Behindlings (38 page)
He loved the pain
Oh God he loved it
‘if it hasn’t already bloody started.’
Her face was now so well acquainted with the tiles at the base of the toilet that the shallow dip – the path, the furrow, the
indentation –
between the particular two upon which she’d rested her heavy head had etched a matching ridge into the soft flesh of her cheek. Even her lower lip had a special… a brief and tender little
pucker
in it.
Katherine gently ran her thumb across this fault-line – this rift – as she gazed – red-eyed – at her reflection in the mirror. Her bath was running –
Hot
Steaming
– and the mirror was gradually condensing over. She coughed, clutched at her head, shivered –
That’s no bad thing, either
– and turned away.
In the roar of the water she could just about decipher the softest –
Knocking, was it?
– pounding.
A fault with the plumbing? A kink in the boiler? Her heart racing? Her blood pumping? The early warning signs of a migraine?
She slowly rotated her head on her shoulders – so stiff it made a sound like a pepper grinder – then took off her apricot dress (the burn on her lap made her tut, miserably), her vests, her shift, her bra and dropped them all onto the floor. She stood there in her knickers, pushing a heavy hand through her knotted hair. She rubbed her eyes and suddenly remembered that her essential bath oil –
Six sweet drops
Lavender
– was still sitting on her bedside table, next to her oil-burner.
She staggered to the door, shoved back the bolt and yanked it open; a plume of hot, misty air burst out ahead of her, almost entirely enveloping the person standing there.
Katherine screamed.
Even as she screamed she realised that she wasn’t really the screaming kind. Her voice was too low. She sounded like a drag queen who’d just broken a false nail five minutes before a big show. It made her head hurt, her throat, tensed the muscles in her neck; and valuable seconds were all but throttled inside this vile and piercing clamour.
But –
Aw, heck
– it was too late to take it back.
‘I’m so
sorry,
’ Eileen gasped – pushing herself up hard against the opposite wall, utterly panicked (almost tripping over a broken coffee percolator Katherine had casually stored down there) – ‘but the front door was… and I wanted… I’ve come about… Wesley said…’ She was staring – round-eyed, aghast – at Katherine’s breasts.
Katherine made no effort to cover herself up. She stood tall and puffy-eyed in just her knickers and her scratches.
‘Wesley isn’t here,’ she put her hand to her throat, scowling, ‘but it’s open fucking
house
in this place today, so you just come right in – stroll through my front door – swan about in my hallway – kick my old percolator – gaze at my
tits
like they’re out on display in a tabloid fucking
newspaper.
You do
just
as you like, okay?’
Eileen shifted her stare. Her eyes were almost teary. She was shaking slightly.
‘I came about the… the
bird,
’ she murmured –
Not… Not… Not…
Katherine continued to scowl at her. ‘It’s in the kitchen,’ she pointed – slightly mystified, ‘through there.’
Eileen followed the direction of Katherine’s finger with her dreamy blue eyes –
‘Is it alright if I just…?’
She ducked her head, apologetically.
‘Sure.’ Katherine grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her as Eileen scurried on ahead. She was wearing a pair of tan, stretch-fabric ski-pants, some little brown boots, a caramel-coloured winter coat with a silk scarf tied around her head. The scarf was pink with tiny, beautifully-painted cowrie-shells and whelk-shells and sting-winkles on it.
‘I like your scarf,’ Katherine growled, still finding some difficulty in placing one foot in front of the other.
‘Thank you.’ Eileen smoothed a nervous hand over it as she disappeared into the kitchen.
When Katherine re-entered this room herself, everything seemed very bright to her. She tried to adjust her eyes, blinked a few times. The whole area was still awash in feathers. Wesley’s rucksack sat in the corner. It was very hot – smelled of booze and sweat and cigarettes.
‘So he invited you to dinner?’ Katherine croaked, trying not to see the room the way Eileen was seeing it, but grabbing a broom from behind the door and circling the table, leaning heavily on it. She bent down – almost lost her towel, nearly toppled right over – and picked up the heron’s wings; hanging the one still on its wire over the back of the chair, placing the other onto the seat.
