Decay Inevitable (2 page)

Wolfing breakfast in a lorry drivers’ café at the end of his journey, the boy watched TV over Jerry’s shoulder and was surprised to see his parents’ house appear on the screen. It seemed alien to him, pinned beneath the harsh lights of the TV crews, barricaded by yellow police tape, despite the many years he’d spent there. A hunt was on for the killer of his mother and father. A photograph of their missing son appeared, shocking him. His own face seemed unfamiliar to him. He glanced around at his fellow diners, but they were deep in their tabloids, or their bacon and eggs.

He couldn’t risk anybody recognising him. He knew it could only lead to his being presented to the people who had destroyed his parents. When they’d finished, Jerry led him to the van and took him home, which turned out to be a small terraced house in Acocks Green. Jerry showed him the spare room and told him he could stay until he’d earned a bit of cash and found some digs. When Jerry disappeared into the bathroom for a shower, the boy walked through the kitchen into the utility room at the back of the house, plugged in the Bosch drill and drove the hammering bit deep into his right eye.

P
ART
O
NE

U
NREAL
C
ITY

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

– Emily Dickinson

C
HAPTER
O
NE:
S
UDDENLY, AT
H
OME

I
F THIS JOB
was a dog, I’d have it put down.

Sean watched Sally let the steering wheel spin back through her hands as the squad car righted itself; a fluid movement. It was early, no need to use the sirens, a good hour and a half before the traffic began to breed. Sally was a good driver and she drove best when she was telling a story. She was deep into one now.

“Next time I took a wander along Loampit Vale, Hunter had shrunk. He was about two foot six. He was kneeling down on the floor counting the coins he’d made from that morning’s begging.”

Sean watched the dawn parade of buildings stream past the liquid windows. Limp Christmas decorations hung from telegraph poles like ropes of phlegm. Neon lights sizzled:
Happy 2K9
. Static barked from his PR; his first coffee of the day was a greased, tepid knot in the centre of his chest. He was glad of Sally’s persistent murmur. He hated getting the Devil’s Hour calls; they were always the worst. This morning looked like being a total bastard. On the shift ten minutes and already there was someone intent on ruining his good mood. He thought of his bed, probably still warm but getting colder by the minute.

“I actually says to him, ‘Come on there, Hunter. Up and at ’em. Bow down for royalty if you like but I’m a far cry from that.’ I didn’t realise, did I – the bastards at the nick never told me – poor Hunter there’s had both his legs off. Thrombosis. Been injecting Temazepam. I gave him a quid – he saw the funny side.”

Slowing now, switching off the police lights, coasting into George Lane, the disused Hither Green hospital on their left a series of black shapes against the failing dark. Sally parked on Lullingstone Lane and they waited for a moment, the engine’s tick a strange comfort as it cooled.

Sean assessed the buildings. “Which one does the girl live in?” he asked.

“That one there. Number fifty-six. Bottom flat. The call came in from a neighbour who lives across the way. He said he saw someone creeping about outside her window.”

“Really? What’s he doing up so late? Wristing himself off watching her curtains?”

“He works nights. Security guard at the hospital.”

“We’re going to get piss-wet through,” Sean said.

Sally opened her door; late December wind knifed them. “It’s good for the skin. Come on.”

They searched the gardens and gulleys surrounding the flat, Sally with markedly greater conviction than her partner. Sean knocked on the door of fifty-six and was about to suggest to Sally that they visit the man who had made the emergency call when he saw movement: a face peering from the window of the woman’s home.

“Sally, there’s someone watching us,” he said, and, to the face, stridently: “Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?”

It was a pasty-faced thirty-something in a towelling robe that greeted them. Nuggets of sleep in the corners of his eyes. Bed hair.

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” droned Sean, going through the motions. He felt like a glove puppet in an act that hadn’t changed for decades. “We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?”

The guy shook his head. “I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.”

“Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?”

The guy looked back over his shoulder. When he returned his gaze to Sean he was wearing a sleepy grin. “Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.”

