Hell Is Empty Page 18

  ‘Why are we going there?’ Romy asked, and I decided to drop the smart-alecness. I had been thinking about her soft mouth and the way she said my name. I hadn’t been concentrating enough on the fact that she was scared and confused.

  ‘There might be some information, or a clue as to how I can stop all of this,’ I said.

  ‘We’re going to see someone?’ Tokuzo asked.

  ‘We’re going to check something out. An address. A garage.’

  ‘A garage? A lock-up?’

  ‘Yes, a lock-up.’

  ‘Great,’ she said, and pushed past me. ‘Don’t expect me to be by your side when you open the door and find all the torture equipment.’

  I coaxed Romy from the bed and followed them both down the corridor to the lobby where I paid their bill. The receptionist looked at me with those dead, dismissive eyes. Her crimped mouth, like a badly arranged pie crust, registered its disgust at this pimp and his bedraggled whores in a series of contemptuous moues.

  ‘Get in the car, quick,’ I said, scanning the road. The service vehicle had gone. The taxi driver was asleep in the front seat, his mouth sagging open.

  I got in and started her up and within five minutes we were on the M4. Nothing in the rear-view mirror. Well, nothing black. Nothing nosing at the rear of the Saab at least.

  I felt myself relaxing, bit by bit. I switched on the CD player and fired up Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Tokuzo said. ‘There are any number of reasons why I’m grateful me and you don’t have a thing any more. And your music is top of the fucking list.’

  ‘It’s possibly not the easiest of listens,’ I said. ‘But why should it be?’

  ‘I’d rather listen to cats screwing. In fact… isn’t this an album of cats screwing?’

  ‘Very funny,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry that I don’t have any dinner jazz, or whatever it was you liked to listen to. Fucking lift music.’

  ‘Please turn it off,’ Romy said. ‘I’ve got a headache.’

  I switched off the music and we rolled in silence. I wondered if Romy knew Tokuzo and I had been involved some years ago. Of course she would. Lorraine would have been counting out my bad points in excruciating detail. She wouldn’t have enough fingers for it.

  I got off the M4 at Maidenhead and drove north through green acres and golf courses, crossing the Thames at Henley and passing through places that sounded as if they must only be uttered by people with very clipped upper-class English accents: Bix, Nettlebed, Crowmarsh Gifford. That last was just around the corner from Wallingford, and we pulled up on the high street, a couple of roads away from the lock-up’s location.

  ‘You should wait here,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck that,’ said Tokuzo. ‘I want some sugar. I want an ice cream and a pint. You coming, Romy?’

  ‘Some coffee would be good,’ she said.

  ‘Please, just don’t fuck about. Keep your heads down. Back here in an hour, right? It’s getting late.’

  ‘Right, Dad,’ she said, and blew me a kiss and flipped me the finger.

  I watched them heading off in the direction of the off-licence and kept an eye on the human traffic for a while. But there were no interruptions in its stream.

  I walked up to the right road. Halfway along it was a turn-off into an alley boiling with chickweed, colt’s foot and nettle. The alley was flanked with garages and came to a dead end: crumbling concrete bollards, a wall of weeds, a single office chair bloated with rainwater. A streetlamp bathed the place in a sickly ochre glow.

  The yellow double lines that edged the road looked to have been painted at some point just before the Iron Age. Some of the garages – the ones on the north side – were well tended, the paint was fresh, the weather-stripping intact. You knew the hinges and pulleys and sheaves were all adequately greased. The ones on the south side, though. Christ. They looked as if they’d been used as target practice for a Challenger 2 battle tank. They were scarred with rust and graffiti spray paint. Tags held sway: KNOWN, FUME, MAKO. Here was the lock-up that corresponded with Henry’s key; the only one that was shut. I wasn’t even sure it would open; the roller looked as if it was badly buckled and, sure enough, when I unlocked it and hauled it north, it seized up after about a foot.

  ‘Fuckers,’ I spat, and my voice shot around the close metal surroundings like a ricocheting bullet.

