Nobody True (42 page)

An odd thing happened when we tottered there on the brink of the sixty-feet drop to the shiny wet street below. Sydney, with the back of his knees pressed against the stone balustrade, looked directly into my—into Moker’s—eyes. The moment froze, became meaningless as far as real time was concerned in the way such important moments often do.

Just for that ceaseless instant, his pale-grey eyes widened and I thought I saw recognition in them.

Maybe his guilt, with oblivion or hell a breath or two away, caused his mind to superimpose my real face onto one that was largely absent, because I’m sure his mouth and his voice started to shape my name, the fright in his eyes swapped briefly for a question.

“Ji—?” I’m certain he was about to say, but overbalance tore him away from me.

The half-formed query—if I’m correct in judging it so—swelled into a ferocious scream that withered to a self-pitying wail just before he hit the ground.

The soft mulchy—mushy—crunch that came back at me was awful to hear.

44

I swayed there on the phoney narrow balcony, any power I had left finally depleted, and the light drizzle soaking the head and hands of a body I’d borrowed for a while, one I’d never have liked to own full-time. A breeze flapped the lapel of the raincoat I was wearing, a breeze whose evidence I saw but couldn’t feel.

I felt empty, vacant, as bare as the shell I occupied. I thought that whatever memories Moker’s cooling flesh had sustained after his soul’s departure—or whatever chemicals in the brain that governed such things and which took just that little bit longer to expire after the body’s death—were finally spent. This shell, this vessel, this host, had no significance anymore, except to those who would view it later and recoil at its ugliness and injury.

It had no importance to me either. Nor had anything else in this world. Maybe.

I leaned forward, knees against the stone balustrade.

I had no further use for Moker. I wanted out. At least his carcass had helped prevent another murder. Pity Moker, himself, hadn’t earned that small redemption.

It was too cold inside this body now, too vacant. I could almost feel its flesh corrupting around me. I wanted my freedom.

I leaned even further out over the shiny deserted street, knees no longer hard against the balustrade then followed Sydney.

Falling in the dark. Body lazily tumbling over. Descent slow. So slow you’d believe that meeting the ground might not be so inevitable. But it is. Of course it is. It just takes longer than you would ever imagine.

And I’m suddenly afraid, even though I know I can’t be hurt at this journey’s conclusion. I’m already dead, so how can I feel pain? Besides, this isn’t even my body. Maybe it’s the shock I’m afraid of. Or maybe my mind is informing me that when you drop from a great height onto something hard and unyielding there’s going to be a lot of hurt. Probably only for an instant—depends on how far you fall—but, like the drop itself, that instant might last a very long time.

Also, something else awaits me in that moment before journey’s end. Moker’s final memory—and yet his first.

And I’ve been here before, but then I was interrupted by my own distress.

—chaos, images rushing through a freshly created mind—no order, no recognition, until everything slows, resolves itself, becomes calm and a clear recollection—

I understand. This is Moker’s original memory. His birth. I continue to fall, sailing down on my back, arms and legs splayed.

—darkness becoming lighter, redness and too much brightness, unformed shapes moving in front of me, floating, but not how I’ve floated before in the womb, huge rough hands beneath my slimed and bloody body, a separation, a snapping of something, the link that fed mi, the sudden awful feeling of loss, a sadness, my first, then sounds around me, not like the constant thud-up that had always comforted me, that had gone now, was replaced by these harsher noises I don’t like very much, and those blurred moving shapes, bright and white and pink, one looming larger than the others, warm stickiness being wiped from my body, unpleasant sounds, gasps, a sudden rigidity to the arms that hold me, an unhappy emotion that somehow transfers itself to me through that hardened grip, causing me unhappiness, more pink shapes, scarcely defined in my early unfocused vision—hands—reaching out to me—

—passed over to someone else, a wonderful feeling, a sense of comfort and safety, a pleasure that was common and continuous until a short time ago—wonderful to have it back, even though it’s not quite the same, not as secure as before—

—A terrible noise, sudden, high, frightened, a scream—

—and a new scene intrudes on the altering reverie, a flashback from a time that’s yet to come—a woman I know although I haven’t seen her for many, many years, the woman who gave birth to me, standing inside an open front door, a haggard woman whose prematurely wrinkled skin is yellowish, her wiry grey-streaked hair straggly, her clothes unkempt, and she looks at me with horror and contempt and slams the door in my face—my poor, poor face—and I hear her screeching on the other side of the closed door—

—go away!—

—go away!—

—and I’m returning to my birth setting and I’m being handed over to that same woman, younger now, tired but pleased—except she’s looking at me in the same way she would look at me years later when I’d gone searching for her and she had screamed and screamed when she had discovered me on her doorstep, the one she’d birthed all those years ago, the child she had tried to forget, the one she should love as any mother would, as any mother should, as any mother must love her own—but instead she was screeching, screeching—

—go away!—

—go away!—

—and now that same screech, only this is the first time, just after I am born, the screeching terrifying me although I have no conception of why it should—the disturbed sounds around me that I don’t even know are voices because I haven’t experienced life yet, but something in the sounds increasing my anxiety—already I don’t like this new world, already I’m becoming bewildered—frightened—and that screeching is shattering forever the contentment I had known in the womb—

—take it away!—

—take it away!—

—and already I have learned rejection.

I smashed into the ground beside Sydney and even relaxed bones shattered. The back of Moker’s head, which had impacted first, cracked like an egg—like a real egg this time, filled with runny yolk rather than chocolate goodies—and I felt the brain mash, some pieces of its matter scattering across the tarmac. Interior organs jumped from their moorings, most rupturing, others squeezed flat. The lungs that must have gathered air through the irregular funnel-shaped face on the way down before the body flipped over burst like overinflated balloons. But the worst thing was the noise of hitting the ground, that same mulchy-mushy-crunch that Sydney had made, except I heard it from the inside, where it was louder and more scary, and the squashing of substances and the snapping and grinding of bones could be felt (no, there wasn’t any pain involved).