Eileen was looking around her, confusedly. She was staring at the wings, frowning at the feathers.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘where is he?’
She gazed over towards the chinchilla’s cage, almost as though half-expecting to see the wild bird crammed in there.
‘The oven,’ Katherine indicated with her head (winced), ‘it’s been cooking for just over an hour.’
Eileen still didn’t seem to understand, so she pointed towards the bird’s head, still lying – gold-green-eyed, harpoon-beaked – on the table. Wesley’s vicious bone-handled hunting knife lay just beyond it.
Eileen’s scarf fell back from her face. Her mouth dropped open. She put up her hand to try and disguise her astonishment.
‘Oh my God,’ Katherine murmured, ‘how did you scratch…’
And then – hard upon it – ‘Oh
fuck,
my
bath.
’
She careered off, unsteadily, down the corridor.
When she finally got there the water was almost running over. She turned off the tap, reached down for the plug, released it, discovered – with a gurgle of rage and a shudder – that the tap had run cold. The bath was lukewarm.
She let it drain –
Screw the bloody environment
– cursing.
When she returned to the kitchen, pulling on her clothes again –catching her fingers in her clasps –noisily haranguing her ineffectual water-heating system; the librarian, the
chief
librarian: her brown boots, her shell scarf, her ski-pants, her scratches, her look of gently haunted bemusement, had all miraculously evaporated.
Along with –Katherine harrumphed so violently that a single, thin apricot strap fell charmingly from her shoulder –Wesley’s best knife, and that poor, that old, that undeniably beautiful but exceedingly dead heron’s head.
Doc held up his hands to silence the others.
‘Furby’s back,’ he announced (to general consternation), ‘and there’s been an almighty rumpus. Wesley got punched out in a bar by a local man. The girl –Josephine Bean –stepped in and saved him; breaching pretty much every notable Law of Following in the process, God Bless her. Then immediately after, Michael Furby –posing as a doctor –locked Wesley inside a toilet cubicle, gagged him, bound him, and tried to drown him in the pan.’
Doc’s initial words were greeted by a shocked –if appreciative –silence, but by the time he’d finished, derisory snorts and hoots were sounding from all quarters. Ale had been drunk (in prodigious quantities. Even the terrier had partaken –his blood-sugar levels having been soberly calculated, well prior). A game of trumps was still in progress.
‘I’m serious,’ Doc hotly defended his bulletin, ‘the shit’s really hit the fan out there. Wesley smashed Furby into a bathroom mirror –my source tells me that they were in the toilets out the back of the estate agency –gave him thirteen stitches in his forehead, apparently, and now he’s fully intent on pressing charges.’
Hands of cards were placed down onto the table. Shoes had been winning. He placed his hand down last of all.
‘What happened with the girl?’ he asked –he had a special interest in the girl; the nurse. ‘How exactly did she save him?’
At this point Herbie arrived back from the urinal, his white stick tapping firmly into legs and tiles and tables, his free hand still fiddling with his fly.
‘So you finally wound up your little
tête-à-tête
with the journalist?’ he muttered, having recognised the timbre of Doc’s voice from a distance.
‘I did,’ Doc nodded, ‘it’s been absolute bloody chaos out there. Wesley’s over at the Cop Shop. He got soundly thrashed by a local lad. And Furby’s back with a vengeance. This time…’ there was almost a chuckle in Doc’s voice, ‘this time posing as a medical practitioner.’
Herbie’s face remained blank. He found nothing to amuse him in Furby’s antics. Furby was a pest. At best.
‘Did you think to ask your source whether Wesley plans to press charges himself?’ Hooch enquired, a canny expression enveloping his features.
‘Course I did. He said he didn’t think so –and seemed rather surprised at it –which I was very happy with, as answers go.’
‘But Wesley
never
presses…’ Shoes interjected.
‘Exactly,’ Herbie turned on him, ‘that’s how he went about testing the calibre of our informant, you cretin.’
‘Ah.’ Shoes looked down, somewhat regretfully, at his hand again.
‘And so you swallowed all that crap he told you about Richard F and the toilet bowl?’ the blind man persisted.
