Incinerator (14 page)

“Are you Reverend Zeto?” Zeto’s brilliant smile dried up and crumbled to dust. He was in his mid-thirties, at a guess, with fine cheekbones and a youthful mop of blond hair. He looked fit, if scrawnier than in his photos—but then getting drunk and nearly killing a score of motorists while failing to kill yourself would motivate anyone to lose a few pounds. I was surprised no one had ever tried to sell “Screw Up Your Life” as a weight-loss regimen—some dieters would try anything.

“Do you want any porridge?” he snapped at me, as if I hadn’t addressed him by name.

“Actually, I was hoping to have a chat with you,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “This food is for people in need, so if you’re not in need you shouldn’t be here.”

“About Nicky. Nicky Hale,” I said.

Zeto hesitated, as if I’d muttered a codeword, then changed his mind. “Whatever it’s about, I can’t help,” he said. “Next!”

“I can wait,” I said. “It’s not a problem. I was a client of hers too. I’m just trying to find out what happened to her.”

“I don’t know what happened to her,” said Zeto. His voice was distinctly lacking in Christian warmth. “I can’t help you, sorry—you can hang around all day if you want. Next!”

The guy behind me didn’t need to be told again. He walked round me, elbowed his way in front and handed his bowl to Zeto, who slopped a big ladle of grey porridge into it and passed it back. “Sugar’s over there,” he said, and pointed. Then he turned and looked straight through me. “Next please!”

You must be the rudest bloody vicar I’ve ever met, I thought, as I went to sit down at one of the long laminated trestle tables. I was hoping maybe Zeto would relent when the crowds eased off, and maybe come and talk to
me, but as the morning wore on he carried on grimly slopping gruel and ignoring my presence. After an hour or so, when the line started to thin, he picked up a rack full of dirty dishes and disappeared into the back room. I kicked myself; I saw now I should have volunteered to help out, instead of marching in and demanding an interview like some arrogant copper. I’d blown it, and Zeto wouldn’t talk to me now if I joined his congregation, served on the altar on Sunday and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on my knees. I stood up and got ready to go: it probably didn’t matter anyway—Zeto might be sour and short-tempered, and lethal behind the wheel, but it was hard to imagine a vicar who volunteered in a soup kitchen sending obscene text messages to Nicky or plotting her disappearance.

But as I turned to the door another man entered and I did a double-take. The new arrival saw me staring and he stared back defiantly, maybe expecting me to look away or gag. He was hard to look at: the left side of his face was a mass of scar tissue and his left eye a sightless white ball twitching under warped and
rigid folds of skin. His woollen hat was pulled down low over his head—I guessed that was to hide his missing left ear and wrecked scalp with its mocking wisps of hair.

Deciding to ignore me, he headed over to the counter for breakfast, and I saw the smile falter on the face of the volunteer with the porridge ladle. Then she forced herself to look him in the eye and grin, and I knew he had seen it too, and I imagined how hard it must be to face that mixture of revulsion and pity every day.

Tray in hand he finally made his way to a seat, and I moved to take the chair opposite. I made sure I faced him full on and held my look to his one sighted eye.

“Excuse me, but is your name Leslie?” I said. “Alan Leslie?”

“What do you want?” Leslie grunted, his mouth full.

“My name’s Finn Maguire. I saw your picture in the paper … I wanted to ask you about what happened.”

“What happened when?” he snorted. Some food fell from the left side of his mouth, through
his stiff lips. Nerve damage, I guessed, and I wondered how often he bit the inside of his cheek and didn’t know until he spat blood.

“You were sleeping rough in a building that burned down,” I said.

“Got burned down,” he corrected me. “It wasn’t spontaneous bloody combustion.”

“Got burned down,” I said. “I’m sorry about your friend Martin.”

Leslie took another forkful of food. I wondered how many times he’d told this story, and hoped it wasn’t often. If finding someone willing to listen to—and look at—him was rare, there was a better chance he’d open up to me.

“He wasn’t my friend,” Leslie muttered.

“Wasn’t he? The media must have got it wrong.”

“He was my lover. We were together.” He stared at me as if daring me to laugh at the idea that this wreck of a face would ever have been attractive to anyone of any sexual orientation.

“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry. It must have been a horrible way to lose someone.”

