He stopped outside a kebab shop, drawn by the scents of sweet garlic and coriander. The yellow glow from the lighted window spilled out across the grubby pavement in a radiant trapezium, a distorted yellow shadow of the window glass. There were three men up at the counter. They all had their backs to him but one of them seemed vaguely familiar, and as Kip studied his worn-out jacket and tatty Levis he realized with a sudden start that it was Dennis Croft. His gut twisted in a mild spasm, and sweat broke out on his palms.
Distantly, as if it were something he was watching on a movie screen, he saw Croft turn towards the window and beckon him inside.
“Can I stand you a kebab?” Croft said. “They’re always good here.”
What the heck? Kip thought. I was about to buy one anyway. He found it difficult to explain to himself why he had obeyed Croft’s summons, only that he was hungry, and that he wanted to see what would happen. Also, he resented the idea that Croft could make him afraid, that he might start avoiding places just because Croft happened to be there. He stood at the man’s side at the counter, leaning against the angled glass and staring up at the television mounted on the wall behind. The reception was bad, and the sizzling of meat on the grill made the soundtrack all but inaudible. Kip gazed without much interest at the striking tube workers, the visiting president he had seen already on the early news.
When the picture of the monster appeared it seemed to come out of the blue, although if he had thought about it more carefully he would have realized it was coming. It had been on the early news also, only he had forgotten. If he had remembered he could have done something, turned away from the screen at the crucial moment. He could have watched the traffic outside until the news had finished. It would have been easy.
Now that Croft was there to compare it with, he realized the photo fit was not all that good. The glasses were the wrong shape, and they made the monster’s face look squarer than it actually was. Also the real Croft’s cheekbones were more pronounced, the eyebrows thinner and less unkempt-looking. He saw that Croft too was staring at the picture. He experienced a sinking feeling, the kind of sick resignation he remembered from all the times he had been handed the results of an exam he already knew he had failed, the dismal knowledge of having been found out. The silence between them seemed to deepen and increase, spreading through the air like some poisonous gas. After what seemed like a long time Croft turned to him, smiling the ratty little half-smile Kip remembered from when he had asked him about the Nikon.
“Weird likeness, isn’t it?” he said. “I keep expecting them to come and arrest me.”
The fry cook was wrapping their kebabs in greaseproof paper, folding it quickly and expertly, the finished parcels like tiny papooses. Croft tore the paper aside almost immediately and bit straight into the middle of his kebab. Kip watched, amazed, wondering how he was able to do that without burning himself. Croft nodded briskly as if in approval and started towards the door. His mouth was smeared with grease, the thin lips glistening. The shop was full now, there were half a dozen people in the queue behind them. The darkness of the street outside seemed deeper and more complete, though Kip knew it was most likely just the contrast with the bright lights inside the kebab shop.
“Your food okay?” Croft said.
Kip nodded. They were walking side by side in the direction of the clock tower. The seconds were passing quickly, and Kip knew he had to say something, that to say nothing would be dangerous, almost as revealing as coming right out and accusing Croft of being the killer. He took a small bite of his kebab. The meat was charred on the outside, pink and tender within. It tasted as delicious as it smelled.
“They all look the same, though, these photo fits, don’t they? They could be anyone.”
“I know you’ve been following me,” Croft said suddenly. The tone of his voice had changed. There was something mean in it, a glistening menace that made Kip think of tensile steel: tripwires, garrottes. He turned to face Kip, forcing him back against one of the shop fronts. “You were taking pictures of me in the park the other day.” He spoke in a harsh whisper, leaning in close, and Kip could smell the garlic on his breath. He stared at Kip fixedly, as if he would have liked to grab hold of him, strike him maybe, as if the effort of not doing so was placing him under a strain. Kip supposed he did not want to draw attention to himself, although no one passing by on the pavement was taking any notice of them and Kip realized they probably thought the monster was his father.
“I take photographs of people all the time. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His words came out in a rush, slipping over each other like coins spilling from a beggar’s torn pocket. Kip replayed them in his mind more slowly, looking for loopholes. So far as he could tell there weren’t any. He decided that so long as he stuck to his story he would be safe.
“Those pictures don’t look like you anyway,” he added. “It’s the glasses, that’s all.” He looked Croft straight in the eye and thought about his father - the way he would come in from seeing Grace Hemingway and ask what was for supper, and his mother would tell him goulash and Kip would play along with her because he knew his world would explode into pieces if he didn’t.