Doc looked up. Herbie hadn’t been party to the earlier segments of his exposition. This meant… He rapidly mapped out the pub’s geography in his mind –distance between the men’s lavatories and the icy back beer patio where his conversation with The Source had been furtively undertaken (waves splashing against the shingle just a few feet behind them).
Hmmn
It wasn’t inconceivable that Herb’d been eavesdropping. He certainly didn’t trust him (forget what he’d said to Hooch, previously. He could be as full of bluster as the best of them. And if a certain level of disingenuousness was the price he had to pay to maintain his seniority –that peerless, nay legendary combination of involvement and fairness, distance and intimacy –then so be it.
Oh yes. It was all very finely judged. It was all riding on a thread. It was all so… so marginal, so
tenuous.
That was the whole point… that was the very
bedrock
of intelligent Following).
Doc couldn’t successfully shake the suspicion that Herbie had it in mind –had always had it in mind, frankly –to impose some spuriously… well,
crass
sense of… of… justice on the whole exquisitely convoluted Wesley equation. To curtail him. To make him comply in some way. To watch him, to oversee, to take an active pleasure in some sort of humbling. A submission. But Wesley would never submit. He just
couldn’t.
Because that would be the end of him –
The end of everything
(Herb took too much interest –point of fact –in all the money-making crap. The insignificant mechanics of the thing. Way too much interest. Tried to cover it up. Didn’t always succeed. Doc’d seen him interrogating the barstaff about backhanders earlier, under the spurious guise of something more piddling.)
To make Wesley
comply.
Like some kind of hard-faced but upstanding sheriff in one of those wild west books Wesley took such delight in reading.
But why, exactly? And was he outside the game or inside it?
That was the vital thing.
‘It was the sink, I reckon…’ Shoes interrupted, ‘I bet Furby was holding him over a sink full of water when Wes shot his arse back, unexpectedly, straightened up, and lifted Furby –face-first –into the mirror in front of them.’
Shoes rapidly re-enacted this manoeuvre, nearly knocking over his pint glass in the process. Hooch shot out his hand and rescued it, sucking on his teeth in fury.
‘It has to be that way,’ Shoes didn’t appear to notice, ‘nobody in their right mind hangs a mirror above a toilet. Not even an estate agent’d do that.’
‘Was there a gag?’ Hooch asked (keen to quickly dispel this strangely insidious agent/toilet image from his pristine consciousness).
Doc nodded, ‘A Welshman, an Englishman and some fella of dubious nationality, all locked up in this toilet cubicle together…’
A short, confused silence… then Shoes guffawed. Herbie smiled, thinly. Hooch scowled. Doc put up a hand to his hot cheek –
Cracking jokes now, eh?
Only two pints down…
Peter, Paul and Bloody Mary, that infernal booze must be getting to me
‘Ha very
ha,
’ Hooch enunciated crisply.
‘He did say there was tape, actually,’ Doc conceded, ‘brown tape.’
‘That’s classic Furby,’ Shoes purred, ‘that’s him alright’.
‘So he got hit in a pub…’ Hooch had his pad out and his pencil at the ready.
‘A bar. Saks. On the High Street…’
‘But he had a deal with The Smack, didn’t he? Wasn’t this place supposed to be his designated watering hole in Canvey? That’s why we’re all sitting here, after all, forking out wadfuls of cash to cover the astronomically over-inflated beer prices…’
Doc suddenly began talking again, over the top of Hooch’s complaining, ‘About nine o’clock it was. Two punches. Very nasty. Felled him both times, apparently. Wes’d just that second walked in there with the estate agent. The other guy powered in through the door straight after…’
‘
Ouch,
’ Shoes winced, ‘Double
ouch,
in fact.’
‘So what did you trade with the hack, to get all this stuff out of him?’ Herbie interrupted, feeling the table-top and making his way gradually back to his seat.
‘I told him that the local constabulary had visited Katherine Turpin’s at around nineteen-hundred hours this evening. I said I thought Wes was renting a room from her. I told him I thought it was about some of the stuff that went on in Rye over Christmas. Or maybe something to do with the Van Hougstraten prank in Brighton at New Year. All guesswork, to be honest, and stuff I’d’ve given to the website anyway. But he seemed satisfied with it.’