Hell Is Empty Read online

  She was pissing me about. It struck me that her proximity to me was no fluke: she wanted to meet me at The Beehive because she knew I lived on Homer Street and that maybe it was a way of pinpointing my exact address. She could be in my flat now, rifling the drawers, pocketing any number of treasures. Not that there was anything worth taking.

  I had to get back. I had to—

  My phone rang. It was Karen. She was screaming into the receiver. I wondered if she’d tried to steal some of Mengele’s Fishbitz and he was now hanging off her, having driven his claws two inches into her flesh. I pleaded with her to take it easy, that I couldn’t understand her, but she would not be mollified. So I put the phone down on her. When she called again she’d managed to put a lid on it to some degree but hysteria simmered just beneath the surface.

  ‘Just count to ten,’ I said, ‘take a deep breath and tell me what happened.’

  I heard a rush of air and she said: ‘I got a phone call. From Benjie. He’s got Simon—’

  ‘You’re kidding. I’m standing outside his house right now. It must be worth four and a half mil.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘Why would he do this? That’s my point. His wife will leave him. He’ll lose his kids. He’s likely to go to prison. And for what? He isn’t getting any money out of you.’

  ‘Principle.’

  ‘Principle?’

  ‘What does it fucking matter?’ she screamed. ‘Maybe his wife has left him already. Maybe his kids despise him. He might have lost his job. He’s behind on his mortgage repayments. He’s gone stark, raving bonkers. What does it matter? All that matters is that he has got Simon.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘He didn’t say. He told me to sit tight, that Simon was safe and well, and that he would call again later with his demands.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Nine o’clock. On the button, he said.’

  I checked my watch. It was coming up to quarter to four.

  ‘We can get you to Scotland Yard,’ I said. ‘I know someone there who will sort this out. He can get a trace set—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No trace. No police. Just me and you.’

  ‘Karen, I’m not tried in negotiations. I get into a tizz if someone asks me what kind of sauce I want on my bacon roll.’

  ‘I can’t do this on my own. And I can’t do this with the police.’

  ‘You can. They’ll help you. There’s a kid involved, for Christ’s sake. We can’t fuck about.’

  ‘I won’t do this with the police involved,’ she said. And now all traces of the panic were gone. Her voice was cold, flat, inanimate. It was like listening to a Conservative frontbencher. She thought Benjie Weston had cashed his mental chips; I thought she had. Pull back to reveal me sitting in my own waste wearing my underpants for a turban.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Chinatown. I’m in a restaurant on Gerrard Street,’ she said. She told me its name. ‘I’m drinking free green tea. There’s a phone box across the way. He told me he’d call it at nine.’

  ‘No mobiles?’

  ‘Apparently not, no.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s his party. I’ll be over there by eight thirty.’

  ‘Please,’ she said, and the line went dead.

  * * *

  Benjie Weston. Who the fuck are you? Other than someone with a dog’s name.

  I approached the house. No cars. No signs of life. I peered through the front window into a large sitting room containing an upright piano and three guitars in stands. There was a plant in rude health on the windowsill. If the house was vacant, it probably hadn’t been vacated too long ago.

  I took a quick glance up and down the street before vaulting the fence and hurrying down the side of the house. The garden went on and on, bordered on either side by neatly trimmed leylandii. A large trampoline stood within their shadow. There was a suite of garden furniture under tarpaulin. French windows separated me from a living room containing a plasma screen as big as a goalmouth. Neutral colours. A huge sofa. A tartan cat basket. Nobody inside.

  I didn’t have time to do any background checks on Weston and find out how fruity loops he was at work or the pub or the gym. And it didn’t matter. At nine o’clock he’d show us just how balls-out bat crackers he was.

