by Joseph Knox
‘Then let me give you some advice.’ She stepped closer. ‘Go home. Save yourself another black eye.’
‘Like you say, my face’d be lost without it.’
Her eyes went back to the bar manager. ‘Getting lost might not be a bad idea, babe.’
‘Sorry to bother you.’
Satisfied, the barman moved further away, started serving a group of girls. Catherine took up her glass, had a good pull and then set it down again. She slid a card discreetly beneath it as she did.
‘I’d say you can buy me a drink some time …’ Her smile was wide and garish again, but for a moment I thought I’d seen the real thing.
‘I’d probably just knock it over. Goodnight.’
She crossed the room with wide, lovely strides and left.
I palmed the card she left under the glass and waited a minute. Then I walked out the door, down the road, to the rented room where I was staying. I threw my broken watch away, took some speed and changed my clothes.
6
The third strike against me was no one’s fault but my own. After it, I was lucky to even get a job following Franchise collectors from bar to bar.
I’d been graveyarding, on and off, for a few weeks. Begging, stealing, borrowing my day shifts, swapping them for all-nighters. I loved watching the city, the town I knew, transforming into something else between the hours of nine o’clock at night and five in the morning. The smiley faces, smeared by kids on windows, pierced with neon light.
I liked the people.
They were young, drunk and in love. The girls were lightning bolts and the boys were all talk. The transsexuals, goths and gays took back the night, diversifying the high street, screaming words en masse I didn’t even know the meaning of. And it was working. Keeping me vaguely sober. Vaguely out of trouble.
The only problem was my boss. Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe. His real name. Perhaps he was doomed as soon as they printed it on his birth certificate. Perhaps he was taunted when he was young, associated from the word go with a national hate figure. Either way, it’s a bastard’s name, and he filled every inch of it. They called him Sutty. The nickname helped avoid confusion but also made fun of his photosensitivity.
Sutty was corpse pale, allergic to daylight.
I learned a lot from him, not all of it good. I started graveyarding with a romantic view of the nightlife which quickly got realistic. I didn’t know about vamps, the dealers who only came out at night, and I couldn’t have told you anything about the gangs, who sold what, and how you could tell them apart. The only ones I could spot on sight were the smilers. So-called because of an inch of scar tissue at each corner of their mouths, where dealers had bladed them, branded them for late payment or too much lip.
Sutty knew which ones were Rushboys and which ones were Whalleys, just by the way they’d whistle for attention. Sutty could spot a Burnsider who’d wandered too far south. He could point out Franchise collector girls, the sirens, gliding from club to club. And he had an almost supernatural eye for trouble. It was a Sunday morning but only just, 2 or 3 a.m., and we were working Oxford Road. Connecting student digs with the university, then the university to the city centre, the road saw the best and the worst of things. Working girls and kerb-crawlers, dealers and users.
It also leads on to one of the city’s most lauded landmarks. The curry mile. Hundreds of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Kashmiri restaurants, door to door, as far as the eye can see. A thriving, vibrant and diverse Muslim community. That was interesting because of a technique we’d started to see.
‘The shawl thing,’ as Sutty called it. Young women wearing burkas, a common sight on the road at all hours, to camouflage their movements. Some dealers had been known to operate out of them, and some of the more nervous tweakers had started to wear them, too. This incensed Sutty. Possibly dark skinned. Possibly a user. His enemy squared.
We were standing by an all-night street vendor, drinking coffee while he smoked a cigarette. He jabbed me in the ribs, nodded straight ahead.
‘There’s our girl.’
‘What? Where?’
He pointed at a small woman in a black burka, on the other side of the road.
‘Looks like someone on their way home to me.’
‘Come on,’ he said, crossing through the cars. He gave them an all-purpose hand gesture and I followed. He jogged up beside the woman, got in front of her and blocked her way. She tried to move around him but he held up his hand.
‘Allahu akbar,’ he said, still getting his breath back.
The woman didn’t say anything.
‘Come on,’ said Sutty. ‘Off with your head.’
The woman looked left to right. She looked trapped. Finally, she took off her black headpiece. She had thinning hair, the colour and consistency of straw. She was white, plainly a user, almost the same pallor as Sutty. As I came alongside them I saw that she had been branded. That inch of scar tissue at either side of her mouth.
‘Wipe that smile off your face,’ said Sutty, laughing at his own joke. The woman’s expression didn’t change. ‘Do you wanna show me what you’ve got in your hand, sweetheart?’ The woman’s right hand was clenched in a fist by her side. Reluctantly, she held it out, opened it. She had two, sweaty, crumpled ten-pound notes. Sutty took them from her, said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and turned to leave.
She stared down at her empty hand. Then around, confused, to me.
‘Sir,’ I called after him. It sounded weak. ‘Sir …’ I said again. When he didn’t turn I shouted: ‘SUTCLIFFE.’
He stopped then, looked at me. His expression was blank.
‘You can’t do that,’ I said. He didn’t move for a moment; standing still against the people streaming past us on the pavement. Finally, he nodded. Walked over to the girl, fumbled in his pockets and handed back the notes. Then he took her by the arm and dragged her towards me.
