Exile (39 page)

“What do ye mean?”

“Wasn’t me,” he said.

She stepped back and looked at him. Doyle wasn’t a social animal; he wouldn’t lie for approval. The sunlight illuminated flakes of scalp impaled on his hair. If Mark didn’t hurt Pauline, then the other brother did. Maureen stood in the shaft of hot sunshine, looking into the shadows, trying to make out his face. “Mark,” she said quietly, “what exactly happened to your brother?”

“Brother’s dead,” he said glibly, picking at a scab on his neck as he stared at the floor.

“How did he die?”

Doyle looked straight at her as he picked at his jugular. The tips of his fingers were tanned a deep, polluted yellow.

“When did that happen?” she asked.

” ‘Bout a month after Pauline,” he said quietly.

“What happened to your dad?”

“Came out of hospital, after what ye did.” He pointed to her, his dry finger catching the light. “Then … he died too.” He looked at his hand, frowning, gray and pained.

“Mark?” she said. She bent down to make him look at her but he couldn’t. “Mark, I think that’s brilliant,” she said softly.

But Doyle shook his head. “It was a mistake.”

“But you did it for Pauline.”

“I did it for myself,” he said loudly, as if they’d had this conversation before. “I was angry. If I’d had Pauline in mind I’d’ve paid more heed to her when she was alive. I felt no different about Pauline before nor after. Made no difference to her. I did it for myself.”

“But, Mark, ye did something.”

“Stop saying my name.”

“I’m just saying, most people don’t do anything.”

“Most people are right,” he said quietly, touching a scab on his face. “All I’ve done is waste myself. Is that why you’re looking for the people who killed that Ann? You going to do something?”

She shrugged. “The husband’s been arrested,” she said.

“Why d’you care? Is he your man?”

“No.”

“Well, why d’you care?”

“He deserves a break.”

Doyle looked up at her. “No one deserves anything,” he said.

“But your father and your brother, didn’t they deserve what happened to them?”

“And they thought Pauline deserved what they did to her. I spend time with men. I hear them. Know what they say about women like Pauline? She deserved it, asking for it, must’ve done something.”

The direct sunlight was making her hot and her fags were lying on the floor but she couldn’t bring herself to sit down in the comforting shadows with Doyle. “This guy,” she said, “his kids’ll go into care if I don’t turn up anything. I think Frank Toner killed her.”

Doyle tittered again and she watched him. He held his mouth tight, keeping the lips tightly under control, but his brown eyes curled into perfectly geometric half-moons, lined by dark lashes. Tittering wasn’t a creepy habit — Doyle couldn’t laugh out loud: if he stretched his face he might split the dry skin on his cheeks. He took out his battered packet of cigarettes and lit up. “Frank Toner never killed her,” he said, pocketing the packet without offering them. “He wouldn’t waste himself on that. And he wouldn’t be so careless after, either.”

“But he was going to kill me just there.”

“No, he wasn’t. He might have hurt ye a bit to scare ye but what he wants is the photograph.”

“But if he hurt me and let me go, I could give evidence against him.”

Doyle looked skeptically at her feet. “He’d deal with ye if ye did.”

Maureen ducked into the shadow and whipped out her packet of cigarettes. She looked at him as she lit up, feeling angry with him again, wanting to hurt him. “You don’t care who killed Ann, do ye?”

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

Doyle shrugged carelessly. “I told her to be careful. If ye run with dogs, ye hear about a lot of things.”

“Why do ye run with dogs?”

“I’m not fit for anything else.”

“Since when?”

Doyle blinked a couple of times and took a deep breath. Maureen calculated that it was as close as she would ever come to seeing him cry.

“Since Pauline,” he said, quietly.

He was like her. He was sad and soiled by what he had seen, a melancholy ruin like Douglas.

“Give Toner the photograph. Ye’d be safe enough,” said Doyle. “Leave it in the pub or with someone. Ye could leave it with me.” He narrowed his eyes.

“I haven’t got it on me,” she lied, still unsure of him. “But I will. Mark, if you’re only fit to run with dogs why did ye grab me there, from Toner?”

Mark Doyle blushed under his blistered skin. “Seen ye, in the main street.” He rolled the tip of his cigarette on the floor, watching it carefully, wanting to talk about something else. “Ye dying tae know what happened to Ann?”

