Incinerator (25 page)

“We can’t, I’m afraid. Gabriel Bisham died last night as a result of injuries received when he was sleeping rough.”

“Sleeping rough?” So his mother hadn’t called the cops. I should have known.

“He’d run away from home. Sunday morning he was sleeping in a doorway when someone doused him in petrol and set him alight. He suffered third-degree burns over eighty per cent of his body.”

“Jesus …” I let myself sound shocked and revolted because I was. The kid had needed locking up, not premature cremation.

“Where were you at one a.m. five nights ago?” asked McCoy. “Sunday the twentieth.”

At one in the morning the previous Sunday I’d been on a coach from Victoria to Chelmsford. On my way to strangle Talent Show Tony, as it turned out.

“You’ve asked me about that already. I was upset about Winnie dying. Went for a run.”

“All night?”

“No, like I said, eventually I went back to Delroy’s place and crashed there.”

Delroy would back me up, if the cops ever asked him, and they probably never would.

Vora waded in. “Excuse me, is this a second murder you’re accusing my client of being involved in? On the same evening?”

“We haven’t accused him of anything yet.”

“You do realize that you’ve been questioning Mr. Maguire for six hours straight, without a break?”

“I am aware of that, Mr. Vora.”

“Because we’re getting very close to an abuse of process.”

“We’re grateful for Mr. Maguire’s cooperation,” McCoy said through slightly gritted teeth. “We just have a few more questions for him.”

“Do you have any witnesses or any evidence that my client was involved in this attack on this young chap Bisham? Do you plan to question my client about every murder that took place in London that night?”

“Only the murders of people he was personally acquainted with.”

You’re wasting your own time asking me
about Bisham, I thought. You ought to talk to Leslie, the homeless guy with the face like melted wax, whose lover had burned alive before his eyes, who slept on the streets, praying to God for a chance at revenge. Maybe one night in some dark piss-smelling back alley he discovered his prayers had been answered.

I said nothing, of course. McCoy was being paid to find this shit out, and I wasn’t about to do her job for her.

“It’s fine, Mr. Vora,” I said. “I’m happy to help.” I smiled at McCoy, but she didn’t smile back. She looked like a woman who could smell a whole nest of rats decomposing and she’d pulled up every floorboard in her house and started ripping holes in the ceiling and she still couldn’t find it. She glanced at the clock and shuffled her folders.

“Let’s go back to your dealings with John Sherwood,” she said.

Twelve hours later Vora and I left the police station. The cops hadn’t pressed charges, but McCoy had asked where I was living, and if I had any plans for travel. I understood her meaning—don’t leave town—but I wasn’t
bothered, because I wasn’t planning to go anywhere. I hadn’t killed Sherwood, and they had no hard evidence suggesting I had. Forensics would have told them he was dead before I ever arrived—maybe even before Winnie died.

Vora was less optimistic; he knew prosecutions were brought even when the evidence was flimsy, bent, or non-existent, because it was the job of the police to keep the courts busy. If the judge threw out a case twenty minutes into the trial, the cops could still mark it “job done”—it was no skin off their noses.

But I was past caring whether I was charged or not. I had enough to worry about—like finding a long-term place to live, for a start.

That Sunday morning Nicky and I had left the bodies of Harry and Susan lying in the library and exited the house the same way we had come in. As we walked in silence towards the station I realized Nicky needed to talk about everything she had been through and everything we’d seen and done—all the brutality and betrayal and slaughter. I knew that because I wanted to talk about it, badly, and she was the only one I could ever talk to. But before
I could even work out where to begin she said, “Have you got a passport yet?”

I saw then it was never going to happen, because we had no time, and our wounds would have to heal themselves somehow.

“Nope,” I said. She grimaced. “You’re leaving the country?” I said. “For real this time?”

“We have to. Both of us. Harry was going to make millions for the Turk. You stopped that scam, you killed one of his people, you rescued me.”

“The Turk won’t even know I was there,” I said.

“He’ll find out, somehow. And he’ll take it out on you. Tony and Kemal used to sit in my cell and tell me about him, about some of the things he’s done to people who crossed him. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”

Actually I do, I thought. I saw Sherwood.

“Where would we go?”