Leslie shook his head and blinked. His one
good eye watered, and I wondered if he was trying to weep, but couldn’t any more.

“That bastard of a barrister made out we started it,” he said. “On purpose, to keep warm!”

He seemed to realize he was ranting, the same rant he’d ranted a hundred times before, that nobody ever cared about, and he clammed up.

“What did happen?” I said.

Leslie stared at me, wondering if this was a wind-up. “There was a report, a fire brigade report—they said the fire started at the foot of the stairs—why the fuck would we …” His voice trailed off again.

“Did you tell the court that?”

“I wasn’t at the trial. I was still in the burns unit.”

“Bisham went to jail for it, though, didn’t he?”

“Six to ten for arson? It was murder, he should have got life.”

“But if he didn’t know you were in there …”

“The hell he didn’t know—the bloody door was screwed shut.”

“Screwed shut?”

“Yeah. Bisham drove screws through the door into the frame, that night, before he torched the place. I know—I’d used that door earlier—but they never read my statement out in court. Nobody picked up on it, because we’re street people and nobody gives a damn.”

“How did Bisham start the fire? Petrol through the letter box?”

“Anyone could have done that. It started at the bottom of the stairs, about ten feet from the letter box. The prick had keys, he let himself in.”

“Bit sloppy, for an insurance job. No wonder he got caught.”

“It wasn’t an insurance job. He wanted us to burn. Me and Martin both.”

“But why?”

“To frighten any other homeless people who wanted to try it on, is why.” Leslie dropped his fork and stared down at his plate as if his appetite had vanished. When he started talking again his voice was so soft I could barely hear him. “Martin had no enemies. He was the gentlest guy you’d ever … He died in front of me. Fell through the floor. He was still alive when the fire …”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Unless you’re praying for Martin,” said Leslie, “stop using the Lord’s name. He hears you.” I thought he was being ironic, but his voice had hardened again—he was deadly serious.

“Who does?”

“The Lord hears you!” snapped Leslie.

“Oh, right, sorry,” I said. “Are you one of Zeto’s …?”

“What?” Leslie snapped, a bit defensively, I thought.

“Congregation,” I said.

“Oh.” From what I could read of Leslie’s face he looked a bit sheepish. “I go to his church, yeah.”

“What did you think I meant?”

“Forget it.” He picked up his fork again to chase a scrap of scrambled egg round his plate.

“Thanks. For talking to me.”

Leslie shoved his plate away. “What’s it worth?” he said.

I fished out my wallet and opened it. All I had left was a tenner.

Leslie snatched it. “That’ll do nicely,” he said.

For all his God-bothering, I guessed he’d spend any money I gave him on booze or drugs. But with a face like that, he was welcome to it. He needed all the narcotics he could get.

I had planned to go straight home, but when I emerged from the railway station I found myself heading south towards the river instead. Not for the scenery, but because Nicky’s house was that way.

A cop—Zoe’s father, in fact—once told me that when someone was murdered the prime suspect was always the one who reported finding the body. Nicky wasn’t dead, but her husband, Harry Anderson, was the last person to have seen her, and it was time to visit him again, to find out what else he knew. Talking to Nicky’s clients had been getting me nowhere; maybe I could rattle Anderson somehow, get him angry. I could mention his coke habit, I suppose, to imply I knew more about him than he’d like me to. I knew he’d helped to make Nicky miserable—he’d told me himself they’d argued the night she walked out—and I wondered again if it was Anderson who’d beaten
her, and if that had been the final straw. I’d ask him to his face, and hopefully he’d claim that it was loveplay, and that Nicky had liked it rough. It would give me an excuse to show him the same sort of affection.

Running all the way it only took me five minutes to get to Nicky’s house, and when I got there I paused on the other side of the street as if I had a stitch and needed to catch my breath, in case anyone watching thought I was casing the place for a burglary. But there was nobody about except the postman trundling his overloaded trolley towards me, music pumping through his headphones. From his tanned legs I guessed he was one of those posties who wear shorts all year round to show everyone how outdoorsy they are. Nicky’s chocolate-box house looked empty, however—the sleek Beemer was missing from the driveway. I cursed. It was the middle of the day, after all—I should have known Anderson would be at work. It occurred to me that maybe I
could
case the joint … start by knocking on the door, see if I could spot an open window. Then I remembered the intruder system I’d seen during my short and
sour encounter with Anderson, and scratched that idea. As the postie approached, leaned his bike against a gateway two doors down and disappeared up that drive, another approach occurred to me—just as illegal, but much less risky.