  I hopped on the Tube and got off at Cannon Street thinking about Weston’s kids. They couldn’t have been much older than five judging by the size and type of the toys lying around the garden. An age when your parents are like gods; you look for them, you call for them, you want to be with them all the time. Sarah had been just the same. Seeking my hand with hers on even the shortest walks, homing in on me at any moment of stress or pain. It had been my side of the bed she came to after a nightmare or during a bout of sickness. The pictures she drew – I have them all in a big plastic tub at Keepsies, the storage place – are invariably of me and her. Which is not to say she didn’t have a good relationship with her mum, of course she did. But Rebecca will say it’s because I was her mental equivalent at the time. I was a goofy dad, she was a daddy’s girl.

  There are some things it’s impossible to imagine; stuff so dark the mind recoils from it. It censors you, and a good thing too. How bad would things have to have become before I held the blade to my daughter’s throat? The person with sleepy eyes who had reached out for me at the start of every day. I was the patient in her clinic (her notes on my clipboard: you just need a medisan), the customer in her restaurant (soop – £15), the visitor to her beauty salon (yes, you can paint my nails but no photos or I’ll tickle you squitless).

  I couldn’t harm my girl. I’d sooner die. And yet many apparently loving fathers had crossed that line. Smothered, strangled, stabbed. Children so small. Voices of confusion and hurt. Tiny hands latticed with defence wounds.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  I thought of Karen and again I began judging her. Wasn’t she the kidnapper, technically, if she was keeping Simon out of the hands of the authorities, who presumably believed him to be at risk if he stayed with her? And the level of calm she was exuding. All right, she’d been blazing at me on the phone, but the sudden switch to ice maiden suggested she was strung out on some form of medication, legally acquired or otherwise. Should I judge her for coping like that, when I was guilty of keeping any number of distilleries in business? She cared, obviously, or she wouldn’t have asked for my help. She wouldn’t be necking green tea by the potful, waiting for the phone to ring.

  I meandered and fulminated until the sky turned dark and I found myself down by the river at Upper Thames Street. To the east, monsters reared. Great cranes adorned with festive lights reached like children on tip-toe trying to drape tinsel around the Christmas tree. I peered at the summit of the Splinter for soft, uncertain light but either I was too far away or the mystery inhabitants were abroad.

  I turned to stare along the grey ribbon of Southwark Bridge Road and without thinking I was halfway across it. Exposed, the wind plucked at me and it felt like the little black beaks of memory opening me up all over, urging me to revisit that night again. I was about a mile away from where I almost died. It took me fifteen minutes to reach Silex Street. New padlocks had been placed on the doors but no such attention had been paid to the upper windows, which sagged open like aghast mouths. Around the back I found a plank of wood I could wedge between the perimeter fence and the underside of a first-floor window frame. I was up and in before I’d thought that the wood might be old and waterlogged and full of rot. I stood there in the cold, still air of dead rooms and felt about in my jacket pocket for the little LED torch I carry with me. The night sprang back from it, so physical, so solid, that I tensed up, believing it must have been a person.

  I saw in the beam evidence of the forensic team’s presence, after I had been shuttled to A&E. A latex glove. A length of yellow tape snarled in spider webs and dust. All of Sarah’s things were gone – her blankets and books – but I coul
dn’t know if she’d taken them herself or Mawker’s unit had seized them for study back at the lab, thinking they belonged to Ronnie Lake.

  Here was blood. And here. And here. It was dark, drained into the old wooden floorboards like mahogany stain. Ronnie’s or mine? A bit of both, I’d have thought. A lot of both. I don’t know why I’d come here. Time to kill I could have killed in a coffee house or a bookshop or a bar. Sarah wouldn’t have stuck around in a place meant to be her grave, a place that must have smelled like a butcher’s display after I’d mopped myself all over it. All I’d done was reopen wounds that my mind had been working hard to sew shut behind the scenes, while my body fought to heal itself.

  Disgusted, I made to leave and the torch picked out an edge of clean orange. I swept the beam back the way it had come: there, near the area where Sarah’s den had been arranged, something sticking out of the cracks in the floor. I teased it out: a discarded train ticket.