  A final look around and I got myself dirty, crawling under the gap into a darkness that smelled like a retirement home laundry basket. Ancient fuel ghosts. Dog urine. Rat spoors. I felt my eyes water.

  I got my pencil torch out and punched light into shadows that seemed reluctant to shift after years of bedding in. There was a switch on the wall but of course it didn’t work. An old MG Midget stood on flat, perished tyres. I couldn’t tell what colour the car was because the paint was scabbed and peeling and riddled with moss. Pigeon shit had hardened to meringue on the windscreen and roof. Its headlights were misted like cataracts. The car was surrounded by boxes, chests and lockers.

  I sneezed hard, twice, and the sound was ushered away as if it had never happened. The ground underfoot was a thin soup of grit and oil. No shackles bolted to the wall, although Tokuzo’s warning had me half-expecting it. No fridge filled with choice cuts. No lampshades made from human skin.

  I started opening drawers and doors. I got through some of the big ones near the entrance first: kitchen carcasses filled with old tools, an engine incrementally rotting away, presumably from the car behind me, work clothes bundled in polythene. A stack of what looked like uncooked waffles, but on closer inspection were the asbestos grids from inside gas fires. I kept clear of those, keen to not fill my lungs with any nasty fibres. An ironing board. A small hill of paint tins. Empty oxyacetylene bottles. By those, a nest of stiff, desiccated rat pups.

  The boxes contained magazines bundled with twine: Radio Times, mainly, but there were also copies of Private Eye and Angler’s Mail. Another box contained a bunch of vintage damaged toys: Action Man without hands, Action Man without feet. A velvet bag filled with chipped marbles. Headless Subbuteo players.

  So far, so Steptoe and Son. I checked my watch. I’d been in here twenty minutes, poking among Tann’s worthless hoard. Why had he given Henry the key? What was he trying to conceal from the authorities?

  I went back to the shutters and prepared to drag myself through the gap again. I’d missed something. The car. Obvious. Right under my nose. I peered through the dusty windows but could see nothing inside. I tried the door but time and rust had sealed it firmly shut.

  I picked up a floor lamp and sent the heavy base of it through the driver’s side window. I shone the torch inside, expecting to see a head in a jar, but there was just a bunch of Reader’s Digest home improvement handbooks and a football coaching manual from the late 1970s. Tissues and travel mints in the glove compartment. I wondered if Tann had ever driven this thing, and whether the odometer – stilled at 96,013 miles – marked the end of his travels, the end of Rebecca’s life.

  I tried the handle of the boot and the whole thing came off in my hand with a shower of rust. Nothing in there.

  Fuck it. Maybe Henry had the key because the Radio Times collection was worth something. I resisted the urge to set fire to the place and destroy everything. His gas fire waffles would survive, at least.

  I thought about that for a minute, and went back to them. I covered my mouth and nose with the neck of my T-shirt and kicked the pile over. Deadly dust rose up in a plume. A metal box was buried beneath them. I plucked it out and took it over to the door. I tucked my T-shirt back into place and opened the box. DIY darkroom prints. Rebecca in the female changing rooms at the leisure centre, in various forms of undress. Wet and gleaming from exertion. My beautiful, young wife. Rebecca at home, in postures of death. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The police found acres of this stuff pinned to his bedroom walls. But now: photographs of Sarah in her school uniform joking with classmates. Photog
raphs of Sarah in the changing rooms, her pre-pubescent body pink and steaming from the shower.

  I dropped the box and the photographs tipped out on to the filthy, fuel-stained floor. Then everything went blurred, and I didn’t realise how much in danger I was until I vomited from the thick, black fumes. I’d set the damned garage on fire after all, in the midst of a rage that sent me spinning around the interior kicking holes in the carcasses, kicking out the headlights of the Midget, dragging all the cabinets and shelves down from the cracked, mushroom-mottled walls.