‘Search her,’ he said. I looked at him. ‘Search her, that’s a fuckin’ order.’
I turned, reluctantly, to the woman. People were walking around us, trying to give Sutty a wide berth. She held out her hands again, opened the one with the money. Except now, pressed between the notes, was a bag of blow that hadn’t been there before. Sutty stepped forward, frowned like he was surprised.
He tutted, twisted her arm backwards and handcuffed her. As he dragged her across the road to a waiting squad car, he flashed me a nasty smile.
‘Good job I gave her that cash back, eh?’
She cried in the car. We booked her in and handed the drugs over into evidence. I didn’t wrestle with my conscience for long. The next day I walked into police headquarters on Central Park, signed in, and took the lift up to the fifth floor. I input my security code and passed into the secure area where seized drugs were held in evidence lockers. I took the cocaine and swapped it for talcum powder. That would have been that. I just happened to do it on a day when Superintendent Parrs was having the lockers examined. I remember walking down the corridor, the blood roaring in my ears.
Then a thin, reedy voice. ‘Excuse me, Detective Constable …’
I knew immediately. I was sitting outside Superintendent Parrs’ office, scared to death, for two hours. When he opened the door to call me in, it was the first time we’d ever spoken. He told me to take a seat and took what I’d come to think of as a quintessentially Parrsian course of action.
He said nothing.
We sat there in silence until I couldn’t take it any more. I told him my story, acknowledging that I was ending my career before it had started. He didn’t argue with that but as I finished speaking, as he sat back to take it in, I thought I saw a flicker of interest.
That Scottish accent. ‘Think the rules don’t apply to you, Waits?’
‘Sutcliffe—’
‘I’ll deal with Sutcliffe. I’ve been having a squint at your record. It’s actually all right, if a little prone to lonerism. You might be what I’m looking for.’
‘Sir?’
‘I’ll be clear, son. I’m gonna give you two choices. Honestly, I advise you to take the first.’ I waited. ‘I can dismiss you on the spot. Raise criminal charges. Pursue a conviction and show you the inside of a cell. I’d also take it to the press, tell them you’re dirty. Render you unemployable for the rest of your life.’
‘What’s my second choice?’
‘You can do a wee job for me. By now, the rumour of what you did is all over the station. By lunchtime, it’ll be all over town. That might be useful.’
‘Useful how?’
He leaned forward. ‘I need someone who looks dirty.’
He outlined the plan.
It was an open secret, he said, that Zain Carver kept police officers on his payroll. There had been years of missing evidence, of failed, fruitless raids on his holdings. It would be my job to find out who was in his pocket. My job to look even dirtier than them. My job to leak bad intelligence and set the trap.
‘Either way,’ he said, ‘you’ll be suspended with immediate effect while awaiting trial. Free from casework. Free to move about. Free to mix with the bad elements.’ He gave me his shark’s smile. ‘If you want to be my man, if you get it right, those charges we talked about can just disappear …’
‘And you advise me to take the first option?’
‘The first option will ruin your career. The second could ruin your life.’
‘When do you want my decision?’
‘Tell you what, I’m gonna start writing up the charges.’ He picked up a ballpoint pen and clicked it. ‘If you don’t want to go to prison, you won’t let me get to the end of this sheet.’
The first option was bad, but it was the mention of a cell that scared me. I’d grown up in a group home. Had my fill of cots, cafeterias, curfews. I looked at Parrs. He was writing fast, and when I saw the words on the paper – conspiracy, corruption – I saw that my choice was actually no choice at all.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
I thought I had nothing to lose. At first I even liked the idea of vanishing into the Franchise. Superintendent Parrs had a fear of me being found out that bordered on paranoia, and only three people knew I’d gone under.
I gave up my flat and put my things into storage. I was moving into the city centre. The thick of it, where I’d go from bar to bar, following the Franchise. I thought hard about what I might say to the people from my old life, but when I told the girl I’d been sleeping with that I was going away for a while, she laughed.
‘Going away?’ she said, throwing her things into a bag. ‘You were never really here in the first place.’
I stopped going to work. I went missing. They briefed a story to the press and everyone believed what they read about me in the papers.
Disgraced Detective Aidan Waits.
My mind coursed, making connections. I toyed with the card that Catherine had left in the bar. It was an invitation to an after-party at Fairview. The home of Zain Carver. I could go there that night and track Isabelle Rossiter.
I found a bottle of wine and got my jacket on. The speed lifted me immediately. I stood by the window for a minute, breathing deeply, looking out at the endless blocks of buildings.
Fifty storeys of unblinking lit windows.
7
I banged on the door and waited.
Bass-driven music beat through the building like a pulse. Shaking windows and walls gave the impression that the house was edging towards me, inch by inch. The sound system attracted strangers in from the street who hadn’t dared knock and they clotted together at the end of the path, watching me like I was their leader.
Fairview was on the border between West Didsbury and Withington, two of the city’s wealthiest suburbs. It looked like the ancestor of some fine family of buildings, raised on the best of everything. I took my bottle of red by the neck and banged its base into the door a few times.
