The Slaughter Man (26 page)

Han Solo was on the floor of the hallway. I picked him up and slipped him into the pocket of my leather jacket.

Then I stepped out into Fitzroy Square, turning up my collar against the black and bitter cold.

‘I know why Mary Wood was seeing you,’ I told Dr Joe. ‘And I know what happened in that family. I don’t mean the Wood family. I mean the Gatlings.’

We were in a bookshop in Notting Hill. It was after closing time but the place was full of happy, bright-faced people drinking wine and waiting to hear Dr Joe talk about a book he had written. We had stepped away from the crowds and into a quiet corridor of books. Intelligent chatter drifted down to us. People were happy that he was there.

‘Max,’ he said quietly. ‘Mary was there for the same reason as all my other clients. She was trying to learn how to be alive in this world.’

‘I know she was abused,’ I said. ‘When she was a girl.’ I thought of the white band of scar tissue around Charlotte’s left wrist. ‘And I know that’s why it was hard for her to be alive in this world.’

I saw by his face that it was true.

‘Ah, Dr Joe!’ I said. ‘You should have told us.’

‘I would have told you if it was relevant to your investigation,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t. The man who did it died years ago.’ He hesitated. ‘Mary’s coach. Her skiing instructor.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘She lied to you. About that, at least. It’s a lot closer to home. The same old story, Dr Joe. The abuse came from within her family.’

I saw the doubt on his face.

‘Why did she stop seeing you?’ I said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Because there was something else she needed to do. To make it bearable. I think Mary had decided it was time to stop talking to you and start talking to the law. She was going to tell the police that she had been abused. I think she was ready. She was ready to tell the world. But sometimes it takes years, doesn’t it? To find the words. To find the words to say that you’ve been abused. Sometimes it takes forever.’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Joe. ‘And sometimes it takes even longer. How do you know about this?’

‘Because it wasn’t just Mary who was abused. It was both girls. Charlotte, too. After their mother killed herself, they were both abused by the old man. By their father. Victor Gatling.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re wrong, Max. Mary loved her father.’

I banged on the door of Nils Gatling’s suite at the Langham, looking at his DO NOT DISTURB sign.

A woman’s voice came from inside.

‘Leave it outside!’

I kept knocking.

Zina opened the door. The girl who had held Curtis Gane in his hospital bed.

We stared at each other, both of us surprised to see the other. What was I expecting? That she was going to hold Curtis Gane forever? Perhaps that is exactly the lie that you buy.

I followed her into a hotel suite that felt more like a house.

Zina was drunk. Sloppy drunk. And something else. Her words slurring into one another when she told me he was in the other room, her robe falling open.

She had some kind of downer in her veins. And then I saw the bubble-wrap package of pills on the dresser. Little white pills with a cross cut into the top.

Rohypnol.

Nils Gatling came into the room in a dressing gown.

‘Let’s talk about your sister,’ I said.

He paused, sizing me up. He wasn’t frightened. It should have been a warning but I ignored it.

‘I have two sisters,’ he said. ‘Which one would you like to talk about, Detective?’

‘Let’s talk about the one who was murdered. I know why Mary was in therapy. She was abused as a child. And she was going to tell the world.’

He looked at me for a moment.

And then he laughed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You only
think
you’ve discovered the reason she was in therapy. You see, the reason my sister needed help is because she was disturbed and delusional. There were suicide attempts. A history of self-harming.’

He saw the doubt on my face and smiled.

‘God knows my brother-in-law was a useless little maggot – but I didn’t envy him his married life. Mary was deeply troubled. If Peter Nawkins had not killed her then she would probably have done it herself. Three things run in my family – blond hair, blue eyes and paranoid-schizophrenia.’ He sighed. ‘It’s the cross we bear.’

I shook my head.

‘I think that if she hadn’t been killed by Nawkins, she wouldn’t have killed herself. What she would have done is
talked
. She would have gone to the police. Therapy did what it could. Dr Joe did what he could. But she needed closure.’

‘Dreadful word,’ he said.

