The flat in Parfrey Street was opposite Charing Cross Hospital. Pinkie knew it had a reputation for amputations and sex changes — although not necessarily in that order. Before the pandemic, residents used to joke that they couldn’t tell if someone coming out of the hospital was a man or a woman. The perfect place, Pinkie thought, for the couple he intended to visit.
Tom and Harry’s flat at 13A was just above a florist’s shop, which was also a café. Next door to the café was a twenty-four-hour general store that sold alcohol in blue plastic bags at all hours. Pre-pandemic there had been a regular traffic of pyjama’d patients, back and forth across the street. They went empty-handed, and returned with blue plastic bags.
Now most of the wards were filled with the dead and dying. The hospital’s regular trade had taken a back seat, and the twenty-four-hour shop was closed twenty-four-seven. As was the florist cum café, and the Pizza Express from which Tom and Harry used to feed themselves on the nights they couldn’t be bothered cooking.
Pinkie cruised up a side street, away from the lights of the hospital and the comings and goings of the ambulances. You hardly ever heard them coming these days. A lack of traffic had made their sirens redundant. He found somewhere to park, and walked back to the door at number one. He drew a crowbar from inside his coat and levered it open. The wood cracked and splintered as the lock burst. The time for subtlety was over. He climbed the stairs quickly to 13A on the top floor and glanced at the nameplate. Tom Bennet. Harry Schwartz. He slipped the wedge-end of his crowbar between the door and the jamb and forced it open. More splintered wood. The noise of it reverberated around the landing, and the hall of the flat beyond. He pushed the door open, then quickly closed it behind him and stood listening in the dark. He heard the rustle of bed sheets, a groan, a sleepy voice. ‘Jesus, Tom, is that you? What the hell are you doing?’
Pinkie turned and opened the bedroom door. He could see the prone figure of Harry wrapped in his duvet, half-raised on one elbow.
‘I thought you were on all night.’
‘I came home early,’ Pinkie said. ‘Because I wanted to put something in your mouth.’
Harry immediately reached for the bedside lamp. He turned it on, startled, and looked at Pinkie standing in the doorway. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
Pinkie looked at Harry appraisingly. He could see what Tom saw in him. He was definitely the alfa male. Tall, well-built, a good head of thick, brown hair. He reminded Pinkie a little of George Clooney. Yes, he definitely had a touch of the film star about him. It was no wonder he was in such demand. Pinkie smiled and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘A friend of Tom’s,’ he said. ‘He told me you might be pleased to see me.’ He glanced down at the duvet. ‘I don’t see any evidence of it yet.’
Harry sat upright and moved away from him. Pinkie didn’t feel as though he was presenting that much of a threat. Why did Harry seem so scared? Time to introduce him to real fear. He drew his gun from beneath his jacket and levelled it at Harry’s head. Harry’s eyes opened wide.
‘Jesus! Please don’t.’
‘Don’t what? I’m not going to hurt you.’ Pinkie moved the silencer to within an inch of Harry’s mouth, and flicked it once. ‘Come on. Open up. I told you I wanted to put something in your mouth.’
‘Oh, my God,’ Harry muttered, and with the parting of his lips, Pinkie pushed the silencer into his mouth and felt it clatter against his teeth. Harry froze, hardly daring to move or breathe.
‘There,’ Pinkie said soothingly. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ He enjoyed their fear. Sometimes there wasn’t time to dwell on it. Sometimes you just had to pull the trigger and be done. He remembered how it felt when the knife went down through the shoulder blades of his mother’s attacker. It had glanced off bone, a sickening, jarring sensation that shot up his arm, before driving on into the heart. The man was dead, even before Pinkie rolled him off her. There had been no chance to register his fear and pain, that moment of realisation that death was upon him. So he liked to savour moments like this. But not for too long. Time was running out. ‘I want you to do something for me, Harry. It will require me to remove the gun from your mouth. So I want you to be a good boy. Do you understand me?’
Harry nodded quickly.
Chapter Twenty-One
I
MacNeil shone his torch into the tiny bathroom beneath the stairs and saw that there was a door just inside it, on the right. He grabbed the handle and pushed it open into darkness. The beam of his torch picked out narrow wooden steps descending steeply into the cellar.
‘You’d better wait here,’ he said.
‘I will not, Mr MacNeil,’ Dr Castelli said firmly. ‘Where you go, I follow.’
‘Be careful, then. These steps are very steep.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I have my sensible shoes on. My housebreaking ones.’
He had to turn sideways to place his feet squarely on the steps and ease his big frame down into the cold damp of the basement. It was a small room, divided in two by a brick wall. Faint yellow street light washed in from a narrow coal chute. A metal grille stopped animals from getting in. It was many years since the coalman had slid his last sack down this chute, but there was a pile of chopped pine beneath it, next to a small wood-burning stove. Low air pressure was forcing the smell of soot back down the black metal pipe that fed up into the chimney, sour like stale bacon. It was icy cold here, and MacNeil was unable to stop an involuntary shiver running through his upper body. He could feel the chill coming up through the floor, penetrating his shoes, wrapping itself around his feet and his ankles.
He ran the torch around bare walls. There was nothing much here. An empty wine rack, a damp cardboard box full of empty wine bottles. A rolled-up piece of carpet, an off-cut from one of the upstairs bedrooms. White, powdery damp oozed out through old brick. MacNeil had to duck as he passed through into the other half of the room. White-painted concrete beams supported a low ceiling. The walls were lined with empty wine racks.
‘Someone must have been very thirsty,’ Dr Castelli said, and her voice sounded strangely dead down here in this cold, claustrophobic space. On the back wall there was an old Belfast sink, a big white porcelain tub. In days gone by perhaps they had washed clothes down here. A single cold-water tap stuck out from the wall above it. Beneath it there was a large gas bottle, and an industrial-sized gas ring on a sturdy metal stand. A container the size of a small barrel stood next to it, covered with a towel. The centre of the room was taken up by a stout wooden table, like a giant butcher’s block, which may well have been what it once was. It was chopped and scarred, and worn into a deep dent at one side, and bleached clean. MacNeil sniffed. He could smell it in the air.
So could Dr Castelli. ‘Bleach,’ she said.
He shone the torch around the room until it fell upon a rusted metal door set into the wall. It was about two feet high and one foot wide. MacNeil tried it, but it wouldn’t move. It was either rusted solid, or locked.
‘Maybe this’ll open it.’
He turned to find the doctor holding up a big old iron key about six inches long. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘No big secret. It was hanging on the wall.’ As he took it from her and turned to try it in the door, she said, ‘What do you think it is? Some kind of safe?’
‘It’s probably an old silver safe. In a house like this the original owners would have been pretty wealthy. They’d have had silver cutlery, maybe a silver tea service. The servants would have locked it away in the silver safe after cleaning.’
The key groaned and complained as he twisted it clockwise. But it did turn, and the heavy steel door swung open, rusty hinges grating. There was a single wooden shelf set in the niche in the wall behind it. The beam of MacNeil’s torch reflected back at them from an array of knives and choppers neatly arranged on the shelf. Not dissimilar to the cutting implements he had found in Flight’s apartment.