“Very sorry... If you should happen... don’t hesitate... Goodnight, then.” All of that jargon made him ill. The constabulary vocabulary; nobody believed the politeness had any depth. He was even starting to speak like a policeman at home. It wouldn’t be long before he flipped his notebook out to give Rachel a report on how the weekly shop had gone.

Flapping through the rain, Sean and Sally hurried back to the car. While Sally negotiated the quiet roads back to the main street, Sean called in to let control know the score.

I hate this job.

It was a different job to the one that had been sold to him. A memory, unbidden, expanded in his mind like a drop of oil in water. Coming home one evening on the train with a friend who had recently enlisted, Christmas bags forming a barrier between them, Sean had been asked what he wanted to make of his life, the odd jobs and dole cheques having left him without any sense of progression.

“You could do worse than join up,” his friend had told him. His cheeks were florid from a spirited chill wind and the beer they had consumed with their dinner. “You could have a fantastic time, a young single lad on the money they pay you these days. It’s a doddle of a job.”

It was tempting enough for Sean to make a few enquiries. Within a week he had allowed himself to be persuaded to fill in an application form. Before he was fully aware of what was happening to him, Sean was six weeks deep into training and already hating everything about it. Showing aptitude for the work helped mask the mismatch. The first week on the beat, one of his new friends on a patrol in Hendon was set upon by six men wearing masks. While five of them held him down on the floor, the sixth carved up the probationer’s legs with a sixteen-inch machete.

Hard months followed when Sean had to battle with the realisation that he was not cut from the kind of cloth that formed a modern police officer; worse, he didn’t even possess a patch of it. Late-night telephone calls to his friends didn’t help. Sean was told to show some steel, to butch it out. Watching the traffic bristling along Amhurst Park where he rented a top-floor flat, he asked questions of himself that could only ever be answered in the negative. Empty vodka bottles piled up in the kitchen, a crass testament to the masculinity to which he felt unable to lay claim.

Somehow, thanks to discreet sessions with the division psychologist and the jockeying of his new partner, Sally, he was able to find cause for hope. Much of the job was dull but safe. Night shifts, however, would always scour the saliva from his mouth and have him on edge whenever the radio on the dash spat its codes of desperation at him.

“Can we stop?” he asked Sally. “Let’s get some coffee.”

Sally brought the squad car to a halt outside a twenty-four-hour bagel shop. Sean slammed the car door, relishing the cold air as it clouted the smell of the job from him. The windows of the bakery bore diminishing spheres of clarity; mist seeped across the panes like a drawn curtain. He could see vague, pinkish shapes behind a counter, loading bread onto glass shelves, their faces snagging on the smears of mist, pulling them out of true as though their owners had no shape, no substance. It was a mesmerising trick. Sean breathed ghosts through the rain, wondering why it nagged at him so.

Sally’s nails on the windscreen: he turned to see her pulling a face, her tongue wedged between her teeth and lower lip.
Come on,
she mouthed.

Sean pushed through the door; hot smells – bread, cinnamon and coffee – settled into him. He was thinking about the man at the window, back at the flat. He couldn’t remember his features, what he had looked like. Every time his mind tried to focus on his eyes, or his mouth, they slid away, like a greasy egg introduced too quickly to the plate.

Would you mind opening the front door, please sir?

“Two coffees please, mate. And a couple of those raisin bagels.”

That look. Everyone he talked to or walked past gave him the same look when he was in uniform. What was it? Hatred? Pity? Mistrust?

He took the polystyrene containers and tried to give his best off-duty smile when the shop assistant told him there would be no charge. Outside he stared up at the closed windows of the sleeping street.

Hot coffee raged across his hands where he had crushed the cartons.

Sally, climbing out of the car, concern creasing her face: “Sean?”

“It was him,” he said.

Hours later, at the centre of the clamour, the blue lights and static volleying around the radios in her living room, those three words were all he could say.