“Aye. I’m going to see Elizabeth.”

He looked up at her, surprised and approving. “Good, aye. If ye want the edge, tell her about the guy’s weans.”

“Where will I find her?”

“Coach? Don’t go in without the photo. Frank’ll kick your head in. He’ll get in trouble if he doesn’t get it back.”

“From the police?”

Mark’s eyes smiled wearily. “The police are nothing to him. He’ll be in trouble from his boss. Frank’s muscle, that’s all he is. Rubbish like us never see the real bosses.”

Maureen looked at him sitting in the shadow. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t rubbish, she wasn’t like him, that she didn’t belong here in Brixton with the Elizabeths and the Toners and the young girls with long hair and stiletto clamps on their feet. She wasn’t ruined, she wasn’t spending the rest of her life running with dogs, she was visiting, just visiting, and Vik was still a possibility. Doyle’s mournful hopelessness was making her feel ill. She wanted to get away from him. She was edging towards the door and Doyle was pretending not to notice. “How did ye find this place?” she said.

“Guy I know loans it to me when I’m down here.”

“How did he get it?”

Doyle looked at the floor. “Won it.”

Chapter 40

TOILET

The instruction booklet wasn’t helping at all and Maureen was having to guess at how the camera worked. She was in the damp toilet in Brixton tube station, sitting in a locked cubicle, trying to fit the film while she balanced the instructions on her knee. She’d had the brilliant idea of making a Polaroid of the Polaroid and giving Toner the new one so she could give the old one to the police to prove Leslie hadn’t been lying. She fitted the box of film into the gaping mouth of the camera and shut the little door. The insides flipped over and the camera jerked noisily as it spewed out a plain sheet of black plastic.

She pocketed the instructions and stood up, propping the photo of Toner and the boy on the cistern. Standing close and looking through the viewfinder, she tried to frame the picture. The flash flooded the cubicle with white light and the camera whirred and clunk-clicked noisily, oozing the picture out of its mouth.

The first picture was useless: the detailing on the cistern was remarkable but Toner’s face came out as a blur and the boy’s arm and face were hidden behind a bald white rectangle of reflected flash.

She tried again, using the close-up button this time. Flash and whir and clunk-click and the camera spewed out another smeared gray photograph. Eight photographs later Maureen realized it was impossible — the details weren’t coming out at all. She’d wasted a tenner on film and forty quid on a cumbersome camera. Gathering the blurry pictures together, she tucked them into her bag next to Kilty’s forgotten shopping and tried to come up with another plan as she unlocked the door.

A black woman in a white coat was standing in the doorway of a small office, looking horrified. She jumped when Maureen came out of the cubicle with the camera in her hand. “Can’t do that in here,” said the woman disdainfully, shrinking from the camera.

“What?”

“You can’t do that in there,” repeated the woman, staring at the camera. She backed off into her cupboard office, slamming the door. Her shadow appeared behind the strips of reflective mirror on the window, watching.

Puzzled, Maureen washed her hands and face. She was drying them on paper towels when she realized that the woman thought she had been taking pornographic photos of herself. She ran away up the stairs to find an office supply shop, her face still damp.

It was busy in the market. She left the bustle of Electric Avenue and turned down the lane towards the Coach and Horses. She could see the front door, the small orange windows and the shimmy of the light reflected from the street. She stopped in a doorway, taking deep breaths, feeling in her bag for her stabbing comb, hoping Doyle hadn’t lied and that Toner really only wanted the photo. She stood the comb up in her pocket with the teeth foremost and practiced drawing it. The weight of her bag was restricting her elbow so she lifted the strap over her head, hanging the bag diagonally to the left instead, patted her pocket and headed for the pub, telling herself to stay calm. She hurried on, strengthened by the presence of the comb and the promise of Elizabeth.

Across the road a drunk man stepped out of the pub and held on to the portico column before attempting a turn into the road. Maureen knew she could be seen from inside. She hoped Toner would be in there, that she wouldn’t have to sit about, waiting for the barman to go and phone him, waiting and getting nervous and trying not to drink. She stood up tall and walked quickly across the road, pushed the door open and walked in. Toner was in the left-hand room, standing at the bar, the central event in a crowd of flies. The snide black barman was smiling behind him, his hand behind his head, smiling and scratching the nape of his neck. Elizabeth wasn’t in the bar but Maureen couldn’t leave now. Sweat trickled down the valley in her back. She walked straight over to Toner and stopped ten feet short. Toner looked up and saw her. “I’ve got something that belongs to you,” she muttered.