The point was to stick to your story. The murderers in the cop films all knew that and so did his father. It was more a matter of nerve than a matter of fact.
Croft took a step backwards, his face relaxing. Kip laughed to signal that everything was all right between them, and after a couple of seconds Croft laughed too. Kip took more bites from his kebab, still seeing in his mind’s eye Croft as he had been moments earlier: the hard line of his mouth, the hollow cheeks, pale in the lamplight, the agitated posture, like that of a beast of prey about to spring.
He had seemed for those few minutes to become something else. At first it was rats Kip thought of, the way a cornered rat could kill a dog if it was desperate enough, or so he had heard. But then he found himself thinking of his Polish grandmother Dasha, and a story she used to tell him when he was younger that she called The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. The story was about a monster that could change its shape at will to blend in with its surroundings. There was a special word she had for it too: wilkolek, or maybe wilkolak, the Polish word for werewolf. He had forgotten all about it until now.
It came to him that murderers, perhaps child murderers especially, were the ultimate shape-shifters. You could bump against one in the crowd, on the station platform, in a supermarket, and never suspect for a moment that what you were seeing was not an ordinary person but a wilkolak. It was only at certain moments that they revealed themselves for what they were. On a darkened street outside a kebab shop, for example. In the nylon-curtained back bedroom of a caravan on the Isle of Sheppey.
He did not believe in werewolves of course, not any more. But he knew the creature he had glimpsed in Croft’s eyes was capable of anything.
It was important not to let Croft see that he knew that. It was his certainty over this - a cold feeling, but steady and clear, like the knowledge of his father’s affair with Grace Hemingway - that kept him from panic, from simply dropping his kebab on the pavement and running away. He asked himself what he would do, what he would say to Croft now if Croft were not a monster but a human being.
I would talk to him about the murder, he thought. I would want to find out what he thought. This answer, the right answer, seemed to light up his mind like one of the illuminated boxes on The Weakest Link. He knew also that it had to be now, right away, while the subject still lay open between them. If he returned to the matter later it would just look weird.
“It makes you think though, doesn’t it?” he said. “That guy really is still out there somewhere.”
Croft swallowed the last of his kebab then used the greaseproof paper to wipe his fingers. “There are always men like that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how many you catch, there will always be more.” He crushed the paper between his hands and dumped it into
a waste bin at the side of the road. “Do you suppose he’s really all that different from you?”
Kip shuddered inside his skin, the kind of quick involuntary movement he sometimes experienced just before falling asleep. It was as if Croft had read his mind, yet the way he had twisted his thoughts, turning them back on themselves so they pointed at him instead of Croft, filled him with outrage.
“You can’t tell me that a guy who does stuff like that is normal?”
“What’s normal?” Croft said, smiling. “Everyone has a side of themself they don’t want other people to see.”
“But this is different. This sicko killed someone. He murdered a little girl.”
“Soldiers kill little girls every day. You don’t see many of them getting arrested for murder.”
Croft was staring at him intently, in a way that made Kip feel uncomfortable. The look was back, the fixed, crazy wilkolak look, not as bad as before but enough to remind Kip of what it had been like to glimpse that side of him, the side he didn’t want other people to see. It occurred to him suddenly that it was his job that had made him that way, his work as a forensic photographer, that the sight of the dead and dying had unhinged him somehow, the way it had with soldiers in Vietnam. Kip had gone through a phase of watching ‘Nam films, although he had grown tired of them in the end because they only ever seemed to show one side of the story. Nonetheless they might help explain Croft. For people like the ‘Nam vets, killing was just another fact of life; they stopped being able to tell what was normal and what was not.
“Did you ever have to photograph a murder? A proper murder, I mean, with blood and everything?” Kip’s heart pounded with a strange excitement. He was surprised and ashamed at how much he wanted to know the answer to his question. Perhaps he’s right, Kip thought. There’s a monster in all of us.
“Plenty of times,” Croft said. “Do you want to see the pictures?” He moved a step closer, so close that Kip imagined he could feel the heat from his body, even though he knew it was just the night air he could feel, the warm night air mingled with the sharp scent of diesel. For the first time he felt really afraid. He knew there was nothing innocent about Croft’s question, that it was indecent somehow, as if he were asking Kip if he wanted to go to a porn film with him, and the worst thing about it was that he wanted Kip to know this, he wanted to make him complicit.
