Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  ‘Hang on, give us that reg again.’

  I headed towards the Tube, phone clamped to my ear. I was almost at Edgware Road when he got back to me.

  ‘Okay, we’ve got a name, but it isn’t Leonard. It’s Leslie. Jeff Leslie. Car’s registered under his name. He lives in Lee. SE12.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘You really ought to back off, Joel.’

  ‘I’ll back off if you fuck off. Address.’

  Within the hour I was getting off a train in Lee, one of those conurbations south of the river that grew out of the presence of the railways. It was the kind of inoffensive suburb I’d driven through on any number of occasions without it ever registering on my radar. Karen Leonard seemed to live in a place off St Mildreds Road, which forms part of the South Circular, the lucky thing. I got to the street and stood in front of the house, a rough-around-the-edges semi with a front garden containing dead or dying plants in the borders. The balding lawn was littered with dog turds.

  I knocked on the door and felt my hands tightening to fists. No answer. A car roared past in the street behind me, the driver leaving it as long as he could before changing gear. I waited until I could no longer hear the protesting engine and then I walked around to the back of the house and put a brick through the kitchen window. I hadn’t even got the latch open when I felt bad news pouring out through the hole I’d made.

  I jack-knifed over the edge of the kitchen worktop and peered around in the gloom. A streetlight just outside just about let me see okay. No body here; no signs of struggle. The kitchens tended to be the war zones, I found, after years of call and response. People brained with cast-iron skillets. Sliced open with broken crystal champagne flutes. Skewered with expensive Japanese knives. Most of it from the wedding gift lists. Not that there was any of that stuff here. It was basics, if that. Paper plates. Instant noodles. Half a jar of fossilised Nescafé. More dog shit in a corner, stiff and furred with mould.

  I moved through to the hallway. Nude walls stained with water leaks. Bare bulbs dangled from a peeling ceiling. Bills scattered on the floor. Nothing to suggest a family lived here, or a woman in the process of trying to find her little one. In the living room I found a wastepaper basket filled with empty cans of strong beer as well as twists of kitchen foil scarred with burns. Delivery pizza boxes freckled with grease. A big TV and a PlayStation. GTA. CoD. Excelsior vodka. Spiritus Sanctus.

  I went upstairs. May the devil make a ladder of your backbone. Karen was in the bathroom. She was on her knees, her head back, resting on the edge of the bath. She was stiff as a bull in a cowshed; she’d been killed hours ago. Her mouth was open wide and a meniscus of blood quivered within, poised to roll over the Plimsoll line of her lips. Her expression reminded me of someone at the shadow zone between confusion and sudden understanding.

  I sat down on the floor opposite her and thought about her and I thought about the house. I pulled out a handkerchief and used it as a barrier when I touched her, turning her fingers so that I might see if there was anything under the nails. Only deeply packed filth. It had been under her nails when we shared our Cornish jaunt. Perhaps she’d brought some south-west grit back with her too. No blood. No skin. No hair.

  I rubbed my face and thought about her and me and what friendship meant to desperate people who needed the money. She’d stitched me up. It had to be about cash; I’d done nothing to cause her to harbour a grudge. I’d have liked to have known how much she’d been paid. I wondered if she’d followed the news stories about me and Becs and put two and two together. When the moths started flying out of her purse maybe she’d visited Graeme Tann at Cold Quay. I would have liked to have heard the conversation she had with him. His promises. And her, thinking she had an escape route. A chance to start again when all roads were destined to lead her back to this eternity of cold dark. As if they were going to pay her anyway.

  All of the shampoo bottles and deodorant cans were neatly placed on the surfaces. No sign of struggle here. Unless the killer had a touch of the OCD about him and tidied up after himself, which was unlikely. And why leave the body?

  As a message, maybe? As a warning. I did this.

  There was a passive spot of blood to my right, near the threshold of the door. There was another one, also passive, on the skirting board on the landing. I got up and had a look. I didn’t know what I was looking at or what to deduce from it. But I didn’t think they belonged to Karen. There were two bedrooms up here. Both of their doors were closed. Was that a good thing? If it was, my heart wasn’t buying into it.

