Dead Money (27 page)

She watched me and we fell into a thick silence again. Whatever I'd said, I hadn't scratched the surface. And then I remembered. The call from the payphone. The tears. I didn't remember what I'd said, but I got the sick, churning feeling that I'd spilled my guts. She was implacable because she already knew everything there was to know and, despite the tremble that wriggled under my skin like the contents of a bait box, I smiled at her. I tried to make it the most pleasant sign-right-here closing smile, but it felt alien on my face and the reaction it got suggested it looked that way too.

"You're beautiful, you know that?"

The colour rose again. "I know what you did."

"I was pissed on the phone, Cath. Can't take that as gospel."

"I know. All you did on the phone was apologise and cry. I'm not talking about that." She pulled out a copy of the
Manchester Evening News
from a couple of days ago and tossed it onto the bed. It was already folded to the page she wanted me to read.

It wasn't Stevie that had alerted the police, it was the dog. Or rather, the dog's smell as it decomposed under that bush. Some twitchy old bitch with trembling nets had seen a man dump something down by the canal with another man. She thought it was fly-tipping – there'd been so
much
of it lately – that she called the council out. And when they got to looking, that was when Stevie decided to bob up to the surface. They thought he was a bunch of old rubbish when he nudged the bank. Got a right shock.

"You hit the dog. You dumped it."

"Good job, too. Or else it looks like they wouldn't have found that body."

"You put that there, too."

I looked at her. Deny, deny, deny.

"You smelled like bleach when you got in that one night. And then there's the smell in the car. I thought it was just me—"

"It was the dog. I told you."

"No, I knew the dog smell. It was something else the second time."

I watched her. She stood rigid. She was frightened of me. I nodded. "Well, I'm sure you think you know—"

"I don't have any proof, Alan. And I'm not going to go looking for any. Whatever you did, you're going to have to live with it. But you're not living with me." She pulled out some paperwork and a pen, tossed them both onto the bed.

"What's this?"

"I need you to sign over the flat so I can put it on the market."

I picked up the pen and tapped the paperwork. "You don't have to do any of this, Cath."

"If you make this difficult, I can make things difficult for you in return. You sign over the flat, I'll sell it and you'll never see me again."

"Please, Cath—"

"Don't. Don't even pretend you're bothered, Alan. I know you're not. You never were. So just sign and I'll be out of your hair."

Spoken like a true salesman. I signed the documents and pushed them back towards her. When she reached in, I grabbed her wrist and held it tight.

"Don't get any fucking ideas," I said.

She looked at me with eyes like ice until I let her go. She could get all the ideas she wanted. She could call the police right now and they could bring me back in on suspicion and I'd be fucked, because I knew a little tug at one of the loose ends would unravel the whole fucking thing. And for the first time since I'd met her, I was frightened of her.

She gathered up the paperwork and tucked it into her bag. Then she nodded at me once and looked at the bed. She looked as if she was thinking about saying something else, but then obviously decided against it. She nodded again and turned to leave.

"Cath."

She didn't stop, didn't look back. I watched her leave, her arse tight and young in the skirt she was wearing and I heard myself breathing through my nose a little too hard. When she was gone, I watched the ward door for a few minutes more before my eyes lost focus and my thoughts turned on themselves and slowed up to a single white light projected against the blank screen of my mind.

Didn't have a job, didn't have a wife. I'd lost everything.

Didn't matter. I still had this paper. There were classified ads for everything. A flat, a job, a wife. It was all possible. Hope sprang eternal. Positive mental attitude. See, that was something that Beale hadn't possessed. And it was something that marked me out as a fucking winner.

I chuckled to myself. It didn't sound right, but it sounded funny so I laughed. And then the laughter stopped making a sound, turning inwards until I shook, tears running down my face. A tickle started deep down in the chest, spreading wider as I tried to stop myself. And then the tearing, the pain that only made it funnier, like stitches in my stomach pulling and then snapping as I grabbed out for something to touch, something to bring me out of these convulsions of laughing and weeping. And as the pain blossomed into full-blown agony, I gasped and coughed and tried to breathe.

And somewhere outside, I could hear a dog barking over and over again.

But it sounded more like me.

***

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