It was around nine o’clock when I pulled up outside his house. The rain was still holding off, and there was even a hint of autumn sunlight glowing palely behind the clouds. It was still pretty cold though, and the wind seemed to be picking up.
A wheelie bin had been blown over at the side of the road, and the bin bags inside had fallen out and split open on the pavement. Bits of rubbish had been picked up by the wind and were flapping around in the air — empty crisp packets, polythene bags, plastic food containers — like confetti at a wino’s wedding.
As I got out of the car and locked it, I wondered why I was bothering. Not only did the car not have a side window, but it was a cheap old pile of shit anyway. I mean, who the hell was going to steal a twelve-year-old Ford Fiesta that was held together with body filler and carrier bags?
I pulled up my coat collar and headed along the street towards Cal’s house. It was a tall old place with black railings and steep concrete steps leading up to the door. The walls of the steps were cracked and topped with birdshit-encrusted slabs, and the front door was daubed with years of graffiti. The shiny black CCTV camera mounted on the wall over the door didn’t seem to fit with the overall shabbiness of the place, but it was an incongruity that fitted Cal to a T.
Cal had lived here since he was seventeen, by which time he’d already been thrown out by his parents and excluded from every school he’d ever been to. It wasn’t so much that he was a bad kid — although he could be kind of wild at times — nor did his alienation have anything to do with a lack of intelligence or understanding. If anything, Cal was just too smart for school. He got bored very easily, and when he got bored, he started looking for something exciting to do. And, for Cal, something exciting usually meant something illegal. Like credit-card fraud, or hacking, or phishing, or mobile phone scams …
He was very good at what he did.
He’d never been caught, never been arrested.
And he made a lot of money.
There were rumours that a few years after he’d moved into this house, which at the time had been a squat, he’d very quietly become the owner. I didn’t know if that was true or not. And, if it was true, I didn’t know if he’d bought it legally or not. But, again, I didn’t care. I liked Cal. And Stacy had liked him too — she was the only member of her family who did — and that meant a lot to me. And it meant a lot to Cal too.
He was twenty-eight now, and he’d been helping me out with things since he was fourteen, and in all that time he’d never, ever, let me down. So, as far as I was concerned, Cal was all right.
I rang the doorbell and waited, pulling up my collar against the wind. The feeling of the house hadn’t changed from its days as a squat — although I imagined that Cal now charged some kind of rent — and as I stood there on the doorstep, I could hear various kinds of music playing in different parts of the house: some rap stuff on the ground floor, a guitar band on the second floor, an operatic voice sailing out from an open window on the third floor. It sounded good.
The girl who opened the door was no more than four-and-a-half feet tall. She was dressed in a pale-blue vest with a tiger’s head on the front, a very short threadbare skirt, black tights, and monkey boots. Plastic bangles rattled on her wrists, silver studs glimmered in her ear, and strings of coloured beads were wound around her neck, together with a knotted thong of black leather and a small plastic doll on a chain. The king-size cigarette hanging from her lip-glossed mouth was far too big for her.
‘Yeah?’ she said, looking at me with glassy eyes.
‘I’m here to see Cal.’
She took the cigarette from her mouth and looked over my shoulder. ‘Who are you?’
‘John Craine. Cal’s expecting me.’
She stared at me for a moment, then shrugged and opened the door. I stepped through into a corridor cluttered with bicycles, bin bags, and damp clothes drying on racks. A high staircase led upwards on the right, and at the far end of the corridor was a large communal kitchen. The house smelled of wet clothes, soup, and marijuana.
The girl took the cigarette from her mouth and scratched her arm. ‘Cal’s down the hall,’ she said. ‘The basement flat.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
She wandered off up the stairs, and I headed down the hallway. At the end, a narrow stairwell with steep spiral steps led down into the basement. More CCTV cameras were mounted on the wall, and I knew that Cal was probably watching me as I moved stiffly down the steps. My legs were really aching now, and my knees didn’t seem to want to bend — a condition not especially conducive to walking down stairs — so it took me a while to reach the bottom. When I finally got there, the door to Cal’s flat — a solid chunk of reinforced steel — was already open, and Cal was waiting for me in the doorway. He looked as good as he always looked: a handsomely wasted face, an uncombed mess of jet-black hair, rings in his ears, eyebrow studs, a touch of eyeliner. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt, skinny black jeans, and black leather boots with red laces.
‘Shit, Uncle Johnny,’ he said, grinning wildly at the state of my face. ‘What the fuck have you been up to?’
By the time Cal had shown me inside and made me some coffee, and I’d sat down at one of his work desks and briefly told him what had happened to me outside The Wyvern, I’d already realised that he was wired out of his head on something. His eyes were huge, he was twitching like a lunatic and licking his lips all the time, and he couldn’t keep still for more than a second.
‘How long have you been up for?’ I asked him as he passed me a mug of coffee.
‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘Day or two … I’m working on something …’
‘What sort of something?’
He jerked his head, indicating a worktop across the room. It was strewn with all kinds of technical stuff: several laptops in various stages of disassembly, mobile phones, wires, cables, routers, tools … bits of equipment that I couldn’t even put a name to. I looked back at Cal, waiting for him to tell me what it was he was working on, but he’d already turned away from me and was walking back across the room towards his cramped little kitchen area. I’d always wondered why the kitchen area was so poky when the rest of his flat was comparatively huge. It had originally been two basement flats, but Cal had converted it into one large living area, with a small bedroom and bathroom at the far end. It was a low-ceilinged room, painted white all over, and most of it was taken up with the tools of Cal’s trade: computers, monitors, printers, scanners, work desks, phones, cameras, TVs, recording equipment. There was a small recreation area in one corner, with a black leather settee and a huge widescreen TV, but in all the time that Cal had lived here, I’d never seen him use it.
‘So these guys who beat you up,’ he said, taking a can of Red Bull from the fridge. ‘Are they connected with something you’re working on?’
‘Well, that’s the thing — ’
‘You didn’t see their faces?’
‘I didn’t see anything. I’m not even certain that there were two of them.’
He popped the Red Bull and drank it down in one go. ‘They didn’t rob you?’
‘No.’
‘Made any enemies recently?’
I thought about Fitch, the straggly-haired dealer from The Wyvern, but Genna had said that he was all mouth, and I got the feeling that she was probably right. And then there was Preston Elliot … but somehow I couldn’t see him going to all the trouble of following me around and lying in wait for me in an alley. It just wasn’t his style.
‘There was a car — ’ I started to say.
‘Have you got a cigarette?’ he interrupted.
I took out my packet. ‘Listen, Cal,’ I said, passing him a cigarette and lighting one for myself. ‘When I went to The Wyvern last night — ’