Incinerator (19 page)

“Delroy, hey.”

He looked up at me, and tried to form a smile, but it was too much effort. The paralysed left side of his face looked like someone had taken a cheesegrater to it. He said nothing, and I didn’t ask how Winnie was doing because it would have been a stupid question. I looked around for another chair and dragged it over, its rubber feet squealing loudly in protest until I lifted it the rest of the way.

“It was an accident,” Delroy mumbled at last. We’d been sitting there five minutes, or maybe ten, watching Winnie doing nothing,
listening to the life support machines hiss and click. “I was walking her to the bus stop. On my way to the club where I do my therapy. We heard the car behind us but thought nothing of it until we realized it was right on top of us.” He shook his head. “Driver had mounted the pavement—must have been tuning his radio or God knows.”

“Did he stop?” I said.

Delroy shook his greying head, and rubbed his face with his uninjured hand like he was trying to wash the horror away.

“Did you get a look at the car, or the driver? Did anyone?”

Delroy shook his head again and stared at the floor.

A hit and run? What sort of a rat would …? A dark thought seeped into my mind like some foul fluid.

“Delroy? You’re sure it was an accident?”

He winced and sank his face into his hands. How the hell would he know, I thought, if the car came from behind, and didn’t stop?

All afternoon the machines hissed and clicked and every so often beeped, and nurses would materialize to check Winnie’s charts
and change the drip bags. They brought us cups of tea that sat and went cold, and murmured to each other outside the curtains in medical-speak about volumes and liver functions. Time had slowed to a crawl. There was a window nearby but the lower half was frosted and the upper half showed a sky so overcast and grey it was impossible to tell where the sun was or what hour it might be. My phone had finally died, but there was nobody for me to call anyway; the only people who mattered were here with me at this moment. Delroy and Winnie had relatives in Birmingham and more in Jamaica, I knew, but when I asked Delroy if I should contact them, or a member of Winnie’s congregation, he just shook his head, as if he couldn’t cope with anyone else’s presence right now.

Eventually I needed a piss, and went to find a loo; the first one I found had a sign that read “Staff Only” but no members of staff were around, and I didn’t particularly want to wander through the hospital in search of an officially permitted peeing place. I pissed, washed my hands and shook the water off, and for good measure stopped by one of the
antibacterial gel pumps that were dotted around the ward and squirted a splash of that onto my hands. As the alcohol in the gel evaporated, chilling my skin, I heard two nurses at the nearby desk talking in a language I could understand for a change.

“Are those policemen coming back?”

“Don’t think so. They said he had given them enough to go on for now, that they needed to find more witnesses.”

“What did this guy say?”

“The husband?”

“No, the driver, when he stopped he said something, apparently.”

“I thought it was a hit and run?”

There was a sudden harsh, short buzz from under the counter.

“That’s Ling, in five—BP’s dropping—”

They hurried from their workstation, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking urgently, away from where I stood listening against the cool corridor wall.

“Delroy?”

“Do you think she needs a drink? She must
be thirsty. She’s been here so long, not even a glass of water …”

I glanced at the fluids oozing down the pipes, keeping Winnie hydrated. Delroy understood what they were for as well as I did; he just felt helpless, and wanted to do something.

“No, Del, I think she’s fine.”

“She’s so still … I wish she’d wake up, even if just to nag me, you know?”

“Delroy … what did the driver say to you? When he stopped?”

“He never stopped. It was an accident.”

“I know he stopped. What did he say to you, Del? Why won’t you tell me?”

For the first time in ages he looked at me. His eyes were bloodshot and weary but full of fight.

“I know you, Crusher. You’ll think you have to set things right, go picking fights out of your league. Winnie wouldn’t want that. Violence begets violence, she’d say.”

“Yeah, and you used to say, they come at you hard, come back harder.”

“In the ring, Finn, not in the real world, for God’s sake—”

“What did he say, Del? The guy who ran you and Winnie down?”

Del was about to answer when one of the machines—I wasn’t sure which—started to beep, and then another, overlapping in a deafening, tangled electronic racket, and Winnie opened her eyes.

I knew immediately that this parting wasn’t going to be peaceful or poignant. Winnie was terrified. She seemed to be choking, and her eyes bulged in terror. She didn’t know where she was or who was with her or what was happening. Delroy squeezed her hand and tried to talk to her, but she stared at him in confusion and fear like she was sinking into a mire of chaos and darkness and pain.

