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CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

I’d made her late for work, so Annie put her foot down. She had an old Renault Twenty, which, coupled with the way she drove it, demoted her backside to the second least ordinary thing about her. It was a heavy, bluff machine, but she kept it barreling along at a startling pace. Momentum, rather than outright speed, seemed to be the key; she barely exceeded sixty miles per hour, but she barely subceeded it, either. She threaded the big car deftly along narrow lanes lined with unruly blackberry bushes, hands loose and comfortable on the wheel, feet scarcely troubling the brakes, throwing it into bends like a fighter jet and fearlessly playing chicken with oncoming traffic. As strong as the urge was to claw desperately for the grab-handle above my head, I remained polite, stowed my damp hands between my knees and focused on my breathing.

“Promise me again,” she said, the car thumping and shuddering as she bounced two wheels across the rutted verge to miss a Land Rover.

“I promise,” I promised.

“Because if anything you do comes back and bites me on the arse...”

“Can’t happen,” I assured her, and, “Like I said,” somewhat less convincingly, “I’m not going to do anything you wouldn’t approve of.” It was probably a lie, but on the other hand, I knew Annie only marginally better than she knew me, so there was always a chance that she was perfectly open-minded. One can always hope.

“Yes, well, I don’t see how you could possibly know that,” she observed, “but I suppose I’ll have to give you the benefit of the doubt, won’t I, because otherwise there’s no way I’d ever agree to help you out. Is there?”

I...

“For the record, I approve of a lot of things, and you think I’m always going to feel like I owe you something and so I can’t refuse to help you, but—”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Right, well, fine, but in any case, I’m helping you because I feel like I owe you something,
and
I think you’re basically a good person, or at least you’re trying to be one, so if you make a fool out of me, all bets are off. Okay?”

“Understood,” I said, although it came out half-formed and trembling as she stamped on the brake, banged home second gear and pitched the car into a tight ninety-degree right, clipping the ditch at the apex and jumping out of the throttle to snap the tail into line on the exit.

I gave in to instinct and grabbed the handle. Annie laughed. She had, I noticed, the smile of a Hollywood vampire, extraordinarily straight save for fashionably proud upper incisors. I suppressed a sudden nonsensical urge to bite her. Then the hedgerows shrank away, and the windshield was filled with nothing but morning-blue sky seaward to the horizon, and for half a dazzling moment, I just thought
fuck it
and said, “Skip work. Let’s go buy matching bikinis and sit on the beach all day.”

She did take me to the beach, but she left me there alone and without a swimsuit. She said, “Keep the key as long as you need it,” and, “Have a good night if I don’t see you.” Then she leaned across and kissed me on the cheek and told me to take care of myself.

“I’ll see you in a day or two,” I said, and smiled, because that’s what being liked by Annie made me do, in a strange sort of way.

I strolled down close to the shore as she drove away, and sat on the sand and watched the shadows of the fishing boats shorten until my goose bumps began to chafe on the chill wind blowing through my shirt. Then I got up and sought shelter on the promenade, where I mistakenly asked a drunken French tourist for directions.

Eventually, having failed to understand the navigation function on my mobile phone, I bought a paper map and a foam cup of burnt tea from neighboring souvenir stands, and so equipped, and cursing the half pound of seabed in my socks, I set off in search of a train.

