Soft (30 page)

Before too long he found himself in an area of two-storey red-brick houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas sprouted from the small front gardens. There was nobody about. A police car hesitated at a junction, and then moved on. Once, when Barker was in his early thirties, he had been stopped and searched on Union Street. They pulled a pair of scissors out of the back pocket of his jeans – his father's scissors, as it happened – and held them up in front of him. ‘I'm a hairdresser,' he said. ‘And I'm Julio Iglesias,' said the policeman. The name meant
nothing to Barker. ‘Julio Iglesias,' the policeman said while his colleague sniggered in the background. ‘He's a famous singer. Spanish. Had sex with three thousand women.' Which meant they didn't believe him, of course. Barker was charged with possession of an offensive weapon, and forced to pay a fine. That Dodds bad luck again. Looking up, he saw a middle-aged woman standing on the pavement. She wore a floral dress, and she was holding a shopping basket made of straw. Her legs were very white. When he passed her, she looked in the opposite direction. The red-brick houses, the small-mindedness – the quiet. He felt as if he'd strayed into the suburbs. He could almost have been back in Plymouth.

At last he stood outside Glade Spencer's house. Red-brick, just like the rest. He'd been expecting something better. He didn't know why that should be, why he should care. Somehow, though, the house seemed tawdry, less than she deserved. He knew that she lived on the first floor and that she shared the flat with a girl called Sally James. The bay window on the first floor was open, he noticed, though the curtains were closed. He wasn't sure how to interpret this. Did it mean that somebody was in? He stared up at the window until his neck ached. In all that time no sound came from inside the room. He wiped the sweat from his forehead; the heat only seemed to add to the silence. Opening the gate, he walked up to the front door. He couldn't see through the panes of frosted glass. Instead, he bent down and looked through the letter-box. It was cool in the house, several degrees cooler than outside. He could see into a narrow hallway – the walls off-white, the carpet a shabby turquoise. On the right there was a door, which was closed. The ground-floor flat. Directly in front of him he could see another door, half-open, and, beyond it, a flight of stairs. They must lead to the flat where Glade Spencer lived – and if the door was open, then presumably, yes, someone was home …

He heard a cough. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a dog
cock its leg against a tree. The man holding the dog's lead was staring at him furtively. Suspiciously. He stared back. After all, there were any number of perfectly valid reasons why he might be peering into a house. Even so, he realised that, to most people passing by, he would look like somebody who was about to commit a crime. Yet there was nowhere to hide, no cover … Then he remembered the man who'd appeared outside his flat a few months back – Will Campbell's father. Suppose he pretended to be trying to trace a friend. It was plausible; it happened all the time. He felt in his pocket, found a biro and an old tube ticket. On the back of the ticket he wrote his brother's name, Gary, and, underneath it, the address of the house directly opposite. He crossed the road. The same privet hedge, the same black plastic dustbins. The same frosted-glass panels in the front door. He rang the bell and waited. Through the glass he watched a figure walk towards him from inside the house. The door opened on a security chain. An old woman squinted at him through the gap.

‘Yes?'

‘Gary in?'

‘Gary?'

‘Yeah.'

‘No one called Gary here.'

Barker looked at the ticket in his hand, then stepped backwards and studied the number on the door. ‘He told me his address over the phone. I wrote it down.' He showed the woman his ticket.

She took it from him, peered down at it. Her hand trembled slightly. Behind her the house seemed to sigh, its breath sour and damp. She shook her head and handed the ticket back. ‘You must've heard it wrong.'

Barker stared out into the silent, sunlit road. Like Will Campbell's father, he seemed disinclined to move.

‘You better try some other numbers,' the woman said.

Strange: she was feeding him lines, a strategy.

He nodded. ‘Sorry to bother you.'

She closed the door.

He watched the shape of the woman shrink and wrinkle in the frosted glass. He could relax now. If the police questioned him, he knew what to say. He would show the officer his tube ticket, claim he was looking for a friend. He could even call on the old woman to vouch for him, if he needed to.

