The Stone Gallows (15 page)

Actually, the paint was a very pleasant shade of red, although probably more suited to interior work. This wasn't the first time it had happened. A couple of months ago, the message had been

‘MURDERER.' If I recalled correctly, it had been in exactly the same shade.

Same paint shade equals same artist. I was glad to see that four months away from real police work hadn't damaged my uncanny talent for deductive reasoning.

Including my own, there were eleven flats in the block. Two on the ground floor, three each on the first second and third floors. Bottom Left had been empty since I had moved in, but every other flat was occupied. There were families, singletons, couples, and of course, the obligatory little old lady with the scruffy cat collection.

I wondered who the culprit was. I doubted it was Flick-Knife and Shabsy. Anything more than a kicking was probably too imaginative for them. It was far more likely that the mystery artist was one of my own neighbours. Almost everybody in the block hated me. If Ian Huntley had moved into the empty flat, the little old lady on the top floor would have welcomed him by baking him a nice cake and warning him to stay away from the nasty fellow on the second floor. Even her cats gave me the evil eye when they passed me on the stairs.

I knocked on the door to the flat opposite me, folded my arms, and waited. After a few seconds, Lee opened the door. In his hand was an empty can of lager, crushed flat in the middle. Something – probably a ball point pen – had been used to punch a group of tiny holes through the side of the can, creating a convenient hash delivery system. I gestured at the paint on my door. ‘Know anything about this, Lee?'

The door opened wider as Lee stepped out, craning his neck to admire the artwork. He wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt over a pair of stained Y-fronts, and an odour of skunk followed him about like cheap aftershave. Manky dreadlocks hung halfway down his skinny back. Music drifted from his open door, funky guitars and a saxophone. He told people he was a sociology student, but as far as I could tell, his days consisted of smoking dope and watching porn.

Maybe I was being unfair. A friend once told me that sociology was a Mickey-Mouse subject. It was always possible that drugs and self-abuse were part of the course.

He shook his head and smiled. ‘Man, somebody's got a grudge against you.'

Thanks, Einstein. ‘Have you been out at all today, Lee?'

‘What's it to you?'

‘Maybe you could tell me when it was done.'

He shook his head. ‘Jane was over.' He winked at me. ‘Spent the day in bed, if you know what I mean.'

Jane was his “girlfriend” – supposedly. According to Lee, she was married, stunning, and wanted nothing more than an affair. Nobody had ever seen her, and everybody thought that he was full of it.

‘Is she still here? Maybe she saw something when she arrived.'

‘She left. About an hour ago. With a satisfied grin on her face.'

‘And you didn't hear anything?'

‘A bit of shouting a few minutes ago. Nothing special.'

I resisted the impulse to kick the stupid little stoner in the balls.

‘That was me. Two kids tried to make off with my wallet. I'm talking about earlier. I want to know who did this.'

The stupid little stoner gave me a stupid little grin. ‘Still playing detective? Far as I remember, you're not a cop anymore.'

‘I'm not a babykiller, either.'

Although, technically, I was. Just because it was an accident didn't mean it didn't count.

‘Whatever.' Lee turned to go. I snatched a quick glance at his hands.

If he was the mystery message-leaver, maybe he had been too wasted to scrub the paint off his fingernails. But there was nothing in-criminating – a few months worth of grime, but no tell-tale paint residue. He went into his flat and shut the door behind him. The smell of hash lingered, not quite strong enough to overshadow the smell of cat urine.

I unlocked my own door and stepped in the hallway. I would deal with the graffiti, but not this very second. Right now, I was going to eat the takeaway I had picked up on my way home. Chicken Jaipuri.

Hot, spicy, full of onions and mushrooms. The high point of a distinctly average day.

Except when I peeled the lid off the foil container, I found that they had given me Lamb Korma by mistake. Instead of chargrilled chicken in a sunset of red sauce, I had lumpy grey meat poking out of a glutinous yellow sludge that reminded me of bile.

I never had liked Mondays.

6.6.

