I sat in the car and looked at it, giving Ann time to show up. She didn’t. I had no good ideas on how to tackle the place, so I got my gun out again and stuck it in my belt. That sometimes helps, as I get to thinking of ways to avoid having to use it, but this time nothing helpful came. I hunted out the most anonymous card in my collection, which read, ‘Brian Harrison-independent systems’. It had been left under my door and I never found out who Brian was or what an independent system might be. I put the card in my pocket and stuck my hand out of the window. The rain had stopped; no excuses. There was no activity in the street. One of the lights had blown and it was dark so I took a torch with me.
I walked down the side of the building, scouting. There were a couple of broken windows boarded up at the back where the outside plumbing rusted and dripped. I skidded or. some rubbish on the path and crashed into a couple of battered garbage bins. One went over and spilled a cascade of pet food tins that bounced and rattled over the concrete to meet a pile of flagons, some broken.
I scooted back up the path to the building’s entrance, which was a sort of porch with a low rail stuck to the side like an afterthought. There were buttons numbered one to ten beside the door; I pushed number one and heard it ring inside, close by. While I waited, I pressed a few other buttons and heard nothing.
The door in front of me opened inwards, and from long habit I moved forward and put my foot up on the step.
‘Yes?’ He looked as if he got more practice at saying no, although not necessarily in English. He was small and dark with a sallow, pocked complexion and a mouth that turned down sourly. His forehead was high and deeply creased with frown marks. He wore dirty boots, jeans and a loose sports shirt outside the jeans. I’d have put his age at around thirty. His forearms were sinewy with dark, downy hair; his biceps looked as if they would bunch up like cricket balls. He pulled a grubby handkerchief from a back pocket and wiped his nose.
‘Er, Mr…?’ He didn’t say anything and I had to take the plunge. I handed him the card. ‘I have to check the foundations-main roads and council job. They’ll be working in the area soon, blasting and tunnelling, so we need to know how sound the buildings in the area are.’ I took two steps back and glanced around. ‘Looks okay, but I’ve got to check.’
He came forward and put the card on the railing. I couldn’t tell whether he’d read it or not, or whether he could read it.
‘Very late,’ he said. The voice was light, almost singsong. There was an accent, not Greek, but like it.
‘I’m sorry, but I must look.’
‘Inside or outside?’
‘Oh, outside, mostly, have to look at any basements or cellars. Just that, unless there’s any major cracks.’ I’d already noticed a big crack that ran raggedly up at the back.
‘Council?’
‘And the Department of Main Roads.’ I tried to give the words all the weight I could, and thought some jargon might help. ‘There’s the flight path to consider, too. Decibels. I won’t be long, it’s miserable out.’
He tapped the breast pocket of his shirt. Keys clinked and there seemed to be some muscular development up there too. He pulled the door closed behind him.
‘I will take you.’
We walked along the path to the back and I bent down to flash the torch at the foundations from time to time. Some of the bricks were crumbling.
‘Damp course trouble?’
He shrugged. At the back he pulled out his keys and we went down a set of steps that the vines and weeds were threatening. He unlocked the padlock on a heavy door; it. swung in and he clicked on the light. It was a small, airless cave, dark despite the bulb. There was another door a few feet into the shadows. It had a strange smell, but how are old cellars supposed to smell? I took a perfunctory look around, said ‘Okay’, and went up the steps. He locked the door and I pointed to the crack running up the bricks. It had fractured a heavy window ledge on the second floor and looked as if it might run up behind a drainpipe to the roof.
‘I’ll have to check that,’ I said. ‘Inside, sorry.’
He looked dubious but I bustled back along the path. ‘Got two other places to see tonight,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
He unlocked the front door and we went into a small lobby with a door on the left and a staircase on the right.
‘You go up,’ he said.
The passage looked as if it hadn’t been swept that year or last. The carpet strip was ragged and there was a coating of dust on the dry, flaky boards on either side of it. There were several doors down one side. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but I thought I saw fittings for outside locking. He padded softly along behind me, the keys clinking in his pocket.
At the end of the passage he quickened his pace, stepped in front of me and unlocked the door.
‘No-one in here,’ he said.
But someone had been in there and pretty recently. The room had two distinct smells-old, stale alcohol and the one that comes from handwashed socks and underwear.
It was completely dark outside now. He turned on the light and blew his nose at the same time. The bulb was fly-spotted, like most of the surfaces in the room. On the floor was the inevitable lino, worn through to the newspaper strata in some places and through to the boards in others. Although the night was mild, the room was cold. Plaster had fallen off the wall in lumps above the skirting board and the stuff that hung on glistened wetly. There was some junky furniture, wood-veneered and peeling. The bed was narrow and the mattress was an ancient, sweat-stained ruin. Cobwebs hung in the corners like thick skeins of grey wool.
I heard movements above me, footsteps and something being dropped. The thought of someone living in conditions like these sickened me. I tensed up, my ribs hurt and I moved angrily across to examine the broken window ledge and to give myself a moment to think. It didn’t take much thinking-the place was a gaol of some kind and I had the turnkey right there with me. It looked just like the sort of place that a damaged or deranged person such as Singer had been reported to be could end up in. I took the. 45 from my belt, cocked it and turned. I pointed the gun at his nose.
‘I’m searching this dump from top to bottom. You’re opening the doors.’
He was incredibly quick. One minute his eyes were registering surprise and the next he was in a crouch and scuttling forward to swing a stiff arm at me like a scythe. He wasn’t balanced quite right, though, and the light wasn’t good for that sort of action. The arm missed and I slammed the side of his head with the butt of the automatic. It got him just above the temple and he grunted and went down. I put the muzzle hard in his ear and felt in his shirt pocket for the keys. I hooked a finger round them but then I felt the soft, loose movement under my hand and pulled away as if I’d touched a snake. The contours of the chest weren’t muscular. With my well-placed gun butt, I’d just floored a woman.
It was obvious now; the short, dark hair curling around the ears was softer than a man’s hair, and with the shirt pushed up I could see the roundness of her hips. It didn’t mean that she wasn’t a nasty, dangerous bit of work. I kept the gun pressed close while she shook her head and hurt herself.
‘You’re not a lady,’ I said. ‘Get on the bed.’ She didn’t move. With an amateur I’d have delivered a boot to the bum for emphasis, but she was no amateur. Her eyes were shining with anticipation of more fighting. My side was hurting and I’d done something to the knuckle that had popped when I’d hit Rex. I wouldn’t have backed myself in a fair return fight. A swinging foot would give her all the chance she’d need. I stepped back and pointed the gun at her knee.
‘Get on the bed or I’ll cripple you.’
She said something unpleasant-sounding in a language I didn’t understand and got on the bed.