  I pressed my hand against the gun in my jacket pocket. It didn’t reassure me in the slightest.

  I opened the bedroom door nearest the blood stain and went in. The master bedroom, if you lodged your tongue in your cheek. Barely enough room around the bed at the centre to walk freely. Anybody with over-developed calves would be struggling. No wardrobe, just an extendable pole jammed between the walls. Plastic hangers. Clothes that smelled faintly of mildew. Second-hand stuff. Cast-offs for a castaway. Dead girl’s clothes for a dead girl. I had a quick look in the bedside table. No photographs. No pictures drawn for Mum. Maybe this Jeff Leslie didn’t like having kids’ stuff knocking around.

  Who are you, Jeff Leslie? I thought. And where the fuck are you?

  I went back to the landing. The door to the other bedroom was now slightly open. Fuck. This. I pulled out the gun and edged towards it. I had my hand on the wood, was about to push when it burst open in my face and I went backwards, pinwheeling, the gun flying from my hand, and I went down the stairs to the half-landing, closing my eyes against the crack I knew I was going to get on my head. It wasn’t too bad; I’d twisted slightly so I was able to get a hand under me and soften the blow somewhat, but I still saw stars. The doorway widened and he came out and he had a claw sticking out of the middle of his hand. He was smiling down at me. His hair was the colour of ash and it was long and lank and hung in his eyes. He was wearing a vest. His arms swarmed with tattoos. His nails were painted black. He was wiry. His face was filled with hollows and shadows. He looked hungry as fuck.

  ‘Leslie?’ I said. My voice was clenched with fear. In those momentary interstices of shadow whenever I blinked, I saw knives slicing into me in the old newspaper factory on Silex Street; I felt pieces of me disengage.

  ‘I’m Paul,’ he said. ‘I’ll be your killer today.’

  The claw was no such thing of course. It was a curved knife. I know a little about knives. Being opened up by one gives you that kind of focus. It was a karambit. It had a finger guard, which meant it would be difficult to knock it from his hand. He held it with a hammer grip. He looked as if he knew what to do with the thing. As if he’d had plenty of practice. He was looking to get a bit more.

  ‘How do you know me? Why do you want me dead? What have I done to you?’

  ‘Ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies.’ He was at the top of the stairs, his boots lipping the edge of the riser. I recognised his voice. He’d been the guy on the end of the phone, sending us deep into the West Country. I wondered briefly who the kid had been, but it could have been anybody. Say ‘Mum’ and I’ll give you a bar of chocolate. What did it matter now? I smelled tobacco on him, and leather. Blood had dried on his nostrils. Maybe she’d cracked him one before he delivered the coup de grâce. Maybe he had a coke habit. What did it matter? There was nothing I could use.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ I asked. ‘Give me a reason, at least. What does it matter if I’m dead? Don’t let me die not knowing. How shitty is that?’

  He wasn’t playing ball.

  I’d landed in an awkward position. My back was crunkled into the corner and one leg was folded underneath me. I was worried I might have done some medial ligament damage there, but really that was the least of my problems, all things considered. I moved my head away from the wall, convinced that half of my brains would unravel from the fracture the collision had undoubtedly caused, but my skull was sound. I saw the
gun immediately. It had fallen to my right; it was two feet away, that was all. I almost laughed out loud.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. I reached out and picked it up. He yelled something incoherent and launched himself at me. I slipped the safety off. I levelled the gun at him and shot him in the jaw. There was a weird splintering impact that reminded me of someone hitting a stick of rock with a toffee hammer. His mouth dropped and bloody teeth spilled as if I’d just hit the jackpot on the one-armed tooth bandit. He looked both mildly disgusted and vaguely distracted. It was an expression that followed him into death as he buckled and fell headfirst towards me.

  ‘For someone who doesn’t like guns,’ I said to him, ‘I don’t half relish pulling the trigger sometimes.’

  I checked his pockets. A couple of tenners. A free IKEA pencil. Juicy Fruit. I disentangled the knife from his finger and pocketed it. I edged past him and went up to the second bedroom. I felt the familiar push-me-pull-you of adrenaline and lactic acid meeting each other head-on. I felt as if I wanted to run a marathon at full speed (including a lap of honour) and simultaneously go to sleep for ten years. I was sick to the core but ravenous too.

