Donor, The (7 page)

It had been two weeks since the weed visited Heath in prison. Since then, Heath had felt jubilant and
powerful
. As he lay in his bunk listening to the night noises of the hall, he smiled. He’d come in handy all right, the poofter. That’s what he and Cynth used to call him (although sometimes she became a bit defensive – ‘He’s not gay, Heath! Don’t be so judgemental!’). If he wasn’t gay, then what was he? He was pathetically small. Around five-nine, five-ten at the most. And what were those shoulders all about? They’d work for a girl, maybe, but not a grown man. Jesus, why did she ever bother with the guy, dare or no dare?

‘Well, if it isn’t Mrs Marion!’ Heath had said when he arrived on her doorstep. She looked about as freshly married as a widow of eighty-five. ‘May I come in?’

And so Cynthia let him in. Let him take her in his car and in his flat. Told him all about her twice-a-week sex life with Will Marion.

‘He tells me he loves me constantly!’ she told Heath, and he laughed. ‘He tells me I have a beautiful flat stomach! He goes on and on, for an hour sometimes.’

Sounded to Heath like better sex could be had in the prison showers than in their marital bedroom. The guy seemed like a pathetically grateful teenager,
without
the physique to match.

God knows how the three years happened. Cynthia went on some nutcase mission to be normal –
bonking
Heath non-stop in the meantime, of course – and he sat by and waited till she was finished, distracting himself with a few bimbos along the way.

And now he was back. The little poofter. Back for more.

Oh, he’d get more all right.

*

Heath pointed his torch at the photograph of Cynthia that he’d pinned to the underside of the top bunk. He knew why Cynthia had left eleven months earlier. He’d promised her he’d get out back then and he was sure he would – if it wasn’t for that fucking yap-yap social worker, the greasy little prick. He understood that she didn’t want the days to drag like they did for him. But he never doubted she’d be there for him when he got out. She knew better than to cross him like that.

Preston MacMillan wasn’t calling Will’s mobile from his office. There were two good reasons for this. Firstly, he was in Egypt. And secondly, he didn’t have an office. The Hunters and Collectors Private Detective Agency was actually the cupboard off the living room of his West End tenement flat. For his birthday, Preston’s mum had paid Fred, her seventy-year-old neighbour, to decorate the cupboard in preparation for his
advanced
higher exams. Under her not-very-close
supervision
, Fred put shelves all the way to the ceiling at one end, a brand-spanking-new Ikea desk at the other and a big swivelly chair betwixt. ‘Thanks, Mum!’ Preston had said. ‘This is really amazing.’

‘Nothing is too good for my boy, you know that, don’t you, Preston? You know I love you?’ his mother replied. ‘Now come and blow out the candles.’

Preston was seventeen years old.

*

The detective agency idea had come to Preston one Sunday afternoon two years earlier. He was
watching
Dexter
, an American television show featuring a serial killer. The thing about this killer was that he turned his problem into something positive by only murdering really badass people.
Ka-ching!
Preston sat up straight. It was perfect. He liked to follow people, women mainly. And he’d been in trouble for it once – oh, but Briony was worth the referral to the Children’s Panel he got for standing over her bed that time. But he also followed males – James Marshall, for instance, who had a better train set than him aged seven. He’d followed him since the train set: as he rode his bike to the secret hideout aged nine, as he played rugby down Giffnock aged eleven, as he kissed Rebecca Gordon behind the scout hall aged fourteen, as he set fire to wheelie bins aged sixteen. He always kept mementos, too. In an old computer box on the top shelf of his new office, a growing collection reminded him of his
subjects
. James Marshall’s water bottle. Susie Davidson’s locker key. Maria McDowall’s glove. Pauline Bryce’s nail polish remover.

The idea was genius – why not follow people who needed to be followed?