  I dragged myself out and sucked in clean air. The heat was building. I could hear the pop and crack of glass and metal. Flames tongued the space around the shutters. I moved off before the whole row went up, and wondered what might be lurking inside each one. Nothing as grim as the thing I’d found. I thought about the visit I’d made to Cold Quay. The pathetic attempt I’d made to get under his skin. The way he’d flipped things around and tied me in knots. How he’d floored me without even trying. I should have gone for his eyes. I should have filed my fingernails to points and tried to rip his windpipe out before the screws could put themselves between us.

  Romy and Tokuzo were leaning against the bonnet of the Saab when I got back, tongues chasing drips of chocolate and ice cream around the sticks in their hands. At any other time I might have made some kind of lascivious remark but now I just wanted to sit down with a hard drink and regain control of my heart.

  ‘You look as if you’ve been wrestling with grease monkeys,’ said Tokuzo.

  ‘Did you find anything?’ Romy asked.

  ‘Some old friends,’ I muttered. I didn’t want to talk. ‘Let’s get you home,’ I said.

  I got the car started and ignored the rest of their questions. Soon they dried up and they concentrated on finishing their ice creams. The smell of it was making me sick. I put my foot down and we made it back to London in decent time.

  I don’t remember parking the car in the bays beneath Tokuzo’s block. I don’t remember going up to the flat, or putting my head down on the pillow. I should have eaten. I should have checked for danger. But after a day like that, I think I deserved just a little bit of oblivion.

  20

  I dreamed I was the guardian of a lighthouse in the midst of a terrifying storm. The rain was not rain but endless torrents of blood. Lightning was the finery in a network of veins, arteries and capillaries. Thunder, the combined screams of everyone on the planet who had ever succumbed to a killing blow. The beam of the lighthouse swept before a sea of tumbling bodies, and someone moved beneath it, in the cone of shadow, scuffling around the foot of the tower like a rat at a kitchen door.

  The architect swung down from the ceiling like a giant bat, his face inches away from my own, inverted. He opened his mouth in a shocking smile; it looked like the horrible down-turned grimace of a great white shark. He said: I know all the best hiding places.

  * * *

  I jerked upright in bed and Mengele sprang away from me as if he’d been hit with a thousand volts. Breathe. Relax. Realise. Not bed. Tokuzo’s sofa. Not Mengele, a cushion. I heard the reassuring ticks of the refrigerator and the chuckle of the broadband hub. I heard the ebb and flow of measured breath in the bedroom. I checked my watch. Six in the morning. Not as much sleep as I’d have liked, but sleep was getting in the way. I could sleep all I wanted when Tann was back in the slammer.

  I lay there for a while trying to imagine what Sarah might do or what Tann might do if they were to meet. I wondered if Sarah would be able to deal with it, with him. It won’t come to that, I thought. And she was smart. Street smart especially, but any other kind there was too. I thought of how she had made that den for herself on Silex Street. The nerve of her. I couldn’t have done that when I was her age. I don’t think I could cook at her age.

  Thinking of Silex Street reminded me of what I’d found there. I fished in my pocket for my wallet and retrieved the train ticket. Bedford. What was in Bedford?

  Lorraine had a bookcase given over to various Ordnance Survey maps she’d collected over the years. I picked one of them out and peered at the UK map on the back. Bedford. Bedford.

  I felt myself go cold. Of course, whenever I’d visited, I’d gone by car. Sarah couldn’t drive, or didn’t have access to a car. So she went by train. From Bedford to Cold Quay was a twenty-minute taxi drive. Why else would she be in Bedford? There had to be some other reason. She wouldn’t go to see that fucker. Not in a million years.

  Why not? You did.

  I had good reason.

  Did you? Maybe she does too.

  What possible reason would she have to go and visit the person who put her mum in the ground?

  To see his face. To make him see her face.

  I showered and got dressed and raided Tokuzo’s fridge for breakfast. I had barely eaten a crumb the previous day. I was so hungry I could have eaten the arse out of a low-flying pigeon. I stuffed crackers and bananas in my pockets and gave head to a third of apple pie straight from its tray. Coffee I could grab on the lam.

  I wrote a quick note and left it on the table.

  Stay here. Stay safe. Call if aggro. I’ll come back soon. J.