  Here I found a handbag. Karen’s presumably. And that was confirmed by the presence of her passport. Now there were photographs. Men. Pictures of her in bars partying hard. More men. And here a photograph of a baby swaddled in blankets. Asleep, it seemed. Dead, in actuality. On the back she’d written the words My Si. RIP.

  Simon.

  There had been no Simon. Well, maybe for a heartbeat or two. She’d used a dead baby as bait to get me out of the city. She and ‘Benjie’ – whoever the fuck he was – had given me the runaround. I left the room and stared down at ‘Paul’. I had a feeling he was a jailbird, recently freed. Everything was pointing towards Cold Quay. I reckoned I could trace Paul back there. I reckoned I could trace Karen to Paul, or maybe even to Graeme Tann. While he was in prison he held sway; now he was out, imagine the clout he could wield. I was a sitting, shitting duck.

  I was on the phone to Mawker again, booking it back to central London. I told him about the assassin and Karen’s involvement and subsequent forced retirement. He swore at me for the best part of a minute and told me he was sending a squad car to pick me up from Charing Cross. It was too dangerous for me to go home, he said. I had to spend some time hiding in the long grass, like a zebra, he said. Until Tann was caught. I didn’t argue with him; I knew I was vulnerable. The next Paul who came my way wouldn’t enjoy the same kind of theatre. He’d get up close to me in the street and tear my neck open without any fancy introductions, or he’d put a bullet through my face from distance. Seven had scarpered from Cold Quay. If Paul was one of them – one of a cadre close to Tann, committed to him, under his spell – then there were conceivably five left who might be keen to do his bidding.

  Was this the same guy I’d put away? A pathetic, weak, snivelling Peeping Tom? I’d visited him a while ago and he’d put me on my arse, but he was still half a pint of semi-skimmed milk to my pot of extra-thick double cream.

  True to Mawker’s word there was a police car at Charing Cross. Some of Mawker’s cronies were at the ticket barrier and they ushered me into the back of it. A woman was waiting for me.

  ‘Carla Kemme,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that, German?’

  ‘Yes, top marks. My father was from Potsdam. I’m here to help you, Joel. We have to move quickly.’

  ‘I think I’m being followed.’

  ‘We’ve sent out a few decoys already. And our drivers are good. Fast. We’ll get you away without any dramas.’

  The car nosed out on to The Strand and we turned east. I felt myself pressed back into the seat as the driver floored it. His eyes flashed to the mirror every three or four seconds.

  ‘Any word on who this guy Leslie is? Was?’

  ‘We traced him to a hotel in Luton. He’s at some conference, blissfully unaware of the fun and games going down at his pad. Karen Leonard was related to him. Niece. Stole his car.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Safe house. You’ve been classified as being in considerable danger.’

  ‘Graeme Tann?’

  ‘Graeme Tann.’

  ‘So he did get out?’

  ‘Yes. We’re hoping we can have him back behind bars within the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Anybody caught yet?’

  ‘No. Unless you want to count Paul Kearney.’

  ‘The guy in Lee?’

  ‘He was in Cold Quay with Tann. One of the rogues’ gallery. Lifer. Long criminal record. Murder at the top of it.’

  Kemme was inspecting her nails. Her fingers were extraordinarily long. She wore her hair in a fiercely angular bob, which looked as if it had been cut by mathematicians rather than hairdressers. Her glasses seemed too narrow to be of any use.

  ‘What do you do with Mawker?’ I asked.

  ‘As little as possible, although we share a wedge of grey space on the Met’s Venn diagram.’

  ‘You’re in the police?’

  ‘I work for Protection Command,’ she said. ‘Specifically SO1. We provide specialist protection, usually for heads of state, government ministers, VIPs.’

  ‘But you’re slumming it for Sorrell.’

