The Company of Fellows (35 page)

“
Back in a
minute,” Tommy screamed in Rosie’s ear. “You OK here?” He was sure
she hadn’t heard, but she certainly looked OK. He slid back along
the gaps against the wall, and emerged eventually back in the
expansive hallway. He felt like Dante led out of Hell as he blinked
in the light. He knew the layout of the house intimately, and
ambled down a long corridor lined with bianca carrara marble, past
the gilded gesso tables and mirrors to the open door second from
the end.

The music in
the room was so quiet Tommy could hear the sound of a cognac being
poured and the clank of a stopper in the decanter. Farlow’s private
study was all the refined understatement lacking in the public
areas of the house. A thin, fine, spearmint coloured velvet carpet,
a vast glass desk and a few van der Rohe chairs. The Bose Wave
sound system was the same one Tommy had in his gym, but he knew
that it never played the kind of music that had made Farlow his
fortune. This is where he gave his ears a rest.

At the moment
it was playing The Bends by Radiohead.

“
Hi, Tommy,
want a drink?” Farlow stood up and shook his hand
cordially.

“
No, no
thanks. Great sound.”

“
Thanks. Good
to see you. Anything I can do?”

“
No, I think
I’m feeling my age, needed to sit down.”

Farlow smiled.
“Trouble keeping up with your new girlfriend? She’s
beautiful.”

“
Yeah, she is,
and no, I’m not having trouble keeping up with her. It’s the rest
of my life I can’t keep up with.”

“
Well, sit
away.”

“
Thanks.”
Tommy felt his eyes beginning to droop as he sat down and he felt
himself fighting them. Radiohead drifted in and out of the
background.
Fake Plastic
Trees
.

It was a
noisy night in London, no rain to dampen the shouting and laughter.
He’d handed in his thesis two days previously and adrenalin was
pumping, keeping him awake, making every nerve end vital. He could
feel lust creeping under his skin like a rabid hunger, the aching
need snaking him across London too directionless to know how to
diffuse it. In the flashing neon of Soho, theatregoers laughing
their way home, friends staggering from pub to pub, coke-fuelled
media types in search of coffee to send them even higher. Foreign
businessmen in groups looking for a good time, teenagers not sure
what they were looking for. Finding himself climbing unlit stairs,
feeling things scraping on his shoes and not wanting to know what
they were. Handing over £30 to a woman sitting with a book of
Telegraph crosswords who waved him through, and sitting on the
corner of a half-lit bed. Thinking he was alone until he saw the
lifeless figure sitting next to him, no effort to hide the drained
white track-marked arms, just a dirty vest she pulled off
mechanically. A body that may have been a woman’s but was too thin
to tell. Hollow haunted eyes staring from a lank red fringe, hands
too weak to coordinate fumbling with his clothes. “Fuck me.” A
thick Eastern European accent with no understanding of the words it
was saying. “That’s it, fuck me.” Then a blank, nothing, it can’t
have been more than a few minutes – similar voices outside, the
same heated laughter and excited rut. Picking clothes up off the
floor, a body motionless beside him, the same lifeless eyes. No,
even the darkness had gone out. Looking down. A naked body that may
have been a woman’s but was too thin to tell. Arms, a belt wrapped
around one arm, just above a needle hanging limply. Tommy pulling
his clothes on and flying down the stairs three at a time, crashing
his shoulder into someone he hadn’t seen at the bottom of the
stairs that he nearly went flying. Looking round to shout what he
thought at whoever it was, but they were gone. Regaining his
balance and running down Brewer Street, down towards and along
Oxford Street finally pulling up on the Tottenham Court Road and
throwing up in a doorway, all he could see the hollow eyes, the
hauntedness gone, staring up from under the lank red
hair.

A life that
seemed as though it came from somebody else’s past. Only it
didn’t.

Becky’s red
hair with its roots beginning to show, dark eyes looking up for
reassurance, for something to hold onto.
“Becky,” He murmured under his breath, “I won’t let you down,
Becky.”

“
Hey,
Tommy!”

Tommy opened
his eyes. Farlow was standing over him. “Hey, what shit’ve you
taken, you look fucking awful.”

Tommy was
sweating and shivering, tears beginning to form in the corners of
his eyes. He wanted to curl up inside himself in a place where
no-one would find him, but he couldn’t. It was the first time he
had remembered anything from the weeks before his breakdown. Is
this like revising when you’re drunk, he wondered? The only way to
remember is to get drunk again. Does remembering mean he was on the
way to another breakdown? He didn’t care. He felt sick and dirty
and afraid.

“
Tommy!”

“
Eh? No, no
I’m fine. Thank you. I’ve just been working too hard.”

He felt
Farlow’s hands on his face, saw him looking at his eyes. He seemed
happy that Tommy’s pupils didn’t show the effects of anything worse
than stress. “You want me to get Simon to take you home
now?”

“
No, thank
you. I’d better get back to Rosie.”

“
Rosie? Then
who’s Becky?”

“
Becky?”

“
You called
out Becky.”

“
It’s a long
story.”
One to save for another
time.

____

54

Rosie was
exactly where she had been, still dancing. The whole sleep and
dream must have been over in little more than a minute. Tommy
needed to calm himself as best he could before he went back to her.
He knew that after tonight he mustn’t see her again until it was
all over. The dirt from a world he had entered ten years ago was
seeping out of his pores, clinging beneath his clothes. It was a
world so far from everything else he knew that he couldn’t imagine
how he got there. Except that he had been sick; sick with something
that he had been terrified of ever since. Something that made him
do things he couldn’t understand or explain, even at the time.
Things that made him realise how much he loved the life he had now,
how much he loved what he had, how much he loved Rosie, and how
fragile his new life was, how easily this stupid thing in his head
could take it away.

