the wailing baby…’

  I expect him to say no to the offer. He seems the sort more comfortable in his own company. But he gives a nod of what seems to be genuine thanks, shoving himself off from the garage door. Before he moves any further he stops and takes a phone from his pocket and photographs the digits scrawled on the floor. I give him a curious look. Why hadn’t he just photographed the van?

  ‘No good without a flash, and I didn’t want to tell your friends they were being watched. Some people react badly.’

  I size him up. Today he looks worse than yesterday: a greenish tinge to his skin, as if he’s been hewn from rotten wood. I watch as he extinguishes his cigar on his tongue, and pops the butt in the pocket of his coat. As he steps past me into the kitchen I get a whiff of him. Nicotine. Ethanol. Some kind of medicated ointment. And something else: that meat-gone-bad aroma, as if one of his organs has begun to putrefy within the frail shell of his body.

  ‘Welcome to the madhouse,’ I say, trying to sound glib, as the mixed sounds of my warring children spill out of the house.

  ‘No,’ he says, cocking his ear. ‘Madhouse doesn’t sound like this.’

  ‘No?’ I ask, unsure what to say.

  He catches my eye, and I see something in his face that makes me want to hold him tight and run away all at the same time. He has seen terrible things, has Mr Roe. Has witnessed them, experienced them, and dished them out.

  And then he’s bending down to pick up Lilly. Hoisting her up without any obvious effort. And she’s smiling at him like he’s some favourite uncle.

  He turns to me, this monstrous thing, and his whole being is transformed by his proximity to this vibrant young life. She revitalises him as surely as if he were a vampire sucking her blood.

  ‘I like the little ones,’ he says, and as he smiles I see the blood where his dentures hurt his gums. He swallows, and puts Lilly down. Whatever I showed in my face, it spoiled the moment for him.

  ‘On second thoughts, I’ll leave it,’ he says, shrugging, and before I can tell him to stay he has pushed past me and is crossing the garden towards the guest house. I wait for the security light to come on: to illuminate him as he stalks, darkly, towards the woods.

  The garden stays dark. He passes through the sensors
like a ghost.

  10

  Four months ago

  A black-painted, candlelit restaurant down a side street in Soho

  He’s brought flowers. Half a dozen red roses and half a dozen white. They lie on the table, wrapped in shiny plastic. There are tiny bugs climbing in and out of the folds. They smell more of funerals than marriage.

  ‘Bit feeble, aren’t they?’ says the man seated across the table. ‘Got that bottom-of-a-fish-tank smell, though I’ve had similar accusations thrown my way. I’d have got something more expensive, but you know petrol stations.’

  The NCA Lead in Covert Operations looks at him from across the table. She rolls her eyes, indulgently, and smiles. If Oscar Parkin were to see the gesture he would no longer recognise the cool, glacial beauty who so terrifies and mystifies him. Smiling, she is a different person entirely. In tonight’s company, she feels free to be herself. Her companion knows all there is to know about her. They have been friends a long time and their dalliance as enemies was brief and hurtful. She’s accepted that he has every right to kill her for what she did to him. Instead he found a way to turn a grotesque situation to their advantage. Forgave her trespasses, in exchange for a chance to be a police officer one last time. To do some good, even as everything about him suggests he is rotten to the core.

  ‘At least they’re not carnations. I hate carnations.’

  ‘Strange thing to hate.’

  ‘Not really. I hate a lot of things.’

  ‘Example?’

  ‘A random?’

  ‘Yeah, first hatred that pops into your head…’

  ‘Pistachios that don’t open. I fucking hate that.’

  ‘Not a fan myself. No snack should contain the word “pis”.’

  ‘And geese. With their green shit and that honking noise they make. I’d snap a goose’s neck if I knew where to hit.’

  ‘I’m goose neutral. No strong feelings.’

  They sit in silence, regarding one another. She’s wearing a tight blue-and-white top beneath a blue blazer, with figure-hugging jeans and kitten heels. Her blonde hair is unkempt, but in a way that suggests it has taken a lot of effort to make it look so carefree. Her lipstick is a deep red. She’s wearing glasses, though the lenses are not prescription.

  ‘Sorry about the Kardashian thing,’ says her companion, pulling at his nose as if it were made of plasticine. He is a schoolboy in his mannerisms, forever fiddling, scratching, probing. ‘Just came out.’

  He’s got a pint of lager in his hand. He’s wearing a simple navy suit with a white shirt and gold tie. It looks wrong on him, but it takes some of the attention away from the state the rest of him is in. He’s been dying for a while now. The man who came back is not the same person she gave up to save her an operation that she had given her entire self over to. For a year he hung in chains. For a year, bad men pumped him full of chemicals and poison and broke parts of him in turn as fancy dictated. By the time he was freed, he was something of a scientific experiment for the people who held him. How far could they push him before his will to live deserted him? That was the mistake they made. His will to live didn’t come into it: desire to survive long enough for revenge was what kept his heart beating even as the rest of him gave out.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ she says, passing him a napkin. He dabs his chin, where pink blood is running from his gums and through the gap between his lips, a souvenir from when they dislocated his jaw and left it out of the socket so long they couldn’t kick it back in. Such injuries do not seem to trouble him. The jaundiced skin, the open sores, the lesions to his scalp – he has never been one to complain. It is the things happening to his insides that are perhaps beyond enduring. His liver. His lungs. They are shutting down in stages. She’s already made him a promise – if his brain starts to go, she won’t let him suffer long. Such is the nature of their friendship. She may once have been his protégée, but she outranks him now. Outshines him in every way. And still she admires him. Still she looks up to him. Still he is the closest thing she knows to a real friend.