Only one of my neighbours didn't hate me. Liz. Top Left, the flat above and across from mine. I had almost removed the paint when she showed up an hour later, smelling of white wine and teetering along on a pair of improbably high heels that would have looked great on a six foot tall fashion model but just looked dangerous on her. She stopped on the landing and watched me as I scrubbed away with a rag soaked in white spirit. ‘What did it say?'

‘That I was a wonderful man and they hoped I would live here for ever and ever.'

‘You'd think they could have slipped a note underneath your door.'

‘Perhaps they didn't have any paper available,' I said. ‘You look nice.'

A black dress decorated with a pleasing pattern of flowers stopped just above the knee. Her complexion was always light, and she wore very little make-up. Her face was round and usually smiling, and her body was about a thousand times more attractive than the stick-insects that grace the covers of the fashion mags, possibly because there was nothing contrived in the way she carried herself. She wasn't trying to be sexy; she just achieved it naturally. I would never mess up a good thing, but every once in a while I caught myself thinking about her in a way that you don't normally think about your friends. It was the Irish accent that did it for me.

She sat down on the steps, pulling off the high heels to massage her feet. ‘Jesus, that's better. I was on a date.'

‘Who was it this time?'

‘A junior doctor.'

I looked at my watch. Ten forty. ‘It can't have gone that well.'

‘It didn't. Turns out, he's looking for a Barbara Windsor.'

She must have guessed by my face that I didn't get it.

‘You know. A naughty nurse. A bit of slap and tickle in the linen cupboard.'

‘I thought you might have meant a seventy year old woman.'

‘Aye, well. He's welcome to her. Halfway through the meal he leaned forward and started to lick my ear. Asked me what colour knickers I had on.' She looked at me matter-of-factly. ‘You're all bloody useless, you know.'

I scrubbed away serenely. ‘I know.'

‘I mean, for God's sake, have you ever done anything like that?'

‘Not recently.'

‘I stood up and walked out.'

I clenched my fist in a gesture of female solidarity. ‘You go, girl.'

She laughed. ‘What have you been up to today? Apart from graffiti removal?'

‘This and that. Bit of the other. Went to see Mark.'

‘Really? How'd that go?'

‘Not well. He wasn't there. I ran into his mother instead.'

‘Your ex?'

‘That's the one.'

‘I thought you looked depressed.'

I shook my head. ‘I'm fine. I always look depressed.'

‘How true.'

‘She made a pass at me.'

God knows why that slipped out.

Liz stopped massaging her feet. ‘What did you do?'

‘I ran for the hills.' I neglected to mention that it had taken a phone call to prompt my tactical retreat.

‘Good man. That's crap you don't need. I mean, what was she thinking? She uses Mark as a. . . a bargaining chip and then thinks you'll drop your trousers the second she feels horny?'

‘Seems like it.'

‘Dirty bitch.' She stood up. ‘I'm starving. I think I'll make some toast. Want some?'

I shook my head. After the takeaway disappointment, I'd eaten an entire tin of spaghetti hoops. ‘I thought you went out for dinner.'

‘Yeah. To one of those places where they give you a lettuce leaf with a bit of grated parmesan on it and expect you to believe it's a salad.'

‘There's Korma if you want it.'

‘What's wrong with it?'

‘It was meant to be Jaipuri. They gave me the wrong thing.'

She almost knocked me over on her way to my kitchen. ‘Not your day, is it?'

7.1.

Insomnia's a bitch.

Even before I smacked a one ton car into roughly one hundred and eighty pounds of mother and child, I had difficulty sleeping. Every day I wake up at the crack of dawn, too hot, too cold, too damn bright to do anything but get up.

This morning was no different. My eyes snapped open at three minutes past five, despite the fact that I had only drifted off to sleep some time after half past one. I lay there, nestled in the warmth of my bed, hoping that maybe this time it would be different and I would be able to go back to sleep. As always, habit triumphed over ambition, and ten minutes later I found myself dressing silently in the dark.

I felt like shit. It was cold and my body ached from the previous evening's tumble down the stairs. I did a series of stretching exercises, the pain flaring like a struck match before subsiding into embers.