I stood there, useless and helpless, until I was pushed aside by one nurse, then another, and now an army of nurses in scrubs descended, shouting statistics and readings at each other, and one tiny Chinese nurse ushered us all the way out of the room, murmuring reassurance, while the curtains closed around Winnie. The nurse pressed Delroy’s crutch into his hand and hurried back in, shutting the door behind her. As I watched through the wired glass the
frantic activity around Winnie’s bed seemed to slacken, and I saw the lead nurse glance at her watch. I caught her grim look to a colleague and the tiny shake of her head, and saw them slipping on that emotional armour medics use when they’ve fought twenty rounds and lost.

Delroy wasn’t watching any of this. He had slumped into a chair and was staring into space as if he no longer understood what he was on this earth for or what he was meant to do. But I knew what I was there for, and what I was going to do.

“What did he say to you, Delroy?”

“Finn, let it go. You’ll do something stupid, wind up back in prison, and everything you’ve achieved, everything your father gave you, all that will be for nothing.”

“It was Sherwood, wasn’t it? Just tell me.”

“I didn’t hear him, I’d banged my head, I was looking around for Winnie—”

“Del, for Christ’s sake—!”

Delroy’s shoulders drooped. “ ‘Mr. Sherwood says hello,’ ” he whispered.

The door of Winnie’s room reopened gently and a nurse emerged—a doctor, I realized, when I saw the DR on her name badge. She
was twenty-something, ash-blonde and beautiful, with skin as smooth and perfect as a doll’s, but her face was set in a solemn professional mask.

“Mr. Llewellyn? I’m very sorry.”

Night had fallen by the time I left the hospital. Saturday night, I remembered, when I saw and heard drunks in the distance hooting at each other as they staggered from one pub to the next.

Delroy had wanted to stay with Winnie until the undertaker came, but I couldn’t do that. He made me promise to go home, and I said I would, but I didn’t tell him that I had no home any more, so I couldn’t go home if I’d wanted to, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t suppose Sherwood would be in his office at this time of night, but I’d wait for him until he turned up, however long that took. His office was only forty minutes away, if I ran at my usual pace.

I made it in just over thirty.

I’d already decided that if Sherwood wasn’t in, I wouldn’t wait—I’d break in somehow and find his home address and hunt him down. If I had time and no alarms went off, I’d shit on his desk too, before I torched the place. I was going to find that prick, and no matter how many Neanderthal bouncers got in the way I was going to hurt him, permanently. For the rest of his miserable life he’d wake up every morning and see in the mirror what I’d done to him and wish he’d picked another line of work.

The alley beside the old snooker hall was empty and stank of cat piss and cheap cigars. Sherwood’s car was parked up in its private parking space, so maybe he was around after all, but I wasn’t going to lurk in the shadows
and wait for him to come out. I walked up to the alley to his office and raised my foot and kicked one door, hard. It burst open like it hadn’t been properly locked, banged off the wall and bounced idly back. The stairs beyond stretched up towards Sherwood’s moodily lit landing, but no one came down to challenge me. Just as well for them. From above I could hear Frank Sinatra belting out some old song about moonlight and romance, so loudly no one upstairs could have heard me. I stepped inside, let the door swing shut behind me and pounded up the stairs, two at a time.

The landing was deserted and the door at the end was ajar. That’s where the music was coming from, and I paused to listen, to get an idea of how many people I might have to deal with inside. My eye fell on that classical painting of a hay cart fording a stream I had noticed on my first visit, and I suddenly understood why it looked so out of place. It had come from Nicky’s house—it was part of that set hanging in her library. Anderson must have borrowed from Sherwood too, and fallen behind on his repayments, and Dean and his boyfriends had
confiscated it the same way they had taken Delroy’s telly.

I couldn’t hear any conversation or movement beyond Sherwood’s door. Was there even anyone there? I felt sure there was, or that someone had only just left—but why leave the place open like this? Now I noticed a smell too, slightly foul, like a toilet that hadn’t been flushed, mingled with something else, something stale and salty. My cold fury started to subside, and I found myself wondering if Delroy had been right, and I had rushed into something I couldn’t handle. Hell with that, I thought—I’m here now, let’s dance. But I tugged my sleeve up over my hand before I reached forward and pushed the office door fully open.