  ‘I hate the Kardashians,’ she says, pursing her lips. ‘Not as much as geese, but close.’

  ‘I don’t think I even know what they look like.’

  ‘Big feathery bastards.’

  ‘Yeah? Which one – Khloé or Kim?’

  She cannot help herself from mirroring his smile. They are sitting upstairs in one of the better restaurants on a quiet street in Shepherd’s Bush. It’s a relatively cosmopolitan area that boasts breakfast clubs and book groups, finger foods served on slate and bottles of Belgian beer. It’s popular with the kind of clientele who call their children “guys” and reply with a variety of grape rather than just a colour when asked about their favourite kind of wine.

  ‘You think he’ll approve it? Seemed a decent sort. Can’t imagine he’ll be comfortable with handing over operational control to the fearsome ice maiden and her anonymous ghoul.’

  ‘Ice maiden? Fuck off.’

  ‘I called myself a ghoul…’

  ‘Yeah, you did.’

  He sits back in his chair. They are sitting on purple leather seats facing a table made of railway sleepers. There are only four other people in the restaurant. They stand at the bar, sipping exotic lagers from vase-shaped glasses.

  ‘Places like this are putting real pubs out of business,’ he says, shaking his head.

  ‘You used to drink in a Wetherspoon’s!’

  ‘Shut up.’

  She considers him from across the table. She still can’t quite believe that she survived the fallout from what she has trained herself to call “the operation”. She’s always known herself to be good at what she does, but for her sins she had expected at least a little damnation. Instead it had worked out better than she could ever have imagined. Just five years ago she was head of the Drugs Squad with Humberside Police. Her mentor had been suspended for beating up a suspect in the cells, and she was surrounded by people who were either too good to be trusted, or too bloody stupid to be interesting.

  She made some bad decisions. Fell for the wrong man. Got herself in deep and had to give up her associate to save her own skin. God knew he had long enough to plot revenge. And yet when he turned up out of the blue, when he stepped into the elevator and greeted her with a cheery “hello, Shaz”, she had seen no malice in him. Sadness, yes. Hurt, certainly. But he didn’t want revenge on her. He wanted revenge on everybody.

  ‘You’re ringing.’

  She pulls the phone from her pocket. ‘Oscar,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Yes. Excellent. I appreciate that. You don’t need to worry. No. Not as things stand. But of course, yes, given time. I’ll forward the briefing notes. Yes. No. No.’

  She hangs up. Looks up. ‘We’re on.’

  Across the table, her operative nods, satisfied. ‘Played him like a violin, love.’

  She turns away from him, looking for a waiter. She can suddenly smell the cheap flowers. They remind her of something. Something sad. She wonders if they were the blooms at her father’s funeral and realises she cannot remember. She’d had little to do with the service. As the baby of the family, it was not a duty that fell to her. It had been organised by her brother and sister, Scott and Geneva, and had been a predictably colourless affair. The service had been in the same church where he and Mum had married, forty-six years before.

  She had been referred to during the service as a “happy accident”. She’d been called that most of her life. There had been talk of naming her “Serendipity” but eventually, Dad decided that was a little too bourgeois for their part of Surrey, and settled on Sherilyn, instead.

  She changed it to Sharon when she was seventeen and fell in love with a bad lad from Walthamstow. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him her real name for fear he would make fun. She hadn’t told him much about her home life. Not about the gymkhanas and the polo club and the special classes for gifted children that had been part of her life since she was seven years old. She didn’t tell
them about her dad, and the golf club, and the six-bedroomed house, or the riding rosettes or the brand-new Range Rover she received for her seventeenth birthday. She didn’t tell him much about herself. Just said she was “Shaz” and that she liked the tattoos on his hands.

  They were a couple for almost a year. It ended when her father found out. He took away the keys to the Range Rover. Took away her membership of the polo club. Made her choose between possessions and the bad boy who made her toes curl with ecstasy every time he stuck his tongue in her mouth and she tasted the hand-rolled cigarettes and beer on his breath. She chose possessions. She broke it off with him. Went to university, like a good girl. Dad had wanted her to join the family firm when she was finished. Instead, she chose the police. Then she chose to be something else entirely.

  ‘I’ll settle up,’ she says, looking at her old friend. ‘You got somewhere to stay?’

  He nods. ‘I always find somewhere.’

  ‘Briefing at nine?’

  ‘Fuck off, you can still taste the toothpaste at nine.’

  ‘You’ve not got teeth.’

  ‘I still like to suck the tube.’

  ‘You are gross. Truly, you are a monster.’

  ‘Yeah. Which makes you Frankenstein.’

  11

  Two days later, I’ve heard nothing from Bishop or the two men in the van. I have, however, got the latest on the “plans” for the castle. The information came from Theresa, obviously, who sat at the breakfast bar with her hands around a mug of quality coffee, and delighted in telling me everything she’d heard from one of her clients down at Strontian.

  ‘Sparing no expense, apparently. Going to be one of those really fancy “alternative medicine” places as well as offering retreats and rejuvenations to the rich and famous. Done it well, don’t you think – keeping it quiet, I mean. All sorted on the planning permission front, which must mean some palms have been greased. You know me, I try to keep my nose out of other people’s business, but I couldn’t help having a bit of a dig about online to see when it all went through with the authorities and there’s next to nothing to be found, which means they probably aren’t going to be advertising their services to the likes of me – much as I’d like to be tightened from the top.