“I have family in Brazil. It’s far enough away, we’d be safe there.”

“Brazil? I’m not going to Brazil,” I said.

“Not even with me?” She took my hand, and for the first time she looked at me with clear affection, and even desire. My heart
lurched, because I’d once longed for that. But intense as those feelings were, they had been born out of danger and fear and the violence we’d faced together; how long would they last? Even if we got as far as São Paulo she’d get bored eventually with a big ignorant lug half her age who spoke no Portuguese and whose only skill was hitting people. Then I’d be stranded miles from home with a woman who’d once liked me, and now pitied me, and nothing to look forward to but sunburn.

How Nicky planned to get out of the country was none of my business. She kissed me on the lips, and touched my face, and walked away towards the station, and just for a moment I was ready to shout out her name and run after her. Instead I turned and walked in the other direction, found a phone box and made a call.

Then I headed for Delroy’s house.

Seeing my face at his door Delroy shuffled back to let me in without a word. The flame that used to burn in him was dimmed now and flickering. It was like he was going through the motions of living with no clear idea why, but he seemed happy to see me all
the same, the way a sick man might be happy to hear a bird sing. He offered me cereal for breakfast, but the milk had gone off so I had toast instead. I had to scrape away the spots of blue mould before I buttered it. I must have smelled as bad as the food in his fridge, because he’d suggested I take a bath before I’d even had a chance to ask.

The water was lukewarm, but it got me clean, and while I soaked Delroy found a T-shirt that I’d left behind months earlier. It had been washed and ironed by Winnie, and kept tucked away in the airing cupboard, and it still smelled of the fabric conditioner she liked to use. I sat in the bathroom with it pressed to my face, breathing in that smell of a time full of hope, until I felt my eyes sting and my throat tighten.

Delroy himself was way past weeping. He set me up in the spare room amid the cardboard boxes of junk he and Winnie had accumulated over decades, and next day I visited a few local charity shops and bought some old new clothes with the last of Tony’s wad. The stolen jacket I stuffed into a public recycling bin.

Though Delroy was only speaking in monosyllables I learned of his plan to take Winnie’s ashes back to Jamaica after the funeral.

Early one morning I hefted his suitcase downstairs—from the weight I guessed he wasn’t planning to come back—called him a taxi, checked he had his passport and his ticket, and walked him up the path to his gate. The taxi driver obligingly heaved the suitcase into the trunk while Delroy and I stood there, realizing it was time to say goodbye, and not sure how.

“You be a good boy now, Finn,” growled Delroy at last. “Keep your guard up.” He held out a fist, and I bumped mine against his. I wanted to hug him but knew that wasn’t his thing—it’d make him uncomfortable—so I let him turn away. Then wished, too late, I had hugged him anyway. The taxi driver held open the door while Delroy heaved himself in and arranged his walking stick between his legs. He didn’t turn to look at me or wave as the car drove off; he seemed already to be four thousand miles away, sitting on a porch of a Jamaican shack in the fading light, waiting for Winnie to come and collect him.

* * *

For the time being Delroy’s home was mine, and nobody seemed to object. A few letters came that looked official but Delroy had left no forwarding address so I just let them pile up on the sideboard. Then I realized Winnie would have hated to see her house so cluttered, so I tidied them away. I visited my bank to explain how I’d lost my cards and my identity documents in the fire, and because they were a bank they kept asking me for identity documents anyway, and I had to keep explaining why I didn’t have any until they gave up and let me have access to the few thousand left in my account. If I was careful it would keep me going long enough to reclaim the money Nicky hadn’t stolen from me when she hadn’t done a bunk.

I got in touch with the Law Society, and the original spotty lawyer I’d first spoken to told me my case would very shortly be resolved. The police were satisfied Ms. Hale had fled the country, and that was good enough for the compensation fund. And it was true, of course, now that Nicky really
had
fled. I would get my money back—by dubious means admittedly,
but seeing as the money came from an insurance pot funded by lawyers that wasn’t going to lose me much sleep.

