Incinerator (13 page)

“I know she says it was you who torched that old pub.”

“That’s not the worst part. Gabriel wouldn’t have cared about that.”

“Then what?”

I saw him hesitate, wondering if he wanted to blurt all this out to some yob he’d only just met.

“It was Messy, the cat,” he said.

“What happened to Messy?”

“Someone soaked her in lighter fuel, put a match to her. Made it look like I did it when I was drunk. Little Gabe was catatonic, traumatized. You can bet the wife brought that up at the divorce hearing.”

“But it wasn’t you?”

“Of course it wasn’t me!
I’m
not the goddamn nutter—
she
is!” He’d raised his voice, and I was worried that we’d attract the attention of the guard, but I guessed plenty of families squabbled during these encounters, because no one seemed bothered. Bisham took a deep breath and calmed down again, but the way he’d lost it to start with half convinced me he was telling the truth. “It was her bloody lighter fuel—I found the can hidden in her car …” It sounded hideous, but I couldn’t see what a tortured cat had to do with Nicky, so I cut across him.

“Have you heard of a woman called Nicky Hale?”

“Yeah, she was Joan’s lawyer. Nice enough, but the silly bitch should never have taken Joan on. Cross my wife, you end up soaked in petrol. Or in here.”

“Nicky was the friend of mine getting the obscene messages,” I said.

“Then she shouldn’t have given Joan her contact details,” said Bisham.

I was here under false pretences; nothing Bisham told me could ever be used as
evidence. He knew that, and I’d kind of been counting on him knowing that—hoping he’d boast about what he’d done, or at least deny it unconvincingly. But he’d convinced me; everything he said about his wife and her mental state sounded pretty much on the money, from my encounter with her. And that meant I was back where I’d started.

“Thanks for your help,” I said.

“We’ve still got twenty minutes,” said Bisham.

“What would you like to talk about?”

“Know any jokes?”

“I know one about a pig with a wooden leg.”

“Nah, not that old one.” He looked down at his hands, steeled himself, and asked, “How was he? Gabriel? When you saw him?”

“He’s big,” I said, mentally fishing for some compliment that wouldn’t be a transparent lie. “Looks smart. Plenty of courage too. Was willing to have a go at me when he thought I was overstaying my welcome.”

“Good,” he said. “He was always a bit of a mother’s boy.”

“Do you want me to give him a message?”

Bisham took a deep breath, then shut his
mouth, as if he had too much to say to fit into the time we had left. Or as if what he had to say to his son couldn’t be entrusted to a stranger.

“Tell him I said hi.” He suddenly reminded me of my dad, and how I’d taken him for granted, and how as a teenager I’d stopped even listening to him, and how one day I’d come home and found him murdered, and it was always going to be too late to fix that. I’d get past Gabe Bisham’s crazy mother somehow, I decided, and shake the pasty little runt till the teeth rattled in his head, and tell him to go and talk to his dad while he had the chance.

I stood, and offered Bisham my hand again. Bisham took it, and there was warmth in his grasp. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Seriously. It’s so bloody boring in prison you wouldn’t believe it.”

“I would, actually.”

He smiled to recognize a fellow old lag. “Come again, yeah?”

“I’ll try,” I said, and we both knew what that meant—that I would sooner peel the skin off my leg with a blunt knife than walk in through those gates again.

* * *

Dalston Prison was on the other side of the city from my gym and I went back the way I had come, by train, through the bleak hinterland of North London, with its railways sidings and decaying brick tenements dotted with weeds on their facades and parapets. The wheels of the carriage didn’t even have a reassuring clickety-clack, they just rattled and banged over endless points, and the thoughts rattled and jostled in my head the same way. So the Bishams loathed each other and their kid was caught in the middle? I’d heard that story a hundred times. At least when my mum had walked out I’d been left with one parent who loved me enough to put up with all my attitude. I knew a few kids who had ended up wandering the streets all night, seething with rejection and humiliation, because their folks couldn’t agree whose turn it was to feed them. Gabe Bisham’s mother might be bonkers, but she loved him and was there for him, and I knew in that respect at least he should count himself lucky.

What I still didn’t know was who had sent those threatening messages to Nicky.

