For a while Lynn didn’t answer. “Maybe not,” she finally said. “Only …”
“Only what?”
“After you’ve … after you’ve been to bed and …”
“And done the deed.” Sharon laughed.
“Yes, if you like. And he’s gone back home to his wife, well, how do you feel?”
Sharon put her hand on Lynn’s arm. “Somewhere between having had a Turkish and a long massage, and being seen to by the Dynorod man.”
The laughter of the two women filled the car and when it faded, Lynn said: “Look, what’s that? Over there.”
“Where?”
“Over there.”
Nicky had walked past the house three times now, a two-story end-terrace with lace curtains at the window, even those above street level. The kind of house, the kind of street where people put milk bottles out last thing at night, but no one had done that here. Okay, he thought, it was getting late but not that late, most of the other houses had lights showing in their bedroom windows at least. Not here. He turned along the side of the house to where a narrow ginnel ran into the darkness, giving access to the backs.
For as much as five minutes he stood in the center of the rear yard, letting the darkness gather round him. A few doors along someone was playing their television too loud, someone else was singing, one of those pathetic songs his mum would sing when she was in the kitchen and thought no one else was listening, or when she came back from the pub after last orders and didn’t care. There was a gap at the top of the window at least an inch wide and his guess was that whoever lived there had forgotten to close it tight. So simple, Nicky thought, so why was he still standing there when by now he could have been in and out? Another ten minutes and he’d be home. Nicky took a pace towards the window, then another; as far as he was concerned most of the evening had been a washout and here was his chance to finish it on an up.
Face close against the glass, he saw, beyond his own reflection, the contours of the neat back room, everything ordered and in its place the way old jossers’ homes were. Some of them, anyway. The ones that didn’t babble on at you in the street, half-drowned in their own dribble, sit in their own piss. Yes, he bet whoever lived here dusted it every morning, moving every sodding ornament on the shelf. Nicky had done places like this before, money hid away in the most stupid places, obvious, inside vases, between the pages of Bibles, biscuit tins. Three hundred he’d found once, three hundred almost, pushed up the arse of this donkey, a present from Skegness.
Easing himself silently up onto the tiled sill, Nicky slipped his fingers over the top of the window and began to slide it down.
Seven
Nicky stood still long enough to let his eyes grow accustomed to the light. Table, chest of drawers, sideboard, mantelpiece, chairs-gradually, the details sharpened into place. Family photographs. He had already turned the key to unlock the back door and slipped back the bolts; he could be out of there in seconds if he had to. But he wasn’t going to have to. Wherever they were, the people who lived there-off on one of them geriatric coach trips or boring the balls off their relations-they weren’t here. Quiet as the sodding grave.
He would do this room first and then the front. No rush for a change, Nicky, take your time.
Brian Noble had followed the boy down into the trees.
He had driven past him twice, the boy standing in shadow at the edge of the street light’s fall, holding his cigarette down by his side, cupped inside his hand. Noble had parked the car on the nearest of the side streets, careful to push anything which might be stolen beneath the seats. One of the women had called out to him, asked him if he wanted a good time, but that wasn’t the kind of good time that interested him. He could get that at home.
The first time he walked on past, just slowing enough to judge the boy’s age-fourteen or fifteen, soft flesh still around those hard eyes. On the way back he spoke, stopped and asked him for a light.
“You don’t want a light,” the boy said.
“Don’t I?”
“Fifteen quid,” the boy said, not looking at the man directly, glancing back and forth along the street.
“What for?”
The boy showed him with an almost elegant gesture of the hand.
“Doesn’t that seem rather a lot?” Brian Noble asked.
“Suit yourself.”
Noble was gazing at the boy’s face, the dark hair that hung loosely across his forehead, the first beginnings of a mustache darkening along his upper lip. He imagined the pubic hair around the boy’s cock and felt himself grow hard.
“Suppose there are things I want to do to you?” Brian Noble asked.
“Cost you.”
“Of course.”
The boy stared at him now. “Well?”
Across the street a car, an Astra, dark blue, slowed almost to a halt and woman jumped out of the back seat before the car had come to a proper stop. “Wanker!” She stepped off the pavement, middle finger trust high into the air as the car accelerated away.
“I have a car,” Noble said.
“Fancy that.”
“We could go to it now, it wouldn’t take a minute.”
“No.” He didn’t know why, but he didn’t fancy it. “No,” the boy said. “Back here.”
Noble looked at the headlights from Gregory Boulevard, strung in perpetual motion through the trees. “It doesn’t look so very comfortable,” he said.
“Suit yourself.”
The boy ground the nub end of his cigarette beneath his shoe and started to move away. Noble detained him with a hand, restraining yet gentle on the boy’s arm. “All right. Have it your way.”
“The money first.”
“What, here? Where everyone can see?”
“The money.”
Noble fingered fifteen pounds away from the fifty he had pushed down into his trouser pocket before leaving the car; his wallet he had locked for safety inside the glove compartment.
“I thought you wanted something more,” the boy said, looking at the money now in his hand.
“Let’s just see, shall we? See how we go. I think that’s enough to be going on with.”
Without another word, the boy turned and Brian Noble, not without the exhilaration of fear, followed him down towards the trees.
Nicky had upturned every jar and ornament, opened every box and drawer, and all he’d come up with was a few pounds’ worth of five-p pieces inside a half-size whisky bottle and a postal order for one pound, forty-two. It went without saying they had neither a stereo nor a VCR, just a poxy plastic radio that wasn’t worth taking and a postage stamp TV that was more state of the ark than art.
He would have to try upstairs. See what, aside from the old man’s best trousers, they kept under the mattress.
Under the worn tread of the carpet, the stairs squeaked a little and groaned, however lightly Nicky placed his feet.
“Slowly,” Brian Noble said, his voice a hissed whisper. “Go more slowly. That’s it, that’s it. There.”
He was leaning back against the rough-hewn stonework of the cemetery wall, its unevenness poking hard against his shoulders, the back of his head, base of his spine.
“That’s it, that’s lovely. Go on, go on.”
The boy stood close alongside him, always looking away, his elbow pressing into Noble’s arm. Noble wanted to dip his head and kiss the V of hair, dark at the back of the boy’s neck, but knew that if he did the boy would pull away. Instead, he set his right hand softly against the boy’s waist, and when there was no resistance, slid it down over his hip and round until his finger ends were resting on the boy’s buttocks. He felt the boy’s muscles tense and prepared to pull his hand away but it was all right, there was no need.
Faint, he could see the headlights along Gregory Boulevard, strung like a moving lantern between the trees.
“Christ!” the boy complained. “How much longer you gonna be?”