‘I’m here because I think this might be connected to our unidentified man from the Palace Hotel.’
‘Smiley Face? Isn’t that what you’re calling him?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Turn out your pockets.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘It’s a simple enough request,’ she said. ‘If you want to remain on my crime scene, you’ll check the contents of your pockets. It’s no less than I expect from every officer. I’m not risking contamination or planted evidence.’ I looked at her for a moment and then at the body beneath the vinyl sheet. I reached into my jacket pocket, removing my wallet and warrant card, which I held up to her. ‘The others,’ she said. I felt inside my trouser pockets, pulling my phone out from one and feeling my keys in the other. And something else. She must have seen my face change. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. I pulled out the plastic zip-bag I’d found hidden in the Inn toilets, before questioning Marcus Collier. It was half-full of white powder.
I closed my eyes. ‘It’s not—’
‘Leave,’ she said, moving past me. ‘Now.’
‘Karen,’ I said to her back. A few heads turned in my direction, including, eventually, hers. ‘I mean it, I’m here on duty. If this is a young woman then it could be connected to the man from the Palace.’ She glared at me. It felt like betting everything I had on one roll of the dice. For a moment the only sound came from the buzzing lights overhead, the water, lapping against the canalside. Finally she lifted the sheet from the body and looked at it.
‘It’s a man,’ she said, before turning her attention to it fully and casting me out of her mind. The officers gathered round either shared smiles or looked away in sympathy. I walked back up the bank to the street, feeling my face and neck burning red with humiliation. I couldn’t face going back to Cherry’s flat. Sutty had eyes and ears everywhere, and he probably knew what I’d done already. He could wait for SOCO to arrive on his own. I tried to think of anything useful I could do. Collier had mentioned the bridge beside the Palace as a meeting place for his girls, but when I went there I didn’t see any.
So Cherry had vanished into thin air.
When I reached my street in the Northern Quarter, I saw a car sitting outside the building. The lights were dimmed but as I got closer, the driver cranked them up to full beam, blinding me. I heard the roar of the engine and the car pulled out, missing me by inches. I went to my door and unlocked it before stopping. Remembering the zip-bag of some nameless amphetamine still in my pocket. I walked to the nearest grid and dropped it in. I paused, standing in the space where the car had been parked.
There was a pile of cigarette butts.
Fifteen to twenty of them. All smoked down to the filter and crushed before they’d been thrown out of the driver’s side window. Someone had been sitting here, waiting, watching, for some time. I looked along the road, wondering who it was and what it meant.
* * *
It felt like the car might come apart when they took the corner, but it turned off the main road and kept on going. There were no streetlights any more, and the way was complicated, impossible. It was just the four of them. The man and the woman, Bateman and Elaine, and the two kids, Wally and Ash.
They could all feel it.
The desensitizing effect of details, fizzing by the window.
Wally was sitting in the back, staring out into the endless dark, until the rattle of the car, the looping, unseen turns, became hypnotic to him. It was freezing cold and he could hear his little sister, Ash, chattering her teeth in the next seat. Wally held her hand because he thought she was scared, because he knew he was. It had been a few weeks since they’d forced their way into Holly’s home, and it felt like they’d been driving ever since. Sometimes they’d stayed on the floors of strangers. Sometimes they’d parked up in lay-bys and slept in the car. Finally, they’d settled in a messy terraced house. One night the grown-ups had been arguing and, when they fell abruptly silent, the boy had crept to the door and watched. On the TV he saw an emotional man and woman sitting at a table holding hands. The sound was muted but there was a large picture of Holly on the wall behind them. Bateman had been gone when they woke up and, after a few days, the boy started to hope he’d never come back. He had, though. He had something he wanted them all to see. Now the children rocked together in the back of the car, in a trance of slow movement.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Bateman, breaking the spell.
It was the first time anyone had spoken in hours and, because he was in the driver’s seat, the car stopped abruptly. There was just the sound of the engine turning over. There was just the blackness all around them. They reversed a few savage feet and then drove on in a different direction. Elaine, the children’s mother, was sitting rigid on the passenger side, her body not moving an inch with the motion of the car.
The grown-ups had woken the children in the early hours of the morning and then carried them downstairs, out on to the potholed driveway, to a cut-and-shut Skoda they’d never seen before. It was a new colour, somewhere between green and rust. Once they’d fastened their seat belts, the grown-ups slammed the doors and argued behind the car. Wally and Ash stared straight ahead, listening to the hissed, 2 a.m. voices from outside. Bateman’s deep, explanatory drone repeating the same sounds over and over again. He didn’t stop when their mother tried to cut in and it sounded as if they were having two separate conversations.
Then one of them hit the other.
The children both jumped at the sound, like the car had gone over a speed bump. Bateman ripped open the driver’s side door and climbed in. His face was flat. That trained inexpression that gave nothing away. It was his fist, flexing open and closed, that said everything.
He rolled a cigarette and tapped tunelessly on the dashboard. They heard their mother picking herself up off the driveway, felt the car rock slightly as she steadied herself on it. She got in on the passenger side without another word and shrank down into her seat. No one spoke as they drove along the motorway, the tension in the car rising, tightening like a knot. Now this sudden deviation into a country lane, the endless, looping backroads, felt like something coming undone, unravelling faster than they could keep track of. When Bateman killed the engine, let the headlights die out and coasted the car downhill, Elaine had shifted in her seat, looking from side to side.
‘We’re lost,’ she said.
‘We’re here,’ Bateman replied.
They were both right.
He eased the car into the side of the road and lifted the handbrake. It was the middle of nowhere, the middle of the night, and no one said anything at first. Through the glare of the windscreen the dark looked unreal, a shining neon black. Bateman stared out of the driver’s side window up at a farmhouse, while the children held hands in the back seat, hoping he’d forgotten them. Even now, ages five and eight, they knew all about Bateman’s stare. They were conscious of its withering effect, of all the things they’d seen spoiling and going bad under it. There was a creak of leather from his seat. He shifted his enormous body round and looked at Wally.
‘Just like we talked about,’ he said to the boy. ‘Pick that door and get up the stairs.’ He felt around in the back seat and passed the boy an aluminium pole, about one metre long. ‘Use this, go nowhere else.’
The boy looked at his mother, at the back of her head. Her knotted black hair. When the silence started to feel like a held, screaming note, she turned around. There was the start of a black eye from where Bateman had hit her.
‘You heard,’ she said.