Decay Inevitable Page 2

  “You could do worse than join up,” his friend had told him. His cheeks were florid from a spirited chill wind and the beer they had consumed with their dinner. “You could have a fantastic time, a young single lad on the money they pay you these days. It’s a doddle of a job.”

  It was tempting enough for Sean to make a few enquiries. Within a week he had allowed himself to be persuaded to fill in an application form. Before he was fully aware of what was happening to him, Sean was six weeks deep into training and already hating everything about it. Showing aptitude for the work helped mask the mismatch. The first week on the beat, one of his new friends on a patrol in Hendon was set upon by six men wearing masks. While five of them held him down on the floor, the sixth carved up the probationer’s legs with a sixteen-inch machete.

  Hard months followed when Sean had to battle with the realisation that he was not cut from the kind of cloth that formed a modern police officer; worse, he didn’t even possess a patch of it. Late-night telephone calls to his friends didn’t help. Sean was told to show some steel, to butch it out. Watching the traffic bristling along Amhurst Park where he rented a top-floor flat, he asked questions of himself that could only ever be answered in the negative. Empty vodka bottles piled up in the kitchen, a crass testament to the masculinity to which he felt unable to lay claim.

  Somehow, thanks to discreet sessions with the division psychologist and the jockeying of his new partner, Sally, he was able to find cause for hope. Much of the job was dull but safe. Night shifts, however, would always scour the saliva from his mouth and have him on edge whenever the radio on the dash spat its codes of desperation at him.

  “Can we stop?” he asked Sally. “Let’s get some coffee.”

  Sally brought the squad car to a halt outside a twenty-four-hour bagel shop. Sean slammed the car door, relishing the cold air as it clouted the smell of the job from him. The windows of the bakery bore diminishing spheres of clarity; mist seeped across the panes like a drawn curtain. He could see vague, pinkish shapes behind a counter, loading bread onto glass shelves, their faces snagging on the smears of mist, pulling them out of true as though their owners had no shape, no substance. It was a mesmerising trick. Sean breathed ghosts through the rain, wondering why it nagged at him so.

  Sally’s nails on the windscreen: he turned to see her pulling a face, her tongue wedged between her teeth and lower lip. Come on, she mouthed.

  Sean pushed through the door; hot smells – bread, cinnamon and coffee – settled into him. He was thinking about the man at the window, back at the flat. He couldn’t remember his features, what he had looked like. Every time his mind tried to focus on his eyes, or his mouth, they slid away, like a greasy egg introduced too quickly to the plate.

  Would you mind opening the front door, please sir?

  “Two coffees please, mate. And a couple of those raisin bagels.”

  That look. Everyone he talked to or walked past gave him the same look when he was in uniform. What was it? Hatred? Pity? Mistrust?

  He took the polystyrene containers and tried to give his best off-duty smile when the shop assistant told him there would be no charge. Outside he stared up at the closed windows of the sleeping street.

  Hot coffee raged across his hands where he had crushed the cartons.

  Sally, climbing out of the car, concern creasing her face: “Sean?”

  “It was him,” he said.

  Hours later, at the centre of the clamour, the blue lights and static volleying around the radios in her living room, those three words were all he could say.

  CHAPTER TWO: FAIT ACCOMPLI

  IT SEEMED PRE-ORDAINED that he should know the victim. Sean sat – the still point at a core of bustle – as forensics sorted through the gimcrackery of her flat. Occasionally they would shoot him an askance look when he picked up some jujube from a table or the floor. One of them, flat-mouthed, pressed a pair of rubber gloves into his hands without a word.

  Naomi Clew, twenty-nine; Caucasian; sandy blonde hair; brown eyes. She had been stabbed eighteen times with a Phillips screwdriver; the fatal blow, a neat little puncture to her throat. Her mouth and eyelids had been mutilated. The body hadn’t been moved yet and was cooling on the bed to which she had been tied. The crisp sizzle of Metz flashes exploded there now; Sean watched the occasional flares coat the hallway as the forensics team took their snapshots. She wore a pair of cream Marks and Spencer silk pyjama bottoms, nothing on top but a glaze of blood. Her toenails were painted with chipped purple enamel and a ring encircled the little toe of her right foot. She wore other pieces of jewellery: a plain silver stud through her tongue, a plain silver bracelet, and a leather thong that threaded a small grey pebble around her neck. He found it hard to concentrate on that.

