Nicky hit the punchline with grim satisfaction.
‘The kid’s only missing. It’s the parents who are dead.’
12
When I was eleven years old and coming up to my twelfth birthday, I dropped a lot of heavy hints about a bike. It was a lot to ask, even if it was a second-hand one, because my dad had just been laid off from the Metal Box factory on Breeze Hill and we’d reached the point where we either had to eat dirt literally or go to one of the local loan sharks and do it figuratively.
As the day approached, it became clear that there was a big secret I wasn’t in on. Conversations between my mum and dad would stop when I came into the room, and there was a general air of silence and tension. When I asked my big brother Matt what was going on, and whether or not it had anything to do with me, he told me to fuck off out of it because he had homework to do. I concluded that the bike had been bought, and that it had probably added to the financial strain the family was already under. Selfish little shit that I was, I took that as good news.
Then, about three days before my birthday, my mum left home: my dad, John, had finally kicked her out after finding her in bed with his work colleague, Big Terry (so named to avoid confusion with the merely medium-sized Terry Seddon). She went in the middle of the night, so the first we knew was when we woke up the next morning and she wasn’t there. Dad told us she’d gone back to live with Grandma Lunt in Skelmersdale, which was a half-truth: her own mother threw her out too, since she didn’t have a job and couldn’t ‘turn up’ for her keep. She ended up going down to London looking for a job, and we didn’t see her again for three years.
So I’m prepared to admit that sometimes I ignore what’s right under my nose: I’m not always right in there with the intuitive connections and conclusions. It’s probably not overstating things to say that – sly as I undoubtedly am – I can sometimes get lost in the wood while looking at the trees.
But this time it was the world’s fault. This time reality had pitched me a spit-ball I couldn’t have seen coming.
At first I tried to slot Nicky’s nasty little revelation into what I already knew. ‘When?’ I asked. ‘When did they die?’
‘Last Saturday. Sixth of May. Somewhere between noon and six p.m. according to the pathologist’s best guess. The guy – Stephen – was shot in the face at point-blank range, and he was kneeling at the time. No sign of a struggle: he saw it coming and he took it pretty well. A good sport, obviously. With the woman it was messier: she was tied up and beaten with the leg of a chair, then shot in the stomach. And the killer took his time, because the path team put the time of her death a good three hours after the guy’s.’
‘But—’ I managed. ‘I met them two days after that – on the Monday. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Are you telling me—?’
I tailed off. I realised that a couple of lights had come on in windows across the street. This clearly wasn’t the best place to be having this conversation. I headed towards the corner. ‘The car’s over here,’ I said. ‘You can tell me as we drive.’
Nicky didn’t move. ‘I told you, Castor, I’ll take a cab. Right now the less of your company I get the better. You want to hear this, you hear it here.’
I turned to face him. ‘Can we at least get off the street?’ I asked, throwing out my arms in a shrug.
Nicky hesitated. ‘I’ll give you five minutes,’ he said after a couple of beats. ‘There’s a bar on Troy Town. It’s hot and cold, or at least it was the last time I looked. Come on.’
He led the way, sullenly silent. I decided to let him simmer down before I broached the subject again: I’d get more out of him that way. But the wheels inside my head were spinning without traction, the gears squealing so loud I could almost hear them. Mel and Steve died two days before I met them. So either I’d met really good fakers or the dead bodies had been wrongly identified.
But it was Tuesday now – or rather, Wednesday morning. If the cops had made a bad ID on Saturday night, they’d had ample time already by Monday to have met the Torringtons, cleared up the little misunderstanding, tipped their hats and gone on their merry way. And that would be on file. And Nicky would have seen it there.
That left the other possibility – that the people I’d met who called themselves Mel and Steve Torrington were two somebody elses entirely. In which case, why pretend? Why introduce themselves as two people who’d just died and whose murders could be the next day’s front-page news?
Because there wasn’t anyone else who I’d have said yes to. They needed me to look for Abbie’s ghost, and that lie was the only one that was certain to do the job.
We turned the corner into Troy Town – which has nothing epic or eye-catching about it apart from its name. Nicky crossed the road, and I followed. On the other side was a short row of Georgian terraces. Every second house had a flight of steps behind wrought-iron railings, leading down to a basement level below the street. Nicky descended one of these flights of steps, and as I followed I heard voices and music from ahead of me, although everything was still dark. Then he opened a door and light flooded out. Not much of it, it has to be said, and not strong: maybe ‘oozed’ is a better word than ‘flooded’.
The bar was actually in the basement of a house. It was called The Level, and it was indeed hot and cold, like Nicky had said. That meant that living and dead were equally welcome. You could smell the dead part of the equation as you came in off the street: a faint sour whiff like leaf mould, mixed with the surgical tang of formaldehyde. Seeing them wasn’t so easy: the only lighting in the room was from candles in the necks of bottles strategically positioned on tables and on shelves around the walls. There was a good-sized crowd lurking in the plentiful shadows – and a poor-sized bar, wedged into a corner of the room. I ordered a whisky, while Nicky passed. Introducing foreign organics into his system is something he tends to avoid. ‘If you’re dead, your immune system is more or less closed for business,’ he’d told me more than once. ‘No blood flow, right? No transport for antibiotics, phagocytes, any of that shit. So once you start letting infective agents in, you’re fucked, pure and simple.’ If this was a more upmarket joint, he would have ordered red wine and inhaled the scent of it: but he wouldn’t stoop to whatever the house red was in this place.
We sat down at the most remote table we could find – but in any case privacy was provided by the other conversations going on all around us. Anything we said would be lost in the general noise. The wallpaper was a virulent red and looked like flock. I reached out and ran my finger down it: it was. Maybe this place had been a curry house back in the day.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ I said, and I took a gulp of the whisky to fortify myself.
Nicky’s mood had calmed somewhat. He was still as pissed off with me as he had been, but he enjoys being the fountain of arcane wisdom almost as much as he enjoys jazz. ‘I would’ve spotted it sooner,’ he said, ‘only like I said, when it comes to murders we’ve had kind of an embarrassment of riches just lately.’
Of course. The spike in the bell-shaped curve. I suddenly remembered one of the headlines I’d read over Nicky’s shoulder on his computer monitor: HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE. Son of a bitch: it had been right in front of my eyes and I’d let it slide on past.
‘They were found in their own house,’ Nicky went on. ‘Somewhere out towards Maida Vale.’
‘Maida Vale?’ I broke in. ‘The Steve Torrington I met gave me an address on Bishop’s Avenue.’
‘What number Bishop’s Avenue?’
I dredged it up from memory. ‘Sixty-something. Sixty-two.’
‘That’s the squat, you fucking moron. And what did he give you the address for? Did he ask you over for cocktails?’