The name – The Hunters and Collectors – came to him one night when he was rifling through his mother’s bedroom cupboard (not for any reason, just because he liked to rifle). In a small shoe box, his mother also kept keepsakes, but only of her electrocuted husband. One was a CD of an Australian band, The Hunters and Collectors. Preston didn’t even listen to it, but the name was perfect.

The agency brought together all the skills he’d honed over his teenage years – he was a capable and thorough researcher, an able computer hacker, excellent at
sifting
through people’s rubbish, genius at hiding behind trees, shrubs or fences while looking through windows with or without binoculars, and he was accomplished at breaking into houses. Mostly, though, he was
dedicated
. Once he set his sights on someone, he did not give up.

So far, he had successfully found a missing teenager and brought her home to her
worried-to-the-point-of-pissed-out-of-her-mind
mother (he kept one of her fake eyelashes); he had captured photographic
evidence
of a gay love affair for a distraught wife (kept a used condom); and exonerated a man who was not having an affair but watching his choice of televisual entertainment in a rented flat as far away as possible from his nagging partner (the remote control).

The first message from William Marion read thus:

In his cupboard office, where he was supposed to be revising chemistry (Did his mother not realise he had learnt it all months earlier? That he would blitz his exams without so much as revising a single page?), Preston emailed back immediately.

 Will got back to him at once, depositing the first payment into his PayPal account and giving him all the information he could think of, including Heath’s details, Janet’s address, Meredith’s address, a brief summary of what he knew about Cynthia’s addiction issues, and the name of her band.

Just as Preston had promised, he set to work straight away.

Zzzzz. Cynthia unzipped the tent. The sound didn’t wake the Peter man she’d shagged and sang at.

‘Who’s asking?’ she said, squinting at the teenager before her. The sun stabbed her hung-over eyes. As they adjusted, she noticed that he looked like a young James Dean.
How young is too young?
she wondered.

‘Delivery boy,’ Preston said. ‘Can we get a coffee?’

‘Depends what you’re delivering.’

‘News from a loved one,’ he said. ‘Meet you down the beach in ten.’

Cynthia immediately assumed the boy had come with news of Heath. Perhaps he’d gotten out – but that couldn’t be right, he wasn’t eligible for parole for another month at least. Unless he’d escaped. Heath had
considered
this before. The last time she visited him, in fact.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ she’d said. ‘If they reject you again, I can’t sit around and wait.’

He got that look in his eye he only got with Cynthia. A little-boy look, pleading.

‘I’ll wait for you, Heath, just not here. You
understand
?’

‘I’ll break out,’ he said, grasping her hand, begging her not to leave him.

‘Heath, promise me you won’t do that. You’ve got another year at most – you’ll get parole next time! Don’t try anything daft or you’ll get another ten years and my tits’ll be doubling for my slippers.’

Maybe he hadn’t listened to her, Cynthia thought as she exited the tent. Maybe he’d packed himself into a large cardboard box and posted himself out the jail. Maybe he’d paid someone to fly a helicopter over the exercise yard and grabbed onto the feet of it, dangling his way to freedom. Cynthia’s imagination was racing as she brushed her teeth and had a pee in the
communal
bathroom. She started running towards the beach, but was out of breath within seconds, so walked as fast as she could.

He was sitting, sunglasses on, at the first cafe in the strip. He’d undone two buttons to reveal several fine blond chest hairs. If he’s over sixteen it’s not illegal, Cynthia thought to herself, wetting her dry lips before sitting down beside him.

‘I took the liberty of ordering for you,’ the boy said. ‘Sugar?’

‘Cheers,’ she said, adding three spoonfuls to her cup of coffee and stirring.

‘My name is Jonathan,’ he lied. ‘Your ex-husband asked me to find you.’

Cynthia choked on her first sip. It sprayed in Preston’s face. He wiped it off with a serviette.

‘What does he want?’

‘Your kidney,’ he said, which caused a second, far heavier, spraying.