The estate where Delroy and Winnie lived was a huddle of bright modern houses, clean and cheerful and green; the local playground was full of kids screaming with glee as they spun around on the multi-coloured whirligigs mounted on thick rubber matting. When I had been a kid around here the playground surfaces had been mostly broken tarmac glittering with fragments of glass and dotted with dog shit, and the climbing frames and seesaws were always vandalized with such painstaking effort you wondered why the punks who did it couldn’t get a well-paid job in demolition.

My dad had hated nostalgia—he said his childhood had been rotten weather and worse food, and anyone who got sentimental for the past was a fool. You had to learn to enjoy the
now, he said. He had a point, but I kept remembering how I’d played on those swings, and how he used to stand behind me, pushing me higher and higher while I squealed in fear and joy. Afterwards I’d ride home on my noisy plastic tricycle, asking impossible questions he’d always try his best to answer.

Winnie opened her door wearing her big flowery apron, and insisted on giving me a huge hug. Her embrace smelled of soap and furniture polish and hairspray, and from inside the house wafted the scent of spiced meat. I followed her into the kitchen, stomach rumbling, to find she was making gungo peas soup—in enough quantities, as usual, to feed a small Caribbean island. While I filled the kettle she drained the water from the pigs’ tails she’d been salting overnight and explained that Delroy had gone to the Benefits Office for tests to see if he was still disabled or had somehow been miraculously cured of his massive stroke.

“These days,” said Winnie, “if you can stand upright for two minutes, they declare you is fit for work, doing what the good Lord only knows, holding up a sign saying ‘Car Wash’ or
some such nonsense, but Delroy so proud he’d rather agree with those … numbskulls before he admit he need help.”

“I should never have come to him with that idea for reopening the gym,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Winnie.”

“Lord, it’s not your fault. Delroy big enough and ugly enough to make up his own mind. It’s just a shame it didn’t work out, that’s all.” She slid chunks of yellow yam from her chopping board into the pot that was just starting to boil. “And you know, maybe it’s for the best. You too young to spend your life slaving away in that place. And Delroy too old, he need to be taking it easy, his time of life.” I frowned. I knew Winnie was trying to put a good spin on it; everything she was saying now contradicted what she’d said when we’d first opened. “Maybe we should go home,” she said. “Sell this place, we could live OK back in Jamaica.”

If Sherwood lets you, I thought.

“Winnie … have you heard anything else from that moneylender?”

“That man …” Winnie scowled. It didn’t suit her.

“Has he been around? Or sent anyone?”

“That creepy little guy who took our TV, one who look like Elvis. He came here, tried to tell us Sherwood was going to take our house, but Delroy told him to take a hike.”

“Seriously?”

“I been to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, talked to the lawyers down there. They say that man Sherwood can’t take our home, he don’t have a leg to stand on. We repay that loan in our own time, he just have to lump it.”

“I’ll pay it off, Winnie, I promise,” I said. “Soon as my money’s sorted out.”

“Oh, that money!” Winnie flapped her hands. “Just goes to show the truth of the Good Book. All that money’s brought nothing but trouble.”

She had a point. Life had been a lot simpler when I’d been working in that greasy chicken sandwich joint, running for fun and spending evenings at home with my dad, both of us wrapped in blankets to save on the gas bill. But simpler doesn’t mean better, and I’d actually started to enjoy having money, and all the possibilities it offered … until Nicky disappeared with it. That was what had brought us all this trouble, I thought, not the money.

There was a rattle of keys and a clatter at the front door which I knew signalled the arrival home of Delroy, stumbling over the front step on his crutch.

“Damn it, something smells tasty! Is it you, Mrs. Llewellyn?”

I saw Winnie’s face break into a huge embarrassed and delighted smile. As she heaved her creaking joints out of her chair and waddled out to meet her husband, I caught a glimpse of the girl Delroy had met on a beach in Jamaica and had followed home and had pestered continuously until she agreed to marry him. Forty-something years later they were still together, still devoted, still sniping and bickering at each other. I wondered if I would ever find someone I could share my life with so completely, and was startled when the image that came to mind was of Zoe in the café in Kew, stirring sugar into her coffee. The girl who’d told me—taught me—never to trust anyone.

