Suffer the Children (2 page)

On the walk back to the Limekiln estate, he goes to the halal shop to get milk and antiperspirant. While he is queuing, the whiff of booze hits him again but when he’s paid and turns to see who’s wearing it, nobody is there. Karl’s heart stops, then beats double time and won’t slow down. His fingers tremble and his stomach feels empty.

He walks quickly back to the Limekiln estate, head bowed, all the way up to the urine-stained, concrete deck of the Limekiln tower, accompanied by the sound of barking dogs. Why do people keep killer animals in a tower block, he
wonders
, picking up a used syringe and putting it in his pocket before a child comes across it. He just wants to be inside, to lock the door behind him and wait for Leanne to come home. They won’t go out tonight. The river can wait.

He pulls out his key and his watch beeps. It makes him jump. It is precisely four. He slips his key in, but before he can turn it, Karl is startled by a pungent whiff of drink. He feels a shadow on him and his skin prickles. His muscles go slack and, again, he can’t move. The shadow gets darker, colder, and as he turns round, he sees a looming, masked figure. Wide,
piercing
eyes, blood-red lips. He closes his eyes and raises his hands to protect himself but he is too late and hears a dull, cracking noise. A searing pain shoots though his skull, down into his neck. His legs give way and he falls heavily on the Limekiln concrete, his skin ripping on the floor. Somebody laughs. A bully’s laugh.

Karl wants to curl up and let the dark come, for it all to be over, but he forces himself to look up. He sees a hand on the key to the door. He reaches into his pocket for the syringe but a searing pain jags up and down along his arm. He looks at the leg of the person who clubbed him and bites into his own lip, forcing his hand into his pocket. He can feel the syringe and takes a grip, eases his hand out of the pocket. He breathes in as much air as he can and sizes up the leg. You can kill someone by sliding air into their blood. But just as he pulls his arm back to stab into the leg, it shifts and he feels a vast thud to his balls. It forces all the air out of him and now the dark comes for him.

When he comes round, Karl is looking at the ceiling of his
bedroom
. He can’t move and there’s something metal in his mouth. He can’t move his jaw or tongue and his insides feel raw. He tastes blood. Someone in a white mask, with black eyes and blood-red lips, holds a whisky bottle aloft.

As they get closer, the blood-red lips make the shape of a smile. He strains to close his mouth but all he can do, as the whisky is poured and poured, is shut his eyes tight, feel the liquid burn him all the way down into his stomach.

With each swallow, he cries another soundless sob, drowned by the spirit. He suddenly feels rough hands on his midriff, down the waistband of his jeans. They tug them down, rip his shirt open.

The person in the mask shows him the bottle with one hand. In the other, a long, thin, glinting sharp blade. Karl’s bowels subside as he feels the cold steel on him, hears someone say: ‘This is from the children.’

Karl fears that this is not the moment he will die. He fears the last breaths will be long and drawn out. As the white-hot line is drawn around his balls, he sees one last thing – a silver gleam, getting bigger and bigger in his sight. He tries to close his eyes, but fingers force one eye open and the blade comes impossibly big until it obscures all the light and touches him. As he waits for the pain he knows his heart does not beat when it should. You don’t hear it until it is gone. The blood inside him runs up against itself and a choir bellows out. He prays for it to cease.

Staffe looks across at Josie and smiles. They are in the kitchen of the house in Kilburn that he has just finished renovating.

‘You’re not eating,’ she says, putting her knife and fork together on the empty plate.

‘I’d rather cook than eat.’

‘You’re a people pleaser,’ she laughs. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

‘Try telling that to Jadus Golding.’

‘Not pleasing our Jadus doesn’t make you a bad person.’

Staffe spears a scallop with his fork and runs it through the beurre blanc sauce.

She stops eating and takes a slug of wine, watching him. ‘You’ve got big hands,’ she says. ‘Big fingers.’

‘My fingers are too big and I’m too old,’ he says.

‘I like your fingers, Staffe.’

‘Do you want some more wine,’ he says, picking up the
bottle
, offering to pour.

‘I think I’ve had enough.’ She leans across and picks up her car keys from the middle of the table, spins them round on her index finger like a gunslinger with a revolver.

