Sirens

by Joseph Knox

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A bag,’ he said. ‘Hundred mil, fuck-all. Just means we know what we’ve got. We can amp up a weak batch or cut down a strong one.’

  ‘Troubleshooting.’

  ‘Well, Grip didn’t always look like Frankenstein. He shot a bag …’ I waited. He went on quietly, like Grip might have his ear to the door. ‘He got sick. It knocked him out. Fucked his arm. For a while they thought he’d lose it, but he got away with some nerve damage.’

  ‘Lucky guy.’

  He shot me a look. ‘He was in a coma for a few days. Came out of it different.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Argumentative. Emotional.’

  ‘Are you saying—’

  Carver shook his head. ‘Opposite of that. He’s lost his stomach for the game. I don’t think he’d hurt anyone.’

  ‘You flushed the Eight, though.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Zain—’

  ‘I wanted to know what went wrong. I wanted to know if the cook had fucked up or someone had spiked it.’

  ‘Who’s the cook?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘It ended up in a seventeen-year-old girl’s arm.’

  He ignored me. ‘I put it away until we could work out what happened.’

  ‘So?’

  He drained his glass again and refilled it. ‘So when I looked for it today it was gone.’

  ‘Gone? Where was it?’

  He didn’t move for a second. Then he nodded over at his desk. I felt sick. Felt the ground dropping out from under me. I tried to speak.

  ‘I …’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘… I left Isabelle in this room the night before she died,’ I said. ‘For five minutes, while I spoke to Sarah Jane. I thought I was bringing her home, I didn’t know she was staying round the corner …’

  ‘Fuck.’ He thought for a second. Frowned. ‘Did they find it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The brick,’ he said. ‘Did they find it at the flat?’

  ‘No.’ It dawned on me what he was saying. ‘In which case, it’s still out there. She must have sold it or passed it on.’ We were both standing now. ‘We’ve got to find it. Tonight, now.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, swiping his keys off the desk.

  16

  We’d been driving for fifteen minutes. We didn’t talk about what might happen if contaminated Eight hit the market. I’d waited in the lounge while Carver had short, aggressive conversations with Grip and Sarah Jane. He came back into the room and flashed me a look.

  ‘That retainer,’ he said. ‘We good there?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You can start earning it.’

  We sped into the city. I got the impression he was looking at old haunts. Places where friends, lovers, rivals had pushed Eight in his heyday. He’d been off the streets for so long that the people and places he remembered were gone, swept under the rug of the city’s regeneration.

  ‘I can think of one person who’d know about it if there was a dodgy brick doing the rounds.’

  Carver flashed me a look. ‘The Bug? You’re talking about the Bug?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You must be fucking joking.’

  I let it go, gave him a minute. ‘So where are we going?’ He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘Zain …’

  ‘Black-and-white town,’ he said.

  ‘The Burnside?’

  He grunted and we drove on in silence. I’d hoped that I was wrong about the paint smears at Fairview. As we got further from the centre the streets seemed to get darker, uglier, there were no people on the pavements. No laughing girls or boys chancing their arms. The buildings on the roadside were old betting shops or burned-out, boarded-up pubs. We followed the Irwell out of town, north, towards that ugly industrial estate.

  The city had written the Burnside off, and the police stayed away. Most tellingly of all, so did the Franchise. As we drove, I watched carefully. The headlights swept across buildings and roads, and the street signs were meaningless. Torn down, redirected or painted over. Responding police cars would get lost in the maze, finally reaching dead ends where they might be fire-bombed or worse. I thought I caught odd smatterings of black and white paint but only in the corners of my eyes. It was there and then gone again.

  ‘This fucking place,’ said Carver.

  ‘Do you know anyone here?’

  ‘Wouldn’t want to.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘One of the girls,’ he said, eyes on the road. ‘Addie. She was collecting here. Papers say the industry went abroad and ripped the heart out of estates like these. Truth is, there wasn’t much heart in the first place.

