Dead Like You (17 page)

43

Saturday 10 January

Yac did not like drunk people, especially drunk slappers, especially drunk slappers who got into his taxi. Especially this early on a Saturday night, when he was busy reading the latest on the Shoe Man in the
Argus
.

There were five drunk girls, all without coats, all in skimpy dresses, all legs and flesh, displaying their breasts and tattoos and pierced belly buttons. It was January! Didn’t they feel the cold?

He was only licensed to carry four of them. He’d told them that, but they’d been too drunk to listen, all piling in at the rank on East Street, shouting, chattering, giggling, telling him to take them to the pier.

The taxi was full of their scents: Rock ’n Rose, Fuel for Life, Red Jeans, Sweetheart, Shalimar. He recognized them all. Uh-huh. In particular, he recognized the Shalimar.

His mother’s perfume.

He told them it was only a short walk, that with the Saturday-night traffic they’d be quicker to walk. But they insisted he take them.

‘It’s bleedin’ freezing, for Christ’s sake!’ one of them said.

She was a plump little thing, wearing the Shalimar, with a mass of fair hair and half-bared breasts that looked like they’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. She reminded him a little of his mother. Something in the coarseness, the shape of her figure and the colour of her hair.

‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘Sodding bleedin’ freezing!’

One of them lit a cigarette. He could smell the acrid smoke. That was against the law too, he told her, staring at her crossly in the mirror.

‘Want a drag, gorgeous?’ she said, pouting, holding out the cigarette to him.

‘I don’t smoke,’ he said.

‘Too young, are you?’ said another, and they broke into peals of squeaky laughter.

He nearly took them to the skeletal remains of the West Pier, half a mile further along the coast, just to teach them a lesson not to risk a taxi driver’s livelihood. But he didn’t, for one reason only.

The shoes and the perfume the plump one was wearing.

Shoes that he particularly liked. Black and silver sparkly Jimmy Choos. Size four. Uh-huh. His mother’s size.

Yac wondered what she would look like naked, just wearing those shoes. Would she look like his mother?

At the same time, he wondered if she had a high- or low-flush loo in her home. But the problem with people who were drunk was that you couldn’t have a proper conversation with them. Waste of time. He drove in silence, thinking about her shoes. Smelling her perfume. Watching her in the mirror. Thinking more and more how much she looked like his mother had once looked.

He made a right turn into North Street and crossed over Steine Gardens, waited at the lights, then turned right and queued at the roundabout before coming to a halt in front of the gaudy lights of Brighton Pier.

Just £2.40 showed on the meter. He’d been sitting in the queue at the cab rank for thirty minutes. Not much for it. He wasn’t happy. And he was even less happy when someone handed him £2.50 and told him to keep the change.

‘Huh!’ he said. ‘Huh!’

The man who owned the taxi expected big money on a Saturday night.

The girls disgorged themselves, while he alternated between watching the Jimmy Choos and glancing anxiously around for any sign of a police car. The girls were cursing the cold wind, clutching their hair, tottering around on their high heels, then, still holding the rear door of the taxi open, began arguing among themselves about why they’d come here and not stayed in the bar they’d just left.

He reached across, called out, ‘Excuse me, ladies!’ then pulled the door shut and drove off along the seafront, the taxi reeking of Shalimar perfume and cigarette smoke and alcohol. A short distance along, he pulled over on to the double yellow lines, beside the railings of the promenade, and switched off the engine.

A whole bunch of thoughts were roaring around inside his head. Jimmy Choo shoes. Size four. His mother’s size. He breathed deeply, savouring the Shalimar. It was coming up to 7 p.m. His on-the-hour, every hour, mug of tea. That was very important. He needed to have that.

But he had something else on his mind that he needed more.

Uh-huh.

44

Saturday 10 January

Despite the cold and the biting wind, several groups of people, mostly youngsters, milled around the entrance to the pier. Garish lights sparkled and twinkled all along the structure, which stretched almost a third of a mile out into the inky darkness of the English Channel. A Union Jack crackled in the wind. A giant sandwich-board hoarding in the middle of the entrance advertised a live band. The ice-cream stall wasn’t doing much business, but there were ragged queues at the Southern Fried Chicken, Doughnut, Meat Feast and Fish and Chips counters.

