The Happier Dead (13 page)

She nodded.

With no clothes on it was difficult to tell her age, but she had the kind of face which makes a man read unlikely virtues.

“The key’s over there,” she said, pointing with a pink painted toe.

Oates undid one wrist, and got up and walked all the way around the bed to do the other one. She watched him go round. When she was released she lay there for a few seconds with an awful passivity. Then she sat up padded over the floor on her hands and took a cigarette from the backpack. The hand that held the light was untrembling. She should have felt uncomfortable with her nudity, but instead she used it to make Oates feel uncomfortable. Maybe it helped her keep her pride, he thought, not to rush to cover up.

“What’s your name?”

“Casey.”

“The man out there said you brought him here because the place you were going to use was full. Is that right?”

She nodded.

“I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I mean he’s dead right, Mr Egwu?”

“How did you know that?”

“He’s one of my clients. Well, he was. And not mine so much as Hector’s, but he likes to do us together sometimes. Hector said he died.”

“Who’s Hector?”

“He works for my agency.”

“And the new-young bloke next door…”

“Hugo? He’s no pickle. He just pretends he is.”

“I’ve seen his driving licence. It says he’s seventy-five years old.”

“Me too. He showed it to me like he wanted to prove it, and I knew straight away it was a fake, but I went all impressed.” She giggled at the memory. “Guys like him want you to think they’re really rich, so they pretend like they’ve had the Treatment. They talk about all these old movies and music and stuff. But the real pickles never talk about the old stuff. They talk way too much about new stuff and about new music. I prefer the ones who are pretending because they take you to nice restaurants and plays if they like you. One time I even went to the ballet. Have you ever been to the ballet?”

Oates shook his head. She was recovering too fast. The cost of developing a skin that thick was that nothing would get through. Not love, or remorse, or even self-sympathy. It dawned on him that he had not really rescued the poor girl from a crime, so much as interrupted a session. When the man in the bathtub had finished with her, he would no doubt have released her, paid her, maybe a little extra for being so rough, and they would put the next date in the diary. And she would have forgotten the whole thing as fast as she did now. For her own survival she had maimed herself, and he felt sorry that she had been forced to do so.

“The real pickles won’t do that,” she went on, “They say restaurants are for old people. And they always want to take you to raves in Peckham and meet your friends. That’s how you can tell mostly. Plus their bodies smell different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve been with lots of them and they just do. You’re not going to hurt Hugo, are you?”

“No.”

“Oh.” She looked out of the window, and when she looked back some door in her mind had broken open and the years had piled in on top of her. “I don’t mind if you hurt him,” she said, and for the first time she pulled the sheet around her to cover herself.

It was funny, Oates thought, how a world which made the old look young made the young look old. In the horror stories vampires drank the blood of virgins to keep them alive, and the Treatment was the same, but with longer straws. The image of the Great Spa appeared as a vast, swollen bubble filled with those distant drinkers, and a long curly straw protruded and kinked its way through the London sky to lodge in the white neck of the girl in front of him. There were so many, millions upon millions of straws arching over London, reaching under doors and through keyholes. Like a mosquitoe’s proboscis, you never even felt them going in. Straws in Lori, straws in Mike, straws even in little Harry; his family portrait a clutch of St Sebastians martyred to a faith that was not their own. The meek would never inherit the earth, because the rich would never die. The new-young suckled themselves to eternal health in their golden summer.

Hugo Travers-Brom Esq. was lucky he was a faker, as Oates felt an overwhelming urge to kick the crap out of one of the new-young. He pictured Prudence Egwu with his hand on his fucking globe. It made him almost sorry to be the one who had to find his assassin. But find him he would.

“But Prudence Egwu didn’t need to pretend?”

“Mr Egwu wasn’t pickled. He was old, like really old. He had all this baggy skin here and his ears were big.” She couldn’t help but glance at Oates’s own ears when she said it. Her words surprised him, and he thought of the portrait downstairs in the study. The man in that picture looked old, not far off Prudence Egwu’s chronological age. How recently had it been painted?