  At the bedroom door I listened to them breathing some more, and felt an ache at the thought that once upon a time I had lain with both of these women and my own sleeping breath had mingled with theirs. And because of me, they were together now. I’d caused an awful lot of the fear in their veins.

  I needed therapy. How do people get on with their lives, when their colours are nailed to the danger mast? Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the domesticity was a sham. Because you can’t switch off. Switching off is inviting trouble.

  I got down to the ground floor and stood at the lift door for a while, checking the area. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but after last night’s lax showing, I felt I needed to demonstrate a touch more diligence. Nobody around.

  I texted Mawker:

  on my way 2 see u – at nsy?

  He texted back:

  like fuk u r fuk off busy.

  I texted back:

  tuff shitz

  I added a grinning dog turd emoji and walked the two minutes to King’s Cross Tube. I was at New Scotland Yard within half an hour. At Reception I asked for my favourite detective chief superintendent and waited outside by the revolving cheese.

  ‘I told you I was busy,’ he squawked. He was holding a case file and a coffee. He was wearing a grey shirt with hoops of sweat under the armpits that you could have fit a basketball through.

  ‘You and me need a talk,’ I said. Maybe the way I said it, without any added snark for a change, caught him off balance. He gave me an odd look, as if I’d complimented him, and then he tucked the file under his arm and told me to follow him.

  We went up to his office and he poured me a cup without asking. I’d seen that before. It was a gathering technique. He was creating a buffer of time in which to consider all possible angles and possibilities regarding this visit. But he knew why I was here.

  ‘I imagine you want to know how the manhunt is getting along,’ he said, offering me the steaming cup of ground winnets.

  ‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘And I’m not drinking that. Put some down for the rats.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Muscles were jumping all over me. What I really wanted was to pick up one of his office chairs and launch it through the window.

  ‘Those words on the case file you gave me. Whether you wrote them or not. “GT visits”.’

  ‘If “visits” is what it meant.’

  ‘Fuck off, Ian. “GT visits”. And you know it. Because you made them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were visiting Graeme Tann in Cold Quay. Admit it. Why?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who told me that. I’m a private investigator. I investigated. I found something out.’

  ‘I might have gone to Cold Quay a couple of times. But not necessarily
to see Tann.’

  ‘Not necessarily? Why then? It’s miles away from this little misery pit. What business did you have at a high-security prison? What possible reason could you have?’

  He sipped his coffee, saw the light, grimaced and put it down. He put his hands on his hips. He looked like a shit supply teacher who’s had a bad day and is about to tear into the disrespectful kids he’s been trying to marshal for the past hour.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  I shut my eyes and sighed. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. Please, God, don’t let it be her. I opened them again and there was the red mist. I walked over to him, close enough to smell his coffee breath and the drenched polyester, ingrained with perspiration notes from years ago when he bought his shirt, quite possibly third-hand, from Corpse Reclamation Threads Ltd. My nerves were tighter than a porn star’s G-string.

  ‘I do want to know, Ian,’ I said. ‘And I want to know now.’

  ‘You don’t want to know now. Or ever.’

  I got hold of him and he got hold of me. We wrestled like that for a while, trying to gain traction but we were both wearing shit shoes on a shit surface and we slid and grunted around like seals on ice in mating season.

  ‘Why were you at Cold Quay?’ I said. ‘On the day it burned.’

  ‘Leave it, Joel.’

  I’d never hit him before. We’d always had those moments of close proximity pull me-push you. He’d headbutted me once. There was always a spice there, the potential for a ruckus. So I thought, Fuck it. Risk arrest. It will be worth it to see him walking around with gaps in his teeth and a black eye. Credit to him, as he sat there spitting blood between his lips, he didn’t threaten me with a cell. He got up and came for me. He’s sprightlier than you’d think, Mawker. He thudded a couple into my ribs, including the one that Henry had been playing notes on earlier, but it was fuelled with breakfast baps and p.m. pints. He was already out of breath and I’d suddenly lost the appetite for it. I just wanted his version of events and I wasn’t going to get it if he was having a coronary, or trying to speak through a mouthful of gore.