Darren Spicer, wearing a donkey jacket, jeans, woollen mittens and a baseball cap pulled low, was flying high, totally oblivious to the cold, as he stood in the queue to buy a bag of chips. The aroma of frying batter was tantalizing and he was hungry. He stuck his bent roll-up in his mouth, rubbed his hands together and checked his watch. Eight minutes to seven. He needed to be back at the St Patrick’s night shelter by 8.30, lock-up time, or he would lose his bed, and it was a brisk twenty-five minutes’ walk from here, unless he jumped on a bus or, more extravagantly, took a taxi.

Tucked into one of his big inside poacher’s pockets was a copy of the
Argus
he’d pulled out of a wheelie bin at the Grand Hotel, where he had registered earlier, to start work on Monday, doing a job that would utilize his electrical skills. The hotel was replacing its wiring, a lot of which did not appear to have been touched for decades. On Monday he would be in the basement, running new cables from the emergency generator to the laundry room.

It was a big area and they were short-staffed. Which meant not many people would be there to keep an eye on him. Which meant he’d pretty much have the run of the place. And all its rich pickings. And he’d have access to the computer system. Now all he needed was a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. That wouldn’t be a problem.

He felt good! He felt terrific! At this moment he was the most powerful man in this whole city! And probably the horniest!

A gaggle of scantily clad girls disgorging from a taxi caught his eye. One of them was a plump little thing, with her tits almost falling out of her blouse and pouting, bee-stung lips. She tottered around on the tiles at the entrance in sparkly high heels, clutching at her hair, which was being batted by the wind. She looked as if she was a little the worse for wear from alcohol.

Her miniskirt blew up and he saw a sudden flash of the top of her thigh. It gave him a sharp prick of lust. She was his kind of girl. He liked a bit of flesh on a woman. Yeah, she was definitely his kind of tottie.

Yeah.

He liked her.

Liked her shoes.

He took a deep drag of his cigarette.

The taxi drove off.

The girls were arguing about something. Then they all headed to the back of the queue behind him.

He got his bag of chips, then stepped away a short distance, leaned against a stanchion and watched the girls in the queue, still arguing and joshing each other. But in particular he watched the plump one, that prick of lust growing inside him, thinking again and again of the flash of her thigh he had seen.

He had finished his chips and lit another cigarette by the time the girls had all got their bags and had fumbled in their purses for the right change to pay for them. Then they set off up the pier, the plump one trailing behind them. She was hurrying to catch up but struggling on her heels.

‘Hey!’ she called out to the two at the rear. ‘Hey, Char, Karen, not so fast. I can’t keep up with yer!’

One of the four turned round, laughing, keeping up her pace, staying level with her friends. ‘Come on, Mandy! It’s cos yer too bleedin’ fat, in’t yer!’

Mandy Thorpe, her head spinning from too many Sea Breezes, broke into a run and caught up with her friends briefly. ‘Sod off about my weight! I am so not fat!’ she shouted in mock anger. Then, as the tiled entrance gave way to the wooden boardwalk of the pier itself, both her heels stuck in a slat, her feet came flying out of them and she fell flat on her face, her handbag striking the ground and spewing out its contents, her chips scattering across the decking.

‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

Scrambling back upright, she ducked down and jammed each of her feet back into the shoes, bending down even lower to lever them in with her fingers, cursing these cheap, ill-fitting Jimmy Choo copies which she had bought on holiday in Thailand and which pinched her toes.

‘Hey!’ she called out. ‘Char, Karen, hey!’

Leaving the mess of ketchup-spattered chips, she stumbled on after them, watching the slats in the decking carefully now. She followed her friends past a toy locomotive and into the bright lights and noise of the amusement arcade. Music was playing, and there were chimes from machines and the clatter of coins, and shouts of joy and angry cusses. She passed a giant illuminated pink cracker, then a glass-fronted machine filled with teddy bears, a sign flashing £35 CASH JACKPOTS, and a cash booth in the shape of a Victorian tram shelter.

Then they were outside in the biting cold again. Mandy caught up with her friends just as they passed a row of stalls, each blaring out music. HOOK A DUCK! LOBSTER POT – 2 BALLS FOR £1! HENNA TATTOOS!

In the distance to her left, across the black void of the sea, were the lights of the elegant town houses of Kemp Town. They walked on past the DOLPHIN DERBY, heading towards the carousel, helter-skelter, dodgems, the CRAZY MOUSE rollercoaster and the TURBO SKYRIDE, which Mandy had been on once – and it had left her feeling sick for days.

