Strawberry Tattoo (36 page)

“I didn’t know,” I admitted. “I just guessed.” I wasn’t going to tell her that at first I had thought it was Suzanne following Lex; Suzanne, who had seemed hostile to him, who was so often absent on mysterious business of her own, who had declared her intention to track down Kate’s killer…. But I felt it would just confuse Mel to demonstrate my lack of omniscience. “Lex kept saying someone was stalking him,” I continued, “and after a while I started to take him more seriously—”

“He knows!” Mel’s voice rang out happily, cutting through my explanation. “He knows there’s someone there! That means he can sense my
presence. There’s a connection between us, don’t you see? There’s a real connection.”

I took a deep breath. It was a dark night, and despite the yellowish pools cast on the pavement by the occasional streetlight, Mel was half in shadow, hands thrust into the pockets of her coat, head ducked. Still, I was shocked by the change in her. There were dark hollows under her eyes and cheekbones; something was eating her from inside, consuming flesh she could ill afford to lose. And her eyes were too bright, as if she were feverish. I thought of the strange nervous energy of tuberculosis victims, high spots of colour on their pale cheeks, eyes burning like an Edgar Allan Poe heroine. Two references to Poe in one evening: New York was certainly showing me its darker side.

“What exactly happened between you and Lex?” I asked. “Was it after we all went out that evening?”

Once Mel had started telling me, she couldn’t stop talking. Apparently she and Lex had bumped into each other at a do the week after our meeting in the pub, got drunk and fallen into bed. A one-night stand which Mel had built up in her mind to exaggerated proportions. She recounted every banal little detail as disappointed lovers always do, turning over the tiniest sentence or action, handling it obsessively until it’s worn away and grubby with use, trying to make it yield proof that they are loved after all.

“… so then he said he’d call me, but I didn’t hear from him for three days, but then I thought, oh, he probably doesn’t want to call me at home because Phil’s there—that’s my boyfriend,” she added casually, “so I called him, and I got his machine, so I left a message saying that Phil was out all the next day and he could ring me then, but he didn’t—well, someone did and hung up, and I 1471’d it but it was a payphone, so I thought: maybe it’s Lex and he’s run out of money….”

I had half-tuned this out, listening only to see if the flow would throw up something more significant. It was appalling to hear, the familiar and terrible power one person’s casual action has to throw a switch in another human being, unintentionally turning on a great explosion of emotion like water bursting through a dam.

“… so I got into ringing him and hanging up, he usually leaves the machine
on, and if you’re fast you can hang up just before it clicks on so it doesn’t register someone’s rung, but sometimes I’d want to hear his voice … then I heard he was going to New York early so I knew I had to come too.” She sounded deadly serious. “I’ve got to find out what he’s doing, what he wants—exactly what he wants, so I can be that for him. Once I work that out then everything will be all right, I know he likes me already, I’ve just got to work out what he wants and
be
it….”

Perhaps it was doing her good to discharge all this sadness, pus purging itself from an open wound. I hoped so. I was still trying not to listen too hard in case Mel’s story seeped into me, wrapped itself round my bones, and started eating away at me like corrosive acid.

Mel had stopped talking. She seemed to be expecting some kind of answer. I racked my brains quickly to summon up the last thing she had said.

“How did I know it was you?” I said.

She nodded.

“Well, I saw you around a couple of times. It was you who passed us outside Hookah a few nights ago, wasn’t it? In a balaclava? And in Washington Square Park today I saw you sitting on the steps in front of us, in your overcoat, and your hat rang a bell. I thought I’d seen it in a shop, but I went back and looked, and it wasn’t there.… Then I was in a coffee shop today, and a guy sitting next to me was wearing this woolly hat, pulled down over his headphones. And for some reason I remembered you wearing yours with your Walkman that time we all met up, and the pieces started fitting together.”

“Did you tell Lex?”

“No. I came to find you first. To make sure.”

“You were going to tell me what he’s been doing,” Mel said intensely. She stopped walking. We were on a dark, narrow stretch of street, buildings looming over us on either side as if they were trying to meet and shut out the sliver of black sky completely. New York had a strange facility for concentrating you in the moment; perhaps it was the sense I always had here of living between inverted commas. The few cars that passed seemed miles away.

Mel was a shadowy silhouette whose expression I could not see. But I
could feel her stare, utterly focused, scorching my face with its unhealthy heat. To give her too much information would be dangerous. Like the fact that Lex was seeing Kim, for instance.

“He’s been hanging out,” I said, playing for time. “He stayed over at mine one night. You were there the afternoon we came back there, weren’t you? Me and Lex and my friend Kim and Leo? I sensed something when I went out later, as if someone was watching me, but I thought I was just being paranoid.”

“He’s staying with her, isn’t he?” Mel said suspiciously. “And he’s in the bar with her right now.”

I said easily:

“He was in a bar with me a few nights back. And he stayed over at mine.”

“I know,” said Mel, and there was something in her voice that I didn’t like.

“Lex is just couch-surfing,” I said, keeping it light. “He doesn’t have anywhere to stay.”

“Not now that that girl’s been killed,” Mel said instantly. “He didn’t tell me anything about her in London. He didn’t even say he knew her.”