‘You can stay,’ he says. ‘It’s only early.’

‘You don’t mean that, and anyway…’

‘What?’

‘Just have a good holiday.’ She has a soft, smudged smile. ‘Sir.’

Staffe scrapes the plates into the bin, rinses them and when he hears the front door slam he goes through to the living room. He watches Josie skip down the steps and make her way towards the gap in the beech trees. Somehow, she must know he’s watching her go because she twiddles a wave with her
fingers
without looking, fixing her tights with the other hand, then slams the gate shut as she shouts at the kids to stop
playing
kerbie in the road.

Tanya Ford can’t get out of the house quick enough. She did her citizenship homework the minute she got in and has been changing in and out of outfits ever since. The ‘look’ is half fairy-tale princess: half street-corner slut. As soon as the
doorbell
rings, she scampers downstairs and out, linking arms with her best friend and calling back to her mother ‘Don’t worry’ as she is told not to be late, to be careful.

‘I love you, Tan,’ calls her mother and Tanya wants to call back that she loves her, too. But she doesn’t, just twiddles her fingers and blows a kiss. Her friend giggles.

When they get to the corner of the road, Tanya folds the waistband of her skirt down, once, twice, meticulously. She applies her lipstick and starts texting, feeling the slow rush of love that’s in the air.

Guy Montefiore tips 5 per cent. He always tips 5 per cent. It brings the fare to twelve eighty-five and he waits for the change to come back through, asks for a receipt. The cabbie huffs and puffs, saying he can’t find a pen.

As he waits, Guy thinks about his daughter. Thomasina is fourteen going on nineteen and he worries about how she is getting on with her mother, picking up bad habits. He grimaces and exhales, blows the thought away.

His mobile phone signals that it has received a text message and he begins to palpitate. ‘Forget the receipt,’ he says as he opens the door and climbs out. ‘You should carry a pen. It’s a tool of your trade.’ He slams the door, harder than necessary. But her words appear on the screen and his fury subsides. He begins to compose a response. A smile comes to his face.

He wonders whether the summer will ever burn itself out. He prefers the shorter days of autumn and winter. The longer nights suit him – he doesn’t have to wait two, three hours after work before there’s the darkness to shield him. But the trouble with the long nights is that his loves are tucked up in bed, not out and about.

Not any old love. It’s got to be perfect. The way it never is for most people.

Guy knows her name and her movements, knows her favourite pop star and who her best friends are. He’s been watching so long now he can even guess what she’ll be
wearing
. Monday night, youth club night, dressing like a tart because that’s what her friends do. It’s not because she wants to be with a boy. She’s not like that. No, Tanya simply wants to belong, and soon she will. Soon, she will be loved and she will be able to love back. The first time.

Guy lets himself in the back door of the church hall, turning sideways and shuffling along between the rows of junk waiting to be collected. There is a dull light from the reinforced glass pane above the fire door but he can do this in the dark.

He passes the tiny kitchen and takes a deep breath, feels a swell in his loins. He presses the door to the stairs that go below and the sound of music comes up. The bass vibrates, buzzes up along his legs as he goes down into the dark,
running
his hand along the rough, unpainted bricks, feeling for the overalls. He takes them off the hook at the bottom of the stairs and undresses himself. He folds his clothes the best he can. They were, when all is said and done, made to touch him just so – at considerable expense.

Guy laments that Tanya has never, knowingly, seen him at his best, but feels a surge at the thought that soon – so very, very soon – that will change.

He makes his way towards the chinks of light that come through the gaps in the stage. As he goes, the music gets louder. He distills the sounds: a hundred teenagers dancing, giggling, scurrying, the deeper voice of a young alpha male as the song peters to an end, demanding what the next one should be. For a moment it is just the soft flesh of voices. Guy stops, mid-step, and holds his breath until the next song cranks up. He crouches down in the usual spot, stage left. It’s where the gap in the sections that make up the stage is greatest. It’s also where she stands. Thank God she’s such a creature of habit.

Guy presses his face to the painted wood and for the first time in twenty-three hours, looking up from just above the level of the dance floor, he sees her. She’s wearing his favourite skirt and a cut-off, silky top that is new. He should be annoyed with her. It shows too much.