  There was also a burn around her throat, a rope burn, inflicted post-mortem.

  “What’s the fucking point of that?” Sean asked nobody in particular. “She was fucking dead already. Why strangle a fucking dead girl?”

  “Come on, Sean,” said Sally, picking her way through the scrum of uniforms. “Fresh air.”

  He let his partner hoist him to his feet and lead him outside. Watery sunlight dribbled across slates glossed by the previous night’s rain. Neighbouring windows were filled with folded arms, nighties and hair in rollers. Vans from BBC, ITN, and Sky were clustered on the allotted parking spaces; sodium light bathed pancake faces with unreal colour as on-the-spot reports were filed. A phalanx of reporters turned Sean’s way. He heard the words: “–officer who made the gaffe...” and then Sally was telling them to piss off while she bundled Sean into the squad car. He covered his face as the photographers blazed away at him and Sally took off through the estate.

  “How did they find out so quick?” Sean asked, looking back at the scramble. “How did they find out at all?”

  “Find out about what?”

  “That I fucked up,” he replied.

  “We both fucked up. Don’t worry, we’ll blag it.” Sally drove south through Catford, winding through dead, monotone streets for twenty minutes before parking opposite a pub – The Gnarled Fiddler – on the Bromley Road.

  “A snifter is in order,” Sally said. “I’m buying.”

  Udney, the landlord of the Fiddler, tossed them some keys from the upstairs window. “Help yourself, Sally, Sean,” he said. “I’m busy stuffing an old bird.”

  They entered the pub to the sounds of muffled laughter. It might have been from the ghosts of the previous night’s excesses. Sally moved around to the serving side of the bar, her feet catching in the tacky layers of spilled booze. She poured a pint of Guinness for Sean, loosing too a hefty glug from the Jack Daniel’s optic. She slid the drinks across to her partner.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “I’m driving, soft lad. It would look great, the two of us suspended on the same day, wouldn’t it?” She poured herself a glass of cola.

  “It’s twenty past seven in the morning, Sally. This isn’t healthy.” Sean nevertheless sank a double gulp from his pint and picked up the short, which he swirled between his fingers.

  “Healthier than sitting in bed looking like a human colander. Arses skywards, mate.” When she had taken a swig, she saw he was still staring into his glass.

  “What?” she said.

  Sean downed the spirit and closed his eyes against its heat. “I knew her,” he murmured. “I used to go out with her.”

  Sally misread the situation. “The lass upstairs?” she asked. “The one Udney’s up to his nuts in right now?”

  Sean held her gaze.

  “Oh shit,” Sally said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not half as much as I am.”

  They contemplated their glasses until they were empty, and Sean watched as Sally refilled them.

  “What will you do? Will you tell Rachel?”

  “I don’t know what I’ll tell Rachel. I don’t even know how I should look at Rachel these days.” He sighed and took another long drink of his pint. I
t was making him feel better and he felt sick for that. “I’m finished.”

  “No you’re not,” Sally urged, reaching out to grasp his arm. “I told you, we can work this out.”

  “I don’t want it worked out. Sally, this is just the first of a long line of cock-ups if I don’t get lost now. I’m not happy with the job–”

  “But you’re a good copper.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m not happy. And if you’re not happy, if your heart isn’t in the work then your head isn’t in it either. That’s when mistakes happen. I should have done more. I should have asked that bastard who he was and then got him to prove who he was. I should have asked to see the woman who lived in the flat.”

  Sally shook her head. “Hey, I didn’t ask either. That puts me in the same shit-sack as you.”

  Sean aped her movements. “All that proves is I’m a bad influence. You need a new partner.”

  “Like I need a third eye,” she spat. “We work well together.”