  It suggested travel between Blackfriars and Bedford stations. The date of issue was this March, one month before I broke into this building. Off-peak day return: £15. It could have belonged to anyone, but Sarah had been here at the time and it had been bought in conjunction with a young person’s railcard.

  Bedford? The only thing I knew about Bedford was something my geography teacher mentioned at school, that it was home to a lot of people of Italian descent. That and… vans, I guess.

  I dug around in the cracks in case there was any other booty to be found, while inwardly rehearsing the putdowns I’d volley Mawker’s way for missing this piece of evidence. Okay, it wasn’t crucial, but it could help me in my search for Sarah, even if she’d made it clear she didn’t want me to come looking for her any more.

  I checked the time and swore. I’d spent two hours in this dive. I got out and hailed a cab on Webber Street. Twenty minutes later I got the driver to drop me on Shaftesbury Avenue and I walked down to Chinatown. I was feeling a little ill after being in the Silex Street factory and the taxi back was too hot, driven by a guy whose No Smoking sign was meant for everybody else but him.

  An old Chinese man raised his hand to me as I entered the restaurant. It was pretty busy but he knew who I was here for; he led me to a table by the entrance littered with torn tissues and a green teapot.

  ‘She gone piss,’ the old guy said, and asked if I wanted a menu. I shook my head and sat down. It was quarter to nine. I guessed Karen had chosen this spot because you could see the telephone box across the way. YOU CAN EMAIL FROM HERE a sign said, but clearly nobody had, perhaps ever. I’d been mildly surprised to see the phone box at all. They seemed out of place, out of time. They were the kind of endangered species your eye tended to dismiss these days. Unless you were desperate for a slash. It had ever been so. They stank of stale urine and stale cigarette smoke when I was a kid, nipping in to see if there was any forgotten change in the coin return slot.

  The only time I’d used a phone box as an adult had been during a trip to Bristol, what… ten years ago? I forget my reasons for being there, but I was staying at a friend’s house in Cotham. We’d gone out for a night in the city centre and, true to form, reduced ourselves to a state of utter paralysis on pints of Directors and, as I remember, a huge bottle of pineapple dessert wine.

  We became separated at some point, and I was so wankered I didn’t remember anything until I came to at four in the morning walking on a street I didn’t recognise. Which wasn’t difficult considering I didn’t live in Bristol. I’d misplaced my phone and my wallet and had to call an operator to say I was lost and how the hell did I get back to Aberdeen Road?

  Karen looked tired and used up, like a tissue. Nothing would rescue her from the creases and wrinkles worming through her skin. They were soul deep. She was like milk, or meat, on the turn. She must have been reading my mind.

  ‘You look like barbecued shit,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t say it too loud,’ I said. ‘I might end up on the menu.’

  ‘Do you want a hit of whizz?’ she asked. ‘It might be a late one. What do you think?’

  ‘One of us had best keep a clean head, and a foot on the brake. It’s nearly time.’

  She picked up her clay cup then put it back down. Her jaws were clenching like those of a snake trying to swallow something way too big for its mouth. ‘I don’t even fucking like green tea,’ she said.

  ‘You know, when I was a kid living up north, I had a friend who used to go down to London a lot to visit relatives. They didn’t have a phone down there, either that or they didn’t allow him to use it. So he’d call me from a phone box. This is back in the day when you could make a call for two pence. But he didn’t even have that. If you called someone, there would be a second, a split second, where you get through before you hear the tone and you have to feed the coins in. He shouted my name into that gap and put the phone down. And he called again. Shouted his name just in time before the pips went. Then he called again, a dozen times, to give me – piecemeal – the number of the phone box he was calling from. So then I could call him and we’d have our chat. Ingenious, really.’

  She seemed a little disgusted with me. Disgust did wonders for her face, actually; it gave it a lift. ‘Is that story meant to cheer me up? Put me at ease? Because it did fucking neither.’