The collision almost jolted me from Moker’s body, but I kind of bounced—or reverberated, to be more accurate—before settling into it once more. I sensed there was nothing left inside, no more memories and no more functioning. Now, in every way, it was an empty shell; and it was time for me to discard it. I sat up and the carcass remained where it was.

Next to me, Sydney’s head was just pulp—unlike Moker, he’d landed face first—and strange yellowish stuff oozed out with the blood. One of his legs stretched out at a comical right angle from his hip and a hand rested against the back of his neck, the palm and clawed fingers curiously turned upwards, his elbow twisted. I think his stomach must have split open, because a big pool of blood was spreading over the rain-soaked street beneath him. It expanded in spurts, as though the heart was still pumping, but it quickly became a steady flow, indicating the last weak dregs of life had finally given in.

I stood up and stepped out of Moker as if I were stepping out of a beached canoe. Yet I couldn’t leave him right then and I’m not sure why. His body was of no more use to me and revenge had been delivered—not that I felt any sense of satisfaction or achievement, by the way, only a feeling of great sadness and completion. Oh, and pity, a deep pity for the unfortunate man who was Alec Moker. I remembered the flashback, the instant memory just before his body struck tarmac, the moment of his birth, a beginning that was so traumatic, so devastating, that it had never been erased from his subconscious, even though it happened when he’d only just been born and such an early event should never have been registered, let alone remembered so many years later. (I wondered if everything that happened to us during our lifetime was neatly stowed away somewhere deep beneath the layers of our mind, never to be lost, never to die, but perhaps recalled at the moment of death. Didn’t happen with me, but then mine wasn’t what you’d call a regular demise.)

I turned as a harsh light came from the other end of the narrow street. A car was approaching at speed, headlights on full beam. Then police sirens, two more cars screeching round from a sidestreet at the other end, racing towards me, the darkness and rain somehow giving their sounds even more urgency. Tyres squealed as all three police vehicles slid to a halt on the street’s slippery surface.

45

A uniformed policeman leapt from his car and ran the few yards to the two broken bodies lying in the street, while on the other side of me the two detectives I knew as Simmons and Coates (the latter Sydney’s ex-brother-in-law no less!) left their Volvo and hurried towards the corpses without quite the same urgency. Other uniformed figures were emerging from the patrol car, a Vauxhall Cavalier, that had stopped behind the Volvo.

“Jesus fuck,” the detective called Coates said in a dismayed whisper as he looked down at the two busted men at his feet. There was no need to take the pulse of either of them to verify they were dead.

The uniformed policeman had made the mistake of taking a small torch from his pocket and shining it on the heads of the two dead men. The light wavered as he suddenly turned away as if to throw up. Simmons gripped the policeman’s wrist and held the torch steady so that he could get a proper look at the corpses.

“That one must be Moker, the lunatic we’re looking for,” he said quietly. “That damage to his face wasn’t caused by it hitting the deck. There’s no blood coming from it for a start and the face is just how Andrea True described it. What about the other one? Oliver Guinane, you reckon?”

“I don’t think so,” Coates’s voice was hesitant, his initial dismay graduating to shock. “Even belly down you can see he hasn’t got Guinane’s curly brown hair. I… I think I know who this is.” He pointed a shaky finger. “See the smashed glasses lying in the blood by his head?”

“So?”

“I think it’s my contact in the agency. Sydney Presswell, company manager and financial director. Used to be my brother-in-law until my sister divorced him a few years ago. I’m sure I recognize that grey-check suit—he wears it a lot. He’s the guy Andrea True said Guinane was going to see tonight.”

Both men, and some of the policemen who were now milling around, peered up at the lights near the top of the building.

“Right,” Simmons said briskly, pointing first at the uniforms, then towards the building’s fifth-floor balcony, lights from the room behind throwing the balustrade into relief. “I want three of you up there right away. That’s obviously where these two took a dive from. See if there’s anyone else around. There should be a man called Oliver Guinane about somewhere. Yes, that’s right, the one we hauled in for questioning about the death of his business partner, James True. For all we know, he might be responsible for this as well.” He nodded at the corpses on the ground. “So go careful just in case. If you find him give us a shout.”

He turned towards the officer who had gagged a few moments ago. “You. Get on to control, tell ‘em we need SOC set up ASAP. Better get the medics in, too. There’s nothing they can do, but we’ll need an ambulance to take the bodies. And listen, I want both ends of the street sealed off for now—we can minimize the area once the essentials have been taken care of. Get moving.”

The uniformed policeman headed for his striped white patrol car, just as a Transit van pulled up behind it. More uniformed men piled out of the police carrier.

Simmons caught the elbow of a policeman close to him and pointed to the Hillman parked outside the agency. “Search that old heap over there, break in if it’s locked. It’s the car we’ve been looking for.”

“Looks to me,” said Coates, whose face was pale in the glare of headlights, “by the position of their bodies, that they might have come down together. Maybe they were having a ruck and it spilled out over the balcony.”

“Yeah, could be. But why would Moker go for Presswell?”

“Guinane must have been the target, but Sydney got in the way, or maybe tried to save his friend, or he could have been the only one in the office. It was no secret that we’d taken Guinane in for questioning about James True’s murder, so maybe Moker thought he was the copycat killer and didn’t like it. Andrea True said Moker arrived at the house shortly after Guinane had left, but maybe Moker got there earlier and listened at a window.”

“Heard Guinane telling his girlfriend where he was going next,” Simmons continued for him, although his tone was dubious.