  “That’s just it, Sally,” Sean said, so gently that she had to lean in to catch it. “I’m not working.”

  HE GOT BACK to his flat at noon, already suffering from a hangover. Looking out of his bedroom window at north London’s sprawl, hangdog and feverish beneath a caul of drizzle, he drank a mug of tea and listened to his telephone messages. Rachel had left two, despite knowing which shift he was working and the number of the station where he could be contacted. She wanted to know what he was going to do. The first message was stiff and demanding, the second weepily imploring. It summed her up, these Janus calls. He had never known anybody with such a volatile personality; it was as if in her thirty years she had been unable to nail down the person she believed she was, as if – even now – she were still riffling her own character deck in an attempt to pick out the right Rachel card.

  The substance of her entreaties to him, no matter the emotions in which they were couched, remained the same. An ultimatum: move in with her or it was over. He replayed, through the steam of his tea, some of the countless arguments and discussions they had conducted, trying to thrash out what was, it now seemed, an insoluble problem. In none of them had the suggestion been made that they were fundamentally ill-matched. On virtually every front – bar sex – their needs clashed. And because everything else refused to gel, so their physical compatibility had been the unifying element to go first. Now it was transparent that there was nothing holding them together and they were both confused, still making attempts to solidify something that had no base upon which to build.

  “I want children.” Her voice, reedy and distant on the tape, as though coming at him from another world, another time. “I want us to work.”

  Naomi sitting on the crossbar of a bike he’s trying to steer, dropping a sticky strawberry kiss on his mouth. She’s squinting into the sun. Her voice belongs to someone much older. Does it matter if I’m ten if I love you? Does it mean anything less?

  CHAPTER THREE: BLUE ZONES

  WHAT A DAY. Sean knew things were likely to happen that would change his life, but prior knowledge had not served him with the tools to deal with them. He had woken before six and for a lunatic moment he thought he was back home in Warrington, his mum pottering around in the kitchen preparing sandwiches for his dad before he went out to work. But the potterer – too loud, obviously designed to wake him – was Rachel. He had given up on his original plan of writing to her and caught a cab over. The weather had worsened during the night as they talked and by two a.m. gales were battering the house. Inside too, Sean had thought, as he watched Rachel fighting inner storms. He wondered which of her numerous personae might reveal itself to him and had prepared for the most vicious. But when she spoke, it was clear that any fury she might have been cultivating had grounded itself on the rocks of his logic. They finished the night promising to rebuild the friendship that had existed before they became lovers. Her invitation to stay had clearly run its course however, and Sean had dressed hurriedly, hoping the previous night’s reason hadn’t festered, become a final, sour rebuke to spoil things. But they had swapped civil goodbyes, had even managed a hug and a brief kiss.

  Now, three hours later, he was sitting on a Lewisham wall, her perfume lingering on his jumper, the memory of her breasts pressing against him for the final time a painful ache in too many places across his body.

  Dealing with the inspector overseeing his shift – a gruff but affable old bobby called Rostron with a dreary penchant for the old ways of the Force – had been a relative pleasure.

  He had expected a carpeting but Rostron had been accommodating, although he was clearly of the misplaced opinion that Sean was an ambitious constable worried about his future. When Sean’s intentions were made clear, Rostron seemed to shrink, sadly accusing Sean of failure before any real effort had been made to improve his career prospects.

  “You’re giving in at the first hurdle,” Rostron had said, pacing his office. “You’re wasting real potential.”

  “This is not for me,” Sean had replied. “I’m a coward. You know, even if I had gone to that flat knowing there was a killer inside, I still would have wimped out of it.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” Rostron had countered, anger hatching in his voice. “That’s not the voice of a policeman talking.”

  “That’s right,” Sean had said, trying to keep traces of facetiousness out of his voice. Rostron wasn’t a bad man. “I’m not a policeman.”

  Tired, emotionally hollowed, he managed a small wave and a smile for Sally as she pulled up in her Ford Focus. She was dressed in a grey baggy sweat shirt and jogging pants; he couldn’t think of an off-duty time when he had seen her in anything but.

