‘Where will I find her?’ He didn’t say anything and I looked over his shoulder significantly.
‘China Town. Y’know Legs?’
‘The topless bar?’
‘Yeah, there’s some shithole building next door. She’s in 4B.’
‘If she’s got a room, why does she trick out of the Palace?’
‘It’s not what you’d call spacious …’
‘OK. Well, that’s a big help, thank you.’ He smiled. ‘Marcus Collier, I’m arresting you.’ I read him his rights and placed a hand on his shoulder.
‘The fuck?’ he said, as I turned him towards the squad car.
‘These gentlemen will look after you from here.’ The two officers climbed out of the car and opened a door for him. I gave the charge I wanted him held on, as well as the fact that he was a material witness in connection with a suspicious death. Then I set out back through the estate for the car I’d arrived in.
6
I called Sutty as I drove. The night had fallen like a curtain while I’d been in the bar. Our shift was technically just starting and he agreed to meet me in China Town. If what Collier said was true, Cherry had been in the hotel on the day we’d discovered the smiling man.
I parked up feeling electric.
I entered through the Paifang, a twenty-foot archway above Faulkner Street adorned with pixies, dragons and gold-leaf finishes. It felt like stepping out of sync with the world and passing through to another dimension, and as I arrived it was coming vividly to life. All-you-can-eat buffets and karaoke rooms were giving way to shot bars, strip clubs and casinos, with sombre neon lights leading the way inside.
It was an easy place to get a fix and the walking dead seemed to shuffle by on every street, dissolving in and out of reality. A recession was like boom time for the drugs trade, with people looking for new methods of escape as conventional ones evaporated. Spice was the current favourite. We were seeing eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds have shaking fits, psychotic episodes and heart attacks.
They called it the rattle.
One man had gone on a rampage here, setting fire to cars, buildings and, finally, to himself. When the police got to him he’d said that he was desperate to get arrested, to get off the drug. It was impossible not to notice them now, coming up or down, shivering in the heat, turning blue. The highs and lows could be harmless, a man or woman, laughing or crying in the street. They could also turn people inside out. Living ghosts, well matched to the haunted, faded splendour of the buildings, the failing romance.
I found the building, as promised, beside a strip club called Legs. There were three or four dancers standing outside talking, smoking cigarettes, staring blankly into the street. They looked beautiful, invulnerable, immune to love. I suppose that they had to. I interrupted a conversation to ask where the street entrance for the flats was. I was pointed by one long finger towards a shabby doorway. The girls knew what went on in there and looked at me like I was a Spice freak or a john. I went to the entrance and searched for a room 4B on the intercom. There wasn’t a button for it, so I buzzed all the others until someone let me inside.
The hallway was poorly lit and the air smelt stale, uninterrupted. I could hear Frank Sinatra, ‘Only the Lonely’, from behind one of the doors and it soundtracked my walk up the stairs. When I came to Cherry’s room, 4B, I saw that the door was ajar. Splintered wood littered the floor from where the lock had been forced. I listened for a moment and then gently pushed it open.
It was a small, airless room. Not a flat. More like a repurposed store cupboard. There was one window, gritted by smog. Its view was crossed out by an external fire escape passing diagonally from one corner to the other. There wasn’t much light, so I clicked on my torch and shone it about. It was neat, in the way that small rooms, small lives, have to be. A multicoloured poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. Several pairs of identical red high heels lined up in a row. A roll-mattress on the floor where it looked like Cherry slept. It was an illegal sublet, neither designed, nor fit, for human use.
Not exactly spacious, as Marcus had said.
It would be difficult for the girl to bring people back here, and I wanted to believe that she was out working, for her own good, as well as our one lead. But when I moved the torch I saw toiletries, which had been lined up on the windowsill, scattered across the floor. I saw a full-length mirror, lying on its side, fractured from an impact.
I saw a shock of bright red blood embedded in the glass.
‘Shit,’ I said.
I heard a movement and shone the light in its direction.
‘Whoa there, hot stuff,’ said Sutty. ‘I take it we’re one step behind?’
By way of an answer I lit up the mirror, the bloody shards.
‘Seven years’ bad luck,’ he muttered.
I shone the light about the dismal room. ‘Looks like she got it all in one go.’
We walked out into the hallway, stepping over the splintered wood. I felt a cold anger on Cherry’s behalf and wondered if she was OK. I wondered what she’d seen. It felt like we hadn’t missed her by much.
‘Well?’ said Sutty, leaning on the wall. ‘Think this is who you saw at the Palace?’
‘I don’t know, but she was definitely there on Saturday night. Marcus was using a room on the third floor for girls and that’s where I saw someone. He said he’d sent her home before his shift ended, but all it’d take for her to get back in would be an object wedged in a fire door.’
‘And what? Smiley Face was a customer?’
I thought about it. Shook my head. ‘He was on the fourth floor. I think he’s something else. Something separate. But that this girl wandered in on it, whatever it was. There’s no way she’s the one who knocked out Ali, for example.’
Sutty nodded. ‘If she’d seen a guard coming she’d have talked or screwed her way out of it.’
‘What scares me is she couldn’t talk or screw her way out of whatever happened here …’
We looked at each other for a moment and then parted, each knocking on a door either side of 4B. There was no one in on my side, and the man on Sutty’s hadn’t seen or heard anything. His English was bad, and he was more scared about his legal status in the country than the building. We worked our way along the corridor, encountering hostility, language barriers and similar results.
I followed Sutty down the stairs.
On the ground floor a frail, nicotine-stained man was waiting for us beside his room. He had an oxygen mask loose around his neck and dragged an air cylinder behind him.
‘Good …’ he said, trying to address Sutty. He walked past the man, to the street entrance, waving at me to stop and talk. The man’s hair was a weak, sickly shade of yellow. ‘Good riddance,’ he hissed, before falling into a hacking fit. His body was wracked with coughs that didn’t quite make it out of his mouth and he shook as they reverberated inside his ribcage. He doubled up and applied his oxygen mask, leaning on the wall to stay upright. When it looked like he was stable again I spoke to him.
‘We’re looking for the woman who lives above you.’
His milky, cataract eyes went wide. ‘Woman?’
‘Girl, whatever.’
He wheezed again and I thought he was going into another coughing fit. It wasn’t until his face contorted that I saw he was laughing. He held on to my arm. His fingers were thin. Cold and hard as carrots. ‘Some girl,’ he whispered. There were tears in his eyes from the effort.
‘Did you see what happened?’
‘… Saw the police drag her out of the building …’ I thought about the violence of the scene. The broken door, the blood.
‘When was this?’
‘… Less than an hour …’
‘How did you know they were police?’
He screwed up his face. ‘… Guy said on his way out …’
‘A man?’ He nodded. ‘What did he look like?’