To their right now were the ghost train and the HORROR HOTEL.

‘I want to go on the ghost train!’ Mandy said.

Karen turned, pulling a cigarette pack out of her handbag. ‘It’s pathetic. The ghost train’s shit. It’s like nothing. I need another drink.’

‘Yeah, me too!’ said Char. ‘I need a drink.’

‘What about the Turbo?’ said another girl, Joanna.

‘No fear!’ Mandy said. ‘I want to go on the ghost train.’

Joanna shook her head. ‘I’m scared of that.’

‘It’s not
really
scary,’ Mandy said. ‘I’ll go on me own if you won’t come.’

‘You’re not brave enough!’ Karen taunted. ‘You’re a scaredy cat!’

‘I’ll show you!’ Mandy said. ‘I’ll bloody show you!’

She tottered over to a booth that sold tokens for the rides. None of them noticed the man standing a short distance back from them, carefully crushing his cigarette out underfoot.

1998

45

Tuesday 6 January

He had never seen a dead body before. Well, apart from his mum, that was. She’d been all skeletal, wasted away from the cancer that had been on a feeding frenzy inside her, eating up just about everything except her skin. The little bastard cancer cells would probably have eaten that too if the embalming fluid hadn’t nuked them.

Although they were welcome to her. It had seemed a shame to hurt them.

His mum had looked like she was asleep. She was all tucked into bed, in her nightdress, in a room in the undertaker’s Chapel of Rest. Her hair all nicely coiffed. A bit of make-up on her face to give her some colour, and her skin had a slightly rosy hue from the embalming fluid. The funeral director had told him that she’d come up really nice.

Much nicer in death.

Dead, she couldn’t taunt him any more. Couldn’t tell him, as she climbed into his bed, that he was as useless as his drunken father. That his
thing
was pathetic, that it was shorter than the heels of her shoes. Some nights she brought a stiletto-heeled shoe into the bed with her and made him pleasure her with that instead.

She began calling him
Shrinky
. It was a name that quickly got around at his school. ‘Hey, Shrinky,’ other boys and girls would call out to him. ‘Has it grown any longer today?’

He’d sat beside her, on the chair next to her bed, the way he’d sat beside her in the ward of the hospital in the days when her life was slipping away. He’d held her hand. It was cold and bony, like holding the hand of a reptile. But one that couldn’t harm you any more.

Then he’d leaned over and whispered into her ear, ‘I think I’m supposed to tell you that I love you. But I don’t. I hate you. I’ve always hated you. I can’t wait for your funeral, because afterwards I’m going to get that urn with your ashes and throw you into a fucking skip, where you belong.’

But this new woman now was different. He didn’t hate Rachael Ryan. He looked down at her, lying naked on the bottom of the chest freezer he had bought this morning. Staring up at him through eyes that were steadily frosting over. That same glaze of frost that was forming all over her body.

He listened for a moment to the hum of the freezer’s motor. Then he whispered, ‘Rachael, I’m sorry about what happened, you know? Really I am. I never wanted to kill you. I’ve never killed anything. That’s not me. I just want you to know that. Not me at all. Not my style. I’ll look after your shoes for you, I promise.’

Then he decided he didn’t like her eyes looking at him all hostile like that. As if she was still able to accuse him, even though she was dead. Able to accuse him from some other place, some other dimension she’d now arrived at.

He slammed the lid shut.

His heart was thumping. He was running with perspiration.

He needed a cigarette.

Needed to think very, very calmly.

He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, thinking. Thinking. Thinking.

Her name was everywhere. Police were looking for her all over the city. All over Sussex.

He was shaking.

You stupid dumb woman, taking off my mask!

Look what you’ve done. To both of us!

They mustn’t find her. They’d know who she was if they found the body. They had all kinds of techniques. All kinds of science. If they found her, then at some point they were going to find him.

At least by keeping her cold he’d stopped the smell that had started to come from her. Frozen stuff didn’t smell. So now he had time. One option was just to keep her here, but that was dangerous. The police had put in the paper that they were looking for a white van. Someone might have seen his van. Someone might tell the police that there was a white van that sometimes drove in and out of here.

He needed to get her away.

Throwing her in the sea might be an option, but the sea might wash her body ashore. If he dug a grave somewhere out in a wood, someone’s dog might sniff her. He needed a place where no dog would sniff.

A place where no one was going to come looking.