Late one night when I turned off the lights and locked up—Winnie was so present in that house I could hear her sucking her teeth if I even left a mug in the kitchen sink—I remembered Zeto, and wondered if Lovegrove would ever come looking for payback. He’d be a fool if he did. I hadn’t sent the footage of him being pleasured by Zeto to anyone else, but I could have it all over the Net in seconds if I wanted, even if the material was a little rich for YouTube. I hadn’t attached any threats or instructions; I figured Lovegrove could work out for himself what I expected him to do. I was pretty confident I wouldn’t hear of Zeto’s case coming up in court any time soon, or any time at all in fact, and that I’d never see Lovegrove again.

So when the back gate squealed at two in the morning, the instant I awoke I knew it wasn’t him.

The bedsprings groaned as I rolled off the mattress, dropped to the floor and crouched there, motionless, listening. Whoever had
opened the gate was moving up the path towards the back door, and now I could hear them trying the handle. They should have known it would be locked and bolted—it was a friendly estate, but this wasn’t the 1930s. I thought they’d try the windows next, looking for one that was ajar, then maybe smash a pane. Instead I heard a grinding, creaking, splintering noise, like someone was wedging a crowbar into a wooden frame and slowly forcing the door.

I rose, pulled on my jeans, wriggled my feet into my shoes, grabbed my hooded sweatshirt and quickly tugged it on. Close by in one of Delroy’s cardboard boxes lay a long thick statue of a crocodile carved from some dark hardwood, with seashells for eyes. I had noticed it a few days earlier, and wondered if Winnie had been the one with terrible taste or somebody at her church. Grotesque as the carving was I felt glad of its weight in my hand. I’d been sleeping with my bedroom door open—I always did—and now I pulled it wide and stepped out onto the landing. There I paused again and listened some more.

There was someone out front too—Winnie
and Delroy had planted thick scented bushes all along the garden path and I could hear them rustling. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. This wasn’t just some local punk out to fund a fix. For a moment I actually hoped it was a police raid, but then cops usually piled in mob-handed, making all the racket they could, on the basis that if they had to be awake at that time of night so should everyone else. These weren’t cops.

The creaking and splintering continued from the back door, and now from the front door I heard a series of clicks, like the lock was being picked. By this point I was at the top of the stairs. The ground floor was a thick pool of darkness; the street lights couldn’t penetrate the yellowing nets and heavy green drapes of the front window, and the only light around the back of the house came from the rear windows of homes fifty metres away.

The darkness would give me a moment of advantage, if I timed this right. I lifted my hand to the light switch at the top of the stairs and waited. The clicking from the lock coalesced into one loud, definite clunk, and slowly the front door was eased open. From where I
stood I could just see the lower half of the door, which was solid hardwood apart from four glass panes in an arch at the top. I shifted my weight to rest my hand on the switch at the top of the stairs that controlled the hall light. The boards under my feet creaked just a little as a bulky figure stepped into the hall. He raised a hand to the light switch and I screwed up my eyes, so when the hall light flicked on it didn’t dazzle me. I heard him take one step into the hall, then I flicked the hall light off again and ran down the stairs into the darkness.

I recognized the silhouette in an instant—Kemal—but he didn’t know where to look. He’d half turned to reach back for the light switch when I rammed the rock-hard wooden carving into his right kidney. He yelled and arched his back, and I raised the crocodile and brought it down on his skull so hard it snapped in two, but the son of a bitch was still standing. I dropped the broken carving and planted a straight right under Kemal’s ear into the hinge of his jaw. It felt like I’d slammed my fist into a bag of pool balls, but it stunned him and his knees buckled, and when I stamped hard on the nearest one he went down in
my direction like a cement mixer going over a cliff. I stepped back, ready to clamber over him and make a break for it through the front door before he recovered, but when I looked up two more heavies in leather jackets were running down the path. I’d never get through the door before they were on top of me. Cursing, I turned back, hoping I’d find better odds in the kitchen.

I did. Dean was standing in the busted doorway, leering at me. He held up his crowbar in his right hand and flipped the fingers of his left at me, inviting me to have a go. I barely had time to wonder if that was the same crowbar that had opened my scalp in the car park before I accepted his invitation with slightly more enthusiasm than he expected. Maybe the silly prick thought I’d be so intimidated I’d stand there and let him jemmy my head open, but by now I knew I was probably going down, and if that happened I was taking Dean with me.