Kip realized he hated Croft, that he loathed him in the way he loathed dog turds, or butter beans, with a vertiginous, sliding repulsion that grew out of instinct and not out of reason. Yet still he could not look away. It was the same as with the dead rat, the spoiled milk. It was not just because Croft knew how to use a camera that Kip felt drawn to him; he was drawn to Croft because Croft had seen terrible things.
“That would be great,” he said. “I’ve been looking at some forensic stuff online actually. I was thinking I might want to get into it. Once I’ve finished college, I mean.”
“Are you sure about that?” Croft said. “Most of it’s pretty dull.”
Kip shook his head. “Not for me. I like the idea of it. I like the idea of never knowing what’s coming next.”
Croft laughed. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Mind your back.” He drew a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket, and a small scrap of paper. When Kip examined the paper later he discovered it was a receipt from the DIY store at the bottom end of Lee High Road, that Croft had bought two tins of white emulsion and a bottle of turps. Croft placed a hand on Kip’s shoulder, bending him forward and resting the paper on his back just below the left shoulder blade. Kip could feel the Biro moving over the paper, the pressure of Croft’s hand firm and even and slyly insistent. Kip fixed his eyes on the pavement. The flagstones were filthy. The whole of Lee High Road was like that, but it couldn’t help it. Most of the dirt was caused by traffic fumes.
“All done,” Croft said, and Kip straightened up. Croft handed him the paper, which Kip saw now had an address written on it, and a mobile telephone number. “I’m busy over the weekend, but you can come on Tuesday afternoon if you like. We can have a chat and I can show you some photos. Don’t forget to bring your camera.” He slipped the Biro back in his pocket. “See you, then.”
He walked off without looking round, heading back the way they had come. Kip took a few steps after him, thinking that he could trail Croft, see where he went, then realized he didn’t need to because he had Croft’s address already on the scrap of paper. It occurred to him that he could go to the police now, that he could tell them everything. He could have Dennis Croft arrested within the hour.
He knew almost at once that he wouldn’t do it. If he went to the police he would be forced to explain himself, to tell them why he had Croft’s address, why he suspected Croft of being the killer in the first place. He would also have to tell them who else knew, and that meant Sonia. He imagined a cop car drawing up outside the Vardens’ house, Timothy Varden demanding to know what the hell Kip thought he was doing getting his daughter mixed up with a paedophile. It would be like telling his father he knew about Grace Hemingway, tearing his world apart in all the wrong places.
He also had the feeling that when the police went to arrest him, Croft would no longer be there. It was a feeling he couldn’t explain but that he trusted completely, a deep itch, the same feeling he had sometimes during a game of Harris, when he knew the person sitting opposite had the ace of spades.
Still further back in his mind he was nagged by the sense that none of these things explained his refusal to act, that the real truth was that he didn’t want Croft arrested just yet, because he was keen to get a look at his photographs.
All he knew for certain was that he wanted to talk to Sonia. He turned left into Brandram Road, walking until he was out of earshot of the main traffic. He keyed Sonia’s number, convinced that she would not answer, that she was out with friends, or that she had left her phone in her bag and wouldn’t hear it ringing. She answered on the third ring.
“Hey,” she said. She sounded happy, and he seemed to catch a trace of her scent, the fresh, tangy scent of the pine soap she used with something else running beneath it, the dense musky smell that came from her armpits and between her legs. He wondered what she had been doing when he called.
“Hey, Son,” he said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. What’s the matter, Eddie? You sound weird.”
His dad called him Ed, his friends called him Kip, his teachers all called him Kiplas. Only his mother and Sonia called him Eddie. He had hoped that hearing Sonia’s voice would make things better somehow, would get rid of all his crazy thoughts about werewolves and Dennis Croft being a murderer, but instead it was just making things worse. He couldn’t get rid of the idea that she was in danger. He wished there were a way of keeping her safe without having to tell her anything. If he told her she might think he was going nuts.
“Have you still got that photo?” he said. His mouth felt dry and he swallowed. There was a back-taste of onion and charcoal.
“What photo? The one of the guy outside the garage.”
He nodded, forgetting for a moment that she couldn’t see him. “Yes,” he said. “Did you keep it?”
“What do you think? You know I love your stuff. What’s going on?”
He felt a surge of happiness, that she should treat him like a real artist, then fought to suppress it. “It’s just that, well, I think I saw the guy again, that’s all.”
“What d’you mean, you saw him again? How long ago?”
“The other day, in Manor Park Gardens. And then this evening, up by the clock tower. I think it was him, anyway. He was too far away for me to see him properly.”
The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10 Page 33