Tanya’s legs are impossibly smooth and they have tanned to the colour of milky coffee. Her tummy has the tiniest pod of puppy fat, her hips haven’t quite spread wide yet. She pivots, hand pointing out at someone he can’t see in a gesture of ironic drama. Someone nudges her and her skirt swirls as she turns to see. He can see the finest down in the hollow of the small of her back.

His breathing is deeper, shorter, he feels the knot in the pit of his stomach tighten. Weak in the legs, he falls back on his haunches, lies all the way back for a moment and lets the music wash over him. He can smell the wood of the bare boards. In the dark, he pictures her dancing, her friends
drifting
away, slowly, one by one, until she’s all on her own.

It takes Staffe fifteen minutes to pack: two T-shirts and two long-sleeved shirts; two pairs of shorts and a pair of Dockers. He’ll travel in his jeans and an old linen jacket. Eight pairs of boxers and socks and Douglass’s
History of ETA
. And he’s done. He checks his phone, sees the missed call from his sister, Marie, and he tries her but there’s no response. He leaves a message to say he’s going away and he hopes Harry is fine. He deliberates, says, ‘And you, too.’

Staffe first went to Bilbao twenty years ago, to identify what remained of his parents. His sister was off the rails and
somewhere
in the Far East so he was left to cope on his own. He made the arrangements to bring them back home. He gave up on university and as soon as his share of the proceeds of their estate came through, he bought a flat in South Ken, for cash. A year later, he took out a mortgage to buy another. Then the compensation came through. Funny, how you can measure the value of two people; put a price on what it might be worth to not have a full complement of parents.

In the ensuing months and years, young Staffe drank too much and made friends too readily, took recreational drugs too much and too often. He got up later and later – and
sometimes
not at all. And he charmed the birds down from the trees the way he always could – a gift that deserted him for only the briefest period of his mourning. And the lovers became part of his mourning, so an analyst had once told him. Gradually, after he joined the Force, he dropped his vices, one by one.

Three years ago, when he lost Jessop, his partner in the Force, Staffe went back to the Basque country to resume the process of finding whoever left that bomb in the seafront restaurant. Sylvie had left him, too, and he felt as if there was nothing but empty space all around him.

He swore to build up the evidence piece by piece. He would gain a conviction and he would gift the killer justice rather than retribution. In his dreams, he asks the killer to seek
forgiveness
and, on his parents’ behalf, he grants it. In his darkest moments, he cannot see a way to do this.

The renovated house smells of fresh plaster and varnished woodwork, new carpets, too. It is too big for him, far too much space. He calls Rosa but there is no response. He decides to go out anyway and makes his way upstairs for what has become a ritual. In the bathroom, he takes out his running gear from the Adidas bag and turns on the shower. The water jets down, hard on his scalp and shoulders; he takes the heat up a notch so it’s almost scalding him and he scrubs and scrubs with the soap. The smell of coal tar gets thicker and thicker, the steam gets more and more dense. This evening, he will run out to Kentish Town and through Islington into the City. Rosa lives in the Barbican. There is a chance, he thinks in more
optimistic
snatches, that she knows where he’s coming from.

Looking up at her place, it is plain that Rosa has company. Staffe’s lungs are bursting and he is dripping with sweat, happy to be at rest. He goes into the piazza and leans against a raised flower bed. He breathes deep and his chest burns. He runs his hand around his neck and feels the dirt coming away. As the evening comes slowly on, he thinks of Rosa, the first time.

Sylvie had been gone a couple of months and his partner, Jessop, had been shipped out to the Met. Staffe got an assault call – not really his bag, but he was in the area.

Rosa was in her flat, the one he is looking up at now. It was a neighbour who called but Rosa, crying, didn’t want to press charges. Staffe held her and said she didn’t have to and as she drew back her head to kiss him ‘thank you’, he saw her bruised eye up close. To this day, he doesn’t know why, but he held on to her, a hand on each hip. Her body felt so soft, even through her clothes. ‘Let me take you out,’ he said. ‘Help you forget this.’