I sat across the aisle from a young woman. She was somewhere in her early twenties and had smooth, fair skin and blond hair like Rachel’s in a neat knot. Her face was unlined by weariness or cynicism or indeed anything save for a faint pair of symmetrical scars close to her hairline, perhaps the mark of a little girl and an excitable puppy hammering out their mutual inexperience. She wore Dunlop tennis shoes below intricately turned ankles and a pinstriped A-line skirt. The low cut of her waitress-issue blouse bared a neck that was all cords and arches, like a Victorian suspension bridge. Her eyes were closed to the sunlight flickering past the window, her ears plugged with tiny white buds, slender fingers tapping a steady moderato beat at odds with the easy sway in her shoulders. I couldn’t hear the music, but as I watched, her body coiled around a deep breath, and the rhythm accelerated through the flat of her hand, and then her hips rocked to four powerful chords, and her head dropped loose on her shoulders, and she squeezed her knees together and drew in her feet, her calf muscles tautening and her ankle bones turning and the tendons in the back of her hand thumping time and the cords of her neck pulling the skin tight over her collarbones as her body snaked through what I heard in my head as Hugh Burns’s guitar solo in “
Baker Street
,” clear as day. And though confined to her seat, she danced unselfconsciously and without restraint, and every small movement in every small part of her—the
life
in her—was the most beautiful thing I thought I’d ever seen. I wanted to cup her gently in my hands and carry her home and keep her forever but, mindful of the probability that she might have other ideas, instead I closed my eyes and turned up the music in my head and, in spirit if not quite in body, danced with her instead.

An hour and something later I was in the city, hiring a bland Chevrolet in the name of Henry Sutton. To a casual, squinting observer blessed with imagination enough to picture him without a foot-long beard, Henry bore me quite a remarkable resemblance. In addition to his rugged good looks, Henry also had a pleasing tendency to leave his satchel unattended when he strolled off to the toilet on the train. I don’t know how long it took him to discover his wallet missing, and then to fail to find it at the station and eventually get around to canceling his debit card, but thanks to a quick stop for a padded envelope and a book of stamps, I’d hazard a guess that I’d already posted it back to him.

Hammer down, but not too far. Speed limits observed to within acceptable tolerances. Temptation to blow whole plan on visit to Rachel resisted. Home within an hour.

I made two slow passes of the mouth of my driveway, looking for any sign of anyone or anything in the trees. On the third approach, I stopped at the gate and stepped out of the car. Sniffed the air. Listened to the breeze. Closed my eyes and felt for the tickle of surveillance across the hairs on the back of my neck.

Nothing. Alone.

I rolled the car through, closed and padlocked the gate behind me. Drove on up to the house and parked in its shadow, close to the front door and with a clear view of the barn and the field behind it. Nothing out there moving, glinting or lying conspicuously still. No one watching. Business as usual.

“My head feels like a...tractor? Or something? I don’t even know what I’m... Did you put me in bed last night? You could’ve just left me on the sofa. I was out like a light, I wasn’t going anywhere. Wait...you’d better not have felt me up, you pervert.”

I flipped a tenth pancake onto the plate beside the stove and carried the stack to the table. A green shadow passed over Erica’s face as I slid it in front of her with a flourish. “Try and get some down you,” I suggested, sliding one onto my own plate and rolling it around a liberal sprinkle of lemon juice and sugar.

She made a strange gurgling sound and shuddered like it was ten below, but to her credit, she made a good effort. She got four down with maple syrup before she heaved mightily into the kitchen sink.

I gave Erica half an hour in a lawn chair, to get some fresh air into her lungs and some sunlight onto her skin. Then I sent her back to bed to sleep off her hangover. She didn’t argue.

I left her aspirin and a bucket of ice, Coke to rehydrate her and to put a bit of sugar back in her blood, a selection of biscuits and a choice of microwavable pasta meals to get her through the night. In return, I collected her dirty laundry, two or three small items of which found their way into a plastic bag in the trunk of the rental car.

Then I slept.

As it had been on a dozen other evenings, the Abbott family home was in darkness when I cruised by on the stroke of sunset. At this time of year, it was also nicely secluded; whether through grief or just plain laziness, the Abbotts had allowed the garden to run its natural course, resulting in a tall and unruly screen of apple blossom and nettles on all three sides.

I stayed pressed to the fence on the approach to the house, so as not to flatten a knee-deep trench across the lawn. The trade-off was a dozen nettle stings to the face, prompting me to wonder whether suffering for one’s art was in any way preferable to no art at all. I concluded that, whichever the case, I’d definitely rather be elsewhere.