After five minutes, I stopped hoping for death and started planning for life.

And life – at least my life – begins with coffee.

Three heaped spoons of instant, four of sugar, all maxed into one tiny cup without milk. For the rest of the day, I'd take it white with no sugar, but the first time round I needed something to kick-start me and give me the energy boost necessary for my morning exercise. I used to jog, but the surgeons had advised me that the repeated impact would place additional strain on the collection of pins and wires that held what was left of my hip together. Instead, I do twelve miles on an exercise bike, working my upper body with a set of dumbbells. I was fairly sure that it was good for me because it hurt like hell.

By six fifteen I was showered, hungry, and feeling slightly better about the world. As I spooned more coffee into a mug, there came a knock on my door. Five seconds later, Liz shambled into my kitchen wearing a pink dressing gown and fluffy slippers. ‘I've ran out of milk.'

I opened the fridge and took out half a pint. She shook her head when I offered it to her. ‘And coffee. And bread.'

I rolled my eyes. ‘There's a soup kitchen down the street.'

‘No good. They've figured out that I'm not actually homeless.'

Instead of a nice, wooden kitchen table, I have some plastic patio furniture that looks like it has been rescued from a tip. She slumped onto a dirty chair, her hair a rats' nest, her eyes full sleep. She looked at me and groaned. Not a morning person, is Liz.

‘You on an early shift?'

She nodded. ‘I've got three hips and an elbow.'

‘Mutant.'

She ignored me. It was a joke she had heard about five million times before, the price of being a theatre nurse specialising in orthopaedic surgery. ‘You want to go and see the new Tom Cruise movie tonight? I was going to go with the junior doctor but he told me that Tom was symbolic of everything that was wrong with Hollywood today.'

‘The bastard. No wonder you walked out on him.' I grabbed another mug from the draining board. I'd been feeding her breakfast a few times a week for the last couple of months, the two of us slipping into a comfortable routine like an old married couple.

She yawned. ‘So. Cinema. Tom Cruise. Car chases. Acrobatics. A dazzling smile with perfect white teeth. You game or what?'

‘I'd like to, but I'll need to see what the boss has planned for me.'

She looked like she wanted to ask, so I changed the subject. ‘Why is it you have to drag me to every single movie Tom Cruise makes, and yet you wouldn't go and see that Martin Scorsese one with me?'

She shrugged. ‘I like Tom. I'm taller than him.'

‘Chipmunks are taller than him. And they also have perfect white teeth. Smaller ones, but it's still a dazzling smile.'

‘Shut up.'

I did as I was told, filling her mug and handing it to her. ‘You want some toast?'

‘Urggh.'

‘So that's a “no” then.'

‘I'm just bored with toast. I could eat a Big Mac.'

‘I'm sorry, we're fresh out.'

Liz is one of those people that can eat anything for breakfast – pizza, curry, chocolate. One morning the two of us walked to Burger King at seven am. I stuck to the breakfast menu, but Liz wanted the works – Whopper, fries and a milkshake. Turns out, Burger King aren't as keen on you having it your way as their advertising campaign would have you believe.

I made toast for myself. Four slices, the butter taken directly from the fridge and carved onto it in thick yellow wedges before being topped with Marmite. Just because I exercise every day doesn't mean I'm obsessive about my health. I hate salad and don't take vitamins.

Mentally, it's important to eat food you like. A plate of whole-wheat soy bread and a glass of lemongrass juice would probably be enough to make me want to kill myself, and with my history it's a risk I just can't afford.

Liz rummaged in the fridge, eventually surfacing with a pork pie that looked like it might have been there since the war. ‘Can I eat this?'

I frowned. ‘I can't remember buying it.'

‘Maybe it belonged to the previous tenant.'

That was actually more plausible than it sounded. Whoever lived in the flat before me must have left in a hurry, because they had left everything behind, including a mouldy bridesmaid's dress and my lovely kitchen furniture. ‘She might come looking for it.'

‘Well if she asks, tell her it went out of date.' She fumbled with the wrapper. ‘It
is
out of date.'