  ‘The rule was that Grip always went with them. No one came here on their own. The Siders weren’t what they had been, but they were still about. And the junkies’d grab a girl as soon as look at her.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t know it but Ads was using. She thought she could control it, keep it to the clubs, but they always start taking it home. She was skimming money from collections. It was just a conversation waiting to happen and that would have been that. Only I left it too long. One night she was short, came here collecting by herself.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Confident, funny. On brand. Some smiler held her down while another stabbed her through the ear with a syringe. Injected Eight into her brain to see what’d happen.’

  I looked out of the window. ‘Don’t you ever get bored of this?’

  He didn’t say anything, but I knew the rest. The Carver Franchise pulling out created a gap in the market for low-rent, low-down dealers like the Siders to sell the worst-quality stuff imaginable.

  Tar.

  It burned people down from the inside out. Sutty said he’d even seen users here potholing. They’d nurture one sustained open vein in their arm and then not let it heal. The skin grew up around the wound like split, puckered lips. At the time I’d thought he was exaggerating, but as we drove I wasn’t so sure.

  We passed through streets of dismal, concrete grey, with flecks of black and white dotted about. It was worn down and burned out now, but the aggressive ugliness of the place could only have been intentional. A part of the design back when it had been an industrial estate. A message to employees that they were here to work and nothing else.

  ‘I’d pull it down,’ said Carver. ‘To the last fucking brick.’

  We pulled up beside a hulking, derelict warehouse. I don’t know if Carver knew the building or if he just picked the worst place he could find. Looking closely I saw it was spotted with faded, cracked-up, black and white paint.

  Sutty had been right.

  Whether the Burnsiders were still operating was up for debate, but their tag seemed disused. That only raised more questions about who was leaving it on Carver’s doorstep. He turned off the engine and flexed his fingers over the steering wheel. We got out and started walking. His car looked ridiculous here, like a rare animal transplanted from somewhere exotic into dull, monochrome captivity.

  As we walked I heard what sounded like animals, howling in the distance. I stopped for a second, realized that they were people. The warehouse had been built with thin sheet metal. In places there were gaps in the walls where the sheets had either fallen out or been stripped away. Through these gaps we could see the glow of flames from makeshift fireplaces, where users would be sitting around, trying to stay warm. The city seemed colder here. November digging its nails in.

  Sitting in the doorway was a toothless, drunken woman and her boyfriend. She was crying, a guttural, painful sound, while the man laughed at her. Carver stepped between them, through the door, and I followed.

  The building was beyond huge, and it was difficult to imagine it ever having been filled before it fell into disrepair. A short hallway led us past what would have been a reception area and into the colossal main room of the abandoned warehouse.

  It was lit only by the
fires burning in three different spots, each illuminating four or five wasted, skeletal people. They were either lying down or staring intently into the flames, but none of them looked at us as we entered. Carver walked towards the nearest group and I followed. He bent to a man, lying passed out by a fire, and rolled him over. A smiler. Scar tissue either side of his mouth. Carver held his arm up to the light, searching for some sign that the missing brick had been here.

  ‘Hey,’ said the man. The only protest he was capable of. He watched dispassionately as Carver removed a tin-foil package from the man’s hand. He opened it, looked inside, and threw it back down, disgusted.

  He was out of his depth. We both were. He repeated the process at the second fireplace, finding nothing but Tar and bad conversation. Carver was already checking the third when we heard some commotion from the doorway. Someone was talking to the toothless woman we’d stepped over on our way in.

  ‘Finally,’ said Carver. He turned from what he was doing and strode in the direction of the door, eager for confrontation. Three shapes appeared. The man in front was bald and wiry. He was white but, even in the low light, looked so dirty that his skin had been permanently coloured. He had golden teeth and tattoos on his face. About ten feet behind him were two younger men. They were bigger than him but it was more fat than muscle. They both had tired, sulky expressions on their faces. They kept their distance while the bald man came closer.

