Higgs nodded.
‘How much are you paying him?’
‘About two f-fifty an —’
‘Good,’ Charlton said. ‘Because that’s all he’s worth.’
Barker smiled as he reached for the clippers and began to shave the hairs at the base of the lorry-driver’s neck. Higgs was bewildered, though. Blinking rapidly, he folded a towel and draped it over a chair.
‘Does he get a lunch-break?’ Charlton asked.
‘One-thirty,’ Higgs said without looking up.
Barker glanced at the clock above the mirror. Quarter-past.
Charlton spoke to Barker for the first time since he’d walked in. ‘There’s a café down the street, the something Grill. I’ll see you there.’
Barker nodded. Bending low, he watched the scissors closely as he steered them round the top of the lorry-driver’s ear. Short white hairs dropped through the air, thin as the filaments in lightbulbs. He hadn’t seen Charlton for at least a month. In February they had met in a pub in Stepney and drunk pints. Later that evening they had dropped in on a friend of Charlton’s, a stand-up comedian, who had offered them cocaine. Charlton did a couple of lines. Barker said no. He listened to them talk for half an hour, their eyes fixed, glittering, their thoughts fascinating and important to each other, then he walked back to his room in Whitechapel.
‘Friend of yours?’ Higgs said when Charlton had gone.
Barker dusted the lorry-driver’s neck with talcum powder and whisked the few loose hairs away with a soft brush. ‘He did me a favour when I first moved up here. He’s all right.’
Higgs turned away, shaking his head.
In the café Charlton was eating toast, his pale lips shiny with butter. He was still wearing his coat. Barker sat down opposite. When the waitress came, he ordered a chicken-salad sandwich and a Coke.
‘You still in that shitty little bedsit?’ Charlton said.
Barker didn’t answer.
‘I’ve got a business proposition for you.’ Lowering his head, Charlton reached out with his lips and drew the top half-inch off his cup of tea. It was a strange sound, like something being played backwards.
He told Barker he had heard about a flat. It was five minutes’ walk from Tower Bridge. Good area, he said. Central.
Barker waited.
‘Only one problem,’ said Charlton, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. ‘There’s people in it.’
‘You mean —’
‘That’s right. Can you handle it?’
Barker looked at the table.
‘You were a bouncer, right?’ Charlton said.
‘How many people?’ Barker asked.
‘Three.’
Barker looked up again. ‘And if I do the job, the place is mine?’
‘For a while.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Six months. Maybe longer.’ Charlton lifted the two fingers that held his cigarette and pressed them to his mouth, the back of his hand facing outwards, the thumb and little finger spread. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked the smoke into his lungs. ‘You’d have bills to pay, but no rent. You could even have a phone. Just like a normal fucking human being.’
On his next day off, which was a Sunday, Barker walked south through Shadwell, crossing the river at Tower Bridge. The few people who were out looked at him oddly. It must have been the sledgehammer he was carrying. By ten-thirty he was positioned opposite the building Charlton had told him about. Behind him stood a warehouse that had once belonged to a leather company; the loading bays had been painted a sickly orange-brown, and the hoists lay flush against high walls of inky brick. It was a quiet street. To his right, he could see green metal gates, some early roses. Trees rushed in the wind.
Can you handle it?
A scornful noise came out of him, half grunt, half chuckle. He didn’t know what Charlton had ever done, but he knew what he himself had done, sometimes for money, sometimes for the joy of it, the buzz. He used to have a temper. A short fuse. Someone only had to look at him the wrong way, or look at him too long, and he was in there with his forehead, his boots, the bottle he was drinking from. The worst thing he ever did? One night, in Stonehouse, he looked up to see George Catt’s face floating towards him through a fog of cigarette smoke. The sagging, bloodhound slant of Catt’s eyelids. Almost as if he’d had a stroke. George Catt. Owner of the night-club where he worked, his boss. How would you like to earn yourself five hundred quid? When Barker asked him what he’d have to do, Catt tapped a cylinder of ash into an empty glass. ‘Knowles,’ he said. Knowles was Catt’s accountant. Young bloke, going bald. But cocky. There were rumours he’d been skimming. Catt pinched his pitted, pulpy nose between his fingers. ‘Do the knees.’ Catt nodded to himself. ‘You want someone healthy to look after your money, don’t you. Someone lucky. You don’t want some cripple.’ Two days later Barker and another man by the name of Gosling took Knowles to the basement of a derelict hospital. They hung him from the pipes on the ceiling, hung him upside-down, and then they beat him with chair-legs, not the rounded ones, the ones with edges. There were all the usual sounds, but what he remembered most was the drip of fluid down on to the concrete — blood and urine and saliva streaming past the accountant’s ears, which had turned bright-red, streaming through his last remaining wisps of hair. A right old cocktail on the floor. At one point Barker leaned over, turned his head the same way round as Knowles’s. It reminded him of a film he had seen once, a documentary about men in space, and how their tea had drifted out of their cups and up towards the ceiling …
Trees rushed in the wind. Trees rushing.
He shifted the sledgehammer from his right hand to his left. Knowles. Somehow, it surprised him that the memory was his, not someone else’s. Of course it was a long time ago, ten years at least — but still. He crossed the street and rang the top bell. Nobody answered. He rang again. At last a window screeched open on the third floor and a girl peered down. She asked him what he wanted. He gave her the bad news, showing her the piece of paper Charlton had handed him. She told him what he could do with his piece of paper, then she slammed the window shut with such force that fragments of white paint were shaken loose, came spinning through the air like snow. Barker stood back, took a breath. Then swung the sledgehammer at the door. The wood buckled almost instantly, splintering around the lock. One shoulder-charge and he was in. He climbed slowly to the third floor, his mind empty. He noticed the silence on the stairs, which was the silence of a Sunday morning.
The inside door was even flimsier — a piece of simple plywood, one Yale lock. He knocked. Voices murmured on the other side, but no one came. He knocked again, waited a few seconds, then aimed the sledgehammer at the lock and swung it hard. After just two blows, the door was hanging off its hinges. That was the thing about squatters. They couldn’t afford decent security. He heard a movement behind him and looked over his shoulder. A woman in a pale-pink quilted house-coat had appeared on the stairs below him, her eyes wide with shock, her mouth tight, as if elasticated. A neighbour, presumably.
‘It’s all right, love,’ he said. ‘Bailiff.’
When he shoved the door open, two girls were standing at the end of a corridor, their shoulders touching. The girl who’d sworn at him wore a long yellow T-shirt. It had a picture of Bob Marley on it. Her legs and feet were bare. The other girl had dyed her hair a dull green colour. He thought they must both be in their early twenties. A boy stood behind them, roughly the same age. They were all perfectly still, almost frozen, like a scene from that TV programme he used to watch as a child, what was it called, that’s right, The Magic Boomerang.