“When was the last time you saw Mr Egwu?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Ages. Like, three, four weeks ago. Can I go now, I have another client to meet soon.”

Getting the Treatment three weeks before his death? That was more than coincidence. That was hubris.

“Will you do me a favour first?” he asked.

“Sure.”

Oates left the room to let the girl get dressed, and walked downstairs with her. On the hall security monitor he called up the footage from the break-in, and scrolled through to the face of the young man standing on the doorstep.

“Yeah, that’s Hector.”

“Can you tell me where I can find him?”

She shook her head.

“How did he contact you to tell you about Mr Egwu’s death?”

“Helen has a secure message board. We were chatting about another job.”

“No phone number, email, anything?”

“No. Hector’s his work name. We never use our real names. He hangs out sometimes at the skate park on Portobello Road, you know, under the motorway. Or I think I saw him there a couple of times.”

“Do you want to come down to the station? We have a unit and a safe house, no one will know you’re there and you can think about what to do next.”

“Like what?” she said, genuinely interested, not in the notion of going to the safe house but of what this old policeman thought she could do differently.

“Like go to school, or something.”

“No. But you’re nice. If you ever want to see me you can. I have loads of policemen so it’s okay. But you have to go through Helen or I get in trouble, okay? Oh, wait!” Her eyes widened, and she turned and ran back up the stairs. She was gone for a couple of minutes, and he was about to shout up after her when she came back down holding Hugo’s wallet.

“I’m never going to see him again,” she said, “and he owes me like a ton of tips. That’s okay, right?”

Oates stood back from the door and let her go past. She ran by him, stuffing the stolen wallet into her backpack, its pink sides bulging and clinking with their hidden load. She stopped and shucked the pack up onto both shoulders before heading off, her thumbs hooked in the straps. In that leafy street, she could have been another daughter at the private day school on Holland Park, come back home in the afternoon to pick up a forgotten text book. She turned and waved to him just before she passed out of sight. Oates felt himself about to cry. He smashed his fist a couple of times into the wall, and the pain chased that fugitive weakness back out of him.

Flexing his hand, he headed back upstairs. As he reached the first landing he smelled smoke, and heard, for the second time, a muffled screaming from the bedroom. He took the next flight three at a time. Casey had torn one of the pillowcases into strips and balled them up with some crumpled pages torn from an investment magazine on the bedside table. She had stuffed these into the cracks along the underside of the locked bathroom door, along with the lighter itself for the fluid kick. The face of some stern CEO was just crisping as he reached the top of the stairs. The fire-alarm started its high pitched scream as Oates stamped the life from the little conflagration.

In the toilet, Hugo was on the floor. He had levered himself out of the bath in his attempt to reach the flames, but the chain that clasped him to the water pipe had been too short to reach. The handcuffs had cut into his wrists, giving him sister scars to the ones on Casey’s wrists. He was breathing through the sodden bath mat, and Oates opened the window to disperse the smoke.

“She took my wallet.”

“Yeah.”

“She tried to kill me.”

Oates leant down and unlocked the handcuffs. With his hands free Hugo curled into a fleshy ball like a poked anemone. Oates squatted by him on the damp floor.

“If I was you, I would hope that nothing ever happens to that girl. I would hope she invests in a good pension, and lives to a ripe old age, and dies surrounded by grandchildren in a sunny retirement home. Actually I would hope she marries a millionaire and gets the Treatment and lives forever. Because if anything ever does happen to her I’m going to give Helen Girst the notion that it was you. And if she takes that notion there won’t be a place in the world she won’t find you. You’re free to go.”

Oates took his damp coat off the towel rail and went back downstairs. He returned to the study and tossed back the last of the whisky. Before he had time to think, he turned to the security panel, called up the video of himself running up the stairs and Casey running down, and wiped it. Then he shut down the cameras so they wouldn’t record Hugo leaving. He would say he’d done it by accident, scrolling through to last night’s break-in.