After working as a bouncer for so many years, you'd think he would have been used to standing around. But you didn't need patience when you worked for a club – at least, not that kind of patience; your time was filled. You had to read faces, make predictions. You had to be a clairvoyant of violence, seeing it before it actually began. And when it began you had to put an end to it. Outside a club, there was always something happening, or about to happen. Outside Glade Spencer's house, the reverse was true. He stood on that street for three and a half hours, and they were probably the slowest three and a half hours of his life. Once, a movement in the bay window startled him, a glimpse of something white, but it was only a cat. He knew its name. Giacometti. If there was a cat in the house, he reasoned, then it seemed unlikely Glade Spencer could have gone away. Or, if she had, she wouldn't be away for long. On the strength of the cat's presence he waited for another hour.

The cat stared at him with yellow eyes.

Nothing happened.

At last, he turned and walked off down the road. He had the distinct feeling that Glade would only appear after he had left. He took a deep breath, let it out in stages. It was a lovely evening, a wind blowing gently against his back. Every now and then he saw a cloud glide past the rooftops. A new energy flowed through him now he was moving. On St Mark's Road he saw a taxi go by and caught a glimpse of blonde hair in the window. Was that her? He stood still, watched the taxi's brake-lights flashing as it slowed for a roundabout. It took a
right turn, into Chesterton Road. If it had been carrying Glade Spencer, surely it would have turned left.

At Ladbroke Grove he bought a ticket to London Bridge. The tube journey was long and hypnotic, full of inexplicable delays. Opening his book, Barker read a passage about the war between Clovis, who was a famous Merovingian king, and Alaric, the King of the Goths. This took place in 507 AD. After killing Alaric in battle, Clovis wintered in Bordeaux. The following year he rode to Angoulême, a place he wanted to recapture. Because he had the Lord on his side, the walls of the city collapsed the moment he set eyes on them. Angoulême was his. Barker closed the book. If only things could be that easy. Or perhaps it was simply that he had no one on his side.

It was after nine o'clock by the time he reached his flat. Once through the door, he leaned against the wall, the lights still off, the rooms in darkness. From the far end of the corridor came a pale glow, almost a phosphorescence, light from the city filtering through the window in the kitchen.

Sunday night.

Above the sound of people shouting in the distance, above the ghostly siren on Commercial Road and the high-altitude rumble of a plane, he could hear the voice of Charlton Williams.
You've had a good run, after all.

The next day Barker stood outside Glade Spencer's house for almost five hours. The trees that lined her street had all been pruned – the foliage had been cut away; only stumps and swollen knuckles remained – and he could find no shade. He could feel the sunlight on his face, his neck, his arms. In films, the detective always has a car. He parks opposite the house, smokes endless cigarettes. In the morning he wakes up slumped behind the wheel, unshaven, bleary. Then, just as he's yawning, the front door of the house opens and his quarry conveniently appears.
Films.
It occurred to Barker that he didn't really have a plan. No chloroform. No rope or twine. No gun. He was waiting
until he saw her and when that happened he would know. But he saw nobody. He noticed that someone had closed the bay window and opened the curtains, and the knowledge that such things could change sustained him through the dull, uncomfortable hours. Once, he peered through the letter-box, just for something to do. One door was open, the other closed. As before. When he put his ear to the gap and listened to the inside of the house, he could hear nothing – no radio or TV, no footsteps, no running water. Sometimes he took out his tube ticket and looked at it, sometimes he walked up the street a little way, trying to believe in the fiction he'd invented the previous day, but his heart wasn't in it. He supposed that, by now, he must have aroused suspicion in the neighbourhood. He no longer cared. By three in the afternoon he could stand it no longer. His skin stung, as if it had been lightly brushed with nettles. The outside of his forearms was pink, the inside white, reminding him of a barbecue at Jim's a few years back, everyone too smashed, the sausages half-cooked. He decided to walk over to Portobello Road, which he had heard about, but never seen. After the hours he had spent in silence, on his own, the crowds of people were a surprise to him. Pushing through the crush, he saw stalls piled high with brooches, bathtaps, shoes. Rubbish, really. Junk. Before too long, he'd had enough. He wandered away from the market, into the narrow streets surrounding it. At last he reached Notting Hill Gate. With a huge sense of relief, he walked down a flight of steps into the cool, grimy atmosphere of the tube, following the sign that said District and Circle Line Eastbound.