“Finn!” barked Delroy. “Sitting there with your gut filling up my kitchen! Fetch some glasses, boy!”

* * *

Delroy finished one bottle of rum and started on another, despite Winnie’s tutting and head-shaking. He barely bothered to dilute it, determined to tie one on, presumably to wipe out the humiliation of having to parade his disability and weakness for some hack government doctor ticking boxes on a form. I was glad to learn he hadn’t demonstrated on the examiner the one physical action he could perform perfectly—a right hook—although if he had I wouldn’t have blamed him. But there’s only so much watery rum I can take, and I took as much as I could before I kissed Winnie’s cheek, clapped Delroy on the shoulder and headed home at a run, my head hazy and my belly sloshing like a water bottle with every step.

Maybe it was the alcohol, or the prospect of another night by myself, or maybe I’d stopped missing Nicky whenever I saw Susan, but when I got home I picked up my mobile and called Susan’s number. Her voice was pleased to hear me, like she’d been waiting for my call, but her words didn’t match.

“I can’t make it this evening, sorry. Can we do it later this week?”

She made it sound like I was her personal fitness trainer, and I realized suddenly she was trying to hide me from whoever she was with. It figured, I thought; I was an illiterate bit of rough about seven years her junior, and she was an educated posh bird whose friends and family had money. She wasn’t likely to be taking me to dinner parties any time soon, unless it was to amuse the other diners by drinking wine out of the bottle or maybe peeling bananas with my feet.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Call me.” I slung down the phone.

She wouldn’t call me. She’d only stuck around to find out what had happened to Nicky, and now she thought she knew, and she didn’t care about the reason why Nicky left, any more than the cops did. I was the only one who gave a toss.

I cleaned my teeth, pulled off my clothes and went to bed.

I woke at five the next morning feeling like a dog turd someone had stepped in, and my mouth was parched and sticky. I wasn’t good at drinking—that had been my dad’s field of
expertise—and I never wanted to be. I was about to slip into my old routine and start cleaning the gym, when I realized the gym had closed, and I was effectively unemployed. I decided to go for a run to burn the alcohol out of my system, and managed ten kilometres before I had to spew into the Thames.

It worked, though. Back home, after a shower—that was one expense of refitting the gym that I didn’t regret—I started to feel human again. I climbed the stair back to my room, towelling my head, and my eye fell on the box files still cluttering my table. There was one client of Nicky’s I hadn’t spoken to yet. Maybe there was no point any more, but I had nothing else to do.

The place I was looking for was once a cosy café in a bustling parade of shops until the North Circular ring road had carved its way through the street, slicing it in half like an earthworm. Except earthworms can survive being sliced in half, while the two ends of this high street were slowly writhing in their death throes. The only businesses clinging on were betting shops and grubby grocers selling
bruised fruit and dented tins. At this time of the morning the bookies were closed, and the busiest shopfront was the one I was headed for. A succession of shambling, scruffy figures, some of them clutching greasy sleeping bags, some of them without even that, came through the open door into the steamy welcoming warmth.

If anyone noticed me, or thought I didn’t belong in a soup kitchen, they didn’t say so, but then homeless and hungry people come in all shapes and sizes. I spotted Reverend Zeto, the kamikaze motorist, right away although he wore no dog-collar. This morning he was in jeans, a T-shirt and a stained cotton apron, which he was using to lift a stack of heated soup bowls onto a counter near a big vat of watery porridge. Two other volunteers bustled around behind the counter, slight women barely into their twenties with their hair pinned up and discreet golden crosses dangling from chains around their necks. They beamed at the punters lining up for breakfast, as if they were privileged to serve them, and their sincerity was touching. I’d never really intended to join the queue, but as I watched
the shuffling customers pick up their plastic cutlery I remembered my own circumstances and wondered if I’d be joining them soon.

“Hi there, what are you having?” Zeto beamed at me. I held back, guilty about taking food meant for the homeless, when I wasn’t—not yet anyway. I grinned inanely, and saw Zeto’s glance flick up and down, and his smile widen. “Haven’t seen you in here before,” he said. “The porridge is better than it looks, believe me.”