Sarah’s key, salvaged from my collection, ratcheted smoothly into the lock on the back door. I left my muddy boots on the mat outside and slipped into the terra-cotta–tiled kitchen. Even in the encroaching darkness, it was clear that all was not as I’d left it, but happily the table hadn’t been taken into evidence, and there was no sign of the Abbotts having done anything drastic, like move out. Indeed, there was little sign that they’d done anything at all. The worktop was greasy beneath dirty dishes stacked close to toppling; those at the top slick and saucy and stained from repetitive rinsing, those at the bottom fossilized and destined only for burial. Loosely knotted carrier bags, bulging with mouldering food waste, formed a bitter-smelling pyramid in the corner by the door. On the far wall, between the door frame and a defiantly empty corkboard, an elaborately painted narrowboat slid between the snow-covered banks of a fenland canal at the head of a calendar unturned since February.

My route to the foot of the stairs took me by the sitting room door, where I paused to peer into the gloom. Four sticky-rimmed mugs and a
heat
magazine on the coffee table. Sideboard artfully arranged to present as the room’s focal point a dozen wood-framed and candle-flanked photographs of a daughter missing, presumed Out There Somewhere.

Perplexed, but nonetheless encouraged, I climbed the stairs two at a time and took to the landing, where the door to the master bedroom was ajar. I gave it a nudge with my toe. The Abbotts’ bed was empty and unkempt. Someone had recently bled in it. I retreated, crossed the landing past the box room and the bathroom to the one closed door in the house. I tucked my hand up inside my sleeve and used it to drop the handle; let the door swing silently into the darkness. And then I breathed a sigh of relief as I discovered that, like her parents, Sarah’s Lilac-on-
Lion King
boudoir was all but frozen in time.

Sixty-five hand-stuffed teddy bears cast a cockeyed collective glare to one side of me or the other. They’d suffered the loss early on of one of their brethren, a fallow creature abducted to a life of unaccustomed wetness soaking up tears and snot on Carol Abbott’s pillow. A small brown cub with felt fur and articulated limbs had joined it as an afterthought, perched in perpetuity atop her bedside table, posed within comforting sight of its elder such that the two might keep one another company on these long, empty-bedded nights.

Otherwise, only the ordinariness was extraordinary. The room smelled of vacuum cleaning and furniture polish. The dresser and windowsill had been recently emptied, dusted and recluttered. The bed had been made, but with little gusto and no attempt at a hospital corner. The wastebasket was still half-filled with Diet Coke cans and used tissues. The clock on the bedside table had been advanced to British Summer Time. According to her bedroom, Sarah and her diary were simply out for the evening.

That such stoicism made my life easier was not lost on me, and in gratitude I worked quickly and tidily. From Sarah’s hairbrush, her pillow and the collar of a jacket crumpled at the foot of her bed, I was able to fill a small Ziploc bag with strands of fine golden hair. From under the bed, rumpled against the skirting board, I rescued an unwashed black silk thong. Finally, from inside the balled-up pair of tights in the middle drawer of the dresser, I retrieved half a pack of Marlboro Lights and a Zippo lighter engraved with the initials SJA. Perfect.

Now for the hard part.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

By day, the Milton Cross estate is an oppressively dreary but otherwise unremarkable warren of sixties-built concrete council flats. Left to its own unsurveilled devices, it’s a hive of inactivity, populated by prospectless drones whose eyes rarely find the motivation to meet. There’s no church hall, no coffee mornings, no kiddies’ play dates. No one’s door is always open. It’s the very antithesis of community.

At night, however, Milton Cross takes on the kind of delinquent vibrance that charms trolls from beneath their bridges across the breadth of the city. They arrive in fleets of old BMWs and absurdly pumped-up little hatchbacks, and they head for the houses with the open front doors, the window frames rattling to the beats of identikit dubstep party albums, the porch lights glowing weakly from within glass bowls dark with the husks of visitors past.

The ground-floor flat I was interested in, however, had no porch light, because I’d already removed the bulb. In the ten minutes I stood in the shadow of the stoop, four miniskirts and two tracksuits passed within fifteen feet, and none turned so much as a hair in my direction. The windows of the apartments opposite were dark, the curtains drawn and untwitching. It was clear that the proverbial casual observer wouldn’t be requiring any comforting cues tonight, invisible as I apparently was.