  ‘Zain Carver,’ he said. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Do I know you?’

  The man laughed. He sounded like a punctured accordion. ‘Nah, mate,’ he said. ‘I bet you don’t. Think of me as the nightwatchman.’

  ‘Once I walk through that door, mate, I’ll never think of you again.’

  ‘Best make the most of it then, hadn’t I? What brings you here?’

  ‘You’ve been tryna get my attention for weeks,’ said Carver.

  ‘Have we, now?’

  ‘The black and white paint at Fairview.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, ten years since Joanna went missing.’

  The bald man smiled. ‘Oh, it’s a matter of the heart …’

  ‘Where I’m least fucking vulnerable. I’m here to ask you a question and then we can all go home.’

  ‘You still can go home, then?’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘We hear you’re famous now. Michael fuckin’ Jackson in Neverland. Police an’ press campin’ outside. What’d we hear, Billy?’

  ‘Famous,’ said Billy, the larger of the two boys. ‘Got his name in the papers.’

  ‘Got yer name in the papers,’ said the bald man.

  ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’

  ‘Know what you mean,’ said the man. Each time he finished a sentence he counted it off on his fingers, like he only had so many left in him and wanted to keep track. ‘Sheldon’ll never believe it when he hears this.’

  Carver took a step forward, looked at him. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You don’t call. You don’t write …’ The man licked his lips. ‘Ever since we gave that girl of yours some earache.’

  In one movement, Carver took the man by the shoulders and head-butted him. I heard a sharp, wet crack and saw blood explode into the air, hanging there for a second like mist. The man’s head went back so quickly I thought he’d broken his neck. By the time I got to Carver he was strangling him.

  ‘Zain,’ I said. I looked at the Burnsiders who’d been standing behind the bald man. Neither moved. Billy, the older of the two, wasn’t even watching. The other one stared at Carver, strangling his boss on the floor. He looked bored. Carver’s thumbs were pressing into the man’s neck so hard they were turning white.

  ‘Zain,’ I said. ‘Stop.’

  He wrung the man’s neck for a few seconds more and then threw him down on the ground. The man let out an anguished scream for breath. His nose was obliterated, his face was covered in blood.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ said Carver, wiping his hands on his trousers. He got to his feet and strode up to the young Siders. Went toe-to-toe with Billy. ‘You heard about that girl? Isabelle Rossiter?’ Billy nodded. ‘The stuff that did it’s still out there …’

  ‘Nothing moves here unless it’s from us,’ said Billy.

  Carver grunted and walked out, back the way we came. ‘Tell Sheldon we said hi,’ he shouted over his shoulder.

  I couldn’t look at the man on the floor but I could hear him struggling for air, inhaling and exhaling bone fragments as he did. The two Siders drifted slowly out of the warehouse. I dialled 999 for the second time in two days and asked for an ambulance. I gave them the address, rolled the man over and followed Carver.

  ‘That’s the only reason we came here? To prove some fucking point?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought we were looking for the Eight.’

  ‘We are,’ he said, wiping blood from his forehead, getting into the car. ‘Any bright ideas?’

  I got in on the passenger side. ‘Just one. Don’t lose your shit again. Don’t leave any more broken noses where we’ve been.’ He started the car and put his foot down.

  ‘That’s what you call supply and demand. Someone asking

  for something and someone getting it.’ I watched his hands, gripping the wheel tightly. I checked the time. It was more than an hour since we’d set out and we were leaving the Burnside with nothing.

  I tried to focus. ‘If the Siders are anything to do with the missing Eight, they’d never sell it on their own doorstep.’

  He thought about it. ‘They’d sell it on mine.’ He leaned forward, dialled a number into his mobile.

  Grip’s voice came through the speakerphone. ‘Any joy?’

  ‘Not at the Burnside,’ said Carver. ‘Check all the bars from Rubik’s down. If they’re setting us up, they’ll sell it in the city, not here.’