C
HAPTER
T
WO:
F
AIT
A
CCOMPLI

I
T SEEMED PRE-ORDAINED
that he should know the victim. Sean sat – the still point at a core of bustle – as forensics sorted through the gimcrackery of her flat. Occasionally they would shoot him an askance look when he picked up some jujube from a table or the floor. One of them, flat-mouthed, pressed a pair of rubber gloves into his hands without a word.

Naomi Clew, twenty-nine; Caucasian; sandy blonde hair; brown eyes. She had been stabbed eighteen times with a Phillips screwdriver; the fatal blow, a neat little puncture to her throat. Her mouth and eyelids had been mutilated. The body hadn’t been moved yet and was cooling on the bed to which she had been tied. The crisp sizzle of Metz flashes exploded there now; Sean watched the occasional flares coat the hallway as the forensics team took their snapshots. She wore a pair of cream Marks and Spencer silk pyjama bottoms, nothing on top but a glaze of blood. Her toenails were painted with chipped purple enamel and a ring encircled the little toe of her right foot. She wore other pieces of jewellery: a plain silver stud through her tongue, a plain silver bracelet, and a leather thong that threaded a small grey pebble around her neck. He found it hard to concentrate on that.

There was also a burn around her throat, a rope burn, inflicted post-mortem.

“What’s the fucking point of that?” Sean asked nobody in particular. “She was fucking dead already. Why strangle a fucking dead girl?”

“Come on, Sean,” said Sally, picking her way through the scrum of uniforms. “Fresh air.”

He let his partner hoist him to his feet and lead him outside. Watery sunlight dribbled across slates glossed by the previous night’s rain. Neighbouring windows were filled with folded arms, nighties and hair in rollers. Vans from BBC, ITN, and Sky were clustered on the allotted parking spaces; sodium light bathed pancake faces with unreal colour as on-the-spot reports were filed. A phalanx of reporters turned Sean’s way. He heard the words: “–officer who made the gaffe...” and then Sally was telling them to piss off while she bundled Sean into the squad car. He covered his face as the photographers blazed away at him and Sally took off through the estate.

“How did they find out so quick?” Sean asked, looking back at the scramble. “How did they find out at all?”

“Find out about what?”

“That I fucked up,” he replied.

“We both fucked up. Don’t worry, we’ll blag it.” Sally drove south through Catford, winding through dead, monotone streets for twenty minutes before parking opposite a pub – The Gnarled Fiddler – on the Bromley Road.

“A snifter is in order,” Sally said. “I’m buying.”

Udney, the landlord of the Fiddler, tossed them some keys from the upstairs window. “Help yourself, Sally, Sean,” he said. “I’m busy stuffing an old bird.”

They entered the pub to the sounds of muffled laughter. It might have been from the ghosts of the previous night’s excesses. Sally moved around to the serving side of the bar, her feet catching in the tacky layers of spilled booze. She poured a pint of Guinness for Sean, loosing too a hefty glug from the Jack Daniel’s optic. She slid the drinks across to her partner.

“What are you drinking?”

“I’m driving, soft lad. It would look great, the two of us suspended on the same day, wouldn’t it?” She poured herself a glass of cola.

“It’s twenty past seven in the morning, Sally. This isn’t healthy.” Sean nevertheless sank a double gulp from his pint and picked up the short, which he swirled between his fingers.

“Healthier than sitting in bed looking like a human colander. Arses skywards, mate.” When she had taken a swig, she saw he was still staring into his glass.

“What?” she said.

Sean downed the spirit and closed his eyes against its heat. “I knew her,” he murmured. “I used to go out with her.”

Sally misread the situation. “The lass upstairs?” she asked. “The one Udney’s up to his nuts in right now?”

Sean held her gaze.

“Oh shit,” Sally said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not half as much as I am.”

They contemplated their glasses until they were empty, and Sean watched as Sally refilled them.

“What will you do? Will you tell Rachel?”

“I don’t know what I’ll tell Rachel. I don’t even know how I should look at Rachel these days.” He sighed and took another long drink of his pint. It was making him feel better and he felt sick for that. “I’m finished.”