The flat, however, was empty. The windows were cold and unshuttered, the strewn contents of the living room settled and lonely and cloaked in darkness. Happily, at least, they were also the typical detritus of a lone male tenant, and judging by the lingering smell of microwaved gravy, one who had recently been in residence.

His name was Mark Boon, and I’d been looking for a reason to return his wallet since retrieving it from the scene of his attempted assault on Annie’s undergarments. I had very little doubt that his absence at ten minutes to midnight on a Monday was similarly attributable, and so I added it to his list of offences, along with not having the common decency to be at home when I came to kill him.

I hoped Mark wouldn’t have to wait for the clubs to close before finding some hapless, legless student to terrorize. I suspected he probably would, though, so rather than hide in a hedge, I elected to wait fifty yards up the road in the car, with a flask of tea and the
Classic & Sports Car
classifieds.

It was a little after three when he finally appeared, agitated and hurrying, hat pulled down, collar turned up, balled fists making torpedoes of his jacket pockets. Every half-dozen strides, he snapped his head around to check over his shoulder, and his eyebrows flashed shock-orange in the sodium glow of the streetlights.

I squeezed my hands into new, tight leather gloves and hooked my rucksack from the passenger seat. Unzipped the front pouch and took out the ceramic lock knife I’d pressed into Erica’s clammy right hand shortly after she’d passed out.

By the time Mark was fifty feet from the car, I was out and across the road and walking away, bag over my shoulder, blade in my back pocket. He’d have seen me, for sure, but a retreating stranger fumbling for a set of keys would be no match for whatever threat lurked over his left shoulder. Indeed, I probably already appeared
too
unthreatening, and so I injected a purposeful sway into my stride and stumbled over every fifth footstep, setting a meandering trajectory for a spot directly opposite the cracked and crumbling path to Mark’s front door and pacing myself a fraction slower than him, now forty-five, forty, thirty-five feet behind me on the opposite side of the street.

My timing was perfect; I reached my destination five paces before Mark reached his, offering him a front-row seat as I dropped my keys on the ground, tripped over my own foot and staggered into a hedge. I heard his feet scuff the pavement as he turned sharply onto his garden path, making no attempt to help me up, just as I knew he would. And now he’d expect me to scuff around in search of my dropped belongings, and he certainly wasn’t going to risk a backward glance for fear of making eye contact with a big, angry drunk whose fall we both knew he’d pretended not to notice. The payoff was swift and inevitable.

Mark was thirty-five feet in front of me, turning the key in his lock. From a sprinter’s crouch, keys in pocket, I covered the gap in six strides and was on him as he cracked open the door. He never even knew what hit him.

I had a speech prepared, but as tends to be the case when I go to the trouble of rehearsing my lines, Mark didn’t stick to the script.

My entrance was perfect; I caught him a swift jab to the kidneys and straight-armed him through the door into the murky flat. After that, though, the plan went south. The floor in Mark’s hallway was laid with cheap laminate, over which he’d placed a thin, scruffy rug emblazoned with the image of a large marijuana leaf. The first thing he did was yelp and the second was try to run, which had the sole effect of rolling up the rug until it caught between his feet, at which point we both tripped over it.

With my grip loosened, Mark made a break for freedom, though inexplicably he ran forward into the gloom rather than back out to the relative safety of the street. Perhaps he thought he could reach a weapon, or that having lost control of him, I’d scurry away with my tail tucked. Either way, he was about to be disappointed, because I had a handful of hemp and an impulse to whip him with it.

He’d staggered no more than eight feet into the lounge when the hastily flung rug coiled around his ankles and brought him sprawling back to the floor with a winded grunt. He was up again faster than he fell, but this time I was with him, hooking his right foot with my own and kicking it high, flipping him horizontal with nothing but gravity between his head and the floor five feet below.

Well, gravity and a coffee table.

He hit it face-first, the edge chopping him across the eyes and the bridge of his nose. Unfortunately, I’d already committed to a calming stamp above the shoulder blades, and the resultant folding of his neck made a rather ominous crunch. By the time his head ricocheted to the floor, it seemed only loosely connected to his shoulders. He’d be out for a while, I thought.