He stepped towards her, raising his hand above his head, and brought it down hard on her face. Maureen’s teeth sliced into her cheek, her left eye flashed blankets of white light and her mouth was suddenly filled with salty blood. A heavy hush descended in the pub as each man computed the difficult equation of why a small woman with blood dripping from her chin was nothing whatever to do with him. Toner slid his fat hand under Maureen’s arm as he had before and lifted her, carrying her to the door of the ladies’ toilet. The chat started again, a little higher, a little nervous, as Toner kicked open the door and threw Maureen face down into the piercing smell of piss-filled lemons. The strap snapped and her bag skidded across the floor, spinning as slowly and as gracefully as a curling stone, stopping an inch short of the far wall. Maureen lay rigid, blood falling out of her mouth onto the floor. Doyle had lied. She wasn’t safe. She reached back in her mind, trying to remember why she had thought it would be safe to come here as Toner kicked open first one cubicle door and then the next. Elizabeth was sitting on the toilet in the second cubicle, her trousers gathered around her knees. She jumped to her feet when the door crashed open, startled awake and trembling.

“Get!” barked Toner.

Her jeans slid to the floor, baring her bony legs and her wet and tattered fanny.

“Get!”

Automatically, Elizabeth bent down to pull up her trousers, banging her head hard off the cubicle wall. She pulled her trousers up over her bare bum and ran to get out, banging into walls and the door in her hurry to get away, running into the pub with her fly undone and her pubes on display. Maureen watched Elizabeth leave and groaned into the stinking floor.

He wrapped his fat hands around Maureen’s throat and pulled her onto her feet, choking the breath from her. She remembered. She reached for the comb in her mind but her hand was frozen. She was so afraid she couldn’t move. She couldn’t move. He pushed her over the sinks, pressing the back of her head into the wall, and squeezed her throat hard, baring his teeth as if he was going to bite her face. She couldn’t move. The pressure was building in her eyes and her tongue began to swell.

“Give it to me!” he roared, flecking spit.

Maureen reached into her coat pocket, sliding her hand past the stabbing comb, and handed him the Polaroid. He looked at it, smiling as if remembering a happy holiday, and hid it in his coat. Maureen’s hand returned to her pocket, settling on the comb, her fingertips running across the ferocious teeth. If she stabbed him she’d have to kill him. One more squeeze of her neck and he’d kill her.

“You should have given it to me in the first fucking place”—he banged the back of her head off the wall—”shouldn’t you?”

“I meant—”

“Shut it!”

Toner retracted his fingers and the pressure from his palm relented, leaving Maureen to find her footing, scrabbling on the slippery tiles. He seemed very pleased.

“Cross me again and you’ll fucking know about it,” he said, smiling to himself. He straightened his coat and flattened his hair, checked in the shattered mirror to make sure he looked flash before he walked out of the ladies’ toilet.

Maureen threw up. Blood and milk splattered her coat skirt. She hung over the lumpy pink puddle, breathing heavily, trying to negotiate the sharp, hot pain in her throat and eyes and the throb at the back of her head.

She turned on the tap to wash out her mouth and looked at herself in a broken shard of mirror on the wall. Her chin was smeared with burgundy blood, her pale blue eyes were pink and cracked. A livid red bruise around her throat tapered away to finger marks at the side. Blood was soaking into the shoulder of her coat. She’d crapped it. She had a fucking weapon in her pocket and she’d crapped it.

She wanted to stay in the toilet, wanted to wait until Toner had left, but she knew that might be never and the longer she stayed in there the more frightened she’d be. She washed out her mouth, poking at the cut in her cheek with her tongue. The long, deep gash was bleeding heavily. She wiped the vomit from her coat and pulled up her collar to cover the marks on her neck, picked up her bag and slowly tied a knot in the strap. She spat out a last mouthful of blood into the basin and kept her head high as she walked out into the pub.