‘And maybe it’s the wrong word,’ I said. ‘But I’ve seen too many victims. And they need the truth to come out, because if it doesn’t it chews them up like cancer. Your sister needed the truth to come out because what had happened to her was eating her alive. She needed justice.’

‘She
did
. She
did
talk. Talked for hours when she should have been training. I imagine it will all be on the records. All the dreary lies. All of her sick fantasies. My mother, too. All the women in my family suffered from the same sick fantasies.’

The women in his family.

His mother. His sisters.

Yes, I bet they all suffered from something.

‘Nobody listened,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen that too. She tried to talk and nobody listened. And at last – all those years later – she was ready to try again.’

There was a knock on the door.

‘Leave it outside!’

The knocking continued.

A flash of pure fury on Nils Gatling’s face.

‘Get that door, you stupid whore!’ he said.

Zina swayed into the room. She looked at him with doped eyes.

‘Get it yourself,’ she said.

He took one step towards her and his hand cracked hard across her face. He was about to do it again when I took his wrist.

‘OK,’ he laughed. ‘OK.’

‘He likes to hurt me,’ Zina said, the red palm print on her blotchy white skin, making her uncertain way to the door. ‘He likes it too much. It’s the only way he can get hard.’

She smiled at her small triumph. But Gatling just laughed.

‘Touch her again,’ I said, ‘and I’ll break your arm in three places.’

He smiled at me.

‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘Defender of the weak.’

I let go of his wrist. This was running out of control. I had to get him to West End Central. We had to get an interview on tape. If we stayed here, I would want to hurt him.

Zina got the door. We didn’t see the room service boy. It was a large suite. She came pushing a trolley.

Champagne. A bucket of ice. Two glasses. Dinner for one.

‘I need you to come into West End Central,’ I said. ‘I need a statement. You are going to be interviewed under caution.’

‘Do you mind?’

The champagne bottle was in his hand.

I ignored him and took out my phone. I wanted everything ready for us when we arrived.

He hit me in the centre of my head with the full champagne bottle. I went down on my knees. The bottle came down on the back of my skull. Something broke and it wasn’t the bottle.

Zina was screaming. My ribs were wet and freezing cold. I had grabbed the linen tablecloth on the room service trolley and dragged down the ice bucket with me. Ice cubes everywhere. Something exploded in my ear. I realised he must have kicked me.

And then as blood slid into my eyes, the pain suddenly came all at once – in my forehead, in the back of my skull, in my ear.

Gatling was on the phone.

‘Get here now,’ he said.

And then, very carefully, the toe of his shoe aiming at the fragile bone just above the ear, Nils Gatling kicked me in the head until the sweet blackness came and took me away.

I awoke and stared at Zina.

I had not moved. I had no idea if I had been out for a minute or an hour. I felt the rush of nausea that comes with dislocated time. I had been knocked about quite badly. But not as bad as the girl who had left Romania ten years ago.

She was in a chair, her head slumped forward.

The front of her chemise was drenched in blood where her neck had been opened up.

‘
Oh God … oh Jesus
,’ I said.

I tried to get up.

Sean Nawkins was there.

He looked at me.

‘Do him here,’ he said, not taking his eyes off me.

‘No,’ said Gatling. ‘We’ve already got to get rid of the whore. Unless you want to leave them both for the maid.’

There was a bottle of water in his hands. One of those small bottles of mineral water that they leave in hotels. They helped me to my knees. It was such an unexpected act of kindness that the tears stung my eyes in pathetic gratitude. Then Nawkins sunk his fingers into my chin and pulled my mouth open.

‘Drink it,’ Gatling said.

I shook my head.

‘
Drink it
.’

I mumbled something.

He put his head close.

‘Fuck you,’ I managed.

‘Get his mouth open and keep it open.’

Nawkins gripped my chin with one huge hand and my nose with the other. My jaw creaked open. The water was poured in. My throat convulsed in spasms, the vomit rising, bitter in my mouth.

But Nawkins had my mouth closed, and the vomit went down my throat with the water.