*

The woman didn’t look like Georgie at all, Preston thought. She had a touch of the substance-addled witch about her – frizzy unkempt hair, overtanned
undernourished
skin, red cannabis eyes. No, Georgie was entirely different from her mother. Brown eyes, not blue, light brown hair not dark, and – even though she was seriously ill – Georgie looked a whole lot
healthier
than her mother. As Preston wiped recycled coffee from his face for the second time, he wondered what use this woman’s organs would be anyway.

*

He’d started the search with the postcard from Goa. Once Will had deposited travel expenses into his
account
, he told his mum he was off to his friend’s
holiday
house in the Highlands to cram for exams. She was an alcoholic and thick as two bricks, his mum. Preston often wondered how he wound up being so gifted. Maybe his dead dad had been a genius, but he doubted this – he’d electrocuted himself changing a light bulb, which didn’t sound too clever to Preston. So maybe it was being somewhere on the autistic
spectrum
that made him a genius. He found this latter fact quite hilarious, imagined himself balancing, arms out, on a long wire beside loads of other window lickers, yelling at people in the real world below … ‘Hey, you down there! Look at me! Here! Up here! On the
spectrum
!’

The flight to Mumbai gave him time to learn some Hindi and Urdu, which was helpful when it came to booking and finding the bus to Goa. He boarded it three hours after landing in Mumbai. In that time, Preston came to understand the saying, ‘The British invented bureaucracy and the Indians perfected it.’ He had to stand at four different counters to buy his bus ticket. Unlike several other white travellers, he didn’t let the laboriousness of the process get him down. How would impatience help? With one hour to spare after buying his ticket, he asked a taxi driver to show him as much of the city as possible. Heavy traffic meant he saw only a very Westernised shopping street, including McDonald’s – where he bought a chicken burger – and other taxis. He boarded the bus with five minutes to spare, placing himself on an aisle seat in the middle and putting a bag on the window seat so no one would sit next to him. Luckily, no one did. He would have hated it, especially if a Westerner had taken the seat. ‘Where do you come from?’ they would have asked before bombarding him with tales of their own lives, expecting eye contact and head nodding.

On the screen at the front of the bus, Bollywood videos played on a loop for the sixteen-hour journey. Bright people danced to loud screeching. Preston could imagine liking it for an hour or so, but sixteen was utter hell. A large sign was pinned onto the driver’s cabin: ‘Our introduction you. Cabin in the only for.’ Preston spent a while trying to decipher the
translation
, and many hours looking out the window at the blackness of this strange night world, illuminated only by occasional advertisements: ‘I drink Limca because I like it!’ ‘Help eradicate malaria!’ and ‘People with
dignity
eat Nepalese sausage!’

Somehow, Preston managed to fall asleep and when he woke, tropical lushness had coloured the landscape. He disembarked in Mapusa. Perhaps if he’d been on holiday, he’d have taken more notice of this vibrant, happy city, its unpaved streets filled with colourful markets and roaming cows. But he was too excited about finding this woman, this Cynthia woman, who held the lives of her children somewhere underneath her skin.

The blue-striped bus to Chapora was cheap, but there was a good reason for this. It carried more
passengers
than three Scottish buses would. Passengers held on to the door for dear life as the sardines inside wriggled to shove them off. Preston was used to
queuing
, and had naively waited his turn to get on. By the time everyone else had managed to squash their way in, bar three locals with less vigorous elbows, the bus was impossible to enter and no amount of
Excuse me, but I have a ticket for this bus!
assisted his embarkation. As the bus was about to leave, one of the locals
standing
beside him walked around to the back and climbed a ladder onto the roof. The other two followed. ‘Come on!’ said the last. A minute later, Preston found
himself
sitting on the roof of a bus with a small railing around the side. It was liberating, Preston thought, to be on the roof of a bus. No one seemed to mind, and – apart from having to duck for electrical cables and low bridges – it was wonderful to see the world from up there. Such a different world too, one where rows of men squatted together in fields and where women sold bright coloured powders in street stalls.