  “Are you really going to do this?” she asked, as he slid into the passenger seat.

  “Yes,” Sean replied, not knowing to which of his decisions she was referring. What pleased him was the knowledge that any of them could be answered in the affirmative. For a change he was doing something positive. Acting for himself.

  “What if someone recognises you?”

  She was talking about the funeral. The newspapers had given it a discreet mention, in contrast to the screamers that dealt with the murder itself on the front pages.

  “I’m not going in,” he emphasised. “I’m just going to wait outside the church in the car for a little while. Pay my respects. You know.”

  “But her parents,” Sally persisted. “They’ll remember you.”

  Through the grimy window Sean thought of a couple eating breakfast on a patio overlooking a distant beach. A dog running through the dunes disrupting clumsy kisses that tasted of apple-flavoured bubblegum, under blankets that smelled of toast.

  “That was years ago,” he muttered. “I doubt they’re still alive. They were old even then.”

  They drove in silence until they reached Lewisham train station. Sean could have walked or jumped on a bus but Sally was adamant she would drop him off. They both knew what was happening.

  “What will you do?”

  It was one of the little things about Sally that he would miss, the ambiguous questions. He wondered briefly if it was a trick she had learned in training, a gimmick that might draw some intelligence from a suspect that might not have otherwise been forthcoming. He hoped that wasn’t the case, that it was a fluke in her make-up, like the way she mixed Sea Breeze cocktails or her habit of singing Sex Pistols songs when chasing a stolen car.

  She was staring straight ahead at the buses growling and grinding around the terminus. From the train station beyond, a clipped PA announcement was borne down to them on a gust. Something about a diversion. Something else about Cannon Street.

  “Work it out,” he said. “Work Naomi out. It’s been such a long time since I saw her last. I could barely recognise her. She looked so... womanly.”

  Sally laughed, despite the gravity pulling Sean’s voice down.

  “Sorry,” she said. “But maybe you’re right. You’re much too soft for us lot. Get on and be a poe
t or something. Grow your hair.”

  “I’ll keep in touch,” he said, leaning over and kissing her cheek, a gesture that mildly surprised them both. “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

  “If my new partner’s a spanner,” she warned, “I’ll send you a phone call so vicious you’ll need to wear armour to deal with it.”

  He waved as she drove away, and she was shouting: “Be a dandy, a folk singer. Be a beautician! You northern ponce, you!”

  HE SAT IN the car for five minutes before realising he had to get closer to her.

  Wishing he had dressed in something more befitting the occasion than a jumper and jeans, Sean stepped through the kissing gate in the church wall and followed a narrow gravel path around the side of the tiny stone building. Tensing himself against a sight he knew he had seen in countless films and three or four times in the course of his work, Sean peered into the graveyard, feeling the weight of grief coming off the stones like something palpable, like heat. Around two dozen mourners had turned out to see Naomi buried. Already they were positioned around the grave: four of them facing Sean, the rest in various degrees of profile or with their backs to him. He moved off the gravel path and pushed through the willows to a spot where he could hear the occasional comforting phrase from the priest. Severed or faded names emerged from moss as he padded through the stones, together with dates and touching, if clichéd, couplets. He tried to maintain his focus on the group in front of him – and keep himself hidden – but the ancient call of the stones was too great. He gradually became aware of two things: that there were a couple of other attendants to the funeral, as furtive as he; and that he was being watched.

  Had he not left the path when he did, the two men would have seen him. They had followed his route along the path and were now standing twenty feet away from Sean, on the spot he had just vacated. An instinct told him to be grateful for this. One of them was fiftyish, with talcum-white hair en brosse. His eyebrows and moustache were dark flat thickets; Sean could not see the eyes they protected. He stood like a suited barrel, hands in front of him, occasionally rubbing his chin against the knot of his tie. His companion was younger and more relaxed. His suit did not fit, and Sean could see the body beneath it labouring to catch breath. His face was scrubbed and scraped pink; his hair was like candyfloss, his eyes owlish and sore-looking.