I braced my leg against the curb and rubbed my calf as if I was massaging out a cramp, and surreptitiously watched as the postman re-emerged, wheeled his bike up to the gateway next door to Nicky’s house, flicked through the presorted bundles of letters on top of his mailbag, chose one and went to drop it off.

The essence of daylight robbery is timing and decisiveness. There’s an element of performance too—to anyone watching you have to make your actions appear unconscious and unremarkable. In two seconds I was by the postie’s bike, in another half-second I had grabbed the next sheaf of letters from his delivery pile, and one second after that I was jogging down the street with Anderson’s correspondence stuffed up my shirt. Luckily I wasn’t really sweating much. I just hoped that the slim bundle I had snatched actually had
letters for Anderson and not just spam from pizza joints and dodgy cab firms.

I paused by a post box two streets away and checked through the bundle. It took me a minute or two, but I found three letters for Anderson and one for Nicky. I posted the remainder, stuffed the others back up my hoodie and ran on. North of Kew Bridge the traffic was static as usual; it gave me a lovely smug feeling to run past the drivers sitting fuming in their cars like a thousand sardines, each festering slowly in its own tin.

My mobile buzzed noisily on my table. I checked the name that appeared on the screen, thought about it, then hit “answer.”

“Hey, Finn, it’s me, Susie.”

“I know it’s you, your number’s in my contacts.”

“I wondered if you wanted to meet up.”

“When?”

“Now would be good.”

“Thought you couldn’t make it till later this week?”

“This is later this week.”

“I’m kind of busy right now.”

“I could come to you.” Part of me liked that idea, and it was easy to tell which part.

“OK. I’ll be in all evening.”

“Good, because I’m downstairs. Why don’t you have an entryphone?”

When I opened the door she pushed her way in like a copper on a raid, grabbed my hair and pulled my face down to kiss her. Well, I thought, no long awkward pauses wondering if the other night was a one-off misjudgement. As she climbed the stairs ahead of me, my eyes level with her swaying ass, I felt the scratches tingling on my back in anticipation, and as soon as she made it to the top floor she turned and seized my shirt. It was just as well I hadn’t got round to replacing the broken furniture.

An hour later, sweaty, panting and newly bloodied, I lay face down on the rumpled wreck of my bed while she wandered around the room in a shirt of mine that barely covered her finely toned ass.

“What do you do for a living?” I said.

“I coach tennis. It doesn’t pay very well, but
I have some money saved up, from when I used to play professionally.”

“That would account for that very fine ass you have.”

“Thank you. I’m told it’s good, I’ve never seen it myself.”

She noticed the mail lying opened on my table and reached for them with the easy familiarity of someone I’d just slept with.

“You have an AmEx card?” she said. She sounded vaguely surprised. Then she clocked the address on the statement. “This is Harry’s,” she said. She looked shocked, and at the same time thrilled—as if I was a cat burglar who had lifted a diamond tiara from a yacht off Monte Carlo, rather than a West London hoodie who had robbed a postman’s bicycle. “What are you doing with it?”

“Checking him out,” I said. “Did you say he worked for a bank?”

“Hennessey’s—one of those private banks you never hear of unless you’re loaded. Very classy, very exclusive. He’s always dropping hints about how his latest client is a rock star, or a Premiership footballer. Nicky got fed up telling him to be more discreet. I think he just
doesn’t want people to know how boring he really is.”

“He’s not that boring,” I said. “I mean, for a bank manager. He’s not boring enough.”

“You talking about the coke?”

That took me aback. I thought Anderson snorting cocaine would be a big deal, given his position. “It’s practically a rite of passage in his business,” Susie went on. “I mean, all the young fund managers do it. For those guys, not snorting coke is like being a vegan or something.”

“Actually, it’s not the coke,” I said. I clambered out of bed, wrapping a towel round my waist to stop the draughts from the crooked windows getting to my vitals. Picking up the credit card statement I pointed to three transactions I’d underlined. “See those?” I said.