  We both raised our heads at the strident sounds of the phone ringing. And then she looked at me and her face had changed again. It was haunted, pale. Tears quivered, on the edge of release. It was an expression that stayed with me, long after she had gone and I had learned the terrible truth.

  9

  We hurried across the way where a guy was staring at the phone box as if it were an alien come down to Earth. ‘It’s for her,’ I said to him as he reached out a hand to answer. I picked up the receiver and passed it to Karen. She didn’t say hello. All she said was four words over the course of about twenty seconds:

  ‘Where?’

  [beat]

  ‘When?’

  [beat]

  ‘Why?’

  [beat]

  ‘Okay.’

  And then she was walking west, towards the heart of Soho.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘We’ve been given another location. Another phone box. In Ladbroke Grove.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said, and stopped walking. A woman with a shopping trolley knocked against my thighs, hissed the word ‘spastic’ and marched by, glaring at me. ‘Did he say “Simon Says”?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What is this? A fucking game? Was it Benjie Weston?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Well it didn’t sound much like him.’

  ‘We go to the police,’ I said. ‘Now.’

  ‘I told you, I can’t. The police get involved, I’m finished. I’ll never see Simon again.’

  ‘What the fuck is he playing at?’ I said. ‘What does he stand to gain from sending us halfway across sodding London?’

  ‘Maybe it’s to make sure the police aren’t involved,’ she said. ‘He could be keeping tabs on me.’

  ‘In which case he’s not going to be too happy if he sees me ferrying you around town.’

  ‘He knows I’ve got a driver,’ she said. ‘I told him I’d wrap the car around a tree if it was just me. My nerves are shot. I almost took the thing up on to the kerb just getting here.’

  She was parked in the NCP in Brewer Street. I paid the parking charge and we went to her car.

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘I wish I hadn’t given up my car earlier.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A fucking Mini,’ I said. I was broadsided by how tiny it was. The Minis on the road these days don’t warrant the name. ‘How old is this thing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘S reg. What was that? Seventies? I think I was at primary school when this rolled off the production line. I’ve sat in baths bigger than this.’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘The Jag is being serviced today.’

  We got in and there was a smell of mildew and petrol.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘That stuff looks like rust there. It’s not rust, it’s liver spots.’

  ‘Shut up, Joel. Fucking drive.’

  We got in and I got it going, momentarily puzzled by the presence of a choke, and the rampant, skeletal gear stick. ‘Add water and clothes and this is a washing machine,’ I said. The sound of the engine was like a wasp trapped in a jar.

  ‘We have to be in Ladbroke Grove by nine thirty. Do you think you can manage that?’

  ‘It would be quicker to walk,’ I said. ‘Backwards.’

  ‘Joel.’

  I drove through Paddington and up through Little Venice. Karen fiddled with the radio but would not rest on a station. She moved on before a sentence was finished or a chord completed so it was impossible to tell what was being talked about, or what was being played.

  I pushed that grunting Tonka toy through the traffic and road works. It was more Bean than Bourne. The wheels were too soft and the suspension too hard. I felt every crease in the road and by the time we turned on to Cambridge Gardens I had a headache and arseache and my ankle was pounding from too much heavy-duty clutch dipping.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right road?’ Karen asked, swaying her head this way and that in a bid to see a likely telephone box. I looked too, but the windows were more befitting a doll’s house. Plus, they were permanently foggy, no matter how much cold air or hot air I aimed their way. Well, I say ‘hot air’ but it was no hotter than the burp of a polar bear after it’s been at the chilled contents of an igloo. ‘There it is,’ I said, guessing wildly. It could have been a portly tall guy in a big red coat, but no, it was a telephone kiosk and it was ringing.

  ‘We’re early,’ I complained, and not without some surprise, as I pulled up alongside it.

  Karen was scrabbling at the door handle and trying to unbuckle her seat belt at the same time.

  ‘Relax,’ I said. ‘Wait until nine thirty.’

  ‘But it’s ringing now,’ she said.