I must have run for about ten minutes without stopping. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like very much, but for someone like me, who hasn’t taken any proper exercise for years — not since I was at school — believe me, it was quite an achievement. I tried to keep some sort of sense of direction at first, but soon I found myself in totally unfamiliar territory. Looking now at the A — Z, I think I must have started off by heading west, towards Camden, but then a series of leftish turns must have taken me in the King’s Cross direction. The first place I can remember stopping was a bus-shelter, and the first thing I can remember doing was forcing myself to think: forcing myself to look at the situation I was in and imagine how it would seem to an outsider.
I had been spotted at the scene of the crime. I had been seen by two policemen, emerging from the house where Paisley had been murdered. And instead of trying to explain myself, I had turned around and run, thereby immediately drawing suspicion on to myself. Well, perhaps when they caught up with me — which I was convinced they would — I could account for that, saying that I was in a state of shock and I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing or how it would look. One or two other circumstances were in my favour: at least there wasn’t a murder weapon with my fingerprints on it, for instance.
As for the killing itself, I was just about in a fit state to realize that there were two possible explanations. Either somebody, for some reason, had wanted to get rid of Paisley, or, more likely, they had mistaken him for someone else — the mysterious ‘landlord’ of the house where they all lived. Who was he, though? The only person who knew him, it seemed, was Chester himself, and he had been very unforthcoming about his identity. Deliberately unforthcoming, perhaps? Karla had told me that Chester had some strange friends. She had also pointed out to me that I didn’t really know him very well. Had I been a little too trusting with our friendly, resourceful, enigmatic manager? What sort of hold did he have over Paisley that could give rise to a scene like the one I had witnessed in the pub that Sunday afternoon? Maybe Chester himself was the owner of their house — maybe he was the one the telephone callers kept asking for, under a succession of different names. Or perhaps I was on completely the wrong track: was Paisley the real target of the attack, and if so, could it have been Chester himself who was behind it?
As I sat in the shelter I saw that there was a bus approaching, and suddenly I decided to get on to it. There was no way the police could have issued a description of me yet, so it wasn’t as if any of the passengers would recognize me. All the same, I paid my fare in cash, rather than showing the driver my travelcard with the passport photo on it. I jumped on without even looking at the front of the bus and without any idea of where it was going to take me. The important thing was that it took me away from here as soon as possible. I sat on the bottom deck, near the back, and willed the bus to move.
And then, of course, panting up to the bus-stop came the bane of every journey — the passenger who gets on at the last minute and doesn’t have the faintest idea where he wants to go. Usually a tourist who can’t speak much English and has decided to use the driver as a combination of policeman, street map, bus timetable and change machine. So the bus is stuck there for what seems like a million years while he names some street in Greenwich or Richmond where he wants to go, and the bus driver has to get out his A — Z and explain to him which stop to get off at and which bus he’ll have to catch next, and then the bloke tries to find his fare and he only has a twenty-pound note or ninety-five pence in Japanese yen and the driver has to fish the change out of his back trouser pocket and you could have travelled to Glasgow and back on an inter-city sleeper by the time the bus starts moving again.
When we finally got going, I began to relax very slightly. The experience of being on a bus had a comforting familiarity and normality to it, so that the horrible thing I had witnessed less than twenty minutes ago began to seem almost absurd. The world I was in — the world of half-empty London buses on a Saturday evening, carrying young, smartly dressed people off to parties and clubs and cinemas — didn’t seem to admit of anything as fantastic as the spectacle of two screeching dwarves bashing a man to death. It was stupid. It was crazy.
Stupid and crazy… and yet this was familiar, too. Dwarves and death. Why did it strike a chord — where had I come across these words recently? And then I remembered. It went back to a conversation we had had, the four of us, on the morning we recorded our demo tape.
Was this just coincidence, or had I actually stumbled upon a clue?
Solo
did I really walk all this way just to hear you say
‘oh I don’t want to go out tonight’
It had been a fine feeling to wake up on Tuesday morning and know that I didn’t have to go into work. Even though we had to be at the studio for ten o’clock, this still meant an extra hour in bed. There was no sound from Tina’s room. This was a relief, too. For the last few nights, strange noises had been emerging from behind her door: muffled cries and grunts, suggestive of physical exertions which I preferred not to speculate about. The toilet kept flushing as well. But I had been lying awake when she came back in from work the night before, and it had sounded as though she was on her own.
There were no notes for me in the kitchen. I took my toast into the sitting-room, watched Breakfast Time with the sound turned down and decided to catch up on the latest messages on the answering machine. I had come back quite late myself last night and hadn’t got around to listening to them yet.
There were four messages. One of them was from Madeline: she said that she couldn’t see me tonight after all and could we make it Thursday instead? I was disappointed, of course, and also a little puzzled. She was always telling me that she had no social life apart from her evenings with me. Perhaps she was ill or something.
The other three messages were all from Pedro. They had each been left at different stages of the evening and together they made up quite a little narrative. The first one was relatively coherent and the only thing you could hear on it was his voice. He must have been calling from his flat.
‘Hello, Tina, my little breast of chicken, my little piece of fur. Listen, I will be a bit later than my usual this evening because I am taking the night off and going with some friends to paint the town. But I will still come and see you because I couldn’t do without you for a single night of my life. Expect to feel my key in your lock before dawn, then, my love. Adios.’
For the next message he was speaking from a call-box: he was slightly louder and there were some voices and some music in the background. His speech was starting to sound slurred.
‘Hi, Teeny-babes, we’re having a great time here, and I’m just ringing to say… Hope I can make it tonight… I still want to come… Maybe I’ll be pretty late but I hope you’ll still be wearing something nice like that thing I bought you. You know, that cost me a lot of money and it’s not every shop that will sell you something like that, and I’m sure if you had another go at it you could fit — ’
The pips went and the message ended.
The last one seemed to have been left a few hours later. This time the voices in the background were both male and female, and the music, although it was louder, was now slow and sensual.