He stood close to the edge of the platform, the toes of his boots just touching the white line. The next train was due in seven minutes. Looking up, he noticed the panes of reinforced glass in the roof. Beyond the glass there was a tree, its foliage colourless and blurred. Every now and then, the wind pushed the branches down, pinning them against the glass. Yawning, he watched the branches sink down on to the roof, lift away,
sink down again. There was something soothing about it – something familiar too, though he couldn't think what that might be. It had nothing to do with the station itself. He had never been to Notting Hill before.

Then, as he lowered his eyes, his breath caught in his throat. There, standing opposite him on the westbound platform, was the girl he had been looking for. He didn't even have to take out the photograph. The flawless skin, the bright-blonde hair. It was her. She wore an ankle-length black skirt that clung to her hips and a shiny orange shirt, and she was carrying a leather bag. Though he knew her height, she was taller than he had imagined, with longer limbs. His heart bounced against his ribs. What should he do?

Before he could decide, her train slid into the station. Flashes of her through the moving windows, her face in profile as she glanced sideways, along the platform. Sweating, he lifted his eyes to the roof, as if in supplication. The leaves darkening against the glass. The leaves. In that moment he decided to let her go. There was no need to cross the footbridge and follow her on to the westbound train. There was no hurry. After all, he knew where she lived, knew where she worked. He could find her any time he wanted. The document he had received from Lambert was his guarantee. And now a coincidence had brought that document to life. It was a good sign – but it was no more than that. Only someone who was desperate would act on it. As her train pulled out of the station, he saw her hunting through her bag for something, one hand lifting simultaneously to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her slightly protruding right ear.

For a few moments he felt an urge simply to be close to her – to travel on the next train going in the same direction, to cover the same ground. But then, just as abruptly, the urge faded. To people watching him rush from one platform to the other, he would look like someone who had got things wrong. They'd think he was a tourist, a stupid foreigner. No, he would take the train he'd been intending to take all along, the train that
was now due in one minute. As for the coincidence, he had no need of it, no use for it. He could afford to squander it. Far more professional, he thought, to act as if nothing had happened. And besides, wouldn't there be a kind of excitement in taking the eastbound train and feeling the city expand between them as they travelled in completely opposite directions?

The tube slid out of the station, swaying slightly, and entered the darkness of a tunnel. He heard Jill's voice on the phone.
Maybe we could spend Sunday together
… He had met her at a party in Saltash, empty cider bottles lined up along the bottom of the walls. The following week, he had called her, asked her out. She told him she would like to catch the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe. It seemed strange to her, she said, but she had never been there – at least, not since she was a child. They agreed to meet at ten-thirty in the café on Admiral's Hard, a narrow street that doubled as a landing slip, its smooth cobbles running downhill, right into the water.

They ate breakfast in the café – poached eggs, hot buttered toast, mugs of strong tea. He noticed that she had an appetite, and he approved of that. Through the window he could see racks of seaweed on the cobbles, abandoned halfway up the street by the outgoing tide.

‘Are you all right?' she asked, leaning towards him.

He nodded. He had finished work at two-thirty the night before and then he had played a few frames of snooker with Ray Peacock. He hadn't got to bed till four.

‘You're tired.' She looked down. ‘We should have met up later. In the afternoon. I didn't think.'

‘Jill,' he said, and put his hand on hers.

She looked at him across the table, the colour in her eyes seeming to heighten and bleach at the same time, as if, in touching her, he'd had some chemical effect.

He hadn't known her well at that point. He still thought she was one thing when really she was something else entirely.
The first time they saw each other, at the party, she'd had a few drinks. Also, she was a sumptuous woman, with full breasts, wide hips and heavy thighs, which only added to the impression he had formed, that she was bold and confident. How could she not be, he had thought, with a body like that? He couldn't have been more wrong, of course. It had taken him months to realise how shy she was, how many doubts she carried round with her. For example: she could stand outside a clothes shop for twenty minutes before she found the courage to go in – or sometimes, after twenty minutes, she would simply lose her nerve and turn away.