‘Wait twenty minutes,’ Gatling said.

The room began to slip away.

Time had chunks cut out of it.

I wanted to lay down and sleep forever, but I was being dressed, put into a hoodie that was too small for me, and then I was going down the hall, dizzy and sick, my legs not working, one of my friends holding me up on either side, into the service lift, larger and shabbier than the lift I had come up in.

We were going out the back way. A young hotel worker was outside sneaking a cigarette.

‘One too many,’ Gatling said, and the kid laughed, quickly hiding his cigarette.

‘We’ve all done it, sir!’ he said.

I felt myself falling into the deepest sleep. The sleep that is next door to death. It felt like all I had drunk was water, for when mixed with any liquid, Rohypnol has no taste and no smell.

It dissolves completely. And then so do you.

The effect that it has on psychomotor performance of mind and muscles can be compared to tranquilisers only if you understand that it is ten times more powerful.

Rapists love it.

Because it means they can do what they like with you.

I woke up with a hammer being tapped against my front teeth.

‘First I knock all his teeth out,’ Sean Nawkins was saying. ‘Then I can saw off his fingertips in twenty minutes.’ He thought about it. ‘Half an hour at the outside.’

The hammer’s claw traced a rough sphere around my face. It dragged across my forehead, my cheek and my jaw and then up the other side.

‘Then remove his face,’ he said. ‘Make a nice deep cut and then I can peel the skin right off.’ He turned away. ‘Then we burn him. And they don’t find a man. Just burned, chopped-up meat.’

I was aware that I was unable to move. At first I thought it was the betrayal of my mind and muscles that prevented me from moving. But then I realised they had taped me to a chair with what must have been a good few rolls of brown duct tape.

At some point I had been sick because there was a streak of yellow bile hanging from my mouth and sticking to my bare chest.

Scout
, I thought, or said it, and maybe even screamed it.

The Rohypnol was a thick fog in my brain and I could no longer tell what was real and what I had only dreamed.

There were lights in this new room and they were far too bright for me to see. I briefly wondered if I was dead already and cast in some over-lit corner of hell.

‘
Oh, please God
,’ I said. ‘
Oh, please Jesus …
’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘Just babbling. It’s the rophies. He’s out of his skull.’

I heard bells. Temple bells, Japanese bells.

I opened my eyes.

I was in the big house in Highgate. I was in The Garden.

I was in the two-storey atrium that I had walked into a lifetime ago, the great white open space with a wall of glass at the back. The blackened stain of the failed fire still covered one high wall and half the floor of the kitchen and dining area. The long dinner table with places for twelve people was still there. Beyond the glass wall there was still only blackness.

And the gentle chime of the bells from the Japanese garden.

Nils Gatling was standing at the window, looking at his phone.

Nawkins was putting my clothes into a black bin bag. It was only then I realised I was naked.

There was a coffee table between us. There was a metal jerrycan on it, a hammer and a hacksaw and a tall glass vase of fresh-cut lilies.

My mind was not working properly. It was very likely that it would never work again. Rohypnol stays in the bloodstream for eight hours and I would be dead by then.

I could not think. I could not see. I could not breathe without being overwhelmed by a sudden tide of sickness.

But I saw one thing.

The man at the window.

And I saw him clear at last.

‘Not your father,’ I told Nils Gatling. ‘You.’

And I did not know if the words were in my mouth or in my head but I saw the little rich boy running wild when his father was out of his mind with grief, when his father was waking up drunk, when his father wished he was dead too.

And I saw Gatling sneaking into the rooms of his sisters, and doing what he wanted, with nobody to stop him.

And I saw Mary slaughtered because she was finally going to talk to the police, all the secrets were about to pour out, because in the end they always come out, even if it takes a lifetime …

And I only knew that the words were not in my head when Nawkins tied up the black bin bag and came to me to tap the hammer against my front teeth again.

‘You certainly talk a lot for a dead man.’

He picked up a and emptied its reeking contents over my head, my arms and my legs. I retched on the stink of petrol.