Had he watched
the girl die, he wondered as he watched Rosie, so full of life? Was
that another secret his mind would let him in on when he wasn’t
expecting it? Or had he been so fuelled with by his own lust that
everything else had passed him by? He thought of her nameless eyes
and wondered if anyone had turned up to her funeral, or whether
they’d been too busy, like he’d been for Shaw. The girl had spent
her whole life being used, and it made him sick to think that he
was one of the ones who used her. No-one had even noticed when
she’d died. Like Carol. Like Becky could so easily be.

As he realised
how delicate his life was he saw the effort it had taken to
construct it, to close it off completely from a past that held
nothing for him but shame and fear and guilt. And he realised just
how thin his defences were that still, just, kept that past at bay.
He knew, somewhere buried inside him, that they had been damaged
beyond repair. It was as though he was on the
80
^th
floor of one of the Twin Towers. The clock was ticking and he
had to run for the stairs and hope.
You
have to make it
, he told himself.
You have to make it for Becky.

He put his
arms around Rosie from behind. For a moment the clean smell of her
perfume washed everything away. She turned to him and kissed him
forcefully, pushing him against the wall, pinning his hands against
black velvet. He could feel her lips on his neck, on the lobe of
his ear. “Thank you, Tommy,” she whispered. Now take me
home.”

He lay in
Rosie’s bed listening to the early morning traffic outside on the
Banbury Road. His breathing was calm. He didn’t know how much
longer he could hold on, but for now he was at least functioning.
And he knew that he was close to an answer. That brought its own
problems of course. Would finding the killer really close the door
in his life he had nudged ajar? He knew he was being hopelessly
naïve even to entertain the thought. And there were other
questions, questions about the people he had just met, people whose
lives had become part of his own without him realising it. What
would happen to Becky and Haydn when they found the truth? What
would Rosie think of him? Would he have to close the door to them
as well and start another life from scratch?

FRIDAY
SEPTEMBER 14, 2007

____

55

Tommy couldn’t
remember the last time he needed a bath as badly as he did now. He
sank into the deep water, breaking the surface of the patchouli
oil, and he felt his whole body coming back to life.

Where would
you go if you wanted to have a spoon sculpted from ice? Maybe there
would be a receipt or an invoice lying around the Professor’s
house. It wasn’t something he’d been looking for before. It was
probably easier to start by asking around. If he asked the right
person the reaction would say all he needed to hear. Who better to
start with than Clarissa, he thought, trained in the fancy fineries
of patisserie? Hedley had said she still worked in the trade.
Exactly what kind of work did she do? He wondered whether it
included intricate little mouldings.

The clean
linen shirt felt wonderful against his skin, and he enjoyed its
coolness before heading back out into the pollution. Even in the
early morning blue little clouds were beginning to bubble and break
up the blue of the sky, working their way towards the sun. The
summer weather would break soon, and wash the particulates away, at
least for a while.

He was already
in Bane’s Avenue, halfway to St Saviour’s and Clarissa. But before
he saw her there was someone else he had to see. Tommy knew the
connection between Carol’s fate and Ellison. Maybe the killer had
figured it out as well. He half hoped he’d rap on the door and push
it open to find a bloodbath. Then he thought of Jane and her
children, saw them kneeling in his blood crying with
incomprehension.

He didn’t want
to think what Ellison had done to them over the years. Chances
were, or at least he hoped they were, they had no idea of any of
that part of his life, no idea until he was dead and everything
came out, and another three lives were ruined. Then there would be
two more sets of children’s eyes looking anywhere for help to
understand what had happened, and a wife who would have to come to
terms with the truth about the man she’d shared a bed with for over
half her life. Three more lives that may or may not have enough
time left to be rebuilt. That was why he had to stop Ellison
becoming another victim.

Tommy pounded
on the door. There was no time to work out what to say. He had to
trust his judgment. That wasn’t as easy as this time last week, he
thought.

Ellison’s
sneering faced appeared around the door. “Tommy West.”

That was a
relief. He couldn’t face Jane or the children. Better they remain
anonymous for the moment. He could do without three more sets of
eyes haunting his dreams. He was sure there would be photos on
Ellison’s desk, part of the conceit of normality. Fortunately it
was too far away from the smoke-stuffed sofa for him to see the
faces in the frames. “Good morning.”

“
Well,” said
the Professor. “We hear nothing for ten years and then you keep
turning up like a bad penny. How very interesting.”

“
Do you mind
if I have a word, Professor?”

“
Just the one?
I’m sure you could manage that at the door, but if you want a
conversation, you’d better come in.”

Tommy thought
he’d take a pop at him if he made any more bad jokes with that
self-congratulatory smile. He could only bottle up his reactions so
far before the cork gave.

“
Will you have
tea?” he asked, pointing Tommy to the scruffy sofa in his study.
“It’s not tea time but it’s always time for tea, eh? I can get my
wife to bring us some.”

“
No, thank
you.” Perhaps the endless joking’s a nervous thing, Tommy thought,
in which case it was a sign he was onto something.

“
So, what do
you want today?”

“
I was in
Spain on Wednesday,” said Tommy.

“
That’s
nice.”

“
Jerez de la
Frontera.”

“
Quite a
beautiful town.” Ellison smiled. “Actually, I think I’m going to
have some tea anyway.”

Great. Tommy
wondered whether to excuse himself to the bathroom. No, just keep
hold of the breeze in his head, blowing jasmine gently against his
face. They were talking about Spain, that was good. About where
Shaw had been in Spain; with Ellison. That wasn’t good. Angel’s
jasmine terrace in Seville. That was very good.