As soon as he arrived in the relaxed seaside village of Chapora, Preston began walking along the dirt-track of a main street, lined with small kiosks selling food and drink, asking shopkeepers and restaurant owners if they had seen Cynthia Marion, offering them several photographs to jog their memories. The fact that most people spoke English did not deter him from using his newfound linguistic skills.

‘Ah, yes,’ the thirty-third person he spoke to said. ‘She stayed up in the red house off the beach track. Left a few weeks back. You can’t miss it. It’s bright red with a green roof.’

The owner of the red house, an Indian man in his fifties, recognised the image in the photograph
immediately
. ‘She headed to Egypt,’ he said. ‘Ronny keeps in touch, I think.’

Ronny was on the loo out the back. Preston had been directed there so he walked down the side of the red house to find a small shed in the middle of the back yard. It was on stilts. Underneath it, three pigs, noses in the air, chomped noisily on something dark and hearty. Preston moved towards the pigs – they looked so cute eating hungrily at the foot of the shed. Suddenly, something appeared from a hole in the floor of the shed. The pigs pointed their noses up towards it, nibbling at the end before it had separated from wherever it came. When it fell to the ground, they
gobbled
greedily. A few moments later, a man aged around thirty-five exited the shed doing up his fly.

‘Takes a while to get used to,’ the man said,
watching
Preston watch the pigs eat the shit that he had just squeezed out. ‘The little buggers have it in their gobs before it’s out your arsehole. G’day, I’m Ronny.’

Preston didn’t shake his hand. He followed him onto the veranda of the house, where Ronny had obviously taken up residence, and showed him the photograph of Cynthia.

‘Yeah, Cynth. I was supposed to meet up with her, actually. Haven’t quite gotten round to it. Party girl! Last time I saw her she was communicating with the moon on the beach in Anjuna.’

‘How was she communicating with the moon?’ Preston asked.

‘There are ways here,’ Ronny said. ‘Usually involve tiny white tabs! One time, we got a lift back here after a party on an ice van. Most surreal journey of my life. Some guy with a really big face was sitting on the block of ice across from us. We couldn’t stop laughing at how big it was. So bloody big! The van delivered ice to twenty-three beach cafes before we made it home. Our bums were numb.’

‘How big was his face exactly?’ Preston asked.

‘I dunno. Probably not big at all. I’m going to a party tonight. I’ll ask the moon for you.’

‘I really don’t think there’d be any point doing that,’ Preston said.

‘Right.’ Ronny was staring at the young man in front of him. He was even weirder than the guy with the enormous face on the ice truck. ‘She went to a place called Dahab in Egypt,’ he said, hoping this news would be enough to make him go away immediately.

Unwilling to endure hours of Bollywood movies on the bus from Mapusa to Mumbai, Preston decided to pay a taxi driver to take him back to the airport. The haggling process went like this:

5,000 rupees.
(Preston)

30,000 no less.
(Taxi driver)

5,000 is my final offer.
(Preston)

This price is
(blows a raspberry).
My taxi has a CD player.
(Taxi driver)

5,000 is my final offer.
(Preston)

I have to come all the way back again! This is good price for you! I will show you things tourists don’t get to see.
(Taxi driver)

5,000. I am not interested in things tourists don’t get to see.
(Preston)

My wife is dead and I have three children to support.
(Taxi driver)

I am in a hurry.
(Preston)

7,000, with music, and I show you two things tourists don’t get to see.
(Taxi driver)

6,000 and it’s a deal.
(Preston)

The drive was interminable, interrupted only by two lengthy stops at carpet shops which tourists don’t get to see, apparently. The carpets were of such high quality and so cheap that Preston bought four with the money he’d saved from previous assignments. The carpets were to be posted to his home address the
following
week.

So easy, this job, Preston thought to himself, as he boarded his next plane. A piece of cake.