  ‘You said it, not me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Crouch End,’ she said. She had the air of someone who had been in the job for so long that she could perform her duties without even thinking about them. It was like listening to someone recite a script. I wondered about that. At least the driver looked as if he was on point. He drove down a one-way street and swung us into Gray’s Inn Road, going north.

  ‘How we doing, Dev?’ asked Kemme.

  ‘All clear, far as I can see. I can spin us around one more time if you’d rather?’

  ‘I trust you. Let’s crack on.’

  We flew up York Way and angled east, through Holloway towards N8. On Weston Park Dev stopped the car and got out. He spoke into his lapel. Within a minute I’d been ushered into a spacious house on the south side. It was frugally decorated. Policemen stood in the kitchen drinking tea and leafing through newspapers. There were bursts of radio static. Dev went to the blinds in the living room and checked the road. I stood at the threshold feeling like a spare cock at an orgy.

  ‘This way,’ said Kemme. She led me upstairs and into one of the back bedrooms. There was a bed and a chair and a table. There was a lamp on it. That was all.

  ‘There’ll be someone in the building with you at all times,’ she said. ‘Feel free to move around the house all you like, but do not go into the garden and do not go into the street. If you have any dietary requirements, someone will see to them for you. Ditto reading materials.’

  ‘How long am I here for?’ I asked.

  ‘Until we round them up.’

  ‘I’m not sure about this. I can look after myself.’

  ‘Maybe. Personally I’d have you as bait in your own flat with a unit ready to move. Mawker wants you protected. He says you need a break.’

  ‘He needs a break,’ I said. ‘In the neck area.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, breezily. ‘I can’t stand here chit-chatting all day. I’ve got a life outside to grab by the balls.’

  ‘You’ll be back?’

  ‘At some point, yes. There are forms to fill in and I don’t trust those idiots downstairs to put their underwear on the right way round, so yes, I’ll be back. But don’t miss me too much, will you?’

  She called out for Dev and then they were gone. I heard laughter immediately from the serge-bots in the kitchen. Someone turned a radio on and a song came on from my youth. I listened to it as I stared out across the leafy hamlet-of-yore. I felt hemmed in and not merely because Crouch End didn’t have a Tube within walking distance. My mood worsened when the DJ described the song when it finished as a Golden Oldie.

  I went downstairs and made a cup of tea and the two police officers there didn’t ta
lk to me and I didn’t talk to them. They looked like adverts for the police from the 1970s. Moustaches. Beer-bellies. Brylcreem. All that was missing were the mutton-chop whiskers and the Ford Cortina.

  I went back up to the room, drank some tea and sat on the bed. It all caught up with me and when I was aware again it was gone midnight. My legs were aching where I’d fought against the stiff pedals in Karen Leonard’s Mini. The tea was cold but I drank it anyway. I could hear someone downstairs peeling cards from a deck and patting them on the kitchen table, and the Golden Oldies kept coming. The Lotus Eaters. Scritti Politti. The Icicle Works.

  I swung my legs off the bed and tried to open the window. Of course it was sealed shut. The radio clicked off and then there were footsteps on the stairs. He switched the light on and stood at the door. His tongue poked around his mouth for stray morsels of Pot Noodle or whatever the fuck cliché copper food he’d been eating.

  ‘It’s sealed shut,’ he said. ‘And it would make my job so much easier if you didn’t try to leave.’

  ‘I just wanted some air in here,’ I said.

  He looked at me as if I was a cheeky monkey in an infant class.

  ‘Get you anything?’ he said.

  ‘Fancy a pint?’ I said.

  ‘Not on duty. But I can arrange for a range of beers or lagers to be delivered to your suite.’

  ‘Never mind. What’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Officer Towne,’ he said. ‘Officer Moore will be taking over later. You should get some sleep.’

  ‘I’ve had some sleep. I want to go walking.’

  ‘Yes, and I want Charlize Theron to give me a full body massage but it ain’t happening any time soon.’

  ‘The fuck is this?’ I said. ‘Graeme Tann goes free and I get banged up. It’s beyond irony.’

  ‘It’s for your safety,’ he said.

  ‘He’s coming for me at home. If he doesn’t know I’m in Crouch End then surely I can go for a walk around here. Just for an hour. Jesus.’