As a soldier Oates had learned the necessity, and later the pleasure, of placing oneself in the hands of a higher authority. He had been a wild young man, and he privately thought the army had saved him from self-destruction. All that mattered was obedience to the system, faith in a wisdom greater than your own, and the ability to take the piss out of both. The Army was like a wife back home whilst you drank in the pub with your mates – you’d complain about her, but you knew you’d go to seed without her, and you’d be happy to go home to her, even if she bawled you out when you got back. In the months and years after they came back from the desert, many of Oates’s old comrades had stumbled, and clutched for the institution, and finding it gone had pitched over the precipice into chaos.

Oates had been lucky to find the police when he did. The stark white lines of the justice system bounded him like the edges of a football pitch; within them he could foul, he could cheat, he could win and lose, and when the ninety minutes were up he could jog off the field and be with his family again. For all his rough play, he stayed within the law, or at least the rough consensus on what constituted the law that existed between him and the other officers (and indeed criminals) whom he respected. It was the only thing that allowed him to act as he did, free from the fear of self-reproach.

Letting Hugo go was uncharacteristic. It was not a breaking of the rules of the game, but an action taking place outside of the game entirely, with no reference point beyond its own morality.

The thought made him feel queasy. He wondered whether he should call in the whole incident, put out a warrant for both of them, and dismissed the idea. It would be impossible to explain why he had not arrested them in the first place. If he could not properly articulate the reasons to himself, he was unlikely to be able to do so for John, or the competent solicitor he sensed lodged politely but firmly between the pages of Hugo’s address book.

As he stood on the cold doorstep he felt again the troubling sensation he had had within the spa when the fat PR had made him dress up as an anachronous version of himself, a doubling of self-perception. He thought for one hallucinatory moment that he could hear his own voice talking to him, whispering in his ear about the love of his life, and he realised with relief that he could, and that Lori was calling him.

“L
OVE OF MY
life. Love of my life–”

“Answer.”

“Hello my love. Where are you?” she said.

“I’m just in Notting Hill. Do you need something picking up?”

“Have you heard on the news?”

“No, I’ve just been working. What is it?”

“They say there’s going to be more trouble tonight. The school’s going to close early, can you pick up the boys?”

“Of course. But I’ll have to go back out again. What time can you be home?”

“Don’t leave them alone. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

“Alright. But...”

“Don’t leave them alone.”

“Alright.”

“They can bloody wait for you for a change.”

“I won’t leave them.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“They’re saying on the radio it’s going to be bad again tonight.”

“Don’t worry. They’re always saying that.”

Hugo came downstairs in his sodden clothes, holding his coat in his hands. He pushed past Oates without looking at him and strode off shivering into the cold with his head down. Oates had one last look around upstairs, fished one of Casey’s cigarette butts from the ashtray on the bedside table, and went to retrieve his car.

He had no doubt that Casey was telling the truth when she said she had a lot of policemen on her books. Helen Girst’s agency was one of the criminal institutions which existed with one foot in the law. The situation was tolerated because the Met simply didn’t have the resources to police every crime in the city, and where they couldn’t police they had to trust to self regulation for fear of something worse. The Girst Agency paid tax, didn’t take slaves, didn’t drug its employees to keep them docile, and didn’t allow violence against its girls, unless the violence was consensual and properly compensated. Over time however, tolerance had morphed into something approaching collusion, and Helen Girst had shored up her alliance with judicious freebies. There was no way he could force her to give information on one of her boys, and if he tried he was likely to get his heels nipped by someone higher up the food chain.

He had the feeling that whatever Hector had stolen from Prudence Egwu’s house, it wasn’t likely to be with him for very long. Hector was no criminal, his incompetence on the video had shown as much. He was doing someone’s bidding. Someone who knew that Prudence Egwu was dead an hour at most after the police knew it themselves. Possibly even before. Someone with a knowledge like that could greatly help Oates with his enquiries. Perhaps he could make Helen understand that the boy might need protection as much as Oates needed help.