Sean the Wardrobe was the first thing I saw, lying face down on the floor, his head towards me, one arm trapped beneath him and the other flailed out sideways with its palm upwards. He had been clutching his belly when he fell, like he’d been shot or stabbed. Now he was staring at the carpet with a sightless bloodshot eye and his nose was squashed flat
into the pile like someone had stamped on the back of his head. No sign of Dean though, not yet.

On Sherwood’s big shiny desk a briefcase perched at an angle that suggested Sean had been about to pick it up before being rudely interrupted. It was shut, but one catch had been flipped open. I reached for the other—it would take only a squeeze of my thumb to pop it, so I could lift the lid and see what was inside. But I held back. Something told me it was full of money, and I had stopped believing in Santa Claus a long time ago. The cheesy swing music came to a roaring crescendo of brass and then stopped, and in the brief pause before the next track started I heard dripping, from the cupboard or toilet or wherever that door behind Sherwood’s desk led to. Then the next Sinatra track kicked in, all jaunty and cheerful: love was here to stay, apparently. As I crept forward I noticed the odour getting thicker—a smell of shit mixed with mouldy vegetables, and under that an odour that reminded me of that shop in the high street my mum used to take me into sometimes on the way home from school … the butcher’s shop.

The music was coming from a CD player on a sleek smoked-glass unit near the door. By now Frank was making my ears hurt so I hit the power switch with my elbow. Silence fell, broken only by that faint dripping, and the buzz of a bluebottle that flew past my ear and through the door ahead of me like it was hurrying to a party. I shoved the door open with my toe and looked in.

It was a bathroom, but a huge one like a showroom display, with a shower cubicle filling one corner and beyond it a glass basin mounted on a plinth under a mirror surrounded by LEDs. Beyond the basin was the loo, and on it sat Sherwood in one of his designer suits, tilted forward on the seat lid, staring down with a look of surprise. Someone had tied him there, wrists behind his back, with a thin wire that looped up and round his throat. Then they’d slit his belly open, so his guts spilled into his lap and overflowed down the legs of his blood-sodden trousers.

I hadn’t eaten all day and it was just as well because I would have spewed everywhere. As it was I bit back the bile in my gullet and swallowed it. Sherwood had been alive when
this had been done to him. This was way beyond revenge—this was delight in pain, joy in horror. It was how traitors had been executed in medieval times. Whoever did this was preserving an ancient art form—disembowelling as public entertainment.

Through a daze of shock I heard electronic whooping in the distance: an emergency vehicle on its way to some drunken pile-up. My mind ran backwards and forwards like a rat in a maze with no exit—who had done this to Sherwood? A debtor, driven too far? No, Sherwood had always picked on the weak and helpless—whoever did this wasn’t one of his clients. A rival loan shark? That cop, Lovegrove—but did he even know Sherwood? The hit-and-run driver …? No, that guy had been sent by Sherwood; he told Delroy as much.

Except … Sherwood never signed the bricks his people flung through windows. He was never that obvious.

The siren was getting closer. Now there were two of them—three. I could see now that someone had set out to kill or maim Delroy and Winnie, and point the finger at Sherwood.
They must have hoped I’d get to hear about it and come galloping after Sherwood like a rabid Rottweiler, and that’s exactly what had happened. I’d been played. Sherwood had been tortured to death, and a suspect with an obvious motive and an arm-long history of violence was standing over his corpse, too stunned to run.

Voices from below in the alley, lowered and urgent. Car doors slamming and a burst of radio chatter, muted too late. The police were right outside—I had to move. I backed out of the bathroom, suddenly aware I might have trodden in Sherwood’s gore and be leaving a trail of bloody footprints. But no, nothing visible. Where were the exits? Sherwood’s punters would have been angry, desperate people with little to lose, and there must have been times when he’d needed another way out. There were no windows as such, apart from a domed skylight set into the sloping roof, but that was too high to reach. Sherwood wouldn’t have relied on it. There was another door in a recess beyond the loo entrance that looked like a stationery cupboard. I didn’t know if I’d left
any prints or DNA on the way in, but I’d sure as hell leave some going out, unless …