“Coming right up,” Symes says. The baggy cords are gone and he is wearing jeans, teamed with a hooded sweatshirt, which has some sort of band logo on the front. His wrists protrude awkwardly from the too-short arms.
He’s dressed himself up as a kid, Croft thinks, and the idea, like the thought of the Ribena, is for some reason awful. Symes tells him to find himself a seat but all the sofas and armchairs appear to be taken. In the end he finds an upright dining chair close to the door. The chair’s single cushion slides about uncomfortably on the hard wooden seat. Croft looks around. He sees there are more people in the room than he thought at first, fifteen or twenty of them at least, many of them now talking quietly amongst themselves. Immediately opposite him, an obese woman in a brightly coloured smock dress lolls in a chintz-covered armchair. She has shoulder-length, lank-looking hair. Her forehead is shiny with grease, or perhaps it is sweat.
Her small hands lie crossed in her lap. The hands, which are surprisingly pretty, are adorned with rings. The woman smiles at him nervously. Quite unexpectedly, Croft feels a rush of pity for her, a sensation more intense than any he has experienced since leaving the prison. He had not expected to see women here.
“Hi,” Croft says. He wonders if the woman can understand him, even. There is a blankness in her eyes, and Croft wonders if she’s on drugs, not street drugs but prescription medicine, Valium or Prozac or Ativan. There was a guy Croft knew in prison who was always on about how the prescription meds — the bennies, as he called them — were deadlier than heroin.
“They eat your fucking mind, man.” Fourboys, his name was, Douglas Fourboys, eight years for arson. Croft had liked him better than anyone, mainly because of the books he read, which he didn’t mind lending to Croft, once he had finished them. He had an enthusiasm for Russian literature, Dostoevsky especially. Douglas Fourboys was a lifelong Marxist, but at some point during the six months leading up to Croft’s release, he had found God. He claimed he’d been sent the gift of prophecy, though Croft suspected this probably had more to do with the dope Fourboys’s girlfriend occasionally managed to smuggle past the security than with any genuine aptitude for seeing the future.
“You’ve got to be careful, man,” Fourboys had said to him, just a couple of days before his release. “They’re waiting for you out there, I can see them, circling like sharks.”
Fourboys had definitely been stoned when he said that. He’d reached out and clutched Croft’s hand, then tilted to one side and fallen asleep. Croft misses Fourboys; he is the only person from inside that he does miss. He supposes he should visit him.
“We know who you are,” the woman says suddenly. “You’re going to help us speak with the master. We’ve seen your pictures.” She smiles, her thin lips slick with spittle. Her words send a chill through Croft, though there is no real meaning to them that he can fathom. The woman is obviously vulnerable, mentally challenged. Clearly she needs protection. Croft feels anger at Symes for allowing her to be here unsupervised.
Suddenly Symes is there, standing behind him. He pushes something cold into Croft’s hand, and Croft sees that it’s a bottle of Budweiser. The thought of the beer entering his mouth makes Croft start salivating. He raises the bottle to his lips. The liquid is icy, familiar, heavenly. Croft feels numbness settle over him, an almost-contentment. Whatever is happening here need not concern him. It is only an hour.
“I see you’ve met Ashley,” Symes says. He squats down next to the armchair, leaning in towards the fat woman and taking her hand. He presses his fingers into the flesh of her wrist as if to restrain her, as if she is something dangerous that needs to be managed. The woman shifts slightly in her seat, and Croft sees that her eyes, which appeared so dull, are now bright and alive. He cannot decide if it is wariness he sees in them, or cunning.
She doesn’t like Symes, though, this seems clear to him. Join the club.
“Ashley is my wife,” Symes says. He grins into the face of the woman, a smile of such transparent artifice it is as if both he and she are playing a practical joke at Croft’s expense.
Suddenly, in the overheated room, Croft feels chilled to the bone.
Is Symes serious? Snatches of words and images play themselves across his brain like a series of film stills: Symes’s grin, the woman’s slack features, the sticky word wife.
You’re wondering if they fuck, Croft thinks. Is that all it is, though? He takes another swig of the beer and the thoughts recede.
“Would you excuse me, just for a moment?” Symes says. “There’s a phone call I need to make. I’ll be right back.” He stands and walks away. The woman in the armchair looks after him for a second, then strains forward in her seat and puts her hand on Croft’s knee. Croft can smell her breath, a sickening combination of peppermints and something else that might be tuna fish.
“You know him,” the woman says, and for a moment Croft imagines she’s talking about Symes, though the words that follow make his supposition seem impossible. “Even though you don’t know it yet, you know him. He’ll steep all his children in agony. Not just the agony of knowing him, but true pain.” She tightens her grip on his knee, and Croft realises that she is strong, much stronger than she appears, or than he would have believed.
The mad are always strong, Croft thinks. He does not know how he knows this, but he knows it is true.
“Who are you talking about?” Croft says quietly. “Who is the master?”
The woman leans towards him. Her face is now so close to his that her features seem blurred, and Croft thinks for a confused moment that she is about to kiss him.
He sees himself straddling her. Her mounded flesh is pale as rice pudding.
“He is the tiger,” she says. She grins, and her grin is like Symes’s grin, only, just like the Jesus man, she has a tooth missing. The sight of the missing tooth fills him with horror.
“I need to get out of here,” he says. “I mean, I need to use the bathroom.” The room feels unbearably hot suddenly, stifling with the scent of unwashed bodies. He places his half-drunk beer on the coffee table, and as he makes his way back to the hallway, he finds himself wondering if the woman will take advantage of his absence to taste the alcohol. He imagines her thin lips, clamping themselves around the mouth of the bottle in a wet, round “o.”
He can hear Symes’s voice, talking softly off in another room somewhere, but Croft ignores it. The staircase leads upwards to a square landing, with four doors leading off it, all of them closed. Croft tries one at random, not through any logical process of deduction but because it is closest. By a stroke of luck, the room behind it turns out to be the bathroom after all. Croft steps hurriedly inside and locks the door. He sits down on the closed toilet seat, covering his face with both hands. The room feels like it’s rocking, slowly, back and forth, like a ship in a swell, though Croft knows this is only the beer, which he is unused to. He has barely touched a drop of alcohol since leaving prison. He presses his fingertips against his eyelids, savouring the darkness. After a minute or so, he opens his eyes again and stands up. He lifts the toilet seat, pisses in an arcing gush into the avocado toilet bowl. He washes his hands at the sink. His face, in the mirror above, looks pale and slightly dazed but otherwise normal. It is only when he goes out on the landing again that he sees the photographs.
There are six of them in all. They are arranged in two groups of three, mounted on the blank area of wall at the far end of the landing and directly opposite the bathroom door. He had his back to them before, Croft realises, which is why he didn’t see them when he first came upstairs. He recognises them at once. He thinks it would be impossible for an artist not to recognise his own work. One of the photos is of Murphy, or rather Murphy’s hands, secured behind his back with a twist of barbed wire. The Kennington case. Four of the other photos are also work shots, all photos he took for the Met in the course of his twenty-year career as a forensic photographer.