‘Yes.’
Karla walked to the mirror and took off her wig of thick, auburn hair. She turned to face me. Her hair was even shorter, now, than in the photograph: a close crew-cut on top, shaved at the sides and back.
‘There,’ she said, coming closer. ‘Now do I look more like a killer?’
I backed away.
‘But — you didn’t kill Paisley?’
‘That was a mistake. Those fucking idiots: I should had done the whole thing myself. I will do it myself. He’s not going to get away again. Christ, I’ve waited long enough…’
She sat down on the bed, and fell silent.
‘Who’s not going to get away?’ I asked. ‘And who are these children?’ I was so bewildered by now, I couldn’t get the questions out quickly enough. ‘Who did you send to get Paisley? Was it those brothers from Glasgow — the same people you named the band after?’
Karla didn’t answer: not for a long time. And when she did finally start to explain, her speech was tired and slow.
‘There was never any “band” called The Dwarves of Death,’ she said. ‘It was just me and my husband. I did the singing and he played the instruments: it was all put together in the studio. We were broke — as usual — and we thought we’d cash in on the whole punk thing and try to make a bit of extra money. We were living in Glasgow, then, and you wouldn’t believe how poor we were. We did the recordings in the evenings. I was going out to work every day, doing cleaning jobs. He didn’t have a job, he stayed at home looking after the kids.’ She pointed to them in turn. ‘Claire, and Sandra. We had twins.’
The bed was covered by a single threadbare quilt. From beneath this, she produced a sawn-off, double-barrelled shotgun, and a box of cartridges. She started to load the gun as she talked.
‘And then, one day, Sandra disappeared. She ran away from home. And that was when Claire came to me, and told me what their… father… had been doing to them, while I was out all day.’ She gave the word ‘father’ a bitter inflexion, as if it was a bad taste that had to be spat out. ‘I don’t suppose you want me to go into the details, do you? A doctor examined her, anyway, and confirmed her story. But I never saw Sandra again. The police found a body a few weeks later. It might have been hers, I couldn’t tell. As for Claire…’ She got up and went to the window, leaving the gun, now fully loaded, lying on the bed, ‘… she grew up into quite a kid. She’s in this “home” now. This centre. I don’t go and see her. She won’t talk to me.’
As Karla’s story unfolded, her voice was getting harder and faster.
‘Needless to say, when all this came to light, he lost no time in clearing out. He vanished into thin air that night and didn’t leave a trace. I could only think of one way of getting a message to him, and that was why I did that song, “Insomnia". We’d just recorded a new single, you see, but we hadn’t done the B-side yet. So one night I just went into the studio and let all the rage and hatred come out. I knew he’d have to buy the record when he saw it, and I wanted to make sure he knew that I was going to track him down. I put that picture on the sleeve, too. We used to dress the girls up in these little hoods and use them in publicity shots. People started to think they were actually members of the band. I wanted that picture to haunt him. I wanted him to know what it meant: that I was going to find him one day. Find him and kill him.’
From the little table, she picked up a small, plastic, rectangular object: it was a cassette.
‘It took me years to track him down. He’d been in Europe most of the time. I followed a false lead and spent months in Canada and America. Then when I’d found him, it took me another year to raise the money to have him killed the way I wanted him killed. It cost me twenty thousand pounds.’
Dreading the answer (because I knew it already), I asked: ‘And where did you find him?’
‘He was running a studio complex in South London.’
She threw me the tape. It was a copy of our demo containing ‘Madeline (Stranger in a Foreign Land)’.
‘Vincent,’ I said.
‘That seems to be what he calls himself these days. He was Duncan when I married him.’
I looked at the tape and frowned.
‘How did you get this?’
‘It was in Paisley’s pocket. Luckily they got blood all over his jacket and had to bring it back here: otherwise the police would really have had no trouble finding you. You even took the precaution of giving your phone number.’
I said nothing, shocked into silence by the thought of all the repercussions, all the ripples set in motion by the recording of this simple song only a week ago.
‘I see that he produced it for you,’ said Karla. ‘There’s a bit too much reverb on the vocals for my liking. He always made the same mistake.’
‘I still don’t understand why the police haven’t caught up with me,’ I said. ‘Surely they’ve spoken to Chester by now? Hasn’t he told them where I live?’
Karla laughed.
‘Chester? He’s more slippery than you give him credit for. I should imagine that when he got back last night and saw all those policemen, he made a run for it. It’ll be a while before anyone hears from him again.’
‘Him and Vincent,’ I said, ‘ — what’s the connection, then?’
‘Business, basically.’ Karla produced a pair of heavy black boots from under the bed and started to put them on. ‘A man like Duncan — Vincent — doesn’t make his living from running a rehearsal studio. Most of his money comes from heroin. Chester does odd jobs for him in that line now and again, but he’s small fry by comparison. His other big field is property. He’s got his hands on a lot of houses in the Islington area, mainly through crooked contracts. That’s why Paisley and friends were living in one of them.’
‘How did you find all this out?’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ she said, as she finished tying her laces. ‘I knew a lot of this stuff was based at The White Goat, although Duncan himself was too clever to be seen there. So I had to sweet-talk the manager into giving me a job, and then one of the guys behind the bar got me this flat.’
Karla filled in the other gaps for me as she got ready to go out. She’d tracked down the two little brothers from Glasgow, who’d been released from prison a couple of years earlier, and offered them five thousand pounds to carry out the killing. They agreed to do it for twenty. She told them what to wear, and even what position they were to take up just before they made their attack. Everything was calculated to recall the promise she had made on that record, and to fill Vincent with as much terror as possible in the few moments before he died. (I remembered, now, the strange way he had reacted to those two children, wearing matching anoraks, who had come into the studio one morning and scared the life out of him.) She knew that The Unfortunates would be out of the house on Saturday night, and she entrusted one of the brothers with the job of contacting Vincent by phone to make sure he would be there. It was only Paisley’s intervention which had made the scheme backfire.
‘Were you there last night?’ I asked. ‘Was it you driving the car?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That was the guy you saw downstairs. He’s just someone I hired. He was recommended to me: does a lot of this sort of work, apparently. He’s going to drive us to the studio now.’
I felt a tremor of apprehension.
‘What do you mean, drive us?’
‘You don’t think I called you over here just to put your mind at rest, do you?’ said Karla, bundling the shotgun and more cartridges into a black holdall. ‘You’re going to help me.’
‘Me? How?’