I wondered why Mel thought that Lex should have told her about his plans to stay with Kate.

“Everyone’s running scared at the moment,” I said. “Did you know that someone else at the gallery had been killed?”

“Lex went to the police station this afternoon,” she said, her mind still on one track only. “That friend of yours went with him. They were in there for hours.”

“He was telling them about having stayed at Kate’s flat till she was killed.”

“Well,
he
didn’t do it,” she said at once.

I let a moment pass, and then said, picking my words with extreme caution:

“Do you know that because you were keeping an eye on him?” Tactfully, I had decided not to use the word “stalking.” Mel might have thought it had negative connotations.

“He went to the cinema,” she said. “By himself. Well”—her voice softened—“I was there too. He didn’t know it, but I was there.”

“And then what did he do?”

“He bought some hash from a guy on the street. Then he went for a couple of drinks. He talked to the waitress. And then he went home.”

It was very neat; this was just what Lex had told me he had done. Sometimes when things correlate so perfectly it makes me even more suspicious.

“What did you do when he went home?” I asked. “Did you hang around?”

“I waited,” she confirmed reluctantly. She had taken a couple of steps back and was now completely in shadow, pressed against yet another heavily barred set of windows. A light shone behind them, through the dark curtains. Each bar was as thick as my wrist. It would be like living behind the metal screens of a South London off-licence, passing the money through the grille, a sawn-off shotgun next to the cash register and a Doberman in the back room, bored and angry, battering at the plywood partition in a constant attempt to get at the customers.

Finally she said:

“I was there for a few hours. Then I went back to my hotel. But I stayed till four at least. I was waiting to see when Kate’d come back, but I was so tired by then I couldn’t wait any longer.”

She said this almost defiantly, as if she were making an assertion that might be challenged. I looked at her hard, wishing I could see her face. Kate had been killed around midnight; in furnishing Lex with this alibi, Mel was giving herself one too. Her eyes gleamed in the dark, their whites the only feature I could distinguish. She looked eerie and half-mad.

“Where are you staying, Mel?” I said. “Do you want to come back to mine? We could have a drink and talk about Lex.”

She shook her head violently.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you about him any more. I wish I hadn’t now.”

“It’s good to get things out of your system every now and then,” I said. Whenever I try to sound understanding, I fail dismally, and this was no exception.

“Don’t talk to me like a bloody agony aunt,” she said contemptuously. “Or some phone ad. ‘It’s good to talk,’” she mimicked viciously. “Well, I don’t want to talk any more. I want Lex and you’re not helping me. What do you know, anyway? You could only keep him for one night, same as me. After that he went off with your friend.”

She had started to shift from one foot to the other, eager to get away from me.

“What are you going to do?” I said cautiously. I was treading on eggshells now and putting my foot down in all the wrong places. “Are you going back to Hookah?”

“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” she said. “Maybe you’re trying to find out what I’m doing so you can do it too. Are you?”

She didn’t give me time to reply. Leaning forward, staring at me intensely, she almost spat the last two words in my face, spun round and was gone, running fast back down the street in the direction from which we had come. I could have caught up with her, but what would have been the point? If she didn’t want to tell me where she was staying I couldn’t follow her until I found out. She was so paranoid she would know at once if I was on her tail.

And I had to admit that I didn’t want to follow her. As I watched her disappear into the shadows I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from me. Mel was infected with her obsession. A strong sense of contagion emanated from her, almost tangibly. The best comparison I could find was something from a horror film: her aura was like a fog which could wrap itself around you and eat your soul out.

I didn’t want to tell anyone about Mel. No logical reason for that: it was pure superstition. Just as only the bravest of us can look hard at the worst ravages of nature, we shy away from the destruction caused by love; we press tranquillisers on the sufferer, trot out the usual clichés about time healing everything and run away as fast as we can. Love scares the shit out of most of us, and I’m no exception. In a weird, twisted way I found myself actually admiring someone who could give herself to it so completely.

So I felt oddly protective towards Mel. She might have crossed the line, but if it were kept quiet she would have much more chance of finding her way back over it again. And I would stay silent about it—as long as she hadn’t garotted anyone en route. That was my one stipulation.

In the meantime, I had work to do.

“Wonderful! It looks just wonderful!”

I basked happily in Carol’s praise. This was the advantage to her being a no-bullshit kind of person; when she went overboard, it was clear that she meant it.

“Yeah, you’ve done a great job,” Laurence chimed in appreciatively. “It’s really clever the way it looks site-specific but doesn’t have to be.”

We were in the upstairs gallery, in which the mobile hung between the
two pillars, just as Don and I had envisaged it. Only a close glance would tell that the mobile had not actually crashed into the second pillar, but was resting against it; the angle at which I had rigged the supporting chains created a powerful optical illusion. I had to admit to a sneaking feeling of smugness. Any paintings hung here would have to compete hard to hold the attention. The heavy silver mass of the mobile was so charged with kinetic energy it looked as if it had smashed into the pillar just moments ago.

“Don has to take some of the credit too,” I said. “We worked it out together.”

Mother, I cannot tell a lie. Actually this frankness was less due to my exquisite sense of honesty than to my wish to see the reaction Don’s name would provoke, mentioned unexpectedly.