  ‘No one knows anything. Or no one’s talking about it. Got ourselves another problem.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Am I on loud?’

  Carver took the phone from its cradle and pressed it to his ear. ‘Gone?’ he said. I assumed they were talking about the bar manager from Rubik’s. The drugs I’d flushed. I assumed he’d run for his life. I needed to talk to him about his relationship with Isabelle and wondered again how I’d do it.

  Carver spoke quietly. ‘Get around everyone. Get around everywhere. Put out a cash reward. Find it.’ He hung up and we drove on in silence for a few minutes.

  I took a breath. ‘The Bug.’ Carver didn’t say anything this time and I went on. ‘Stuff gets cut down and sold on every day. There’s a roaring black market for Eight.’

  He still didn’t say anything.

  ‘If someone was trying to move a brick, he’d hear about it.’

  ‘He’s a fucking psychopath.’

  ‘What have we got to lose?’

  Carver looked at me. ‘My temper.’ He drove on for a minute. ‘Grip can go with you.’

  ‘Mr Level-Headed? Leave him out of it.’

  ‘You wanna talk to the Bug on your own? You must have something I haven’t seen, brother.’

  ‘Turn left here,’ I said. ‘Yeah, we go way back.’

  He didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t tell if he was disgusted or impressed.

  17

  The Bug was an urban legend made flesh. He’d been a heroic user of heroin in his day, perfecting a style known as cannibalization. He was the rag-and-bone man of the scene, picking up the stuff that even hardcore users wouldn’t shoot and finding a home for it. He considered using another person’s needle a high in its own right, and would mix together the dregs from several syringes, recutting it into one cocktail.

  But it wasn’t until he got sober some years later that he picked up his nickname. Injecting had always been sexualized for him and, once he stopped, he spent even more time around users. Especially young ones.

  They called him the Bug because he would hover around a g
roup of kids, salivating as they shot up. Then, once they were high, he’d lower himself down and kiss, gently, along their arms until he got to the vein they’d shot into. Then he’d suckle at the wound, letting out low, satisfied moans. His primary physical threat was being literally infectious. He bragged about an entire alphabet of hepatitis in his bloodstream.

  He became a cult figure in the gay scene, performing a transsexual BDSM act under the name Daddy Longlegs at unlicensed saunas and sex clubs. He made existential, art-house pornography. Wrote cheap but well-selling chapbooks of poetry and sold his own artwork for hundreds of pounds a go.

  Among a subculture known as bug chasers he became infamous. These young men saw HIV as a status symbol and pursued it with a suicidal vigour that was both sad and compelling to see. He practised unprotected sex with people who considered it a gift to be infected by him. The rumours were outrageous, awful and –sometimes – true. He was well spoken, wore tailored clothes and revelled in these contradictions in his character.

  He lived in a converted church off Alexandra Park. Carver pulled up across the road without looking directly at the place.

  ‘If I’m not back in ten minutes …’

  ‘Don’t bother coming back at all,’ he said.

  18

  I got out and crossed the road. It was gone midnight and these ten stress-free seconds, breathing the cold air, made me feel light-headed. I got to the door and pressed the intercom. The building had been renovated and modernized. It was a world away from the Burnside and I was grateful for it.

  ‘Yesssss,’ buzzed a bored, mechanized voice.

  ‘Waits.’

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  ‘Come on in, handsome.’

  The place was decorated in sedate, pastel colours that belied the Bug’s wild reputation. The main room was large and spacious, resplendent with solid, load-bearing beams. A teenage boy was sitting at a piano, naked to the waist, playing a sonata. Some of the less bombastic Beethoven, I thought.

  On a bed in the centre of the room a young couple lay in their pants, kissing, grinding slowly against each other. At first I thought they were both boys, but saw that the girl simply had short hair, an angular, androgynous face, and a flat chest. The bed was low, Japanese in style, and had a glaring spotlight above it. Neither of them looked up when I walked in.