It opened to a girl in a black evening dress. She had a hospital-
white complexion and real red hair. She said something to me but it got carried away with the music escaping from indoors. Her eyes were framed by mascara and they, along with that timeless dress and those lost words, made her look iconic, like a silent film star from the twenties. I stood there with a helpless look on my face. She must have been used to this reaction by now because she took Catherine’s card from my hand and beckoned me in.
I walked inside, into what felt like solid air. It was a madhouse of laughter and limbs, and there were people dancing, sweating, kissing, everywhere I looked. Turning to thank the redhead who’d opened the door, I saw she had already bolted it behind me and picked up a conversation, mid-sentence, with another man. As expected, I stood out in the room, closer to thirty than twenty.
I couldn’t see Catherine anywhere but another girl caught my eye. She was standing off to the right, looking hopelessly out of place. Punkish, electric-blonde hair had replaced her natural colour, but it still sat atop that pretty face. She had the fine, slim figure of a seventeen-year-old girl but had tried to dress older. She gazed vacantly about, chewing a strand of hair, absorbing knowing looks from swaggering, slightly older boys.
Isabelle Rossiter.
She wore a light, frayed scarf, which she toyed with constantly, checking it was still there. Her father said that she had stabbed herself in the neck and I assumed that it covered a scar.
I moved out of the doorway, muttered some kind of thanks for being let in and threw the redhead a dying look. She took it with that necessary indifference of the beautiful, who kill by the hundreds every day. I gave Isabelle Rossiter a friendly nod and moved on.
The hallway was constipated with people and I shoved through them, parting a shit-faced sea of twenty-somethings, drinking straight from the bottle. Some people were glass-eyed from shooting or smoking Eight, but the main force tonight was ecstasy. Five, as they called it. I felt too foreign an object to join the ones dancing in the next room, too tired to fight this back-and-forth shit-tide in the hallway, and going up a floor was impossible. The stairs were made invisible by couples, all queuing towards toilets, showers, bedrooms and sex.
‘Can I have a swig?’ a girl said into my ear.
I saw a flash of porcelain skin, white teeth and manic blonde hair. I thought of the picture her father had given me. Isabelle Rossiter was thinner than that now, but it didn’t mark her out in this room. The other girls were between five and ten years older than her, but all had similar frames. Like they’d refined themselves to within an inch of their lives, paring back anything extraneous.
‘Course,’ I said, handing over the bottle. In the time it took her to have a drink and wipe her mouth, she lost interest in me. She looked around the room, like she hoped someone else was watching us. When movement in the hallway forced us closer together, she considered me, up and down. Her eyes met mine again, looking disappointed.
‘What brings you here?’ she said, over the music. It was a bright question. My age, my disposition, my dark clothes made me stand out against a backdrop of youth, energy and colour.
‘Thought you might need a drink.’
She showed me her perfect white teeth. ‘How do you know Sarah Jane?’
‘Sarah Jane?’
‘The redhead whose feet you just fell at.’
‘I was meeting her for the first time.’
‘She only ever lets in people she knows …’
‘I’ve got one of those faces.’
‘One of those faces?’ She contemplated me properly for the first time. ‘Is that how you got the black eye?’
‘Case of mistaken identity.’
‘Yeah yeah,’ she said, taking another swig from my bottle. People passing pushed us closer together. ‘I bet it’s make-up to make you look dangerous.’
‘Why bother with make-up? I just go to parties and throw insults at the biggest man I can see.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you met Zain?’
We were so close together our lips almost touched. I leaned int
o her neck so she could hear me better over the music.
‘He here tonight?’
‘Haven’t seen him.’
‘You know him, though?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, face vacant.
‘Only, from what I hear, I’d get more than a black eye.’
‘How did you say you knew Sarah Jane again?’
‘I said I didn’t.’
She moved away from me. ‘Then what are you doing here?’
‘Meeting nice girls …’
‘Zain doesn’t do nice girls.’
‘What about you?’
She wrinkled her nose up at the schmaltz. ‘I wasn’t very nice when I got here and I’m even worse now.’
‘Worse how?’
She started to turn and I took the bottle back.
‘I wanted that,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well.’
‘Come on … a drink’s the least you can do.’
I nodded and took a swig.
She tilted her head to one side, tried to look bored. ‘I’ll blow you for it.’ People pushing through the corridor forced us closer together again and I thought I saw her blush. I handed back the bottle and gave her some space.
‘Free of charge.’
She looked at it in her hand for a few seconds. ‘Sorry,’ she said. She half-smiled, embarrassed. ‘Don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.’ She stepped backwards and was absorbed into the hungry, swelling crowd.
I drifted from room to room with the movements of the party. There was just one locked door, and I wondered what was behind it. I didn’t see Sarah Jane, the redhead, or Isabelle Rossiter again that night. As far as I could tell, Carver and Catherine never even showed up. It gave me the odd feeling that they were all together, somewhere else entirely. That all this had been for my benefit. I wondered what Parrs had got me into.
8
I woke early on the Saturday. The last day of October. I found David Rossiter’s card and dialled ten out of the eleven numbers before hanging up. Instead I dialled a different number altogether. Superintendent Parrs answered on the first ring.