I kicked the door shut and stumbled and tripped my way to the window to draw the curtains, then picked my way around the wall until I found a light switch. There was only one bulb, but it was naked and bright and threw sharp shadows across the wasteland that was Mark’s living room.

He didn’t have much in the way of furniture; an uncomfortable-looking leatherette couch and two threadbare armchairs had worn twelve holes through the brown cord carpet. An expensive-looking hi-fi stood on an upturned milk crate below a vast wall-hung television, cables dangling and snaking from one to the other to the Xbox on the floor. In the corner, a tired old flatpack bookcase listed five degrees to starboard under the weight of half a dozen video games and the combined works of Barker, King, Herbert and Straub.

What Mark did have was pizza boxes, and beer cans, and biscuit wrappers and socks. Sticky, stained mugs and crusty dinner plates. Empty supermarket carrier bags scrunched into nooks and crannies. Envelopes torn just enough to check the letterheads, then discarded unopened.

The bedroom was scarcely any better, and it smelled like a tomcat, but I did at least find some clean bedding at the bottom of the wardrobe. I stripped Mark’s bed, carefully parceling the sheet so as to preserve any flotsam and jetsam. Then I carried it through to the living room and arranged it semi-tidily on the couch, tossing his pillow on top and punching a head-size dent into it before covering it haphazardly with his duvet.

I spread a clean sheet on the bed and fished Erica’s laundry out of my bag. There were three pairs of knickers, and one pair was more visibly distressed than the others, so those were the ones I turned inside-out and rubbed all over the middle third of the sheet before tossing them to the corner of the room. I balled up a second pair and left them on the bed, which I topped with a soft blanket. Then I delved into the small selection of beauty products in my rucksack and liberally fumigated the room with cheap body spray, most of which ended up in my mouth.

Some time later, after I’d stopped sneezing and coughing into my elbow, I pulled the bed six inches from the wall and dropped behind it Sarah’s thong and a newly bought hairbrush, around which I’d woven strands of her hair.

Then I gathered the remaining bundle of laundry and the bag of cosmetics and followed my nose to the bathroom. Surprisingly, it was reasonably clean and tidy, at least until I threw Erica’s clothes on the floor and emptied the bag in a sweeping, clattering arc across the sink and bathtub. The only thing I picked up was her toothbrush, which I placed at the back of the sink, near the cup containing Mark’s.

Satisfied that my staging was just the right side of conspicuously chaotic, I turned off the light, retrieved my bag and crossed to the tiny kitchen. I didn’t have to hunt for the knickknack drawer; there was only one set of drawers, and therefore only one second-drawer-down. I used Sarah’s cigarette packet to nudge a cigarette packet-size hole among the knickknacks. Then I half closed the drawer and returned to the living room, where I carefully placed the cigarettes and Sarah’s Zippo in the center of the coffee table. A discovery, a presentation, a challenge.
What are these doing here, Mark? What did you do to Sarah?
For a seasoned
Columbo
viewer it might have been a signpost too far, but you never know, it might just work. After all, nothing demands suspension of disbelief quite like real life, does it?

Whatever. Best I could do. Frankly, I was by now more concerned with Mark, whose breathing appeared dangerously shallow. My plan to stick the knife between his ribs relied on him being conscious and upright and more or less able to pump blood to his own extremities, but he was out like Evel Knievel, his pulse had joined him on the floor, and there was no way on God’s green Earth I was going to get him vertical, let alone hold him up one-handed long enough to stab him.

Not for the first time, I settled for a quick and dirty gash. He didn’t have any color left in his upturned cheek, but I expected it was already starting to pool in the other, so, blade opened, I tugged off his hat and took a handful of orange-orange hair and lifted his head. His neck gave the faintest creak of resistance, and then, with a hollow pop, gave out completely, his shoulders slumping and his face swiveling around to stare up at me, thirty degrees beyond dead.

I didn’t have a Plan C.